Vote! Vote! Vote!

Voting has many purposes. The most obvious is to elect the candidate the voter wants. Or to keep out the candidate the voter does not want. Voting to express commitment to the democratic system comes lower on the list of reasons. And pushing that commitment further and further away from importance is a deliberate policy of any authoritarian government.

It is much easier to control the democratic element in governance by devaluing the effects of the vote and reducing democratic participation. This is done by replacing elected representatives by parallel administrations, made up of appointees and placemen, that are better funded by the central Executive and subvert the decisions of the elected body - all decisions, not just those disliked and in opposition to central policies. The aim is to drain all power away from democratic choice.

The tactic of making a democratic vote seem a pointless exercise is furthered by deliberate and constant propaganda that there's no point as they're all the same anyway; the voting system makes it impossible to change anything and, the corollary to this, the voting system is being changed or is now too complex and makes it impossible to express a choice. Reports of 100,000 spoiled ballots on ballot papers deliberately obfuscated, unwanted effects from second and third preferences, there will be a very low turn-out .... all feed into this.

Making voting a daunting undertaking is another ploy. By holding elections on working days, limiting the hours in which votes can be cast in a 24/7 society (certainly in the big cities), siting voting places in unfamiliar environments, ringing the casting of the vote with rules and instructions on minute matters of behaviour and threats of invalidation. The list goes on and on.

The result is that the voters think it's not worth it, they're all the same, I can't make any difference, I'm tired after work, and have things to do this evening, apart from looking after the children, I don't know how to do it and I don't know the place I'm supposed to go and do it in. They want a polling card or something I haven't got, and I'll be in trouble if I spoil the ballot.

It's all done on purpose, all the time, a relentless blizzard of Don't Vote.

Go and vote. Go with a friend, take all the children. Go with the dog and make one of those faintly intimdatory figures outside asking for your polling number when you come out to hold his lead while you're inside. If you feel uncertain about how to vote, ask the people inside to explain it again to you; they will, very pleasantly. Vote for who you fancy and forget the clever footwork. All the votes are counted and, at a level beyond which candidate is actually elected, there is a plebiscite effect. Every vote speaks even if every vote doesn't immediately count.

Don't listen to the detractors and Dementors.

VOTE!

Il Marcio Su Roma

Tomorrow the polls close at 3pm on the elections for the mayor of Rome. The first round, which coincided with the vote in the general election that gave power to Berlusconi and the Northern Leagues, resulted in 46% for the Democratic Party's Rutelli, and 40% for the dyed-in-the-wool Fascist, Alemanno.

The Right is rallying to Alemanno, with a programme fired and enthused by anti- immigrant, large public works, lower taxes, and social housing policies. There is no explanation of how lower taxes can yield public works and council housing.

The Left, with its extreme edges fraying into grouplets and factions, its trotskyoids and greenery-yalleries, are threatening the Democratic, reasonable, moral governance of the city by their failure to support Rutelli in the first round, and 'demands' in the second.

It is hard to decide who is worse, between the two sets of extremists and authoritarians.

UPDATE

Alemanno has been elected mayor of Rome. So much for the Rainbow Left and their betrayal of decency in the name of ideological purity.

Bloomsbury Round 3: Stakes Out

'A4200 ‘Bloomsbury Corridor’ Parallel Initiatives Study:
Invitation to the third Stakeholder Workshop – 19th May 2008

I am pleased to invite you to the third stakeholder workshop being held as part of the A4200 ‘Bloomsbury corridor’ study for the London Borough of Camden. The corridor runs along Southampton Row, Russell Square, Woburn Place, Tavistock Square and Upper Woburn Place. The study aims to deliver a more attractive and user-friendly area [for Olympic representatives and the Olympics media, Ed.]

This workshop brings together the work carried out to date by the project team and the views of stakeholders on the options developed [these were reported on Angels earlier, Ed.] In this sense, the study team will present the ideas that will form part of the forthcoming public consultation.

Light refreshments will be served from 6pm.

I attach the notes from the second workshop held in February.'

A full report on the battle for Bloomsbury, in its grand institutional and research mode, together with its shops, traders, mixed housing, squares and gardens, settled population and their services (we need a secondary school south of the Euston Road) and no division of eastern Bloomsbury from western Bloomsbury (corridor indeed) mode, will be given after 19 May Stakeholder meeting, Ed.

Just In Time to Protect Ourselves From Brown's Madness

Most households operate with a just-in-time philosophy even if they are unaware of it. Households' inventory suppliers are their supermarkets, which are run, too, on just-in-time principles, though more consciously so. What began in Toyota in Japan has become the predominant life style of advanced, highly urbanised societies. Just-in-time has brought great advantages: standardised quality of goods; higher urban densities as storage and processing space is reduced; economies in storage and processing costs as these are supplied further up the supply chain; optimised use of various production factors.....

Unfortunately just-in-time is intensely vulnerable to the slightest disturbance in the supply chain, or any feeder supply - like petrol and diesel and, consequently, the transport system.

So get in your car, fill it up with petrol, then fill it up inside with staples of all and every kind but, especially the heavier things like washing machine liquid and other household detergents, tinned goods like tomatoes; packaged water; flour, rice, pasta, dried pulses, sugar; and do the light but unwieldy stuff too, loo paper, other household papers, breakfast cereals, nibbles and crisps...

Outsourcing inventory saves money, but when prices are rising as household supply prices are, and the government has succeeded in allowing a dispute about pensions, for those who are not yet employed by a company, to result in cutting off the Forties field and closing down 40% of the United Kingdom refinery capacity, it is time to act against the madness of Brown before he reaches right into your larder and empties the shelves.

It's Rabies Now

An outbreak of rabies is feared after a rabid dog bit three people. The United Kingdom doesn't do rabies, at least it didn't before Jonah.

Bail Out Under European Examination

Fears that the Bank of England intervention in support of the UK's banks and financial system will be regarded as state aid to a failing sector and fall foul of the European Union competition rules are widespread and well founded.

Gordon Brown's undivided attention for the last 11 years has reduced the mainstay of the United Kingdom economy to the status of Alitalia.

Managing Mr Brown

What is the Labour party to do as poll after poll shows them that they really do have a 'Loser not a Leader'? Tessa Jowell's revelation that the London election campaign to keep Ken in power is being guided by Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and Philip Gould shows the Labour party dilemma in tableau.

Labour must hold London but large numbers of London voters have just had their taxes raised by Brown's last budget effects coming into force a week before the vote. What kind of political management was that, didn't Labour realise these destructive measures would coincide with the London elections? Or did Brown really keep everyone, including the business managers in the Party, in the dark and spring them as a complete surprise last year? And if he did, what kind of behaviour is that as well?

Labour has lost control of the political timetable because of the secretive compulsions of its strange Leader. There are reports that it has taken weeks of blandishments to get Brown to understand that it is wrong to raise taxes on the poor; while he accepts it might be causing political difficulties, he hasn't accepted it at all and is now pretending he didn't agree to the deal that Darling and the Treasury offered Frank Field and large numbers of furious and frightened Labour MPs to withdraw their threat to vote against the government on Monday. As a result the threat is restored and the numbers of government opponents has increased.

Labour cannot really oust yet another leader without calling an election, both for the leadership and for the country. The end of this Parliament is too close now.

Perhaps it would be best if Brown were to be made to understand that his health cannot allow him to continue after the end of this session, a caretaker leader be installed to oversee the choice of new leader, and a general election held in the Autumn. The deepening shadow of the election that never was, both for the leadership last summer and the country last Autumn, has blighted the Labour party for long enough . Brown will cost them London, the local elections, and office if he isn't managed into retirement.

Tears Before Bedtime

Take out a mortgage you can't afford by self certifying your income, then default on your payments. Overdraw your current account without authorisation. Max out as many credit cards as you can get hold of and then default on those too. Declare yourself to be self-employed for social face but really register for benefits. Save nothing, least of all for a pension.

I've got it all wrong and brought the children up wrongly too. I never thought of the New Labour state taking on all and every debt and reproving the slightest gesture towards rewarding or enforcing financial responsibility either on the part of the Bank of England or on the part of the high street banks.

And inflation will wipe away the debt, but will it wipe away the tears?

No By-Elections

The current High Commissioner of Malawi is due to leave at the end of next January.

Jack McConnell, former First Minister of Scotland, and the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, denied that he had been given the job as a consolation prize by Gordon Brown after Labour's election defeat in Scotland, to encourage him to step down as Labour leader at Holyrood so that Brown's protegee Wendy Alexander could be imposed as leader on the parliamentary Labour party in the Scottish parliament. His majority in his Motherwell and Wishaw constituency was slashed from over 9000 to under 6000 as the SNP took power last year. (The other Scottish MP for the same constituency who sits in the Westminster parliament has a majority of 15,000 - the whole area should be solid Labour.)

Mr McConnell confirmed he would leave the parliament before taking up his new position but at Westminster parliamentary committee hearings on why a senior diplomatic post had been given to someone from outside the diplomatic service, he stated: "I don't have an expectation that this new position will start early next year or even at all next year. I think it will be determined by the interests of the UK government." He said also: "I can give the committee an assurance that the starting date would not be influenced by trying to pick a particular date for a by- election,""Circumstances could change over the next few months that might lead to a different skill set being needed for a certain period of time," he said. The Foreign Office needed the scope to put in a temporary High Commissioner.

John Horam (Conservative) : "The only thing I can think of is that the government wants some wriggle-room when it comes to holding a by-election."

Poverty and Inequality

A 16 year old leaving school and starting work is unlikely to command a wage of more than £18,000 a year before stoppages. Starting out in life, it would be reasonable if no tax was due on a necessarily low income; but when the first band of tax is doubled then a young worker is almost certain to be pushed into debt by New Labour's tax ferocity. There is no redress, even if the young tax payer suddenly faced with a doubling of their tax rate would be willing to submit to the means test. For there is no benefit, universal or means-tested, available. There are benefits for the workless, for the young mother, but not for the young worker, just punitive taxation.

There are benefits for the young who continue their learning outside the workplace. But for the 16 year old continuing to study, the means test is applied to the generation above them, to their parents, despite there being no certainty that a student can access the wealth and income that belongs to others. So although the age for entry to independent study at university level is 17, many are beginning university level courses at school with, by definition, inferior teaching and inadequate library and laboratory provision; and again, it is the New Labour regime that has removed universal free tertiary education and maintenance grants to the qualified, as it opened expensive and valuable resources to many unable to use or benefit from them.

Post 16 school and college allowances are determined by parental means testing too, so that fierce disincentives to continuing to study are systemically present. When the appalling policy of raising the obligatory school-leaving age to 18 is added to these factors, it is clear that a determination to infantilize and control the young is operating.

The working young should be encouraged in their independence by not facing punitive taxation. The young pursuing learning should be encouraged in their work by the provision of grants either means-tested on their own means - though numbers of independently wealthy among 16 to 21 year olds are miniscule - or support should be a universal benefit for those qualified to undertake the course of study.

Poverty does indeed result in inequality. All the young are poor and have a claim upon the generosity and resources of our society, but New Labour should stop discriminating among them wearing ideological blinkers that produce perverse rewards and crippled life chances in the name of fairness and opportunity for all.

Creating the Client State

Brown had first commissioned work on scrapping the 10p rate in 2003; he considered it for the 2005 and 2006 Budgets. (writes John Rentoul in the Independent).

This was no unconsidered effect of a coup de theatre for his last budget. Brown planned impoverishing those who were not already caught in his spider's web of high taxes and benefit claims, planned it for years.

"...it is his intention to return to this issue in future Budgets and the Pre-Budget Report. He does want to look more at what we can do for those on the lowest incomes, just as we have done in previous budgets...We will be consulting with stakeholders, with MPs, and with different groups on the next phase...' He plans to entangle, too, the young and newly employed, the old and newly retired, and the lowest paid without children in his Shelob's lair.

"A little way ahead and to our left..., issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that we had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider..., but huger than the greatest hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes... there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.
As soon as she had squeezed her soft squelching body and its folded limbs out of the upper exit from her lair, she moved with a horrible speed, now running her creaking legs, now making a sudden bound.'

Come on Frodo, I mean Frank!

Scottish Raj in Westminster Fails the Poor Throughout the UK

Andrew Mackinlay, MP for Thurrock in Essex, (reports the Times), suggested the sensitivity of the party’s high command to the issue, (doubling the tax rate for the poorest in the country), was blunted by the fact that local elections are not taking place in Scotland, where so much of the Labour establishment is based.

“If they had been going to the polls in Scotland next week, the political antennae would have picked this up and we wouldn’t be where we are now,” he said. “This might have done 10 days ago. It won’t do now.”

A Commons Committee reporting next June with recommendations that will be ignored by the arrogant politicians, elected by Scots in Scottish constituencies, who are running the Treasury and the New Labour Executive, including the Prime Minister who has only ever won an election in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, is not remotely good enough.

Scotland has a prime minister, Alex Salmond, and its own parliament. And very good they are at running their country in a decent and reasonable fashion. Who on earth are these other Scots infesting our lives, in all their incompetence and dishonesty, at Westminster?

Divide and Rule

Multiculturalism and Diversity ideology divides our society into groups identified by characteristics that should bear no weight in choices and actions that are at society-wide levels. It is clear now that the same pernicious thinking has been used in economic and financial policy pursuits. Pensioners, children, hard-working families, the disadvantaged (various), have all been separated from one another and the generality, to be the target of policy objectives and policy justifications.

The truth is that just as all of us need our streets safe, our bins emptied, our schools educating, our army defending, our judges upholding the law, so too most of us are quite poor. Yet this 'progressive' New Labour junta, in its actions and in its ideological stance, insist on removing our money and handing it round their current priority groups.

Children and their poverty is a favourite. Well, my children are not under sixteen. No longer children, their wages can be taxed at double the rate of a year ago. Is sixteen suddenly a rite of passage out of worthiness and into targethood for rapacious Labour tax and spend policies? But eighteen year olds entering university are children and are poor. Unless their parents' income, used as the benchmark for determining their poverty or otherwise, excludes them from assistance with fees and living costs, even though the wealth is not theirs at all.

Most people under 30 are single and already handing over a large conribution, willing or not, to families and the workless. Now they are handing over double the amount, because they are not poor. Only by any reasonable measure, such as income, they are poor, but they don't count.

Pensioners are poor, unless they are single women, when they are not and must have their tax doubled. And so it goes on.

For over 10 years taxation, benefits, and spending policies have been in the micro-managing, bogey-covered hands of an intellectually underpowered, controlling, sly, lying, trotskyoid fanatic. They should have been both widely debated, agreed, and under the control of a clever, informed and competent technician with a sane and compassionate understanding of the possibilities of government and the alleviation of need in all classes and estates.

The Labour government had such person and gave him office. He was the Leader's first target and victim after Labour was elected. Brown then worked his way steadily through the Party and many of its ministers until he brought down the Prime Minister we elected, and usurped his place as he had that of Frank Field a decade earlier.

Brown Gets It At Last:“We cannot have the Budget defeated."

The Leader is going to feel our pain. “I understand how difficult it is out there. I understand that people out there are fighting the elections and questions are being asked. With food prices rising, fuel prices rising, people want to know that we do get it, that we understand what is happening to them... [Isn't the government fighting the elections. Brown seems to think he's above winning votes and influencing people].

"Issues have come up in the past. We have dealt with those." [He's lost it here; what is he talking about?]

"We have a responsibility to listen, to hear and to understand what has been said." The man is so differently-abled he has to be instructed on how human beings interact with one another then accidentally reads out the instructions on his brief that are written in to help him to appear normal; he'll be reading out "look up, smile", next.

The pretence that nearly five and a half million poor people are not made even poorer by New Labour tax taking, sustained for months until payslips arrived with the money gone (Brown actually demanded to be shown payslips proving people are being impoverished! What is he on?) has finally been brought to an end.

When will he grasp that if the New Labour tax take had been less onerous during their failed years in power, people would not have had to support their living standards by credit card borrowing and remortgaging their houses.

New Labour Executive Losing Ability to Set Taxes

The Leader is being challenged on a second tax rise imposed, in his last budget before ousting the elected prime minister, last year. This time the challenge comes from outside Parliament. The 2p rise in fuel duty, on which a delay until next October has been forced already, will now be contested across the United Kingdom by campaigners organised by the the People's Fuel Lobby. As well, Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland has begun shutting down as threatened industrial action by the trade union Unite, in defence of its members wages and conditions, is met by action to protect the plant by Ineos management.

Major parliamentary,Party, popular, industrial and union challenges to Executive decisions to tax us even more heavily are gathering speed and strength. There is only one way to resolve such widespread and effective challenges to government authority under a democracy. The voters should be offered party manifestos that embody their choices, and consulted in a General Election on who they want to exercise power.

UPDATE

John Hutton, Minister Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform took emergency powers yesterday. These include: police impounding lorries, arresting drivers and stripping them of their operators' licences; invoking anti-terror laws; rationing petrol and ring fencing supplies to privileged users, mobilising troops. Police already have powers to break-up blockades of oil refineries, and clear petrol station forecourts and approaches of queueing motorists.

A Citizens' Income

Over the centuries a citizens' income has been regarded variously as, for instance, a credit due for the appropriation of originally commonly owned natural resources, or as an entitlement originating in today's superior productivity with respect to subsistence. A basic income, regardless of personal circumstances, by virtue of citizenship, is a fine objective. It is so expensive only the unreasonable would not reply instantly, 'How is it to be done'.

James Meade, in his Agathotopia (a good place, rather than utopia which is nowhere) advocated the replacement of wages by a participatory income, a share of enterprise value added. This gave workers higher and more secure employment, but more uncertain earnings - hence the need for a citizens' income. A citizens' income would be funded either from income from state assets - if and when the state had managed to transform the national debt into net state assets, or through a sequence of government budget surpluses, or via progressive taxation (plus taxes on pollution, as well as on advertising which he regarded as a form of pollution).

Milton Friedman regarded a citizens' income as an enhancement of individual choice, a substitute for paternalistically chosen benefits in kind. It is interesting to consider that post-socialist transition countries could have used public capital to fund such an income, instead of dilapidating it through mass privatisation.

A citizen's income for Silvio Berlusconi or Bill Gates is a small price to pay for the ending of means tested, state paternalism. And charitable giving by recipients who felt in no current need would be better than any allocations determined by the ideology of the authoritarian state.

Can Doubling Taxes on the Poor Be Justified For It Cannot be Withdrawn

Making war and raising taxes are the central powers of any state.

New Labour doubled taxes on the poorest workers. Now, if the New Labour Executive backs down on its taxation decisions, reinforced by their having been voted through the Parliament using the fullest Labour majority, then the government, and especially its Leader who raised the tax against the poorest when Chancellor, will be truly in office but not in power.

Wales Is Not New Labour

Westminster prime minister Gordon Brown has been criticised for abolishing the 10% tax rate, which had been introduced to benefit the lowest income workers. While raising taxes on the poorest working people in the country is to be condemned as contemptible, another effect may not have yet been calculated. Good governance in Scotland, at last free of a half-century and longer throttling by the Labour party, is being watched closely by Wales, the other devolved state in New Labour's country of the Nations and the Regions.

Welsh working people, too, are badly affected by the 10% tax rate abolition. Up to now Plaid Cymru has not enjoyed the same widespread and rapidly growing commitment displayed in Scotland to the Scottish National Party since it gained power and the long echoes of the Labour Movement's historic grasp on the working class died away. Apart from hopes by the Conservatives that their strength in Wales is not reduced to virtual nothingness as it is in Scotland, there should be great fear too, in New Labour, that Welsh voters will choose Welsh nationalism rather than the Conservative or Liberal Democrat opposition, to drive home their final loss of faith in a United Kingdom New Labour government that has suborned the name of their party but delivered insults and disadvantage to most of the Welsh people.

The Marketplace of Ideas Or No Platform

That people might be swayed by emotion rather than reason sets up a false opposition. Feeling is an excellent means of forming a view. Reason is so often feeling in gaudy.

Yet it is this false opposition that underpins the argument for the objectionable New Labour propaganda stance of No Platform. All of a piece with its social and cultural authoritarianism, it attempts to argue the morality, not just the political convenience, of denying any discussion of contentious public policies. Policies such as redistributive taxation, world policing of 'failed states', multiculturalism, the fecklessness of some working age benefit dependents, positive discrimination, justice and punishment - fill in according to choice.

On all of these matters no opinion has been expressed in this post. But so relentlessly has the ideology of No Platform been driven, by the state broadcasting system, by newspapers kept afloat by state advertising, by pressures within all educational institutions - schools, universities, and state-funded research and development agencies, by trade unions and by workplaces where these predominate like local authorities, quangos and non-governmental Third Sector organisations, etc., that there is an implication or presumption of racialism, discrimination against designated sectors, genders, statuses, or illegal thought crime, from even mentioning them.

Effectively large areas of public policy have been removed from public debate justified on spurious grounds of iffy Fabian political philosophies over individual choice and thought. As any fule no:


"If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."

But then Noam Chomsky is a Hero.

Cutting the Inflation Rate is Easy and Benefits Everyone.

Two ways to cut the cost of living for everyone instantaneously:

End charging for owning a television; those who wish to watch BBC can pay as they go.

Slash the duty on petrol and diesel; the Labour government is taking far too much off drivers and road transporters under the current high supplier prices for oil.