It is not true, though frequently expounded by the press, that the Conservative party is seeking to take and stand on some political and moral centre ground that is currently occupied by the herd of authoritarians and their placemen that claims to be our elected government.
The government we voted, rightly or wrongly, into office is not this freak show which, furthermore, pretends to complete change from what the defenestrated Labour Leader offered. Here there is the form of democracy but no substance.
And now a general election both proper and welcomed by the Opposition whose conference had been used rightly to set out a clear and attractive programme and manifesto, an election which could have settled the essential issue of governance in this country - our relationship with the European Union - has been denied.
We have an Opposition with a whole set of policies laid out clearly before us, so popular that the deceitful cherry-picking displayed this week only underlines the collapse of the Leader and his Party's socialist planning 'vision'. The Conservative leader and his party have no wish nor political need to stand upon the contaminated ground occupied by Brown and his apparatchiks: the pouring away of tax-raised resources on the client state, the maintenance and enlargement of enormous Soviet-style segments of the economy in the state provision of health, education and welfare services, presenting many of the problems of transition from planned economies faced and resolved in eastern Europe
Our state and its current regime has aspects of what millions in eastern Germany took to the streets to end, as did the citizens of the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, in their Velvet revolution; what Walensa and Solidarnosc pulled down in Poland - but we are less fortunate than the Poles for they will have elections on 22 October to give or refuse their agreement to the European Union new constitution.
The great demonstration by the people from the countryside which brought millions into London and other urban centres to press for a fair and democratic use of state resources and the assertion of the value and values of rural life, the equally huge numbers who stepped out to condemn adventurist aggressive wars of primitive accumulation foisted upon us by lies and secret deals, were not made up of wholly different populations as the regime's propaganda proclaimed; they were no more the unspeakable than they were the cadres of the trotskyoid outside left.
In the next few months the Leader intends to sign away the economic, legal and foreign policy independence of the country, cloaking his action in a miasma of propaganda about red lines.
If we are offered only the semblance of democracy and choice, if we are bullied and surveilled by the ruling regime rather than governed by consent with a responsive and benign administration, then we know that our Velvet revolution must come; we know too, that historical precedent is there in the great popular uprisings throughout English history, that the organizational capacity is there, and most of all, the the depth of feeling.
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HG - I said a while back we need a March For Democracy, and you and others suggested we'd just get our heads cracked (which all depends on how many march, and the ration of morons of the SWP brand turn up).
You changed your mind? I do think a huge public march on London would shake the buggers up. And no. I'm not offering to organise it!
Yes Elby, mind change has occurred.
If my head must be cracked then it will be in no greater danger than the heads of the whole of eastern Europe, and if they had to, and did, so can we.
They have refused to go to the country E, so the country must go to them.
As for the organizing,I thought of the two huge mobilisations from rather different ends of the spectrum but with a great deal of overlap of democrats and libertarians and wonder if the grass rootiness of those efforts would unite round being denied a voice (ie election) on things like tax levels, foreign policy, European political impositions, the surveillance state, finger-printing school children, DNAing us all, giving tax-payers money to rotten little banks with lots of subprime mortgages and tendentious 'foundations', death on the health service, fuel duties, raising taxes ever higher on small businesses, snouts in troughing by their nomenklatura - you know, the usual stuff that raises the consciousness of an ordinary person to boiling point.
Alright, you talked me into it. Count me in. Say the word. Say where and when.
And if innocent bystanders have their head cracked, they simply will have an additional incentive to join our cause (as Stalin correctly understood and clearly stated).
In eastern Germany the groups started to form and spread from the churches, In Poland it was the free trade union and the skilled workers - the Angels - in Czechoslovakia the intellectuals and the students in school and higher institutions began the popular move to regain democracy, in Italy it is the world of theatre and spectacle using the bloggers and the net to call people into the piazza to sign for people's instigated laws restricitng the piggery and corruption at least.
Our country has an Opposition offering decent policies, it has local and national political structures we can get involved in, and and there are huge issues about sovereignty, about taxation, particularly on fuel and earned income and transaction costs, about the surveillance of the state on us all, that make it a shorter road to obtaining a clearer goal.
We want an election, the election that should have been held when the Brown authoritarians drove the elected Labour government from office using party micro-control and management to subvert the country's political system.
HG: If you're serious, as I believe you are, you will have to be unrelenting in your calls. How many times did Cato end his speeches with "Cartago delenda est"?
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