Majorityrights Central > Category: British Politics

Picture for a moment an early morning, say, next Spring.  It is the middle of the rush hour in a city in the north of England.  But this is not to be just any city or any morning.  This morning will be remembered as long as men draw breath.  This morning local radio has reported that three identical backpacks, each equipped with a tank and motorised aerosol, have been discovered - one at the railway station, two on busy street corners.  The tanks were said to be empty.  How many more there are out there nobody knows.  Shock and rumour spreads.  Al Qaeda.  People are talking about biological weapons, smallpox possibly.  Could it be true?  It doesn’t matter.  Everyone knows what it means if it is true.

By nine the broadcast media are reporting the events and speculating on their cause.  Scheduled programming has been suspended.  A few talking heads – opposition politicians, terrorist experts, ex-military men, an ex-scientist at Porton Down – are wiseacring at short notice in the way they do.  But as yet there is no official statement.

In any case almost as one, people are drawing the obvious conclusion and deciding what they must therefore do.  An exodus of citizens terrified for their children and themselves bursts into being.  Schools just filled are quickly emptied.  Cases are packed, cars loaded and driven out into streets in which no law, no bar to progress is tolerated.

It takes another sixty minutes for central government to act.  There is no great appeal for calm.  Calm, if that is what it is, will be enforced.  Everyone attempting to leave or who has left the city is to return.  Everyone contemplating leaving the city is to remain where they are.  All are to obey a 24-hour curfew to be effected from 6pm.  Ominously, there is no confirmation or denial of the rumours, no attempt to appear other than authoritarian.  Public fear reaches a point of conflagration.

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Censorious, over-regulatory, ban-happy, criminalising – that is the nature of Blairism and of our culturally-liberating government as it impacts upon the quiet lives of Middle England.  If you hunt or if your hobby is shooting, if you own a house which you may wish to sell, if you own a horse or both a car and a mobile phone you will be regulated or you will be banned.  If then you fail to comply you will be criminalised and have to pay a swingeing fine … or face jail.

The social customs and interests of all those respectable, responsible folk who abide by the law and intend no man harm are being steadily legislated away.  It might not be programmatic.  A case can be made for each of these new legal instruments and, yes, they arise through different causations, not simply political malignity.  But the unavoidable overall picture is one of a government with extreme and well-targeted regulatory instincts ... a government with absolutely no inclination to maintain for its own sake our long-standing tradition of liberty.

At some point that has to and does connect to a set of profoundly malign political values.

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Digby Jones, Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, will tell his members at their annual conference today, “there will not be any work in Britain for unskilled people … within one scholastic generation.”  Outsourcing is the culprit, with the jobs going to India, China and, increasingly, the countries of eastern Europe.

Jones is scathing of the protectionist trends in American and French political life.  One would, of course, expect him to be.  The CBI has been a cheer-leader for goin’ global for years.  Its D-G has “formed the view that if ever there was a country made for globalisation it is Britain. It is in our DNA.”

Well, he might be over-heating somewhat there and probably meant to say that it is in our island culture.  Still, from that one can fairly construe that he is referring to the culture of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples of this island.  So, if globalisation will indeed pin our future prosperity to our native capacities, which seems to be the logical extension of Jones’ premise, why are we allowing in 150,000+ legal and illegal immigrants each year with not a moment’s consideration of theirs.

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Mr Blair’s thinking operates on three levels: what is best for the British government, what is best for the Labour party and what is best for him personally.

Ewan MacAskill, Diplomatic Editor, The Guardian

One bright point of hope at last in the relentless march of statism and culture war: our civil servants are a weak and sickly bunch.  Or possibly they are just lead-swingers, depending on your credulity.  Or the lack of it.

A report published by the Cabinet Office has found that the average civil servant nabs two weeks of sickies a year.  The trend is rising.  In 2000 the average was 9.3 for women, 8.0 for men.  In 2001, it was 10.4 days for women, 8.5 for men.  Men are currently stuck on 8.5 days but the girlies have raced on to 11.3.  I haven’t found figures for 2002.  But in that year the three sickest government departments, apparently, were Transportation, Family & Community Services and, naturally, Health & Wellbeing.

The private sector is another story.  The outdoor life certainly seems one of rude health.  The check-shirted, blue-jeaned tough guys of oil and mining only succumb on 3.3 days a year.  Builders, who in my experience believe the common cold to be a rumour, take 4.2 days.

The lash of low rates of pay, presumably, forces expiring hotel and leisure staff to work – except on 4.6 days a year.  Across the board, the private sector average is about 30% below the public sector.  I can’t help thinking, though, that the Human Resources types who monitor these things have never ventured onto an average British dairy farm or they would find the differential quite incalculable because dairy farmers do actually have to be buried – and, if that won’t do it, cremated - before they will stop work.

It comes as no surprise to learn that ministers have set a target – yet another – of a 30% reduction from the 1998 sick-leave total.  They have decided in typical, arbitrary fashion that bureaucracy is, in fact, capable of emulating capitalism.  I suppose if in the face of all the known facts you cannot bring yourself to believe in differing human potentials and in the ineffably superior efficiency and work ethic of free enterprise you will never, never learn.

If I was Gordon Brown I wouldn’t bother about investigating all this.  If we can’t sack the lot of these people and slash our taxes the safest and best place for them is their sickbeds … or the pub … or the bingo hall … or the pier at Margate.  I suppose it might rain.

There has been no shortage of blogging about Rocco Buttiglioni.  He is, or was, good copy.  He brought about a colourfully chaotic passage in EU life, and we should all be grateful for that.  No doubt, the focus will now quickly move on.  His honesty and principle will not be much remembered.  Probably, there was never much chance that he could succeed to the Commission.  But it was a stand worth making, if only to remind us how dominant, arrogant and wrong the left is.

That said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with Rocco’s heroism.  He wasn’t proposing to expunge cultural marxism from the face of Europe.  Quite the contrary -  as a modern conservative politician he was a realist on social policy in the same way that his more or less post-socialist persecutors in the European Parliament are more or less realists on economic policy.  And he wanted that justice job.

So, with this post I will not pile more words onto the mountain of them blogged about the erstwhile Buttiglioni crisis.  Instead, I am going to ask you to make three leaps of the imagination.  If nothing else that is, as my foolish generation used to repeat ad nauseum, something completely different.

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In the piece I posted yesterday I displayed my ignorance - not in itself unusual, of course.  But in this case I was specifically unaware of our equality-driven government’s new initiative on violence against women.  No more.

The staggering thing is that neither Andrew Lansley nor, inexplicably, Ann Widdecombe rejected the idea wholesale or demanded to know what statistical evidence supports it.

A survey of 5000 young British women has yielded some interesting results. On the one hand, the survey confirms the “ladette” trend in female culture. More than half of the women admitted they got drunk at least once a week, 45% had taken drugs, 35% smoked and 73% had slept with someone they wished they hadn’t.

But some more conservative attitudes have survived behind the party girl exterior. A very large majority, 81%, hoped to give up work whilst looking after their young children, 86% wanted to get married and 96% believed they would be able to be faithful in marriage.

On issues of national identity, 70% wanted Britain to leave the EU and 80% rejected the Euro.

The moral of all this? Perhaps not to be too glum about liberalism controlling the beliefs and behaviour of young people. On some issues, at least, conservatism is still the majority view, even amongst young, modern, trendy party girls.