Monthly Archives: April 2015

Houdini moment for the UK?

Majoring on the minors!

I said to a work colleague of mine recently that the whole political class in the UK needs to be swept away. That’s not to say that there are not some good people in all the parties, absolutely, but the whole mindset and ideology that has a grip on the main legacy parties needs to be utterly destroyed. That ideology is like a capsule of poison that has been inserted Into the heart of the nation that will stifle any remaining freedoms. We need a new leadership in the nation.

The thing with this election is that the traditional parties will say little or nothing that matters to the long term future of this country and plenty that is by far not as important to that long term future. Yet again the main parties will be telling us how they are going to sweeten us to vote for them. They will be looking at the next five years rather than the next 100 years, a fatal mistake because the issues facing the UK now need a patriotic leader who can look 100 years ahead at a critical juncture in our history.

However what makes the average voter tick? Perhaps they will be thinking, how will this government benefit me financially, will I get a bigger tax allowance, lower taxes, more benefits, a housing subsidy? And so it goes on. But somebody has to pay, and that somebody is us. It is a very powerful temptation for a voter to seek financial advantage, who could blame them, especially when so many people are struggling to make ends meet. Yet how many of us have got into financial difficulties entirely through our own poor decision making which has got nothing to do with whether the government follows this policy or that policy? Governments say they are going to benefit us financially, but how many voters will vote in the interests of the long term future of this nation, how many will be thinking of their children and grandchildren?

Precious few I suspect. Those who do not have children or grandchildren, and never will, and that is a substantial proportion of the adult population, a sad indictment of our society I might say, will be even less inclined to think of our long term future as their lives are more likely to revolve around just them.

The parties will give the usual noises about health and education, that these merit goods will be safe in their hands. Are they important you bet they are, but are they the most important issues? The NHS should be seriously looked at anyway as to whether it is the best model of health service. We could do a lot worse than look at some of the other perhaps more successful models of health care around the world. There are big questions arising over how it should be run and who it should help. There should be a debate on exactly what treatments should and should not be allowed at the taxpayers expense. How much emphasis should be put on preventative as opposed to corrective medicine? To what extent should the NHS be a world health service?

A huge issue for the UK to deal with is who governs us, will it be Brussels or Westminster? This is an issue that is increasingly being taken out of our hands, and 800 years after Magna Carta in 2015 we may be about to see the freedoms we have enjoyed for so long finally being snuffed out with virtually a whimper. If the Labour Party gets in again with some sort of covert confidence and supply arrangement with the SNP, enough damage may be done to finish off the UK for good and deliver the country like a filleted haddock to the EU on a plate. No true patriot could vote for the Labour Party as they are not giving a referendum on the EU, the very least any party can do to placate the British people. At least David Cameron is giving us the long promised referendum, although some might say he will be a bit slippery. The problem with the legacy parties are that they are wedded to the EU Project, it is burned into their thinking and many of them will not have known anything else, let alone be aware of the bullying spirit behind the EU forcing conformity on individual nations.

And you will not hear a word about militant Islam, an issue which is bubbling away under the surface but would put a firestorm into the election campaign if truths came out in the open. This is an issue that has to be dealt with now but the legacy parties will be desperate to maintain the status quo, ‘nothing to see here, look away now.’ There is such delusion at a high level that Ed Milliband is reported as saying that ‘Islamophobia’ would be made a criminal offence in the UK if he becomes Prime Minister. Meanwhile the demographic time bomb is ticking away as indigenous Brits do not have many children and immigrants do, happily so if the largesse of the State helps them. While the news tells us recently that by 2051 ethnic minorities are predicted to make up a quarter of the British population. This will fundamentally and irreversibly change the nation for ever and not for the good on present projections.

Furthermore the legacy parties are all wedded to anti discrimination and equality legislation which will continue to chip away at our freedoms until someone says, ‘enough of this madness!’ A parable of our present sorry state is the Equality Commission of Northern Ireland taking a baker to court for refusing to put a slogan on a cake supporting gay marriage (and gay marriage is not even legal in Northern Ireland). You have to wonder who these cold hearted bureaucrats are who are willing to trample on the consciences of ordinary people. And so these stories make Great Britain a basket case in the eyes of the world.

So, you will not hear a thing about these matters in the General Election campaign, rather what would happen to the NHS if the other party got hold of it, or what will happen to zero hours contracts, or perhaps those cuts won’t be so bad under X compared with Y. All short term and less consequential whilst the really big matters will prance around like an elephant in the room while the politicians try to mouth their platitudes. Still no statesman in the house!

Despite all this, is the worm turning in the UK? Too many people can now see what is going on and in this most unpredictable of elections the fruitcakes and loonies are not coming home to the Tories, neither are the SNP voters returning to Labour. People must have the courage of their convictions and vote for who they consider best represents them and must not be bullied into thinking that they will somehow let in some highly dangerous coalition if they fail to vote for one of the big parties. 2015 could prove to be a watershed year. There is always hope. First it’s impossible, then it’s difficult, then it’s done! Will the UK, on its last legs, at the bottom of the ocean, in a coffin, and chained up to boot, perform a Houdini for the world to see?

David Starkey

‘I don’t see anybody around with any prime ministerial qualifications at all.’

It was a joyous experience to read the musings of the waspish David Starkey in the Daily Telegraph the other Saturday. The Daily Telegraph was bombed with a hefty dose of common sense when David Starkey the well known historian gave a wide ranging interview on various topical subjects. His views are very conservative, in fact he would be better voting for UKIP than he would the Conservatives. They need him more. He is a blast of fresh politically incorrect air who is not spellbound by the evil magician that has cast a fog of deception upon the minds of many British people.

He is not intimidated by the ‘racist’ narrative that has run through political discourse for so long. He is not afraid to argue that there is what he believes a black propensity to violence in this country, saying that the figures support this, seeing one of the reasons as cultural. He has got it on victim hood. He helped himself up by his bootstraps besides the evident past disadvantages of being gay and born seriously disabled, saying you must be master of your own life and not look to government to institutionalise you as a victim. Amen to that!

This is one of the most important things he said, the catastrophic culture of victimhood that the political classes have foisted on the UK population. He understands better than most this poison that has entered the body politic and threatens to crush the life out of the nation. Just how many groups in society are we going to class as victims before we start treating people as grown ups responsible for their own lives regardless of disadvantage?

His thoughts about gender are mind bogglingly revolutionary, ‘the genders are different. And the whole thing is not just the result of wicked gender grooming. It’s not simply societal. It is the result of biology.’ Obviously.’ He is just stating reality. However I am not quite on his wavelength when he says that as far as intelligence is concerned women tend to cluster more around the mean, whereas men are either very, very bright or very thick.’ But what do I know?

Referring to his partner he says, ‘I see no reason apart from tax considerations – which we haven’t dealt with – why a gay relationship should be the subject of public rules.’ There we have it, you certainly cannot class all gays as having the same mindset on these issues. Too right for any conservative position where state sanctioned homosexuality just does not float their boat.

He waxes eloquent on Magna Carta, ‘we have the oldest functioning political system in Europe and it goes back directly to Magna Carta. There is a continuous line of constitutional and political development from Magna Carta.’ By the time it had been nipped and tucked, it had become a brilliant piece of political compromise.

He is pretty scathing about the present political class, implying that Ed Milliband if not the devil in disguise is not far off in his demeanour and intent, saying that Milliband is ‘poison.’ His line is damning, that we do not have a statesman or leader to deal with the issues. He sees the forthcoming general election with a degree of modified despair. He understands that inciting a politics of envy is just not where it’s at, the rich against the poor, rather than recognising the immense contribution of the rich, the talented and the entrepreneurs towards all the material things we enjoy. ‘A welfare state of necessity imposes high levels of taxes on ordinary folk.’ So don’t just take money off the rich to pay for it.

This just supports the argument that you get out of the system what you pay in, you certainly don’t expect something for nothing. And so we end up with one of the highest peacetime debts we have ever had. Starkey thinks the deficit should have been reduced much more with a radical reappraisal of what the state does. Precisely!

He is scathing about cutting defence and the police being scaled back when the threat of terrorism is so high. Starkey is all for leaving the EU, saying we don’t fundamentally depend on their markets, although they depend on us. We do however have a decent trade balance with the rest of the world.

You gotta hand it to him. Davis Starkey is a true Brit! I agree with him on almost everything!

EU perspective

The EU gets a lot of bad advertising here in the UK especially from the so called right wing press.Sometimes the message can be exaggerated or amplified to create the EU bogeyman continually trying to bleed the UK dry. I am no fan of the EU but there may be an argument for a little perspective when it comes to our EU contribution, which often comes up in the media.

It might be argued that the EU is another conduit for redistributing income and wealth across the continent. Not surprising given the socialist tendencies of so many of its top officials. The net contributors are like those at the top of the tree in any progressive tax system such as exists in the UK whilst the net recipients are like the benefit claimants at the other end of the scale. You don’t really have to think much about who the net contributors are.

Yes, Germany is one, but that is no surprise given that it is the economic powerhouse of Europe and the second really large economy in the world after the U.S. in the HDI index, a pretty impressive performance. The HDI index is a measure of economic development of any given nation. Small and prosperous nations like Norway and Switzerland dominate the upper reaches of this index, so it is no small feat for Germany. All the bigger and richer member states are net contributors, countries such as the UK, Sweden, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Belgium.

What percentage of UK public spending goes to the EU? If you take the net figure for 2015, the percentage is actually very small, about 1.18 percent, although in absolute terms a figure of £8.6B. In this sense it is perhaps possible to overstate on the euro sceptic side the direct financial inroads the EU makes into the UK economy. On the other hand, it is still a very big number. To put this in context, that figure comfortably covers the two new aircraft carriers being built for the UK navy. Alternatively you could buy sixteen new hospitals in approximate terms or dozens of new schools (the Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough, one of the most expensive schools in Britain, cost close to £50m to build). That’s still quite a lot of extra money that we would be free to spend if the money was still in our pockets. So there is some point in the UKIP argument.

Pro EU supporters would of course note the small net contribution of the UK to the EU although it is a small percentage of a very large figure. Fair enough, but it also disguises the fact that we pay about £20B gross to the EU in contributions from UK government and households, the equivalent figure was £17.2B in 2013, giving a figure of about 2% of total public expenditure. This is expenditure that is taken out of our hands and given to an external authority to decide how to spend. Some people would argue of course that it would be far better for us to spend our own money rather than give it away to a supranational authority to make such decisions. The EU spends lots of that money on the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) which is a strong vested interest on the continent. We pay more in than we get out, but EU supporters might argue that we have access to EU markets and contracts as a result of our contribution. But is such a contribution worth it? If we were out of the EU we would still be trading with one another. Trade is trade and politics is politics.