The Coalition government, which in opposition vigorously attacked proposals to allow the security services to monitor e mails and phone calls, has backtracked on it’s pro-freedom/anti-snooping rhetoric with a proposal to give those same security services powers to check on our website visits and e mail and phone contacts on their own initiative without a warrant.

At present it doesn’t involve content, for which they will still need permission, but, rest assured, that will be the next step.
In a statement, the Home Office said action was needed to “maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes”. “It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” a spokesman said.

Maverick Tory MP David Davis sums up why these proposals need to be beaten back.

‘It is not focusing on terrorists or on criminals. It is absolutely everybody. Historically governments have been kept out of our private lives,’ ‘Our freedom and privacy has been protected by using the courts by saying “If you want to intercept, if you want to look at something, fine, if it is a terrorist or a criminal go and ask a magistrate and you’ll get your approval”. You shouldn’t go beyond that in a decent, civilised society but that is what is being proposed.
‘They don’t need this law to protect us. This is an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary innocent people in vast numbers. Frankly, they shouldn’t have that power.

‘
The government hopes that, by playing the terrorist card, it can gain some grudging support. But how long before those who oppose gay marriage or the EU or other fashionable causes are also deemed “dangers to the public” and placed under electronic surveillance on the whim of a government functionary.

If they have good reason let them request a warrant. If not then either do more legwork and make a better case or keep their noses out of our private business…

I really don’t care about the “human rights” of a terrorist or one who advocates terror.

I can think of better ways of improving our transport infrastructure than spending billions on a high speed rail system that won’t be fully operational until 2032

I don’t see why my gas and electricity bill should be higher in order to pay for wind farms that blight the landscape and are so unreliable they have to be backed up with alternative energies when the weather is calm

If I were in government “gay marriage” would not be top of my agenda. In fact it wouldn’t be item 999 on my agenda

I do not expect a “conservative” government to be taking money out of the pockets of poor people in Britain so that it can end up in the Swiss bank accounts of rich people from third world countries

Neither do I want a “conservative” government to waste time and money on “initiatives” to tell me what to eat and drink and how to be a jolly good chap

I am not impressed by plump faced, well heeled privately educated politicians from Oxbridge who have never held down a real job pretending to be “right on” while prancing around in shirt sleeves for silly photo ops

We have too much debt. We pay too-high taxes. We build too few houses. We are losing old jobs and costs prevent us creating new ones. We are having a bad time, and we want the people who rule us to lead us out of that, and think of little else. It is simple, but not easy.

Why oh why can’t we have a set of politicians who throw all their energies into that and NOTHING ELSE!!!!!

Chained......

I feel I am in chains – I want a government that breaks those chains by implementing policies that might be deemed unfashionable by the media and cultural elite…

The will of Parliament should be sovereign over the the opinions of judges and external officials and/or institutions

People who break the law should suffer considerable inconvenience and if they continue to break the law the consequences should not be pleasant

The so called “conservative” government of David Cameron and his metropolitan elite would sneer at me for being naive while emptying my pockets to fund their feelgood fantasies. Liberals and left wingers would call me a “fascist”.

Is there any political party rooted in the present and future rather than in an idealised past and untainted by racist intolerance that would find my list fit for purpose?

h/t for Prometheus

Mr Cameron told last year’s Tory conference in Manchester: “I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.” Last week his spokesman said he was “passionate” about the issue.

So passionate that this proposal was never mentioned in the 2010 conservative Manifesto – nor, indeed, in the manifestos of the Labour Party or Cameron’s Coalition colleagues the Liberal Democrats.

Yet suddenly we have been told by no less a government figure than Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone (an obscure liberal/left chattering class busybody who is now something called “Equalities Minister”) that she will soon be asking for a public debate about how gay marriage can be introduced.

Excuse me? I must have missed the previous debate about whether gay marriage should be introduced.

No I didn’t – because there never has been a debate about whether….instead Ms Featherstone trills rather meaninglessly about “the people”

Mrs Featherstone, however, has argued that marriage is “owned by the people” and that governments have a duty to change laws to bolster the “underlying principles of family, society and personal freedoms”.

Total drivel.

I have no issue with the current situation. Same sex couples already now have the same legal rights as married heterosexual couples via the civil partnerships introduced by Labour in 2004. They can even have their partnerships blessed by a priest to give their relationship a religious dimension.
However I can detect no massive groundswell of opinion throughout the land demanding a such a fundamental change to the concept of marriage that has been established in these islands for well over a thousand years. But what does exist is a well orchestrated campaign by a tiny group of activists with a hotline into our media/political elite and Cameron the former PR man is deeply embedded into that elite.

Over the last half century changes of direction in several key social and ethical policy areas such as abortion, penal policy and immigration policy have been driven by the liberal/left against the wishes of the majority. Yet, partly through fear of being branded as ignorant and intolerant and partly by sheer inertia these deep seated changes to the social fabric have been absorbed by the public with little overt resistance. The result? The emergence of a dysfunctional society and an accompanying breakdown in social cohesion.

But perhaps at last the silent majority will no longer remain so acquiescent. Voices are being heard in opposition to the Cameron/Featherstone diktat and some of those voices are being raised in anger.

The government has sown a wind – they might find themselves facing a whirlwind…..

On the other hand the whirlwind might prove yet another storm in a teacup and the silent majority will just once again give way to the relentless march of those who wish to transform our society into something more malleable – and easier to manage and control…

The sad news about the death of Ray Honeyford, a brilliant head teacher whose career was broken in 1985 by the zealots of multiculturalism is made more poignant by the fact that subsequent events have proved him right. As head of a school with a largely Asian intake he warned against the dangers of multiculturalism which, during the 70s and 80s was the official policy of the educational establishment, aided and abetted by the great and the good of the media, the political elite and the lords of academe.

According to this policy, ethnic minority children were encouraged to cling on to their cultures, customs, even languages, while the concept of a shared British identity was treated with contempt. Honeyford thought this approach was deeply damaging.
He feared that it promoted division, hindered integration and undermined pupils’ opportunities to succeed in wider British society.

He was subjected to a campaign of unrelenting vilification from the liberal left and the race relations industry and was given up as a sacrificial lamb by his terrified employers with little, if any, support from the Thatcher government.

….and it made me think of Enoch Powell….

Enoch Powell was a brilliant academic (Professor of Ancient Greek at age 25) and also a combative conservative politician who possessed the remarkable gift (extremely rare amonst UK conservatives) of being able to connect with the man or woman in the street.

His views on immigration and the EU struck a chord that resonated with the majority of British people at a time when those same opinions were deemed unacceptable by the cultural elite that dominated – and continues to dominate – politics, the media and academe. As a result he was ostracised and ignored by the establishment and remained a political outsider from the late 60s onward.

Though popular with everyday folk he never deliberately courted popularity. Indeed some of his views (he was opposed to capital punishment) went against the grain of public opinion. But this independence of mind merely served to endear him even further with the public. There was always the feeling that with Powell you had a politician who was totally honest, never self serving and always ready to tell you the truth however unwilling were your ears to receive it.

Naturally he was given the cold shoulder, not just by the left but also by many of his Conservative Party colleagues who wanted a quiet life free from the strictures of the BBC and the UK Guardian.

Naturally all his warnings about the impact of uncontrolled immigration, European integration and lax fiscal policy have come to pass….

For a taster one clip and two quotes

Powell on the race card

Powell on “Western guilt”

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the ‘developed’ countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced ‘aid’ to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Powell on “Europe”

We are taunted—by the French, by the Italians, by the Spaniards—for refusing to worship at the shrine of a common government superimposed upon them all… where were the European unity merchants in 1940? I will tell you. They were either writhing under a hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940.

Finally a must-read….Simon Heffer’s magisterial biography of Powell….

It’s inevitable. Mention Thatcher (or Palin or Bush or Blair) and the looney tunes pour out of the sewers.

So stand aside Stalin with your NKVD killing squads and your gulag. Get to the back Mao and your famines and Red Guards. Ignore Hitler’s SS and death camps. Forget Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killing fields.

There’s a new mass murderer in town.

Margaret Thatcher.

That’s right. Elizabeth Farrelly’s snarky little memoir of her brief sojourn in London at the height of the “Thatcher Regime” smoked out a comment which referenced one Paul Treanor, a passionate opponent of the nation state and crusader for collectivism who uses Russian statistics to “prove” that free market economies shorten life expectancy and since Thatcher’s free market ideas were copied by countries all over the world she is clearly directly responsible for mass murder.

If the free market has caused about one-third of all deaths, in market economies, over the entire period of their existence, then the market has killed hundreds of millions of people. More than all wars, and more than the impact of a one-kilometre meteorite

Treanor believes that Thatcher should be tried and sentenced by a special tribunal and, naturally, there could only be one outcome.

A European Tribunal for Thatcher would be a sign, that Europe intends to remedy this defect of the British nation state. Such a tribunal should have the power to apply the death penalty, the most appropriate penalty for mass murder.

Of course, being a tankie, Treanor would be quite familiar with tribunals imposing death penalties. He would also assume that statistics published by the Soviet Union were totally honest, though others might disagree. But the true significance of his ill constructed ramblings has nothing to do with facts and figures or with constructing a case.

It is about the construction of a narrative. A narrative which aims to sabotage the argument for individual responsibility and limited government that underpinned Thatcher’s policies – for what worried the collectivist consensus was her popular appeal and the impact her electoral successes had on subsequent political generations.

So the counter myth of brutal Thatcher capitalism gained currency in those elite circles that had the most to lose from the decline in state power – the cartels….the bureaucrats, the academics, the planners and the pressure groups who all depend on the public teat for their well financed comforts.

Treanor’s looney tunes ramblings are merely a useful tool to justify their convictions – and in today’s climate it is more than likely that some BBC documentary maker or Hollywood producer could use them as the basis for a smooth piece of Michael Moore style agitprop that would mainstream the concept of Thatcher and her free market ideas as the willing agents of the grim reaper.

They wouldn’t deny the slaughters of Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, they would merely slip her into the discourse using the sly concept of equivalence.

The Stasi support group GRH are only the tip of an iceberg, comrades….

Lady Trumpington was born in 1922 and as Miss Jean Barker was one of the young women who worked at Bletchley Park helping to break the German codes during WW2. Many years later she was one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers. She’s a tough lady, used to smoke 70 cigarettes a day, has a very broad sense of humour and was once described as a “battleaxe”…there’s not many of her sort left anymore but when a colleague in the House of Lords rather patronisingly referred to her elderly years her reaction appeared to be very brief and quite explicit…

The Occupy protesters in the UK and USA have apparently adopted Guy Fawkes as their role model.

That figures…

For many years he had been a soldier in the Spanish army sent to crush the Dutch rebels who were fighting to win their independence

He was a terrorist who did not mind killing hundreds of people in his attempt to kill King James I

He wanted to turn England into a client state of Spain

He planned to kidnap the young daughter of King James and educate her as a Catholic to rule over a largely Protestant England as a puppet Queen using the Spanish Inquisition to suppress those who opposed the influence of Rome and Spain

By the beginning of the 1600s the English Parliament was beginning to see itself as a counter balance to the power of the monarchy – Fawkes and his Spanish minders believed Catholic monarchs ruled by divine right and should not be challenged

So…let’s see….

Guy Fawkes =Soldier in an army of occupation +Terrorist +Traitor +Kidnapper + Fanatic + Hater of an elected parliament….

Come to think of it – that mask is a perfect fit for those Occupiers…

Five minutes of pure, unadulterated pleasure as a pompous, self important weasel from the media elite (a former editor of The Financial Times, the UK equivalent of the WSJ) and a robot from the propaganda division of the EU get hung, drawn and quartered over the Euro…..

Tags: EU, euro, Guilty Men, media elite, Peter Oborne