Wednesday 29 May 2013

State Illegality

I trust you have all seen the reports about how Britain has been detaining over 90 Afghan nationals in a camp in Afghanistan for the past 12 to 15 months without charge, access to lawyers or even the knowledge of why they are being held. You are fed up with me telling you how we are totally under the spell of all things American, but here is concrete evidence. This may be our Guantanamo Bay.

Regardless of what you may think about the Afghans, this is outright illegal behaviour by the British government, and, one of the oldest principles of democratic government, going back to its infancy in Greece, is that if the government refuses to abide by the law, then no-one else is obliged to either. A lawless government is no government, it has neither authority, legality, or moral basis for its rule. The corruption of the Westminster parliament is almost complete. In 1928, the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis stated that If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.’ St Thomas Aquinas argued that we cannot be bound to obey laws that are manifestly unjust because laws that violate reason are not laws, they are something else. Thus, even if the government claims a form of legality for its treatment of the Afghanis they are incarcerating, their obvious unjustness disqualifies them as reasonable measures.

As far back as the Roman Empire, the Roman jurist Pliny the Younger stated that the Prince is not over the law, but the law is over the Prince. Despite these warnings over the centuries, our government is putting itself and its agencies above the law whenever it suits them and in the UK we are losing our claim not only to be a democratic and legal society but also hold to fundamental principles going back over the centuries. In ancient Athens, the Athenian statesman, Pericles argued that
"Our polity does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. It is called a democracy, because not the few but the many govern. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; 

The English philosopher John Locke stated that "wherever law ends, tyranny begins." and, in his definition of the rule of law, Lord Thomas Bingham states that
"ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably" and that "the law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights”

As a result, we can safely conclude that the UK is in the process of abandoning the rule of law. In 1821, 100 years before the Nazi takeover in Germany, the German author Heinrich Heine wrote
 "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” He was right, and they did.

The British government is in the process of destroying human rights, and has been since at least the election of Blair although it was Thatcher who began the process. In order to destroy rights, they must abandon the rule of law and where they have incarcerated Afghans without charge, access to a lawyer, or revealing why they have been incarcerated, they will end up incarcerating British citizens. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 

 

Friday 24 May 2013

Beware what you wish for, you may just get it!

Last month all Scotland's police and fire services were centralised into one unitary body for each. This means that all decision-making within these services has been centralised. Today, the 22nd of May, the president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents called for a reorganisation of Scottish local government, a reduction in the number of local authorities, and the creation of a single emergency service. The purpose of such reforms is to cut the cost of local government and his justification is because the police have been reformed and have been subject to cuts, then so must all other locally based services.

Here we have the police interfering directly with the political structures of the nation and arguing for the reform of our system of local government because he's angry at the way his service has been treated by the national government. Thus, we now see at all levels of our society how economic problems are driving all political and social policy decision-making. Instead of politics being the bedrock of national policy with elected representatives making policy that is supposed to reflect the needs and problems of the polity, we have unelected officials demanding changes to our constitutional structure because they have been subject to a reform which should never have been made in the first place.

In his ‘Representative Government’ John Stuart Mill argues that

‘The very object of having a local representation, is in order that those who have any interest in common which they do not share with the general body of their countrymen may manage that joint interest by themselves.’
 
All communities have interests in common that they do not share with other communities. Liberal democracy requires a system of limited government with defined independent centres of power. It requires legitimacy and representation and as wide a dispersal of power as is necessary. Britain is in fact heading in the opposite direction. Centralisation is the foundation of authoritarianism and totalitarianism and a necessary precursor of any totalitarian regime is the elimination of any form of local government.. Centralisation is the response of people who are determined to exercise complete control divorced from any form of democratic accountability. It is the antithesis of devolved and democratic decision-making. The notion that we have too many local authorities is a nonsense, and assumes that there is only one form of management structure that fits all and that decisions made in Glasgow or Edinburgh will meet the needs of, and understand the conditions in, Dingwall, or Stranraer. For example, policing, refuse collection, street cleaning, library provision etc. in Glasgow will be very different from Dingwall or Stranraer. They will impose different priorities and have different costs. You are not comparing like for like, and any claim that the decision-making process is the same for all such communities is simply wrong and ignorant, and any politician claiming that a centralised structure for any such services will adequately meet their needs should be barred from office as he/she is self-evidently an imbecile.

Local government and local services are not called local for nothing. Should they become centralised, they become national and cease to be local. For example, if you create a single emergency service, where will it operate from? Who will finance it and control it, and more importantly, who will select its management and who will hold them to account? The police are the personnel who guard and protect the polis, the local community. A policeman is a man of the polis, and this is not some abstract philosophical point as the origins of the police were to draw people from the local community who knew the community and cared for it. When the police service becomes national and loses its local genesis and a police chief begins to influence the constitutional arrangements in our society on purely economic grounds, our democracy is indeed in dire peril. The continual centralisation tendencies in this country are a grave threat to our rights and our freedoms, you have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
 

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Poor? It's all your own fault.

I would like to alert you all to a report out today published by the Joseph Rountree Foundation that should send a chill down everyone's spine, and marks a significant victory for the Conservatives Party's war against the most vulnerable people in British society. Constant propaganda by the Conservatives and their supporters in the right wing press has attempted to demonise the unemployed, the poor and people on benefits, and it is now bearing handsome fruit. Using data collected from the British Social Attitudes Survey, the Foundation reports how the people who vote Labour now increasingly blame the poor for their poverty and agree that welfare dependents are undeserving. We now seem to live in a country where poverty is seen as the fault of the individual rather than a social problem.

In Nazi Germany people who were seen as a burden on society, or as a danger to the state had a label attached to them, 'untermenschen' meaning underpeople, or subhuman. The untermenschen included racial groups who the Nazis attempted to portray as subhuman, but also included the disabled, the mentally ill etc. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, to the Nazis, people who they considered had no contribution to make to society were also labelled, 'ballastexistenzen' human ballast that could be thrown overboard when the ship of state got into difficulty. Nazi literature actually referred to such people as useless eaters. Under the Nazis, such people were subjected to compulsory euthanasia.

This is what you do when you demonise people and group them into convenient categories such as scroungers and skivers, when you blame the ills of society on the helpless and the disadvantaged who have no powerful voices to support them, you finally herd them into camps and gas them. But that couldn't possibly happen in Britain, could it?

We now live in a Britain where everything has only one value, an economic value. If you are not economically active you are worthless, because no one has any worth that cannot be priced. Nobody in a modern free market neoliberal economy is deserving of any consideration if they have no meaningful economic contribution to make. Such attitudes are deserving of the label evil. Britain is descending into a dark place where the victims of catastrophic incompetent government and elite policies are successfully demonised as the culprits. Goebbels told us that if we tell a lie, we should tell a big one and tell it often. Our government's lies are huge and constantly repeated, and it's working. Our leaders are completely immoral and shameless, they are also dangerous, and this applies to all our major parties and press.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Monday 13 May 2013

Gordon to the rescue

I have just been watching the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown telling us how the Labour Party are the only people who can make Scotland a fairer society. This is similar to UKIP telling us that they are the only people who can secure our future in Europe or the Tories assuring us that the NHS is safe in their hands.

Gordon Brown is the man who oversaw the greatest economic divide in British history, who was the most incompetent Chancellor in recorded history, who was a disastrous Prime Minister, whose party refused point blank to repeal any of the Tories labour laws, and the party who encouraged the rape and theft of our national wealth by the financial industry, who introduced the Private Finance Initiative, who passed over 4,500 new criminal laws, including the crime of swimming in the hull of the Titanic, who lied through their teeth to Parliament and the British people over weapons of mass destruction and who then proceeded to bomb Iraq back into the Middle Ages, who refused to stop the Murdoch press from hacking people's phones, who told people that they were quite relaxed about people becoming filthy rich (they quite conveniently failed to tell us that they were also quite relaxed about people becoming filthy poor by the way) who began the privatisation of our health and education systems, the party who introduced those pillars of the welfare state, ATOS, into assessing who is fit for work and who decided that if you can hold a pen you are fit and if you don't work you are a benefit scrounger, who argued for 90 days detention without charge, for identity cards and who supervised the installation of surveillance equipment that puts Britain at the top of the league of the most spied upon people in the world, who introduced secret courts and colluded with the Americans on rendition and torture of British citizens.

These are just some of the measures I have thought of from the top of my head. The Labour Party are a genuine disgrace and if the Scots actually pay any attention to this man and his appalling party then they have only themselves to blame. If you listen to them, you are committing your future to Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls etc who make the Addams Family look like intellectual giants. Whose Scottish leadership under the 'woman of the people' Ms Lamont, demonised the unemployed and people on benefits by accusing them of living in a something for nothing society. However, that is only likely if Labour win the next election. If they don't Scotland will again be at the mercy of a Tory government that is descending into fascism, in which event they will be ably supported by UKIP, a party who not only welcome members of the BNP, but are happy to endorse such people as candidates for election.

Remember, if a Labour politician's lips are moving they are lying. Gordon Brown is a joke, but unfortunately there is nothing remotely funny about him or his Labour Party. You trust these people at your peril.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.

book

I hesitate to appear to use this blog as a promotional tool, and I trust any regular readers will not view me in that manner. However, if you are interested in what I say and in my opinions of our modern society, I am having a book published in September called "Human Rights in a Big Yellow Taxi."

Should you wish to see a preview of the cover of this book, you can view it on Amazon or the Book Depository by simply typing in the title.

The theme of the book is how we are losing all of our human rights to satisfy the prerogatives of the dominant neoliberal free market economic ideology. As you will know, I consider this ideology and the theories that support it as wrong and fraudulent. As a result, the assault on our rights and freedoms are not only unjustified but are sinister and are being implemented in order to prevent any challenge to the unbridled theft of our national wealth and to reduce the working people of the country to a state of servitude akin to forms of slavery. This is, of course, the entire thrust of the right's desperation to get us out of the European Union and the protection of the European Court of Human Rights. No person with any conscience or decency can support the Conservatives or UKIP but particularly anyone who works for a living as they will remove all of your employment rights at the first opportunity.

The reference to a big yellow taxi is inspired by the Joni Mitchell song of that name when she tells us in the chorus

"don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"

If any of you are too young to know the song, just Google it, I'm sure you'll like it, and, be under no illusions, your rights are going and will soon be gone unless we waken up and say enough is enough,

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Saturday 4 May 2013

Your future after Thursday

I invite everyone who reads this blog, whether they agree with me or not, to watch events as they unfold in the wake of Thursday's local elections in England. I'm sure I don't need to tell you of the significant gains made by UKIP. In the immediate future, this will have important implications for British politics and for British society.

The first reaction from the Tories has been to pledge to legislate for a referendum of our continued membership of the European Union. This is the dream of the right in Britain, to withdraw us from Europe, particularly as this would enable them to scrap all legislation protecting human rights. In particular, the Tories wish to scrap all employment legislation in order to completely subjugate working people and destroy any remaining vestiges of trades unionism. In this venture the Tories will be completely supported by UKIP who are openly calling for the scrapping of our employment legislation, and, judging from their 13 years in government, and their continued pronouncements, they will not be opposed by Labour. We withdraw from Europe at our peril as we will be completely at the mercy of these people with no fall-back support.

What is characterising modern British politics is hatred. The Tories and UKIP hate! They hate working people and their labour organisations, they hate Europe, people on benefits, immigrants, Muslims and anyone who disagrees with them. If you think that Nigel Farage is a nice bloke and a breath of fresh air, simply watch him on television, on Question Time and in interviews. He is intolerant of anyone who disagrees with him, is extremely rude and will not allow anyone to put their point of view over uninterrupted. You are not allowed to disagree with him. Add in the fact that he openly welcomes members of the BNP into his party and is quite happy to have them stand as candidates. Then transfer those attitudes and that approach into government and decision-making and you had better worry about the future thrust of British government. Why, because the Tories are determined to capture the ground that UKIP presently occupy and will now tailor their policies to do just that. What is extremely worrying is that these parties are carrying the majority of the English electorate with them, and this is what will be foisted on the Scots regardless of what they vote in 2015.

Another point from last Thursday is that on those results Labour will not form a government, so, if you think that the Tories will lose the next election, think again. In 2014 you will be faced with a stark choice, take the future government of Scotland into your own hands, or invest your future with racists, neo-Nazis and people who hate!

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Thursday 2 May 2013

Chips are for your tea.

I was asked recently if I've got a chip on my shoulder about the government? Good question and it deserves an answer. The answer is no, I don't have a chip on my shoulder, as I try to look at reality as objectively as I can, but I am resentful and angry at how successive governments have been, and still are, systematically dismantling and destroying my country and my society and causing genuine hurt and pain to thousands of people who don't deserve it, for their own personal greed and arrogance. First, let us not be under any illusions, the government is only the public face of a much wider ruling elite who utilise the government and its decision-making for their own ends. These ends include stripping the ordinary people of this country of their rights, their prosperity and their security and reducing the working people of this country to a level of servitude that will be akin to a form of slavery, and they do this with a callous indifference to the effects of their actions.

I am an empiricist, which means that I only accept the type of knowledge that can be known through observation and experience. Empirical knowledge, the evidence of our observation and experience shows us without any doubt that the dominant ideology in the UK, free market neoliberal economic and political theory, is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong and has failed. It is not only empirically observable in the UK but in Greece, Spain, Portugal etc. where it has had catastrophic effects on these societies.

However, who is to blame for the situation we find ourselves in? Well, our government and its allies in the gutter press have provided us with numerous scapegoats, particularly, people on benefits, immigrants, the European Union and our system of human rights. Human rights are a constraint on our government and its allies preventing them from reducing working people to poverty, denying people their benefits etc. and so our human rights must be removed in the cause of making as much money as possible. In the process the government and its supporters display a breathtaking indifference to the misery and hardship they are causing.

Britain is the fifth richest country in the world and we have over half a million people every week being fed from food banks. People in Britain are literally starving while other people earn more money in a year than they can possibly spend in a lifetime. Britain has abandoned civilised behaviour and has lost any type of moral compass. As I said in another post, the majority of people in this country believe that  27% of the benefits budget is lost to benefit fraud, when the actual figure is 0.7%. Why do people believe that? Because the government and its allies tell them, they peddle a shameless lie. I could go on and on, but people don't want to know. I was warning people that the financial crash was coming over ten years before it did, but people just laughed. How did I know? Because the theories that underpin free market economics are flawed, and in places simply wrong. If you start from a false hypothesis, you must reach a false conclusion. The problem with the government's hypotheses over the last 30 years is not just that they have been false, but that they have resulted in public policy that cannot work in the long-term. That is why this government hasn't a clue how to solve the financial mess we are in. I shall be happy to expand on any of these points for anyone who wants me to. I thank you for your interest and for a challenging question and I hope I have answered it satisfactorily.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.