Human Rights, who needs them with Westminster looking after us?

For all of the people who genuinely believe that we are Better Together in a glorious united Great Britain, I would ask you to consider the real world for a moment. The latest data from the Office Of National Statistics, published last month show us that since the financial crash in 2008, real wages have fallen on an average of 13.8% across the UK whilst average executive pay has risen by 14%. In Scotland, average pay has fallen by 9.9% which would suggest that the existence of a Scottish Parliament is doing something to help the working people of Scotland. Across the UK the average salary of a company executive is £2.1million whilst the average chief executive was paid £3.7million.
This data also informs us that the average employers earns 136 times more than the national average. I surely cannot be accused of distortion when I conclude that this shows that the government’s policies are wholly directed to beggaring the workforce and enriching the wealthy, thus transferring wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest.

On top of this, the laughingly titled Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, today informs us that Britain is drafting plans to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights and repeal the Human Rights Act. Grayling said on the BBC's Radio 4 that

"I think that what we've got to is a situation where the European court of human rights has lost its legitimacy in the UK by doing things that frankly, the people of this country and their elected representatives do not want," and that the Tories would set out a "clear pathway" for change by publishing a draft bill and leaving the European convention on human rights would be one possible option.
"We're looking at a number of different options," he said. "There are four principles that have to underpin what we do. We have to curtail the role of the court in the UK. We have to replace the Human Rights Act, which as Lord Judge rightly says is one of the key reasons why the European court of human rights seems to have such sway in the UK. We've got to ensure there's a balance of rights and responsibilities in our laws, and I think above all, we've got to make our supreme court supreme."

I love the way that Westminster politicians always claim to be speaking for the people of the country. I am one of those people and no-one has ever asked me my opinion on anything. I do not know anyone who has actually been asked for their opinion by any politician.

As I continually warn you, these people will simply not be constrained in their activities, which primarily consist of looting the national treasury and reducing the working people of the country to a state of modern slavery. If you don't believe me, then at least believe the evidence that continually confronts you every day. The only ray of hope we have is an independent Scotland that will sever us from these barbarians. If we remain Better Together your future is impoverishment, dependence on foodbanks, and the removal of all forms of human rights that are your only possibility of any form of redress against these licenced criminals that pose as your elected representatives. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Why get something for nothing when you can pay for it?

I have been asked why I portray human beings as being irrational. As I have said earlier, human beings have the capacity for rationality, and, we can be very rational when we put our minds to it, but we do not start from that position. Human beings pay lots of money in supermarkets for bottles of water which they can get for free any time they wish by turning on a tap. A rational being would buy a bottle of something, perhaps Coca Cola, and then, after having consumed the Coca Cola, fill the empty bottle with tap water if they wished to have a bottle of water for their convenience. When you buy a bottle of water in a supermarket, do you really think that the people who produced that bottle actually made the water, or that their water is somehow different from that which you get from a tap? As I said before, I am as irrational as the next person, but I draw the line at buying water; that is a descent into insanity, it is quite extreme irrationality. Bottled water is, however, a good metaphor for our consumer society and the power of advertising. The modern discipline of marketing is the science of fooling people and exploiting their irrational nature. It convinces you that the water you are buying is better than normal tap water when even a moments reflection will tell your rational self that this is an impossibility.

However, as I have also previously noted, I do not claim any great insight into such matters. It was David Hume who taught us the basic concept that our reason is a result of our feelings, that is, we do not feel the things we do, for example about what is right and wrong, about what is good and bad, from the application of reason, in fact the opposite is true, that we reason about things because of our feelings (that reason is, as he said, the slave of the passions) which are dominated by our socialisation. It was Sigmund Freud who taught us that when our feelings (what he termed our affective interests) motivate us in relation to any kind of phenomenon, we are liable to act like imbeciles and our reason flies out of the window. It is only when we master our feelings and consciously apply reason that we are able to act in a truly civilised manner, that our intellect can only reliably function when it is removed from the influence of our emotional impulses. You see our intelligence is not an independent force, it is, as both Hume and Freud point out very dependent on our emotional life.

I was drawn to this topic by the fact that the last post I published, warning you that this new year may be your last, attracted more views than any other post I have published. I may be wrong, but I suspect that was because some people may have thought that I was about to predict the end of the world, instead of just the end of your annual holiday. Such ideas of Armageddon appeal to people's irrationality, whereas they are not particularly interested in reasoned argument, it is too boring. I can sympathise with that as I am an avid fan of Terry Pratchett and appreciate escaping from reality from time to time.

I have come to the conclusion that the capitalist system that dominates our Western nations is in the early stages of its death. That is because, as I continually post here, it is founded on a false set of premises and theories. The capitalism that it purports to represent was abandoned many years ago, and the discipline of economics has become basterdised to the point of unrecognisability. Economists simply no longer quite know what they are talking about. Have a good new year and be tolerant and kind. Ps. I watched my favourite English team win 2.1 on Boxing Day thus recovering from their 3.0 drubbing last Saturday. I thought I'd share that with you!

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Happy New Year, it may be your last.

All the major supermarkets are open in Scotland on New Years Day. This is the first time this has happened and is a good example of how the dominant ideology in this country is systematically destroying our culture, our institutions, our values and our normative order in its never ending pursuit of profit and the exploitation of its workforce. It is only a matter of time until Christmas Day is sacrificed to the economic gods and the destruction of the moral order is complete. Easter as a holiday from work as a mark of respect is just a memory now. I have no particular time for the Christian religion but I am very conscious of the symbolic nature of its holy days and how that particular religion underpins the moral order and social cohesion of British society. What is happening is the destruction of respect and of the increasing contempt that the masters of our economic and political life display towards values, rights and any form of moral barriers to the pursuit of profit.

As Emile Durkheim explains, religion is simply the worship of society itself, and the destruction of religion and its attendant symbolic characteristics is a manifestation of the relentless attack on traditional British society with the purpose of altering the nature and structure of that society to resemble one huge business enterprise that operates 24 hours per day, 365 days per annum. Now, I am aware that New Years Day is not a religious matter, but in Scotland it has been traditionally more important than Christmas and is central part of Scottish culture. When I worked in industry we had a days holiday at Christmas but two days at new year. This traces back to the Protestant Reformation in Scotland when the Church of Scotland discouraged the recognition of Christmas on the grounds that it was a Popish festival. But even these fanatics and bigots recognised the need for a substitute to break the monotony and mitigate the bleakness of winter, something our ruling elite cannot now bring themselves to recognise.

You see holidays, and holy days, interfere with profit making, they are constraints and, as I continually stress, the neoliberal free marketeers will not tolerate constraints on their activities. What the British people continually fail to realise is that we are governed by people with no moral compass. They have neither dignity, decency nor self-respect. They only operate by one value, money. Everything is judged and calculated from the point of view of how much they can gain from it. Thus, if a tradition like new years day interferes with their pursuit of gain then they will have to remove that tradition. Thus, religious and cultural norms and values must be modified to justify an economic imperative or removed and replaced altogether. In the process the workforce must be increasingly subjected to conditions of employment that resemble forms of slavery and the unemployed, the sick and disabled be penalised for their unproductive characteristics. They must be made to accept that they are scroungers and parasites and of no economic value. Surely even the most biased conservatives in this sick society must see what is happening. Britain is a very sick society and is drowning in a moral swamp of its own making. Oh, the economy may eventually make some sort of recovery, but by that time society will be dead because under the neoliberal agenda economic recovery is contingent on the destruction of a fair and just society. It need not be this way, you have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Irrationality can be fun

I apologise for not having posted for five days, but I have been away. I live in Scotland, but I frequently go to England to watch football. I was down in Milton Keynes this week, watching my team being thrashed three nil. I say thrashed, because they were lucky it was only three. I often ponder why I should travel 400 miles to watch a team lose, as, when I am leaving the ground on such occasions, wet, cold and thoroughly disappointed, I recognise that I am probably quite insane (though I must say I watch them win more often than see them lose). At home I watch football every week. I follow a team that plays in what is known in Scotland as Junior football. It is a semi-professional form of the game.  I used to watch my home team in the Scottish senior leagues, but I gave that up as I came to increasingly realise how corrupt senior Scottish football is and how all the teams that play in Scottish senior football are in reality only expected to provide opposition to the old firm of Rangers and Celtic. Have you ever noticed how, according to the Scottish media, Rangers and Celtic are never beaten, they only lose games. In other words, when they lose it is their own fault, they are never beaten by a better team.

I appreciate that travelling to watch a team from the lower leagues in both England and Scotland is rather irrational, but, as I have posted before, the human being is a profoundly irrational being and I recognise that in myself, and, where appropriate, quite enjoy allowing my irrationality to lead me. I love the cruelty of football, where a team can be very dominant in a game and still get beaten. I love its tribalism when thousands of people who do not know one another are best mates and kindred spirits for an hour and a half each week. Football is a very social activity and a powerful source of social cohesion. It is particularly focused and in our age where the ruling elite are determined to atomise society and destroy the social and cultural ties that present barriers to financial crime it forms a powerful social role of communalism and solidarity. It is also a very working class sport where even the Manchester United's of the world are still dependent on their working class roots for their survival. The Junior leagues in Scotland are particularly working class and are not forums for the faint hearted or easily offended. They are supported by real people with a very defined cultural philosophy. Football is a powerful antidote to what sociology calls, anomie. In that context I have gained a grudging form of respect for those Rangers supporters, who, when their team was forced to begin playing in the bottom tier of Scottish football, refused to abandon them and travelled to Alloa, Cowdenbeath, Brechin etc. in numbers to show their loyalty and their love, thereby displaying an inordinate irrationality and proving the philosophy of David Hume whilst torpedoing free market economic dogma.

Another fascinating aspect of football is how it is frequently refusing to be bullied by the market. How supporters, if they dig their heels in, are forcing business interests to rethink what they assumed would be an easy target for asset stripping and a quick profit. You see, contrary to what business and financial interests believe, football is not a business and does not have customers. It has supporters who can follow teams even when the team is quite unsuccessful, and that is irrational, it does not mirror the supposed rational consumer model of free market economics. In that sense I am irrational. Football is a community based voluntary activity, because, as I said, supporters are not customers, they are people who voluntarily turn up at their chosen ground every week and pay to watch an activity that they have no possibility of influencing and that often fails to reward them with a result. No business could survive under that form of economics. Because a thing is irrational it is not necessarily stupid, I am going to watch my English team again on Boxing Day, and, because I am succumbing to my irrational self, am supremely confident they will win. I will report in due course.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.

Thatcher's greatest success was hiding the truth

The following is a cut and paste from an editorial in the Guardian today

Has British politics given up on the working poor? It is an extraordinary question to have to ask after a week in which official figures recorded wages lagging the cost of living for the fifth straight year, with pay even more stagnant at the bottom end. The proliferating use of zero-hours contracts since the recession is only the tip of an iceberg of insecurity. And even as unemployment declines in the recovery, the number of unwilling part-timers, lumped with inadequate hours, continues to set records. Toil for scant reward really ought to be the great issue of our day

My point in pasting this is that I have been telling you this since I started my blog, and, whilst it is welcome that the Guardian is at least attempting to highlight the state of poverty in modern Britain, it is to be condemned that such sentiments are just beginning to be spoken when this state of affairs has been obvious for many years now. There are several reasons for this. First, by taking all this time to see what was in front of them, the Guardian writers betray how they have successfully bought into the neoliberal agenda, and have shared the 'there is no alternative' narrative. Thatcher was uniquely successful in winning the battle of ideas and establishing what Antonio Gramsci called a 'hegemony' in ideological terms. As I continually tell you, to accept that there is no alternative is intellectually imbecilic, as, in economic, social and political life, there are always alternatives, there is a multiplicity of alternatives if you only sit down and look for them. There is no one 'correct' or acceptable economic and social system. There is no one model of capitalism. But in Britain, we have been lulled by constant propaganda to believe that there is. This is the principal reason that we cannot affect any recovery from the recession as we are still applying the model that has so catastrophically failed. All the so-called alternatives we are being offered are in reality simply variations of the same theme.

Next, the notion that the British political system has given up on the working poor refuses to accept that the economic model we are operating from has a very deliberate agenda for working people, and that is to impoverish them as far as possible. They haven't given up on the working poor, the fact that we have the phenomenon of working people being driven into deeper and deeper poverty is evidence of the government's active agenda. In other words, being increasingly poor whilst being actively employed has been the deliberate goal of British government since 1979. What has happened is that it has taken a long time to attack and remove the carefully constructed institutional safeguards that were erected over many years to prevent such things happening. Now that most of these safeguards have been removed the Tory led neoliberal agenda is bearing fruit and the Thatcherite programme is finally being realised in all its glory. What the British people and its so-called intellectual leaders cannot seem to accept is that the Westminster elite are at the forefront of a programme to transfer as much wealth as possible upwards and away from the mass of the people, and in doing so reduce the working people of the country to a modern form of slavery in which they will work for almost any wage, under almost any conditions. That is the whole rationale behind the phenomenon of zero-hours contracts, to create a ferocious insecurity and transfer, not only as much wealth, but as much power as possible into the hands of the super-wealthy and the owners and controllers of that wealth. Neoliberalism and modern Toryism, which are also the dominant ideas of both Labour and the Lib-Dems, is immoral, unethical and criminal. That is what you voted for, and is all you will be offered in 2015 if you remain blind and loyal to the Westminster lie. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

The Wealth Creators must be judged differently from the scum

We have been given a glimpse of the future as Western society increasingly mirrors ancient Rome where the wealthy and powerful were governed by different laws than the rest of the people. A 16 year old Texan boy, Ethan Couch killed 4 people and left another brain damaged and unable to move or speak whilst driving under the influence of alcohol 3 times over the limit but was given 10 years probation instead of a prison sentence.

His defence successfully argued that he suffered from what they called 'affluenza' which means that he was so wealthy that he believed that his actions would have no consequences and the judge accepted this.

The constant Tory propaganda that wealth creators are special and should be treated differently than other people is now a reality. The Tories of course borrowed this idiocy from the Americans, and of course, this ruling by an American court will soon be established in this country as well. I have already noted in other posts how, if you work in the capitalist conglomerate system you can do what you want as you will not be held responsible, and now we have graphic evidence that the wealthy are to be judged by different moral criteria from the rest of society.

Britain is entering a perilous and dangerous state whereby we are in fact becoming two different nations sharing the same geographical space. There is the nation of the rich, important and powerful and the nation of the poor, disadvantaged and unimportant. They poor are unimportant because they are not wealth creators. I have, however, also pointed out in other posts how this is simply wrong and that wealth is created by human labour and not by bankers and financiers who simply manipulate the wealth that is created by working people. Should power be disrupted by the weather, all so-called wealth creation immediately comes to a halt until some working person physically restores the power supply by repairing the damage. The so-called wealth creators cannot operate without electricity or computers and so any wealth they supposedly create is ultimately dependent on someone maintaining and installing electricity supply and physically making and assembling the computers.

That we are in this state is testimony to the power of socialisation and constantly repeated lies. If working class people are not involved in the creation of our wealth, why do you suppose that the authorities are so paranoid about strikes? Why is it that they constantly warn how striking damages the economy and disrupts everyone's lives; if working people have no input into wealth creation then what does it matter if they go on strike?  Rome was a slave society and could not operate without the slaves who did the work and created all the wealth, and we, in modern Britain, are increasingly being reduced to a slave like status. The beauty of it is that the ruling elite have actually convinced us that their vision of society is the correct one and the only available model and that working people are actually worthless and are totally dependent on the great and the good for their survival. We must therefore be totally thankful to these people for whatever crumbs they are willing to give us and stop complaining. If we want to blame anyone there are plenty of people available, the useless of society, the poor, the sick, the disabled. They are the real culprits, they are the people to blame for the state the country is in and are ruining our lives by demanding benefits they neither deserve nor should be entitled to. They are the scroungers and the skivers who live off our hard earned taxes. So, it is only right and natural that the wealth creators should be governed by different laws and different moral standards. The next time you see a banker or someone who is obviously wealthy, shake their hand and thank them that they allow you to share the same space and breath the same air that they do and accept that they have a right to do what they want.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.

Work your way out of poverty, Aye Right!!!

I would just like to add to what I posted yesterday on the future of the UK after the next election in 2015. I trust you noticed that, in evidence to the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons this morning, the Chancellor George Osborne, said that he wanted to cut the welfare budget by billions after 2015. In addition, I want you to remember that just last month Labour's Shadow Welfare Minister, Rachel Reeves, told us that Labour intended to be even harder on benefits than the Tories.

Now, to be fair to them, Both Labour and the Tories are telling us quite openly what we can expect from them and that we are of course Better Together. So, there will be no use complaining after 2015 that you didn't know, nor can anyone even suggest that I am either making this stuff up, or even exaggerating, even though if you do not keep up with the news, it must seem as though most of this is a figment of my imagination as it seems hard to believe that it is occurring in a supposedly civilised society.

In addition, all this frenzied activity, whose purpose is to impoverish the majority of the population so that they will be prepared to take work at almost any salary and under conditions that are little better than slavery, will take place just as Westminster MPs get an 11% pay rise. Labour and the Tories will continue to tell you that such measures are necessary to ensure recovery, but I trust that by now you will recognise that for the lying propaganda that it is.

What a wonderful country we live in, governed by wise, decent and charitable Samaritans whose sole purpose is the welfare of the poor, the disabled, the sick and the needy. What a wonderful institution we have in the Westminster Parliament, under whose guidance we are so obviously Better Together. I also trust that you have read the latest Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report which shows that over half of all the officially poor people in Britain are in work. That is people who are classified as living in poverty by this governments own standard of poverty. So, even if you can get a job, you have no appreciable hope of a better life.

As a result, the ordinary people of Britain have no future hope of any form of improvement or betterment, and you have heard it from the Prime Minister, The Chancellor and the Labour Party. Scotland however does have hope, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 

No Welfare State, no NHS, welcome to your future if you think we're Better Together

I must confess to you that I committed a grievous sin today, one I am truly ashamed to admit. I was in a hospital waiting room and I picked up and read a Daily Mail. There, I've told you and I will now spend a week in sackcloth and ashes in burning shame. However, I read a report in the Mail that Prime Minister Cameron had told a Mail reporter that he wanted a clear majority at the next election because being in coalition had prevented him from fully implementing the policies he deeply desired to implement unhindered, cutting income and business tax, go further on welfare reform and reform human rights law. So, there you have it, your future with the Better Together people, because whether you vote Tory or Labour at the next Westminster election that is what you will get because I will remind you again that Labour has already committed themselves to match the Tories benefit reforms and tax cuts.

You will notice that the tax cuts will be on income and business taxes, no cuts in the consumption taxes that penalise the poorest the hardest, like VAT, petrol, clothes etc. and are designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, a process that will intensify under such policies. This attack on the poor will be intensified by even harder benefit cuts and attacks on the welfare budget. This will affect benefits, health and education. It will hit the poor, the elderly, the sick and of course, the disabled, the clear enemy and principal target of Mr. Duncan Smith. How that man hates the disabled. His hatred of the disadvantaged is genuinely terrifying to behold.

As I have repeatedly told you, the attack on our human rights is economically motivated. Its purpose is to remove all constraints on the government's economic policies and programmes and to ensure that their destruction of the NHS and the welfare state, and their relentless determination to reduce Britain's working people to modern forms of slavery will meet with no resistance. What they call the war on terror is merely a convenient excuse to introduce measures that are distinctly authoritarian and undemocratic and are aimed at rights at work, rights of public welfare, benefit rights and trade union rights. One of their great aims is to end rights of protest and demonstration, and this is a desire of all the major parties, indeed that is what is meant by all being in it together.

I will remind you again, no politician has been elected to do these things, no-one told you at the last election that this was their actual policy programme, they are getting away with it because they have managed to convince the British people that the financial crash was their own fault, it was not Westminster or the financial class. It is classic scapegoating. We have the spectacle of another banking scandal today with Lloyds being fined £28million, but nobody is to be punished, nobody is to lose their job, nobody will be prosecuted. Their rights to break the law and defraud the public are protected by the very legal system that is supposed to punish. Their punishment is corporate, it is never individual. If you work in Britain's corporate or financial system you can actually do anything you want and you will not be punished. The corporation will be punished, and of course if a bank is punished then that is actually you and I being punished instead because if a bank is fined they pay the fine with the money you and I save in that bank, it comes out of the money you and I are supposed to get back in interests, it never comes out of their pocket. If you vote to maintain this disgraceful system next September on the farcical proposition that we are Better Together, then I repeat, you will deserve all you get. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Privatisation is a criminal activity

I apologise for not posting for almost a week, but I am rather busy just now. However, I was amused to read a thought from Sir Terry Leahy, until recently the chief executive of Tesco, who was quoted as telling us that

The state has to do less. It has to get out of the way and expect the private sector to do more, be it investment or new business creation.

What is interesting about this is the revelation of how the people like this who run this country and who tell governments what to do live in an alternative universe, in actual cloud cuckoo land. Since the election of Thatcher, the state has been systematically 'rolled back' to use her own words. The entire rationale for all the privatisation that has taken place since then has been the need for investment and jobs that cannot be provided for by the public sector. Not one of those privatisations has worked, and rather than invest, the newly privatised industries and sectors have, instead, happily siphoned off all the wealth into their own pockets. The recent farce of the Post Office is ample testimony to that.

It was getting the state out of the way that produced the financial crisis with the disaster that is Labour and their 'light touch' approach. The light touch that is required for these criminals is the light touch of a police hand on their elbow guiding them to a deserved prison sentence. It should be remembered that the first great privatisation was council housing. I was ridiculed for years for predicting the inevitable result of this policy. Oh, it was very popular, but was also the predictable disaster it has proved to be. You see, the real reasons for all these measures have nothing to do with the public good, or the benefit of the nation. They are purely motivated by elite greed and for the profit of a very few people. The public are of course invited to invest in the newly privatised sectors, but as soon as they are privatised at ridiculously low share levels, the major corporations step in and offer the mugs a good profit on their small investment and within a short time the same gangsters control the newly privatised industries and the public at large are left paying the bill for the profiteering that was the real motivation for the privatisation in the first place.

No public utility should be privatised full stop. They are state assets and must necessarily be controlled by the public through their representatives. Christ told us that we will know the real nature of people and events by their fruits, and the fruits of privatisation are all sour and rotten. The tragedy is that the Sir Terry Leahy's of the world believe such nonsense and the Westminster criminals believe it too as they live in their own out of touch little world and kid themselves on that they actually know what they are doing. As I keep reminding you, they are congenital liars. For example, they keep parroting the lie that they have created a million new jobs and they are never challenged on it. If they are creating all these jobs, why do the unemployed figures not reflect that? I gave you the example recently that over 200, 000 of these so-called new jobs were created by simply redefining the staff in the further education sector as private sector as opposed to public sector workers, there were no new jobs, it was a bare faced lie. That is what you voted for and continue to vote for. You have been warned. The market doesn't work and is a massive lie. It is not, and can never be free and the evidence is all around you, it is one of the most demonstrable aspects of the modern world.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Westminster- The Legion of the lost and Lonely

It is only fitting to mark the death of the only great man left in this sorry world, Nelson Mandela. Indeed the world has become a poorer place this morning. I was left thinking about his work when listening to Question Time last night and was forced to turn it off halfway through as I could no longer stand listening to such a bunch of gibbering bombastic charlatans with the exception of the admirable Mary Beard. The two representatives of government and opposition, Danny Alexander and Rachel Reeves, can only make anyone with even a sliver of intelligence and decency despair for the future of this country. They are quite frankly appalling. You see, everything they say and everything their parties stand for, is constrained within the very narrow confines of the dominant neoliberal economic ideology. They have neither imagination or self-respect and are simply robotic mouthpieces for the neoliberal ruling elite they represent. I repeat, Westminster politicians are lost and are intellectually bankrupt. They not only constantly repeat the lie that there is no alternative, they actually believe it, and it is that belief that demonstrates that they are not at all intelligent. If I can remind you of some of the words of Nelson Mandela

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of fundamental human rights. Everyone everywhere has the right to live with dignity, free from fear and oppression, free from hunger and thirst, and free to express themselves and associate at will.Yet in this new century millions of people remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. Massive poverty and inequality are terrible scourges of our times - times in which the world also boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation.While poverty persists, there is no true freedom. Amnesty International is right to stand up against the rights violations that drive and deepen poverty.People living in poverty have the least access to power to shape policies - to shape their future. But they have the right to a voice. They must not be made to sit in silence as"development" happens around them, at their expense. True development is impossible without the participation of those concerned.

If you will allow me to remind you of something I posted recently, that the richest 1% of the world's population own half the world's wealth. Such a statistic is hard to believe, but it is accurate. By contrast, the poorest 66% of the world's population own only 3% of the world's wealth. If Mandela is correct in what he says, what successive British governments have been doing, since at least the election of Margaret Thatcher, and yes, this includes the Labour Party, is ruling unjustly and denying much of the British people their fundamental human rights. British government has been quite deliberately transferring wealth from the poor to the rich and has produced a society where, just this week, the British Medical Journal has published that poverty in this country has become a dangerous health issue. The 7th richest country in the world has over half a million people depending on food banks and announcing that people will have to work until they are 70 before being considered for a pension. The imbecile Alexander admitted on Question Time last night that this meant everyone, even people who would be physically incapable of still being able to do their job at that age, such as people who work in heavy manual labour. He thus admitted on national television that the government had just announced a policy that is not only unjust, but unworkable. That is the nature of government in this country today. If that hadn't occurred on a national television programme I am sure people would have accused me of making it up.

Never underestimate the hatred of Britain's ruling elite for ordinary people, or their determination to subject the bulk of the population to modern forms of slavery. It may seem extreme to say that they have deliberately created this poverty and despair, but they have. It is quite calculated. These are successive governments who quite deliberately make no attempt to recover an estimated £40 billion of unpaid tax per annum. That alone could remove all poverty and hardship in this country and provide everyone with a decent pension, so you should ask them why they let this situation continue?
Should you vote to continue to support such people next September then that is your choice. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Westminster - a threat to our liberty

I have been writing since I started this blog about how our government and its ruling elite simply refuse to he held to account on any level of their activities and how this renders our so-called democracy a farce and a fraud. In defence of that I ask you all to take note of the dangerous threats levelled at the Guardian newspaper today in Parliament, behaviour that even the President of America admitted could not happen in the USA. We had the ludicrous spectacle of a Labour MP demanding to know if the editor of the Guardian loved his country, and of Tory MPs demanding that the Guardian be prosecuted, all because they have dared to expose the unacceptable levels of surveillance that we are subjected to by the government and its henchmen in the security services.

Every other country in the Western world has accepted that what the Guardian has done is not only democratically acceptable, but necessary, in that they are doing what the government itself should have been doing by holding the security services to account for unacceptable practice. What this sordid episode demonstrates vividly is the extent of the corruption within the entire Westminster establishment, from the politicians through the civil service and the security forces.

I am intrigued by this Labour imbecile equating loving your country with a refusal to criticise it. Any criticism of government and its activities is now being likened to treason and proof that you hate your country and are a stooge of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This is not a minor point, and should be taken very seriously by all of us. Westminster is becoming a genuine danger to freedom and liberty.

Oscar Wilde was spot on when he described patriotism as the last refuge of every scoundrel. The claim that they loved their country was the refuge of the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the KGB and the Stasi. It is the refuge for racists, religious bigots, warmongers and every kind of official criminal. You love your country so it has to be cleansed of all degenerate influences, of the weak, the poor, the dangerous minorities who are different etc. However, genuine love of your country involves analysing its faults, its weaknesses, its intolerances and its injustices and remedying them. It involves exposing bad legislation and governmental criminality. It was that dangerous Marxist revolutionary St Thomas Aquinas who told us that an unjust law was no law at all and that we are not obliged to obey it (well he must have been a dangerous Marxist revolutionary if he said a thing like that - no?).

A country is its people, its traditions and customs, its institutions and its history, To know who we are, we must first know who we were and how we came to be who we are. A country is (supposedly) represented by its government, but the government is not the country, nor, as is abundantly obvious, does it always represent it faithfully and properly. I know you must be fed up reading me saying it, but our political class in modern Britain are appalling and so out of touch as to be a genuine worry. They are, in addition, not very intelligent, and they are certainly a danger, both to our liberty and to our well-being. Westminster represent nobody but themselves and their elite mates. You are the electorate, you can change things if you use your votes wisely. It's up to you, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

If you're corrupt then we're certainly Better Together

I trust you have been reading about the Tory MP Andrew Lansley, the man who wants to completely privatise the NHS and who earns a salary of £135,000 per annum as a cabinet minister, and who has claimed £6000 in expenses for hotel bills in London, despite the fact that he owns a £1million flat 1 mile away from the Houses of Parliament and another house a 34 minute train journey away. This is one of the architects of the government's austerity programme who constantly tells us that we are all in it together and that there is no alternative. This comes on top of Tory MP Liam Fox, a man who lost his cabinet post for corruption, who claimed 3p on his expenses for a car journey of 100 metres. The people who persistently tell us that we are all in it together are the same people who constantly tell us that we are all better together.

As Alex Salmond pointed out in the Scottish Parliament, the leader of the better together campaign, our own Darling Alistair, was in the television studios 1 hour after the publication of the Scottish Government's proposals for an independent Scotland rubbishing the document and telling us how irrelevant it was. This was a 649 page document, and, as Salmond pointed out, if he had read it, he must have read 3000 words per minute. The Westminster clique have neither shame, dignity or any self-respect, but of course we will all be better together with them leading us into a glorious Westminster neoliberal future of poverty, foodbanks and zero-hour contracts whilst we cheerfully watch and applaud them looting the national Treasury.

From another perspective of the future under the Tories, we have the spectacle of the Tory MP Tim Yeo, being de-selected by his constituency party because he has supported gay marriage and continued membership of the EU. So, what does that tell you about Westminster politics. Well, MPs are supposed to represent the people who elect them, not a 25 person committee of their local constituency party caucus. Thus, if Yeo wishes to remain an MP he will have to represent his local party management committee and the rest of the electorate in his Surrey constituency can go to hell whether they want him as their MP or not. They are not going to be asked.

The Westminster system is genuinely corrupted beyond repair under the present three parties who represent it. If you still listen to them, particularly that grotesque and mindless caricature of a Labour Party that inhabits Hollyrood then that is your choice. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat