Monday 27 February 2017

A Hard Brexit? bring it on

I expect I will come in for a fair bit of criticism for this post because I have to admit I am getting quite animated by the prospect of Brexit, but for reasons that most people will not agree with. Let me begin with noting how Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, regaled the Scottish Labour Party conference on how nationalism and racism are really the same thing. Now, Sadiq Khan is as familiar with Scotland as I am with London, I have visited the place five times in my life which is five times too many. London is as familiar to me as Paris, and I have never been in France. The honourable Mr Khan shows how the English elite have not a scooby doo about Scotland and Scottish politics. I have repeatedly admitted on this blog that I support the SNP and Scottish independence but I am not a nationalist by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the people who voted Yes in the Scottish referendum are the same. Our support for the SNP and independence is a disgust with, and a rejection of, the Westminster pigsty, and we are fortunate that we have an alternative to the Westminster filth, an alternative that is predominantly working class. Most of the people that Mr Khan assumes are flirting with racism are traditional Labour supporters who simply refuse to associate any longer with, or support, the odious party that he represents, the party of illegal rendition, of warmongers, torturers, and neoliberal imbeciles who presided over the banking crash. In Scotland voting for the Tories is like voting for the Black Death and the Liberal Democrats are simply a joke. In other words, voting for the SNP is a mechanism to cleanse our political system and our nation and start afresh.

Now we may not get independence, but every utterance by clowns like the honourable Mr Khan makes it more likely. Wedded to the idea of unionism with the rest of the UK, the Scottish Labour Party becomes an increasing irrelevance and because of their impotence, we will probably see a rise in the Tory vote because unionists have nowhere else to go. Again, an increase in support for the Tories is another likely move towards independence. Labour's only hope in Scotland is to oppose Brexit and adopt support for independence and they have neither the intelligence nor the courage to do so.

I have told you that I consider Prime Minister May as quite stupid, a perfect example of well-schooled but not well-educated. Every day she does more to cement my opinion of her as she is like an unguided missile, offending almost everyone who matters in the EU and hardening their stance on negotiations for Brexit. As a result we are likely to see what the pigsty calls a hard Brexit with very few concessions made by the EU. This result will be brought about by the pigsty's sheer arrogance and affrontery. Ms May is like someone who buys a ticket for a train journey and then insists that not only should the train go where she wants it to, but that she must be allowed to drive it. If the Tories continue with their present strategy then Brexit will be a disaster, and that is the conclusion of most of the people who specialise in European politics, I do not claim any originality here. As a result, this also brings independence closer for the Scots. What the Sadiq Khan's of the world fail to grasp is that Brexiteers are the real nationalists, the foreign haters, the Little Englanders who quite genuinely believe that Britain still matters, that it is important, with a culture and identity that is being daily bastardised by the invading hordes. It will take a disaster and a national crisis to make such people realise what they have done. The dry rot is everywhere in the building but the house will have to collapse before they even recognise something is wrong, but with a bit of courage and self-confidence Scotland will avoid such a fate. I will finish with a reminder of how Britain is becoming ever more barbarous. A lady of Singaporean origin who has lived in this country for 30 years, married to a British gentleman, with two children and grandchildren from the marriage has just been detained in a centre and then unceremoniously bundled onto a plane and sent back to Singapore without being allowed to see her husband and children. Her crime? She spent too long on a return to Singapore caring for her dying mother. The British are of course a Christian people, motivated by love, compassion and charity, and governed by the rule of law and justice. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Thursday 23 February 2017

Rule Brittania, Brittania rules the hate.

I genuinely do not take pleasure in saying I told you so, but I feel that the main thrust of this blog since I began has been vindicated by Amnesty International's annual Report "The State of the World's Human Rights" published yesterday. I have been repeatedly warning that government's, obsessed with neoliberal free market economics, are determined to remove all of our human rights, indeed that was the subject of the book I published in 2013. In the Report, Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said: “A new world order where human rights are portrayed as a barrier to national interests makes the ability to tackle mass atrocities dangerously low, leaving the door open to abuses reminiscent of the darkest times of humanity". Again commenting on a subject I have repeatedly warned about, the Report also slammed the British government for "grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities." That is indeed perhaps the most shocking and shameful indictment of the pigsty, one of the things I have told you makes me ashamed to be British and why I no longer call myself British, I am a Scot. What is almost as bad however, is that very honourable and well-meaning people in organisations such as Amnesty International are only now wakening up to what I have been warning you about for the past five years. That is testimony to the hegemonic control that the neoliberal political and economic ideology has been exercising over our people.

As you will be aware, in the aftermath of the Brexit campaign a right-wing nationalist fanatic fatally shot a Labour MP Jo Cox in the street. Yesterday her husband Brendan made an appeal to people to resist the hate speech and divisive language that has become the norm in this country, telling us that this is not us, this is not an accurate reflection of the British people. Much as I admire Mr Cox and sympathise with his plight, I am afraid I must disagree with him. This is, unfortunately, all too accurate a picture of what the majority of people in the UK have become, goaded into hatred and resentment of foreigners, immigrants and the less fortunate in society by the tabloid press, led by the Daily Mail, and UKIP led by the odious Nigel Garbage, indeed the Great Garbage has been highlighted by Amnesty in their Report for his behaviour during the Brexit campaign. In this they have been ably supported by the nutcase factions within the Tory Party, such as Duncan-Smith, Gove, and of course our dearly beloved Spider who has once again made a complete fool of himself in a European Forum, telling the world's press that Brexit is a 'liberation' implying of course that we have been under occupation for the past 50 years. I was going to call him a halfwit, but that would be  too complimentary to him because if you had the ability to combine the intellects of the entire British government you would not manage to come up with a halfwit

Since Brexit we have had our excuse for a Prime Minister railing against all and everything connected to the EU and damning it on a daily basis. As I have told you before, dear Mrs May is a genuine thicko who is making it up as she goes along. We have even had the spectacle of this parody for a politician threatening the House Of Lords with extinction if it dares to exercise its constitutional duty by holding her Brexit agenda to scrutiny and to account. As I have again repeatedly warned you, this country is sliding ever inexorably into an authoritarian state and that has now become so obvious that even some of the more timid of the Tories are speaking about it. We had a report in the Guardian about senior Tories warning that they are afraid that 'there will be blood on the streets before too long' if this government does not relent in its war against its own people. We are now characterised by hate, by callousness and a form of cruelty. I invite anyone to log on to the Independent newspaper website and read the comments below the line in any political article. It will really shock you, and is strange for a paper like the Independent which is quite responsible (except when it comes to Scotland).

It is an axiom of business that shop floor attitudes and culture are a reflection of the management, as personnel policies are determined at the top and are reflected down throughout the organisation. In Theresa May and her gangster government we have some of the most callous and cruel personnel imaginable, and this is now being reflected by an increasingly intolerant electorate. Today in a debate in the pigsty on the government's decision to halt all refugee children a Tory MP, Pauline Latham, told us that we should stop being so sentimental about these children, telling the pigsty that if children were living in “rat-infested” shelters with no mattresses in Greece, that was not Britain’s concern. Now I ask you, if you cannot get sentimental about homeless and parentless children, living in makeshift camps in the middle of a European winter with no end in sight to their tragic situation, then we really have abandoned all humanity and pretence of civilisation. That is the reality of the governing class in modern Christian Britain. This is Thatcher's legacy. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Sunday 19 February 2017

Politics has become genuinely dangerous and has declared war on reality

I apologise for not posting for a week, but I have had guests staying with me, from Cornwall, or Kernow, as the Cornish like to refer to it, as this is the old Cornish name. Cornwall is a most agreeable part of the UK and it is in the Cornish people's favour that they look upon the rest of the English nation with a healthy disdain. I like eccentric people and places which is why I like Liverpudlians, Geordies, the Cornish etc. With the exception of the Cornish, northern people are far more down to earth, hospitable, and 'real' than the rest of the English, and I count the north from about Stoke-on-Trent upwards. These are mainly the areas of the core working class, the people who are universally despised by the southern English middle classes. I once had the pleasure of a lady hotel owner in Devon tell me that were it not for the legendary spending of the Scots, she would never allow them into her hotel. She actually told me and my wife that she despised anyone who came from north of Birmingham (they were uncivilised). The only reason she had taken our booking was because we had a Yorkshire Terrier and she loved Yorkies, having two of her own. So, dogs originating from Yorkshire were welcome, but the people were not. I bet you think I just made that up. Scottish people are very big spenders by the way, contrary to popular mythology, and there can be few more hospitable places in the world than Glasgow. However, if you visit Britain and want to stay somewhere that gives access to the most diverse activities and places, whilst providing the best of facilities, Manchester's the place, not London. But forgive my inane drivel and allow me to make a few observations.

We live in genuinely perilous times. Politicians have always lied, but in the past they could expect their career to come to an end when found out. In addition, they were usually careful to lie about things that they could reasonable expect not to be found out about, or that they could plausibly deny. Today we live in a world where, not only do they lie about things that are blatantly obvious, but people will actually defend them and still vote for them. It was raining when the American president was sworn into office but I have watched him tell the world that it was a beautiful sunny day, and he has now regaled us about the terrorist atrocities committed within Sweden by Islamic immigrants which is entirely fictitious. Now, such things may seem trivial, but this is the President of the United States revealing behaviour that must surely question his sanity or his respect for the rest of the human race. All that has happened since his inauguration demonstrates that this is a person who is simply incapable of honesty, or of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, but the worrying thing is that none of this seems to make a blind bit of difference to his supporters. This is why I comment about such things, because even if I have no affect on anyone, I at least try to do something to counter the seemingly inexorable slide towards some form of quasi-fascist authoritarianism in our poor nations. As Edmund Burke warned us, "all that requires for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing."

Now, Trump's behaviour is bad, and to my mind inexcusable, but, as I have written here before, at least Americans have a Constitution and a Supreme Court to protect them as a last resort. In this heap of garbage (this midden) we laughingly call a nation, our political system rests solely on trust. We have no independent institutions or codes of conduct we can turn to when our leaders behave like that. Trump's campaign against the press is hysterical, but it succeeds with many people because it holds a kernel of truth, and of course for a liar to be really effective, they must garnish their lies with titbits of truth from time to time. I am not familiar with the American press, but we have the Mail the Express and the Sun who daily degrade our nation with filth. If you want to know what fake news looks like then look no further. But we also have some press who attempt to provide a semblance of responsible reporting, even if they will happily stoop to outright lying when it suits them, such as during our two recent major referendums. However, what I am writing about is the capacity for lying that takes the form of sheer naked effrontery. An example is Nigel Garbage as I can honestly say that everything I have ever heard that person saying has been a lie, and he gets away with it because he brazenly looks right into a camera, or at an audience, and lies through his teeth while wearing that idiotic grin that says, I'm lying, you know I'm lying, I know you know I'm lying, and I know you want to believe me, so you will end up agreeing with me. That is the Trump's strategy as well. The Great Garbage was succeeded as leader of UKIP by Paul Nuttall who has obviously proven a very adept pupil as he has continued the fine right-wing political tradition of pathological lying and demanding that those who challenge the lie are the real liars. This is the new politics.

Nuttall has come under criticism and anger from the relatives of those who died in the Hillsborough tragedy for first claiming that he was at that game, and then claiming that he had personally lost close friends who died at Hillsborough. He was forced to admit on national radio that this latter claim was untrue, as he put it, ‘a mistake’. No-one in the entire Liverpool area has any recollection of him being at the game, nor of him ever mentioning it before now. He was twelve years old at the time, and no-one can find any relative or school chum who can support his claims. In the finest British political tradition, he got his press secretary to take the blame, because the mistake was not his. At no time did he explain how the press secretary made the mistake, just that he had not said that, which of course he had. Next he claimed that he was invited to join the board of the North West Training Council charity and then posted on his website that he was a member of that board, writing on his website that he was “thrilled at the honour of being a board member.” However, the chief executive of the charity says that he was never a member of that board nor was he ever invited to be a member. He also claimed that he played professional football with a team from the Liverpool area called Tranmere Rovers which was also demonstrated to be a lie and on his website claimed that he had a PhD in history which was also demonstrated to be untrue. But in true UKIP and Trumpian style, all of those lies, which were verifiable and undeniable somehow become the truth and he is a victim. As he told his party conference, to which they all (knowing full well that he was lying through his teeth) roundly applauded him and registered their full support, “But I do not apologise for what is a coordinated, cruel and almost evil smear campaign that has been directed at me. It is based on lies from sources who have not been named." The real source of course was his own website. This person is a member of the European Parliament and is currently standing for the Westminster pigsty in a by-election. He will fit into it perfectly and seamlessly if elected. We are indeed descending into darkness. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Monday 13 February 2017

Liverpool , a beacon of sanity in this barbarian nation

Well the real world is again coming around to the Kommirat view of things with the Guardian newspaper running a leader article  decrying British government and society as cruel. Yesterday the Sunday papers ran articles showing how a recent government minister, a lady (well a female), called Nicky Morgan, has been writing on the Tory Party website warning that they are again being seen as the nasty party. This is a reference to a speech made by the Prime Minister, Theresa May herself, in 2002 when she described the Tories as the nasty party, telling the Conservative Party that their base was too narrow as were their sympathies. In her piece, Morgan highlighted a letter she had received from a Tory constituent who told her he could no longer support a party that was “hellbent on completely destroying, our relationship with our mainland European neighbours, on driving the NHS onto the rocks (or into the private sector?) and on closing our doors to migrants in desperate need of our humanity” As I have written before, not all Conservatives are stupid people, it is just that most stupid people are Conservatives (which of course is paraphrasing John Stuart Mill).

Morgan wrote how the Tories will have to start working hard to dispel the appearance that they know the price of everything and the value of nothing in the wake of their abandonment of humanity by stopping the Dubs child refugee scheme (I paused here to wonder if this person was aware that she was quoting Nikita Khrushchev, who of course is a kindred spirit of modern Tories). I have news for Ms Morgan, she is asking the impossible. Because of the Tories hate campaigns against Europe and immigrants we are witnessing a plethora of swastikas and white supremacist slogans appearing all over the place, particularly in the London Tube network, but more worryingly on university campuses and on synagogues and mosques (although this type of behaviour is relatively rare in Scotland which is, of course, much more civilised and intelligent than the rest of the UK). This type of activity has been bolstered by Trump and his rhetoric and the impression that it is now all right to vent your racist hatred and religious bigotry, especially as none of our leaders will condemn such behaviour. What is significant is that most of the blame for this state of affairs lies with the Tory press, particularly the Mail, the Express and the Sun, who run incessant campaigns against immigrants and foreigners in general. They have been responsible, in collusion with the government, for a serious hardening of hearts in this ghastly country, and remember, this is all quite deliberate and orchestrated. The British Home Office is staffed by some of the most odious individuals it is possible to imagine, people who delight in devising racist and cruel policies and feeding the Tory press lurid stories. The one shaft of sunlight is the decision by Liverpool football club to ban all Sun reporters from their facilities as a result of the "Total Eclipse of the Sun" campaign organised by Liverpool supporters. I can proudly say that I have never bought a Sun in my life. It is just a pity that they haven't included the Mail and the Express as well. As you will be aware, most shops in Liverpool will not sell the Sun because of its depraved conduct following the Hillsborough disaster. I am going to buy a Liverpool scarf. As I trust you understand, I am not anti-English, just anti-Westminster and anti-Tory. I despise Scottish Tories equally with their English counterparts. I have supported an English football team, Port Vale, for many years and go south to watch them regularly. I also occasionally watch an English team called Burnley when Vale is playing too far away for me to travel. I will now have to try to get to see Liverpool, only having seen them once before when they were playing Port Vale.

When I started writing this blog and reporting on zero-hours contracts, there were an estimated 250,000 people in Britain under this disgusting form of naked exploitation. Last year this had risen to 903,000 and it is expected that they will reach over one million by this summer coming. The average wage for such workers is £7.25 per hour, whilst the average wage for the executives of the UK's 100 largest stock market listed companies is £1000 per hour, 138 times what the average worker earns. That, in modern Britain is considered, not only acceptable, but what the Tory government calls "the right thing to do." I was going to write to Amber Rudd, our Eichmann clone of a Home Secretary, to ask her if, given that she believes accepting child refugees incentivises children from all over the place to become refugees, we should we stop paying unemployment benefit because it must surely incentivise people to give up their job in order to receive benefits, or disability benefit as it must surely incentivise people to seek a disability? I didn't write to her because I don't want to give such barbarians ideas that they would assuredly adopt. Britain, but particularly England, is becoming darker and more barbarian every day and the Tories are descending into a political hell. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Thursday 9 February 2017

We are indeed fortunate to be ruled by people motivated by a greater good

On 28th April last year I posted on the Tories refusal to accept 3,000 homeless and parentless child refugees. In that post I wrote
Thus to give sanctuary and safety to what would almost certainly be the next generation of suicide bombers and Islamic fanatics must be against the national British interest. On the other hand the explanation for the refusal to support this proposal may just perhaps be that the Tories are genuinely evil, callous, and so lacking in humanity that they have abandoned all vestiges of civilisation. Like their economic doctrine of free market neoliberalism, they are a lie, a sham and a fraud. I really thought that nothing the Tories could do could surprise me any more, but this is so disgusting that I find it difficult to digest.

I that light I am sure we all fully supported the US immigration official who justified the detention of a five year old boy on the grounds that just because he is only five years old does not mean he is not a security risk. I am convinced that Britain and America are genuinely descending into a form of collective madness. It is bad enough our governments wallowing in an orgy of racist xenophobia and anti-Islamic hatred, but you would think that an ordinary citizen, faced with being told to detain a five year old on security grounds would have enough decency and self-respect to tell his/her superiors to get lost. But no, such is the ideological environment created by both governments and by their supporters in the media, we now find ourselves in a situation that is definitely similar to 1930's Germany. I was of course being ultra-sarcastic when I wrote that, but we now find that public officials are actually giving life to my fantasies. We are indeed abandoning all vestiges of civilisation.

I write this because today, as you will all be aware, the British government officially abandoned any commitment to accept any more children. The proposal to accept 3,000 of the estimated 95,000 solitary child refugees in Europe was the work of Lord Dobbs, a Labour party peer who arrived in Britain at the age of six under the Kindertransport scheme that rescued Jewish children from the Nazis. Under enormous pressure the government finally relented and said they would accept some of them. As of today they have accepted 200 and expect another 150 by the summer. Enough is enough however, 350 is too many and the scheme has been halted as of today. The excuse given by Amber Rudd (who completely disgraces the office of Home Secretary) in the pigsty today was that helping child refugees to escape homelessness and living in a tent, open to exploitation, trafficking, hunger and even starvation was 'incentivising' them and encouraging even more children to become refugees. Such sentiments defy intelligent comment, they are so vile and inhuman that they are difficult to absorb. The Tories even utilise free market economic language to justify their barbarism as they are incapable of justification in plain English. I would respect them  more if they simply told us that because they are all Muslim they hope that they simply crawl away and die and stop being a nuisance. At least that would be honest.

If you think I am at times a bit hard on the Tories, I am afraid they are becoming indescribable even to me. In their favour however, they are all self-confessed church going Christians, synagogue attending Jews and even some mosque attending Muslims. They are all good practising religious people in some form or another. That is their escape clause. They are not unfeeling and are motivated by a greater good, we are indeed fortunate. The Donald is even a self-confessed Christian so I must be wrong about them as usual. I will sleep better for that tonight, but feel that I must still tell you that you have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Monday 6 February 2017

Words appear to be a weapon of war for Mr Trump with no meaning outside his own experience

As you know, I am reluctant to criticise politicians from other countries given that this sorry nation harbours one of the biggest collection of political misfits and incompetents it is possible to imagine. No British citizen who supports the appalling set of braindead dinosaurs who inhabit the pigsty has a right to comment on the personnel from other states. However, if I may be allowed to make some observations about Donald Trump I trust you will forgive me this indulgence. As I noted the other day, never in my lifetime has any one person so dominated the news media and the column inches in our press. I trust you will accept that any observations I make are not made for malicious purposes and are just that, observations that are not made to be offensive or personal, although it is almost impossible to avoid looking like that. After only two weeks in office I can only conclude that the American political system is in the first stages of a significant crisis that is threatening to tear that country apart and it behoves us to understand why as it affects the entire world.

I am reminded of the Muslim gentleman who addressed the Democratic convention and asked if Trump had ever read the Constitution. We have also seen this week, numerous persons and institutions challenging his measures on constitutional grounds. I have, even this early, concluded that Mr Trump has not indeed ever read the Constitution, does not even begin to understand it if he has read it, or that he even cares about it. I have now read several commentators saying that Trump never reads books. Now I don't know if that is correct or not, but it struck me as being very probably true. As anyone can see and hear, Trump is completely monosyllabic and is obviously incapable of speaking in sentences or continuous narration. Again I ask you to accept that this is an observation and not a criticism. I am struck and rather intrigued by the manner in which he frequently fails to finish a sentence and simply tails off as if he has quite forgotten what he was saying. This makes me suspect that even if he attempted to read the American Constitution he would not even begin to understand it because he displays a very limited vocabulary and although he speaks a great deal, he says very little and persistently repeats himself. This is not particularly important in an individual except that in this case the individual is the President of the United States in whom a command of language is an absolute essential. When I wished to understand the American political system I made a point of reading the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers which I consider would be a minimum requirement for anyone seeking office in the USA. That, however requires a vocabulary that includes political terminology that you will not learn within a business environment.   

You see language is both symbolic and representational. Language is a major source of our meanings system and the more limited our vocabulary then the more limited is our ability to understand the complexity of language and the meanings derived from that language. In addition, language is cultural and differs between cultures; for example an American visiting Britain may well find him/herself being asked if they would like to enjoy a fag and be met with bewilderment if they display offence at such a suggestion. If you do not read and you limit yourself to a very narrow cultural base of experience of others and their diversity, you deny yourself both understanding and a breadth of meaning. As a result the Constitution will contain words, and more importantly concepts, that will not make any sense to Trump as they will be unfamiliar to him and were written within a very different cultural context from his experience. He will not possess a personal lexicon that would enable him to interpret nor understand them. Thus, it appears to me that we have the highest office in the United States occupied by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals underpinning the system he has become responsible for, and who has little possibility of ever developing an understanding. That is why he bridles at questions challenging his determination to get his own way. He fails to understand that being CEO of a company is a very different thing from being CEO of a nation state. He simply does not understand politics. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat   
 

Sunday 5 February 2017

If FDR were alive today?

I have not posted for a few days because I am watching my predictions of a descent into authoritarianism in both the US and Britain unfolding before my eyes. In the past week, both the British and American governments have graphically given us notice that they will not tolerate being challenged nor held accountable. In Britain we have parliamentary government, not executive government. We vote for a parliament, not for a government, and the government is then formed from the winning majority party. It is a convention that the Prime Minister is the leader of that majority party but the Queen can theoretically ask anyone elected to the parliament to become prime minister. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that parliament hold the executive to account, because it is the parliament we vote for, not the executive, and it is parliament that is so dismally failing to do what is has been elected to do.

The British government’s White Paper, very reluctantly produced by the government after a Supreme Court ruling, to allow the pigsty to at least have the semblance of an input into the process of leaving the EU quite astonishingly contained the phrase that “Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU” adding pathetically that “it has not always felt like that.” Thus, parliamentary sovereignty is admitted by this loathsome gang of Tory krypto-fascists, to have been in peril all this time, not by the EU, but by successive governments who have continuously lied through their teeth about our relationship with Europe to cover their own criminality and incompetence, and by utilising the party system to systematically reduce our elected representatives to a shower of craven underlings. Those underlings have shamefully submitted to a succession of governmental bullies by not challenging their assumed authority and it was left to a private citizen to attempt to restore some meaningful democracy by forcing these porcine replicas of real human beings to actually attempt to do the job they are paid to do and hold the criminals in the executive to account. However, even given this minor concession, the pigsty has again failed to stand up, for not only their own rights, but the rights of the British people as the negotiations and agreements that will be concluded to take us out of the EU will remain unscrutinised until the last minute. What all of this shambles tells us is that the British parliament has completely abdicated its responsibility and no longer understands its purpose, what it exists for and what its role is. Now you know why I call it a pigsty as these cretins demonstrate daily that they are only in it for what they can get. This is the end result of the party system, a set of craven individuals who, in order to enjoy the graft and corruption that comes with being an MP, have quite voluntarily given up the ability to think independently. The other stench that emanates from their White Paper is the admission that their Leave campaign rhetoric was a farrago of lies, as they persistently told us that we must regain a ‘control’ that we had never lost in the first place.

What is sinister in all of this is the rhetoric surrounding it with the Tory press and Tory politicians branding anyone who calls for a say in this process enemies of democracy and enemies of the people. The lady who took the government to court had to go into hiding because of the numerous death threats she received. We had the Daily Mail, the intellectual offspring of the Volkischer Beobachter, calling the judiciary enemies of the people because they dared to argue that the representatives of those same people must have an input into the process. We now have a similar spectacle in the US where the president has adopted the practice of labelling anyone who follows a profession ‘so-called’ as in labelling a federal judge a so-called judge and Meryl Streep a so-called actress etc. This is an attempt at humiliation and denigration and is very dangerous, because he is trying to belittle a federal judge’s character and professional ability because that judge had the temerity to disagree with him. When you do that you are in fact attempting to subvert the rule of law and replace it with your own demands. What is familiar in the US scenario is that the resistance to such authoritarian trends is coming from outside Congress and not from the elected representatives of the people. Official opposition in the US appears to be Saturday Night Live. I leave you with part of a speech to Congress by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1938

Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.


Not a lot has changed eh? You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat