Tag Archives: Fascism & Totalitarianism

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What Labour’s 2015 Election Manifesto Won’t Be Saying

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Seven years into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,  and just 3 months away from what could be the most crucial  General Election since World War 2, and the Labour Party are in deep trouble – and all because of a Bacon Sandwich!

So what can be done? What could the Labour Party possibly say in its 2015 Election Manifesto to win the day?

How about this:

Proposed Labour Election Manifesto 2015

The end of World War ll in Europe finally came with the unconditional surrender of German forces in Reims on 7 May 1945 – exactly 70 years to the day before the coming General Election of 7 May 2015.

The efforts of the Labour Party during World War 2 succeeded in “taking the profit out of war”. The 100% Excess Profits Tax, the controls over industry and transport, the fair rationing of food and control of prices all helped to win the war. With these measures the country came nearer to making “fair shares” the national rule than ever before in its history

Both World War 1 and 2 had been won by the British public. The gallant men and women in the Armed Services, Medical and Public Services , factories and offices were promised a happier future than the one that had faced so many of them after WW1.

Just two months after Germany’s surrender, a landslide victory for the first-ever majority Labour government, in the Khaki Election of 5 July 1945, ushered in a new post-war settlement of a happier future, with fair shares for all, by bringing many of the key means of production, distribution and exchange into public ownership and the creation of the National Health Service and the Welfare State,

The people made tremendous efforts to win both wars. But, after they won, they lacked a lively interest in the social and economic problems of peace, and accepted the election promises of the leaders of the major political parties at their face value.

So the “hard-faced men” who had done well out of both World Wars were able to get the kind of peace that suited them. The people lost that peace. And when we say “peace” we mean not only the Treaties, but the social and economic policy which followed the fighting.

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If we want the BBC to do its job we have to complain when it doesn’t!

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Over the past 40 years I’ve watched the rich and powerful greedily chomping their way through every scrap of public property they could get their hands on – from British Aerospace and British Telecom to gas, electricity, water, British Rail , the Royal Mail and now – the last remaining jewels in the Great British public’s crown –  the NHS and the BBC.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Powerful
Lifestyles of the Rich and Powerful

It’s not hard to understand why they want all this stuff.  If you sell things people don’t really need, your profits are  hostage to the whims of fashion, but if you have a monopoly on all the things people can’t live without then your profits are guaranteed for life.

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A Peaceful & Prosperous New Year to EVERYONE!

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A video Christmas Card: a load of YouTube videos mashed up with a home-made song.

“Woe is us, we”re in a lot of trouble. We’re at a point of maximum denial. People are ignoring the obvious, They’re keeping the news out of the News.”

“The oligarchic character of the modern English Commonwealth does not rest, like may oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.”

G K Chesterton, 1905
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How the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta could be used to remove all our liberties

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‘Those who are willing to trade liberty for safety deserve neither and will lose both’.

Benjamin Franklin, 1755

In the age of global terrorism, the need to increase security to protect our freedom is something most of us accept without a second thought. “If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about” is the mantra repeated whenever concerns are raised about any loss of civil liberties accompanying increased surveillance – succeeding not only in dismissing those concerns but also implying that anyone who IS concerned MUST have something to hide.

So what Benjamin Franklin had to say on the subject seems to make about as much sense as saying that those who are willing to trade money for something they want deserves neither and will lose both. Everything comes at a cost, and loss of liberty is the cost of safety. Everybody understands that.

But what DOES make sense are the constant threats to our safety and well-being that we hear about on the news everyday. Every kind of ill, from terrorism to carbon emissions, from measles to AIDS. All are kinds of illness. All put is ill-at-ease. All are kinds of dis-eases to which we are continually trying to find a remedy or cure.

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Every cloud has a silver lining – just don’t tell the kids

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Every cloud has a silver lining.

That’s one of those sayings anyone over the age of 60 probably heard quite a lot when they were young but rarely hears now. Like nursery rhymes and coal scuttles, it’s a relic of a bygone age. But that doesn’t mean its not worth preserving, because what is says could be very useful in the times we’re living through now.

What that saying reminds us is that every picture has its shadows and it’s source of light. Every positive has a negative. Every thesis has its antithesis. Every bad has a good. Every good has a bad. Or, in other words, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller, 1689

To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.

… is how the founder of the physical sciences, Isaac Newton, put it in his Third Law of Motion.

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Michael Shrimpton – Spyhunter

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Here’s a video not many people have watched, or are ever likely to watch. It’s a 40 min speech given by barrister Michael Shrimpton at the Britain on the Brink conference in Winchester on 22 September 2007.

What was the Britain on the Brink Conference you might ask? Well, according to the YouTube blurb is was:

A one day Conference by and for people of all parties and of none.

Hardly the kind of catch line that’s likely to attract many YouTube hits you might think. And you know what? … It hasn’t! 

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Income of the 100 richest people could end global poverty 4 times over!

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The net income of the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to make extreme poverty history four times over.

That’s a pretty extremist statement. A headline from The Morning Star, The Socialist Worker or Marxism Today you might think? Nah. It was from an Oxfam press statement released on 19 January 2014.

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What’s really going on in Ukraine?

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Of all the coverage of the Ukraine situation we’ve seen so far, this report from Democracy Now makes the most sense:

It features a leaked phone conversation between top American State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and America’s Ambassador in Kiev which, according to Stephen Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and Politics at New York and Princeton Universities, shows that the Obama administration plotted “a coup d’etat against the elected President of the Ukraine!”

WTF!!! That’s pretty important information which puts President Putin’s response in a completely different light.

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What supporters of government press regulation want us to forget

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In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must  have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.*”

Who do you think said that? Some ‘ranting conspiracy theorist’ like Alex Jones perhaps? Who else thinks governments deliberately deceive the people to take them to war in foreign lands?

So it’s a bit of a surprise to discover those words were the rulings of a Supreme Court Judge, Justice Hugo Black, in the landmark decision in June 1971 protecting the right of the press to publish government secrets in the Pentagon Papers leaked by the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

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Oh how times have changed!

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“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.

The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves”

Sound familiar? It did to me when I stumbled across it on the Democratic Underground website. I thought it was a pretty accurate description of how things have changed in the UK since 9/11. So it was a bit of a bummer to discover it was taken from a book about the rise of fascism in Germany in the years leading up to World War II.

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