THE MURDER AND EXPLOITATION OF JO COX

Jo Cox MP, whose brutal murder on the 16th June by a 52 year man with mental health problems and alleged sympathies with the US based neo-Nazi Nationalist Alliance organisation, and, Britain First, a UK based nationalist party, had hardly been dead more than a few hours before a number of self-serving, left-leaning, ‘Remain’ campaigners leapt onto the now blood-soaked Cox bandwagon in order to make political capital from her utterly pointless murder.

First was the London Labour MP for Bermondsey and Southwark, Neil Coyle, who when interviewed just a few hours after Cox’s killing sought to link it directly to Brexit and the Leave campaign, saying that they had published “dangerous material” which risked inspiring the “extremist elements on the hard right in this country”.  Hard Right being the latest terminology of the left, as opposed to Far Right, or Extreme Right, which apparently nolonger convey the correct amount of ‘rightness’. So ‘Hard Right’ it is.

Coyle’s comments were predictably followed the next day by the hysterical ravings of The Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee who saw in Cox’s murder a causal link between the ‘open and shocking’ statements of the Leave campaign whose ‘inflammatory language’, ‘finger-jabbing’ ‘dog-whistling’ and ‘overt racism’ she claimed was a ’noxious brew’ and ‘dangerous’ mix of ‘anti-MP’ and ‘anti-politics’ which led inextricably to Jo Cox’s murder. Toynbee then damned, among other things, Leave’s new ‘Breaking Point’ poster, which showed, in a style reminiscent of the Thatcher era Conservative Party election poster, ‘Labour’s Not Working’, a never ending queue of refugees waiting to enter Europe.

Using the poster as a springboard Toynbee went on to link the Leave campaign indirectly with, not just Cox’s murder, but the rise of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, the White Power movement, Neo-Nazism, and Oswald Mosley and called for Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Chris Grayling to be expelled from the Conservative Party for making immigration a voting issue in the Brexit campaign. 

The Guardian then claimed in its editorial that Jo Cox’s death was an affront to the ideals of diversity and multiculturalism, both causes that I am sure Jo Cox supported, and which therefore is not an unreasonable 

assertion, but then The Guardian extrapolated that the ‘Hard Right’s’ racism and Islamophobia was the mirror image of the ideology Isis and Al Qaida use to attract recruits. From that it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to imply a direct link between Cox’s murder and Leave’s campaign. Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster was  especially singled out for attack and called repugnant, while Leave’s campaign was ’nasty’, ’divisive’

and encouraged UK voters to turn their backs on the world and to embrace ‘barbarism’.

Yet in using Jo Cox’s murder to smear and undermine the Leave campaign and at the same time shunning much of ‘parochial’ Britain as William Haig sneeringly referred to those supporting Leave, the Remain campaigners and the Left should look in the mirror, for that is where the viciousness and thuggery began. When hundreds gathered to mock and celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s death, or when a mob of thugs attacked Nigel Farage and his family in Scotland, or when Conservative’s were spat at, punched and called scum while trying to attend their party conference in 2015, or when members of antifacist groups openly talk of wanting to kill their opponents, and so on ad infinitum politicians reap what they sow.

Toynbee wrote that the use of immigration in this campaign was unleashing ‘dark and hateful’ forces, yet it was the Labour party that unleashed immigration on an unprecedented scale with hundreds of thousands of people arriving in the UK during Labour’s time in office that destroyed communities, jobs and caused a housing crisis. It was a Labour Home Secretary, David Blanket, who said in 2003 that there was “no upper limit” to the number of people that could settle in the UK. It was a Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who, in 2010, dismissed a concerned woman’s questions on rising immigration, as ‘bigoted’ and it is Labour that has consistently attacked and silenced any form or discussion on immigration and migration as ‘racist’. 

So yes people are angry, and yes people are fed up with politicians, and yes, there are ‘dark and hateful’ forces at work, but they have been caused not by the ‘Hard Right’, or Leave’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster, but by the Left, by mainstream politician’s, and by the EU’s unelected officials telling us what to do. What Polly Toynbee, David Cameron, George Osborne, The Guardian and the rest of the political and chattering classes who try to shame us into obsequious silence by their taunts of racism and nationalistic parochialism forget, is that it is they who have taken away the people’s voice and our now causing some people’s anger to turn into rage. 

The utterly pointless, brutal and stupid murder of Jo Cox may have been a symptom of those ‘hateful’ forces, or equally it could just be the actions of a pitiful man with mental health problems. Yet whatever motivated the killer, it was nothing to do with the Leave campaign and if the Establishment try to make it otherwise in order to shut the people up then those dark hateful forces really will find a voice and they will make the Establishment listen whether they want to or not.

Nigel Wingrove © 2016

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Ever since the failure of 2010’s general election to produce a clear winner and the unedifying sight of Gordon Brown desperately trying to cling on to power finally persuaded the Liberal Democrats to get into bed with the Conservatives and form a coalition, the country has been slowly and inexorably pushed towards collapse. Forces outside the government who see any cuts in state expenditure or the welfare state as an attack are rapidly forming allegiances with more militant groups to protest each and every cut. Those groups in turn are forming lose understandings with far more extreme antiestablishment individuals and collectives who see in this wave of protest an opportunity to create wider disorder, sow division, and to possibly bring down the government and with it the Establishment.

Ever since the first student protest and the taking of Millbank Tower caught not just the police, but just about everyone else by surprise, every protestor and militant grouping worthy of the name, from anarchists to the Socialist Workers Party, are seeing the coming year as a real chance to smash the Tories, kill a few police and really smash the rich. And I think that they might just do it, as for once the all the necessary ingredients for creating an explosive are coming together, and the students have unknowing lit the fuse. 

It was Gordon Brown though who set everything in motion and who is conveniently now out of the public eye earning vast sums of undeserved money giving after dinner speeches and writing his memoirs while others have to deal with the results of his profligacy. Brown mired the UK in debt and created a false boom in house prices and borrowings by consistently keeping interest rates at historic lows. He compounded this when things started to go awry by using Quantitive Easing to try and buy the government out of debt in the short term by printing more and more virtual money to purchase its own government bonds. 

The financial icing on the cake though was his ‘save the world‘ moment when Brown pumped billions of pounds into the banking sector in order to save key banks like RBS and Northern Rock from collapsing under the weight of their own financial indolence. In doing so he undermined any validity capitalism has in claiming that companies stand or fall by their own actions and those of the free market. He showed instead that greed. failure and incompetence, when on a scale of ‘too big to fail’, carried no responsibility and could actually be rewarded by unprecedented bailouts from the taxpayer.

The US and most of the West has in turn followed the same model and the world’s economies are now awash with QE and bailed-out bankers demanding enormous bonuses again. Yet such is the level of debt of banks, hedge funds and some countries who have mortgaged everything up to the hilt and then borrowed even more to pay the interest on the interest that someone has to take steps try and reduce it and start paying the debt off. At this point Gordon Brown vanished and the UK’s students lit the fuse that Brown had left conveniently out for them on a plate.

Cuts are never easy, particularly when for years the UK government has handed out money as if we had a limitless supply. Soon people take State spending for granted; their benefits, grants, health care, education, housing and so on is seen as a right yet where that money comes from is often overlooked. People understood that the country was in debt, people began to take on board some of the issues surrounding bonds, QE and so forth and yet as the cuts were outlined they also saw smug bailed-out bankers and the billions pumped into failed banks. Banks that should have been allowed to fail, with the shareholders and investors taking the hit instead of the tax payer. Instead the moral high ground has been lost. How can the government demand millions in cuts when they have just given millions to some of the very individuals and companies responsible for causing the financial crisis in the first place? The bailout of the banks is another ingredient added to the explosive. 

The Coalition is yet another ingredient. A weak union between two weak parties that oscillate between indecision and niceties and along the way try and sneak in some ineffectual savings has no hope. Government spending in November 2010 was actually up on November 2009. It’s as if the government has lost control and despite desperately trying to do the right thing is secretly wringing its hands in despair. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is, according to some newspaper reports, suffering depression or cracking up and Prime Minister Cameron has yet to show he has the mettle to be as tough or as strong as he will need to be to stand up the coming storm. 

Alongside a weak government we have a dispirited police force that is disliked, maligned and restricted by politically correct dogma that has made its handling of anything from street crime to demonstrations the subject of discourse and remonstration. They are in effect damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Yet the police’s role in the coming year is crucial as they stand, often literally, between the force of the protestor and the Establishment. If they fall or fail then inevitably the Established falls with them. 

The protests themselves, the cuts, a weak unstable coalition government, bitterness at the bankers bailouts and the potential of a UK sovereign debt crisis; non of these in isolation would be enough to destroy the status quo, but combined they just might. 

Yet the Establishment as we know it has stood for over a thousand years and has weathered everything from the Spanish Armada and the second world war to the General Strike and flower power so why should this current situation be so different? Because the last ten to fifteen years has so changed both the make-up of the country, through immigration and social engineering, to the extent that nationhood nolonger binds the people together around a centre. Secondly the invasive and relentless attacking of the Establishment, by which I mean the State, Christianity and the values by which we live, have so undermined and devalued it as a core belief system that few would rush to defend it and many more would seek to destroy it. 

And then the lit fuse reaches its target and bang! No more Establishment, or rather the slow unravelling of our society and Establishment would begin. Some riots, some nastiness, some looting, some whatever .. And then what? David Miliband and New Labour? A utopian non-capitalist ideal where we trade sandals for lentils and plant trees in the City and sacrifice bankers on May Day? Or will it be a slow disintegration into anarchy, where the police force slowly crumbles, where the veneer of decency and morality decays bit by bit until finally its gone and a brutaligenzia reigns?

But have those wishing for the demise of the Established order thought things through? Smashing a window is easy, finding and paying someone skilled enough to replace it is harder. And who will invest in a Britain racked with civil disorder and strife. Who will pay the bills and who will govern? Left or Right, if those wishing for the destruction of the old order win, then whatever follows will, in all likelihood, be far worse. 

AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP

Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, says the bible, in which case, the people of the UK may well be about to reap the whirlwind for having created a political, economic and social climate that now has all the ingredients for disaster on a biblical scale. 

We have three ‘leaders’ and three political parties that have totally failed to either address or acknowledge the true and dire state of this countries finances or the fragile social environment against which our national debt has been borrowed and whose foundations it props up. Equally, we have a population that has become so inured by credit, cocooned by public services and enfeebled by political correctness and human rights legislation that in a ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ kind of way they have become Generation Eloi. A placid and docile race content to shop, watch TV, and trade banalities on Twitter and Facebook while their comfort zone is fueled by ever rising property values, easy money and a sense that life just gets better and better. It doesn’t, sometimes it gets nasty. 

This is one of those times and usually this country throws up a few strong leaders to rally the people, to speak the unspeakable and rouse us from our nice comfort zones. Instead we have thrown up a collection of political pigmies, men of such shallowness that their superficial values and trite displays of political ‘passion’ only highlight their complete lack of any beliefs worthy of the name. These worthless little men, the product, born not of deep political conviction and struggle, but of focus groups and public relation experts are our creations and our nemesis. They are what we deserve.

Clegg, Cameron and Brown and the political parties that they represent are finished. They are bereft of new ideas and incapable of leadership. Instead they, like smart and slick salesmen, smile and recite their latest formulated political ideas. Prepacked and preordained. Uniform, and for the most part interchangeable, this is one idea fits all politics. If it works for the Conservatives, then it’ll work for the Liberal Democrats and New Labour. They are like the Ford Ka, the only difference being the colour. Blue for the Conservatives, Red for Labour and Orange for the Lib Dems, with a big yellow streak down the middle. Perhaps, now that all the parties are up for a bit of Lib Dem action and are selling out any remaining credibility for the chance to bed Clegg, they should all have a yellow streak down their backs.

Our country is broke and teetering on the brink of a financial and social catastrophe yet during the three weeks of electioneering our would-be prime ministers barely mentioned it instead they fell over themselves to boast about what they would not cut.  Brown, no doubt with a tear in his eye, announced that he was ‘shocked and angry’ that Cameron and Clegg were in a ‘coalition of cuts against children’ and that cuts in child tax credits were an anathema to him. As were cuts to the Health Service, Education, the Police, or it seems anything else that might hurt the vulnerable. In our new Eloi paradise it seems money is no object. If we’re short we can just borrow it from those nice people in the City or, better still, we can print it. 

Watching and listening to these three wise men was like watching a troupe of fanatics that have been fired up by a preacher and told to spread the word. Suddenly Brown and Co. had seen the light, “No Cuts”, “Protect the Vulnerable” they cried. “What’s My Line?” had morphed into “What’s My Slogan?” and it was going to be cutback light, no pain, maybe an ache, no cuts now but a scratch or two next year or the year after that. Like the parent whose child had a nightmare, they were not only going to leave the hall light on but would sit next to the bed and watch over us. See, there’s nothing to worry about... The trouble is, there’s actually lots to worry about, not the least of which is the three buffoons that would lead us and the three parties they represent, for the longer they delay making cuts the sooner that their ability to act may be taken out of their hands. Very soon the financial markets and world events may, like in Greece, begin to exert pressure on our economy that will affect interest rates, the exchange rates and the Government's ability to borrow and maintain its current financial commitments.

Yet the mantra of ‘no cuts’ rules and the people like it. ‘Protect (the vulnerable) and Survive’ is the way to win this war. The only trouble is that you don’t win wars by being nice or by protecting the vulnerable, in fact, often the vulnerable are the first to go, after all they contribute nothing and often take more than their fair share. The Health Service is full of useless managers and inept staff that should be sacked to make way for people who can actually do the job. Unfortunately, politicians and sentimental journalists have so milked the whole ‘angels in uniform’ nonsense that the Health Service has become a sacred cow that consumes money faster that its asylum seeker, economic migrant patients can spend it. Likewise our bloated public sector is ludicrously over staffed with no-hoper under achievers who are being paid vast salaries for doing nothing more than being alive, while others are so obviously cranially challenged that the kindest thing to do would be to kill them. 

The vulnerable, along with hundreds of thousands of individuals whose contribution to the UK is on a par with their IQ’s, is actually what a large percentage of our national debt is paying for and would be easy to cut if we had a government prepared to forgo the ‘nice’ in order to deal with the ‘nasty’ for once. However given that our three main political parties are now about to engage in some sort of ghastly love-in and the only political parties waiting in the wings are UKIP, whose leader flew his plane into a field on election day, the BNP, which collapsed into farcical disarray during the last few days of the campaign by getting sued by Unilever and having its website pulled and the Greens, who at least managed to get someone elected, it’s unlikely that anything will be done and that the vulnerable, the public sector and sacred cows are all safe for now.

The truth is that we are reaping what we have sown and that right now there is no alternative to the Clegg, Cameron and Brown Kabal in whatever form it finally takes and that is the truly scary aspect of this non-election. For, in order to protect the vulnerable and the public sector, these men will most likely damn us all. Amen.

THE BLAND LEADING THE BLAND

It says something about the state of the UK when over ten million of its adult population choose to spend an hour of their time watching three virtually identikit politicians regurgitate three almost interchangeable responses to a series of preset questions and go wild with excitement. The media claimed the next day that the American-style format ‘leaders debate’ had ‘electrified’ voters and galvanised a previously lacklustre campaign and made the previously unelectable Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg the viewers’ favourite, a bit like the X-Factor, though with Peter Mandelson taking Simon Cowell’s role, Brown playing Subo and Clegg and David Cameron doubling up as Jedward. So far there’s all to play for, though, whoever wins, the loser will be the UK and its people.

Since the ousting of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party in 1990, British politics began the process of morphing from nasty to nice and from nice to bland and from bland to banal. Firstly, the inability of the Labour Party to mount a credible campaign against the Conservatives kept them out of office for over eighteen years, necessitating the creation of New Labour and the election of a media-savvy leader in the form of Tony Blair. Secondly, Blair transformed Labour’s fortunes to such an extent that the Conservatives in turn became unelectable and ensured that New Labour has had thirteen years in office, a feat almost unimaginable a decade ago.

Blair’s triumph was that he was able to tap into the psyche of New Britain in a way that no one else, except perhaps Simon Cowell, could and, in doing so, stymied the opposition to such an extent that it was effectively dead. So dead, in fact, that the Conservatives have, rather than reinvent themselves as a credible alternative to New Labour, sought to become New Labour, Right. The Liberal Democrats in turn, have slowly moved from a party of ban the bomb, lentil-eating greenies to a slightly fadish and more socialist version of their previous selves and become, in effect, New Labour, Left. Blair, ironically, had admired Thatcher and her strength in sticking to her beliefs, something Blair, to his credit, did over Iraq but, to their shame, our opposition have no sense of. To them, belief is what they think voters want or what their focus groups tell them we want or, worse, is a watered down, or beefed-up version of an existing Blair or New Labour policy. If it worked for Blair then it will work for us. Radical ideas, like radical politics, are out. British politics is now lite and trite. 

Now Blair’s Dauphin, Gordon Brown, the anointed one and his chosen successor is seeking to carve out his own niche and to wear the crown of elected office, something that has so far eluded him in his sham role as unelected Prime Minister and saviour of the world. Likewise, Clegg and Cameron are seeking the voters’ approval so that they too might savour elected office and yet they offer nothing. No new ideas, no new initiatives, no nothing. We have weak men, appealing to a weak electorate with neither able or willing to accept or utter the truth that our country is teetering on the abyss; financially, socially and morally.

Now, our would-be leaders feed and nurture belief that the worst is behind us that by some clever trickery and word manipulation, printing money became quantitative easing for instance, that they have all but conquered the recession. That we can avoid any hurt by cost cutting ‘savings’, by making our public services more efficient. This is against a national debt that is increasing by half a billion a day, which currently stands at £776bn and which, according to the governments own figures, is due to reach £1,406bn by 2014/15. Further, if government spending continues at current levels then as a percentage of GDP it will rise from 70pc now to 500pc of GDP by 2040 with the interest alone equaling 27pc of GDP. These figures are from the Bank of International Settlements the body for the world’s central banks and are contained within a report called The Future of Public Debt: prospects and implications. What they mean is that the UK is bankrupt and borrowing like a man possessed, with the report showing that, aside from Japan, which has higher savings, UK public spending is the highest in the world, totally out of control and heading for disaster.

Yet, our three main political parties are now virtually interchangeable, sub-Blair clones, scared of offending, scared of losing and scared of being different. Not for these men the hard choices and true cost cutting that hurts, that will bring protest and pain yet ultimately might go some way to averting disaster. No, what we have instead is inaction and inertia, the politics of fudging and prevarication, of sound bites and friendly chats on TV sofas, all driven by the politics of needing to be liked. Gone is the genuine passion of the convicted politician whose ideal’s drive him and in has come the need me, like me, fay politicians of today, the X-Factoresque Tweedle Dee’s and Tweedle Dum’s who will dance to almost any tune provided enough of us can hum it. Men and women whose message is vote for me because I’m nice and leave the nasty stuff to someone else.

Leaving the nasty to someone else is fine of course, provided that whatever bogey man is lurking in the wings stays away. We all like the nice and calm but, by and large, we don’t elect politicians to be nice and, more to the point, it’s usually the nasties that we ultimately remember and respect. Churchill’s demands to rearm and resist Nazi Germany weren’t exactly popular at the time as most of the electorate dismissed his dire warnings as warmongering. Thatcher was almost universally loathed when she tackled the Trade Unions and government overspending. In the US, Reagan was shot and mocked for his stand against communist Russian but all three politicians had stood up for what they believed to be right and more importantly had done what they knew had to be done at a time what doing so made them reviled by many.

Are Brown, Clegg or Cameron prepared to be reviled for tackling this countries spiraling debt? No, though they may well be reviled later for being nice and delaying the pain. But right now, they want to be liked so much that they’re not even admitting the extent of the problem. They’re lying, in fact; lying because they’re still spending and promising to do what we can’t afford; lying by printing money; lying by hoping that inflation will magically reduce the debt and, most of all, they’re lying because they all refuse to address our debt honestly and by doing so they cheapen and discredit our democracy, devaluing it to the point that one day soon someone might just kill it off and put it out of its misery ...

THE GREAT WAIL OF CHINA

China has always been a mystery to the West. Ever since Marco Polo introduced Europeans to its charms in the 14th Century the West has been both captivated and horrified in equal measure. Whether by its isolation, perceived cruelties, its unChristianity, its sheer size, its Dynasties, its culture, foot-binding, use of opium, or just its inscrutable ways, China was, and remains, inscrutable.

Over time, the West has sought to conquer, then influence, then constrain, then trade, then exploit and now, it seems, coerce and cajole China to change its ways. To be, in essence, more Western, for China to be more like us and to be, in effect, less Chinese. Christian missionaries tried, governments tried, by force and by trade, individuals fell in love with China, Hollywood, artists and writers added to its mystique. The world too, from time to time, marveled at its past achievements like the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army, or gasped at the staggering statistics of China’s population, currently 1.3 billion people or 20% of our planet’s total, or more recently perhaps thought nervously of China’s growing strength, both militarily and economically, and tried to understand the unique hybrid form of totalitarian capitalistic communism that is driving it. And failed.

For China is not Western or a foreign country that has become Westernized, it is China, a great concoction of contradictions and anomalies that have built up over thousands of years to create one of the greatest countries on earth. An empire, in fact, that developed for the most part in total isolation from the rest of the world and which has gone from a feudalistic Dynasty, to gangsterism and warlords, to nationalism, near anarchy, brutal subjugation under the Japanese, civil war, revolution, and communist revolution in its purist and most radical form. A revolution that took in the cult of leadership, Stalinist style economic plans, genocide and a cultural-revolutionary revolution that would see China destroy utterly much of its non revolutionary past including its art, its literature and where possible many of its people and yet emerge with its communist ideology intact.

China’s communist revolution in fact grew out of foreign interference, for China had been sliced and diced by the British, the French, the Americans, the Russians, the Germans, and most noticeably the Japanese who in the 1930s decided to show how big and tough they were by attacking what was then a weak and virtually defenseless country. China was a mess, a 20th Century basket case, with foreign powers claiming chunks of it for their own and generally riding roughshod over the impotent Chinese government. Moreover, much of the land was controlled by feuding warlords, nationalists and communists, all of whom fought each other, the government, and who totally exploited any people not on their side.

By 1949 things were so bad that most foreign powers had packed their loot-filled bags and left while the nationalists, led by Chang Kai-shek, and the communists, led by Mao Zedong, fought it out. The communists won and Chanh Kai-shek fled with as many of his troops as could follow and set up camp in Taiwan, with US protection of course. Since then Chinese communism has followed its own unique path to nirvana in its own way and on its own terms, give or take the odd Soviet missile and the occasional copyright infringement.

Under Mao, China may have looked organised but it was an economic disaster. It had state-owned collectives and Soviet style state run industries none of which were remotely profitable. Mao instigated a plan for a Great Leap Forwards though it would have been better called A Great Step Backwards. It was a disaster, millions of people died from starvation, nothing worked and economic failures were hidden by political crusades and slogans. Everyone may have had a little red book but they didn’t taste good and when Mao went to the great politburo in the sky in the late seventies Mao’s successors set about not dismantling communism but by making it work, Chinese style.

The much-underrated Deng Xiaping got rid of a lot of the Soviet style collectives and introduced private ownership, and allowed private enterprise and new businesses to operate outside of government control. Further he created new Special Economic Zones in areas like Shanghai, which, free of much regulation and state interference, brought in foreign investment and business. Now, nearly thirty years later, China’s economy is booming and is second only to the US as a world power.

This is the new Chinese revolution; it's a revolution that is uniquely Chinese and the West doesn’t like it and, in particular, the liberal, human rights obsessed, Obama-riven, hand wringing West. Why? Because Chinese communism didn’t collapse in 1989 the way Russia communism did. In fact, when the pro-democracy brigade in China decided to get all happy-clappy and start banging their drums in Tiananmen Square and building papier-mâché statues to the Goddess of Democracy, the Chinese government showed exactly what they thought of free speech and human rights. They sent in the army, killed several hundred protestors, and drove a tank straight at the Goddess of Democracy and flattened her right in front of the worlds press.

Now, twenty years later, as China’s economic might by necessity makes her a big player on the world stage, so über democrats like Hilary Clinton feel that they can lecture China on Human Rights as if they were ticking off a cheeky coolie. Equally, trendy and crucially important companies like Google can threaten a nation state with the removal of its product if the State doesn’t change its behaviour in a way that suits that particular company’s business and, suddenly, it's 1899 all over again. Even the UK is getting in on the old imperialism act with the country’s entire liberal media backed up by our main political parties all lecturing and whining hysterically to China when China sentenced a UK citizen to death for attempting to smuggle four kilograms of heroin into the country. No doubt Gordon Brown sees the chance for an election boost here and will restart the Opium Wars with himself in the role of ‘Chinese Gordon’.

Chinese occupied Tibet now has more Human Rights activists in it than Buddhists and has to operate while being lectured to constantly by uptight angst ridden college graduates on how to run their country. China, it seems, is the New World Order’s yellow-faced bogeyman du jour, only now Fu Manchu has cut off his pigtail, shaved off his long moustache and wears a suit rather than silk robes. But to the West he’s still evidence that a leopard can’t change its spots. Once an evil Chinese bastard, always an evil Chinese bastard as they say in liberal, caring circles everywhere.

Yet do the Chinese care? If we believe the Human Rights brigade there are 1.2 and a half billion Chinese, all desperate for their right to send emails to other Human Rights activists in Palestine or wherever. The reality is that most Chinese are too busy making money, getting kitted out in the latest Gucci and Chanel uniforms and flogging Mao Zedong kitsch to tourists to care about their human rights.

This is China, not Tooting, a country that has never known democracy, that saw five million of its people starved to death as policy under Mao and watched the Japanese in 1937 rape, torture, mutilate and murder hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in their then capital Nanking and the West did nothing and said nothing. Even now, Japan denies it ever happened. Sorry, it seems for Japan, is the hardest word. The key Western powers were no better as virtually every possible item of value or cultural significance that they could get hold of was looted, stolen or smashed during their occupancy and China’s indigenous religions were mocked and decried as heathen and their followers dismissed as savages. Now as we start the 21st Century we’re at it again and still telling China what to do.

New ‘capitalist’ China, it seems, is where the East meets West and the West doesn’t like it. We don’t send gunboats any more, or send in troops to loot and destroy or grab territories like Hong Kong. No, now we whine and wail and political opportunists like Gordon Brown and Hilary Clinton have hissy fits and newspapers and commentators, who would normally bend over backwards to use the most gushing politically correct euphemism when describing someone’s race or ethnicity, feel it perfectly acceptable to describe the Chinese as barbarians and lampoon their culture and government.

China has no reason to listen. Its people will choose their own destiny, which may well be democratic or most likely a uniquely Chinese variation on it. Whatever they choose though, they should choose it because it is their choice and not the choice of self-aggrandizing Western politicians and egoistical human rights activists whose arrogance and hectoring of the Chinese is on a direct par with the Christian missionaries who so plagued China in the 19h Century, they were wrong then and the activists are wrong now.

Confucius say he who buys US treasuries will eventually own the seller.

THY SHALT NOT OFFEND, EVER!

Twenty years ago I made a short film, Visions of Ecstasy, which was refused a certificate for release on the grounds that it was potentially blasphemous, effectively banning the film and stopping it from ever being shown. In the summing up I was deemed to have ‘outraged the divinity of Christ’ and it was feared that the public broadcasting or distribution of my film was a threat to public order and since then, for better or worse, ‘visions’ has sat on my shelf gathering dust. Preserving God’s divinity and saving the country’s streets from riots and baying mobs seeking divine retribution. As a result of this I have had, aside from a loathing of State censorship, an equally strong dislike of religion, particularly when followers of a religion seek to use the State to enforce their values. So it was with some surprise this week that I found myself not only siding with some Christians but actually getting angry on their behalf as the zealots of political correctness, appeasement and ‘cultural diversity’ sought to further the advancement of their new PC Jerusalem by censoring personal beliefs and the dress of Christians.

In the first of three separate incidents, a Christian couple, Ben and Vogelenzang, were charged with breaching Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which apparently covers causing harassment, alarm or distress, because they allegedly insulted a Muslim woman. The Muslim in question was staying at the Bounty House Hotel in Liverpool, which is run by the Vogelenzangs, when a conversation arose about her faith. During the chat one of the topics discussed was whether Jesus was a minor prophet as Islam teaches or whether he was the son of God as Christianity teaches.

It was further stated by the fun-loving intellectual Mr Vogelenzang, that Mohammed was a warlord, while the equally philosophical Mrs Vogelenzang stated that she thought the burka was a form of bondage for women. Apparently this line of conversation so outraged the woman that she felt compelled to rush to the nearest policeman who, instead of telling her to grow up and get a life, questioned the Christian couple and charged them with a ‘religiously-aggravated public order offense’. They are now awaiting trial.

Now, to my mind, having a chat or an argument about politics or religion or whatever is what makes the world go round, and a religiously-aggravated assault would have meant that the Christians had donned Mahamoud Ahmadi-Nejad face masks and fist-fucked Ms sanctimonious up the arse while reciting the ten commandments and telling her to convert, as opposed to having a quiet tete-á-tete about the pros and cons of shrink-to-fit burkas. Still, I’m sure that the police know best and rounding up Christian law-breakers is really going to make us all feel safe out on the streets.

The UK’s next ‘feed them to the lions’ moment came when Exeter NHS nurse, Shirley Chaplin (no relation to Charlie, though he probably scripted her case), refused to remove her crucifix neckless and now faces the sack. Chaplin is the second nurse this year to suffer this fate as NHS nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended in February for the same ‘offense’. Chaplin has apparently worn her crucifix for 38 years without hordes of non Christians running out of Exeter’s NHS hospitals in shock and horror that a ‘christian’ was openly walking the wards.

It would have been interesting had Exeter’s wannabe twat-boy suicide bomber, Muslim convert Nicky Reilly, not failed in his attempt to blow up a café to see whether the local NHS authorities would have rushed around getting Muslim nurses to remove their ‘approved’ headscarves in case they gave offense to non-muslim infidels who had just had their limbs blown off? I doubt it.

The UK’s third Christian pogrom has, surprise, surprise, come from the Government, where so much nonsense comes from these days, and is contained in the hysteria-driven new legislation called ‘lets protect little children from everything and wrap them in cotton wool until they are 18’, or the ‘Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’, as it's more popularly known.

Under this new legislation, anyone coming within two miles of children has to be vetted by the ISA to see if they are a crazed sexual predator, murderer or a Scout master whose idea of getting ‘hands-on’ experience is to turn the local camp into a nonce nirvana. Christians, who are well known for their happy-clappy-touchy-feely tendencies, are of course worried that the authorities have singled out the ‘touchy-feely’ part of the bible for special attention, and they have.

From summer 2010, everyone from School governors to dentists and nurses (though not crucifix-wearing ones as they will have all been sacked) must have their backgrounds checked by the ISA, as must authors who visit schools and parents who organise lifts to sports matches and so on. Christians fear that, because of their beliefs on homosexuality, marriage and of course shrink-to-fit burkas, they could be unfairly targeted by this legislation and have their careers ruined as a result, which, given current trends, is quite likely. So now the UK's Christians, the people that for years who were seen as the guiding moral force in the land, the people who used to pack our churches on a Sunday morning and whose quaintness was, like rain on bank holidays, robins and Rupert annuals, forever England, are now being persecuted by the forces of multiculturalism, mediocrity and modernity.

Normally, the trials of tribulations of a few Christians would, like the idle wind, pass me by, but such is the speed and unceasing advance of political correctness, appeasement and abasement by the authorities to all things Islamic that I felt genuinely aggrieved by their plight. In particular because petty officialdom mixed with an almost fawning desire to please and carry favour with all things Sharia (note the Home Office announcement to its employees not to eat food in front of their Muslim co-workers during Ramadan as it might make them feel hungry or Councils desire to rename Christmas as a ‘holiday’ and to remove Christmas trees) is destroying our pagan/Christian roots and the moral basis on which we live.

The religious base of this country is pagan and then Christian and, whether we like Christianity or loathe it, its key commandments form the moral code which holds us together. We know that it is wrong to kill, to steal and to fuck our friends' partners and get jealous when someone has more than us and these rules and a few others have for centuries made us what we are. As we have have become less religious so the laws have been weakened and amended, we no longer lock homosexual men up or burn witches, but generally the Christian moral code still holds sway, or rather it did.

With the demise of Christianity will fall our values, not all at once of course and not immediately, but they will fall. Every assault on Christianity is an assault on our wider freedoms, on women’s freedoms, on sexual freedom, on, ironically, religious freedom and the freedom of speech and into the gap will step another religion. A religion whose moral code allows for no dissent, no sexual freedom, no individual rights and which will enforce its laws totally. It is a religion that would, were it in control, certainly not allow a member of another religion to discuss and comment on its shortfalls and allow complaints against it to be made in law. In fact one of its first acts, should it become the leading religion in the UK, will almost certainly be to abolish Section 5 of the Public Order Act and its ubiquitous religiously-aggravated public order offense. We should abolish it first, reclaim the moral high ground, celebrate our culture and protect the Christians in our midst, for without them the country will move another step closer to the abyss.

Hallelujah

Mad, Bad and Culled: Come Back Eugenics, All is Forgiven

Apparently the UK now has some 84,150 people locked up in its prisons, give or take the odd dying train-robber and Libyan terrorist, with more being added every day. This, given the fact that you have to be on your twentieth offense or whatever before one of our courts would even consider locking you up, means that there are probably one to two million criminally minded types or their dependents hanging around, feeding off welfare, stealing what they can, breeding or generally behaving like some parasitic munchkin any one time.

This vast criminally-minded sway of the population is the Underclass, the great cradle to grave, totally welfare dependent, semi-literate, thieving subhuman dross that has sunk its rotten teeth into the soft belly of Brown’s Britain and is, in conjunction with the Government, bleeding it dry.

For years successive UK governments have cosseted the weak, the needy and the medically unfit along with the undeserving, the could work but won’t, those that can take whatever the State has to offer and more, and turn welfare dependency into an art form. They are encouraged to do so at every turn by a system that rewards sloth and indolence as much as it penalizes success. 21st Century Britain is rotting from the inside and yet our leaders go on prescribing more of the same, like some quack doctor that goes on pumping mercury into a patient even when it is obvious that his medicine is killing him.

Our ‘we’re all victims now’ culture, coupled with the States self-flagellating obsession with human rights and being seen to be politically correct, has now become so insidious and all pervasive that many of us utter and enact PC pieties with the same gusto that a religious zealot once used in trying to do, and being seen to do, God’s work. Both kinds of zealotry are insufferable and both carry the same degree of saintly sanctimoniousness but whereas, at least for most of the last hundred years, Christianity operated separately from the state and strived to instill a basic set of moral values in the population, the modern politically driven PC mandarin is driven not by morality but by the spurious concept that all humans have rights and that, contrary to modern notions of evolution, that we are also all equal.

We are also all vulnerable and must therefore also be protected from all possible harm which has led to the formation and writing of new legislation under the ‘catch-all’ header of ‘Health and Safety’, the politically correct world’s Sermon on the Mount, the Holy Grail of the blame someone else, Help me I’m a victim give me compensation, Ism-ist culture that is destroying Western life faster than the plague wiped out our ancestors.

Now a criminal has rights, his skin colour cannot be mentioned as that is racist, his photograph cannot be displayed as that breaches his human rights, his religion has to be respected along with his sexuality, food intake, living space, hair style, and so on infinitum. The Victim has less rights. In the UK, defending your home against burglars can make you more of a criminal that the burglar. Hurting or hitting a criminal is a minefield of politically driven nonsense that rarely favours the victim and all the while the crime rate climbs, though now of course criminals can add the ‘credit crunch’ to their lexicon of woes, grievances and excuses for their criminality. This is the ‘you made me a criminal so my crime is your fault’ concept. We are in fact the cause of crime, not the criminals.

I though would like to see a state that removed all rights from criminals other that the right to exist and only then if they had committed a crime that didn’t warrant the death penalty. Murderers and other criminal dross should be killed. To my mind, the day that a criminal commits a crime is the day that their ‘human rights’ cease. California’s “three strikes and you’re out’ legislation whereby any criminal convicted of more than three offenses was put away for life seemed pretty fair. If you haven’t learned that crime is pretty stupid after getting caught and convicted twice then maybe jail is the best place for you to be after all.

In the US and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a far more dramatic, draconian and, many would say, unacceptable policy with regards not just to criminals, but to their offspring, families, the disabled, the infirm, and those on the margins of society, this policy's name was Eugenics and in the US a policy of sterilizing criminals to stop them breeding and creating more criminals caused consternation and fear in prisons throughout the country. Eventually the war and concerns at the Germans' capacity for death (even in the early 1930s the Nazis were killing tens of thousands of the so-called feeble-minded and sterilizing thousands more under the guise of eugenics) ensured that US lawyers would be able to protect prisoners' rights to their bodies.

Consigned to the lunatic fridges of the science world after WWII’s eugenics nightmare showed that the Nazis' enthusiasm for bumping off anyone with so much as a cleft palette had led to the killing of some six million Jews, homosexuals, communists, Slavs and a large number of Gypsies, meant that the idea of the State killing off its perceived undesirables was going to have to take a back seat for a while. But, ideas like Eugenics, which is basically the study or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive traits), have a habit of coming back. As they say in the bible (Genesis 40-41) ‘you can’t keep a good man down’ (though actually you can if you shoot him).

Modern science, with its ability to ‘enhance’ babies in the womb, clone, alter cells, preventing certain hereditary diseases from occurring, understanding DNA and so on, show that we are getting extremely close to creating a ‘perfect’ human or at least science's idea of a perfect human. Indeed, James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who is also an outspoken proponent of using genetic engineering to "redesign" future children and "improve" the human species. said that: "If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease.... So I'd like to get rid of that.... Those parents who enhance their children, then their children are going to be the ones who dominate the world.... People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

Yet, while the world talks of the perfect human, our society appears obsessed with encouraging the rise of the imperfect human. We dumb down, we despise elites, we mock intelligence and celebrate stupidity, we ignore differences of race and ability for fear of nebulous ‘rights’ and we nurture a parasitic criminal underclass allowing it to breed and fester while undermining and damning the rest of society. The underclass is like a great sway of vermin that lives, like rats, only a few feet from us at any one time. The underclass does no work, contributes nothing, is uneducated, steals, is violent, takes up property and landspace, and constantly whines for more. It is ungrateful, vile, and dangerous, yet we pay it millions upon millions of pounds every year. We provide the feckless young underclass girls, pregnant almost as soon as they can be, with homes and money, rewarding their careless promiscuity, young underclass males can procreate at will as the state will pay for their offspring. All responsibility for their actions is absolved and paid for by the State. This is anti-eugenics, the rise of stupidman.

The 21st Century Brave New World is not populated by the beautiful and the ultra intelligent rather we are evolving the super-stupid. The new stupidtelligentsia is probably the first species on earth that is regressing and disproving Darwin’s theory of evolution at the same time. Each generation born in the underclass has less brain power, is more brutal, less able to speak and more criminally minded that the last and each generation is more likely to destroy the hand that feeds it, us.

Eugenics may have had a bad start and a bad history but it offers a solution for the future, a solution that we will inevitably begin to be used as it becomes available. For, as sure as part of our population rejoices in its own squallor and simian qualities, so another will be striving for higher goals, to produce the perfect human and drive the human race forwards. It will be interesting to see how the champions of the underclass and of political correctness and Health and Safety deal with the rise of the über babe... Born of human to be better than what went before, or born of subhuman to be less than... No doubt the only winners, as in all things, will be the lawyers, a species that neither evolves or regresses but, like God, just is.

THE AGE OF THE ELOI

The soft, fluffy, cotton wool mindset that seems to have reduced most of the world's left/right political animals to a sort of sludge-brained Eloi have somehow convinced themselves and, seemingly, most of the population, that the secret of a happy life is now to log-on, dumb-down, spend-large, think-small (if at all) and care lots. Empathy is the new apathy. I feel, you feel, we all feel but ideally I feel more than you. Now, if a butterfly sheds a tear in Japan, there’s hysterical grief in New York.

From President Obama’s recent beer swilling love-in with a policeman and a crabby black professor whose brilliant IQ he demonstrated by breaking into his own house (the professor then cleverly got himself arrested by getting all mouthy with the policeman who had come to check out a reported burglary), to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s lamentable attempt at bonhomie on breakfast TV, our leaders strive to be our mates.

A few weeks ago, when Gordon Brown tried to get all pally with the nation over concerns that hirsute singer Susan Boyle was going loopy and spent his airtime discussing Boyle, while at that very moment Moslem psychos were dicing their British hostages (reader’s may recall that Boyle’s sudden fame and wealth coupled with her inability to shave her face had made her go insane). No doubt the link between sudden fame and madness might go some way to explaining Brown’s own transition from smug and inept, but little known Chancellor of the Exchequer, to smug, power-crazed, I-can-walk-on-water-and-heal-the-world loony, Prime Minister. Our leaders are now desperate to connect with the people and more importantly to be seen connecting with the people. To show us that they ‘feel’ and ‘share’ our concerns: that our issues, no matter how trivial, are now their issues. That these tears of concerns are crocodile tears and not butterfly tears is now irrelevant, if they feel then we feel and vice versa.

Obama maybe in charge of the most powerful nation on earth, but years of touchy-feely rhetoric from the liberal left/right intelligentsia, coupled with his predecessors' failings and perceived gungho US-style Jingoism, have created the USA’s first Presidential enoch. Obama may be black, but his balls are distinctly pink and, judging from the amount of make-up he’s wearing, possibly shrinking as well. So when Iran’s religious thugs stamped all over their people’s valiant attempt at protest it was no surprise that the US uttered barely a word in protest. It should also be no surprise that Iran is now storming ahead developing their nuclear bomb or that North Korea can can lob nuclear test missiles around with impunity . After all, what’s Obama’s new all inclusive US of A going to do to stop them? Have a group hug probably or, maybe, if Obama gets really angry, he’ll stamp his feet and buy a new dress - cos he’s worth it and anyway that’ll show ‘em.

Our leaders though are only reflecting the deeper ‘nicey’ malaise that is sweeping the West. Now that political correctness, health and safety mania, sexual, religious and racial offend-thee-not legislation and a total obsession with making sure that no one is hurt or emotionally upset by life we are collectively dumbing down and regressing so fast that soon we’ll all be on a par with the Taliban. Lest we forget the Taliban are a species that, in 2000 years, has barely evolved beyond the stone-age; not, for them two brain cells when one will do.

It is telling too that the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband and the Obama administration now want to arrange for talks and hugging with the Taliban. No doubt in this touchy-feely world we can overlook the fact that the Taliban blows up and murders school children in an effort to stop young girls being educated, that men can be killed for shaving and that being caught with satanic objects like a radio will get you thrown into a Taliban slammer. The liberal left/right coalition also conveniently ignores and turns a blind eye to the fact that the Taliban’s treatment of women is on a par with our treatment of battery hens only worse, given that we thankfully don’t stone chickens to death or burn them alive. Oh and lest we forget to the Taliban homosexuality is an abomination, so no same-sex beard love-ins in Afghanistan unless Susan Boyle decides to drop in for a sing-along and a bit of back door action.

We now have a world at the pinnacle of our achievement so far and we can either progress or, in a fit of mass hysteria, embrace a utopia that never was, can be, nor will ever be despite Obama’s pink testicles and Gordon Brown’s Saviour complex. What we have instead is a slowly evolving do nothing, want everything, emotional feel for everyone, upset no one, we are all equal, no gain cos we don’t want the pain, con trick. We are rapidly morphing from a can be, can do people, into a should we, can we, what if population of dullards not fit for anything except emotional turpitude and emphasizing with celebrities.

In the 1960s film version of H G Wells novel the Time Machine, the hero, played by actor Rod Taylor, stumbles across a seemingly idilic scene where young, good looking people sit around a river bank eating and drinking, seemingly without a care in the world. Suddenly a young woman falls into the river and starts drowning. She screams but the people ignore her cries and carry on eating and drinking, oblivious to her plight. These are the Eloi, a people who want everything but do nothing.

Then today a news story broke of a man who drowned in 18 inches of water after his car plunged down a steep bank into a stream. The rescue services and police arrived quickly along with a ‘health and safety’ officer who deemed the bank and water too dangerous for the men present to attempt to rescue the man and consequently a unit with 'water experience' were summoned from 50 mies away. While they waited for the second unit to arrive the men present sat around drinking tea while the man cried for help and died.

In the Time Machine the hero, in despair at what mankind had become, cried out to the Eloi:

"What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so that you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams, for what?!!! So you can swim, and dance, and play”.

Had the film been made now Rod Taylor would of course have hugged them...

SPASTICS ELASTIC

The reissuing of the book Art of the Nasty which Salvation originally published in 1998, which has now been revised and updated and published anew by FAB Press, has, along with the passing uncut of Lars von Triers' new film The Antichrist and the reclassifying of an episode of Friends from PG to a 12 for the use of the expression ‘laundry spaz’, meant that film censorship is again in the news. Has the BBFC gone too far? Is the BBFC too soft on sex and violence? Is the reclassifying of Friends politically correct lunacy?

Who knows and who cares?

What matters ultimately is the quality of the work on screen and our response to it. Adults will respond to something that they don’t like or which offends their tastes by switching off, not buying something or through disinterest. They do not need a censor telling them that this year's PC bugbears are offensive ‘words’, but showing a close-up of a woman hacking off her clitoris or a man ejaculating blood, as is the case in The Antichrist, is now OK.

Jennifer Aniston’s Friends character, Rachel, used the expression ‘laundry spaz’ to describe her ineptness in using a washing machine. According to the BBFC’s head of policy, Peter Johnson, ‘spaz’ is “short for spastic or ‘mong’ (originally a reference to people with Down’s syndrome), which is quite common in American works and we (the BBFC) have found that UK audiences are quite offended... research told us that for the public this is now as important as drugs or horror or sex”. Boo hoo.

What Mr Johnson and co at the BBFC mean is that they now seek offense, that they see racial and disability discrimination, sexism, agism, homophobia and religious hatred seeping out of the cinema screen relentlessly. Now censorship is morphing, moving away from the old taboos of the sexually explicit and the gratuitously violent and into a new, quasi Orwellian world of thought control and new speak where disapproved words and ideas outside of the new norms are excised and erased forever.

This move is the censors Shangrila where they can be part of the brave new world where hatred and wickedness are excised not just from film but ultimately from our minds. Spaz may have been one small word for Rachel but it was a whole dictionary for the BBFC. Already, filmmakers and scriptwriters are pouring over their Thesauruses in search of nicer, more cryptic ways, of calling a dwarf a ‘dwarf’ or of insulting a black or gay man without using the ‘n’ or ‘f’ words. If they can’t find the appropriate ‘nicer’ euphemism then rest assured that the BBFC will have a whole selection of tasty morsels in their new ‘it's a wonderful world’ lexicon of life. When opened, it plays ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’, unless you’re a spaz of course in which case you can just dribble along to the chorus. Offensive? Well yes. Should I or anyone else be stopped from saying things like this? No.

The episode of Friends that caused all the fuss was an early episode that consequently fell foul of the BBFC’s new offend-thee-not word holocaust, which is currently culling non pc words from our vocabulary faster that you say spastics elastic to someone with a speech impediment. Such is the odious advancement of the notion that we are all equal and of equal worth (except white, working class males and Christians who are of course scum), and being of equal worth should not be offended or discriminated against in any way least we get upset or emotionally damaged. Hence highlighting the noxious and improper use of the word ‘spaz’ in Friends which might not only ‘offend’ us but legitimate spazes as well, that is someone born with spastic diplegia, or hypertonia, which is better known as cerebral palsy, or just plain ‘spastic’ but which has now be reclassified by the generic term ‘disabled’. Likewise the ‘Spastics Society’ was rechristened ‘Scope’ in 1994 which of course means nothing and offends no one and therefore conforms to the new pc mantras of inclusivity, touchyfeely, niceness where no one gets hurt. No matter that you have an incurable neurological disorder that will probably kill you by age thirty, just so long as no one refers to you as a spaz it’ll all be alright and life is so much better for the rest of us now that your offensive sounding ‘spastic’ disability has morphed into ‘scope’, which of course rhymes with ‘hope’, which is wonderful and sounds so much nicer.

Likewise, the BBFC will no doubt be removing words like nigger, poof, faggot, cripple, spic, yid and so on from films where their use is deemed inappropriate or likely to cause offense. Yet, why is it so offensive? ‘Sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us’ children use to chant in response to being called a fat pig, or indeed a spaz. Yet in our new utopian society where you can get three months community service for mugging someone yet years for offending another race or religion, words not only hurt they are deemed so dangerous that they cannot be heard or spoken. Silence in Brown’s Britain is indeed golden.

What is it that modern society now fears so much that we have to censor words, and has in a sense made words more alarming to the BBFC than the sight of a woman mutilating her vagina? Is it that words hurt? Or that words make us do things, that they inspire us to hate as well as to love or like? That they can make us despise someone or something that pictures cannot, or is it that these now ‘forbidden’ words are part of something intangible that the new politically correct quasi religion of mainstream soft left/right political thought cannot tolerate? That some thoughts and the words that represent them are now deemed so dangerous that they have become the new taboos? I think so.

Hatred of a religion or race is a taboo. Hatred of a particular sexuality is a taboo. So is questioning women’s rights or the rights of the disabled or rights for other groups. All are now protected and enshrined in law. Discrimination is in many cases a crime as is the telling of racist or sexist or religious jokes to various degrees a crime. One may argue that this is a good thing. That allowing groups and individuals the freedom to express hate or to promote hatred against an ethnic or specific minority is bad and unnecessary in these enlightened times. Yet there is a balance to be struck between protecting society from those that potentially would destroy it or aspects of it and an individual's right to express his or her disgust, or hatred of that society.

By censoring words, the BBFC and the government that sanctions and endorses their decisions are denying those individuals, and the wider voice of dissension that doesn’t buy into this new nicetopia, a voice. And when people are denied a voice they get angry.

In the US, freedom of expression is enshrined in law as the First Amendment and protects the extremes from the mainstream. So pornographers and the Ku Klux Klan can sup with Pro Lifers and radical Islamists and no one gets hurts. American society manages to be what the UK aspires to be, but which in our new politically driven times is failing to be; a true Democracy. The BBFC and those that seek and take offense so readily should remember that the first recorded case of word censorship was of the philosopher Socrates whose writings were believed to be corrupting youth, his punishment was death...

I VOTE, THEREFORE I AM

The last few weeks have been historic for many reasons. In the UK, our main political parties have disgraced themselves so much that they may well have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Indeed, Labour and the rubbish that is Gordon Brown may well be dying before our eyes and it may yet be that Labour will collapse as an electoral force in much the same way that the Liberals did in 1921 when dissatisfaction, with their handling of the First World War, the suffragettes and Irish Home Rule, all combined to convince the electorate that the once great Liberal party was a weak and spent force. Indeed, in the general election of 1922 the Liberal vote totally collapsed allowing the Labour Party to become the main opposition to the Conservatives for the first time. The Liberal Party never recovered...

This would be exciting if the Conservative or Liberal parties offered an exciting alternative, unfortunately they don’t, in fact, many of the expenses-fiddling MPs belong to the Conservative Party anyway and, more importantly, neither the Tories or the Liberals have anything new to say. The reality is that our three once great political parties and those that join them and represent them at Westminster are tired, bereft of ideas, indolent and corrupt. Theirs is the politics of the sound bite and the vacuous, of the craven preaching to craving, whose political agenda is that of the prostitute who ‘will be whatever you want me to be’ and whose ‘passionate beliefs’ are rehearsed and acted out before us with all the conviction of a poor man’s Hamlet performed by the local amateur dramatic society.

Anyone who watched Gordon Brown’s ludicrous ramblings last week as he sought to galvanise Labour Party members would have seen right through Brown’s vainglorious displays of ‘passion’ as he listed his intention, at a time when the country is collapsing under the burden of State debt, of spending yet more money we don’t have eliminating child poverty, youth unemployment, third world hunger and, if I remember correctly, curing AIDS in Africa. Each tear-jerker policy accompanied by Brown’s now familiar punching of his fist into the palm of his other hand, while with his one good eye he stares wildly around like some myopic cyclops buoyed up on crack-cocaine and his own rhetoric. No wonder that the latest reports have him planning to slink out of office some time soon so avoiding the double whammy of a decimated Labour vote and an economy reduced to the level of basket case Zimbabwe. It's no surprise that Gordon Brown is suddenly so keen on giving money to Africa as the only countries likely to take in a buffoon like Brown once he decides to flee the UK as his financial chickens come home to roost will be the the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia or Zimbabwe, though I suspect that even Robert Mugabe may think twice before letting Brown get at his coffers.

So it was moving and wonderful to see the brave and truly passionate men and women of Iran braving that regime's religious zealots and Revolutionary Guards to march through Tehran’s streets demanding that their votes count. We forget in the UK when we take our democracy for granted that, in other countries, the right to vote is often a fragile right and that people, as in Iraq and Iran, brave life and limb literally just to put their precious ‘X’ next to their candidate of choice.

I remember the collapse of the Shah’s regime in 1979 and watched the Iranian Revolution unfold as an impotent West and in particular an impotent and useless US administration led by Jimmy Carter, floundered and vacillated as disaster followed disaster and the seeds of Islamic fundamentalism were sown. So it would be genuinely exciting if the people of Iran were able to topple and overthrow what is currently one of the most destabilizing and dangerous states in the world. It is also worth remembering that the pre-revolutionary Iran was one of the most pro West Muslim countries in the Arab world and one of the most modern and forward looking despite the Shah’s excesses and abuses of power and its people deserve a lot better than being led by a second rate Holocaust denier with a death wish who wants to lob nuclear bombs around.

It's a shame then that, while some of those most deserving of democracy fight and die for their right to choose their political leaders and style of government that, in the UK, we seem to have chosen the ‘am I bovvered?’ path to political oblivion. It's ironic too that we have democracy but are represented by politicians and political parties that are so ghastly that we can no longer be bothered to vote while those who can’t vote but want to are currently represented by some of the bravest people alive, themselves.

Perhaps when the UK’s political system collapses or when our increasingly invasive police state finally crosses the line and takes control because our politicians are so crap that they can no longer do their job then people may realise what we had. Though I doubt it, for now our democracy is about the freedom to watch Jade Goody die, or read Katie Price’s thoughts on sex or fly to our second home in Malaga or whatever. Where is my Vote? is the cry on the streets of Tehran ours may well be Vote - Why should I?

We may soon have the answer.

Democracy Betrayed, Betrayed by Democracy

England is often cited as the Mother of Democracy, a defender of freedom and a nation that values the beliefs and hopes of its citizens above all, and who will, if necessary, defend those beliefs to the death. Yet, since this nation and its people last fought for its survival in World War II, some 70 years ago, our Governments, politicians, and the Establishment that nurtures them have slowly eroded our freedoms, ignored the values of this nations people, mocked our culture and betrayed our beliefs. In so doing, they have created a society and country that is corrupt, decadent (in a bad way) and totally at odds with the nation our forebears fought and died for all those years ago.

These last few months have shown the people of this country, the ‘Mother of Democracy’ just how corrupt, weak, criminal, shameless and our utterly immoral our politicians and the Establishment have become. Not content with riding rough-shod over the values of centuries, of destroying this nations identity, of mocking its laws, its religions, its indigenous peoples and our morals they have looted and stolen at will. The credit crunch and the expenses scandal may well prove to be the defining moment, the events that finally tipped the scales between public indifference to the machinations of our self-serving politicians and financial institutions to real public anger at our current malaise.

What Labour has done, as to various degrees the majority of governments since 1945, is pursue the creation of a racially harmonious, sexually progressive and socially cohesive society where crime, poverty, racialism, disadvantage, class divides and equal opportunity prevailed. Indeed, with the best of intentions, the new European ideal was to be colour blind, racially mixed, classless, sexless and devoid of strife and, in order to achieve this, our leaders and betters have passed umpteen laws and sublimated our culture in pursuit of an unattainable Utopia that has absolutely ignored our past and will destroy our future.

So it is, for the last 65 years our politicians gradually, and with increasing fervor under New Labour, have sought to limit opposition and silence criticism of their new multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-everything Shangri La. Yet, by criminalizing our right to expression, successive governments have in turn denied us the benefits of the Democracy bequeathed to us by forefathers. Instead, we are being subjected to the iniquities and vagaries of a vile, weak and utterly useless system of beliefs that has no mandate, no validity and no longer even the veneer that it has the law on its side. For the utter contempt by which our politicians, and the Establishment which props them up, have lined their pockets and feathered their nests should be the last straw, for democracy has damned us and we in turn should damn the democracy that protects them.

What is the point of democracy if those empowered by its citizens steal from its coffers and pursue political objectives regardless of the wishes of its citizens? Maybe it's because our politicians hold us in contempt. Maybe its because our hopes and fears are too basic and simple for our grandiose politicians, with their notions of a vast multicultural disneyland, to bother with.

After all, most people believe in the death penalty for murder and child molestation, yet such attitudes are mocked by our leaders. People under the threat of prosecution may seem to embrace the fact that successive governments have filled this country to overflowing with the world's human flotsam and jetsam, and that the son of God was probably a sodomite who took it up the ass to save the mankind yet, I think not.

Rather it may be that the people of this country are sick of the rubbish done to them in their name. Sick of the vested interest groups lining their bank accounts with Euro grants paid for by our taxes. Sick of lying and thieving politicians who patronize them on the one hand and buy their second homes from them on the other and, most of all I suspect, sick of the mess that England has become.

Politicians may say sorry but words cost nothing and, in these circumstances, come very cheap indeed. In fact, Gordon Brown and his ilk are, in my opinion, for their fleecing and making destitute of our economy and in the mass immigration that they have overseen and encouraged, treasonable. They have engineered the virtual financial and racial destruction of our nation and it is yet possible that this country will collapse or at best emerge greatly altered. How altered depends on how angry the people of England are. In times passed, traitors' heads were stuck up on pikes on the top of the Tower of London, where their sightless dead eyes could gaze out over the City of London. It would be fitting if Brown and his cronies could share the same fate. So I hope that the people of this nation are very angry indeed...