‘The British Labour Party apparatchiks have come a long
way in a few years. The upper reaches of the Labour Party lead lives that bear
no relationship to the lives of their supporters. To the leadership, playing
around with extravagant sums of dough is, well, just normal. Why do bus
drivers, office cleaners, schoolteachers, and gardeners fail to understand
this?
The political classes in Britain
(and no doubt the US) are beneficiaries of double standards and condescension.
They preach to working people about the importance of hard work and of paying
ever-increasing taxes, yet play footsie under the table with those whose job it
is to provide advice on how to squirrel away their wealth and earnings.
They give lectures on diversity but
spend most of their time with fashionable elites and showbiz personalities.
They are insulated by their wealth and privilege from the pressures that face
ordinary people, pressures that they have imposed on lesser mortals. In short,
they behave pretty much like the bureaucrats of the old Soviet bloc telling
everybody else how to live their lives whilst exempting themselves from any
moral and financial restraints.’
The Truth Is Marching On
just another flim flam man .....
‘All public discussion on how to
defeat terrorism, in what Tony Blair terms the unique conditions of modern
society, is now couched in a simple dichotomy: the tension between civil
liberties and security. Yet this formula is old, centuries old, as is the
philosophy that underpins it.
Articulated by Thomas Hobbes in
the 17th century, this ideology sets out a cold contract among individuals to
form the state: the individual surrenders part of his liberty to purchase
security, which it is the sovereign's job to determine.
It is this model that has been
reinstated in force by the government of the day, without adequate resistance
from either the left or the right. Yet to accept this representation of the
modern political realm as an inevitable conflict between security and liberty -
or even accepting the debate on these terms - means yielding to the highly
limited framework in which it is set.
In order to make the argument for such a social contract
persuasive, Hobbes portrays a dangerous world filled with unknown enemies
perpetually striving to murder one's family and destroy one's property, a
nation filled with untrustworthy neighbours, isolated individuals who live in
fear of each other, and only the power of the state to protect society from the
evils inherent in human nature. How much of your liberty do you yield to your
protector? As much as he says he needs to provide you with protection.’
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