Content about Politics

Our new government has a particular and historic responsibility: to rebuild confidence in our political system. After the scandals of recent years, people have lost faith in politics and politicians. It is our duty to restore their trust ... We must be different from what has gone before us - careful with public money. Transparent about what we do and how we do it. Determined to act in the national interest, above improper influence. (Ministerial Code, May 2010, Foreword by David Cameron)

Why do our politicians go straight to the private bankers, who simply create money completely out of thin air ... just figures on a computer screen ... and when this ‘money’, or more accurately this ‘nothingness’, is received by our government, we, as taxpayers, start paying the exorbitant interest which is currently costing the British people in real money at least £125,000,000 a day, or more than £44,000,000,000 a year?

The answer, of course, is very simple and to the point. 

Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, said in his statement:

This is not a step I have taken lightly. I am a firm believer in greater transparency and this government and this department have done far more than our predecessors in publishing information about the performance and results of our policies. But there also needs to be a safe space where officials are able to give ministers full and frank advice in developing policies and programmes.

The price of fuel is pushing up the cost of bus and car journeys. Car insurance has gone up across the board by between 40 and 60% this year, despite the reduced risk incurred by fewer car journeys. Train travel is already prohibitively expensive if more than one person is travelling together.

And now, for the air travellers amongst us, to add to the lies of liquid bombs and shoe bombs, we have underpants bombs.

In 1748, French political thinker, Montesquieu, identified in De l’esprit des lois the three branches of government between which power should be allocated and separated: the executive which takes action to implement the law, defend the nation, conduct foreign affairs and administer internal policies; the legislative which makes law, and the judiciary which applies the law to determine disputes and punish criminals. According to the doctrine the executive cannot make law. Neither can the legislative determine disputes or any of the branches exercise the power of the other.

Philanthropist - the word is supposed to invoke the image of the so-called wealth creator giving freely to good causes for the benefit of his fellow man.

These days, though, it has become something quite different, as Agenda 21 and the Big Society instead invoke images of a (Leo) Straussian hell where laws are created not by accountable, representative, government for the benefit of society, but by corporatised charities and think tanks.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development if predicting that Britain will fall back into recession this quarter.

George Osborne on the other hand, says we won't. Commenting on the OECD forecast, he said:

This is a forecast... Our own forecast from our own independent body, which we published last week, says we are going to avoid a recession.

Our own independent body?

What planet is this man on? How can any body be "our own" and "independent" at the same time?

There will not be many of us unable to see that the handing over our national defence to corparations with foreign interests is national suicide. 

That is unless you are Bernard Gray, the Chief of Defence Materiel at the Defence Equipment and Support branch of the Ministry.

Whilst acting as an advisor to the Ministry of Defence in 2009, Gray compiled a review of  defence acquisition, in which he strongly recommended the privatisation of the Defence Equipment and Support Branch, by creating what is termed a Go-Co partnership.

Key to this policy is the weakening and ultimately, the removal of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, which is delivered by the Royal Navy’s nuclear Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines. Armed with 16 Trident Ballistic Missiles, which can each carry multiple warheads, these submarines are based at Faslane on the west coast of Scotland.  

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage – almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recounting of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance ...

The targets of the Bangkok bombs is not clear, but Israel is taking as much political mileage from it as they can. "We can assume from the other experiences that we were the target," said Itzhak Shoham, Israel's ambassador to Thailand.

Speaking about the bombs, Shoham said, "they are similar to the ones used in Delhi and in Tbilisi. From that we can assume that there is the same network of terror."

The Economist's blogger Bagehot writes that his:

print column this week looks at the British debate about high pay, and suggests that the row is about more than bonuses and banks. Somewhere in amongst the public rage, I think the British are losing faith in the idea that they live in a meritocracy.

Bagehot expresses views which are typical of the oligarchical mind, which whines when the unwashed masses demand limits are placed on bankers salaries.