This Will Surely Improve His Image

If you follow British politics, you know that the Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is a deeply unpopular socialist politician who has no chance of surviving the next election. Indeed, the other day, he was described in the press as "dead politician walking." One of the charges against Brown is that he acts imperiously. It was about a year ago that he unilaterally signed Britain's sovereignty over to the EU without allowing the public a promised referendum. Yesterday, Brown produced a YouTube video in a doomed-before-it-began effort to rouse the British population. Part of this was shot at a school with a WWII montage dotting the walls:



That's bound to endear him more to the public. Obviously, even his photographer and handlers - to allow that shot to be taken - are ready for this guy to make his final exit.

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A Trip Around The Anglosphere

Some of the most interesting links from blogs north of the border, down under and across the pond, all below the fold.

Art: The Battle of the Nile, Thomas Luny, 1834

North of the border:

The Covenant Zone revisits the inspiring story of Paul Potts, quoting the great poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling.

At the Halls of Macademia, police in small town Canada are publishing the names of those who solicit prostitution. The author waits to see the effects, noting that in small towns, public shaming is still a reality.

Blazing Cat Fur is ordering up a cup of "Rainforest Deforestation Expresso" Heh.

Ezra Levant takes stock of the battle for freedom of speech in Canada and finds it going fairly well. A very interesting post.

Five Feet of Fury blogs on one author who is using the Canadian legal system to charge Muslims hecklers and Canada’s largest book chain with racism.

Down Under

Dr. John Ray posts at A Western Heart on how freedom of speech and hate speech is viewed from the far left. Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Col. Robert Neville, possibly the most eclectic in thought of any blog on the net, posts on a wide range of topics in his post, "In the Ninth Circle of Hell with the MSM, Obama, Mohammed and the Mythical Moderate Muslims." He starts off by noting that the MSM puts their money where their biases lie.

Heh. KG tells the story of a real cat burglar.

MK posts on the conundrum facing U.S. troops in Iraq. There are just not enough bad guys around at the moment to keep it interesting.

From Aurora at the Midnight Sun, there are some utterly sick bastards in this world, and none moreso than those who abuse children or who find the abuse tolerable. The secular left really do wish to tear down all taboos. God help us if they succeed.

Across the Pond

An Englishman’s Castle blogs on the accuracy of a comparison between zealots who are fundamentally opposed to scientific experimentation and Nazi book burners.

At Biased BBC, they chronicle the hatred and disrespect of the chattering class at the Beeb for former PM Margaret Thatcher. If you step back in history a bit, you will find the same scenario played out as to Churchill.

Bishop Hill blogs on the many discontinuities in the global warming world, starting off with this nugget: "Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis of the National Technical University of Athens published a paper in which he demonstrated that climate models have no predictive skill at regional levels, and there is no evidence that they work at larger scales either. This is a pity, as we are currently destroying our economies on the basis of the output of climate models."

Brits At Their Best takes note that "yesterday was the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile, when Admiral Nelson confronted Napoleon's fleet." They quote the beautiful poem "Casabianca" by English poet Felicia Hemans that pays homage to the bravery of the young French Admiral who fought with honor and died when his ship was destroyed.

Helen Szmanskey, blogging at the BrugesGroupBlog, comments on the failure of the DOHA trade talks, assessing that such large scale talks are doomed to failure, individual agreements are a better idea, but that the EU prevents its countries from taking that route.

As David Milliband sharpens the knife he plans to stick into the back of Gordon Brown, Burning Our Money ponders just what, if anything new, Milliband might have to offer. The conclusion – not much.

At a blog run by the Centre For Social Cohesion, Simon Cox posts on a charge by British playwright Simon Gray accusing the National Theatre of being afraid to run anything that might be deemed critical of Islam because of fears of violence.

Nick at Counting Cats in Zanzibar has his list of the worst films ever along with some stinging commentary. One of my few points of disagreement is on Hannibal.

David Thompson has a fascinating post on obfuscation and intellectualism. I love the opening quote: "The more sceptical among us might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is."

With gas prices falling in the U.S., EU Referendum is wondering about the huge hike that occurred across the pond. "The US situation is now so very different from what we get from this side of the pond that it is germane to ask what on earth is going on."

The Heresy Corner looks at the polls and the intense unpopularity of Gordon Brown – and took stock that opinion polls showing that all of Labour’s alternatives fare worse than Brown with the exception of . . . Tony Blair.

Ireland’s Hibernia Girl has gotten some good reviews . . . and a prognostication that her heresy will end in a jail cell.

At Neuarbeit Macht Frei, a discussion of changes proposed to British criminal law that would insert gender criteria and overlay the foundational social relationship of marriage. This law looks nothing so much like modern social engineering by radical feminists. The House of Dumb gives his observations on it, calling it "Harriet Harperson's latest attack on the state of holy matrimony."

Mick Hartley has an interesting post on "liberalism" and Iran. As an aside, I would add that classical liberalism and our modern progressive who still call themselves "liberals" are worlds apart. Freedom of speech is an essential element of the former, and in many parts of the West, under significant attack from the latter.

At Persevere, a British commander charges that UK Muslims are fighting on the side of the Taliban against British troops.

At the Police Inspector’s Blog, discussion of how Labour is moving ever closer to that Orwellian reality.

The Pub Philosopher discusses the First Amendment right of freedom of speech from across the pond and hits on the common sense balance that his forebearers who wrote that document hit upon in their crafting. Basically, the First Amendment allows free speech "short of telling lies about individuals" – which are allowed but subject to libel suits – and "directly inciting violence" – which can be criminal. Thus, to answer his question, the rantings of Sheppard and Whittle would be constitutionally protected in the U.S. and, two, I find that much preferable to hate speech laws. Such laws are simply tools for social engineering by government.

From the Monkey Tennis Center – if you’re short on global warming alarmism, just make some up like they do at the BBC.

Posts About Our Allies:

There are some interesting posts on this side of the pond that discuss the UK and others. When one ponders the benefits of being a British colony, one should begin with a map about GDP distribution in the world today. Megan McArdle, at the Atlantic, pulls out the maps and writes: "When you see the map, it becomes radically apparent just how firmly Britain was the root of the Industrial revolution. With the lone exception of Japan, the darkest places on the map are either next to Britain, or former British colonies. And aside from Saudi Arabia and Chile, all the growth seems to spread outward from those Anglosphere points of infection. Nowhere, not even Saudi Arabia, has the income density of Western Europe and North America."

And at Bookworm Room, she has a fine post that discusses, in part, why the Industrial Revolution at the time rooted more firmly in the U.S. than in the U.K.

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An English Lesson For E.J. Dionne

Dionne really is such low hanging fruit, going after his insipid columns is akin to taking a few practice swings with a bat before stepping up to the plate. Today he completely mistakes what is going on across the pond as the basis for his suggestion that McCain make a sharp left turn to be more like Obama.
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You can find EJ Dionne's column here. Dionne's message therein to McCain today - ditch conservative principles and become more liberal, just like the Tories did, and you stand a chance of winning the election.

There are just a few problems with that. First and foremost among them is that Republicans lost power when they lost their mooring from conservative values. They spent our wealth like drunken Democrats. When the now indicted Sen. Stevens put the Bridge to Nowhere on the Senate map, all but a few Republicans walked across it like lemmings. But that aside, looking to the UK, it is true that the Tories would never be mistaken for conservatives in the U.S. They are Labour lite - but they have been that way for the better part of a century. Voters are not warming to the Tories because the Tories have suddenly changed brands. To the contrary, they are utterly rejecting Labour, whose ideas are pretty much the mainstream socialism that Obama promises.

I've been calling Britain a laboratory in modern socialism for years. If there is a lesson to be learned from the British experience, it's that socialism is a grand failure.

As to why the Tories lost power in the first place - they sacked Margaret Thatcher because of her opposition to the EU. When Thatcher came to power, she did so on the heels of hard economic times. She revamped the British economy and tore the economic heart out of British socialism. She was villified for it, and when she lost power, that did not mean the end to the Tory problems on Europe. That, plus a series of sex scandals and some bad economic times did in Thatcher's successor, John Major. The Tories imploded, much as Republicans in 2006.

Now, after eleven years of mucking things up like only socialists can do, we are being treated to the spectacle of Labour embracing conservative principles in an effort to hold onto power. The latest Green Paper on policing, promising a devolution of power, is about as far off the left playbook as Nancy Pelosi embracing drilling in ANWR. So, to the extent that there has been movement in the political parties over the past decade in the UK, its been the movement of Labour towards the center left occupied by the Tories.

That aside, EJ did chuck in a few laughers with the best being far and away to assert that Gordon Brown and Obama share a "broadly center left world view." Gordon Brown is anything but center left. And to claim that there is anything about Obama that can be characterized as "center" or even "center left" is laughable. This is a guy whose voting record is well to the left of the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress, who wants to declare Iraq a defeat, and who wants to institute cradle to grave socialism in the U.S. That is "center" only if you are in Cuba or Venezuela. Even China has given up that ghost.

Oh well, Dionne may never get anything right in his columns, but he always provides fine entertainment - unintended, though it may be.

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Labour Takes It In The Shorts

The socialist Labour Party was trounced in mid-term elections two months ago, and now, in a by election, have lost possibly the safest seat they had, Glasgow East. The Tories are publicly urging PM Gordon Brown to call another general election and even one Labour MP has now called for Brown to step down.
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This from the Telegraph:

Challenged by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, to call a general election after the loss of Glasgow East to the Scottish National Party, Mr Brown said he was "getting on with the job".

Preparing to meet trade union leaders in Warwick, the Prime Minister said: "We've got to listen and hear people's concerns and that's exactly what we are doing. People are worried every time they go to the petrol station for fuel and worry about the costs. These are concerns that are happening in every other country.

"My full focus is on taking people through these difficult times."

But Graham Stringer, a former minister and the MP for Manchester Blackley, added to the pressure on his leader by becoming the first Labour MP to publicly urging for Mr Brown to consider his position.

Mr Stringer said the Cabinet must have a "closed and honest discussion,” adding: “We need a new start and that can only come from a debate around the leadership.”

In one of the biggest electoral upsets of recent times, the Scottish National Party candidate John Mason last night overturned a huge 13,507 majority in Glasgow East and clinched the former Labour stronghold from the Labour candidate, Margaret Curran, by 365 votes.

Speaking earlier outside his home in west London, Mr Cameron said the result showed that voters were telling the Prime Minister: "We think you're failing and we want change."

Mr Cameron said: "I wonder whether we can put up with this for another 18 months.

. . . This morning Des Browne, the Scottish Secretary, admitted that it had been a "bad night" for Labour. But he said that the party had recovered from previous by-election disasters and could do so again. He maintained that Mr Brown was the best leader for the country in difficult times.

. . . The defeat sends a chilling message about Labour's electoral prospects to already dissatisfied party backbenchers, the majority of whom enjoy much smaller majorities. Labour's collapse in a working class area also suggests that the party's traditional support is joining the middle classes in turning their backs on the party.

This morning Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, said that if the result were replicated at the next general election, Labour would be left with only one MP in Scotland. She described the victory in Glasgow East as a "sensational, spectacular, epic result".

She said: "The cost of living, fuel prices and food prices were an enormous factor in this by-election. But also for the first time in history this was a by-election between two governments - the Labour Government in London and the SNP Government in Holyrood. Clearly the Labour Government is deeply unpopular."

Mr Brown has already seen a safe Labour seat lost in May when a 7,000 majority in Crewe and Nantwich was reversed by the Tories. Last month Labour came fifth in the Henley by-election. But for half a century, Labour has enjoyed political supremacy in the east end of Glasgow – the party's 25th safest seat in the country and its third most secure in Mr Brown's Scottish heartland.

In the poll, Mr Mason received 11,277 votes (43 per cent), beating Mrs Curran, who took 10,912 (42 per cent). The SNP's vote increased 26 percentage points on the 2005 General Election, while Labour's fell 19 points. . .

Read the entire article

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Deconstructing the Socialist's War On Law & Order In Britain (Updated)

In Britain, socialists, with their modern belief in multiculturalism, dominate government, academia and much of the news industry. Britain embraced socialism in the immediate aftermath of WWII as a means of righting a deeply troubled class based system. To their credit, the socialists solved that problem. But the socialists have gone far beyond, embracing multiculturalism and creating their own immense problems by undermining almost all of the pillars of British society. Britain is, in essence, a laboratory for the ills of modern socialism in an anglo democracy.

[Update: Within a few days of posting this, I was directed to a Labour Party proposal to allow for local elections of the police leadersip. This is a sea change and as about as unlikely an event as Nancy Pelosi embracing offshore drilling. It may well be a measure born of desperation, given the Sword of Damoclese under which the Labour Party electoral fortunes now sit. None the less, the plan looks viable. Interestingly, it is drawing fire from some conservatives. I have posted on it here. It obviously renders the first two points I raise below moot.]

I posted below, in Britain's Devil's Advocates, that perhaps the most dangerous way in which socialists were destroying British society was a failure to impose law and order. Soon after I had written that post, the Home Office released a report showing a 9% drop in violent crime in Britain. The report was trumpeted as proof of the success of the socialist Labour Party by arguably the most risible den of multicultural elitists in the whole of the chattering class – the BBC. It was all positively Orwellian.

This post is meant to analyze the why and how of what the socialists are doing to undermine law and order in Britain. The starting point is looking underneath the great statistics to see what is really going on:

Labour’s superlative crime statistics are an attempt to magically change chicken excreta into chicken salad. This from the blog Burning Your Money:

. . . Over the decade since that tough on crime supremo took over, police recorded crime is up 7% (1997-98 to 2007-08). And when you probe beneath the totals, crimes of violence turn out to be up much MUCH more.

As the chart above shows, the increase in really bad stuff is nearly 70%. What's that? Ah yes, of course - we're not allowed to make that comparison because during the last ten years, the Home Office changed its counting rules for recorded crime not once, but twice. Twice. Is it any wonder nobody trusts the stats? Well, you know what? We're making the comparison anyway. And we're saying to the Home Office and the BBC, the reason we don't believe you is that the official stats are about as reliable as a one-careful-owner Renault Megane from Arthur Daley. We'd rather believe the evidence of our own eyes - such as the letter I have in front of me right now from our local police warning us of a spate of violent break-ins, and advising us to phone 999 at the slightest sign of a sledgehammer coming through the frontdoor. . . .

What is happening in Britain is a case book study in why socialists / multiculturalists have no business being put in charge of running a lemonade stand, let alone a country. The problem is fourfold.

One, socialists are statists. They suffer under the dual fallacy that the common man is not to be trusted and that the world will function better only if they, the elite, are making the decisions. Democracy is merely a distraction for these people. They centralize and accrue power. And that includes centralized control over policing throughout the country. The local police are ultimately controlled and appointed by the central government. Thus it is no surprise whatsoever that the biggest complaint I hear from my friends in Britain is that the local police are not responsive to the community.

It would seem patently obvious that if you want to make the police responsive to local concerns, you would give the locals the hiring and firing authority over their local police leadership through elections. No more appointments from above and minimal regulation of standards.

Ah, but that would violate the very first tenet of the multicultural left - that they are superior and the decisions should be left to them. Therefore, when last year John Reid, Labour's then Home Secretary, pondered how to better increase the accountability of local police to the local populace, the mere mention of local elections did not even pass his lips. Instead, he suggested giving out phone numbers directly to the police station. It was stupefying.

But it gets worse. When you have centralized control, there is of course tremendous pressure to show that the central planners are doing their job well. Thus you get things such as proposed "policing standards" from the Home Office that curiously seem to have no connection whatsoever with police efficiency:

Guidelines ordering police to respond to emergency calls within three hours and to attend less urgent incidents such as burglaries within three days have been drawn up by the Home Office.

Three hours? That of course was not a standard drawn up to improve law and order. It was a standard drawn up in response to the public perception of failing law and order and a police force that is unseen and unresponsive. Clearly it was a gambit by the socialists in the central government so that they can claim in the future that police are responding to 99.99% of all calls within the prescribed time standard. Voila. A Labour statistical masterpiece to be reported prominently on the telly. Who are you going to believe about police responsiveness, Gordo and the Beeb news reader or your lying eyes?

Two, because socialists believe in their own superiority, what they do best – and most – is regulate. The answer to any problem is not to devolve power or deregulate, but rather to pass a new law or regulation on top of the existing ones. Thus you have an ever growing nightmare of bureaucracy and red tape that takes police off the streets and otherwise detracts from them doing their job.

Please do not mistake anything that I write here as a knock on the British police per se. I have no doubt that the average individual officers are as fine as you will find anywhere. The socialist system in control of the British police is another matter entirely. For example, this a few months ago from a British Police Inspector who blogs under the nom de guerre of Inspector Gadget:

We are very nearly finished in Ruralshire Constabulary. It is chaos and it can only be a matter of days. Someone has to turn off the life support machine. Politically Correct to the point of insanity (Home Office ‘Equalities’ Circular Number 10 of November 2002 is now being enforced in Ruralshire - this bans the use of the terms ‘homosexual or homosexuality’ and demands the use of the term ‘gay’ instead ) and immersed in the enormous chaos of another complete reorganisation of the Divisions various units, we are literally imploding.

We have just had to take another twenty or so officers off the streets to provide the staff for three new units. These units will be fighting a desperate rear-guard action for the next few months to increase our performance in the Customer Satisfaction area. These officers are not actually going to do anything to help our ‘customers’, they are simply going to concentrate on making hundreds of calls to victims to check their satisfaction levels.

And see his related posts on the effect of centralized control and massive overregulation of the police here, here, and here.

Onto the third component of imploding law and order in Britain. Socialists want to win elections, and thus those wonderful statistics you see that show crime ever dropping and more arrests being made involve a tremendous amount of gaming the system. This means targeted policing that distorts priorities and leaves everyone, the police included, jaded and cynical.

For example, there was this story not long ago:

Police spent months gathering statements from 542 people who donated money to a youngster who collected £700 for Comic Relief but then kept it.The case was then recorded as 542 crimes of obtaining money by deception, boosting detection rates even though the youngster only received a warning, the Police Federation conference in Blackpool heard yesterday. It also emerged that an unidentified child in North Wales received a "penalty notice for disorder" (PND) for chalking on the pavement.

The cases were highlighted as absurd examples of the "target culture" reviled by many rank and file officers in England and Wales, which is "criminalising middle England".

The critics say pressure to boost the apparent success rate against crime forces police to make ridiculous decisions and use arrests, cautions or fines for trivial incidents which would not previously have been treated as crimes.

Investigation of more serious offences is then neglected. . .

Read the rest of the story here. You can also troll through the archives of the Police Inspectors blog and find countless examples.

The fourth component of Labour’s destruction of law and order is by far the most insidious. It begins with the socialist / multiculturalist mindset - a philosopy right out of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto - that Western society is at the root of today's problems. Indeed, it is so ensconced in the psyche of Britain's hard left socialists that there is largely a complete refusal to see reality on that score. For one crystal clear example, as I pointed out in the post Britain’s Devil’s Advocates, there is that dyed in the wool socialist, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

[The Archbishop] is doing to Christianity what Labour is doing to Britain. He is the man who prior to this day had praised Islam, damned America as an imperialist nation to a crowd of Muslims, blamed America for Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East, refused to proselytize for Christianity among Muslims, and advocated implementing at least parts of Sharia law in Britain. The Archbishop's latest assault on the Christian faith has come in an apologia to Muslims for the violent history of Christianity and what seems an apology for one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith - the Trinity.

I could give hundreds of examples, but one more will suffice - the BBC, with their recent drama showing a British Christian beheading a Muslim in an act of terrorism. Boy, that one has a real basis in reality. Counting Cats quotes Melanie Phillips on this issue: "It is really quite obscene that the BBC repeatedly portrays the victims of mass murder – Americans, Israelis – as its perpetrators and its actual perpetrators as victims."

Thus the logic is that Western society is bad and either should not be defended or the defense should be ameliorated by recognition that those attacking Western society are at least partially justified in doing so. Society itself is at the root of crime. With that mindset permeating the justice system, the system changes its emphasis. No longer is punishing the crime and bringing fair retribution to its victim the top priority. It is replaced as the top priority by rehabilitation of the offender. This is often accomplished using "alternative sentencing" rather then jail time. While rehabilitation is a laudable goal to be sure, the motivation to rehabilitate itself disappears when it is divorced from meaningful punishment. In other words, when socialists prioritize rehabilitation over punishment and no longer see punishment as a necessary element of rehabilitation, then law and order really begins to fall apart. And that is what we are seeing in Britain today.

Three examples highlight this last component. Inspector Gadget complains of this often. He has an example spot on in his blog today:

Interesting Radio 4 Interview at the "Foundation 4 Life" youth project this morning. They deliver ‘Behaviour Modification Workshops’ for young people who are offending or considered to be at risk of offending/ re-offending. . . .

Two of the youths involved were interviewed. Born and living in this country, they were, never the less, very hard to understand. One of them was asked about the new Government plan for 5 year sentences for knife crime:

"My Boys don’t care about no sentence. When they are doing what they are doing (carrying knives) they don’t care about no consequences"

He then went on to say that his most recent conviction was for street robbery. He had been found guilty and sentenced to 6 months; he had served 3 months and his comment was:

"Three months! That is good for robbery, man" He then explained that he had 32 previous convictions and had been to prison only twice. . . .

If this individual has 32 previous convictions, clearly he has been arrested and/or dealt with by police officers 32 times successfully i.e. a conviction was obtained.

In light of this, yet again, Inspector Gadget asks anyone who cares to comment:

"How exactly is this kind of repeat offending by violent, disturbed and feral youths (who have been dealt with time and time again by us) still the responsibility of the police?"

"What exactly are we NOT doing as police officers in this case?"

"What accountability is there for the Courts?"

We need some high profile ACPO officers to start telling the public about this. Apart form the horrendous public safety issues, we are getting sick of arresting the same people again and again with no tangible result and then being blamed for their behaviour.

Read the entire post. This unconscionably lax treatment of serious crime does not extend just to the feral youth culture. For example, On June 11, 2007, the Telegraph reported that "[t]housands of sex offenders including paedophiles and rapists have escaped with cautions rather than being jailed over the past five years." This is indicative of what is happening throughout the UK legal system.

Peter Hitchen's perfectly captures what is occuring in a recent column, noting the sorry state of any meaningful punishment and the latest mind-numbing recommendation that thieves, swindlers and burglars receive no jail time:

Here is the news, 20 years from now: ‘Government experts are urging that murderers should be given community service where possible, rather than jail terms. ‘The panel pointed out that there was little evidence that prison terms reduced reoffending, as most murderers committed fresh killings soon after release. And packed jails mean that only the most serious offenders can be kept inside. 'The Lab-Con-Lib coalition government’s crash programme to build new prison camps has increased places to 500,000, but overcrowding is still serious...’ Here the bulletin comes to an abrupt end because of a power cut resulting from a wind shortage.

Actually, 20 years may be too long. This week, a body called the Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP for short) did actually say that convicted thieves, burglars and swindlers should not automatically go to jail. Their thinking, if it can be so described, is roughly as follows. The prisons are so full that offenders could only go to jail for a short time. During that time there is no chance of turning them into better people and it doesn’t keep them off the streets for very long. So why bother?

You will have noticed there was no storm of rage from the politicians. They, too, have accepted the half-witted, thought-free ideas that enslave the SAP. They loftily dismiss the suggestion that convicted criminals should be punished. They whimper that ‘deprivation of liberty is punishment enough’. They wince fastidiously at the idea that prisons should be seriously unpleasant places run by the authorities.

That is why burglary – which 40 years ago was a rarity and an outrage – has become so common. Why shouldn’t the same thing happen to murder? It already seems to be under way. Behind all this is the foolish idea that people who knowingly and deliberately do bad things should be ‘rehabilitated’ and ‘helped’.

Any fool knows it is wrong to break into someone else’s home and steal from it. He does it because he thinks he can get away with it, and because he is not afraid of what might happen even if he is caught. He is laughing at us.

Since these days you have to commit about 50 offences right in front of a CCTV camera before the police will act, those who arrive in our prisons are already experienced, habitual criminals. It is absurd to think they will be ‘rehabilitated’ by their time in these silly warehouses, run by the convicts and full of drugs.

Prison’s main purpose is to frighten potential criminals into staying within the law. The hundreds of thousands who now live criminal lives do so mainly because they are not afraid, as they once would have been. So we have to be afraid instead.

Read his entire post.

This is all a case study in why the philosophy of Karl Marx should have been interred with his bones. Instead, it is alive and thriving – much like a malignant cancer - in Britain today. Either Britain will dispense with socialism or Britain will eventually crumble. I am an optimist and an anglophile, and thus my bet is on the former. But I am also a bit of a realist. Given the stranglehold of socialists on all the reigns of power in Britain, and in particular in academia and the news, the latter is a real possibility also.

Update: Welcome to readers from Rightwing News and Likelihood of Success

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UK's Continued March Towards The EU

As I pointed out two weeks ago, Britain only had three chances to stay out of the EU - the vote in the House of Lords, the Irish Referendum, and the court case challenging Labour's refusal to grant a referendum to the people of Britain. As an aside, voting in the Tories would be utterly useless - Tory leader (term used loosely) David Cameron has already shrugged his shoulders and announced that he would treat Labour's acts as a fait accompli. Since I wrote that post, The House of Lords, gerrymandered by Labour PM Tony Blair near a decade ago, rolled over for Labour. Ireland voted against ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon / EU Constitution, but the EU is doing all it can to ignore its own laws and go ahead with the Treaty anyway. And today, the court case by Stuart Wheeler predicated on enforcing Labour's promise in their 2005 election plank to put any EU Constitution to a vote of the people, has failed at the lower court.
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This from the Telegraph:

A High court ruling removed the last obstacle to Britain's ratification of the European Union's treaty despite Labour's manifesto for a public vote.

Mr Brown has been under intense pressure to declare the treaty dead after Irish voters rejected it in a referendum earlier this month.

Mr Wheeler's case had forced the Prime Minister to delay the formal ratification of the treaty until the court's ruling.

At the heart of the case was the question of whether a political party's election manifesto was legally enforceable and whether the public have a "legitimate expectation" to see measures pledged during an election campaign enacted.

Rabinder Singh QC, appearing for Mr Wheeler, 73, said at a recent two-day hearing: "The Government promised a referendum and should keep its promise."

At stake were the fundamental principles "of good administration, fair play and straight dealing with the public," he said.

However, Jonathan Sumption QC, appearing for the Office of the Prime Minister, told the judges: "This case is politics dressed up as law."

. . . Ruth Lea, Director of the Global Vision think-tank, said: "Today's ruling by the High Court is extremely dispiriting especially as many European politicians have made it quite clear that the Lisbon Treaty is the Constitutional Treaty in all but name.

"Under these circumstances, the British people are surely entitled to their referendum on the Treaty as the Irish people did. All our polling shows an overwhelming majority in favour of a referendum."

Read the entire article. You can find the Court's decision here. According to the Court, Mr. Wheeler did not establish to the Court's satisfaction that the original EU Constitution and the new Lisbon Treaty are essentially identical documents and that, as a matter of policy, the Court would not enforce a campaign promise.

As to the argument that Wheeler's case that this was nothing more than politics dressed up as the law, what does that attorney think the law is if not politics "dressed up" with the police power of the state? This was really a case of whether politicians can be held to their political promises, which I happen to think is the weakest of arguments that could have been brought in this matter. As a policy matter, I do not think that appropriate for a court to decide for that as, carried to its logical extreme, it has the potential for havoc as circumstances or minds may validly change. That said, this particular promise was on a matter that goes to the heart of democracy in Britain and, as such, is I think a special case. Further, Courts in Britain, just as in the U.S., seem wholly unable to stay out of making inappropriate policy decisions of late, so we shall see.

The EU Referendum proclaims itself "disappointed but not surprised." They note that Mr. Wheeler's chances on appeal are, at best, slim.

The approval process for the EU is going forward with the Queen apparently having already given her assent. At Brits At Their Best, they have posted an open letter to the Queen noting that she has violated her Coronation Oath to defend the laws of Britain and withdrawing their fealty to the Crown. The fight is hardly over, and the Irish No vote has at least exposed how the EU's ruthless determination to put its plans in place wholly irrespective of democracy or law - something that will surely come back to haunt them. And perhaps the Irish vote may yet prove decisive.

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Britain's Final Chances

The EU will become a super-state once its Constitution, embodied in the Treaty of Lisbon, is fully ratified by all member countries. The EU is an anti-democratic experiment in socialism that stands in contradiction to Britain’s anglo-saxon traditions of representative democracy, individual rights and capitalism (see here, here, here and here). While membership in the EU has proven a boon for Britain’s political class, it has proven very bad for the rest of Britain in innumerable ways that only portend to worsen.

Britain's integration as an EU province is also very bad for the U.S. Britain has been America's closest European ally. As Britain is subsumed into the EU, so goes both its special relationship with the U.S. and, in a larger context, a critically important member of the anglosphere whose traditions and values animate the freest and most prosperous nations on earth.

Britain is at a tipping point on the EU membership in many ways. Things look bleak at the moment. Gordon Brown and Labour are determined to transfer Britain’s sovereignty to the EU without any vote of the people. The "conservative" Tory Party is little more than a light version of the socialist Labour party. As I posted here, it is led by David Cameron, a weak man driven by political expediency rather than conservative principles who has said that he will treat Labour’s actions as a fait accompli. What is going on in Britain is a stealth coup by a disingenuous political class that is being largely supported by British media though minimalist and superficial coverage.

We are down now to the last three chances to derail British ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and transfer of the bulk of its sovereign powers to the EU. The House of Lords must vote on the Lisbon Treaty this week. Ireland is the only country to hold a referendum on the treaty, and they do so on Thursday. Lastly, there is a court case seeking to force Labour to uphold its pledge and hold a referendum on the EU. Speaking on these issues are Melanie Phillips, John Bolton and EU Referendum’s Dr. Richard North.
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Author Melanie Phillips has written an exceptional article documenting the current situation and the stakes at issue:

. . . The EU is the issue that all politicians are ignoring in the hope we will forget about it. Most immediately, they hope we have forgotten to be concerned about the European Constitution, which is masquerading as a bog standard treaty over which we need lose no sleep.

This constitution, which would bring into being an unprecedented bureaucratic super-state and end once and for all what remains of the independence of EU member nations, was dumped after it was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. It was then resurrected in all but name as the Treaty of Lisbon, which Parliament is in the process of ratifying. This week, that constitution faces a triple test.

Today, businessman Stuart Wheeler's legal challenge to Labour's refusal to honour its manifesto pledge to put it to a referendum reaches the High Court. On Wednesday, the ratification Bill reaches the House of Lords. This Bill was ruthlessly shoe-horned through the Commons. This week we will see whether their Lordships will also spinelessly roll over, or recall their historic role as a last- ditch defence of this country's interests against such abuse of power.

But something else is happening which our politicians didn't bargain for. As we know, the constitution has to be approved by every member state or else it falls. On Thursday, Ireland votes on the treaty - and it looks as if it might vote against it.
The Irish government is filled with panic and horror at the possibility that the Irish public might actually be thinking for themselves. For the EU has always relied on bamboozling the public about the joys of EUtopia and terrifying them that their whole world will collapse if it is thwarted.

More and more people, however, are realising that they have been lied to, not only about the constitution but about the whole EU project. In Britain, we were told from the start that it was only an economic union which would entail no loss of sovereignty.

That was the very opposite of the truth. The dirty little secret is that, even without the constitution, political power has simply drained away from Westminster to Brussels.

In a little-noticed but quite devastating speech in the Commons last week, the Tory MP Peter Lilley recorded that last year the EU passed no fewer than 177 directives - more or less equivalent to our Acts of Parliament - and 2,033 regulations enforceable in the UK, as well as making 1,045 decisions which affect us.

Our own Trade Minister has admitted that 'around half of all UK legislation with an impact on business, charities and the voluntary sector' stems from laws passed in Brussels. . . .

Now the former Tory policy adviser Lord Blackwell is arguing that Britain should renegotiate the terms of its EU membership, restricting it to trade agreements and common security and environment policies, but rejecting EU control over monetary policy, foreign affairs, defence and justice.

An opinion poll run by his group Global Vision suggests that more than a third of voters across all parties would back a prospective Conservative Government pledge to negotiate such a change, and that people would support it in a referendum by more than two to one.

The fact is that those opposed to the creation of a European super-state are not the 'xenophobes' or 'Little Englanders' of the overheated Eurofanatic imagination.

. . . The EU is fundamentally an anti- democratic project, based on the belief that the individual nation is the source of the ills of the world and that by contrast supra-national institutions offer the solution to all its problems.

It is that absence of democratic transparency which is now corrupting not just European politics but our own. The fresh outbreak of 'Tory sleaze' over the expenses gravy train is rooted in Brussels, where corruption is the accepted way of EU life.

Yesterday, the Irish government said that a 'no' vote over the constitution would be a crisis for Europe. What rubbish. The plain fact is that the EU has brought about a crisis for democracy within Europe. Which is why it is essential that we should renegotiate our place within it.

Politicians, however, run a mile from any such suggestion. The terror of acknowledging the true nature of what has happened, in case he is required to address it, has propelled David Cameron into a cul-de-sac.

His pledge to allow the British people a vote on the constitution is worthless since - as he has only now admitted explicitly - once the treaty is ratified it will be almost impossible to do anything about it.

But since his party has warned that the constitution will spell the end of British self-government, this turns Mr Cameron into the Hamlet of the European debate - an awesome talent for speeches denouncing tyranny, but a complete inability to act against it.

Mr Cameron is paralysed by fear of reigniting the Tories' internal civil war over Europe. But the Tory Europhiles are now moth- eaten has-beens who have comprehensively lost the argument with the British people.

The fact is that Parliament is now so emasculated it is becoming the equivalent of Westminster regional council in the Republic of Euroland.

. . . It is time to end this charade. Whatever happens to the constitutional treaty in Ireland or anywhere else, Britain must now re-negotiate its relationship with the EU. The politician who does so will be a hero to the nation. Which is why Mr Cameron should ignore the faint-hearts and suede-shod Euro-fanatics in his ranks. This country must rediscover its identity and sense of purpose, or else it is finished. It can do so only if it regains the power to govern itself.

The issue is quite simply whether democracy in Britain has a future at all. It could not be more fundamental. . . .

Read the entire article. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton spoke at the University of Dublin against ratification of the EU treaty, both because it is anti-democratic and its effects on NATO and the US-British relationship:

The Lisbon Treaty poses a threat to NATO and undermines democracy by handing more power to Brussels, a former senior advisor to President George W Bush has warned.

John Bolton, . . . said the new Treaty could hurt the military alliance between Europe and the US.

He was speaking only days before Ireland hold a referendum on the EU Treaty, the only member country to do so, with the latest polls showing the Yes campaign slightly ahead.

But an Irish vote No on Thursday will mean the Treaty, which abolishes dozens of national vetoes and creates the new post of EU president, cannot come into force in any of the 27 member states.

. . . Mr Bolton has previously warned the deal threatens Britain's special relationship with the United States and yesterday said he would not understand the Irish giving "more powers to bureaucrats."

He added: "The only people you elect have a very limited role and I think this treaty will further enhance the power of institutions in Brussels without extending democratic authority to people."

. . . A Global Vison/ICM poll published yesterday found 64 per cent of Britons would back a renegotiated looser relationship with the EU in a referendum, against 26 per cent who would oppose it.

Read the entire article. Dr. Richard North, who runs the EU Referendum blog, added his own thoughts to those of John Bolton:

. . . For sure, the official US view is very much at variance, expressed in a report last month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. This stated that Washington would support a more "muscular" EU, provided that European defence spending was sufficient for a radical improvement in military capabilities on this side of the Atlantic. Some four months previously, in a speech in Paris, Victoria Nuland, the US ambassador to NATO, had overtly supported a militarily stronger European Union . . . That support, though, was conditional on the Europeans embarking on a "radical improvement in military capabilities, with a far more focused policy on defence spending.

"While we cannot say that Bolton's view in any way reflects official US policy, it may be a straw in the wind. From the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, we recently had a report indicating that many of the EU member states were having trouble meeting their existing defence commitments. While between 2001 and 2006, France, Britain and Spain spent more than three percent of gross domestic product on defence, Italy spent only 1.47 percent, and spending in Germany and Sweden sharply declined.

Even more recently, we had seen reports that the French military is in trouble, with most of France's tanks, helicopters and jet fighters are unusable and its defence apparatus on the verge of "falling apart".

Elsewhere on this blog we recorded the difficulties EU member states had in equipping its force for Chad and latterly we concluded that – in terms of military performance, the idea of European defence was an "unrealisable dream".Despite this, we have seen continued attempts by the EU to create a "European Army" – but all that actually amounts to is a "dedicated military headquarters", more structures and oversight of the military function by the EU parliament.

. . . For some member states . . . the objective of pooling military structure is to spend less money on defence.

Going back in history, one must recall that one of the greatest supporters of the nascent European "project" – in the fifties and sixties – was the US government, with CIA money being channelled into the European Movement. Not least, the US then saw in a united Europe a bastion against the emerging threat of Communism which threatened to engulf the whole of Europe.

Now, if Bolton is seeing the EU defence ambitions as a threat, he cannot be the only influential American to take that view. This may reflect the assiduous work of a number of British teams who have been over to the States, working through right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation – warning them of the dangers.

As did it help the EU on its way, therefore, there is now a glimmer of hope that the US could be instrumental in prising away the UK from the "project", having seen – at last – that the EU represents a danger to the interests of democracy and global security.

Read the entire post. NATO as it is has significant, possibly existential problems. Most NATO nations other than Britain do not field a functional military and most NATO members are not fully supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Moreover, given the anti-democratic nature of the EU, having all of the member nation’s forces integrated and under EU central control could prove problematic down the road for any states whose restive populations decide they no longer want to be part of the grand socialist experiment that is the EU.

At any rate, we are nearing the end of Britain's chances to sidestep the transfer of their sovereign rights to the EU. Much will be decided by week’s end.

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The Nature of The Tories

The Tory victory in the UK's local elections, discussed in the post below, has not made Britain's conservative columnist Peter Hitchens a happy camper. He sees the modern Tory party, led by David Cameron, as a light version of the socialist/marxist Labour party - a criticism that you will find repeated often on this blog. Given the existential challenges Britain faces, I suspect the revitilization of the Tories or the mark of their demise will come in the next few years when they retake control of Britian and have to choose what to do about the EU.

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This from Peter Hitchens writing in the Daily Mail:

. . . What I am in favour of is, above all, national independence in which we choose our own destiny. Without it we would just be the serfs of whoever ruled these islands from far off and it would be pointless to discuss politics because we couldn't affect our destiny. We are rapidly approaching this point as the EU increases its powers over us, and no seriously patriotic party can continue to avoid the issue of withdrawal from the EU.

Next, I am favour of the liberty of the subject in a society governed by the rule of law, in which law-abiding people (who have made their own laws to supplement the force of conscience) are able to live freely according to their consciences.

I believe that these conditions are only possible in a country where the married family is strong and the state is weak, except in the matters of national defence and criminal justice, where it should be strong. They also rely on adult authority over children and a strong, generally accepted morality based on Christianity. That's what I'm in favour of, and I judge all political actions by these tests.

. . . [T]he most urgent and important task, before all else, [is] to get rid of the Tory Party. I learned from discussions with leading Tories that they loathed and despised my views and did not share my objectives. I realised that neither I, nor anyone who shared my views, had any chance of entering Parliamentary politics as long as the Tory Party occupied the position which ought to be held by a properly conservative, pro-British political formation. there is no mechanism in the Tory Party for reform or policy change, so there was no possibility of working within it. If I was serious, then my first task must be to destroy it.

. . . Patriotic? [The Tory's are] the party that got us into the Common Market, that actively supported staying in, in the 1975 referendum, that agreed the 'Single Market' and the 'Single European Act' that ended our national veto, that rammed Maastricht through Parliament. This is the party that devastated the armed forces with cuts at the end of the Cold War. And, I might add, it was the party that failed hopelessly to rearm until the last minute, in the face of the German threat in the 1930s, and which tried to dump Winston Churchill as an MP when he objected to this. Patriotic, my foot.

Law and Order? I could go on for hours (see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty' , where I do go on for hours). But the Tories have been specially useless on this. They did nothing to save or reinstate the death penalty, and many of their MPs have always voted against it. They did nothing to reverse Roy Jenkins's abolition of foot patrols in the 1960s. And this is the party that passed the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which subjected the police to a spider-web of politically correct codes of practice, designed by Guardian-reading liberal lawyers, which are the source of most of the 'form-filling' everyone pretends to be against.

Then there are prison sentences. It was the Tories, in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, who first thought of defrauding the public by automatically halving almost all prison sentences, letting voters think that the Burglar Bill was going down for four years, while Burglar Bill knew perfectly well that he'd only serve two. Labour have been adept pupils in this game, but it was the Tories who thought of it.

The family? What did the Tories ever do for the family? The 1989 Children Act, a body blow to all types of adult authority, was once again a Tory Bill, inspired by United Nations Marxoid piffle about 'Children's Rights' (which mean social workers' rights to poke into private matters). And have you noticed the Tories trying to make divorce harder, or reforming the Stalinist laws that mean a man who wishes to stay married to his wife can be told he is divorced whether he wants to be or not, dragged from his own home by the force of law, denied access to his children and deprived of his rights in his own property?

Have you seen any Tory opposition, since the sad death of Janet Young (whose brave, honest conservatism was loathed by much of her party), to the spreading of anti-marriage propaganda in schools? On the contrary. the Tories now proudly endorse the entire agenda of the sexual revolution. You might also have noticed that it has been Tory local authorities which have persecuted people who protested against homosexual propaganda in public libraries, Tory authorities which have enforced politically correct rules to prevent conservative-minded parents from adopting, Tory local authorities which have snooped on the private lives of parents.

If there's a moral, cultural or political battle to be fought anywhere in this country against the revolutionary left, it will be the Tories who won't be fighting it. Office is all they want, and they'd promise to guillotine the Queen if they thought it would get them back into Downing Street.

. . . I defy you to tell the difference [between Labour and Tory] in practice. Sure, the slogans on the posters are different, but in reality, the only function of the Tories in our system is to continue to implement Labour policies while pretending to be against them, so providing a safety valve to vent discontent, whole leaving Labour policies untouched. The pattern of our government since the war has been intense revolutionary periods of Labour rule (1945-51, 1964-70 , 1997-????) succeeded by long years of do-nothing Toryism in which the Labour revolutions were not challenged, and the clock not put back by a single second. (the 1974-79 period is really just a mess of drift, since nobody had a proper majority, but Labour still managed to do quite a bit of damage).

This isn't the place to argue in depth about the Thatcher period, but even she failed to reverse the huge growth of the public sector, merely diverted it from the productive (coal, steel, gas, electricity, telecoms) to the unproductive (the NHS, armies of social workers, state education, local authorities) and she completely failed to challenge its egalitarian campaign to destroy proper learning and authority in schools, or to challenge its revolutionary social and moral agenda, undermining personal responsibility and family life - and eventually threatening liberty too.

Anyway, to the extent that she did challenge any of this, Margaret Thatcher was furiously opposed by her own party - and when she began to see the danger of the EU, which she had till then supported, the Tories savagely dumped her - as they would again dump any leader who took a genuinely pro-British position on anything. The myth that she was scuppered by the 'poll tax' is just that, a myth. It was her Maastricht speech and her 'No! No! No!' to Brussels rule that brought out the assassin's knives. Her replacement, John Major , was the first New Labour Prime Minister. The policy gap between Major and Blair in 1997 was minimal.

What's more, that gap has become even more tiny since 1997, as the Tories have done what they always do, and agreed to accept Labour policies as the condition of being allowed back into office ( see my last week's blog for a rare case of this brutal fact being stated in public) .

. . . I don't want a Brown government any more than I wanted a Blair government, and I am on record as about the longest-lasting and most consistent opponent of this lot in British journalism, from the days when some surprising people (you know who you are) were making their peace with New Labour and having drinkies at Downing Street. But if you do vote Tory you (and I ) will get five more years of Gordon Brown policies, and quite possibly five more years of Mr Brown too. The Tories are still a very weak party, and it will take an electoral miracle for them to win a working majority. They are, as they have been since 1997, the only opposition Labour (whose own vote is also shrivelling) can beat.

The Blairite media are now running a campaign to turn Mr Brown into a sort of political Jade Goody, a national hate figure so loathed that he has to go round with a bag, or a blanket, over his head. This is interesting in itself. Ask why the very people who put Mr Blair in power ( and never turned on Blair on this way, though he is just as responsible for it) now want Mr Cameron in office? Is it because they want a change? Or is it because they want things to stay the same, only to employ the safety valve and so ensure that a real re-examination of the way we are governed does not take place? A Cameron victory would mean the final crushing of all remaining conservatism in the Tory Party, and ten more guaranteed years of what we have now - universal political correctness, a bulging welfare state, gargantuan taxation and of course continued absorption into the EU and unending lawlessness and disorder.

. . . [I]f the Tories collapse there'll be a new party. . . . It's the best hope there is. The alternative is just years of the same, until the country, riven by crime and disorder, sinks beneath the waves of welfare bankruptcy and becomes a wholly subject province of the EU state, governed largely by force. Or we might get some kind of thug-nationalist government, swept to office by desperation. You want that? Stick to the Tories.

I suspect that what people don't like about this idea is that it is so harshly realistic, and requires too much of them.

. . . The British seem to need to face almost total defeat before they are interested in fighting to save themselves. Dunkirk has to come before D-Day. Well, think of the collapse of the Tories as a necessary political Dunkirk. I can't guarantee that victory will follow. That will be up to us. But I can guarantee that, as long as the Tories occupy the place which should be taken by a proper opposition, there's not the slightest hope of real change for the better. So please don't vote for them. It only encourages them.

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Change & The Cessation of British History

All things change, whether for better or worse. In the case of Britain's decision to transfer sovereignty to the EU and the manner in which the socialist Labour government is executing that transfer, the change indeed seems to be for the worse.

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Today marks a major landmark along the road to Britain's internal dissolution. In December, socialist Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown signed the Lisbon Treaty - the EU's new Constitution - transferring the majority of Britain's sovereign powers to the EU, subject to domestic ratification. Brits At Their Best puts this in perspective:

For American readers, imagine the US giving up its independence and sovereignty, abandoning its constitutional protections and joining a conglomeration of Canada, Mexico, Central and South American countries under new laws dictated to it by bureaucrats in Buenos Aires. That is what we are talking about with the EU.

As characterized in today's Telegraph, the "EU is profoundly anti-democratic, secretive and hungry for power." It is a grand experiment in socialism, running against British traditions of democracy, capitalism, and individual rights. Life as a citizen in a province in the EU portends to be quite costly to the average British citizen, and EU law is working an irrevocable change to the make-up of Britian by mandating an open borders type of immigration that is out of control.

In 2005, the Labour government campaigned on a promise to the people of Britain that they would be allowed a referendum on whether to take this huge step of transferring sovereignty to an EU super-state. It turned out to be unnecessary then as the EU Constitution was rejected by other countries when put to a vote of the people.

But in late 2006, the EU Constitution was dusted off and relabled the "Lisbon Treaty". The EU strong-armed its members not to allow any referendums by the electorate on the treaty. PM Gordon Brown acquiesced to this highly undemocractic strategem. And yesterday, efforts in Britain's House of Commons to force such a referendum failed. EU Referendum explains:

The Daily Mail puts it somewhat luridly, with the headline, "Day they betrayed British democracy", then declaring, "Yesterday will go down in history as the day our politicians surrendered most of what was left of Britain's sovereignty and trusted the nation's future to a European superstate."

We would prefer to say that the these politicians have surrendered another tranche of their powers to a super government, rather than state. But that – in this particular context – is pedantry. The term "surrender" is perfectly adequate, and it truly represents the tawdry performance of that motley lot we watched today.

For that reason, we concur with the Mail's view that:

What we witnessed last night was the political class ganging up against the voters who gave them power… Is it any wonder that more and more Britons are losing their faith in the political process? . . .

Read the post here. The matter will now go to the House of Lords, but no different result is expected.

What happens with Britian is of vital importance to America for several reasons, not the least of which is that Britian is both the closest natural ally of the U.S. and has historically been the bridge between the U.S. and Europe. But Britain is also important in another respect.

It was Britain that bequeathed the anglo-saxon traditions of democracy and individual rights that define America and, indeed, all of the world's most free and prosperous countries today. The Bill of Rights is essentially an amalgam of the rights of Englishmen that existed by common law and solemn compact with the crown at the time of the American Revolution. Britain has since moved beyond those traditions. And in that regards, what we can observe in Britian today is a kind of laboratory experiment demonstrating what happens when a nation leaves behind the natural rights theories of Locke in favor of the socialist theories of Rousseau.

In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill in favor of Labour PM Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. And while Labour has since done away with the most radical economic aspects of socialism - i.e., dispensing with the infamous "Clause IV" of Labour's plank calling for nationalization of industry and truly wide-scale redistribution of wealth - many other aspects of the socialist experiment, including an incredibly poisonous welfare system that promotes a permanent underclass, have remained fully alive and malignant in Britian to this day.

In comparison, the U.S. has moved much slower to embrace of the socialist ethos. In post-WWII America, the conservative movement rose to oppose it upon the quill and wit of William F. Buckley, a man who did indeed stand athwart history. Britian's post World War II history has also seen several conservatives who have tried to slow the tide, with possibly the best known being Margaret Thatcher. Ironically, she lost power becasue of her stance against further expansion of the EU. Britain as a whole has been a far more favorable environment for secular socialism than the U.S.

Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian beleif that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism and multiculturalism. And what we see being played out today in Britain is the incredibly destructive end result of over half century of movement towards socialism - an act of national suicide by the socialist Labour government. As to the British electorate, far too many of their number have been taught to be ashamed of what little of their history was covered in a British schools curricula increasingly animated by the socialist ethos and which includes even the denigration of Churchill. The majority are now silent and apathetic as the final light in their great country is blown out by those who see in its history and traditions nothing worth fighting for.

Socialism has won in Britain - in all of its well-meaning banality. And Britain will soon be no more. For a time at least. Until things change.

Update: "Londonistan" author and Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has composed an exceptional article, describing in detail the societal costs of Britain's experiment in socialism and how many are seeking to recapture in Britain the patriotic spirit and national cohesiveness that they observe across the pond in America. As Ms. Phillips observes, their attempts are focusing on the superficial, not the substantive ills of British society. I highly recommend her article , particularly as an adjunct to this post.

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Tossing Down The Gauntlet On The EU

Britain - and all of Europe - is in the midst of a slow motion coup by its socialist governments. In 2005, the EU drafted a Constitution to replace the existing EU treaties and create an EU superstate. Throughout Europe, referendums were planned to enact the Constitution. But the French and Dutch voters were of a different mind. They voted no.

The Labour Party, in its 2005 electoral platform, had promised the people of Britain a referendum on whether to approve the EU Constitution. But after the French and Dutch had voted no, the Constitution was deemed dead.

But the socialists of the EU had no intention of having their grand project sidetrack by such minor annoyances as democracy or the will of the people. They took the Constitution and merely relabled it "The Treaty of Lisbon," reformated it's contents as amendments to existing treaties, then took the position that there need be no referendums since this was merely a treaty. It was an act of breathtaking cynicism. Britain's Labour PM Gordon Brown signed the treaty in December and has refused to honor his original pledge to allow a referendum of the British public. And today, Rees-Moog of the Times puts that despicable act in context in his article, "They lied yesterday; they will lie tomorrow:"

The Lisbon treaty is a dangerous betrayal. The process of ratification of the Lisbon treaty will start this week in the House of Commons. I'm against the treaty because it involves an important constitutional transfer of powers from the European nations to the European institutions, from national democracy to supra-national bureaucracy. I'm in favour of a referendum, not only because it was promised by Labour, Tories and Liberal Democrats at the last general election, but also because it would be the best way to ratify - or reject - a big constitutional change. The people should be consulted when their powers of self-government are being given away.

I was struck yesterday by an observation of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. He said: “The reform treaty gives Britain a bigger voice in Europe.” That seems to me to be the opposite of the truth. The reform or Lisbon treaty gives Europe a much bigger voice in Britain. It follows the original constitutional treaty in giving the European institutions that are not democratically accountable important additional powers, while failing to repatriate any powers to the individual European nations.

The original constitutional convention was supposed to reduce the democratic deficit of Europe. The Lisbon treaty has done the opposite, taking powers away from the nations and their electorate. The treaty is a defeat for the idea of a liberal democratic Europe; it is surprising that British Liberal Democrats are among its keenest supporters.

The Government's handling of the referendum issue has been shameful, because that, too, has been anti-democratic. The advantage of a referendum process is that it imposes a regard for public opinion on European politicians. If they want to win the referendums, they have to negotiate a popular and democratic constitution. . .

In the case of the European negotiations the original constitution, which led to the Lisbon treaty, was hijacked by Brussels federalists - contrary to the wishes of the people of Britain, France and the Netherlands. Having hijacked the negotiation, the federalists then found that their idea of a supra-European constitution was deeply unpopular. They could not face any more referendums in Europe because they would lose them. In particular, they could not face a British referendum. The British voters do not want to hand over more powers to the European federalist bureaucracy; they want to get some of them back.

The negotiations for the Lisbon treaty were, therefore, designed from the beginning to get round the need for referendums, except in Ireland, where the Irish constitution requires one. Naturally, this underhand process was designed to avoid the British having a referendum. The Labour Government was a co-conspirator in avoiding the need to fulfil what had become an awkward election pledge. The plot certainly involved Tony Blair, whose last public decision was to agree to the new treaty. He was not acting in order to fulfil his election commitment but in order to evade it. After some initial show of reluctance Gordon Brown accepted this deceitful subterfuge. The British people know they are being manipulated; they resent it.

The ratification of a treaty is a relatively difficult parliamentary process; any treaty will have been negotiated in detail by the Government. The language of a treaty cannot be amended like that of an ordinary Bill. Parliament has to say “yes” or “no” to the treaty as a whole. However, Parliament could impose conditions that might affect or defer the operation of a treaty, or require a referendum as a condition of the ratification process.

Such amendments are likely to be argued in the debate on the Lisbon treaty. One reasonable condition would be to defer ratification until the voters have had an opportunity to decide at a general election. If the Labour party could win an election with ratification of the Lisbon treaty as a manifesto commitment, that would satisfy the requirements of democracy. Of course, Labour might lose, but that would be democratic too.

A referendum would be easier and more straightforward than a general election. It is, after all, something that all three large parties promised at the past general election. The Government cannot honourably avoid it. House of Commons select committees with Labour majorities have found that the Lisbon treaty, on which a referendum is being refused, is really the same as the original constitutional treaty on which a referendum was promised. At present the Conservatives are the only party intending to honour their manifesto commitment.

I do not know what the longer- term impact of ratifying without the promised referendum would be. It would certainly embitter politics. There are many Eurosceptics who feel very angry, who feel betrayed. Voters would become more cynical about politicians, and might regard them all as untrustworthy. The young Eurosceptics are as angry as the older.

In England there is a rising tide of nationalism responding in part to the success of the Scottish nationalists; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had their devolutions, in each case ratified by a referendum. I think the English would claim their own devolution from Europe if they were forced into a centralising treaty and denied their promised referendum. . .

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Muslim Fortresses Flourish In Multicultural Britain

I blogged below on a British blogger, Lionheart, who is facing prosecution for critizing Islam. Juxtapose that with this today, from the Telegraph, and you will have some idea of just how dire things portend to become in Britain as the socialists use their police power to enforce a suicidal multicultural philosophy on the indigenous population:

Islamic extremists have created "no-go" areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter, one of the Church of England's most senior bishops warns today.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester and the Church's only Asian bishop, says that people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, he compares the threat to the use of intimidation by the far-Right, and says that it is becoming increasingly difficult for Christianity to be the nation's public religion in a multifaith, multicultural society.

His comments come as a poll of the General Synod - the Church's parliament - shows that its senior leaders, including bishops, also believe that Britain is being damaged by large-scale immigration.

Bishop Nazir-Ali, who was born in Pakistan, gives warning that attempts are being made to give Britain an increasingly Islamic character by introducing the call to prayer and wider use of sharia law, a legal system based on the Koran.

In an attack on the Government's response to immigration and the influx of "people of other faiths to these shores", he blames its "novel philosophy of multiculturalism" for allowing society to become deeply divided, and accuses ministers of lacking a "moral and spiritual vision".

Echoing Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, who has said that the country is "sleepwalking into segregation", the bishop argues that multiculturalism has led to deep divisions.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, has accused Muslims of promoting a kind of "voluntary apartheid" by shutting themselves in closed societies and demanding immunity from criticism.

In the Synod survey, to be published this week, bishops, senior clergy and influential churchgoers said that an increasingly multi-faith society threatens the country's Christian heritage and blamed the divisions on the Government's failure to integrate immigrants into their communities.

It found that more than one in three believe that a mass influx of people of other faiths is diluting the Christian nature of Britain and only a quarter feel that they have been integrated into society.

The overwhelming majority - 80 per cent - said that the Government has not upheld the place of religion in public life and up to 63 per cent fear that the Church will be disestablished within a generation, breaking a bond that has existed between the Church and State since the Reformation.

Calls for disestablishment have grown following research showing that attendance at Mass has overtaken the number of worshippers at Church of England Sunday services.

Bishop Nazir-Ali, whose father converted from Islam to Catholicism, was criticised by Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain. He said: "It's irresponsible for a man of his position to make these comments.

"He should accept that Britain is a multicultural society in which we are free to follow our religion at the same time as being extremely proud to be British. We wouldn't allow 'no-go' areas to happen. I smell extreme intolerance when people criticise multiculturalism without proper evidence of what has gone wrong."

But the Bishop's concerns are shared by other members of the General Synod.

The Rt Rev Nicholas Reade, the Bishop of Blackburn, which has a large Muslim community, said that it was increasingly difficult for Christians to share their faith in areas where there was a high proportion of immigrants of other faiths.

He believes that increasing pressure will be put on the Government to begin the process of disestablishment and end the preferential status given to the Church of England. "The writing is on the wall," he said.

Gordon Brown relinquished Downing Street's involvement in appointing bishops in one of his first facts as Prime Minister - a move viewed by some as a significant step towards disestablishment.

Last night, Mr Davis said: "Bishop Nazir-Ali has drawn attention to a deeply serious problem. The Government's confused and counter-productive approach risks creating a number of closed societies instead of one open, cohesive one. It generates the risk of encouraging radicalisation and creating home-grown terrorism."

Read the article. This is true insanity. Note that even as Britain's socialist PM, Gordon Brown, moves towards disestablishment of the Church of England, he has recently appointed radical Islamic organizations to MINAB to oversee the countries Islamic clerics and standards for Islamic education. Will Britain survive this?

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