It's Character, stupid

One salient fact has percolated through to the minds of the nation's voters; the MPs they've hitherto returned to Parliament have been somewhat morally deficient. We are also in the early stages of post-tribal politics, for with the retreat from the grass roots of the major parties, such allegiances have withered. This election, unlike any in living memory, will put the character of candidates under the spotlight; every time they glad-hand a constituent, the unspoken question "Are they bent?" or more probably "How bent are they?" will hang in the air between them. For many voters, manifesto commitments will be as unintelligible as you are to your cat - they will listen with polite interest, but the noise will mean little to them.

And for the first time, when every cellphone has a video camera, when every voter has a facebook page or a blog, a whole world away from 2005 in technological terms, would-be MPs will be as exposed as never before to recording, scrutiny and dissemination. The magic of MP status has been broken on a wheel of porn videos, bath-plugs and duck houses, and the public will regard Parliamentary candidates with all the care they would accord to suspected paedophiles.

Yesterday we saw the user-Web expose Brown's fake supporters at St Pancras and give notice to Brown's clumsy mis-speaking, and such things I think will be the keynote of this election. Grainy cell-phone videos on Youtube will document the progress of the campaigns across the country, and citizens who challenge, berate, chastise or heckle candidates will each claim their fifteen minutes of fame.

I suspect that two or three weeks into the campaign, the parties will realise that Character, not politics, will be the key theme of this election. Then it will really start to become interesting.

Brown's Freudian slip

No wonder they don't let Brown speak without an autocue; he may inadvertently stop lying and tell the truth by accident. Verbatim from his Downing Street election launch just now;

"We will renew the contract between the people and those that they are sworn to serve"

You couldn't make it up

Labour's regressive manifesto - back to the '70s with Gordon

The Telegraph characterises the coming fight as 'Big Government versus Big Society', and though Dave's pledges to decentralise the State owe more to the principles of homeopathy than political economy, it's a fair summation.

For Labour's draft manifesto, revealed in the Guardian, is an unequivocal plan to strengthen even more the State and the Leviathan of Big Government and to disempower even further the British people;

Provisions for the management of inefficient police forces to be taken over by efficient forces. "Where service is not good enough, it will be taken over by the best," the draft says
The Home Office have been trying for a decade to strong-arm police forces into merging, in a long effort to wrest control of the police from citizens to the State. We've proven stubbornly resistant to Labour's vision of a National Police Force under the control of central government - but here's Labour's devious work-around. Simply set the efficiency bar to 'fail' half the existing forces over successive years and within a Parliamentary term you can pretty well create a National Police Force.

Simultaneous referendums on a new voting system for the Commons and a 100% elected second chamber.
After having enjoyed all the benefits of skewed electoral quotas under the FPTP system, even Labour realise that our unequal constituencies can't continue for ever. In a sop to a potential alliance with the LibDems, Labour are embracing the AV system - a system that will give even more power to central metropolitan parties, and detract from the local constituency link.

A national youth service alongside votes at 16.
The idea of a national youth service fills me with horror; it will have a Minister, and no doubt a new quango - the National Youth Agency? - to run it, with a dozen Regional Directors on £200k a year each, all faithfully parroting Whitehall's central diktats. Perhaps Gordon even has a uniform in mind ...

Rights for football supporters to take over football clubs.
This is the reintroduction of Labour's oldest and most fondly held tenet - the Right of Nationalisation. Clause 4 is back. Expect Labour to extend the 'right' to all sort of privately-owned enterprises, not just football clubs.

A living wage of £7.60 in Whitehall, funded by a cap on the salaries of the most highly paid public sector employees.
They just can't resist central command and control, can they? What's the free market reward package in London for unqualified admin workers? Why pay more than this? This is an obvious sop to Mark Serwotka and the PCS Union; with Jack Dromey and eleven other TU reps on Labour's NEC, the Blairites need to pay-off the Unions. With our money.

Same old same old Labour. This could have been Michael Foot's manifesto - all that's lacking is a commitment to unilateral disarmament and a score of scruffy lesbians on the platform.

Now this IS a Big Society

From time to time I've offered the town of Vail, in Colorado, as an example of how Localism works at the micro level; the town budget, it's police force, how the local sales Tax is applied and so on.

Brussels Journal carries an interesting piece on how Localism functions at the macro level - in Switzerland;

Long ago, the Swiss understood that most things government needs to do and constructively does are at the local level. So, unlike in most modern nation-states, local government has the bulk of the resources and activities, while the central government remains relatively small and less important in the daily lives of the people. In the U.S., roughly two-thirds of government is at the federal level, and one third is at the state and local level. Switzerland is just the opposite, with roughly two-thirds of government being at the state (canton) and local level.

Indeed, in overall state expenditure in Switzerland, the Communes, the lowest level of government, account for 30% of autonomous expenditure, whilst the Cantons have 40% and the Swiss State only commands 30% of total spend. Nor is this just a sharing of a State-determined tax pot; the Communes have the competence to determine property and income taxes, which account for fully a third of the total national tax-take, a power which makes them an equal player with both the State and the Cantons. In the UK the position is centralist beyond belief; only Council Tax, at about £25bn annually, is levied and collected locally. The remaining 95% of taxes are determined and collected centrally, and given that local councils are prevented by law from setting the Council Tax they want, rather than the level set by Whitehall, it's also true to say that 100% of UK taxes are determined centrally.

There is no fixed model either for the size of the Communes, or for the relationship of the Communes to the Cantons; again, such things are left to be determined locally, and thus Swiss government is the most delightful 'postcode lottery' of diversity, with administrative arrangements tailored to suit local circumstances rather than determined by rigid central diktat.

The following table, from Kubler and Ladner, demonstrates the spread in size of the lowest tier of Swiss municipality;



Thus in Switzerland there is an average of one lowest tier authority for each 2,700 of the population, with each Commune having real autonomy. By contrast, the UK has one lowest tier 'authority' for every 118,400 of us, with each ruled rigidly from Whitehall and with virtually no local autonomy.

Democratic deficit? This is off the scale. It's not hyperbole to say that our system of government in the UK has more in common with a South American dictatorship than with a European social democracy.

You will therefore understand the scale of my disappointment with Dave's 'Big Society', which is little more than a damp squib when what we desperately need is an earth-shattering big-bang Monster Rocket.

Switzerland isn't alone in terms of democratic access; France has one municipality for every 1,580 persons, and Germany one for every 4,925. My examplar US town of Vail is also pretty typical of democratic access in the US, with one municipality for every 7,000 persons.

And what's the best on offer from any UK political party right now? The right of a neighbourhood group to take over the running of the village hall, but only if it's falling down. How pathetic. How low have we fallen, how blinded have we been by a moribund centralist Statist party system run by foreign governments, corrupt oligarchs and nihilistic Marxist unions.

The vocabulary of Socialistspeak

Both Brown and Darling are referring to Cameron's plans to scrap Labour's NI increases as 'taking money out of the economy'.

Excuse me?

Ah, I see. For Statists, there is only one economy - the fantasy model, the make-believe, away-with-the-fairies command economy under the direction of the central State. For Brown and Darling, the State and the Economy are one - so depriving the State of additional taxes is 'taking money out of the economy'

In the real world, of course, not implementing the NI increase will maintain and encourage employment and the additional money retained in the real economy will multiply its impact. In the real world, 'taking money out of the economy' means allowing Labour to increase taxes and squander the product on non-productive ends.

Conscience and its right to freedom

The title of this post is that of a book by the late Fr Eric D'Arcy, a gifted De La Sallean alumnus, the popularity of which amongst seminarians has no doubt fallen into desuetude. It deals in part with those things that fall between Caesar and Spirit, issues such as abortion, sterilisation, homosexuality and euthanasia. Traditionally as a society we recognised the primacy of individual conscience in such matters; Catholic surgeons were encouraged to make arrangements in the operating theatre to let someone else snip the vas deferens or excise the ovary, orthodox social workers were excused from counselling pregnant teens and so on.

It was the rise of liberalism, and not just the liberalism of the left, that abrogated wholly to the State those matters which previously had been regarded as within the realm of individual conscience. In the black Rousseau-esque world of the secular State, there is no room for personal liberty, no place for faith, and in that grey area in which the duty owed to Caesar and that owed to the self overlap, the State says that Caesar's interests must be paramount. But conscience is a quality interior to man, and whatever powers the State has over our mortal bodies, here is a place the power of the State cannot reach.

Neither is there room in faith for moral relativity, the scourge of our age and the cancer that eats at the Anglican church. The teaching of the Church must be a matter of moral absolutes or it is meaningless.

And when our interior, personal conscience and the teaching of the Church both together ajudge an act or course of action as morally wrong, there is no legitimate temporal authority on the Earth that can compel us to disregard the scintilla conscientiae, the spark of conscience.

As I have written previously, no Christian need be under any obligation to heed the assumptions behind Equalities or other legislation in so far as this violates the sanctity of individual conscience and Christian faith; being true to one's conscience is the prime duty we owe to our interior selves, and this is not a realm where Caesar has any authority.

And before those of you who are driven to do so leave vituperative comments, I would ask you to consider that I'm not seeking to compel or regulate your behaviour or beliefs, merely for the freedom for each individual to do so for themselves.

The Rise of the Dags

The Levellers wanted to restrict the time one person could serve as MP to a year to prevent the growth of a political class. They were acutely conscious that MPs should not be a class apart, as Nicholas Winterton would have them be, but those with careers and farms and practices who sprang from the constituency and whose interests were those of their neighbours and fellow worshippers who returned them to Parliament.

The dissolution of this Rotten Parliament will also see the retirement of the last remnants of MPs who served as their forebears have served since the seventeenth century. But if this was the Rotten Parliament, the next threatens to be the Parliament of Dags.

Instead of revitalising the moribund and dis-empowered local parties, party HQs have exercised even more of a stranglehold over candidate selection with Dag Quotas and parachuted Dags, giving voters an unprecedented field of Dag candidates of such uninspiring mediocrity that their only distinguishing characteristic is the degree of sycophancy towards party bosses that each evinces. They will form a parliament of fawning, creeping, obedient nonentities competing wetly for junior office, holding to the evil lie that 'politics is a profession'.

The next election will improve the health of our democracy about as much as an infection of Smallpox.

The choice is between Brown, a liar, a crooked deceiver, a coward, who suborns every trace of honourable conduct and responsibility to his own interest, and Cameron, a sincere and honourable man but weak as a reed and who lacks the intellectual strength to put country before party. God help us.

My only real hope is that the election sparks the fires of chaos in Parliament, and that from the ashes something good may be reborn.

LOCOG to buy armoured vehicles for Olympic VIPs

Not only will the fat-cats of the Olympics family have entire arterial roads and the Blackwall Tunnel closed for their cavalcades, much as politburo bosses in a column of Zils did in Soviet Moscow, but security fears over their trip through the rougher parts of South London have prompted LOCOG to buy 70 surplus UK Saxon armoured vehicles at a bargain price of about £15k each.

The Saxons, from Territorial Army stocks, have been refurbished by Witham Specialist Vehicles with suede bucket seats, surround sound systems and cocktail cabinets in the armoured bodies. Seats have been widened from the standard 14" to 23" to accommodate the larger Olympic arses, with each Saxon holding up to four fat-cats.

With a top speed of 60mph, Olympic officials are expected to be safe from irate local populations, who will be banned from leaving their own roads and held by cattle-pen barriers as the VIPs whizz past.

RPGs, anyone?

If the US won't support Falklands sovereignty

The US is rightly our closest ally, but sometimes even our best friends need a gentle nudge when they're being foolish. If the US won't support Falklands sovereignty, we should invite them to pack up their bases on both Ascension and Diego Garcia, for clearly it's hypocrisy to deny sovereignty for one island group but accept it for others ....