The Limits of the State

You may never have noticed, but Switzerland doesn't have a President. Or a Chancellor. In fact, the Swiss Head of State is, collectively, the seven-person Federal Council. It's worked this way since 1848, and the seven between them run just about everything a central State should run. The Swiss people make sure the central State doesn't get too ambitious by limiting the amount of tax-take they can spend - about 30%. The other 70% is determined and managed locally.

You see, there's no causative link between a nation's level of taxation and the size and power of the central State, a fact that bypasses Polly Toynbee completely. Shocked by the damage that Snowden's revelations may do to the image of the benign and all-powerful central State, Lady Toynbee leaps to the defence of the Megastate. "Labour needs to hymn the good the state does and the civilising value of what taxes buy – health, education, safety, proud public spaces. All the things that people value most." Toynbee pompously proclaims, blind to the reality that the Swiss enjoy better health, education, safety and higher quality public spaces than we do, with a much much smaller central State and highly constrained taxation.

People have a perfect right to grant their governments the power to snoop on their emails, browsers and tweets - but this must be a choice openly made, with the power always to withdraw or reverse the consent. Such consent has been noticeably absent in this case.

Different Brand, same Scum

Like a dog returneth to his vomit, Whitehall returns to intrusive surveillance of free citizens. It doesn't matter whether Tory Pepsi or Labour Coke is the brand in the window of Number Ten, the totalitarian centralist command and control freakery of Whitehall just dusts off the folder and presents it to whichever Home Secretary is dumb enough to fall for the lies, the distortion, the misrepresentation. And Oh Boy have they had some dumb Hoons to manipulate; Blunkett, May, Smith, Reid, with the collective nous of a Sea Cucumber.

These Whitehall Scum are the true enemy of the United Kingdom; they are at war against the people of this nation, shits in silk stockings. They cling like leeches to the system of central government adopted in WWII as a war emergency measure, and having tasted power will not now willingly relinquish it. 

If we are to free ourselves in this nation, we must take the metaphorical axe to their Mandarin fingers. Firstly, this noxious Bill must be defeated.