…From the digression here.
I agree with Ted; David Davis was the obvious candidate for the Conservative leadership. The election of the vacuous Cameron was a travesty. On the matter of the surveillance bill, Davis, one of the lone voices defending liberty and privacy, has summed it up perfectly. His accusation that the British public are intellectually lazy is spot on. After all, how often does any objection to mass surveillance get rewarded with the idiotic “nothing to hide, nothing to fear ” mantra? Indeed, it is only a matter of time before some brain-dead fuckwit trots it out as if they have just shat out a pearl of wisdom.
Thing is, though, it seems to matter not, who is Home Secretary. Sooner or later they become poisoned by their department. So all of them, sooner or later become rabid authoritarians. I’m inclined to agree with Sean Gabb when he said that the whole edifice needs raising razing to the ground. Destroyed; annihilated; vaporised. Not just that, but nuked; burned; buried in concrete – whatever it takes to destroy it utterly and completely, for this organisation is a cancer at the heart of our society. I won’t say government, for government is itself a malignant growth; nothing more than a glorified protection racket with a patina of legitimacy that it has awarded itself, to disguise its criminal nature.
So, those who were wondering why I’ve not discussed the surveillance bill… what is there to say?
I’m not certain, as I’m saying this off the top of my head so to speak, but I think it should be razed to the ground.
Yup. Corrected.
A coincidence. Shortly before reading this post I was thinking what an awful mistake the “Conservatives” had made by rejecting Davies.
And I thought the mistake was made by the electorate in punishing the LibDems for preventing exactly this kind of bollocks for five utterly thankless years. Never mind tuition fees – you can always teach yourself if you can’t afford to pay someone to teach you; it’s not as if the Internet doesn’t exist – *this* was a battle worth fighting. And it was a fight they couldn’t afford to lose, because doing so would utterly destroy the remaining vestiges of democracy the UK has left. There is no going back if this staggering display of stupidity and ignorance becomes law.
And yet, this is clearly what the voters wanted. Fine. They can have it and deal with the consequences.
Maybe, just maybe, those consequences will be so bad, they’ll learn their lesson and realise that democracy doesn’t just happen automatically. You have to watch over it, protect it, and fight for it, constantly.
Surely both applies. Either would have closed the window of opportunity. Also, I don’t place a great deal of store by democracy. It is a means to an end – or should be. That end being liberty. All too often, though, democracy is little more than thinly disguised mob rule.
It is, sadly, the least worst form of government we’ve managed to invent. It also doesn’t scale well and tends to work best at local and regional levels — as the Swiss demonstrate every day.
The UK’s problem was caused by the rise of Labour in the 1920s: as soon as the two-party system became three, the First Past The Post system broke down. That nobody has ever fixed it in the decades since then suggests The People don’t consider having a viable democracy all that important. The LibDems wanted to change the system to something less idiotic for years, but, again, they were utterly ignored. Not once, but over and over again.
I say again: the UK has the government it deserves. People need to start taking responsibility for their actions. Including informing themselves of the facts.
Conspiracy theorists have suggested the election campaigns between Cameron and Davies was a foregone conclusion taking into account Cameron’s profession before politics. The senior members of the Tory party, most of them middle aged to elderly gathered for the speeches after a nice breakfast and a brisk walk to the venue. Cameron spoke first. Then lunch. A three, or four, course meal with wine and probably liqueurs. No brisk stroll to walk it off, but coffee and more liqueurs. During the interval for lunch it was suggested that some mischievous folk arranged for the heating to be turned up – of course, if this was so, Cameron could claim he knew little about it. If you look at the footage, note how many were falling asleep during David Davies’ speech. Perhaps if the contestants for Miss World had stood there and slowly disrobe, those same people would still have difficulty keeping their eyes open. Once the speeches were over, the sleepers were woken up and, as they had no idea what Davies said, the votes went to Cameron. Working in the devious world of PR can have its advantages and we now have Dim Dave as our political sub-master below Merkel and Junker. What was it Pete Frazer used to say in “Dad’s Army”?