Apparently, local democracy is under attack.
Local councils in the UK are to face new curbs on their powers to divest from or stop trading with organisations or countries they regard as unethical.
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has confirmed it is drawing up new guidelines to prevent local authorities from mounting their own “boycott and sanction” campaigns.
My reaction to this is; about time, too. I do not pay council tax to enable the local council to engage in sanctions and boycotts or to engage in politics of any kind. I pay them to provide local services and nothing more. So if they are stopped from engaging in such behaviour, behaviour that I have never been given an opportunity to have a say on, then bloody good.
Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said it was a “direct attack on local democracy” with far-reaching implications for all campaign groups .
It is nothing of the sort. Local democracy means voting for who arranges the bin collections, not boycotting the favoured bête noire du jour of the SJW cretins. Given that the sanctimonious self-righteous SJWs who engage in this behaviour have never asked for my vote on the matter, the one thing it is not; is democracy. Never was. And the kind of campaign groups that want to boycott Israel can go fuck themselves. If this initiative weakens them, then that’s a good thing, too. The more “far-reaching implications,” the better, frankly. These people are not democrats, they are despots and the sooner they are taken on and preferably crushed, the better it will be for all of us. Local councils are there to provide local services and nothing more.
“Public money should be used for the public good, not to support destructive industries like the arms trade that profit from war,” he told the Independent on Sunday.
No. Public money is there for providing public services, not for engaging in political campaigning. Go fuck yourself.
“At the moment the focus may be on arms companies and Israel, but if these changes are allowed to go ahead then they could affect almost all campaign groups.”
Good. Campaign groups have no business influencing local government in anything other than local services. Given that things like the arms trade and Israel are nothing to do with local services, they are nothing to do with the council and the campaign groups can fuck right off.
Unless, of course, they want to campaign for a weekly bin collection. No? I thought not.
“…destructive industries like the arms trade that profit from war.”
Yes, heaven forfend that a local factory making munitions, guns, or military aircraft be prevented from making anything for anybody. It’s not as if the local jobs matter in any way.
Attempting to end warfare by boycotting the makers of the weapons is as stupid as attempting to end poverty by boycotting the Royal Mint. Weapons do not cause wars: governments* do. Money does not cause poverty: economists do.
* Imbecilic Shitheads In Syria, or whatever those arseholes are called this week, are a religious cult that comes bundled with a free government system. It may be an impressively obsolete system that is well past its Use By date, but it’s included in the price and comes with a ready-made holy text, philosophy, and world-view. Like most religions, it’ll also take care of all your thinking needs for you.
Councils should spend taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ money as efficiently as possible to provide the services they are expected to. Certain things, such as defense and foreign policy are quite rightly centralised in the national government.
That said, if the party forming a council went to the election with a clear commitment to engage in a boycott, then I’d say that was democracy in action, i.e. if a majority was dumb enough to vote for the Green Party which has a clear policy of support for the boycott of Israel campaign, then it would seem right that the council would waste money on these and other stupid Green Party policies.
I’d suggest the law should make it clear that a council cannot engage in boycotts unless they were a clear manifesto commitment. I’d make it illegal to hold a local referendum on boycotts, that would be a waste of taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ money.
This being precisely what doesn’t happen. Rather, when in power, the sanctimonious arseholes use that power to engage in their pet prejudices. Apart from Brighton, possibly…
If local authorities are allowed to finance the political enthusiasms of the usual nutters then council taxpayers should be allowed to opt out of paying the proportion of their tax devoted to such “political” causes.
For instance, here, in the London Borough of Haringey, I would happily forego my part in financing Black “History” Month or coughing up to support the gimmegrants. I would also withdraw my subscription to “Haringey People”, the propaganda sheet published by the council.
Preferable, of course, would be LR’s recommendation to let the council and its fellow activist parasites f*** off to start with. IMHO councils are there to provide a limited number of basic services to council taxpayers (rubbish collection, street lighting etc).
BTW, and call me an unreconstructed reactionary, but the franchise at council elections should be restricted to those who actually pay council tax from their own resources. At that point we might get councils – or, at least, councillors – which concentrate on a limited remit and consequently provide visible and controllable services more or less efficiently and at reasonable cost. As it is, in Haringey, the benefiterati majority living in the East of the borough have provided Labour with a bought and paid for majority at every election since time immemorial (well the late 60s anyway). Not that, under the present dispensation, Conservative or LibDem councillors would be superior.
Manifestly, in common with most other councils, in my limited experience of these things, Haringey is effectively run by the officers who lead the elected members round by the nose. Anybody who has attended a meeting of any council committee (or the full council) dealing with all or part of the council’s accounts and finances will have experienced the vertigo induced by sight of the unplumbed depths of councillors’ ignorance. To be fair to the elected members though, the structure and arcane conventions of local authority accounts – mandated by law and uncriticised practice – obfuscate rather than enlighten the realities and dynamics of council finance
Such a set-up obviously hands power to the “experts”: the council’s financial officers. Mind you, these are the same “experts” who, at Haringey, lost £35+ million by keeping taxpayers’ funds on deposit in Iceland’s banks despite all the warning signs. Almost needless to say, the incompetents kept their jobs. Of course, the fog in which council accounts exist not only help to preserve the officers’ grip on power, but helps those who wish to politicise and weaponise the council’s financial resources – which brings us back to the subject of this thread.