British democracy has lost its meaning. The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population, operating through corporate control. The state itself exists to serve the interests of these corporations, guided by a political class largely devoid of ideological belief and preoccupied with building their own careers and securing their own finances.
A bloated state sector is abused and mikled by a new class of massively overpaid public secotr managers in every area of public provision – university, school and hospital administration, all executive branches of local government, housing associations and other arms length bodies. All provide high six figure salaries to those at the top of a bloated bureaucratic establishment. The “left”, insofar as it exists, represents only these state sector vested interests.
These people decide where the cuts fall, and they will not fall where they should – on them. They will fall largely on the services ordinary people need.
Meanwhile we are not all in this together. The Vodafone saga only lifts the lid for the merest peek at the way the corporate sector avoids paying its share, hiding behind Luxembourg or Cayman tax loopholes and conflicts between international jurisdictions – with which our well provided politicians are very happy. The often excellent Sunny Hundal provides a calm analysis of the Vodafone case here:
Let me tell you something else about Vodafone. Vodafone took over Ghana Telecom three years ago. They paid an astonishingly low price for it – 1.2 billion dollars, which is less than the value of just the real estate GT owned. The value of the business was much higher than that, and there was a substantively higher opening bid from France Telecom.
The extraordinary thing was the enormous pressure which the British government put on Ghana to sell this valuable asset to Vodafone so cheaply. High Commissioner Nick Westcott and Deputy High Commissioner Menna Rawlings were both actively involved, with FCO minister Lord Malloch Brown pressurising President Kuffour directly, with all the weight of DFID’s substantial annual subvention to Ghana behind him.
What is the point of DFID giving taxpayer money to Ghana if we are costing the country money through participating in the commercial rape of its national assets?
And why exactly was it a major British interest that Vodafone – whose Board meets in Germany and which pays its meagre taxes in Luxembourg – should get Ghana Telecom, as opposed to France Telecom or another company? Was privatisation at this time the best thing for Ghana at all?
This Vodafone episode offers another little glimpse into the way that corporations like Vodafone twist politicians like Mark Malloch Brown around their little fingers. It mioght be interesting to look at his consultancies and commercial interests now he is out of office.
BAE is of course the example of this par excellence. Massive corruption and paying of bribes in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania end elsewhere, but prosecution was halted by Tony Blair “In the National Interest”. BAE of course was funnelling money straight into New Labour bagmen’s pockets, as well as offering positions to senior civil servants through the revolving door. Doubtless they are now doing the same for the Tories – perhaps even some Lib Dems.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html
It is therefore unsurprising the BAE were able to write themselves contracts for aircraft carriers which were impossible to cancel and that their New Labour acolytes were prepared to sign such contracts. It is, nonetheless, disgusting. Just as it is disgusting that there is no attempt whatever by the coaliton to query or remedy the situation. There is no contract in the UK which cannot be cancelled by primary legislation.
Meanwhile, bankers’ bonus season is upon us again and these facilitators of trade and manufacture are again set to award themselves tens of billions of pounds to swell the already huge bank accounts of a select few, whose lifestyle and continued employment is being subsidised by every single person in the UK with 8% of their income. This was because the system which rewards those bankers so vastly is fundamentally unsound and largely unnecessary. Money unlinked to trade or manufacture cannot create infinite value; that should have been known since the South Sea Bubble.
Yet even this most extreme example of government being used to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else, has not been enough to stir any substantial response from a stupoured, x-factored population, dreaming only of easy routes to personal riches, which they have a chance in a million of achieving.
Conventional politics appears to have become irretrievably part pf the malaise rather than offering any hope for a cure. But political activity outwith the mainstream is stifled by a bought media.
I see no hope.
Previously under the control of the weasel like Wee Duggie Alexander and now Andrew Mitchell, famous for his use of offshore tax havens.
http://www.international-adviser.com/article/channel-4-investigates-tax-avoidance
Nemak Shafik, the permanent secretary to the gangsters-in-charge was Vice President of the World Bank. Enough said.
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/About-DFID/Our-organisation1/Management-board/
Well Woolas has been kicked out after some election court ruled he had screwed up. So what about Straw and his bribery of the electorate with a curry supper which Craig pointed out was against the rules. Or is he immune from such rulings?
“Such cutting debate…”
Anyone who writes “X is an illusion. Always has been” has not offered anything worth debating. So dismissing their “argument” with “Bullshit!” is simply showing them that they have not made a substantial claim and therefore can be dismissed without a substantial reply.
Now, you are really sticking your neck out with your sarcastic dig showing that if debate had ever sunk to a new low you were determined to take it lower and not even bother to sign your post. Not even with a handle.
So who are you? Do you have a point? if not fuck off!
“….every fucking democracy is an illusion….there can be no such thing”
“Bullshit!”
“Such cutting debate…”
I believe what the first commentator may be alluding to is that, without some constitutional basis which sets down unalterable principles, democracy is open to becoming the tyranny of the majority over the minority
or in the case of most British parliaments in recent years, the minority over the majority
Democracy is not a right in a practical sense. Lots of democracies required fighting – war or revolution – to achieve them. As soon as a democracy is established, special interest groups start finding ways to subvert its power to themselves. These groups are often successful to some extent. It usually takes some crisis before enough people see the problem and take action.
The growth of democracy is not a gentle increase. Rather, it is achieved in sudden leaps, with a gradual diminution and decay between.
Democracy is like health. It’s not something that you achieve once and forever. It’s something that has to be maintained. The UK effectively has AIDS; the immune system of democracy has been subverted.
Craig,
I see no hope either, but we _must_ have hope.
It’s worth remembering that the founding fathers of the USA set it up as a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy,…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_republic
…and thought things through long and hard before doing so
Angrysober,
I have read in-between your lines of humour.
Let me remind you of the crushing of Iran’s first *democracy*. The overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh by the intelligence agencies(SIS).
The crushing of Iran’s *democracy* launched 25 years of dictatorship under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi.
So much for the defence of freedoms eh?
A prime example of the overthrow of a democratically elected government to suit British economic and strategic interests – OIL (Hossein Fardoust).
I trained men in HMS Collingwood who told me the Mossad supported SAVAK tortured many and a favourite of theirs was pulling toe-nails out one by one.
Sources:
“Targeting Iran”, by David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky, Ervand Abrahamian, and Nahid Mozaffari.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB126/iran980600.pdf (Heavily redacted)
“All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”
Stephen Kinzer. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2003.
“It’s not something that you achieve once and forever. It’s something that has to be maintained. The UK effectively has AIDS; the immune system of democracy has been subverted.”
Quite a good analogy that is, Clark!
Mark,
“I have read in-between your lines of humour.”
Please explain what the above sentence means!
“Let me remind you of the crushing of Iran’s first *democracy*. The overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh by the intelligence agencies(SIS).”
You don’t have to remind me of it. I know about it. I actually think about it quite disproportionately to other things I do. By the way, have you read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes?
There is also another book out recently which I would like to read. By an Iranian writer. I’ll look up a review of it. Hold on!
Oh, here we go:
http://www.amazon.com/Iran-CIA-Fall-Mosaddeq-Revisited/dp/0230579272/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288973303&sr=1-1
Once the system becomes corrupt it is very easily controlled by rogue elements in the Elites with the assistance of MI5/MI6 (or other security services) since almost everybody can be blackmailed by those who know where the skeletons are.
illusion….what i meant is what Craig is saying in his main article …democracy does not work and never will…
I have Angrysober but the saddest fact to me and a responsibility is the British took the lead in Iran.
The CIA just wanted to change the world but they did not know the world, so we encouraged them despite the wisdom’s of great British men. Men like Lord Acton who fought against the brutality of Robert Mugabe’s regime, he said,”And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Tenet knew about 911 – he told us – we sat and watched while the worst of us ‘put’ options.
“Tenet knew about 911 – he told us – we sat and watched while the worst of us ‘put’ options.”
Sorry, Mark. There’s no point in being a radical if you are too mealy-mouthed to say what you mean.
What are you talking about?
“The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population…”
– but was this not always the case? Surely the whole foundation of the political system is thugs annexing land.
I found John Humphrys recent report from China, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11575942 interesting where he describes a ‘dissident’ as one who wants to be able to change the government.
He says, [The Chinese] seemed genuinely baffled by my insistence that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to throw out the people in power if you don’t like them.
He doesn’t notice that the de facto British government does not really change just because there is an election and the faces change. Jack Straw et al are still at their command posts.
By the way, I did read it before and many other readers would have seen it, but who was the numptie who was getting all angry about the “disgusting Western habit” of sitting on a toilet seat instead of squatting?
I can’t remember who it was but that idiot is a prize-winning self-hater unless of course he goes outside for a crap, which I most certainly doubt.
“He doesn’t notice that the de facto British government does not really change just because there is an election and the faces change. Jack Straw et al are still at their command posts.”
Yeah, coz Britain’s just the same as China innit Al!
Tosser!
@Craig,
I just shared these thoughts with a friend, speaking about the US economic system:-
I do not believe that the intention of the financial elite is specifically to destroy the middle class. The destruction of the middle class is an inevitable consequence of a number of factors:-
1. In the 1970s Nixon opened the trade door with China and the manufacturing interests saw great opportunity in investing in a country where the same environmental, work safety
laws, cheap labour did not apply as in the US. This process has led to the flight of factories and manufacturing out of the US – to China and other cheap labour places such as Mexico. Logically, without the factory in the US then the jobs are not available in the US.
2. Join to factor 1 above, the removal of currency controls and free flow of capital around the world. The ideological process for free global financial movement started with Ronald Reagan as the spokesperson for the process, who then gave the process its ideological underpinning which was sold to the American people and the world at large.From the 1930s the Glass-Steagall Act was sensibly enacted to introduce regulation and sensible checks and balances so that the events which led to the Great Depression would not be allowed an environment for replication. The stupidity of the political directorate was to preach an ideology of virtual unrestrained “free market” activities, which when translated into individual investor action actually became unrestrained greed and literal theft of pension funds, life savings and people’s investments. The Savings and Loan debacle was just a baby to the monster that later emerged. Each President after Reagan has only entrenched the process. The end result with the derivatives and mortgage collapses is that millions of people ended up financially screwed because of the Wall Street “banksters” theft of trillions.
3. The third step in the process, was how the political directorate reacted to the crisis and this now is where stupidity can be seen to have made a marriage with theft and greed:-
i) Does it make any sense to hand back to institutions and individuals sums in trillions when it was their financial actions, such as in the derivative and mortgage markets, that had caused the financial crisis?
ii) Even if some institutions were to be saved and financially restored, as Obama did with the automobile sector, did it make any sense to do so in a manner that did not correct and reintroduce the missing checks and balances – absence of which had caused the crisis?
iii) Is it not telling that Bush had started the process of handing out the trillions, and with Geithner’s advice Obama continued the process?
What this all equates to is a total sell out by the political elected officials to the greed and criminality of the financial classes. The bigger picture is that with a huge gap in missing globally competitive manufacturing in the US there is a gaping hole in the US jobs market, and with the financial shenanigans of the US Treasury there is an expanding unsustainable deficit. The US has gotten away with this madness for so long, mainly because the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency.
If you think it is all very bad at present, just wait as the crisis deepens.
This is how I see it.
CB ( http://www.globaljusticeonline.com)
Some are calling for a revolution:-
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jspv=2&c=xjU0u9weXnth4C5mWelC9KcbCWd%2Fc4lm
At the individual level, we can first begin to understand the bigger picture, but ultimately we ( the individual) need to question ?” have we acted responsibly and what can each of us do? When the answer comes, then act accordingly.
Nuff said.
CB
A belated contribution to Guy Fawkes’s day.
Back to the future:
http://parent:[email protected]/parental/bang/bang.html
Angry – Darioush Bayandor tells the truth and exposes the prevarication of Kermit Roosevelt’s account that sits in the minds of the intelligences agencies and many Iranians. We were interested in securing oil and the clerics took advantage of the internal dynamics to secure power. What happened to the money supllied by the CIA to bride Iranians actors or crowd control – who knows – maybe it was saved and used again in the last elections 😉
Of course Mark Golding, who runs a phony charity, has to bring up the “false flag attacks” of 911 and 7/7.
Mark, you’re a moron. 19 Arab Muslims did 911.
And stop getting rich off of sick pictures of children blown up by jihadists.
More news to cheer us up…
‘US troops beheaded Iraqi detainee’
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/148265.html
Original:
http://wikileaks.org/id/9144F69E-423D-4561-52BC3A74A67A6F2F/
Roderick,
I don’t believe the system is controlled by rogue elements in the Elites with the assistance of MI5/MI6 (or other security services.)
I believe the system is controlled very tightly by a ‘government’ within the government, most probably made up of senior Privy Councillors and their advisers. This hidden government has huge resources often procurred by the intelligence services in investment here and abroad and looked after by certain accountancy firms.
I agree with writerman when he talks about neo-feudalism. If the companies of the hidden government out do other private businesses, which would be a strong possiblity because the government companies wouldn’t be weighed down by loans, then people would become neo-peasants owning nothing serving their masters.
Oh dear, it looks like the British are just as bad as the Americans, anyway:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11702111
– and the MOD doesn’t want a public inquiry and is already calling it all ‘history’:
“The MoD takes all allegations seriously and has already set up the dedicated Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) to investigate them.
“The IHAT is the most effective way of investigating these unproven allegations rather than a costly public inquiry.”
I supose once Larry shows up it’s time to close the thread. However, as no one has put in a word against the corporation tax and in favor of its legal avoidance by Vodafone, I will.
A tax on corporations is a tax on investment, and is thus a job killer. By eliminating the corporation tax, investment in Britain would greatly increase, offshore tax avoidance structures would be dismantled and their administrative function repatriated to the UK, and people like Rupert Murdoch (reportedly the second person admitted to 10 Downing St after the election of the new government) would have less reason to bribe the government by, for example, writing multi-million-dollar book deals with retiring politicians.
The present regime of corporate taxation unfairly penalizes small businesses that lack the resources either to lobby government to tilt the playing field to their advantage or to devise tax avoidance measures.
Elimination of corporation tax increases internally generated funds for new investment. Profits paid to shareholders would continue to be taxed in the hands of those shareholders as they should be. Dividends paid to foreigners can be subject to a withholding tax.
Although plutocracy has always been the normal form of government, it is more destructive of public welfare today than in times past because the plutocratic oligarchs have largely abandoned their local and national allegiance. Their executive jets and mega-yachts have made them citizens of the world — those parts of it that remain habitable. How to restore a sense of responsibility among the rich, and in particular a sense of responsibility for the welfare of those who live where the wealth of the plutocracy is generated, is something that needs serious consideration.
Cheer up. Things could be worse
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_94vWmzABPGg/TNQg7fQxgUI/AAAAAAAAAkY/yItl3U4hmlA/s1600/5407418.jpg
See John Pilger’s latest article in New Staetsman!
They said to me “smile, things could be worse”…
So I smiled, and things DID get worse!
In the microcosm that is Norfolk, the news is controlled by Archant. Thery used to have a forum to debate the issue but rid themselves of ‘too free a speech’a couple of years ago.
Today its sister paper, the Evening News shut its forum.
Comments are now ‘ordered’ by a machine and any foul words will throw up a maderator to look at it. Had three refusals on pressing issues to do with cuts, meals on wheels,etc. their reasoning for refusal: ‘other’.
please can anybody elucidate me as to what this may be?
Regional media outlets are shutting their facillities to debate and bring up issues, like the 700 K wasted by South Norfolk DC this year alone, on court costs in lost planning rows they should have known they’d loose.
There is another issue of police corruption at bethel Street police station that is not being touched by the media, one officer is suspended, unnamed, and other are being investigated.
I reluctantly agree with Craigs analysis, but not with the last sentence.
As long as we are here and alive and kicking, we shall kick and scream and kick some more.
In a years time, once the cuts have brought it home to them that they are the one’s who will be hardest hit by future tax takes by greedy bankers and such ilk, a very young disenchanted, unemployed generation of school leavers who can’t get jobs, housing and qualifications will remember their agility with all things hand held, they will use Facebook and other sites to meet and coordinate actions, they will set up sites themselves and become a force to be reckoned with, internal strife by young people who have to live rough on the streets, fight red tape every step of their way.
Or was that a book I read?….
Have you got a link for the Pilger article Mike?