Daily archives: September 9, 2011


Bliar: How Much Death Can One Man Want?

I presume that serial killers become addicted. The really big killers, like Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot appear figures divorced from humanity. I really do find it hard to know what to make of Tony Blair. Universally execrated for fabricating the evidence to attack Iraq, apostle of war everywhere, Israel’s most ardent supporter, I used to think the desire for personal wealth – which his murderous career has indeed brought – was his primary motivation. But with his latest cheerleading for yet more wars, it seems he is indeed one of those who, having thrown off conventional morality in favour of homicide, just wants to go on and on with it.

For Bliar, the desire for killing will never stop.

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Wasting Ordinary People’s Money

Blanket opposition to public spending cuts is not my thing. We have far too large a state. It interferes far too much with our freedoms. It wields far too much physical power through excessive armed forces, it controls a crazed ability to wipe out human life on the planet, it attacks – apparently permanently – other countries and kiils their people. It carries out far too much surveillance of us.

It also wastes the hard earned money of working people on idiots like Martin Samuda. According to his Guardian profile, he has this non-job: “He works within schools as a home liaison officer, and within youth support”. You can catch the tone of the sort of things he does in his job from this article on his good friend Mark Duggan. If Martin Samuda views it as a mere peccadillo, scarcely worth mentioning, to be travelling around London with a loaded firearm (a converted weapon of precisely the type used in the majority of fatal gang shootings in London’s recent past), then what kind of use is he in his home liaison visits?

I have feared ever since the looting that one outcome is going to be an increase in funding for the entire class of social worker/youth leader/paid community leader who pop up everywhere in the media as pundits at times like these. Their refrain is that there is nothing wrong with urban street culture, that its adherents are victims not instigators of violence, and that the way forward is more government money for them.

The horrible death of Baby P revealed the uselessness of the vast hordes of local authority community and social officers sucking money from working people. It was certainly true that Ed Balls treated Sharon Shoesmith scandalously; but not nearly as scandalous as the incredible amount of taxpayers money this woman was getting.

Real communities cannot be developed by the state, and in fact excessive state interference distorts the growth of community and stunts it. There are many things that need to be done to address the problems of our society. One of them is to sack Martin Samuda and anybody else being paid from other people’s taxes in any similar kind of work, all round the country.

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