I return from summer break with a shock as the UK hits moral rock bottom. On the day that it is revealed that 2,380 people in three years died within 14 days of being declared fit to work by an ATOS assessment and having benefit stopped, we also have 45 of the most appalling members of the political class elevated to trough it for life in the House of Lords, at a possible cost to the taxpayer of 67,500 pounds per week in attendance allowances alone.
It is worth remembering that it was the Red Tories who brought in ATOS, and Yvette Cooper, to be precise, who ordered the extreme tightening of the unfit to work assessment which has resulted in death for thousands and dreadful stress and misery for hundreds of thousands. Ian Duncan Smith may have also gleefully implemented it, but this particular horror was entirely inherited from the Guardian’s favourite leadership candidate.
The House of Lords appointments are so horrible it is difficult to comment. The most utterly objectionable of all is one of the least known to the public. Stuart Polak becomes a Lord for services to the Conservative Friends of Israel. That you can, unelected, become a legislator of the UK based on your loyalty and service to another state is appalling.
Others are more obviously dreadful. Lord Hogg now has a title that befits the moat of his home, which he had cleaned by the taxpayer prompting much rage in the expenses scandal. Tessa Jowell benefited from hundreds of thousands of pounds of corrupt money from the sordid Berlusconi, claiming she did not read the mortgage documents in which his cash paid off her house, before she signed them, and going through an entirely risible pretence of temporary separation from her husband, David Mills, who escaped a corrupt Italian justice system. David Willetts was rejected by his constituents because of extreme expenses scamming, and walks grinning back into the Lords.
Michelle Mone is rewarded for her opposition to Scottish independence. The woman sold out the workforce who made her fortune by expensively covering her crotch and now comes out as a Tory knicker saleswoman. Darling also is ennobled for services to the union, after being too cowardly to face the electorate in May. The Lib Dems get more legislators today than they could manage at the general election. That is simply astonishing.
The conduct of the political class is utterly shameless. Meantime they indulge their fantasies of stripping workers of all protection and of stopping aid to the needy, and while the politicians gorge and gorge, the poor are quietly being slipped away to die.
I have just read two very interesting books by Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur (2011) and Europe after the Minotaur: Greece and the Future of the Global Economy (2015). The first does a good job of explaining U.S. economic policy since World War Two.
10.18pm Predictable and as expected from the Laddie himself.
Habbabkuk you flatter yourself with delusions of haqeequt/reality.
How do you ban a troll? They are a figment of imagination.
With about as much reality as a Swedish troll-wife’s rape accusation.
Calling for special dispensation for Lords from a second nation.
The machine on the turnstile recognises my finger, therefore I am.
“Most of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters believe America is the “greatest single threat to world peace” and one in four think a “secretive elite” controls the globe, according to pollster analysis.”
If the USA is not the greatest single threat to world peace which country is? It is difficult to conceive of anyone putting forward the name of any other country-with the possible exception of Great Britain, which was initially responsible for urging the US to take up the white man’s burden and throw its weight into the Cold War.
As to the idea that a “secretive elite” controls the globe, or attempts to do so, surely that is hardly controversial?
See for example:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42728.htm
Speaking of Varoufakis, there’s a very interesting article about him in a recent issue of The New Yorker: The Greek Warrior: How a radical finance minister took on Europe—and failed.
Bevin And Lysias
Great Links there, i have been in and out of both..Both quite Long.
Cheers
I see The Hope over Fear Rally Just got a little More Interesting.. With regards Confirmed Speakers.. Eh Craig.
Lysias, thanks for the quote from Dante’s Inferno (which in this day and age should be required reading).
I seem to have misquoted it slightly, but feel that the premise still stands.
RobG
If you like a wee Bit of Electronic Music, There is a Great Inferno Vid on Youtube by Tangerine Dream.. you too Lysias ..although Very long and Very theatrical ..But Brilliant.. Just in case yas Fancy it. 🙂
Indeed thanks Bevin & Lysias for two great links; here’s one that is also rather on the ball;
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-08-27/purge-of-corbyn-voters-unmasks-labour/
I must say I liked rafael behrs casting of elizabeth kendall as Cassandra. However,while Cassandra was right and ignored, Elizabeth is right wing and ignored.
Jon – “Nonsense. Private consenting acts are not at all comparable to the greed and violence and abused [sic] of power potentially involved in, say, bombing another country.”
– – –
I didn’t directly compare “private consenting acts” with acts of political corruption and war crimes, Jon. You drew a long line across my comment and dumbed it down to a straw man. And you use the word “consenting” as if that washes a behaviour of any negative external impacts and moral consequences. (“Moral” meaning “concerned with the survival and wellbeing of one’s own kind”, eg. Humankind, community, family.)
But since you raised the idea of comparisons, I do indeed think they can be. The hedonism of sex and drugs can be compared to the personal gratification sought by ambitious Prime Ministers who sign off on bombing campaigns — both behaviours involving selfish indifference to the consequences. And if you think that they are not even remotely comparable, they can still be systemically associated. Perhaps one does not lead to another, but I can see a drug-using, prostitute-using cabinet minister forming a symbiotic relationship with his war-mongering leader. We could call them ‘useful knaves’ who engage in soft corruption which functionally enables the development of hard corruption through the erosion of moral observance in the course of carrying out their official duties.
Can you say that a hunger for sex and drugs is different to a hunger for money? Any need or want of a man is a weakness that can be exploited. Even a hunger for food can be exploited and it is a necessary requirement of fitness for public service that people are resistant to temptations — especially those that compromise the integrity of a person’s moral character. Hence why integrity checks are carried out on officers in sensitive positions.
Of course, I am not saying that the absence of common vices is indictative of a character fit for public service. What I am saying is that vices are indicative of higher potential for service failure or exploitation that enables political evil.
So your weak argument that attempts to dissociate “private consenting acts” from the wider machinery of the political system is actually complete nonsense and demonstrably so.
…
Incidentally, on my off-topic reference to religious evil as it is most spectacularly being carried out in Syria today, you never did get around to answering my long-standing question regarding what exactly defines religions of peace and religions of violence. Any comments?
We wake in the safety and comfort of our homes to hear that bodies of MORE than 70 refugees have been found in that chicken lorry parked on an Austrian highway. Also that 200 refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean.
When are the warmongers who created the mayhem in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other ‘theatres’ going to act?
The thread on Medialens on Craig’s piece has extended.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1440688715.html
One commenter:’Craig’s being too optimistic to call this a bottom.’
They are, and they have!
Simply they ignore the dead, the dispossessed as they have with the sick and infirm. Dead don’t speak or complain.
Note the beebeecee is still busy classifying them as migrants and not refugees, kind of they had a choice and they chose to come over here and get “free money, free houses, free phones, free …. ” perpetuating this myth that has been assiduously created by the oligarch owned media.
One thing I’ll give Conservative Friends of Israel – its a very successful lobby group. They got Tory MPs to betray their country and vote for the invasion of Iraq almost to a man. If I remember correctly only 2 Tory MPs voted against the declaration of war (the second of the votes).
Stuart Polak deserves an honour – but not from this country.
“When are the warmongers who created the mayhem in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other ‘theatres’ going to act?”
Never, Mary, if the media have their way, except to launch ever more violent assaults, direct and covert, against regimes the “West” dislikes. When I talk to people in the street, we all know what lies at the root of this tragedy – the wars started in the Middle East by the West. But when they discuss what is happening on the radio or TV, what is the one cause never mentioned? Why these same “humanitarian” interventions, all backed so enthusiastically by the “moderate” and “liberal” commentators now savaging Mr Corbyn’s character in the hope of ruining his leadership of the Labour Party.
The March 19 2003 list of those MPs vote on the rebel amendment saying there was no moral case for war against Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2862397.stm
See Cooper and Burnham voting with Blair. Kendall was not around at the time.
Habbabkuk:
2/. On the disability question- I suspect that the numbers being thrown around would need some further analysis but my question is other. I have heard it said that it has long been the practice for GPs to be generous in certifying incapacity in areas of high unemployment and few job openings because this is advantageous to the people concerned in terms of the benefits they receive and that govts tended to turn a blind eye (interaliab ecause it made the unemployment figures look better). Is there anything in this?
I was a social worker for nearly 30 years, and can confirm that I did encounter a few people who were faking disability. I have no knowledge of doctors who knowingly turned a blind eye.
I do know, however, that even before the coalition government, say in the early years of this century, most of my clients (with mental health problems) who had to see the doctor to get their disability rated for benefits purposes were terrified of seeing the doctor, and asked me to accompany them on many occasions.
When I did so I normally found that the doctors, many of whom I believe made a living out of performing this duty, were cursory in their questions, often completely avoiding eye contact with clients, and frequently being very rude to them.
I also attended many appeals against decisions based on doctor’s interviews, and almost invariably won the appeal.
It is also clear to me that it was on the watch of New Labour that the benefits system, which was never much fun for claimants, took a sharp deterioration, somewhere about 2005, when it became massively more bureaucratic, more user unfriendly.
I am not up to date having retired with exactly what the Tories have done to the system, but they would have had to go some to ruin it as much as Labour did.
And the main vote. Reassuring to see Jeremy in the Noes.
Note the number recorded as Absent. Mealy mouthed cowards unless they were ALL laid up with the flu.
Iraq — Declaration of War — 18 Mar 2003 at 22:00
The motion voted through by a majority of MPs agreed that the Government “should use all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction”.[1]
This resulted in the United Kingdom joining the United States led invasion of Iraq two days later.[2]
A proposed change to this motion saying that This House “believes that the case for war against Iraq has not yet been established” had just been voted down.[3] A number of MPs voted in one and not the other, or voted inconsistently.[4] Earlier in the year, during the build-up to war, there had been three other votes in favour of the Government policy.[5]’
http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/division.php?date=2003-03-18&number=118&display=allpossible
Explanation of the votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Parliamentary_approval_for_the_invasion_of_Iraq
@Lysias at 7:23
The Lords should be dissolved. But for some time I’ve advocated sortition as the best way to select a government, so let’s use the Athenian option for the Commons.
Think of the benefits: there will be no privileged political class, that ends at once. Public schools can no longer groom the children of the wealthy for careers in power, unless they have a system for roulette. For the rest of us a period in government will be an unwelcome interruption of our personal routine. It would be like jury service – a tiresome civic duty, not a limitless snout in a bottomless trough.
And the laws of chaos being what they are, half the house will be female: there’s gender balance at a stroke. Only three or four will be millionaires, around two will be members of a political party, none or perhaps one will have that Malthusian Oxbridge PPE. There will only be one paedophile, a minority seriously over-represented in the present system. Add on your own encouraging statistics.
There is a hidden assumption that people in politics should be people who are good at politics (politicians!) and that there exists within our society creatures who possess that exceptional skill – like jugglers, or footballers, or ladies who can pick up coins from a table without using their hands.
It’s not true. We’re all bad at politics. We should just make a goverment from a random sample of ourselves.
Note that the staffers prefer Yvette aka Mrs Edward Balls, both supporters of the war criminal BLiar and members of his neoliberal gang.
‘Crucially, although Yvette Cooper is the preferred candidate of most party staff – in part for political reasons, and partially because so many former staffers are working on her campaign – the near-universal expectation is that Corbyn will win, with most expecting him to triumph by more votes than the total number of exclusions and the overall number of lost voters.’
26 August 2015
How will the purges change Jeremy Corbyn’s chances?
Labour have revealed the latest changes to their party’s electorate – putting the total number of voters down from 600,000 to 553,954. What does it mean for Corbyn’s leadership hopes?
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/what-does-labours-shrunken-electorate-mean-jeremy-corbyns-chances
‘Cooper was born on 20 March 1969 in Inverness, Scotland. Her father is Tony Cooper, former General Secretary of the Prospect trade union, a former Non-Executive Director of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and a former Chairman of the British Nuclear Industry Forum. He was also a government adviser on the Energy Advisory Panel.’ Wiki
Balls became an MP as late as 2005. His brother is head of European Operations for PIMCO.
‘In the 2015 General Election Balls lost his seat to the Conservative Party’s Andrea Jenkyns by a margin of 3.6%. On 11 May it was reported that Balls would receive up to £88,000 as a “golden goodbye” on leaving the Commons.’
‘In September 2007, with his wife Yvette Cooper MP, he was accused by Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker of “breaking the spirit of Commons rules” by using MPs’ allowances to help pay for a £655,000 home in north London.[46] Balls and Cooper bought a four bedroom house in Stoke Newington, and registered this as their second home (rather than their home in Castleford, West Yorkshire) in order to qualify for up to £44,000 a year to subsidise a reported £438,000 mortgage under the Commons Additional Costs Allowance, of which they claimed £24,400. Both worked in London full-time and their children attended local London schools. Balls and Cooper claimed that “The whole family travel between their Yorkshire home and London each week when Parliament is sitting. As they are all in London during the week, their children have always attended the nearest school to their London house.”[47]
Balls and Cooper “flipped” the designation of their second home three times within the space of two years.[48] In June 2008 they were referred to the Standards Commissioner over allegations that they were claiming expenses for what was effectively their main home in London, their combined claim was £24,000 i.e. “slightly more” than the single MP allowance.[48] The commissioner exonerated them, adding that their motives were not for profit as they paid full capital gains tax.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls
Only one word. Vile.
Lysias
28/08/2015 7:23pm
I should stress that I strongly favour your idea, because it is democratising.
I wanted to look at a few problems with it. I am genuinely curious.
What is to prevent a Parliament by sortition from changing the constitution in order to vote itself into power in perpetuity?
What is to prevent the presence of a highly charismatic and commanding personality from persuading the Parliament that this is a good idea, or otherwise taking the lead and establishing a virtual one-person or one-party rule? (Democracy did not stop Hitler from exercising a constitutional dictatorship).
Tom Paine argued strongly that no Parliament was to regard itself as perpetually bound by its predecessors, therefore constitutional laws brought into being to prevent such things from happening could be overridden by a current Parliament. If not, why not?
Suppose the first business of such a Parliament were to reintroduce capital punishment for a number of offences? Statistically, I believe the majority of the population are in favour of it and I think it highly likely that members of a Parliament chosen in the manner you suggest would soon raise the issue. Would you be agreeable to such a reintroduction? If you would not, and you think that it would be inappropriate for a civilised society to do so, how would you propose to limit the powers of Parliament?
By its very nature such a Parliament would consist of majorities and minorities. What would be to prevent the tyranny of the majority? For example, if a majority of Parliament saw fit to introduce economic persecution of, say, Jews, or Muslims, or homosexuals, or saw fit to introduce the public torture and execution of these, or of paedophiles or convicted terrorists, say, because the majority of Parliamentarians were not Jews or whatever, what would be your reaction to that? How can these matters be guarded against?
We live in reasonably liberal societies, where people are generally decent. Some of these scenarios are pretty unlikely but that does not make them impossible. (In fact I would argue that the capital punishment one is far from unlikely.) Would you assess that all societies around the world are equally ready for Parliament by sortition, or would such a system result in some societies in extreme cruelty and persecution of minorities? How would you propose solving such a situation?
Kind regards,
John
John Spencer-Davis said:
I like this how many angels can dance on a pin head genre of arguments. Fact that already Muslims and immigrants are getting persecuted in this country, that is without any help from the parliament is irrelevant apparently. So far as torture and extra judicial murders go, we are debating the dancing angels on a blog that belongs to a poor bastard whom bravely outed the torture that was being carried out to glean information for the UK government without the help of the parliament, and got the shaft as a thank your for his troubles.
The current parliament has been in perpetuity filled with the single party Tories from three different franchises, evidently goes unnoticed too.
The principles of distributed wisdom based on the life experiences of the participants have proved successful in the jury trials, that is other than the Guinness trial in which the chap got off free although he had been breaking the law royal fashion.
Why sortition should be any more dangerous than the current arrangements or the attempts of a military coup in UK by certain factions that were not happy with the left wing tendencies and were insistent to reintroduce a “proper governance” systems in its place?
We the people are not perfect, and yes there will be mistakes, but fact that corporate groomers will have a tough time to select the members unless that is the pick up software was written by Diebold or some other such like company. However, this does not mean that the skies would fall and the Earth would be knocked of its orbit if we the people got to run our own affairs without the benefit of any guardians whom condescendingly keep telling us all we cannot run the system and need to be saved from ourselves!
Why should the would be members fall for the “strong orator/man”? Why should the would be members vote themselves in for perpetuity? If the majority want capital punishment then so be it! But ensure that the sortition also is applied to the executioner who is to pull the trigger to kill the offender is in place too!
All too often the exception cases come to dominate any proposal, simple fact is world is not run on exceptions, and exceptions are not the norm!
I am all for sortition and let the chips fall where they may! Remember the kaleidoscope speech of the bLiar? What is good for the goose etc. In fact the first result of such a parliament will be; all men and women are equal, hence none of the current preferential justice/treatment/salary/……. will hold, and we may even get to have a written constitution, instead of the phony “unwritten” one that changes every ten minutes or so dependent on the circumstance!
Jemand
Private consenting acts
My mum has a picture representing the story in the Gospels of the possessed individual ‘Legion’ because of the number of ‘satanic devils’ he had. The pigs are all sleeping in deepest peace and Legion is holding his head as if it is about to explode. In Islam we are told that Allah sends the devils to disturb those who neglect His worship. Certainly in the Gospels, by God’s leave and Jesus pbuh request, the devils are cast out and Legion returns to normality.
I totally agree with you that if a politician has a devil that gets him to romp with sex slaves then the devil could also persuade him/her ( because there is a big question mark over some female politicians including Mrs Thatcher and Jimmy Savile ) to illegally bomb sovereign countries .
On the other hand having got their ends away to their full satisfaction they might come back to Westminster on Monday morning and obediently follow the Geneva Convention. More important is the possibility of blackmail. Both Blair and Brown appear to have been blackmailed into their major crimes of 1/ the Iraq war and 2/ not challenging the City about banking, not to mention William Hague. The Eton public school system removes children from parental support at an early age so that they can be moulded into neo=colonial monsters without the necessity of such drastic means. hence Cameron’s apparent ease with his war-crimes in Libya and Syria.
This is my point: a politician who is at ease with his/her extreme criminality like Chavy Dave Cameron, is far more useful to the murderous Zionist elites than someone who is having their mental testicles permanently squeezed like Blair.
Blair was only able to say that he was very relaxed about people acquiring vast wealth because of the leverage being applied to his brains. He was and still is in obvious pain while Cameron is conducting a vile and inhuman war against the people of Syria with very little obvious twitching of conscience .
Contrast this with Jeremy Corbyn who exudes nervous confidence, nervous because of the extraordinary publicity and confidence because of his clear conscience and huge integrity.
Who is more dangerous? The dismantler of the richest Muslim country in Africa and causer of 14 million displaced person in Syria? or the carpet-bomber of Afghanistan and creator of Islamic State. If you put them in the balance their crimes are roughly the same. It makes no difference if a politician is squirming under Zionist threat of exposure or quietly at ease with the Zionist program of destruction he is charged with discharging..
Fedup
“Muslims and immigrants are getting persecuted in this country,”
Can I have a bit of Brunei Wafirah CEO Dr Nazir’s £250,000 p.a. persecution, plus the power to put employees who displease him on construction industry blacklists please.
You know nothing about the corruption in the Asian Muslim business community and the level of collaboration with our war criminal politicians of the Asian Muslim imams.
Howver you are a useful shill for the Asian Muslims burn their businesses to the ground or who are currently murdering Sunni civilians in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan for Saudi dollars.
Shill on, prat, shill on.
Anyway Fedup,
If Muslims are getting beaten up, are still so unstreet-wise that you don’t know that Asians pay other people to do their dirty work for them? Dr Nazir CEO of Brunei Wafirah, now selling Halal products in Tescos under a different name, employed an English manager to do his dirty work for him and he changed his personal address and car when he realised that his nasty vindictive business practises had been reported by his disgruntled staff to me.
Welcome to the real Muslim world,fantasy child.
Here’s a taste of Muslim corruption, droit de seigneur, murder, in a Turkish small town controlled by one powerful feudal family.
The real world of Islam is about control, power, money, sex, corruption.
Wah Muslims are getting beaten up. yes by other Muslim families trying to get the better of them.
Do you know the second largest expense in Asian families after mortgages is paying quack maulanas to put on and take off evil spirits from them? It’s £100 for saying hello and of course nothing will happen quickly. You might see some results after 20 more hellos.
Dream on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKyuA9oyf0k