The good news from Stoke Poges: the local Conservative Party is globally on message – and obviously offside
Grieving for democracy
The Slog: I have been sent a hilarious trail of email correspondence ‘c0mmenting’ on a recent Slogpost
about Michael Gove’s ‘Open 10,000 academies, win a Home in Downing
Street’ project, and its deep attachment to the Camerlot principles of
local democracy, green belts, cultural integration and so forth. I’ll
take you through the highlights in a few paragraphs time, but in the
meantime I thought some global context might serve to highlight the
irony of the pathetic attempt at a defence by the local Conservatives in
Stoke Poges.
For anyone who fears for the Rule of Law (and equality before it) in
Britain, it’s been a bad week. Newscorp has maintained from the start of
Hackgate that Murdoch “never knew of payments made by Sun staff to
police before News Corporation disclosed that to UK authorities”. Sadly
for the Digging Aussie, an Exaro-sourced
tape distributed this week confirms once and for all that this was a
massive corporate lie intended to pervert the course of justice. Rupe
the Dupe is clearly heard saying to his staff, “We’re talking about
payments for news tips from cops. That’s been going on a hundred years,
absolutely…..I don’t know of anybody, or anything, that did anything
that wasn’t being done across Fleet Street.”
Not content with admitting he lied to the CM&S committee,
Murdoch defends illegally bribing police officers by saying “everyone’s
doing it”. Which is fine, and so as everyone is avoiding/evading tax,
killing folks and rogering pigs, let’s all get out there an among all
those care-home kids who are just gagging for it? Hand me the KY Jelly,
Robin.
At another point, Murdoch insists that “the [Hackgate] investigation
was about almost nothing….the police didn’t treat our people well, but
don’t worry – we will get our own back”. So then, let’s add conspiracy
to hinder a policemen in the furtherance of his duties to the
charge-list.
When Vince Cable admitted to two Telegraph journalists (who, by the
way, were taping him illegally) that he was going “to get Murdoch”, the
Business Secretary lost the BSkyB bid portfolio to…Jeremy Hunt, a man
known to want Murdoch’s children. Now that Murdoch has fessed up to
perjury, bribing cops, perverting the course of justice, and conspiring
to inflict vengeance on the police forces of our land, you’d think that,
in a civilised culture, he’d be down the Dock Green nick before his
feet touched the ground, chummy. But the idea of Merdeschlock even being
interviewed by the authorities doesn’t appear on a single MSM
radar-screen.
Hold it up to the light, no equality before the Law in sight.
Last Friday, the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt tweeted effusively in
celebration of “our great institution” the NHS. Seven years ago, he
co-authored a pamphlet arguing vociferously for its complete demolition.
So that was enough (allegedly) to get him the Health Secretary job.
Cameron’s decision to appoint him – and Hunt’s pretence of affection for
the system – are examples of tooth-rattling hypocrisy and mendacity.
Does anyone care any more? Not really. The catalogue of accusations
against Jeremy Hunt spanning ten years of shady business dealings and
lies to Parliament are recorded at the the Hunt Balls
page on this site. When tackled by SW Surrey constituents about the
content, Hunt writes them letters saying he’s no idea what I’ve got
against him, or why I am spreading false stories about him. But when I
ask either his office or Viriginia Bottomley’s for a comment, none is
forthcoming.
Hold it up to the light, not an ethic in sight. (And sad to relate,
Labour is all over the place on what to do with the NHS: hence the ease
with which this casual two-faced bollocks continues).
Crossing the Channel to our largest trading partner, the Template
that became a One-Off has now morphed into Standard Practice. I’m
talking, of course, about bailins, Open Bank Reconciliation, or as we
mere mortals call it, thieving. The principle behind the bailin concept
is unequalled in the long history of the State asking the citizen for
undeserved help. It started with fighting wars about dick size, and in
its contemporary incarnation seems to involve giving those who have
screwed up our future pilfering the remaining means we have to help us
survive it.
All is euphemism and obfuscation from the EC: ‘shareholders’,
‘priority’, ‘uninsured’ and even ‘acceptable depositor risk’ – as if,
when one goes into a restaurant, (a) they ask you to pay the bill in
advance and (b) you should treat badly cooked food – or no food at all –
as an acceptable risk. Three words suffice: it is insane.
But not if you’re trying the Save the World. Banking attorney Ellen Brown
(she’s bright and true, you should look at her sites) rephrases
previous Slog rants on this subject with this superbly succint comment:
‘Shifting the burden of a major bank collapse from the blameless
taxpayer to the blameless depositor is another case of robbing Peter to
pay Paul, while the real perpetrators carry on with their risky,
speculative banking schemes.’
As for the concept of ‘insurance’, we would all do well to remember
the track record to date: When the Cyprus national legislature
overwhelming rejected the original 9.9% depositor ‘levy’ (another
terrifically mendacious noun) the insured deposits under €100,000 were
spared; but it was at the expense of the uninsured deposits, which took a
much larger hit, estimated at the time to be about 60%. These quickly
rose to 85%. Most of those snared by the net expect to see none of it. A
lifetime’s savings, stolen by greedy, fiscally incontinent and
financially incompetent pillocks.
Who will actually do all this insuring has been on my mind since the
EC first started using the word three weeks ago. Insurance institutions
badly hit by the 2008 crisis would be risibly inadequate to any such
task – and all the players know this. The idea that a systemic
assurance collapse would be allowed in deference to a citizen being
burgled by the State is an amusing thought, but it’s a fantasy: another
‘law’ would be passed forthwith to declare it offside. This is exactly
what happened in Iceland, after the Court of EFTA ruled that the
insurance funds “were not intended to cover that sort of systemic
collapse”. Well of course they weren’t: they were designed solely to cover poor ickle puppies hit by cars and fuffly-wuffy kittens stuck down the well.
The simple truth is that two weeks ago (on June 26th to be precise)
the EU FinMins agreed a scheme blatantly designed to shift the
responsibility for bank losses from governments to bank investors,
creditors and uninsured depositors. The Treasuries are empty folks,
you’re on your own. But we apparently need a referendum on Brexit from
the European Union – because the Tory Party is split – and as usual
Labour is completely out of touch….and strategically clueless about
developing a sensible EU policy.
Hold it up to the light, not a trace of decency or contrition in sight.
In both the US and the UK, the slippery but not-entirely-waterproof
Bandaid lies about unemployment continue. Obama continues to count those
who have dropped off the jobless lists as solved cases, although they
obviously aren’t. And he is shifty on the subject of hours worked per
job. The truth about growing poverty in the United States is reflected
by the horrendous growth in the numbers of people there on food stamps:
forty-eight million as of last month… up from thirty-four million when
Obama began his first term. But still the likes of Dan Hannan, the FT
and the Daily Telegraph trot out the Party line about “America booming
towards recovery”.
In Britain, the Conservative Party has just the one trick when it
comes to misleading the electorate about unemployment – it says that the
employment level is rising. And they’re right, it is. But what has fallen dramatically is the number of hours per job.
Lose your job as an insurance clerk and find another as a part-time,
commission-only knitting machine salesman, and to the Coalition you’re
sorted, mate. Dan Hannan trots out the employment tweet abut twice a
week: he retweets all the Leftist idiots shouting ‘Smash Tory Scum’ –
but never the empiricists who give the lie to his infantile ruse.
Hold it up to the light, not a trace of truth in sight.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So anyway, there’s our context: equality
before the Law, ethics, decency, contrition and truth all in steep
decline at the hands of those allegedly looking after our interests. To
be honest, I could sit here throughout the day and do nothing but churn
out endless examples of what is, very obviously, the Schüss down into élite corporatist depravity: the only problem would be fitting all the examples onto the Web.
Still, having skteched out the global
picture, now we go back to Stoke Poges, where there are lots of ruffled
feathers following the Slog’s exposé of spendthrift and dubious DfE
tactics in the race to have an non-localist school in every town by
2015. Thanks to the kindness of local residents, I can now share with
you some truly Hippo-sized hypocrisy in the discomfort of those caught
in the albeit narrow beam of Sloggist light. This is one resident’s
email reply from Attorney General and local MP Dominic Grieve to the
charges I laid at the Gove door:
I was shown a copy of this article and have also seen your comments.
There is, of course, a legitimate debate concerning whether the
school should be sited in Stoke Poges and the local community has made a
compelling case for why this should not happen.
The debate is not, however, helped by factually inaccurate material of the type set out in this article.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely
Dominic Grieve
The factual inaccuracy I’m prepared to face up to – I said there were
‘no’ Sikhs in Stoke Poges to justify a 100% Sikh school there. In fact,
there are a few hundred at most – the majority are against the school – and they represent between 2-4% of the total population there.
So much for our Attorney General: already overruled by the DfE’s
Michael ‘Messiah’ Gove, he chooses to dismiss the entire piece on the
basis of inaccuracy….but offers no response to the charges made of
ignoring local democracy, ignoring educational localism, ignoring Green
Belt promises made by the Prime Minister, and cynically avoiding a
face-off with Slough Labour Party by foisting this ridiculous project
onto a small rural town.
Next comes a crackerjack, semi-literate email response from the
wonderfully named Philip Dumvill of Beaconsfield Conservative
Association. As a classic example of massaged statistics, bad declension
and the feigned outrage of the affronted Tory, it is without parallel
in my experience:
‘Really!
Just read a few lines of this blog and realise that this man (or
women) [sic] is contributing nothing to the debate. He starts by
claiming that no Sikhs live in Stoke Poges . Well 756 of Stoke Poges
4306 electors have Asian names – ( obviously not all Sikh.) That’s
17.5%.
The debate so far has been vigorous and occasionally heated but
his allegation [sic] border [sic] on those of a fantasist. And his final
paragraph just takes the biscuit!
Philip
Just to set out the last paragraph where I appear to have stolen a biscuit, it ran like this:
‘Apply your radical realism, citizens:
this Establishment is peopled by drones, liars, sociopaths, guzzlers and
neocon fanatics. It is fuelled by hubris, dirty money, Class A drugs,
and crooked lobbyists. And it is enslaved to the banks and the media.
They must be thrown out for good: and the internet is one of the few
weapons left to us.’
I imagine you will now understand why I
thought some context might be required re the world I live in, and the
outer ring of Planet Harrumph occupied by Mr Dumvill.
Then there is Philip’s apples-and-pears
approach to maths, which suggests that a bright career in politics lies
ahead of him. First of all he takes the 4,300 figure for electors,
but the total population is 5,044. I would beg to suggest to the bloke
who puts the Dum in Dumville that those eligible to vote will not be
attending the school in Stoke Poges, and that this issue is about the
number of Sikh children in the village…given that the school’s pupils will be, um, 100% Sikh, and not adult, as such.
Then he admits not all the ‘Asian names’ in
the village are Sikhs, but proceeds to use the total figure anyway to
arrive at the truly idiotic suggestion that almost 1 in 5 of residents
are Sikhs. There is already the necessary link
above to demonstrate what utter bollocks this is, but to set him
straight again from here, there is probably no more than around a 3%
Sikh population in Stoke Poges, and the children (given the older age
bias of the Ward as a whole) represent at most 2%. So Mr Dumvill has
used an 820% level of statistical license to make his case. Par for the
course, really: he should switch Parties and become Ed Balls’s pps:
they’d get on like a house on fire.
Finally, it seem me allegation border on
those of a fantasist. Just goes to show, I suppose, what a decent
education can do for your English: he removes 75% of my charges to
produce one bad verb, and then ups to the plural again to make me more
of a fantasist. Plus, of course, he offers no answer to the allegations –
just a short-trousered (and, I might add, libellous) insult. But being a
decent cove, I shall not on this occasion be calling upon the services
of my close friend Sir Algernon Tryle of the Tryle & Errah legal
practice.
So there we have it. As another week of quite indescribable
sociopathy no doubt stretches before us, for the time being this latest
chapter in the Great Book of Politically Devious Cockups must draw to a
close.
Dear oh dear oh dear oh dear. Sigh.
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