tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-837991676808346552024-03-13T11:17:10.909-07:00(beyond) 300 words(Sometimes a bit longer, but it won't hurt...)Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.comBlogger294125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-77820659841213838932019-12-09T11:29:00.002-08:002019-12-09T11:30:16.683-08:00Why voting statistics matter in this general election<p>We need to keep a close eye on voting statistics in the forthcoming general election because, arguably, a general election has been rigged before, in 2005.
<p>In early 2001, postal voting on demand was legalised by Tony Blair’s government, whereas previously any elector wishing to vote by mail had to make a representation to their constituency’s registration officer.
<p>In the general election of May 2001, postal votes, in terms of raw numbers, made up just under a half of Labour’s majority over the Conservatives.
<p>When the 2005 general election came around, however, our attention was diverted elsewhere – to the war in Iraq and its questionable legality. According to the House of Commons Library briefing paper “UK election statistics: 1918-2015”, there were almost 4 million postal votes counted, with Labour’s majority over the Tories – again in terms of raw numbers – being 0.77 million. In the Parliament elected by this poll, Gordon Brown would sign the UK up to the Lisbon Treaty, which was the discredited EU Constitution in rejigged form.
<p>As the “Zombie Parliament” has taught us, the EU’s placemen will stop at nothing to frustrate the democratic process. Just as Jo Cox’s tragic murder was used to try to derail the EU Membership referendum, so we need to watch out for a similar atrocity or a declaration of war between now and the election that will be used to try to deflect our attention from abuses of the electoral process.
<p><em>Gerry Dorrian</em>
<p>Further reading: <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brexit-Democracy-Reclaiming-suffrage-political-ebook/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=brexit+and+democracy+gerry+dorrian&qid=1575919597&sr=8-1"><em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming Full and Equal Suffrage from the Political Cartel</em> by Gerry Dorrian at Amazon</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-67261620840260146422019-11-04T12:09:00.001-08:002019-11-04T12:09:29.996-08:00Grenfell Tower: letter to Daily Express<p><em>The Daily Express were kind enough to print a letter I wrote to them about the true cause of the Grenfell Tower catastrophe. This is the full text of the letter.</em>
<p>Fire chiefs may have questions to answer regarding the loss of life at Grenfell Tower (“So many lives could have been saved”, 31/10/2019). But we need to remember the root cause of the carnage: the cladding voided the block’s fireproofing, which in turn turned London Fire Brigade’s advice to stay put into a death sentence.
<p>We need to remember that the cladding was commissioned by upper-middle-class types from the surrounding Kensington & Chelsea area who had elbowed their way onto the block’s management committee, probably because they thought the building an unsightly carbuncle in their area. The blue paint on the cladding added nothing to the lives of working-class people who lived there, it just made the block more pleasant to look at. It would not have occurred to the sharp-elbowed interlopers to have done something so pedestrian as inform the Fire Brigade of their intentions – if they had, the resulting investigation would have found the cladding not only unsafe, but applied contrary to the US manufacturer’s warning not to apply it higher than fire service ladders could reach.
<p>I can only hope that both survivors and relatives of victims, already struggling with trauma and grief, will come to see the true cause of this terrible tragedy.
<p><em>Gerry Dorrian</em>
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-40350305134052444632017-06-16T02:00:00.000-07:002017-06-16T03:07:22.460-07:00where does the buck stop for Grenfell Tower?<p>I’m not a fan of London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan because I’m not a fan of the contemporary Labour party, but I think I have something to add to the debate about who is to blame for the flammable cladding on Grenfell Tower. I was a chair of a housing association management committee in Scotland and have been involved in tendering processes for similar amounts as have been said to change hands for the Grenfell cladding.
<p>Glasgow is a far smaller city than London, but even so the Lord Provost – our equivalent of a mayor – was not involved in the tendering process. No politicians from any party or at any level were involved. And they knew better than to ask to be involved, as even the request would have exposed us, the management committee members, to accusations of being vulnerable to political influence.
<p>According to the Evening Standard, a former chair of the firm acting as landlord for Grenfell Tower, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/grenfell-towers-management-company-who-are-kctmo-what-other-properties-have-they-worked-on-a3565311.html">stepped down because of “concerns” about how the firm was being run</a>, as did residents who were part of the management committee. It is with the commercial arm of this firm that the investigation into the fire must begin, and also the investigation into the tendering process, which must also have the remit to inquire as to whether management committee members had the latitude not to accept the lowest amount tendered.
<p>Then the investigation must go to the firm which supplied the cladding, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4609428/The-luxurious-lifestyle-cladding-firm-couple.html">Harley Facades</a>. Did this firm use “green” legislation to bypass safety concerns, or did it flog KCTMO the cheapest stuff it had lying around claiming it would win green brownie points with the council? How many more lives are presently endangered by such green issues?
<p>And finally there is the number of dead. Do either Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council or KCTMO know or care how many people were actually living in its property? I ask because the whole nightmare could be a parable of the fate of working-class people in the face of the Establishment, crammed into a concrete box and forgotten. And at the end, the dead have only one right: to be remembered.
<p>Gerry Dorrian
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-46554353877139367792017-06-15T23:40:00.000-07:002017-06-15T23:40:58.849-07:00"Brexit and Democracy": table of contents<p>Table of contents for <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brexit-Democracy-Reclaiming-suffrage-political-ebook/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497594849&sr=8-1&keywords=brexit+and+democracy"><em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel</em></a>:
<p><strong>Part 1: Antecedents of the European integration process</strong>
<p>Chapter 1: Unity as foundational myth
<p>Chapter 2: The Franco-Prussian War
<p>Chapter 3: War and fascism
<p>Chapter 4: Supranational pan-Germanism
<p>Chapter 5: Totalitarian convergence
<p>Chapter 6: Heidegger’s diaspora
<p><strong>Part 2: European integration in re-action: the closed society and its beneficiaries</strong>
<p>Chapter 7: The return of convergence
<p>Chapter 8: British entry to the Common Market
<p>Chapter 9: Currency and convergence
<p>Chapter 10: Towards catastrophe via crisis
<p>Chapter 11: The UK political cartel tightens
<p>Chapter 12: Was the 2005 general election rigged?
<p>Chapter 13: The road to referendum
<p>Chapter 14: The EU referendum: tragedy and backlash
<p>Chapter 15: The relationship between democracy and fascism
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brexit-Democracy-Reclaiming-suffrage-political-ebook/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497088156&sr=8-1&keywords=Brexit+and+democracy">Buy <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> from amazon.co.uk (or your local Amazon store).</a>
<p><a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/728594">Buy <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> from Smashwords.</a>
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Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-53255939691541366822017-06-12T03:52:00.000-07:002017-06-12T03:53:45.822-07:00Heidegger's arithmetic<p>Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, has been feted as winning a great victory – with The New Statesman, for example, publishing a piece called <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/june2017/2017/06/jeremy-corbyn-has-won-great-victory-and-so-have-liberal-democrats"><em>Jeremy Corbyn won a great victory</em></a>. His party won 262 seats and Theresa May’s Conservatives won 318.
<p>Has the Left lost all grasp of arithmetic? Unfortunately not. What we are seeing is a political arithmetic from a very sinister time in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany: Heidegger’s arithmetic, from his 1927 work <em>Being and Time</em>.
<p>Martin Heidegger was, famously, “Hitler’s philosopher”. He rebelled against the phenomenology of his mentor, Edmund Husserl, which allowed each person an equal right in collectively constructing the world; instead Heidegger divided humanity into two: the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”.
<p>The authentic are the people who, in Heidegger’s view, matter: the elite, even the Master Race. Their thoughts count for much more than the inauthentic, the rest of humanity in an amorphous herd whom Heidegger calls “the they”, whom Heidegger accuses of the tendency to establish a dictatorship of “inconspicuousness and unascertainability”. It’s not difficult to see how those eager to apply a veneer of intellectual respectability to that franchise of street-fighting gangs called the Nazis saw something they could use in Heidegger’s philosophy and adopted it as their ideology. The classification of the inauthentic as the Other, the they, powered the Holocaust.
<p>In 1940-41 Jean-Paul Sartre read Being and Time while a prisoner of war, and would use it as an inspiration for his existential work <em>Being and Nothingness</em>, in which he retains Heidegger’s classification of “the they”, defining it again as the Other, an amorphous mass that “disintegrates” when one tries to understand it.
<p>Sartre’s importance is not so much in what he wrote, but in that his work provided a bridge for Heidegger’s influence to travel from the Right to the Left – Jacques Derrida, for example, was dismissive of Sartre as “merely another metaphysician”, but his breakthrough and most influential work, <em>On Grammatology</em>, is full of references to Heidegger.
<p>There was a golden age of socialism in Britain. It started in 1948 when Clement Attlee’s government instituted full and equal suffrage with the Representation of the People Act 1948 and founded its corollary, the NHS. And it was ended when the OPEC oil crisis of the mid-1970s swallowed up the money that makes any golden age possible. In the wake of this, the socialists who followed used Heidegger-ridden logic to justify their rejection of democracy as a means to pursue the socialist agenda, a justification that was, in their eyes, intensified when the OPEC-fuelled crisis reached full penetration and swept Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 after the “winter of discontent”.
<p>That’s when Heidegger’s arithmetic became as fully accepted by the hard Left as it had been by the Nazis – not that surprising when you consider politics is a circle, so that as left and right descend below the horizon of democracy they continue to become more distant from the open society, but get closer to each other: see the diagram on the book cover below. So we had Militant running Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, justifying the misery it caused to its own working-class employees by the glories of the Revolution to come: Heidegger’s arithmetic in action.
<p>Heidegger’s arithmetic is also apparent in the attitude of former Home Secretary Diane Abbott sending her son to private school while opposing increasing grammar-school places for working-class children: the offspring of “the they”, the inauthentic, must be denied any opportunity to be able to compete with the children of the elite, the authentic, so as to deny them an intellectual foundation from which they might set out to frustrate the goals of the elite. These goals have never, at any time, had anything to do with enabling the many - the working-class, "the they", to better their lot.
<p>And Heidegger’s arithmetic shines through in Jeremy Corbyn’s composure as a general who has won a great victory: his hard-Left MPs are the elite, and any MPs opposing them, even if they are numerically superior, are inauthentic and therefore their numbers count as nothing.
<p>Nothing is so toxic to Heidegger’s arithmetic as full and equal suffrage democracy, which is why Corbyn has radicalised a horde of young idealists to oppose democracy by calling for restricting the franchise to those under 60. If they succeed in this it is the beginning of the end for democracy: the next step will be epistocracy, where people have to pass exams before they are deemed able to vote by a state who would only pass those who would vote according to its wishes. At present, the only qualification you need to vote is the capacity to suffer because of the deeds or misdeeds of your government, and this must remain so if you wish to be safe from your government.
<p>If this radicalised cadre manages to decentre full and equal suffrage as a means of deciding who rules, we can only make our opposition to our rulers known by unrest, which runs the risk of sliding into civil war. And that’s why Heidegger’s arithmetic needs to be put into history’s waste disposal unit.
<p><strong>Read more about Heidegger, the risks to democracy, and Brexit</strong>:
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brexit-Democracy-Reclaiming-suffrage-political-ebook/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497088156&sr=8-1&keywords=Brexit+and+democracy">Buy <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> from amazon.co.uk (or your local Amazon store)!</a>
<p><a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/728594">Buy <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> from Smashwords!</a>
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Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-43885256469688768042017-06-10T07:54:00.000-07:002017-06-10T07:55:45.821-07:00Brexit and Democracy is now on Smashwords<p><em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel</em> is now on Smashwords. A detailed survey of Brexit and the historical, philosophical and political issues surrounding it, this is your unmissable Brexit companion!
<ul>
<li>Why did it take the Scottish National Party to start an "avalanche of philosophy" in Britain that finally saw the long-promised EU membership referendum materialise?
<li>What was the 2012 incident that enabled UKIP to put a crack in the political cartel?
<li>Why was nothing done when Otto Kirchheimer started noticing cartelisation in European political parties in the mid-1950s?
<li>Did the Marshall Plan unwittingly lay the groundwork for the eventual formation of the European Union?
<li>What is the relationship between the German and Italian unification processes and the EU?
<li>Did nation states start to evolve from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, or from the 1555 Peace of Augsberg?
</ul>
<p><a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/728594">Buy <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> from Smashwords!</a>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brexit-Democracy-Reclaiming-suffrage-political-ebook/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497088156&sr=8-1&keywords=Brexit+and+democracy">Buy <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> from amazon.co.uk (or your local Amazon store)!</a>
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Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-79422247650258558472017-06-07T03:48:00.003-07:002017-06-07T09:31:21.558-07:00"The European Union"<p>The European Union may have been officially founded by the Maastricht Treaty in 1991, but the idea has been around for a very long time. In fact, the phrase "The European Union" was first used by Charles Irenée Castel, a former soldier who became a priest and was known as l'Abbé de Saint-Pierre (and gets a mention in Tolstoy's <em>War and Peace</em>).
<p>The European Union, according to Saint-Pierre, would be modelled on the cooperation between the German principalities, which were then effectively, if not formally, as related as England, Wales and Scotland are now. That is to say, in our idiom, it would be a supranational superstate. Saint-Pierre said heads of state would have their authority over their citizens guaranteed, <em>but</em>, right afterwards and in contradiction, he proposed that the Diet (a proto-Brussels) would be the "supreme judge" of its members' rights and that any member breaking a treaty would be treated as a "public enemy".
<p>So there you have it: the European Union <em>in ovo</em>, including the name. The section of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre's book <em>Project pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe</em> first mentioning The European Union is in the photo below, courtesy of the French National Library:
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<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brexit-Democracy-Reclaiming-suffrage-political-ebook/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496817366&sr=1-6&keywords=brexit+and+democracy">Read more in <em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel</em> - out now for Kindle!</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-29580356336560217362017-06-06T10:26:00.003-07:002017-06-06T10:26:36.666-07:00Bibliography from "Brexit and Democracy"<p>Here is the bibliography from <em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel</em>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=nav_signin?ie=UTF8&qid=1496750611&sr=8-2&keywords=brexit+and+democracy&">Go to Amazon to buy your copy now!</a>
<p><b>UK statutory material</b>
<p>Representation of the People Act 1918
<p>Representation of the People Act 1948
<p>Representation of the people Act 2000
<p>Electoral Administration Act 2006
<p>European Union Referendum Act 2015
<p>
<p>Hansard, <i>Schuman Plan</i>, house of Commons Debate 13 June 1950, vol 476 columns 35-47
<p>Hansard, <i>Council of Europe</i>, House of Commons debate, 13 November 1950, vol 480, columns 1392-1504
<p>Hansard, <i>EEC Membership (Referendum) Debate</i>, 11 March 1975, column 305
<p>Hansard, <i>European Treaty Referendum</i>, 21 January 2008, columns 1324-1325
<p>Hansard, <i>European Union Referendum Act 2015</i>, First Reading, House of Commons, 28 May 2015, column 246
<p>Hansard, <i>EU Referendum Rules debate</i>, 5 September 2016 column 2WH
<p>House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, <i>Child sexual exploitation and the response to localised grooming: Second Report of Session 2013-2014, Volume II – Oral and Written Evidence</i>, The Stationery Office 2013
<p>House of Commons Defence Committee, <i>Iraq: An Initial Assessment of Post-Conflict Operations, Sixth Report of Session 2004-05</i>, The Stationery Office 2005
<p>House of Lords European Union Committee, <i>European Defence Agency: Report with Evidence</i>, The Stationery Office 2005
<p>House of Lords European Union Committee, <i>Report on 2014-2015</i>, The Stationery Office 2015
<p>House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution,<i> Waging War: Parliament’s role and responsibility, Volume I</i>, The Stationery Office 2006
<p>Chilcott, Sir John, <i>The Iraq Enquiry (The Chilcott Report), Vol 1</i>, National Archives 2016
<p>Chilcott, Sir John, <i>The Iraq Enquiry (The Chilcott Report), Vol 2</i>, National Archives 2016
<p>Ely, VN and Smith, JMA, <i>Memorandum of Dissent</i>, in Halsbury et al, <i>Committee on Decimal Currency</i>, 1963
<p>Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, Master of the Rolls, <i>Who are the Masters Now?</i> Judiciary of England and Wales 2011
<p>Memo from Lord Kilmuir to Edward Heath, 14 December 1960, in Gowland, David and Turner, Arthur,<i> Britain and European Integration 1945-1988: A Documentary History</i>, Routledge 2000
<p>Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry Executive Summary, The Stationery Office 2013
<p>Audickas, Lukas, Hawkins, Oliver and Cracknell, Richard, <i>UK Election Statistics: 1918-2015</i>, House of Commons Library 2016
<p>Miller, Vaughne, <i>The 1974-75 UK Renegotiation of EEC Membership and Referendu</i>m, House of Commons Library Briefing Paper no. 7253 (13 July 2015)
<p>Tetteh, Edmund, <i>Election Statistics: UK 1918-2007</i>, House of Commons Library 2008
<p>Uberoi, Elise, <i>European Union Referendum 2016</i>, House of Commons Library 2016
<p>White, Isobel, <i>Postal Voting and Electoral Fraud 2001-2009</i>, House of Commons Library 2012
<p>HM Government, <i>Why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK</i>, 2016
<p>UK Government and Parliament, <i>EU Referendum Rules triggering 2nd EU referendum</i>, 2016 (petition)
<p>Labour Party General Election Manifesto February 1974
<p>Britain Forward, not Back: The Labour Party Manifesto 2005
<p>A Future Fair for All: The Labour Party Manifesto 2010
<p>Invitation to join the Government of Britain: The Conservative Manifesto 2010
<p>Liberal Democrat Manifesto 2010
<p>The Labour Party Manifesto 2015
<p>Liberal Democrats Manifesto 2015
<p>The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015
<p>
<p><b>European and other statutory material</b>
<p>Treaty of Rome, 1957
<p>Single European Act 1985
<p>Treaty on European Union [The Maastricht Treaty], Council of the European Communities/Commission of the European Communities 1991
<p>Treaty of Amsterdam, European Communities 1997
<p>The Future of the European Union (Laeken Declaration, 2001)
<p>Treaty of Nice, European Communities 2001
<p>Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities 2005
<p>Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, Official Journal of the European Union, vol. 50 (17 December 2007)
<p>
<p>ECJ proceedings, Judgement of 31/3/1971 – Case 22/70
<p>
<p>Delors, Jacques, <i>Report on economic and monetary union in the European Community [The Delors Report]</i>, 1989
<p>Hallstein, Walter, <i>Statement by Professor Dr. Walter Hallstein, President of the Commission of the European Economic Community to the European Parliamentary Assembly on 20th March 1958</i>, European Economic Community Commission 1958
<p>Kaczyński, Piotr Maciej, Kurpas, Sabastian and ó Broin, Peadar, <i>Ratification of the Lisbon Treaty: Ireland is not the only problem</i>, European Policy Institutes Network Working Paper n. 18, September 2008
<p><i>Meetings of the Heads of State or Government, Paris 19-21 October 1972</i>, Bulletin of the European Communities No 10 (1972), pp9-26
Werner, Pierre, <i>Report to the Council and the Commission on the realisation by stages of Economic and Monetary Union in the Community (Werner Report)</i>, Council-Commission of the European Communities 1970
<p>
<p>Panagariya, Arvind and Findlay, Ronald. <i>A Political-Economy of Free Trade Areas and Customs Unions</i>, The World Bank 1994
<p>
<p>North Atlantic Treaty (Washington Treaty) of 1949
<p>
<p>
<p><b>Journal articles</b>
<p>Ascher, Abraham and Lewy, Guenter, <i>National Bolshevism in Germany: Alliance of Political Extremes against Democracy</i>, in Social Research vol 23 (1956)
<p>Berman, Sheri, <i>Populism is not Fascism, but it could be a Harbinger</i>, Foreign Affairs November/December 2016
<p>Capitani, Lorenzo, <i>Informed Voting</i>, Philosophy Now issue 116, October/November 2016
<p>Cohen, Deborah and Carter, Philip, <i>WHO and the pandemic flu “conspiracies”</i>, British Medical Journal vol 30 no. 7759 (12 June 2010)
<p>Creery, Janet,<i> Read the fine print first</i>, Peace Magazine vol 10 no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1994)
<p>Farr, Jason, <i>Point:The Westphalian Legacy and the Modern Nation-State</i>, International Social Science Review vol 80 no. 3/4 (2005)
<p>Huzzey, Richard, <i>When is a slave not a slave?</i>, History Today Vol 62 Issue 12 (December 2012)
<p>Jerzak, Connor T, <i>The EU’s Democratic Deficit and Repeated Referendums in Ireland</i>, in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol 27 no. 3 (September 2014)
<p>Kirchheimer, Otto,<i> Notes on the Political Scene in Western Germany</i>, in World Politics vol 6 no. 3 (April 1954)
<p>Kirchheimer, Otto, <i>The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes</i>, Social Research Vol 24 No. 2 (Summer 1957)
<p>Kjaer, Poul F, <i>Law and Order Within and Beyond National Configurations</i>, in Kjaer, Poul F, Teubner, Gunther and Febbrajo, Alberto (eds.), <i>The Financial Crisis in Constitutional Perspective: The Dark Side of Functional Differentiation</i>, Hart 2011
<p>Large, David Clay, <i>A Beacon in the German Darkness: The Anti-Nazi Resistance in West German Politics</i>, in The Journal of Modern History, vol 64 (December 1992, Supplement: Resistance Against the Third Reich)
<p>Low, Alfred D., <i>The Anschluss Movement 1918-1919 and the Paris Peace Conference</i>, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society vol 103, 1974
<p>Moore, NEA, <i>The Introduction of a Decimal Currency in the UK in 1971. Comparisons with the Introduction of a Single European Currency</i>, Economic Papers, no. 111, June 1995
<p>Newman, Philip C, <i>Key German Cartels under the Nazi Regime</i>, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol 62 No. 4 (August 1948)
<p>Siune, Karen, <i>The Danes said NO to the Maastricht Treaty. The Danish EC Referendum of June 1992</i>, in Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol 16 no 1, 1993
<p>Whitfield, Lindsay, <i>The politics of urban water reform in Ghana</i>, in Review of African Political Economy vol 33 no. 109 (September 2006)
<p>
<p>
<b>
Books: Primary sources </b>
<p>Ankersmit, Frank, <i>Manifesto for analytical political history</i>, in Jenkins, Keith, Morgan, Sue and Munslow, Alun, Manifestos for History, Routledge 2007
<p>Arendt, Hannah, <i>On Revolution</i> (1963), Penguin 1990
<p>Bagehot, Walter, <i>The English Constitution</i> (1867), ed. Paul Smith, Cambridge University Press 1991
<p>Benn, Tony, <i>Arguments for Socialism</i> (1979, ed. Chris Mullin), Penguin 1980
<p>Bentham, Jeremy, <i>An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation</i>, Macmillan 1876
<p>Bettenson, Henry and Maunder, Chris, <i>Documents of the Christian Church</i> (Fourth Edition), Oxford University Press 2011
<p>Biesta, Gert, <i>Education after Deconstruction</i>, in Marshall, JD (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004
<p>Bogdanon, Vernor, <i>Eastern Europe</i>, in Butler, David and Ranney, Austin, <i>Referendums around the World: The Growing Use of Direct Democracy</i>, The AEI Press 1994
<p>Bogdanor, Vernon,<i> Social Democracy</i>, in Seldon, Anthony (ed.), <i>Blair’s Britain</i>, Cambridge University Press 2007
<p>Bogdanor, Vernon, <i>The People and the Party System: The referendum and electoral reform in British politics</i>, Cambridge University Press 1981
<p>Bonde, Jens-Peter, <i>From EU Constitution to Lisbon Treaty</i>, Foundation for EU Democracy 2008
<p>Brecht, Bertold, <i>The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui</i>, (1957), trans. George Tabori, Bloomsbury 2013
<p>Brennan, Jason, <i>Against Democracy</i>, Princeton University Press 2016
<p>Buiter, Willem H, <i>Economic, political and institutional prerequisites for monetary union among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council</i>, in MacDonald, Ronald and Al Faris, Abdulrazak (eds.), <i>Currency Union and Exchange Rate Issues: Lessons for the Gulf States</i>, Dubai Economic Council 2010
<p>Bunting, Thomas Percival, <i>The Life of Jabez Bunting Vol I</i>, Longman, Brown, Green, Longman & Roberts 1859
<p>Cawkwell, Thomas W, <i>UK Communication Strategies for Afghanistan</i>, 2001-2014 (2015), Routledge 2016
<p>Christiano, Thomas, <i>The Significance of Public Deliberation</i>, in Bohman, James and Rehg, William, (eds.) <i>Deliberative Democracy</i>, The MIT Press 1997
<p>Churchill, Winston, <i>The Gathering Storm</i> (1948), Houghton Mifflin 1985
<p>Clark, Alan, <i>The Last Diaries: In and Out of the Wilderness</i>, Phoenix 2000
<p>Coffey, Peter, <i>The Economic and Monetary Union and the Euro</i>, in Coffey, Peter (ed.), <i>Europe – Toward the Next Enlargement</i>, Springer 2000
<p>Comte, Auguste, <i>Course of Positive Philosophy</i> (1830), in <i>Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings</i>, ed. Gertrud Lenzer, Transaction 2009
<p>Comte, Auguste, <i>System of Positive Polity</i>, Longmans, Green & Co 1835
<p>Comte, Auguste and Saint-Simon, Henri de, <i>Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of Society</i> (1822), in <i>Auguste Comte and Positivism:The Essential Writings</i>, ed. Gertrud Lenzer, Transaction 2009
<p>Cooke Taylor, W, <i>Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire</i>, Duncan and Malcolm, 1842
<p>Dale, Iain (ed.) <i>Labour Party General Election Manifestos 1900-1997</i> (2000), Routledge 2007
<p>Daly, Eoin and Hickey, Tom, <i>The political theory of the Irish Constitution: Republicanism and the basic law</i>, Manchester University Press 2015
<p>de Bonald, Louis, <i>De la Souverainté, du Pouvoir, des Lois</i> (1830), in <i>Oeuvres</i> Vol 1, 1859
<p>Degras, Jane (ed.), <i>The Communist International 1919-1943 Documents: Volume III, 1929-1943</i>, Royal Institute of International Affairs 1965
<p>Derrida, Jacques, <i>Dissemination</i> (1972)
<p>Derrida, Jacques,<i> Of Grammatology</i> (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press 2016
<p>Derrida, Jacques,<i> Writing and Difference</i> (1967), Routledge 1978
<p>Descartes, René, <i>Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from the Objections and Replies</i> (1642), trans. Michael Moriarty, Oxford University Press 2008
<p>Dickens, Charles, <i>Bleak House</i> (1853), Penguin 1988
<p>Dryzek, John S, <i>Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations</i> (2000), Oxford University Press 2002
<p>Dunleavy, Patrick, <i>Alternative theories of liberal democratic politics: the pluralist-marxist debate in the 1980s</i>, in David Potter et al (eds.), <i>Society and the Social Sciences</i>, Open University Press 1981
<p>Dutschke, Rudi, <i>On anti-authoritarianism</i> in Oglesby, Carl (ed.), <i>The New Left Reader</i>, Grove Press Inc. 1969
<p>Elstub, Stephen, <i>Towards a Deliberative and Associational Democracy</i>, Edinburgh University Press 2008
<p>Engels, Frederick, <i>Introduction to Sigismund Borkheim’s pamphlet, “In Memory of the Blood and Thunder Patriots. 1806-1807”</i> (1887), in <i>Collected Works</i> Vol 26, Lawrence & Wishart 1990
<p>Engels, Frederick, <i>The Chances of the War</i> (1870) in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 22, Lawrence and Wishart 1986
<p>Estlund, David, <i>Why Not Epistocracy?</i> In Reshotko, Naomi (ed.), <i>Desire, Identity and Existence: Essays in honor of T.M. Penner</i>, Academic Printing and Publishing 2003
<p>Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, <i>Addresses to the German Nation</i> (1808), Cambridge University Press 2009
<p>Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, <i>A State within a State</i> (1793), in <i>The Jew in the Modern World: a Documentary History</i>, eds. Paul R Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, Oxford University Press 1995
<p>Gauville, Louis-Henri-Charles de, <i>Journal du Baron de Gauville</i>, Gay 1864
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<p>Gramsci, Antonio, <i>The Problem of Praxis and Intellectual and Moral Reformation (prison notebooks)</i>, in <i>The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935</i>, ed. David Forgacs, New York University Press 2000
<p>Gramsci, Antonio, <i>The Problem of the School</i>, in <i>The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935</i>, ed. David Forgacs, New York University Press 2000
<p>Habermas, Jürgen, <i>Popular Sovereignty as Procedure</i> (1988), in Bohman, James and Rehg, William, (eds.) <i>Deliberative Democracy</i>, The MIT Press 1997
<p>Halévy, Élie, <i>Saint-Simonian Economic Doctrine</i> (1907), in <i>The Era of Tyrannies</i>, Anchor Books 1965
<p>Halévy, Élie, <i>Socialism and the Problem of Democratic Parliamentarianism</i> (1934), in <i>The Era of Tyrannies</i>, Anchor Books 1965
<p>Hegel, GWF, <i>The Philosophy of History</i> (1822), trans J Sibree, Batoche Books 2001
<p>Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, <i>The Science of Logic</i> (1816), trans. George di Giovanni, Cambridge University Press 2010
<p>Heidegger, Martin, <i>An Introduction to Metaphysics</i> (1953), trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Port, Yale University Press 2000
<p>Heidegger, Martin, <i>Being and Time</i> (1927), trans. Joan Stambaugh, University of New York Press 1996
<p>Heidegger, Martin, <i>“Only a God can Save Us”: The Spiegel Interview</i> (1966), in Sheehan, Thomas (ed.), <i>Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker</i>, Transaction 2010
<p>Herder, Johann Gottfried von, <i>Fragments on Recent German Literature</i> (1767) in <i>Herder: Philosophical Writings</i>, trans. Michael N Forster, Cambridge University Press 2002
<p>Herder, Johann Gottfreid von, <i>Kant’s Practical Philosophy</i> (1762-1764), in Kant, Immanuel, <i>Lectures on Ethics</i> (1997), Cambridge University Press 2001, trans. Peter Heath
<p>Herder, Johann Gottfried von, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (c.1793), in Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N Forster, Cambridge University Press 2002
<p>Herder, Johann Gottfried von,<i> Treatise on the Origin of Language</i> (1772), in <i>Herder: Philosophical Writings</i>, trans. Michael N Forster, Cambridge University Press 2002
Hobbes, Thomas, <i>Leviathan</i> (1651), ed.Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press 2003
<p>Husserl, Edmund, <i>Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy</i> (1913), trans F Kersten, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1983
<p>Kissinger, Henry, <i>Diplomacy</i>, Simon & Schuster 1994
<p>Lassalle, Frederick, <i>The Working Man’s Programme</i> (1862), The Modern Press 1884
<p>Lebovics, Herman, <i>Social Conservatism and the Middle Class in Germany, 1914-1933</i>, Princeton University Press 1969
<p>Lepschy, Giulio C, <i>Mother Tongues and other Reflections on the English Language</i>, University of Toronto Press 2002
<p>Lenin, VI, <i>Conspectus of Hegel’s Book “The Science of Logic”</i> (1915), in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 38, Progress Publishers 1976
<p>Lenin, VI, <i>First All-Russia Congress on Adult Education</i> (1919), in <i>Collected Works</i> Vol 29, Progress Publishers 1974
<p>Lenin, VI, <i>What is to be done? Burning Questions of our Movement</i> (1902) in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 5, Progress Publishers 1977
<p>Lenin, VI, <i>What Next? On the tasks confronting the workers’ parties with regard to opportunism and social chauvinism</i>, in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 21
<p>Luther, Martin,<i> On the Jews and their Lies</i> (1543), trans. Bruce Delmont, Lulu 2010
<p>MacMillan, Harold, <i>The MacMillan Diaries Vol 2</i>, ed.Peter Catterall, Macmillan 2011
<p>Mair, Peter, <i>Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy</i>, Verso 2013
<p>Marston, RC, Carli, G, Attali, J. Petty, JR and Solomon, R, <i>Exchange Rate Coordination</i>, in Feldstein, Martin, (ed.), <i>International Economic Cooperation</i>, University of Chicago Press 1988
<p>Marx, Karl, <i>On the Jewish Question</i> (1844), in <i>Collected Works</i> Volume 3, Lawrence & Wishart 2010
<p>Marx, Karl, <i>Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War</i> (1870), in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 22, Lawrence and Wishart 1986
<p>Marx, Karl, <i>The Civil War in France</i> (1871), in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 22, Lawrence and Wishart 1986
<p>Marx, Karl, <i>The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</i>, in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 11, Lawrencde & Wushart 2010
<p>Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, <i>Demands of the Communist Party in Germany</i>, in <i>Collected Works</i> vol 7, Lawrence & Wishart 1977
<p>Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, <i>Manifesto of the Communist Party</i> (1848), in <i>Collected Works</i> Vol 6, Lawrence & Wishart 1987
<p>Michels, Robert, <i>Political Parties: a Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy</i> (1911), trans Eden and Cedar Paul, Batoche Books 2001
<p>Mill, John Stuart, <i>Considerations on Representative Government</i> (1861), Batoche Books 2001
<p>Mill, John Stuart, <i>Utilitarianism and On Liberty</i>, Blackwell 2003
<p>Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, <i>My thoughts</i> (1721-1755)
<p>Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, <i>The Spirit of Laws</i> (1748), Batoche Books 2001
<p>Mussolini, Benito, <i>Al Largo!</i> (1913), in <i>Opera Omnia</i> vol 6, La Fenice 1953
<p>Mussolini, Benito, <i>Contro la Guerra</i> (1914), in <i>Opera Omnia</i> vol 6, La Fenice 1953
<p>Mussolini, Benito, <i>Mezzo Milione di Organizzati sono col Partito Socialista per la Neutralità Assoluta dell’Italia</i> (1914), in <i>Opera Omnia</i> vol 6, La Fenice 1953
<p>Neunreither, Karlheinz, <i>Political Representation in the European Union: A Common Whole, Various Holes, or Just a Hole?</i> in Neunreither, Karlheinz and Wiener, Antje, <i>European Integration after Amsterdam: Institutional Dynamics and Prospects for Democracy</i> (2000), Oxford University Press 2004
<p>Nietsche, Friedrich, <i>On the Genealogy of Morality</i> (1887), Cambridge University Press 2006
<p>Nietzsche, Friedrich, <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None</i> (1993), trans. Adrian del Caro, Cambridge University Press 2006
<p>Oborne, Peter, <i>The Triumph of the Political Class</i>, Pocket Books 2008
<p>Orwell, George, <i>Animal Farm</i>, Penguin 2013
<p>Orwell, George, <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i> (1949), Penguin 1983
<p>Panagiotarea, Eleni, <i>Greece in the Euro: Economic Delinquency or System Failure?</i>, ECPR 2013
<p>Plato, <i>The Republic</i>, trans. Alan Bloom, Basic 1991
<p>Pope Pius XI, <i>Mit Brennender Sorge</i>, 1937
<p>Popper, Karl, <i>The Open Society and its Enemies</i> (1945), Princeton University Press 2013
<p>Popper, Karl, <i>The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science </i>(1952), in <i>Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge</i> (1963), Routledge 2002
<p>Ronson, Jon, <i>Them: Adventures with Extremists</i>, Picador 2001
<p>Russell, Bertrand, <i>A History of Western Philosophy</i> (1946), Unwin 1979
<p>Saint-Pierre, l’Abbé Castel de, <i>Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe</i>, 1713
<p>Saint-Simon, Henri de, <i>Catechisme des Industriels</i>, Imprimerie de Sétier 1823
<p>Saint-Simon, Henri de, <i>De la Réorganisation de la Société Européene</i>, Adrien Egron 1814
<p>Saint-Simon, Henri de, <i>Lettres d’un habitante de Genève à ses Contemporains</i>, 1803
<p>Sapir, Edward, <i>Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech</i> (1921), Dover 2004
<p>Sartre, Jean-Paul, <i>Being and Nothingness</i> (1943), Washington Square Press 1992
<p>Sartre, Jean-Paul, <i>The Humanism of Existentialism</i> (1946), in <i>Essays in Existentialism</i>, Citadel 1965
<p>Scheler, Max, <i>Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values</i> (1916), trans Manfred S Frings and Roger L Funk, Northwestern University Press 1973
<p>Speer, Albert, <i>Inside the Third Reich</i>, Hachette 1969
<p>Spinoza, Benedict de, <i>Theological-Political Treatise</i> (1677), trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, Cambridge University Press 2007
<p>Stalin, JV, <i>Marxism and the National Question</i> (1913), in <i>Works</i> volume 2, Foreign Languages Publishing House 1953
<p>Stalin, JV, <i>The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists</i> (1924), in <i>Works</i>, Vol 6, Foreign Languages Publishing House 1953
<p>Strumia, Francis, <i>Supranational Citizenship and the Challenge of Diversity: Immigrants, Citizens and Member States in the EU</i>, Martinus Nijhoff 2013
<p>Thompson, EP, <i>The Making of the English Working Class</i> (1963), Penguin 1980
<p>Trotsky, Leon, <i>The War and the International</i> (1914), Marxist writers’ Internet Archive 1996
<p>Ure, Andrew, <i>The Pholosophy of Manufactures, or, an exposition of the scientific, moral and commercial economy of the factory system of Great Britain</i>, Charles Knight, 1835
<p>Webb, Paul, <i>Party Responses to the Changing Electoral Market</i> in Britain, in Mair, Peter, Müller, Wolfgang C and Plasser, Fritz, <i>Political Parties and Electoral Change: Party Responses to Electoral Markets</i>, SAGE 2004
<p>Wilks-Heeg, Stuart, <i>Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern</i>, The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd 2008
<p>Wittgenstein, Ludwig, <i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i> (1921), trans. DF Pears and BF McGuinness, Routledge 1974
<p>
<p>
<p><b>Books: Secondary sources</b>
<p>
<p>Abrahams, Fred C, <i>Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe</i>, New York University Press 2015
<p>Allinson, Mark, <i>Germany and Austria 1814-2000</i> (2002), Routledge 2013
<p>Andall, Jacqueline and Duncan, Derek, <i>Memories and Legacies of Italian Colonialism</i> in Andall, Jacqueline and Duncan, Derek (eds.), <i>Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory</i>, Peter Lang 2005
<p>Ariew, Roger and Watkins, Eric,<i> Readings in Modern Philosophy</i>, Vol. 1, Hackett 2000
<p>Atikcan, Ece Özlem, <i>Framing the European Union: The Power of Political Arguments in Shaping European Integration</i>, Cambridge University Press 2015
<p>Bailey, Jonathan, <i>Great Power Strategy in Asia: Empire, Culture and Trade</i>, 1905-2005, Routledge 2007
<p>Barrett, Anthony A, <i>Caligula – The Corruption of Power</i>, Routledge 1981
<p>Bartoli, Angie, <i>Introduction</i>, in Bartoli, Angie (ed.), <i>Anti-racism in Social Work Practice</i>, Critical Publishing 2013
<p>Baugh, Daniel, <i>The Global Seven years War 1754-1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest</i>, Routledge 2014
Birchall, Ian H, Sartre against Stalinism, Bergahn 2004
<p>Black, Jeremy,<i> War in the Nineteenth Century: 1800-1914</i>, Polity 2009
<p>Bobbio, Norberto, <i>Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction</i> (1994), trans. Alan Cameron, Polity Press 2005
<p>Bourrinet, Philippe, <i>The Dutch and Communist Left (1900-68): “Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin” – “All Workers Must think for Themselves!”</i>, Brill 2017
<p>Brovkin, Vladimir, <i>Russia after Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society</i>, 1921-1929, Routledge 1998
<p>Brown, Gordon, <i>Maxton</i>, Fontana 1986
<p>Brunschwig, Jacques and Lloyd, Geoffrey, <i>A Guide to Greek Thought: Major Figures and Trends</i> (2000), trans. Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press 2003
<p>Butler, David and Kavanagh, Dennis, <i>The British General Election of 1997</i>, Macmillan 1997
<p>Butler, David and Kitzinger, Uwe, <i>The 1975 Referendum Second Edition</i>, Macmillan 1996
<p>Chisholm, Michael, <i>Britain on the Edge of Europe</i>, Routledge 1995
<p>Church, William Farr, <i>Richelieu and Reason of State</i>, Princeton University Press 1972
<p>Ciment, James (ed.), <i>Encyclopedia of Conflicts since World War II</i>, Routledge 1999
<p>Clark, Martin, <i>Modern Italy, 1871 to the Present</i> (1984), Routledge 2014
<p>Cloake, JA, <i>Germany 1918-1945</i> (1997), Oxford University Press 2002
<p>Cook, Bernard A, <i>Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia</i>, Volume 1, Routledge 2001
<p>Coppa, Frank J, <i>The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust</i>, Catholic University of America Press 2006
<p>Cowley, Philip, <i>The coalition and Parliament</i>, in Seldon, Anthony and Finn, Mike (eds.), <i>The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015</i>, Cambridge University Press 2015
<p>Cowley, Philip and Kavanagh, Dennis, <i>The British General Election of 2015</i>, Palgrave Macmillan 2016
<p>Cowley, Philip, Stuart, Mark and Trenner-Lyle, Tiffany, <i>The parliamentary party</i>, in Peele, Gillian and Francis, John G (eds.), <i>David Cameron and Conservative Renewal: The limits of modernisation?</i>, Manchester University Press 2016
<p>Creasman, Allyson, <i>Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517-1648</i> (2012), Routledge 2016
<p>Crowson, NJ, <i>Britain and Europe: A political history since 1918</i>, Routledge 2011
<p>Davies, Norman, <i>Europe: A History</i>, Pimlico 1997
<p>Day, Alan John, <i>Directory of European Union Political Parties</i>, John Harper 2000
<p>de Grand, Alexander J, <i>Italian Fascism: Its Origins & Development</i> (1982), University of Nebraska Press 2000
<p>de Sanctis, Fausto Martin, <i>Churches, Temples, and Financial Crimes: A Judicial Perspective of the Abuse of Faith</i>, Springer 2015
<p>Diegman, Albert, <i>American Deconcentration Policy in the Ruhr Coal Industry</i>, in Diefendorf, Jeffry M, Frohn, Axel and Rupieper, Hermann-Josef, <i>American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955</i> (1993), Cambridge University Press 1995
<p>Dietrich, Donald J, <i>Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich: Psycho-Social Principles and Moral Reasoning</i>, Transaction 1988
<p>Dietrich, John, <i>The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy</i>, Algora 2013
<p>Dow, James R, <i>Germany</i>, in Fishman, Joshua A (ed.), <i>Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity</i>, Oxford University Press 1999
<p>Duggan, Christopher and Pieri, Giuliana, <i>The cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians</i>, Manchester University Press 2013
<p>Dyson, Stephen Benedict, <i>The Blair Identity: Leadership and Foreign Policy</i>, Manchester University Press 2009
<p>East, W Gordon, <i>An Historical Geography of Europe</i> (1935), Methuen 1962
<p>Edelstein, Melvin, <i>The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy</i>, Ashgate 2014
<p>Falasca-Zampone, Simonetta, <i>Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy</i>, University of California Press 1997
<p>Felderhof, Marius and Thompson, Penny, <i>Teaching Virtue: The Contribution of Religious Education</i>, Bloomsbury 2014
<p>Ferguson, Niall, <i>The Balance of Payments Question</i>, in Boemeke, Manfred F, Feldman, Gerald D and Gläser, Elisabeth, <i>The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years</i>, Cambridge University Press 1998
<p>Fishburn, Matthew, <i>Burning Books</i>, Macmillan Palgrave 2008
<p>Fleishcacker, Samuel, <i>On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion</i>, Princeton University Press 2004
<p>Ford, Robert and Goodwin, Matthew J, <i>Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain</i>, Routledge 2014
<p>Forster, Anthony, <i>Euroscepticism in Contemporary British Politics: Opposition to Europe in the Conservative and Labour Parties since 1945</i>, Routledge 2002
<p>Fromkin, David, <i>A Peace to End all Peace</i>, Holt 2009
<p>Gaab, Jeffrey S, Munich: Hofbräuhaus & History – Beer, Culture & Politics (2006), Peter Lang 2008
<p>Gallagher, Kevin P, <i>Regaining Control? Capital Controls and the Global Financial Crisis</i>, in Grant, Wyn and Wilson, Graham P, <i>The Consequences of The Global Financial Crisis: The Rhetoric of Reform and Regulation</i>, Oxford University Press 2012
<p>Garau, Salvatore, <i>Fascism and Ideology: Italy, Britain and Norway</i>, Routledge 2015
<p>Gentile, Emilio, <i>Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo</i>, Laterza 1982
<p>Gerassi, John, <i>Using Sartre’s Regressive/Progressive Method against Him: from Guilt to Commitment</i> (1982), in McBride, William L, <i>Sartre and Existentialism: Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde</i> (1997), Routledge 2011
<p>Gerbet, Pierre, <i>The Fouchet Negotiations</i>, in <i>Britain’s Failure to Enter the European Community 1961-63: The Enlargement Negotiations and Crises in European, Atlantic and Commonwealth Relations</i>, Routledge 1997
<p>Gervasoni, Marco, <i>La rivoluzione per fare che? I sindicalisti rivoluzionari italiani e le rappresentazioni del mondo nuovo (stato, mercato, sindicato)</i> in <i>Marginalismo e socialismo nell’Italia liberale 1870-1925</i>, eds. Guidi, Marco EL and Michelini, Luca, Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli 1999
<p>Goldberg, Eric Joseph, <i>Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817-876</i>, Cornell University Press 2006
<p>Gomes, Leonard,<i> German Reparations 1919-1932: A Historical Survey</i>, Palgrave Macmillan 2010
<p>Gori, Annarita, <i>Tra patria e campanile: Ritualità civili e culture politiche a Firenze in età giolittiana</i>, FrancoAngeli 2014
<p>Gowland, David and Turner, Arthur, <i>Reluctant Europeans: Britain and European Integration, 1945-1998</i>, Roultledge 2000
<p>Graebner, Norman A and Bennett, Edward M, <i>The Versailles Treaty and its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision</i>, Cambridge University Press 2011
<p>Gregoe, A James, <i>Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism</i>, University of California Press 1979
<p>Gow, James, <i>The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes</i>, Hurst 2003
<p>Greenhough, Mick, <i>Brave New Europe</i>, ShieldCrest 2016
<p>Groth, Miles, <i>The Influence of Heidegger on Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis</i>, in Ashworth, Peter and Chung, Man Cheung (eds.), <i>Phenomenology and Psychological Science: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives</i>, Springer 2006
<p>Hacioglu, Ü et al, <i>The Globalization of the 2008-2009 Financial Crisis</i>, in Dincer, Hasan and Hacioglu, Ümit, <i>Globalization of Financial Institutions: A Competitive Approach to Finance and Banking</i>, Springer 2014
<p>Hamilton, Richard F, <i>Who Voted for Hitler?</i>, Princeton University Press 1982
<p>Hanley, Catherine, <i>Louis: The French Prince who invaded England</i>, Yale University Press 2016
<p>Harmon, Mark D, <i>The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis</i>, Macmillan 1997
<p>Hassan, Gerry, <i>The Future of “the Global Kingdom”: Post-Unionism, Post-Nationalism and the Politics of Voice</i>, in Westall, Claire and Gardiner, Michael, <i>Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature</i>, Palgrave Macmillan 2013
Hayes, Barry Bascom, <i>Bismarck and Mitteleuropa</i>, Farleigh Dickinson University Press 1994
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<p>
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<p>
<p>Ames, Chris and Norton-Taylor, Richard, <i>Alastair Campbell had Iraq dossier changed to fit US claims</i>, The Guardian, 10 January 2010
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<p>Zeitung für den Deutschen Adel vol 5, 1844
<p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=nav_signin?ie=UTF8&qid=1496750611&sr=8-2&keywords=brexit+and+democracy&">Go to Amazon to buy your copy now!</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-38613872355302559982017-06-06T08:28:00.001-07:002017-06-06T08:28:57.724-07:00"Brexit and Democracy" is now on Kindle<p><em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage</em> is out on Amazon for Kindle. It deals with the following questions:
<ul><li>Was the 2005 general election rigged - and if so, why?
<li>Was Britain's entry to the Iraq war linked to the above?
<li>How did 56 Scottish National Party MPs arriving in Westminster in 2015 make the EU referendum possible?
<li>Why did the Liberal Democrats switch from opposing a referendum to demanding one?
<li>Why was a plan for European monetary union abandoned in the early 1970s?
<li>And what on earth does the cover illustration signify?
</ul>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071WLRFJD/ref=nav_signin?ie=UTF8&qid=1496750611&sr=8-2&keywords=brexit+and+democracy&">Go to Amazon to buy your copy now!</a>
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Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-47021453189635386372017-06-01T23:35:00.001-07:002017-06-01T23:52:02.362-07:00Quotes opening "Brexit and Democracy"<em>These are 6 quotes on democracy and the European integration process with which I open my new book. </em>Brexit and Democracy<em> is due out on Monday 5 June!</em>
<blockquote>It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.</blockquote>
<p>John Stuart Mill, 1861 [1]
<blockquote>I know that you [English] have the art of sticking to the form, and more than the form, of the old traditions while starting them in new directions. While becoming an extremely democratic country, you have kept the form, and more than the form, of an hereditary aristocracy and an hereditary monarchy. It may be that even if your constitution becomes more dictatorial you will preserve the form, and something more than the form, of the parliamentary system.</blockquote>
<p>Élie Halévy, 1934 [2]
<blockquote>Europe finds itself still divided and indeed has never advanced beyond the unity achieved by the legions of the Roman Empire. It has vigorously resisted the attempts made successively by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler to achieve unity by force…Certainly Europe was never, since ancient Greek thinkers first conceived it as a continent and tried to map it, either culturally homogenous or politically one.</blockquote>
<p>W Gordon East, 1962 [3]
<blockquote>There is no chance of a possible EU democracy because there is no European people, no <em>demos</em>. No <em>demos</em>, no democracy – quite simple.</blockquote>
<p>Karlheinz Nunreither, 2000 [4]
<blockquote>The whole European integration experiment, from the Coal and Steel Community on, has been a political wolf dressed in economic sheep’s clothing.</blockquote>
<p>Willem H Buiter, 2010 [5]
<blockquote>Membership of the EU makes Britain literally un-governable, in the sense that no administration elected by the people can govern the country.</blockquote>
<p>Steve Hilton, 2015 [6]
<p>
<p>1. Mill, John Stuart, <em>Considerations on Representative Government</em> (1861), Batoche Books 2001, p184
<p>2. Halévy, Élie, <em>Socialism and the Problem of Democratic Parliamentarianism</em> (1934), in <em>The Era of Tyrannies</em>, Anchor Books 1965, p263
<p>3. East, W Gordon, <em>An Historical Geography of Europe</em> (1935), Methuen 1962 (new epilogue), p437
<p>4. Neunreither, Karlheinz, <em>Political Representation in the European Union: A Common Whole, Various Holes, or Just a Hole?</em> in Neunreither, Karlheinz and Wiener, Antje, <em>European Integration after Amsterdam: Institutional Dynamics and Prospects for Democracy</em> (2000), Oxford University Press 2004, p148
<p>5. Buiter, Willem H, <em>Economic, political and institutional prerequisites for monetary union among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council</em>, in MacDonald, Ronald and Al Faris, Abdulrazak (eds.), <em>Currency Union and Exchange Rate Issues: Lessons for the Gulf States, Dubai Economic Council</em> 2010, p65
<p>6. Hilton, Steve, <em>How the EU makes Britain impossible to govern</em>, Daily Mail 23 May 2016. Available at <a hre="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3603793/Why-quit-EU-Cameron-s-guru-Friend-strategist-Steve-Hilton-breaks-ranks-Brexit-say-Britain-literally-ungovernable-unless-power-self-serving-elite.html#ixzz49wh1Y52c">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3603793/Why-quit-EU-Cameron-s-guru-Friend-strategist-Steve-Hilton-breaks-ranks-Brexit-say-Britain-literally-ungovernable-unless-power-self-serving-elite.html#ixzz49wh1Y52c, accessed 28/5/2017</a>
<p><em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel</em> is due out on Monday 6 June.Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-48966404843630630062017-06-01T06:04:00.000-07:002017-06-01T09:31:30.077-07:00"Brexit and Democracy" is coming!<em>This is the preface to </em>Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel<em>, which I hope to release as an ebook on Monday 5 June 2017.</em>
<p>This tract has come out of some five years of investigating the state of democracy in Britain in particular and Europe in general, after I started analysing general election figures and found an anomaly for 2005. I have written on this before and, if anybody has bought Brexit and Democracy specifically to find out more about this issue, you could go straight to Chapter 12, <em>Was the 2005 general election rigged?</em> Or if you would like more contextual information, you could start at Chapter 11, <em>The UK political cartel tightens</em> or even Chapter 10, <em>Towards catastrophe via crisis</em>.
<p>I have written <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> to be either read through or dipped into. There’s a lot of philosophy in Chapter 6, <em>Heidegger’s diaspora</em>, so you might decide to skip it, but you might find trying to tackle it helps you understand the European integration process and related British politics, especially as far as “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” is concerned.
<p>Whatever your views on European integration, I hope you find <em>Brexit and Democracy</em> a useful resource. But, more than that, I hope you enjoy it.
<p>Gerry Dorrian<br>
Cambridge, June 2017Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-21261105377786595812016-06-25T09:34:00.004-07:002016-06-25T10:01:14.170-07:00Article 50 may be legal, but was Gordon Brown's premiership valid?<p>Tony Blair may not be telling the whole truth about the reasons for his unhappiness with the British EU referendum result.
<p>When he says Brexiteers "dismissed" the Remain campaign as scaremongering, he seems - <em>seems</em> to be buying into the absolutely toxic stream of thinking that questions the intelligence of people who voted for Brexit. For more of this see today's <em>Times</em>, which beside the usual graphs of what the regional votes were, gives the average percentage of people in that area with 5 or more GCSEs at A-c. One woman interviewed this morning complained that she was "highly educated" and didn't understand the case for Leaving. Are the metropolitan intelligentsia preparing to take us down a slippery slope, similar to one that caused a lot of trouble in the 20th century?
<p>I believe Blair is nervous because of a little-mentioned change to electoral law during his first term. The <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/2">Representation of the People Act 2000</a> effectively legalised postal voting on demand by abolishing safeguards built into the Representation of the People Act 1985 (and earlier versions) which stipulated that anybody who wished to vote by post had to give a reason for doing so to the Registration Officer. A House of Commons Library investigation into electoral fraud dates the rise of such fraud to industrial levels to that change.
<p>Jump to the 2005 General Election, and as you can see in the tables below, the number of postal votes cast were a massive 514% of Labour's majority over the Conservative Party, who were the runner up, ie they formed the main Opposition Party. This is in terms of raw numbers and does not take into account our first-past-the-post system, of course, but look at what the raw numbers are: there were 5,500,000 postal votes, and Labour's majority over the Tories was a mere 770,000. (<em>click to enlarge</em>)
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<p>Here's <a href="http://law.slough.info/law44/law44p072.php">what Judge Richard Mawrey QC had to say</a> about electoral fraud in his famous "banana republic" judgement, delivered two months before the 2005 General Election:
<blockquote>Anybody who has just sat through the case I have just tried and listened to the evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising. To assert that ‘the systems already in place to deal with the allegations of electoral fraud are clearly working’ indicates a state not simply of complacency but of denial.
<p>The systems to deal with fraud are not working well. They are not working badly. The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated.</blockquote>
<p>This matters because, after Tony Blair retired, Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon Treaty.
<p>Article 50 of this treaty specifies the procedure to be followed if a country is to secede from the EU. There has been some debate over whether Article 50 is the sole legal way of achieving Brexit. But there may well be another factor to consider here: was Tony Blair's 2005 election win democratically valid? In other words when Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon TReaty, including its Article 50, did he have a legal mandate to represent the people of Great Britain?
<p>Mr Blair - and Mr Brown - have some very interesting times ahead.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/2">Representation of the People Act 2000</a>
<P><a href="http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03667/SN03667.pdf">House of Commons Library: Postal Voting and Electoral Fraud 2001-2009</a> (Isobel White, 2012)
<P><a href="http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP08-12/RP08-12.pdf">House of Commons Library: Election Statistics 1918-2007</a>
<p><a href="http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/RP12-43">House of commons Library Election Statistics 1918-2012</a>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1486254/Postal-votes-an-invitation-to-fraud-says-judge.html">Postal voting an invitation to fraud, says judge</a> Nick Brittien, The Telegraph, April 2005)
<p><a href="http://law.slough.info/law44/law44p072.php">Judge Mawrey's "banana republic" remarks on postal voting fraud in full</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-92195547320193860352016-01-25T06:52:00.001-08:002016-01-25T07:28:32.165-08:00are the SNP "managing" news of 10,000 job losses?<p>I’d hoped to have something a bit cheerier to write about on Burns’ Day, but was alerted to a haemorrhage of jobs by a Scottish friend: 5,500 late last year, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/555cd072-5c54-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3yGHZErzb">forecast to rise to 10,000</a> soon, mostly in Aberdeen. I replied I was surprised that I hadn’t read about losses on such a scale in the national press, to be told "the SNP is managing the news".
<p>The Scottish National Party (SNP), I should say, is the party that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-scotland-32635871">won 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in Westminster</a> (with 50% of the national vote), making them Britain’s third largest party in the process.
<p>Much of their astonishing performance was based on their own predictions of a new oil field discovered off the East Coast of Scotland which, they said, would add a minimum of £15.8 billion to the nation’s coffers, and a maximum of £38.7 billion.
<p>After they had won 94% of the nation’s seats in the Westminster election, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11698662/SNP-dramatically-cuts-pre-referendum-oil-predictions.html">they were forced to admit that the true range was £2.4-£10.8 billion</a>, but it turns out this estimated sum had already been factored into figures available before the election and therefore adds nothing new to anybody’s coffers.
<p>As if the misery caused by unemployment on this (or any) scale were not enough, a brain-drain of highly skilled workers formerly employed in Scottish oil is taking place, taking not just income but know-how out of the country. If they’ve settled down by the time (please God) the industry recovers from what looks like turning into a global financial meltdown, how will they be replaced?
<p>The Scottish National Party is a socialist party. Socialism and nationalism have been mixed before and it didn’t work. Personally, although I’m Scottish I live in England and, much as I value my Scottish heritage, in neither country have I ever voted for a party whose name ends in –NP.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<br>
300 words</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/555cd072-5c54-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3yGHZErzb">Oil explorers predict 10,000 more job losses in North Sea sector</a> Kiran Stacey, Financial Times, October 18 2015
<p><a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/business/14103520.North_Sea_oil_and_gas_firms_warn__More_job_losses_on_the_way/">Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce survey highlights challenges facing North Sea</a> Mark Williamson, The Herald, 26 November 2015
<p><p><a href="SNP dramatically cuts pre-referendum oil predictions">SNP dramatically cuts pre-referendum oil predictions</a> Simon Johnson, Daily Telegraph 25 June 2015
<p><a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/snp-msp-apologises-after-causing-7128348#zBl49TpY0dWswgMj.97">SNP MSP apologises after causing outrage with comments over North Sea oil crisis</a> Catriona Webster, Daily Record, 6 January 2016
<p><a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/nicola-sturgeon-told-quit-blame-7239425#gX65uGWmfQvA7tII.97">Nicola Sturgeon told to quit blame games and deal with oil crisis as union chief demands summit</a> Andy Philip, Daily Record, 25 January 2016
<p><a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/all-about/north-sea-oil#PK5P3sRZR6Lre38X.97">Click here for the Daily Record's rolling news page on North Sea Oil and the unfolding crisis</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-72918312326825533702016-01-12T11:05:00.001-08:002016-01-12T11:52:28.176-08:00Indoctrination? All About History publishes guide to striking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee423/300_word_theses/strike_2_zpspywht6yq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" width="425" alt="indoctrination? you decide!" src="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee423/300_word_theses/strike_2_zpspywht6yq.jpg" /></a></div>
<p></p>
<p>A word can give away so much, and this time the word was “abhorrent”. The word was used by the magazine <a href="http://www.greatdigitalmags.com/view/allabouthistory/4078/all-about-history-issue-34"><em>All about History</em></a>, saying in a spread entitled <em>Protest across history</em> that the "Red Wedge" of socialist musicians toured the UK in 1987 because of "the abhorrent possibility of a third consecutive Conservative government", in an issue of the magazine timed to come out when many doctors are striking and hard-left unions are pledging to come out in support.
<p>It’s the only point in the feature where an emotive adjective is used to describe the object of protests. Here’s a quick summary of just some of the movements or incidents from the feature that appear not to warrant being described as abhorrent or indeed anything else judgemental:
<ul><li>The Imperialist government of India which brought Mahatma Gandhi into conflict with it ( resulting in the Salt March, 12 March 1930)</li>
<li>Rosa Parkes being ordered to vacate her seat for a white person in Montgomery, Alabama (Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1 December 1955-20 December 1956)</li>
<li>Racists from the US who spawned the Black Power movement (Black Power salute, 1968 Olympics)</li>
<li>Homophobes from New York City Council who closed the Stonewall Inn (Stonewall Inn riots, 28 June 1969)</li>
<li>Apartheid in South Africa (Soweto School Uprising, 16 June 1976)</li>
<li>The Philippines’ murderous Marcos regime (People Power Revolution, 1983-86)</li>
<li>Suppression of democracy and democrats in China (Tiananmen Square Protests (15 April-4 June 1989)</li>
<li>Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq in the face of a million-strong protest (Iraq War potests, 15 February 2003)</li>
<li>The police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (Ferguson Riots, 9 August 2014)</li></ul>
<p>The next spread deals with <em>How to go on strike</em> and gives a pictorial guide to the Miners’ Strike, although there are several facts missing. The very first window is entitled <em>Hold a Ballot</em>, but although we learn the legalities strikers must observe before going out, there’s no mention that the National Union of Mineworkers(NUM) held two national strike ballots in 1982 and one in 1983 it lost all three, and had to resort to holding ballots on a region-by-region basis and concluding that the activist-enforced victories added up to a mandate for a national strike, which was illegal both under UK laws and the NUM’s own constitution, leading people both within and outwith the NUM to conclude that the strike was more about trying to spark a regime-changing revolution than fighting for admittedly bad pay and conditions. Neither do we get the chance to <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption-1853-to-2011">read that there were 989 coalmines</a> employing 502,000 people in 1964, the year Labour’s Harold Wilson started his first stretch as Prime Minister (with the Tories’ Edward Heath holding the post 1970-74) and 219 mines employing 242,000 people in 1979, when James Callaghan, having taken over following Wilson’s resignation in 1976, lost the election to Margaret Thatcher. Nor, unforgiveably, is there any mention of David Wilkie, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/01/miners-strike-taxi-driver-killed-1984"> the taxi driver murdered by two strikers</a>, Reginald Hancock and Russell Shankland, because he was taking a non-striking miner to work. The only mention of violence is:
<blockquote>Acts of violence could alienate some of your supporters. Getting thrown in jail can help gain sympathy to your cause, but you can’t stand on the picket line when under lock and key.</blockquote>
<p>And on the strike’s end, the magazine counsels:
<blockquote>it is important to know when a battle is lost. Cut your losses and you may return another day to win the war.</blockquote>
<p>Some pages on – and significant given Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/nov/25/john-mcdonnell-mao-zedong-little-red-book-commons-spending-review">chucking Mao’s Little Red Book</a> at Chancellor George Osbourne – is a Lonely Planet-style guide to Maoist China which, while not quite a celebration, mentions that Chinese people "die in their millions" under Mao’s leadership, but leaves out the scale: at least 50 million people, many more than Hitler and Stalin combined. A little later comes an article entitled <em>What if Trotsky had come to power?</em>, which again is not a hagiography, but is remarkable given the Trotskyist tendencies of Labour’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his followers.
<p>Magazines are often compiled over the course of weeks if not months, but the BMA strike was decided on in mid-November, which would have given politically-skewed personnel ample time to partially clear the decks and produce an overtly political "bookazine", printed on glossy paper and with lots of illustrations, that would be especially attractive to young people (David Butt, Group Managing Director of Imagine Publishing, <em>All About History</em>’s parent group, states the company <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/opinion/ian-burrell-the-publisher-of-bookazines-hopes-his-reliable-unstuffy-medium-will-appeal-to-parents-9947433.html">took on many former Ladybird illustrators</a>").
<p>For this reason, I advise you to buy <a href="http://www.greatdigitalmags.com/view/allabouthistory/4078/all-about-history-issue-34"><em>All About History</em> issue 034</a> for a rare insight an how the wider educational establishment is presenting a skewed narrative to younger people in order to co-opt them as footsoldiers in the war to right what they perceive as being history’s wrongs.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<em>
<p><strong>Recources</strong>
<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption-1853-to-2011">Historical coal data: coal production, availability and consumption 1853 to 2014</a>, gov.co.uk - click link to open spreadsheet
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/nov/25/john-mcdonnell-mao-zedong-little-red-book-commons-spending-review">McDonnell's great leap forward puts Osborne one step ahead</a> John Grace, The Guardian, 25 November 2015
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/01/miners-strike-taxi-driver-killed-1984">From the archive, 1 December 1984: Taxi driver killed by striking miners</a> Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, December 2014
<p><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/opinion/ian-burrell-the-publisher-of-bookazines-hopes-his-reliable-unstuffy-medium-will-appeal-to-parents-9947433.html">Ian Burrell: The publisher of 'bookazines' hopes his reliable, unstuffy medium will appeal to parents everywhere</a> Ian Burrell, The Independent, December 2014
<p><a href="http://www.imagine-publishing.co.uk/">Imagine Publishing homepage</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/"All about History Homepage</a>
<p><a href="http://www.greatdigitalmags.com/view/allabouthistory/4078/all-about-history-issue-34">All about History Issue 34</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-78018398557112112392016-01-11T08:30:00.001-08:002016-01-11T08:32:15.810-08:00some estates need bulldozed, but they sink because of people<p>David Cameron’s vow to take the bulldozer to sink estates applies to England, but I thought some lessons from my homeland might prove a cautionary tale for him.
<p>In Glasgow, there was a much-trumpeted slum clearance project in the 1950s. I’m sure it was proposed for the best of reasons, but what it turned into was an exercise in social cleansing, in that when the slums were knocked down – and they did need knocking down – working-class people were moved out of the city centre and relocated at its periphery. Talk about deconstruction at work!
Unfortunately, not all went well in the new estates, and for a simple reason: the same people who made the slums worse than they needed to be turned the new estates into sink estates.
<p>The borderline and more-than-borderline psychopaths who keep people divided and tied up in crises are fireproof: at best landlords are scared of confronting them, and at worst they are invaluable to landlords because they prevent effective tenants’ committees to form and stay stable long enough to hold said landlords’ feet to the fire.
<p>This is, as I say, a Glasgow story, but I would be very surprised if it were just a Glasgow story.
<p>The millionaire songwriters of Squeeze, who changed the lyrics of <em>Cradle to the Grave</em> to send a message to the Prime Minister on the welfare State, might have been lucky enough to get out of council housing before drugs took hold, more in some areas than in others. But I lived through it, so please forgive me for my lack of misty-eyed nostalgia. To make things worse, Glasgow Housing Authority (later Glasgow Housing Association) was so fiscally incontinent as to run up almost a billion pounds in debt, meaning it could do nothing to upgrade its stock, and GHA’s leader was forced to admit that nobody who could afford to live elsewhere was living in its stock. Again I’d be surprised if this were purely a Glasgow story, even if the scale of folly is unique.
<p>Many housing estates do need bulldozing, because they were built not out of respect for human families but along the lines of battery farms, confining the maximum number of voters in the minimum space. But beware agenda contamination: will the new houses be smaller so there’s more of them, to disguise the overpopulation crisis arising from open-door immigration? Will the input of EU money be trumpeted in order to influence the result of the referendum and settlements thereafter?
<p>The ball’s in your court, Prime Minister.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian</em>
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-15967925999396633282016-01-02T12:33:00.004-08:002016-01-02T12:41:30.970-08:00Sherlock and the BBC's war on plot<p>Since I refuse to fund the media wing of a paedophile ring – ie I don’t pay the BBC Licence fee – I had to wait until today to watch the <em>Sherlock</em> New Year Special.
It was good. Better than that, it was great, done in the definitive style of Granada’s <em>The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</em> starring Jeremy Brett, the definitive Holmes, with a gothic mystery it seemed only Holmes could solve, with witty references to Watson’s publication of Holmes’ adventures in <em>The Strand</em>.
<p>Then suddenly and inexplicably we are in the present day on board a private jet and Holmes is delivering an impassioned defence of recreational use of illegal drugs. How depressingly BBC.
The theme of the episode was women’s rights, particularly in the context of the invisibility of women in the late 19th century.
<p>Really? Wasn’t this show broadcast by the same BBC that dropped former <em>Countryfile</em> presenter Miriam O’ Reilly like a hot potato when she started making noises about misogyny and ageism in the Corporation? That has form in hiring pretty young female current affairs presenters and weather-girls then throwing them on the trash heap when they no longer look like Barbie? That forced Martine McCutcheon, while in Eastenders, to do a lingerie photoshoot for lads’ mag FHM without a female chaperone?
<p>Although the programme aired at 9pm on New Years’ Day, right on the watershed, there were several explicit scenes of suicide, which will be watched by teenage fans throughout the iplayer availability slot. Is this really appropriate?
<p>The theme of suicide was part of a postmodern thread going through the program drawing attention to the fiction-within-a-fiction gothic tale within the “real-life” tale. As soon as I worked this out I saw the connection with the theme of Santa Claus recurring throughout the dreams-within-dreams thread of the inspirational Dr Who 2014 Christmas Special Last Christmas – and it turns out both episodes were produced by the same man, Stephen Moffatt. Is there such poverty of talent within the BBC that they have to recycle old plotlines?
<p>Postmodernism, the view that there are no facts except those things we decide (ie the Establishment decides for us) are facts, and there is no right and wrong except those things we decide (is the Establishment decides for us) are right and wrong, but when used to underpin plot so heavily it allows a war against plot that amounts to an excuse for lazy writing and producing.
<p>And in the last analysis, given the problems the world faces at the moment, it’s salutary to remind ourselves that people who believe in facts and that they are on the side of right will always win against people who have surrendered their powers of discernment to hypocritical Establishmentarian bureaucracies like the BBC.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/communications/women-in-news-and-current-affairs-broadcasting/WNCABEvidence.pdf">Women in News and Public Affairs Broadcasting</a> House of Lords Select Committee, Miriam O' Reilly's evidence begins from p171
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-37518891919748514032015-12-24T14:41:00.001-08:002015-12-24T14:41:32.796-08:00Call the Midwife and the bleak road to Bethlehem<p>In Christmas Eve’s <em>Daily Mail</em>, Libby Purves writes a heartwarming piece about the <em>Call the Midwife Christmas Special</em> and how the series as a whole provides an island of emotional comfort in the cynical ocean that modern life has become.
<p>It would be cynical of me, therefore, to point out that Purves, who predicts that BBC’s <em>Call the Midwife</em>’s Christmas Special will outperform ITV’s rival <em>Downton Abbey</em> offering, has been a BBC radio presenter since the 1970s and is using the article to curry favour with her managers.
<p>But there’s a whole further level of cynicism to go to. <em>Call the Midwife</em> seems not just to be an evocation of a fondly-remembered past but also a reflection of how the Establishment works, in that it depicts middle-class professionals doling out largesse to a poverty-stricken and prejudice-ridden populace.
<p>In fairness to the programme makers, that's not a million miles away from how the healthcare Establishment sees itself. A friend’s mother, as a staff-nurse in the 1960s, was reprimanded for “socialising with care assistants”, the latter being traditionally drawn from more working-class backgrounds as the professionals. In the 1980s as a student nurse myself, I had to endure a lecture from a ward-sister on how people from my part of Glasgow’s East End were uneducated, feckless and had too many children. Nowadays it becomes harder and harder for people of working-class backgrounds to become nurses as the entry level qualification is a degree – heaven knows why – and when was the last time you were treated by a senior doctor with an inner-city accent?
<p>And sometimes the programme-makers’ own prejudices show through the slick production, now that the storyline has moved beyond Jennifer Worths original memoirs. For example, in the 2014 Christmas Special, we see a mother-and-baby home for unmarried mothers where the care standards are appalling. The doctor comments, “these places used to be run by charities, then they were taken over by the council”. In fact, the original National Health Service White Paper of 1944 envisaged control of services on the ground by local and borough councils, but with the 1946 National Health Service Act Aneurin Bevan expropriated the councils – and therefore the councillors and the electorates who voted for them – in order to nationalise the whole thing and place it under the control of predominantly unelected officials, ground-level services being entrusted to local health authorities, now trusts and clinical commissioning groups, which were and are almost completely outside of democratic control and oversight. The subtext of the doctor’s comment was, I think, that democracy was not the proper system from which to run services that reach out to “ordinary people”, as I believe we of the non-elite are now called.
<p>I suppose this year’s <em>Call the Midwife Christmas Special</em> will provide an island of warm fuzziness in the bleak ocean of exclusion we all now founder in, and sometimes that’s what the doctor ordered. Programmes like <em>Call the Midwife</em> manipulate our brain chemistry to produce a sense of supported catharsis – a good cry, in other words.
But sometimes it’s time to put down the tissues and see the world as it really is. As Mary and Joseph discovered on the bleak road to Bethlehem, the world is cold and unforgiving, and nobody comes to mitigate this. Sometimes the solution can only be that we have to create warmth and forgiveness by ourselves, because when nobody comes then each individual has to ponder whether it is he or she that has to act.
<p>I hope you manage to draw what warmth and forgiveness you can from whatever source you can find this season. As the sun sets on freedom and democracy the road ahead is bleak, and I hope we find each other in the coming year.
Resources
<a href0"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3372735/A-magical-reminder-time-need-really-felt-cared-Call-Midwife-set-Christmas-Day-ratings-learn-bygone-era.html">A magical reminder of a time when those in need really felt cared for: As Call The Midwife is set to top Christmas Day ratings, we can learn something from a bygone era</a> by Libby Purves, Daily Mail 24 December 2015
<a href0"http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06tp68g">Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2015</a> BBC webpage
<a href0"http://www.sochealth.co.uk/national-health-service/the-sma-and-the-foundation-of-the-national-health-service-dr-leslie-hilliard-1980/a-national-health-service/">A National Health Service</a> White Paper of 1944
<a href0"http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1946/81/pdfs/ukpga_19460081_en.pdf">National Health Service Act, 1946</a>Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-19049912324981602602015-12-03T06:05:00.000-08:002015-12-03T06:07:13.239-08:00was Hilary Benn also referring to fascism at the British Establishment's heart?<p>There’s no denying the power with which Hilary Benn wrapped up his Syrian war speech, summarising why Britain should go to war and at the same time reminding his Labour colleagues that they are the inheritors of a proud tradition of facing down fascists.
<p>But was the Shadow Foreign Secretary also referring to fascism elsewhere apart from Syria? I ask because the man whom the coda seemed to be directed against most, Jeremy Corbyn, took the position of Labour leader after an election in which there was no defined electorate, which would seem to be the sine qua non of any democratic process. Instead, you paid your three quid and you got your vote, leading to a satire-transcending farce in which even <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/21/ned-the-cat-votes-corbyn-labour-leader-llamas">a journalist’s pet cat was sent a voting paper</a>.
<p>Significantly, a large number of Conservative party members voted for Corbyn, with the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> leading the charge in a strategy they claimed would <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/jul/16/telegraph-tory-votes-jeremy-corbyn">"destroy the Labour Party"</a>, in a move that many Telegraph readers found a step too far, one writing:
<blockquote>Isn’t anyone feeling just a little queasy at a mainstream newspaper calling for a democratic election to be undermined and compromised?</blockquote>
<p>I believe that the Telegraph, the Tories’ in-house paper, was lying about its motives. One key characteristic of the 2015 General Election was how similar the three main party leaders sounded (before the Lib Dems’ parliamentary collapse): in particular, on the subjects of open-door immigration and integration, David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg each became a Nigel Farage mini-me.
<p>Suddenly, Miliband having fallen on his sword, Jeremy Corbyn comes out of the political outback to win the Labour Party leadership, his job to show the faithful that there really is a difference between the Labour Party and the Tories, in an “election” that both of these parties, Parliament’s biggest, participated. In order to keep the Labour party faithful on-board, it was imperative for them to believe that Corbyn represented a different sort of politics, and it was imperative to get the Conservative party faithful behind him to mitigate the effect of labour democrats upon the election. This, I believe, was the Telegraph’s true intention.
<p>The Labour Party leadership election was an example, I believe, of the political cartel in action. This is a system whereby which party is in power takes second place to the “right people” the chosen few from the three main parties, being re-elected. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s adviser during the PM's first term, took this even further in the Sunday Times and referred to our system as “a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite who are in power no matter the electoral outcome”.
<p>So when Hilary Benn referred to the Labour Party’s tradition of facing down fascists, I have to wonder whether he is referring to the expropriation of the democratic process by figures on both his benches and those opposite. If he is, I hope he’s prepared to seek out friends among democrats of all political shades, as he’ll need them.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmhansrd/cm151202/debtext/151202-0005.htm">Read Hilary Benn's closing remarks at Hansard (begins on column 486)</a>
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/21/ned-the-cat-votes-corbyn-labour-leader-llamas">Ned the cat votes Corbyn for Labour leader – but llama family misses out</a> - Aisha Gani, The Guardian, 21 August 2015
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/jul/16/telegraph-tory-votes-jeremy-corbyn">Why the Telegraph's call for Tory votes for Jeremy Corbyn will backfire</a> - Roy Greenslade, The Guardian, 16 July 2015 (original Telegraph article: <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11741861/How-you-can-help-Jeremy-Corbyn-win-and-destroy-the-Labour-Party.html">How you can helo Jeremy Corbyn win - and destroy the Labour Party</a>, 15 July 2015, article attributed to "Telegraph Comment Desk")
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-64722525375917747622015-11-10T08:03:00.000-08:002015-11-10T08:03:47.576-08:00Fascism's ascent through the Labour Party<p>Eric Hobsbawm said in <em>The New Century</em> that in the early 1980s left-wing activists started entering public services in huge numbers.
<p>The timing is significant: in 1979 Margaret Thatcher won a convincing general election victory after a campaign aimed predominately at working-class people. It became apparent that democracy wasn’t working in the way hard-left figures wanted it to, in not delivering victory to socialist politicians whose plan was to bring the country to its knees financially in order to foment revolution. Post-revolution, democracy would be allowed to wither on the vine so that the middle-class revolutionaries could not be replaced by what they saw as their underlings.
<p>It didn’t quite work that way: the electorate continued to vote Conservative through the 1980s and well into the 1990s in numbers that would be impossible to explain without votes from working-class people, who Marx’s lazy assumptions indicated should be becoming class-conscious and seeking to make the state, and therefore democracy, irrelevant.
<p>Hence the Gramscian infiltration of public services by hard-left activists in what Gramsci’s acolyte, Rudy Deutsch, called a "long march through the institutions". Preparations were made to turn the country into what they claimed would be a multicultural society, which would have been a laudable aim, but was actually a Derridean attempt to deconstruct Britain and ended up giving us a nation of ghettoes. Most unforgivably, Lucaksian views that the state would fall more quickly with the implosion of the nuclear family were used to justify sexualising children, a view that allowed the far-left BBC to ignore Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia, if not tacitly condone it.
<p>Harriet Harman, the interim leader of the Labour Party after Ed Miliband’s resignation, was a follower of the last view, as shown by her <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2575505/Letter-paedophile-group-links-Harriet-Harman-Patricia-Hewitt-AFTER-said-marginalised.html">lobbying of the Callaghan Government in 1978 to decriminalise child pornography</a>. Her successor, Jeremy Corbyn, became leader after an election without a defined electorate which Labour’s own senior figures where desperately trying to wreck until the last moment. But democracy – largely through their own efforts – had become as irrelevant within the Labour Party as it has outwith, as witness the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/15224779/Escape_from_Oppression_The_Federalist_Derivation">voting figures for the 2005 General Election</a> which indicate an enquiry as to its democratic probity is required.
<p>The French-Jewish philosopher Élie Halévy, in his landmark 1936 essay The Era of Tyrannies, established that Marxism and fascism are both descended from socialism, which was constructed in the early 19th century to carry on the work of the French Revolution. If he is correct, and I believe he is, we should call a spade a spade and correctly identify the process that has brought Jeremy Corbyn only a short chain of events away from the premiership as fascism at work.
<p align="left"><em>Gerry Dorrian</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2575505/Letter-paedophile-group-links-Harriet-Harman-Patricia-Hewitt-AFTER-said-marginalised.html">Letter from paedophile group links Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt to it AFTER they said it had been marginalized</a> Daily Mail - shows picture of 1978 letter from Harriet Harman, proposing that child pornography only be an offence if the child pictured institutes proceedings
<p><a href="https://www.academia.edu/15224779/Escape_from_Oppression_The_Federalist_Derivation">The Federalist Derivation</a> by Kriss day on academia.edu. Go to p15 for figures indicating voting fraud in the 2005 general election. Free - sign in with Facebook, Google+ or email accountJoe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-81692468083800064392014-12-05T03:00:00.001-08:002014-12-05T03:44:44.873-08:00letter to Nicola McKenna of TV Licensing<em>Edited version of a letter to Nicola McKenna, collections manager from TV Licensing, upon receiving a threatening letter from her.</em>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee423/300_word_theses/tv_investivation_zps7b857cf1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" width="425" alt="tv licensing threat header" src="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee423/300_word_theses/tv_investivation_zps7b857cf1.jpg" /></a></div>
<p></p>
<p><em>Dear Ms McKenna,</em>
<p>We were dismayed yesterday to find a letter from TV Licensing lying outside our back door that said "you are hereby given official notice: your property is now under investigation" and threatened us with court action. Why was this? Is disconnecting oneself from the BBC really such a subversive act?
<p>We do not have a TV, informed you of this, and confirmed it to Debbie Beckett of Customer Services in May, when we wrote that we would be happy to receive a visit as long as we have 48 hours’ notice. I do not think this is excessive – it is equivalent to the notice landlords have to give their tenants before they or their agents enter the property.
<p>The visit will take place while I am there. No agent will be admitted to the premises when I am out unless they are in possession of a search warrant signed by a magistrate, which we will subsequently challenge. The visit will be filmed and may be put on the web. Should you take us to court on any pretext I will put regular updates of the proceedings online.
<p>We do not watch any TV as it is being broadcast. We have drastically cut down on the BBC TV we watch afterwards on i-player and watch almost no commercial TV. We have been irritated by BBC bias, ageism and misogyny for some time, but for us the final straw was the lengths to which the BBC went to protect its reputation from the activities of Jimmy Saville, to the detriment of his victims.
<p>Finally, I wish to put in a Freedom of Information request for all information in all formats you hold on our house, with details of how you got that information. I also wish to know what organisations or agents you are using to gather this information, which powers they are using and on what basis.
<p align="right"><em>Yours<br>
Gerry Dorrian</em></p>
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-77055740967701260562014-10-10T04:16:00.000-07:002014-10-10T04:16:05.052-07:00the political cartel's bloodied nose makes it more dangerous than ever<p>I wonder if Peter Mair realised, by the time of his untimely death in 2011, the enormity of his contribution to political science with his identification of the <a href="http://politicacomparata.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/katz-and-mair-1995-changing-models-of-party-organization.pdf">cartel party</a>?
<p>Ths is a political party that has, in its own eyes, outgrown its traditional constituency – eg workers, landowners, reformers, etc – and now campaigns for as big a chunk of the general electorate’s vote as it can muster.
<p>The concept of the cartel party was a crucial step in identifying modern politics in general as a cartel affair, with a number of parties cooperating to ensure that they, and only they, participate in the structures of power, regardless of which among them in particular ends up holding the reins of government after any given election.
<p>So <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/10/douglas-carswells-clacton-victory-speech-ukip-must-stand-for-all-britons">Douglas Carswell’s acceptance speech</a> as UKIP’s first elected MP was an attention-getter:
<blockquote>Crony corporatism is not the free market. <em>Cosy cartel politics is not meaningful democracy.</em> Change is coming with the realising that things can be better. <em>(My italics)</em></blockquote>
<p>He’s perhaps right, however, that the day’s other by-election in Middleton, where a candidate in a safe Labour seat managed to defeat UKIP by less than a thousand votes, is just as more meaningful for a party that is often denigrated as “far-right”.
<p>I would be surprised if the British political cartel of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties took this lying down.
<p>And there appears to be a precedent for a party taking affairs into its own hands which I fear may be replicated across the cartel.
<p>In the 2005 General Election, there were 3,963,000 postal votes cast – in an atmosphere where the industrial scale of postal vote fraud had just been revealed – which constituted 12.7% of all votes cast; compare this to the postal voting figures of 1,370,000 (4.9%) in 2001. Labour's majority over the Labour party in 2005, in terms of raw votes, was 789,500 - equal to a fifth of the postal votes cast.
<p>I’m sure I don’t need to add that Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon Treaty/EU Constitution on the 2005 mandate, but the point for our purposes is that if something as major as a General Election was rigged in the past, it can be in the future.
<p>As we congratulate Douglas Carswell in Clacton and John Bickley in Middleton, we need to keep our eyes open like never before for sleight of hand and distraction emanating from the political cartel.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<br>
300 word theses</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/10/douglas-carswells-clacton-victory-speech-ukip-must-stand-for-all-britons">Douglas Carswell’s acceptance speech: 'Ukip must stand for all Britons'</a> - Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, 10 October 2014
<p><a href="http://300wordtheses.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/neo-fascism-and-neo-corporatism.html">Neo-fascism and neo-corporatism: the emergence of the cartel party</a> - 300 words
<p><a href="http://politicacomparata.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/katz-and-mair-1995-changing-models-of-party-organization.pdf">Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, party Politics, 1995</a>
<p><strong>Resources for figures on 2001/2005 general elections:</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp2008/rp08-012.pdf">Election Statistics: UK 1918-2007</a> - House of Commons Library, Research Paper 08/12, February 2008
<p><a href="http://www.ukpolitical.info/ResultsFull01.htm">2001 General Election Results</a>, UK POlitical Info
<p><a href="http://www.ukpolitical.info/ResultsFull05.htm">2005 General Election Results</a>, UK Political InfoJoe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-48967719606577905332014-08-11T03:12:00.001-07:002014-08-11T03:21:29.763-07:00near and far Jihad: a question for Western leaders<p>In the Daily Mail, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2721515/ROBIN-HARRIS-Our-leaders-denial-Islamic-revolution-exposes-naivety.html">Robin Harris makes an impressive case</a> for robust action on the Caliphate proclaimed by Islamic State, now massacring thousands in Iraq and Syria, and condemns Western leaders for being "catastrophically naïve" in their analyses of the turmoil in Muslim countries.
<p>I can’t argue with that, but I feel I must in turn suggest that Mr Harris is naïve in suggesting the Caliphate poses problems only for countries with a majority Muslim population.
<p>As early as 2009, Jihadis have split their struggle into that <a href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/why-jihad-went-global-book-review/#.U-iCKBsg_yA">against the far enemy</a> – or far Jihad – which is America and the West, and near Jihad against Israel and all local administrations that fail to unqualifiedly call for its destruction.
<p>Far Jihad is well-ensconced in the West, with anybody proposing counter-Jihad (literally action against jihad) <a href="http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/counter-jihad/">condemned by organisations such as Hope not Hate</a> as fascists, racists, and generally “far-right”, which has no fixed beaning but refers to anybody whose views they disagree with.
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2721230/Thats-boy-Australian-jihadists-seven-year-old-son-poses-decapitated-head-Syrian-solider.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" alt="new face of the Caliphate: click for more" src="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee423/300_word_theses/australian_zps1cde8b88.jpg" /></a></div><a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/anjem-choudary-steps-islamic-caliphate">Jihadis like Anjem Choudary have openly called for a Caliphate for years</a>, and this is key to understanding their mindset. The Caliphate can be proclaimed at any time in any country by any jihadi.
<p>Counterjihad military action must therefore also take two parts: far counterjihad against genocide and, crucially, supporting Israel, whose attacks by Hamas were a diversion tactic to blind liberal Western media to Islamic State atrocities; and near counterjihad, including robust action on hate-preachers like Choudary and real policing of protests against established <a href="http://gerarddirect.com/2012/10/15/10000-muslims-protest-against-google-hq-in-uk/">Western traditions such as free speech</a>.
<p>Far and near Jihad are now coming together, as shown by a recent <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673493/Infidels-wear-red-collars-shave-heads-Nazi-vision-Muslim-Britain-Imam-ran-Isis-barbecue-Welsh-park.html">open recruiting drive by Islamic State's predecessor ISIS in Cardiff</a>. The question I pose Western leaders is: do you act now to protect your many loyal citizens of all backgrounds, including moderate Muslims, or must you be swept away to protect our children?
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<br>
300 words</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2721515/ROBIN-HARRIS-Our-leaders-denial-Islamic-revolution-exposes-naivety.html">ROBIN HARRIS: Our leaders are in denial about this Islamic revolution because it exposes their own naivety</a> - Daily Mail, August 11 2014
<p><a href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/why-jihad-went-global-book-review/#.U-iCKBsg_yA">Why Jihad went global</a> -Jim Miles, The Palestine Chronicle, 2009
<p><a href="http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/counter-jihad/">Counter-Jihad report</a> - Jim Lowles, Hope Not Hate, August 2012
<p><a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/anjem-choudary-steps-islamic-caliphate">Anjem Choudary: Steps to an Islamic Caliphate</a> - The Clarion Project, April 2012
<p><a href="http://gerarddirect.com/2012/10/15/10000-muslims-protest-against-google-hq-in-uk/">10,000 Muslims Protest Against Free Speech at Google in UK</a> - Gerard Direct, October 2012
<p><a href="http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-172990-Thousands-rally-in-UK-to-demand-end-to-anti-Islam-speeches">Thousands rally in UK to demand end to anti-Islam speeches</a> - Murtaza Ali Shah, The International News (Pakistan), April 2013
<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673493/Infidels-wear-red-collars-shave-heads-Nazi-vision-Muslim-Britain-Imam-ran-Isis-barbecue-Welsh-park.html">'Infidels must wear red collars and shave heads': 'Nazi' vision of Muslim Britain from Imam who ran 'Isis' barbecue in Cardiff park</a> - Abul Taher and Nick North, Daily Mail, June 2014
<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2721230/Thats-boy-Australian-jihadists-seven-year-old-son-poses-decapitated-head-Syrian-solider.html">'That's my boy!': Shocking photograph of a SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Australian boy brandishing the head of a Syrian soldier - and his jihadist father who took it</a> - Emily Crane, Louise Cheer, Daily Mail, August 11 2014Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-22357620938327112182014-08-05T04:00:00.001-07:002014-08-06T05:22:49.591-07:00Israel and why Westphalia matters<p>In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 years' war by esconcing Cardinal Richelieu’s principle of <em>raison d’état</em> – justifying Catholic France’s alliances with Protestant powers to prevent absorption into the Holy Roman Empire – as the defining principle of the nation state.
<p>Under <em>raison d’état</em> each state was free to run its legal internal affairs as it wanted, for example responding to pressures for universal suffrage at its own speed.
<p>When Tony Blair was elected in 1997, he trumpeted a post-Westphalian settlement which would see Britain not only buy into the European Union’s supra-national agenda like never before, but participate in wars to spread neo-conservative values to Afghanistan and Iraq in what former US Deputy Defence Secretary Robert Ellsworth called "<a href="http://www.nhinet.org/ellsworth.htm">salvation without representation</a>".
<p>In Israel’s Gaza campaign, we’re seeing a demonstrably democratically-elected government take on Hamas, a group banned in many countries for its links to terrorism. It is in a sense a campaign against the crisis-hit post-Westphalian movement, where
<blockquote><a href="http://www.social-europe.eu/2013/02/a-crisis-of-the-state-the-end-of-post-westphalian-model/">it is the "internal" boundaries</a> that create problems. Security, defence of privilege, identity, recognition and cultural traditions…are now altered, uncertain, liquid. They are no longer reliable.</blockquote>
<p>Egypt’s sponsoring of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is also a classic Westphalian move: Egypt is one of the states that have banned Hamas. If Palestinian terrorists (by no means all Palestinians) were to catastrophically weaken Israel, the terrorists’ first move would be to announce themselves part of the <em>soi-disant</em> caliphate proclaimed by Jihadis in Iraq and Syria.
<p>This is also a supra-national power, but far removed from the <a href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/kfgeu/kfgwp/wpseries/WorkingPaperKFG_48.pdf">multilateral transfer of rules</a> with the EU as template dreamt of by Blairites. It is an attempt to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, and as such the next stop would be Egypt, therefrom the rest of Arab Africa.
<p>Israel is certainly fighting for survival, but it is now at the centre of the fight for the nation-state system. All of us who value freedom need to realise that freedom lives or dies with Israel.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<br>
300 words</em></p>
<p><strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.nhinet.org/ellsworth.htm">Imposing Our 'Values' by Force</a> - Robert F. Ellsworth and Dimitri K. Simes
<p><a href="http://www.social-europe.eu/2013/02/a-crisis-of-the-state-the-end-of-post-westphalian-model/">A Crisis Of The State? The End Of The Post-Westphalian Model</a> - Carlo Bordoni
<p><a href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/kfgeu/kfgwp/wpseries/WorkingPaperKFG_48.pdf">The EU as a Multilateral Rule Exporter: The Global Transfer of European Rules via International Organizations</a> - Mathieu RousselinJoe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-37851422315281728422014-08-01T08:31:00.001-07:002014-08-01T08:31:37.117-07:00comparisons between Hamas and Nazis aren't made lightly<p>During the Second World War, the British visited a lot of attrition on Germany and on Germans for a very good reason: it was them or us.
<p>The Israeli Foreign Minister harked back to this time when he <a href="http://embassies.gov.il/london/NewsAndEvents/Pages/FM-Liberman-meets-with-British-Foreign-Secretary-Hammond-24-Jul-2014.aspx">delivered a message to his counterpart</a> here, Stephen Hammond, on the conflict in Gaza:
<blockquote>[Foreign Minister Avigdor] Liberman told Secretary Hammond that Israel expects special understanding on the part of the British. During one of the most difficult but greatest hours of Great Britain, when London was bombed during World War II, we learned from Churchill that even if the price is blood, sweat and tears, a nation that wants to survive must fight for its freedom.</blockquote>
<p>Any comparison between Hamas and the Nazis is neither done lightly nor without justification. In November 2013, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem, Al Quds, made international news when it <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/12/13/after-nazi-style-rally-al-quds-university-announces-hate-speech-course-but-only-in-english/">hosted a Nazi-themed rally</a>; six months earlier – shortly before the murder of Gunner Lee Rigby – <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/20/nazi-flag-adorned-with-swastika-spotted-flying-over-palestinian-town-photos/">the Swastika was spotted flying</a> over the town of Beit Omar.
<p>This is what the Israelis are facing: a war that is basically a continuation of the one we faced from 1939-1945; a war that is not about land or money or power but the very existence of the Jewish people. Those brave Palestinians who realise and reject this know the risks they run: recently <a href="http://osnetdaily.com/2014/07/false-flag-busted-hamas-murders-25-gazans-blames-it-on-israel/">jihadis murdered 25 peace activists and blamed it on Israel</a> even as Palestinian rockets, by accident or design, fall upon Palestinians.
<p>As genocide is prosecuted in Syria and Iraq, our prone media prioritise manufactured outrage at recycled pictures and promote the BDS agenda. The original Nazis were more honest in their evil when they verbalised their version of BDS: <em>kauf nicht bei Juden</em> – don’t buy from Jews. As jihadis and their useful idiots shout and fly Palestinian flags over council buildings, please spare a thought about where the Swastika and kauf nicht bei Juden were headed from the start. There's been no change in plan.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<br>
300 words</em></p>
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83799167680834655.post-44673661114339073792014-07-18T03:03:00.001-07:002014-07-18T03:19:40.867-07:00Flight MH17 decisions: wait till vested interests stop shouting<blockquote>The outrage [shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine] immediately raised questions over why commercial flights were using a region where attacks on aircraft have been rife.</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10974823/Air-operators-belatedly-avoid-Ukraine-war-zone.html">These words from the <em>Telegraph</em></a> form the most succinct explanation, I think, as to why Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 came to grief in such a terrible tragedy. The article says, earlier, that "aviation safety authorities in the United States and Europe warned pilots in April about potential risks flying in or near Ukraine airspace". The paper now reports other Asian airlines "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10975344/Asian-airlines-stopped-flying-over-Ukraine-months-ago.html">had already abandoned [flying over Ukraine] months ago because of security concerns</a>".
<p>Regarding concerns, <a href="http://www.icao.int/safety/lpr/LPR13Presentations/Day%201-12%20Report%20of%20Ukraine%20-%20LPRs%20Technical%20Seminar.pdf">an International Civil Aviation Organisation website document</a> ostensibly praises Ukrainian Air Traffic Controllers for picking up English language skills, but then expresses concern that:
<p><blockquote>Learning language is a long and costing business…[and] Lack of resources does not allow to invite native speaking teachers and instructors to train aviation personnel, to purchase necessary equipment for…training, to organize recurrent training of teachers, instructors, raters and examiners abroad.</blockquote>
<p>Considering airline fuel is expensive, and the Malaysian government was found in investigations into the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 to be a major shareholder in the debt-stricken airline, and one can understand their pilots being pressured to fly over Ukraine.
<p>Ultimately, did Putin order the plane shot down? I don’t know, but the picture gets more complex the more you examine it. And I wonder how long conspiracy-theory sites will take to notice that the US, the UK and the EU could all do with attention taken off their internal affairs, or even that it might not be beyond the abilities of Jihadis to down the flight and blame it on an Israeli attention-diversion exercise?
<p>I have my own theory – that it’s always better to wait for vested interests to stop shouting before making decisions with long-lasting consequences.
<p align="right"><em>Gerry Dorrian<br>
300 words</em></p>
<strong>Resources</strong>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10974823/Air-operators-belatedly-avoid-Ukraine-war-zone.html">Air operators belatedly avoid Ukraine war zone</a> - Tom Whitehead, Nick Collins and Martin Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2014
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10975344/Asian-airlines-stopped-flying-over-Ukraine-months-ago.html">Asian airlines stopped flying over Ukraine months ago</a> - AFP, Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2014
<p><a href="http://www.icao.int/safety/lpr/LPR13Presentations/Day%201-12%20Report%20of%20Ukraine%20-%20LPRs%20Technical%20Seminar.pdf">Challenges in implementing Language Proficiency Requirements in Ukraine</a> - International Civil Aviation Authority; statement made on p12 of pdf. 2003 mentioned in document, but date of its publication not apparent
Joe Danielshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13813771610543530480noreply@blogger.com0