where does the buck stop for Grenfell Tower?

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.

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.

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), stepped down because of “concerns” about how the firm was being run, 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.

Then the investigation must go to the firm which supplied the cladding, Harley Facades. 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?

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.

Gerry Dorrian

comparisons between Hamas and Nazis aren't made lightly

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.

The Israeli Foreign Minister harked back to this time when he delivered a message to his counterpart here, Stephen Hammond, on the conflict in Gaza:

[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.

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 hosted a Nazi-themed rally; six months earlier – shortly before the murder of Gunner Lee Rigby – the Swastika was spotted flying over the town of Beit Omar.

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 jihadis murdered 25 peace activists and blamed it on Israel even as Palestinian rockets, by accident or design, fall upon Palestinians.

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: kauf nicht bei Juden – 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.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Ukip "racism" row: is the Daily Telegraph buying into the political cartel?

Comedy’s funny. Peculiar, I mean: for example, I remember an American friend looking nonplussed at Father Ted, while I was splitting my sides.

Less amusing is the alacrity with which some on the Left will jump on certain types of comedy but not others. Dan Hodges, for example, has published a blog entitled Ukip is now a racist party, in which he seizes on comments made by comic Paul Eastwood (right), which retain their humour even within Hodges’ tirade.

It’s all what you’d expect from a Labour and union aficionado. What is unusual is that it was published on the blogs site of the centre-right Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph has become obsessed with Ukip recently, the party being mentioned in the analysis section at least once daily.

This, I believe, is the political cartel in action. We have a Tory-aligned publication running standard left-wing dog-whistle fare because both Conservatives and Labour are terrified of the long-term consequences of Ukip breaking up the current three-way football match where the parties kick the ball to each other to try and con the masses that the result is democracy.

And as for the charge of racism, I think questions like, for example, "what race is Islam?", although valid enough, risk heading down the wrong road. The whole vocabulary of race relates to the sinister concept that differences between groups of people are inherited and not culturally instilled. This vocabulary first served the slave trade (and indeed still does) before being conscripted to justify eugenics. It’s easy to forget, though, because "you are racist/fascist/insert your own meaningless-through-overuse adjective" is increasingly used merely as a synonym for "I disagree with you". We risk sliding back to the horrors of the 20th century through forgetting that words, contrary to what post-modernists believe, have meanings.

And that wouldn’t be funny.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Ukip is now a racist party - Dan Hodges, Telegraph blogs, 3 March 2014

Neo-fascism and neo-corporatism: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - 300 words

Click to go to Paul Eastwood's page at Jo Martin management

Establishment and Outsiders: patriots live on Winston Parva's Estate

I’m sure Norbert Elias and John Scotson never intended "Winston Parva" to represent the relationship between patriots and super-elites, but as an analysis of power relationships their sociological classic The Established and The Outsiders holds strong in this context.

Winston Parva is the fictionalised village in which the authors identified two classes of people: the Established in the old village, and Outsiders who inhabit the "Estate".

The power differential between Insiders at the centre and Outsiders on the Estate is what they wanted to examine. Power centres, once established, proceed mindlessly upon the Nietzschean task of acquiring more power: witness the neo-imperialistic chequebook held out by George Osbourne to Ukraine while flood victims here, on the UK Establishment’s home ground, appear to occupy at most afterthought status.

Lars B Ohlsson describes in his summary of Insiders and Outsiders the mechanism by which we Outsiders on the Estate – patriots – are kept in our place:

gossip centres and cliché-based judgements, condemnation and discrimination of 'them' while praising and promoting 'us', continually [feeds] the existing order.

Thus we have patriots condemned in general as "racists", "swivel-eyed loons" etc, for no good reason other than these are the present Establishmentarian buzzwords describing political Outsiders – witness Nigel Farage’s treatment in Edinburgh. The most extreme example so far is the removal of foster-children from their guardians on the grounds that "Ukip members might not be suitable foster parents for non-British children".

That UKIP is poised for major gains is due in no small part to the revulsion felt by people of all political persuasions that the Establishment feels parents’ political persuasion is sufficient reason for interventions in family life of the most extreme kind. Come the elections we need to remember that as far as the Establishment is concerned, we’re all outsiders living on the estate.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Established and The Outsiders - click to read reviews on Amazon

Insiders and Outsiders - aspects of inclusion and exclusion - a summary by Lars B Ohlsson

We should open chequebook to rebuild Ukraine, says Osborne: Chancellor offers millions to new government - Tim Shipman, Daily Mail, 23 February 2014

EU wonders why Britain hasn't tapped fund for flood relief - Reuters, 12 February 2014

Nigel Farage Edinburgh Protest Turns Ugly As Ukip Leader Locked In Pub 'For Own Safety' - Huffington Post, May 2013

Ukip row: multiple reasons children taken from Rotherham foster parents - Helen Pidd, The Guardian, November 2012 - "Ukip members might not be suitable foster parents for non-British children"

Council admits mistakes over Ukip foster parents storm - Ben Quinn, The Guardian, May 2013 - "The removal of the children caused outrage across the political divide"

Barnet Alliance [for Public Services] denies responsibility for leaflets branding UKIP 'racist' - Chris Hewett, This is Local London, January 2014

How to Spot a Swivel-Eyed Loon - The Guardian, undated

what the flooding crisis says about our fading citizenship

The thoughts of an Argentinian political scientist about newly-democratised nations might not appear to have much in common with the present flooding crisis, but perhaps we should look closer.

The late Guillermo O’Donnell wrote On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems about the travails of Peru, Argentina, Brazil and other countries, but as comparative politics his insights are valid further afield – for example, you could say that the "profound crisis" of the "big state" becoming democratic mirrors that of the hypertrophied state in danger of losing its grip on democracy.

For O’Donnell, the state is more than the sum of its bureaucratic parts: it is "a set of social relations that establishes a social order" bound together by laws applicable "over a given territory", ie that country’s. He adds that the without these laws and the lawful agencies they underpin "the national state and the order it supports vanish”, leading to "a democracy of low-intensity citizenship".

With the Somerset floods we’ve seen a population which was left in chaos and crisis since the end of last year, with forces personnel only being sent in when the Establishment was embarrassed. Compare this with the near-immediate response to Thames Valley flooding, although even there it seems "some people are getting help and others aren’t": we see "a state whose...publicness and citizenship fade away at the frontiers of various regions and class and ethnic relations". In both areas every adult has one vote each, but each areas’s value to the regime (which O’Donnell stresses can be authoritarian even within a democratic state) seems the variable determining speed and credibility of response.

The Governmental and Environment Agency’s responses to the floods are not what one would expect from democratically-accountable institutions. They evince a vassal state in a neofeudal relationship to the EU overlord.

The question is: will votes challenging the democratic legitimacy of that relationship be respected as having equal value with those cast for parties that accept it?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems - Guillermo O'Donnell, Kellogg Institute, 1993

Chertsey residents claim 'homes sacrificed to save others' - bbc.cocuk - "some are getting help and others aren't"

(neo)feudalism and the EU - 300 words

all issues should be up for debate: letter to Cambridge News

Letter to Cambridge News, published on Friday 13 2014. The names of the people I'm responding to have been changed.

I AM writing in regard of the letter from Jane Smith, Jean Smith and Joan Smith ('Negative power of persuasion', News, February 1, 2014). The education and health sectors are major topics of interest in any election, and should neither be demonised nor protected by taboo that prevents discussion of faults.

What I am most anxious to say, however, is that it is not 'racist' to voice concerns about mass immigration or violent religious extremism. The very vocabulary of race is sinister and outdated, and harks back to a time when differences between groups of people were attributed not to culture but to inherited factors. I believe this vocabulary, designed to turn off the critical faculties and elicit a more primal, uglier response from the target audience, will be employed more and more as the European and general elections draw closer.

People who use words like 'racist' and the like reveal more about themselves than they realise: when they think democracy might return a result they don't approve of, they're just not that into it.

Gerry Dorrian

neocorporatism on the march: the Tube strike is a punishment for democracy

The picture is eloquent:

This is what happens when you elect a clown as mayor. Not so funny now, is it?

The seventeen-word manifesto delineates the purpose of the Tube strikes of 5-6 February: punishing citizens of London for using their democratic birthright to elect a Mayor whom TUC high command disapproves of.

Peter Mair and Richard Katz referred to a situation where bodies such as trade unions developing relationships with the state mirrors the relations between the state and political parties. In other words, these bodies – such as unions – determine the direction of the state, supplanting democratically-elected representatives.

Mair and Katz call this situation “neocorporatism”. Given Mussolini identified corporatism as fascism’s political synonym, it’s surely fair to surmise that neo-fascism and neocorporatism can be similarly identified. The unions – in this particular case the RMT and TSSA – are using a 48-hour strike to inform London voters that their democratic choice of mayor is unacceptable to them.

Neocorporatism is the logical next step on from the political cartel formed by our three main parties, who kick the ball to each other every so often to give us plebs an illusion of democracy. The fightback starts when we use our birthright to elect representatives from outwith the cartel.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair

Mussolini on the Corporate state - Political Research Associates

Live blog of the Tube strikes - Claire Carter, The Telegraph, 6 February 2014

Cambridge Greens targeting Lib Dem vote? letter to Cambridge News

I disagree with Dr Rupert Read, lead party MEP candidate, on the subject of wind activity and the impact of human activities on climate.

What I round equally interesting, however, is Dr REad's reference to the "pro-nuclear, pro-fracking, pro-coal consensus of of Labour, Conservative and UKIP."

One party is conspicuously absent from Dr Read's tirade. If the Green Party plans to target Lib Dem voters in the 2015 general election as well as in the European ones, does that mean the city's next MP will be from the Labour, Conservative or UKIP party?

Gerry Dorrian

Click for Cambridge News homepage

NOTE: I usually change the names of people I'm responding to when putting my letters to the Cambridge News up here, but haven't done so with Dr Richard Read because as an MEP candidate he is a public figure.

(neo)feudalism and the EU

The first use of "neofeudalism"seems to have been in 1940, when a doctor complained to the Medical Times about the consequences "if medicine was to be neofeudalized by the state". (Obamacare, anybody?)

Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell ran with the idea, identifying neofeudalism within "those regions where the local powers…establish power circuits that operate according to rules that are inconsistent with, if not antagonistic to, the law that supposedly regulates the national territory".

European patriots can see the reverse process to O’Donnell’s happening in regard to the EU today – the supranational giant has established power circuits that operate according to rules that are inconsistent with, if not antagonistic to, the systems of laws that supposedly regulate the national territories.

For example, the Atlantic Arc unites fragments of the UK, Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal that have no other link than that the Atlantic laps upon their coasts; and the BBC has admitted taking £3m in grants from the EU, and acts as the EU’s propaganda outlet in the UK.

Like the feudal overlords of old, the EU has enlarged its fief by sleight of hand; it wasn’t announced to the British people until 2001 that "this country quite voluntarily surrendered the once seemingly immortal concept of the sovereignty of parliament and legislative freedom by membership of the European Union". By then all that was needed was a dynastic marriage in the form of a constitution: the Lisbon Treaty was signed by Gordon Brown under the so-called "democratic" mandate of the 2005 election.

So what destroyed feudalism? Here, after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in the words of Marxist writer Mark Starr, "the peasants were never reduced to the old Feudal bondage again, and a time of prosperity for them, known as the Golden Age, followed". Neo-feudalist bureaucrats of the Paris-Berlin axis take note.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Excerpt from a 1940 letter to the Medical Times - the first recorded use of "neofeudalism"?

On the State, Democratisation and some Conceptual Problems (A Latin American View with Glances at Some Post-Communist Countries) - Guillermo O'Donnell - go to p10 of the .pdf for a description of what he calls "neofeudalized"

Atlantic Arc homepage

BBC admits receiving millions in grants from EU and councils - Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph, Feb 2012

Britain and Europe: The Culture of Deceit - Christopher Booker, October 2001; the passage quoted is at the top of the article

Mark Starr: A Worker Looks At History - Chapter 8 The Fall of Feudalism

Did Labour win the 2005 general election? - 300 words

neo-fascism and neo-corporatism: The Emergence of the Cartel Party

Régime censitaire is an interesting phrase: cens was a fee paid to a feudal lord which sometimes accorded voting rights. Thus the régime censitaire refers, in Peter Mair’s and Richard Katz’ seminal 1995 article Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party, to the state of democracy in the late 19th century, where some degree of property ownership was necessary in order to vote.

The "cartel party" refers to a situation where major parties compete for an electorate’s votes with none offering anything qualitatively different from the other, therefore they gain more from cooperating with each other than competing, to democracy’s cost. (Hobbling the free press, anyone?)

Parties evolve from "caucus" entities representing the minority entitled to vote to “mass parties” upon universal suffrage, then "catch-all" parties offering all things to all people, little different from each other. Here the titular cartel starts to form.

Scarily, Mair and Katz note that other bodies such as trade unions and employers’ associations "[develop] relationships with the state that are not unlike those developed by the parties themselves" – I would add developers and the diversity industry. They call this "neocorporatism". I have to wonder if they were referring to a quote by Mussolini, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power". Is neo-fascism the corollary of neo-corporatism?

There is hope: new parties can challenge the cosy huddle, but must resist the trap the Liberal Democrats (identified by the authors) have fallen into of joining "the establishment they once decried".

Mass parties on either side of the pond produced Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher, and FDR, JFK and the Bushes before political cartels reincarnated the régime censitaire by restricting power within the circle of those who possess it already.

My money’s on UKIP and the Tea Party to shake things up. How about yours?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, originally from Party Politics

(Leveson deal: MPs debate press legislation: as it happens - Rowena Mason, Daily Telegraph, 18 March 2013

"Mussolini on the Corporate state - Political Research Associates

Click for reviews of Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, in which Mair's ideas on the political cartel arising from the article reviewed were posthumously developed from his notes

click for a review of The Triumph of the Political Class, in which Peter Oborne continues on Mair's ideas in Ruling the Void

CJ Sansom's "Dominion": a low punch at UKIP

It’s now widely accepted that Winston Churchill had a "wobble" in his now-famous three days in May 1940 when he was occupied by the feasibility of negotiating a peace with Hitler’s Germany after the "Narvik Debate" on the disastrous Norwegian campaign brought down Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative government and Churchill came to lead a tripartite National Government.

In CJ Sansom’s alternative history novel set in 1952, Dominion, Churchill was rejected in favour of Lord Halifax as leader of the Tories. Following the Dunkirk evacuation, a crisis in Parliament led to those peace negotiations with the Nazis, and Great Britain became effectively a German vassal state under the leadership of Lord Beaverbrook.

I don’t agree with Sansom’s intimations in the novel that patriotism is by nature evil. Nevertheless, taking something you normally wouldn’t pick up and turning it into something you can’t put down is the mark of a great writer.

What worried me is that, after the end of the novel, Sansom presents an essay on his views on Nazism, nationalism and patriotism in general (which, in conjunction with Palestine – ie Israel – he cites as the two great blights of the real postwar world). At the end of the essay, in which Nazism and fascism are extensively mentioned, he opines that UKIP is another manifestation of the "blight" of patriotism.

He offers no opinion on the EU which, although not a national or nationalist entity, many would point to as non-violent fascism. By the time he comes to UKIP, after pages spent railing against fascism and associating patriotism therewith, the footnotes have dried up, but the intention seems to give the reader the idea s/he is reading an academic essay condemning UKIP.

Should we be asking Macmillan whether, should it reprint Dominion before the 2015 General Election, it will reprint Sansom's tendentious essay?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Three Days in May: When Winston Churchill wobbled - Jasper Rees, Telegraph

Conduct of the War Hansard minutes of House of Commons debate of May 8 1940, also called the Norwegian Debate/Narvik Debate

Click to read reviews of Dominion at Amazon

Pan Macmillan (publishers of Dominion) contact page

voter ID: the story behind the Electoral Commission's announcement

If the Electoral Commission wants voters to produce IDs at polling stations Parliament could effect this by amending the Representation of the People Act: it's been amended 42 times in its lifetime.

The furore revolves around the 2000 Act’s amendments of the 1985 Act.

Sections 5-9 of the 1985 bill present various safeguards ensuring that absent voters using proxies or postal votes assure the Registration Officers of their identities.

Section 12, para 2 of the Representation of the People Act 2000 informs us that "Sections 5 to 9 of the Representation of the People Act 1985...shall cease to have effect" apart from in Northern Ireland. Replacing them is Section 4, relating to people in mental hospitals who are not detained offenders or on remand.

In other words, the 2000 act allows party activists to satisfy themselves of the identities of absent voters.

Nick Ross’ thesis, expanded in his book Crime, is that crime isn’t facilitated by bad people so much as that which is pilfered being readily available.

In the recent past what’s been pilfered appears to have been votes, to such an extent that even the International Committee of the Fourth International got worked up about it in 2004. The following year, in terms of raw votes, Tony Blair’s New Labour won by 1,500,000, in a General Election in which 6,000,000 postal votes were returned.

But from which "high risk areas" (the Electoral Commission’s words)? These are the ones they identify:

Birmingham, Blackburn with Darwen, Bradford, Burnley, Calderdale, Coventry, Derby, Hyndburn, Kirklees, Oldham, Pendle, Peterborough, Slough, Tower Hamlets, Walsall, and Woking.

I can identify 7 areas above where the population makeup is skewed away from the average mix in the UK. So why does the Government want to foist ID cards through the back door on all of us?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

ID needed at polling stations, recommends independent watchdog - Electoral Commission: see Editor's Note para 2 for the "high risk areas"

Representation of the People Act 1985 - see sections 5-9 as mentioned

Representation of the People Act 2000 - see Section 12, para 2 and Section 4 as mentioned

Nick Ross's Crime - 300 words

- Britain: opposition to Iraq war led to Labour vote-rigging in 2004 elections World Socialist Web Site, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International

open letter to the Archbishop of Westminster

To the Right Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster:

Dear Archbishop Nichols,

You have asked the Coalition government to review 2012 immigration legislation preventing spouses from outside the European Economic Area from joining their British husbands or wives if they (the non-EEA spouses) earn less than £18,600.

It’s dispiriting to see families with one British member split up. I’ve been in a long-distance relationship, and it hurt; I had cause to remember the French prayer to Our lady of Lourdes, which urges: priez pour ceux qui aiment et sont partis.

But if I may ask you to tune your political antennae to a wider wavelength, I hope you will see that years of poorly-controlled immigration has caused such a population rise in this country that in 2012 we were delivered a stark wake-up call: during the UK’s second-wettest year on record, our drinking-water nearly ran out.

We in Cambridgeshire have seen the benefits immigration can bring with Pinoy – Filipino men and women – coming to do healthcare jobs in the early 2000s and fitting in seamlessly with our Judaeo-Christian heritage. But a proportion of them have been forced out of their jobs due to EU rules saying that when contracts come up for renewal EU citizens must be prioritised.

This, I think is the crux of the matter: British citizens, whom you so rightly point out are suffering, are put in this position because the government has extremely limited powers to act on couples when neither of them are from Great Britain.

Like many others, including members of your flock, I look forward to the day when Britain’s politicians can truly govern within British borders and prevent British people from suffering. I hope you will speak out to say that the desire of British people to be governed solely by British politicians is by no means sinister or toxic, so that injustices like those you have identified can be consigned to history.

Yours faithfully
Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Catholic leader brands immigration policies 'inhumane' Miranda Prynne, The Telegraph, 16 December 2012

Changes to the family migration Immigration Rules come into effect on 9 July 2012 - UK Border Agency

Met Office: 2012 was UK's second wettest year on record - bbc.co.uk

Drought Declared Across 17 More Counties As Warning That Water Shortages Could Last Until Christmas - Huffington Post, 16 April 2012

immigration laws limit the days of being enriched - 300 words

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Principles of Liberalism may be described (at least today) as principles of assessing, and if necessary of modifying or changing, existing institutions, rather than of replacing existing institutions. One can express this also by saying that Liberalism is an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary creed (unless it is confronted by a tyrannical regime).

In Karl Popper’s penultimate Liberal Thesis, he delineates tradition’s role: the means for an institution to evolve as situations change, or – perhaps more sinisterly – as the Establishment’s view of the institution’s purpose changes.

One of several institutions I could mention in illustration is the police. While Sir Richard Mayne (right) defined police work in 1829 as "the prevention of crime [and] detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed", as mass immigration changes our national makeup police become increasingly the enforcers of last resort when British culture opposes that of the Establishment’s favoured ethnicities. Thus, we see the English flag described as "racist" and a Christian preacher arrested for saying what has been in the Bible for millenia.

(I’m not criticising rank-and-file police, merely illustrating how Establishment opinion drift causes institution mission drift.)

In qualifying liberalism’s evolutionary nature with the caveat that it can become revolutionary when confronted with tyranny, Popper recognises the contributions liberal philosophy and politics made to the American, French and various humanitarian revolutions. It’s necessary to remember, though, Public Opinion and Liberal Principles appeared in 1956, before liberal leaders worldwide prostituted the movement’s vitality to the left, causing Ronald Reagan (left) to say "I never left the Democrats, the Democrats left me".

But Popper’s unquestioning acceptance that liberalism’s evolution will be in a socially positive direction contradicts a point made elsewhere in Conjectures and Refutations wherein he takes Hegelians and Marxists to task for assuming the same, through mistaking Kant’s triadic layout of his categories for a statement that syntheses will always be preferable to the conflicts they resolve. That, as institutional mission drift shows, depends on the Establishmentarian agenda regarding the conflicts.

I think Popper would reply that in the open society we can’t afford to make any thinker carry the cross of infallibility.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Resources

History of Policing - Metropolitan Police

Motorist told flag could be racist - Charley Morgan, This is Wiltshire, May 2008

Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin - Heidi Blake, Daily Telegraph, may 2010

"Why Reagan Was 'The Great Communicator' - Craig von Buseck, cbn.com

is the Kenya mutiny symptomatic of wider unrest?

The sit-down strike by soldiers of the 1st Battalion (Yorkshire Regiment) was a very British mutiny. I suppose in a sense Corporal Anthony Brown was lucky to be merely thrown out of the Army: after the 1917 Étaples Mutiny, Cpl Jesse Robart Short was executed for calling an officer a “bugger”.

The present action, taken during the Askari Thunder exercise in Kenya, also stemmed from the actions of people in charge: two commanders – who haven’t had their names plastered all over the press like the enlisted men – got drunk the night before a forced march and were found after the exercise sleeping off their hangover.

Incidents like this never spontaneously erupt; the discontent is usually slow-burning, with a possibly small incident turning into a flashpoint, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It’s also impossible to ignore what’s going on around at the same time. We have the trial of one of Gunner Lee Rigby’s killers, who has been heaping praise on the nursing and medical care he has received, treatment he ensured Gunner Lee would not live to benefit from.

And of course there’s Marine A (Sgt Alexander Blackman), who was sent to Afghanistan to engage with terrorists in irregular warfare, and is facing 10 years in prison for doing precisely that.

There is an inequality inherent in any functional system, without which systems tend to collapse – but that itself can lead to system collapse when the inequality gap is unbridgeable.

This happened literally in the Étaples mutiny, when the officers appropriated billets in the posh resort across the bridge and left troops to fester on the wrong side of the river. If what happened in Kenya is symptomatic of a wider dislocation between officers and enlisted soldiers, perhaps the veteran Fusiliers’ march on London was but the politest of warning shots.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Afghanistan veterans jailed for parade ground sit-in protest over "muppet" officers - The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Court-martial of Cpl Jesse Robart Short - National Archives

Lee Rigby murder trial: 'I’m a soldier just like Drummer Rigby... I killed him because this is war’ - Tom Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2013

Sgt Alexander Blackman: Marine backed by 60,000 people over killing of Taliban insurgent - Daily Mirror, 8 December 2013

Breaking: 100,000 people (the threshold that should trigger Parliamentary time for a topic) support Sgt Alexander Blackman - Daily Mail, 11 December 2013

Click to sign the HM Government e-petition to free Sgt Alexander Blackman (Marine A) - at time of writing 37,691 signatures

Veteran Fusiliers to march on London - ITV news, October 2012

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Institutions alone are never sufficient if not tempered by traditions. Institutions are always ambivalent in the sense that, in the absence of a strong tradition, they also may serve the opposite purpose to the one intended…To sum up: Traditions are needed to form a kind of link between institutions and the intentions and valuations of individual men [sic].

Popper’s fifth liberal thesis seems a comment upon the national and international institutions set up in the wave of collectivism that followed the Second World War.

I’d like to look at Great Britain’s welfare state, set up to combat the "five giants" identified by Sir William Beveridge in his report of 1942: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.

The welfare state had no traditions in British society and therefore became a political football at elections times, and at other times it housed a massive unelected Establishment intent upon walking a socialist state into our systems, no matter the political hue of the day’s government. The result: Beveridge’s five giants are bigger than ever:

Want:

Food banks are proliferating, as are payday loan companies.

Disease:

The National Health Service is in a perennial state of collapse and, at the last count, 13,000 people have died unnecessarily in just 13 trusts.

Ignorance:

The Teaching Times reports that 17% of school leavers are functionally illiterate; this despite unprecedented funds being pumped into education since 1997.

Squalor:

It seems children are found living in squalid conditions every week, with social services aware of their condition. There's countless articles on this - check it out.

Idleness:

Idleness has long been a political synonym for unemployment. School-leavers struggle to find jobs because older immigrants with more mature social skills take bottom-rung positions that school-leavers traditionally occupied. Further strain is put on the welfare system by immigrants who come here specifically to claim benefits without working.

It’s no surprise that Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has announced that the welfare state needs "permanent cuts" if its cost is to be sustainable. Had William Beveridge been less dazzled by the hope of collectivism, he might have seen that the War to End all Wars was never going to come, and cut his cloth – and ours – accordingly.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Resources

Social Insurance and Allied Services Report by Sir William Beveridge (The Beveridge Report

Numbers relying on food banks triple in a year - bbc.co.uk

13,000 died needlessly at 14 worst NHS trusts - Laura Donnelly and Patrick Sawer, July 2013, The Telegraph

17% of school leavers "functionally illiterate" - Teaching Times

Autumn Statement 2013: Britain can no longer afford welfare state, warns Osborne - James Kirkup, December 2013

social services snatch baby from womb

Put a frog in cold water and slowly raise the temperature: it will sit there until it dies. This week we heard of the case of a woman whose baby was snatched by social services, not from the cradle but from the womb. The water is starting to bubble.

The woman, an Italian spending two weeks in Stanstead to complete a Ryanair training course, is bipolar and wasn’t taking her medications.

Bipolar disorder is the most common mood disorder. An Australian study found 2.5% of the population were bipolar; in Italy, 10% of patients accessing non-psychiatric medical facilities are bipolar.

An Italian judge found that the lady agreed British social services had authority over the situation – but when she called the police because she couldn’t find her daughters’ passports, they told they were taking her to a hospital to check her baby was OK. It was a psychiatric hospital, where she was later restrained while being forcibly sedated in preparation for a C-section. Her baby was snatched from her womb, which should be its safest refuge.

The message is unmistakeable: take your medications or lose your children. Didn’t anybody stop to think that many psychiatric meds are contraindicated in pregnancy? Did the NHS operating team know they were working in, to be charitable, a legal grey area?

This isn’t just about mental illness – social services have form in targeting people they consider to be on the verge of public opinion then moving inwards: think how the snatching of foster-children from UKIP foster-parents was prefaced by a similar attempt on an English Defence League member.

In order not to jump out of the water as it heats, the frog has to have its brain removed. If we don’t get angry about this one, I think that description can be fairly applied to us.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

"Operate on this mother so that we can take her baby" - Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 1 December 2013

MP John Hemming to raise Essex forced Caesarean claim - bbc.co.uk

Bipolar disorder and its diagnosis - Royal College of Psychiatrists; quotes study on lifetime incidence of bipolar disorder in Australia on p9 of the pdf

Disturbi dell' Umore - Epidemologia - Manuale Merck (in Italian)

Incidence of bipolar disorder in 3 UK cities - British Journal of Psychiatry

Wisdom on frogs - Michael Jones, The Atlantic

Council which removed foster children after parents' UKIP membership was discovered finally apologises seven months on - Simon Tomlinson, Daily Mail

Why try to take baby from EDL mother but not from "terrorists"? - Ted Jeory, Daily Express

the acid test: will Lee Rigby's murderers be treated the same as Mohammed Saleem's murderer?

The murder of Mohammed Saleem while he was walking home from his mosque in Birmingham was a callous, cowardly act.

So was the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

Every crime is individual. But there is one equivalence between the murders of Lee Rigby and Mohammed Saleem. Mohammed Saleem’s murderer, Pavlo Lapshyn, hated non-whites. Lee rigby’s murderers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, hated non-Muslims.

It’s been said Lapshyn is a racist because of his hatred of non-whites, and I have some sympathy for this, especially when I read of the grief of his victim’s family, who say "He did not do anything to deserve this - other than be a Muslim". However, if you ascribe differences between groups of people to culture, not colour, it soon becomes clear that "white" is no more a race than "non-white". And "Muslim", indicating adherence to a religion as diverse as any other, is no more a race than "non-Muslim".

So why is it that news of Pavlo Lapshyn’s trial was – rightly – all over the mainstream media while Adebolajo’s and Adebowale’s is conspicuous by its absence?

The media blackout of the Somalis’ trial is so deep our increasingly prone press is not even commenting on the blackout’s existence. This must only fuel rumours asserting our masters and their media lapdogs have acceded to the view that "Muslim [jihadi] blood is superior to infidel blood".

That being said, the blackout is not the most important issue. Pavlo Lapshyn was sentenced to life imprisonment with a tariff of 40 years for his repulsive act. Will Adebolajo and Adebowale receive a similar term for their equally repulsive act, caught on multiple cameras? If they aren’t, surely it would be naïve of the government not to expect those effectively declared as being of lesser worth to react accordingly?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

HM Government e-petition: lift the Lee Rigby media blackout

Pavlo Lapshyn's 90 days of terror - bbc.co.uk

Mohammed Saleem stabbing: Man admits murder and mosque blasts

"Muslim blood is superior to infidel blood" - Raymond Ibrahim, The Commentator, 19 November 2013

Mosque bomber Pavlo Lapshyn given life for murder - bbc.co.uk

all that glitters: the hidden secrets of money?

I once volunteered at the Bath Street Citizens’ Advice Bureau in Glasgow. In 1998, a senior member of staff there said at a public meeting that he could lay his hands on proof that the financial system was configured to produce debt. Shortly afterwards the branch was informed we owed a staggering unpaid debt that nobody had heard of. Before twelve months had passed since that meeting, the branch – the busiest in Scotland – had been closed down. We never had a chance to hear the lowdown on the financial system.

So I’ve no idea whether the answer would have been similar to that of Mike Maloney (right), who has posted a series of four videos on Youtube entitled Hidden Secrets of Money. The last episode, The Biggest Scam in the History of Mankind, has gone viral.

There’s no doubt that Mike is selling something: he runs a company that trades in silver and gold. And if the videos stir up anxiety and even panic about the imminent collapse of global currency systems, that would be to his benefit.

However, I’m left rather disturbed by the videos; they have the ring (no pun intended) of truth. It’s been suggested that Gordon Brown sold Britain’s gold to shore up international banking systems as the financial tsunami that still rages approached, but - as Maloney suggests - could countries holding British pounds have actually been demanding the repatriation of their gold? And I’m left wondering (I emphasize this is me and is not said at any point by Maloney) if the coming influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe has been planned in order to soak up the enormous amount of money being printed by the treasury so prices don't start rising precipitously?

I agree wholeheartedly with Maloney that our greatest investment is education. I recommend you watch these videos, do your research, and make your mind up.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Hidden Secrets of Money - YouTube. Episode 1 - each episode links to the next

The Biggest Scam in the History of Mankind - Hidden Secrets of Money on Youtube

GoldSilver.com

Hidden Secrets of Money website

Revealed: why Gordon Brown sold Britain's gold at a knock-down price - Thomas Pascoe, Telegraph blogs, July 2012

Money Week: The End of Britain - 300 words

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Democracy as such cannot confer any benefits upon the citizen and it should not be expected to do so. In fact democracy can do nothing – only the citizens of the democracy can act (including, of course, those citizens who comprise the government). Democracy provides no more than a framework within which the citizens may act in a more or less organised and coherent way.

This may seem a strange thing for the person who wrote The Open Society and its Enemies during World War II to say. However, in that work, Popper presages Winston Churchill’s bon mot that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried".

Churchill was speaking after the electorate gave him "the order of the boot" in 1945 and might be forgiven for a dash of rancour, but he identified a key element of democracy: all its stakeholders must be prepared to accept outcomes they disagree with.

An occasional plebiscite is no panacea for our problems. For example, immigration still besets the UK despite a party traditionally tough on immigration leading the Coalition. In fact nearly all politicians fail to act as citizens of a democratic nation, regardless of whether they agree with what the bulk of the people demand.

Those individuals and groups who have exercised their right and their duty to "act in a more or less organised and coherent way" concerning immigration and national identity have been damned by the unelected Establishment, which tolerates only views it agrees with, as fascist and racist (add any derogatory "ism" of your choice). Elected politicians of all political hues, with depressingly few honourable exceptions, collude with and even contribute to the smearing.

Is this merely democracy delivering results we disagree with? Well, with most of our rules coming from Brussels and merely being ratified (as opposed to voted upon) by the European Parliament before incorporation into our law, there’s minimal democracy happening. If we can expect no benefits to arise from the mere fact that our government is democratically elected, what can we expect in democracy’s absence save more of what has always accompanied contempt for common folk, witness the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War and the Regency Riots?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary