Who are the Subversives Now?

According to the OED a subversive can be someone who seeks to demolish or turn upside down or overturn and so if your views or actions are seen as having this effect expect to be on the awkward squad list kept by your local Special Branch Officer. I would now like to add the names of various politicians and police officers to that list since they are now the new subversives. The power of the people has been turned upside down, if it were ever the other way round, and this stolen power is now increasingly used against them.
According to our own publicity the United Kingdom is described as a ‘liberal democracy’ .This means different things to different people. What it means to me is a system based on that old fashioned phrase, rarely used now by politicians of the Blair years, and even more rarely, understood, ‘The Rule of Law’. I do not know who taught Tony Blair British Constitutional Law or indeed if he ever studied it to become a barrister, before that is, he became a failed Prime Minister, but if he did, he seems to have been unconvinced by its core teachings.

This is surprising because the Rule of Law is fairly simple to grasp, even by those who merely gargle at the fountain of knowledge. Basically, government is to be by law, rather than the whims of rulers or their officials, all are equal before the law and have access to it, and it is the courts, not government officials, who rule on the interpretation of law. There are one or two fuzzy edges about where administrative tribunals and the like fit in, but these are no longer seen as a threat to good government. The threat to the Rule of Law today seems to come from our elected governments which seem ever eager to create more and more discretions for more and more ‘officials’. The keenness for privatisation and the ‘war on terrorism’ has combined to blind our politicians to what they are doing.

The point which the Blair generation and many of its apparatchiks either never learnt, or chose to forget, is that in seeking to protect our Liberal Democracy from the enemy within or without, you risk destroying the thing you cherish. It is rather like getting the balance right in the countryside. Once a beauty spot is discovered all sorts will rush to see the beauty and unwittingly destroy it with their traffic jams, car par, gift shops and theme parks. Stop everything happening and you deny others the chance to experiencing what only an elite few could enjoy. In the context of civil liberties if you get the balance wrong and make things too easy for the police we all pay the price through facing more and more difficulties, especially if you want to be a participating and critical citizen in the political process.

The product of the Blair years is a path to the destruction of liberal democracy. I never understood the phrase, ‘Town Air is free air’ but the meaning fell into my lap in a small museum a few years ago. When people were more or less enslaved by feudalism the big change would be that of somehow becoming a ‘freeman’. One route would be to acquire a small strip of land in a town, since that brought the status of freeman. How that was achieved I have no idea, but when I go into our big towns today and see the tooled up police walking the streets, followed by their reserves in the form of Community Support Officers, followed by the private security guards, thug wheel clampers and the like, and see it is all being observed by the CCT cameras on every street corner, in every shop and at every car park, station and shopping mall, ‘town air’ is now suffocating. The dust which spread out from the Twin Towers is no longer grit but has been atomised by our politicians and has blinded them. Those politicians who have wielded power both before and after 9/11 in an attempt to impose Law and Order, have subverted the Rule of Law. They, not their critics, are the subversives now.

Dacier

A National Income Limit and Better Property Use

I have just heard about the Peoples Manifesto which Mark Thomas is promoting in his current tour. You might like to see what he is doing by going to www.markthomasinfo.com/ where you will also find a useful card you might like to carry if you are young, out late at night and experience the exercise of a power to stop and search. This is not to say that if you are not young you wont be stopped but the statistics seem to show you are unlikely to attract the attention of the police.

Among the policies you will find is the suggestion that if properties are left unoccupoied for more than five years, ownership will lapse and they can be used for public housing. This would have a considerable impact on properties in urban areas but there are many properties in the countryside which would already qualify. One of the big irritations to local families is that their younsters would like to base their lives in their own community but property prices and the non-existence of social housing makes this practically impossible.

When visiting Devonshire and Cornish resorts in years gone by it was always a source of sadness tainted by amusement that the hovels near the quayside, which previously would have been occupied by the fishermen, were now tidy little second homes or holiday lets which once September had passed stood empty until Easter. At the top of the vilage would be a housing estate provided by the old Rural District Council where all the latter day fishermen and other trades now lived. Today, local people don't even have that option unless a housing trust can be persuaded to set up shop. Even families with a plot of land will often find their plans rejected when they want to build a home for the next generation.

In France the 'dessertification' of the countryside becomes obvious when you pass by unoccupied farm buildings ripe for development as holiday homes, usually for Brits, with little idea what they are taking on. Here in the UK if you travel in most parts of holiday Britain after September you will find deserted villages where schools, shops, pubs and post offices have all passed into local memory. This is most ovious in East Anglia andCornwall but they are not alone. I had often wondered how a 'Chelsea by the Sea' came about, but having learnt in recent years how huge City bonuses can be, I suppose it has to be spent on something. More on such things later.

Dacier