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Posts Tagged ‘Political Ideas’

With the UK currently having the rotating chair for the European Court of Human Rights and David Cameron visiting it to deliver a speech to all 47 members with the theme of reforming the way it operates, there is a fluttering in the Dove Cots of the “European Elite” ever prepared to defend their entrenched positions of privilege. As with many things, the actual “truth” behind the operation of the ECHR and our own, one suspects, very badly drafted Human Rights Act may well be fairly complex and difficult to unravel if left only to the Lawyers.

However, the political reality is all too apparent as the recent decision that the radical cleric Abu Qatada cannot be deported to Jordan where he comes from, is a case in point. David Cameron or even Ed Miliband if he were the current British Prime Minister, cannot ignore the political realities even when you warn that “Hard Cases make bad laws…”

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I suppose and in often strange ways, we sometimes discover “the fatal flaw” in most ideas. Having started my commercial life as a designer concerned with engineering and production, there was a very amusing story about a “new mousetrap”, I will not bore you with the tale but the ‘punch line’ was quite simple:

The basic concept behind the design was obviously flawed and when called upon to deal with this, the designer instead of having a total rethink, just “improved” upon or refined his own flawed original concept. To engineers, this was all very amusing because it was something that we had to deal with on a daily basis and knew that it was far too easy to be led astray. I have an awful feeling that Scottish independence is the same…

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The other day Ed Balls admitted that if Labour came to power they would not promise to reverse the cuts in public expenditure currently being made by the Coalition Government. Frankly, the only comment one can make to that is “About time !” The reality is if and when Labour next comes to power, the political weather and economic climate will have changed, inevitably.

Although right now both this and the World generally face some difficult financial issues, these are perhaps just symptoms of other problems rather than the core disease. For a country like the UK, we are probably looking at a long term decline that started during the First world War which coincides with the rise of the Labour Party. One could speculate that solving this decline could also coincide with its (Labour’s), decline just as Communism collapsed with the Berlin Wall.

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It is quite amusing to see the current furore in the Media over the SNP and a Referendum on “Scotland leaving the Union”. It is akin to the nonsense expressed by Germany and France over “preserving the Euro at any costs…”except apparently doing what is required immediately to do so. My question in both cases, keeping the Union with Scotland and keeping the Euro alive is WHY ?

If Scottish people are feeling so “inferior” to their English counterparts that the “only solution” in their minds is total Independence from the UK, then, so be it. If Germany is far too successful and therefore in effect impoverishes the “Southern Europeans”, why not split the Euro membership into two, it is only common sense after all. But politicians do get misled far too often for no doubt for well intentioned reasons but in the end mislead themselves…

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Every now and again and generally in the Telegraph, some daft old fool will prattle on about how “grammar schools were wonderful and just what the country needs today…” or some other such and similar drivel which would be okay if even slightly true but as it isn’t, it is not even worth a debate.

As a working class lad who attended a Catholic grammar school in South London during the late 50s, early 60s, I remember it with fondness and was grateful for the experience. However, one should not get sentimental over them, they were a product of their time and that time has now well and truly passed.

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Yesterday, there was a report published by a self appointed committee into the question of changing the Law within the UK to allow assisted suicide. The committee was headed by Lord Faulkner and was set up by Dignity in Dying, a lobby group, and paid for by the author Sir Terry Pratchett, who has Alzheimer’s disease and is campaigning for changes to allow assisted suicide.

To that extent one may rightly argue that it represents a bias and therefore taints its conclusions in the same way that a “Tory Think Tank” publishing a report recommending that people should vote Conservative would. However and within all this lies something else to my mind, the whole discussion holds up a mirror to what is becoming a Narcissistic society that has lost touch not just with religious values but with the values that have underpinned humanity throughout the ages and regardless of time and place.

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At the ‘turning of yet another Year’ there was a really interesting article in The Economist recently about the continuing phenomena of yet further increases in US productivity, it is well worth a read even if it raises more questions than answers : http://www.economist.com/node/21542211

Of course it led me to consider a personal “theme” I have been developing and that I feel will become ever more important from 2012 onwards, right across the “Old” Western industrialised economies and the World at large, “Productivity” in the old sense, is no longer any kind of solution, new thinking is needed.

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At this time of year, the weekend before Christmas and the New Year, the ‘Media’ is full of “End of Year Perspectives” of one sort or another which generally manage to be totally appalling as the Editorial Staff “Make for the XMAS Hills”. This will be followed by two weekend’s worth of “Sunday Papers” that contain no news and were largely constructed, weeks ago to cover the total absence of any staff on the news desks…all being off on holiday ‘jollies’ whilst the proprietors of the “Titles” still want an income – total bullshit !

To add to that we have the death of a “noted journalist who was an atheist” called Christopher Hitchens and is ‘intimately missed’ by all the other media luvvies, a guaranteed recipe for maudlin sentimentality over a largely mediocre talent if past experience is to go by. Where shall I start ? With the dead atheist of course…

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There is a proposal by a UKIP Peer Lord Pearson of Rannoch to set up a House of Lords Committee to examine the value of the UK belonging to the European Union. It is envisaged that the membership of this committee would be made up of seven people, two “For”, two “Against”, two of no strong view on the matter and, an independent chairman.

The idea would be by diligent examination of the issues, it must be possible to arrive at a firm view, backed with facts that says that it is either “In” or “Against” the UK’s interests to be a member of the European Union. This is a fine ambition I might suggest but there are quite a number of obvious problems with the whole idea…

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Whatever else may be said or written, as an Englishman, I am just so ‘stoked’ that for once, a British Prime Minister has returned from an EU Meeeting having made a positive decision and without excuses about why they were mugged by the ‘other big boys’, that is something even the ‘sainted Maggie’ never did. Well done David Cameron, I say.

Well we have the overnight fallout from the EU Conference on Treaty Changes to accommodate the Euro Crisis although these “changes” obviously don’t require a Treaty Change, they are just a further strengthening of the so called stability pact rules that everyone has already disregarded, led by Germany and France in the first place. What a load of bullshit this all was !

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