Led By Donkeys (iii)

Is Gruff the only one finding it impossible to understand the opinion of 'Bystander' at The Magistrate's Blog in this case.

'Heavy-handed' policing (in itself a subjective assessment) may be cause for a complaint to whatever post-Blair body handles complaints about the police these days but it is not an excuse for a mob-handed assault on a police station and magistrates have no business asserting the contrary (in public at least).

Led By Donkeys (ii) (ToC viii)

Is anyone surprised that Ruhela Khanom has escaped punishment for being in contempt of court? Perhaps if she'd been wearing an 'offensive' t-shirt she might have suffered the wrath of the law but, under the warped Br*tish regime of appeasement that is multiculturalism, Moslems, and other ethnic minorities, have been encouraged to believe that they are subject only to their own peculiar codes of decency and are above English law.

Law and order has collapsed in England.

Led By Donkeys (ToC vii)

Yet again we learn that in pursuit of their culturally destructive and unmitigatedly evil multicultural crusade the authorities are literally 'turning a blind eye' to extremely serious crimes that are routinely committed by immigrants against the indigenous population. Not Proud of Britain (But Would Like To Be) has posted this link to an appalling story that would have had the media in a frenzy had the races of the perpetrators and victims been transposed.

The laws of England do not appear to apply to immigrants, unless they condescend to observe them, and race equality legislation does not appear to apply to the English. We are, at best, second-class citizens in our own land. When our 'leaders' signal that they are afraid to defend our own children from the criminal attentions of what are essentially foreign perverts for fear of being seen as 'racists' (a stick that has been so frequently misused that it now only intimidates the morally and politically cowardly) they demonstrate only that they are incapable of discharging their obligations to us.

Given the appallingly low calibre of those now holding the higher public offices we can expect no improvement in the disgraceful situation to which we have been brought until we abandon the mainstream political parties, as they have abandoned us, and reclaim the political process for ourselves.

Tough on Crime (vi)

Anyone who doubts that the lunatics really have taken over the asylum should read this news report and this.

Sorting out the mess of tainted law left by Messrs Blair and Brown, and to a much lesser extent Lady Thatcher and Sir John Major, is going to take some time but (if we are lucky) at least some of the ill-conceived and ill-thought-out legislation enacted during the last ten years can simply be repealed. Eradicating the cancer of woolly thinking that has destroyed the ability of our our institutions to act sensibly and effectively is going to be rather more difficult, however.

Let Them Eat Brioche! (cf: Eat My Shorts!)

Until quite recently the average law-abiding, tax paying citizen didn't care much about the law, which is not the same as not caring for the law. He paid as much of his taxes as he had to, generally obeyed the law (few of us have not exceeded the speed limit, parked on a double yellow line or uttered treasonous comments about one or another of the rats who thrive in the constitutional sewers) and was content to get on with his life in the knowledge that the law was (generally) content to let him do so, as long as he let his fellows alone. What was then called 'give and take' governed social transactions and, although there was injustice and unfairness, most people were content, most of the time, to accept the status quo, because most people were taught that the law was only concerned with the lawless, and that was mostly true. That situation no longer obtains.

The last five decades have seen an accelerating shift in social (say 'societal', if you must) norms so that the law is now so effectively neutered by hastily enacted, and woefully ill-conceived, legislation that it is now incapable of protecting (though, paradoxically, it is unable to admit that it will no longer protect) the law-abiding and maintains itself, like some bullying yet cowardly beadle, by attempting to terrorise those who were unaware that they were anything but law-abiding. Now the law seems obsessively preoccupied with regulating not just every action, but every utterance and every thought of every person. If we are not petty bureaucrats we are now petty criminals and, whether or no, we are all suspects in Laura Nodder's great game. Should we once fail to obtain, in triplicate (and after the appropriate training) the relevant official sanction we will rue the day.

For decades people have muttered angrily about the manifest unfairness of a legal system that fines people one thousand pounds for watching television without a licence, or failing to return a completed electoral roll registration form within the specified time, or failing to notify the DVLA of one's change of address, yet awards convicted foreign rapists fifty five thousand pounds because an interpreter was not present when his rights were read to him or sends hardened juvenile psychopaths on adventure holidays or awards a typist almost half a million pounds for a sore thumb.

The English love liberty, privacy and freedom from interference but such things are anathema to the Br*tish political class, obsessed with regulation and centralised control, and fearful of individual initiative. We still maintain a sense of fair-play, despite the many unfairnesses with which we are served, and despise dishonesty. We regard even petty criminals with contempt yet crime bothers the political class only in as much as it might affect the (almost pointless) ballot: It isn't the relative handful of predatory scum that threatens the established order, it is the millions of essentially decent, law abiding, tax paying citizens who are able to function without the permission of some overpaid and under-worked official and whose dissent could derail whatever 'great project' is in hand.

One of the dangers of living in a closed, self-regarding community is that, because alternative views are not presented, one develops a restricted view of the world. Politics is one such closed, self-regarding community. Those who comprise the political class, those who have set themselves in authority over us, and their functionaries and flunkies, have lost sight of their ostensible purpose. Politicians evidently believe that they can maintain themselves simply by intravenously feeding us an unrelieved diet of the thin intellectual gruel that is the woolly thinking, smudgy graphics, ideology 'lite', vaguely centre-left, 'promise anything and everything to anyone and everyone as long as it gets us elected but don't cut taxes and don't stop legislating' approach to what has become nothing more inspiring than national management. Why otherwise would they persist in asserting that they are concerned only with building a Br*tain in which every 'stakeholder' is 'engaged' with the centrally determined ideas of the moment; with vacuous utterances about 'rebuilding shattered communities'; about individuals taking responsibility for the communities in which they live; about enabling all to make their contribution to society, whether they wish to or not. We are not fooled by the arrogant clowns who scramble over each other to feed on the dung heap that is politics in McBraun's Br*tain of The Nations and Regions; who have clearly forgotten that actions speak louder than words and clearly do not realise that their actions prove their words to be mere empty rhetoric.

The English have not enjoyed a revolution against the tyranny of an oppressive, bloated and self-serving establishment for some time but the necessity for another is developing fast. The spark is likely to be something mundane: a harassed citizen driven beyond breaking point by an unproductive and otherwise unemployable baboon given a badge and a fluorescent jacket and the power to annoy the law-abiding.

Life Imitating Art (Apropos of The Post Below; q.v.)

As the king's men fell over themselves in their eagerness to put poor Humpty back together again, the king dragged Alice off to watch the lion fight the unicorn, which scene neatly epitomises life in contemporary Br*tain. Gruff almost wrote 'Lewis Carroll couldn't have made it up' but, of course, he did.

All The King's Horses ... (ToC v)

Humpty Dumpty was a conceited fellow, as Alice discovered, and richly deserved his great fall, but although the king sent all four thousand two hundred and seven of his men, and all but two of his horses, they couldn't, as every child used once to know, put him back together again, which was sad for poor Humpty but resulted in one less bad egg to trouble society.

Theo Spark has posted a link to this story of life imitating art in The Daily Mail. Except to ask why a man who had no legitimate reason to be in another man's bedroom in the early hours of the morning, and fell four floors to his death trying to escape, should be described as an 'alleged' burglar, and to observe that, given the apparent circumstances, use of that adjective in this particular instance cannot but be subject to Humpty Dumpty's peculiar verbal modus operandi, there is nothing more to be said.

Full Speed Ahead and Don't Worry About Icebergs

Whoever is in charge on the bridge of The Good Ship Whacky Br*tain, if indeed anyone is, seems heedless of the disaster towards which we are steaming headlong. Wonko has posted his understandably outraged comment on this story but it comes as no surprise to read what is just another barely credible tale of the official lunacy we fund with our hard earned taxes. After ten years of the sort of government that a madman such as Caligula might have had difficulty conceiving, England has been transformed into a country in which the indigenous population are officially second-class citizens.

It might have been comforting to reflect that, failing the outright abolition of what little remains of democracy in the English part of The Plodding Scotchman's beloved 'Br*tain of the nations and regions', Big Browner would have, at most, only three, destructive, years left but, despite three convincing defeats since 1997, the Conservatives have become, under Grooovey Dave, as electable as Labour were under Michael Foot. By describing the English as ignorant to a Glasgow audience and promising the Asian population of Ealing Southall, in languages that few others in England can understand, that he will make a number of their religious festivals bank holidays, Scotchman Cameron has made it very clear that he has nothing to offer the people of England but further disadvantage, division and discrimination. That the man clearly believes he addresses his particular audience in a bubble, his words untranslated and unreported, suggests that he lacks even a basic grasp of political realities in a fragmented and allegedly 'multicultural' society in which an increasingly disaffected and restless majority can see that it is disregarded and derided. The man is a buffoon and none but buffoons will vote for him.

We are ruled, unopposed, by a foreign politician we have not elected, a virtual dictator, intent on dismembering our country for the benefit of his own. Five hundred and twenty nine members of parliament sit at Westminster for constituencies in England yet very few have the courage to defend our country from the ravages of the Scotch dominated Br*tish state. The mainstream parties have abandoned us and our only hope is to fend for ourselves at the next general election.

The Scum of The Earth

A fine appreciation of irony is, we like to think, a characteristic that defines us as Englishmen and women and one of the supreme ironies of Br*tish history is that those who were lauded for having made Br*tain great invariably garnered the credit, and the honours, that rightly belonged to those whose lives were governed by their whim, and whom they not infrequently despised. The Anglo-Irishman Arthur Wellesley once described the men under his command as 'the scum of the Earth', yet his fame was founded on their unwavering courage and unquestioning loyalty. It was a bitter irony that many of them ended their days as inmates of workhouses or as crippled beggars on street corners. A reasonable person looking at the way that their successors are treated today might not unreasonably assume that those who ultimately control them share the opinion of His Grace.

Another characteristic that we like to think defines us is an ability to laugh at ourselves, and our blackly ironic humour has certainly seen us through some dark days, but for some of those who have taken The Queen's shilling laughter rings hollow and the continued failure of our 'leaders' to take their plight seriously smacks of taking the piss.

It is blackly ironic, though far from funny, that when our servicemen and women return from defending democracy in some land that, often, few here knew existed beforehand, they find that as far as those whose freedom they guarantee, such as the good people of Ashtead, Surrey, are concerned, they are still, apparently, 'the scum of the Earth'.

So much for 'progress', so much for 'social democracy'.

Who's Zooming Whom?

Truth is stranger than fiction, they say, and for those of us not 'in the know' it can be difficult to disentangle the one from the other but one can be forgiven for thinking that since the truth needs no defence, strange stories of this sort naturally beg the question (of democracy, the law and the western liberal tradition): Quo vadis Domine?

Although it is not a Whacky Br*tain story, it is a whacky story about a Briton in a Europe that is daily becoming whackier, and less free.

Ever Decreasing Circles

Pity the poor residents of Ashtead, Surrey, who will now have to suffer the presence of wounded service personnel and their families as a result of a unanimous decision by the planning sub-committee of Mole Valley District Council.

Unbelievably, 86 residents of the area objected to an application to convert a house into accommodation for the families of wounded servicemen (and women) receiving treatment at Headley Court rehabilitation centre. This report is disturbingly similar to accounts from the First World War (another pointless slaughter of men with qualities far superior to those of the pen pushers and desk warriors who sent them to die) of letters to the papers complaining that the sight of so many mutilated servicemen disturbed the wives, children and servants of respectable gentlemen.

How frightfully infra dignitatem.

Gruff can never read or hear the words 'Mole Valley' without thinking of the anally retentive Martin Bryce, the character played (and evidently thoroughly researched) by Richard Briers in the television comedy series Ever Decreasing Circles. Hopefully the circles in which the good people of Ashtead move will decrease to the extent that they disappear up their own backsides. It's unlikely, however. The spiteful, petty-minded meanness of such characters deserves ridicule but reminds us that, like the poor, the unbelievably selfish and stupid will always be with us. When contrasted with this tale of Whacky Br*tain it's hard not to suspect that someone, somewhere, is having a bloody good laugh.