October 30th 2009
On the Commons MPs registry of Members' interests website are these words:
'Employment agreements deposited with the Registrar are available for personal inspection only...'
WHY? After all we've seen in recent months, are they really suggesting that those seeking out evildoers should traipse up to London to see how much they're being paid for umpteen bits of grubby consultancy? The entries there are a farce: Jack Straw went once with his wife to Wimbledon, and Gary Streeter got paid a research respondents fee for being on a panel. Hold the front page.
For anyone's interest, here's a list of why I call Britain the EU's biggest secret society....which is, let's face it, saying something given the Brussels record of unelected skullduggery:
Secret Family Courts: An open invitation to every paedophile and money-grubbing Council in the country to traffick in human beings at their most delicate age
Gagging Orders: Arse-covering Judges wacking eight, ten and even eighteen year gagging orders on disgraceful examples of abuse and corruption threatening to unmask their fellow-members of the elite.
Local Councils: Driving through planning schemes with minimal discussion and even less public debate....in many cases to line their own pockets. Planning departments in such Councils refusing to comment on why objections to plans have not been upheld.
Call centres: A cheap way via which senior execs in service-providing companies can hide from the public and refuse access to real service.
Websites: Unwilling to furnish telephone numbers, email addresses or even Head Office addresses via which consumers can get anything from service to redress. In a study conducted among Microsoft dealers in 2007, less than 5% knew the physical address or phone number of the manufacturer.
Whitehall Government: A website allowing for 'access' to the centre of Government, in which we must give our email address, but they refuse to give us theirs. Take a look at the site: there is no means at all of phoning either No's 10 or 11 Downing Street. Tip: Ring the Ministry of Business, and they'll put you through. (I'm serious)
'Freedom' of Information Act. A farcical piece of window-dressing in which information is released with more blanked-out bits than there is text. Nothing in this country is released unless the Establishment wants it that way - usually for some grubby motive such as finding a fall-guy or smearing a contemporary opponent. Without the Torygraph, we would've had the usual sanitised expenses documentation followed by pathological lying about what was under the black stripes in the copy.
Government Contract Corruption: We are all as electors and taxpayers apparently far too excitable and naive to be allowed to know how and why Tony Blair was allowed to stop a police investigation into the BaE Saudi Contracts. Also to know why he can't be prosecuted in the UK (although he could as President of the EU) and what on earth the point therefore is of having an 'inquiry' into something nobody's allowed to enquire about.
The pre-Iraq War 'Dodgy Dossier'. We still have no clear idea how Civil Servant Kelly died, the pressures put upon him immediately before his death, why an invasion to pre-empt Weapons of Mass Destruction produced one bicycle and a deluded Fuhrer living down a grid, and why our signal software was so poor, American pilots (falsely accused of being trigger-happy) innocently attacked British convoys on the ground.
The GCHQ Billions. This has to be the darkest, smelliest cess-pool of secrecy ever created by Man. It involves rich media owners of indistinct nationality, the major ISPs (already mired in their own foul practices) and £13 billion of public money given lock, stock and staring down every barrel to a snooping organisation answerable to no elected official anywhere in our governmental set.
The Establishment continues with its silly charade about 'only £3billion of test monies' being given to GCHQ. But as nby has asserted (without as yet any superinjunctions) for some two and a half years, they've been given the whole banana and told to get on with it. We are now only a few minor nuts and bolts away from 24/7 surveillance of all our phone calls, website use and email correspondence.
How bizarre it is for me, at nearly 62 years of age, to wind up sounding like a triadic melange of Ken Leninspart, a 1968 UCal paranoid radical, and every conspiracy theory nutter in existence wittering on about Madeleine McCann murder suspects.
But the reality is that I have been a passive liberal for most of my life: a bloke quite happy to enjoy the good things of life, raise a nice family, and feel justly proud of an oft-criticised island country called Great Britain. So if folks like me are getting radicalised in their dotage, we have a serious culturo-political problem.
The existing political Establishment refuse to address the reality of a libertarian democracy turning into an oligarchy of idealogues. To be succinct for once, outdated polemics are getting in the way of good governance.
Yet again, I say to all nby readers: the Internet is the way to defend ourselves. We must use it or be reduced to nothing more than serfs at the beck and call of delusional arrogance.
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