Power is Money, Money is Power

The two are interchangeable and more or less synonymous. Neither of them is particularly subject to national boundaries and such entities as countries simply provide one of many different types of power base. To me, once you accept that those two are different forms of the same force, then a lot of things become clearer.

Whilst, in an attempt to create religious tolerance, a lot of societies are these days at least nominally secular in nature, politics is in many ways itself a religion and, as such, it seeks to control people usually through fear of one sort or another. The people serve the political machine rather than the machine serving the people. To use the vernacular, as seems to happen so frequently in many walks of life, the tail is seeking to wag the dog and in politics, that is almost uniquely successful! Of course, the other thing that should be pointed out is that, in spite of what so many believe, all political machines (and religious organisations too) are corrupt to a considerable degree – and some are rotten to the core!

There are two basic financial systems in the world – capitalism and socialism and that is indeed what they really are – monetary systems – in spite of all the attached ideologies used to pretend they are something else. If you had a world socialist system, it would be totally dominant because, when not in conflict with capitalist systems, it does not need to compete, it controls the power and its elite can print and distribute the money (or goods and services) as they see fit. Equally, if capitalism were completely unrestricted world wide, then it too could control all the money and services and the wealthiest and most powerful elite would again distribute the money according to their preferences. In that case, exactly as with socialism, the rest of us are totally subservient.

Now that normal religions hold less sway in a large sector of human society, politics has replaced it as a tool to control the people and the people worship at the altar of the new all seeing omnipotent god they must obey, just as they do when a “standard” religion is the device in use.

Yet it all comes back to the fact that power and money are what everything in our world is about and they are the means by which we are all forced into servitude. As I said in an earlier post, capitalism can be made to at least partially regulate itself in the best interests of the general population, but it will always be fighting to become utterly dominant. However, a capitalist democratic system provides the best opportunity we, the people, have of wresting at least a degree of political control from the elite and using it to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism. Socialism in all its forms (including communism) does not permit that wresting of control and never will. Under any socialist system, the state is always fully dominant and will challenge any and all attempts to make it serve the public, in spite of all the fancy claims to the contrary – and that’s probably the principal reason why I so hate what it stands for.

But it’s still all about money – which is power – which is money – which is…

Arrogant Bastards!

In an ordered society, you’ve got to have rules and that means you’ve got to have some kind of authority to make sure that the majority of the citizens living in that society abide by those rules – more or less at least. It used to be done using religion and the fear of reprisal by a vengeful god, but that seems to have much less effect these days, particularly in the a rather more sophisticated (or less devout, depending on your beliefs) West.

The trend that perhaps most concerns me is that I can often see a tendency for politics that suggests it’s going the way of religion and it’s doing so for many of the same reasons too – the arrogant bastards at the top of the pile!

As with religious leaders, politicians are being caught out more and more frequently behaving in an entirely inappropriate way. Church leaders are frequently discovered to be paedophiles, rapists, crooks and megalomaniacs and so increasingly are politicians. It appears to be sheer arrogance that feeds such egos as these people exhibit, but the most worrying thing is that, generation by generation, ordinary people are turning away from these controlling influences as their excesses become more and more apparent. Where will it end?

Personally, being an atheist, I pretty much welcome the waning of religious influence. I don’t want to belittle anyone’s beliefs, but to me it shows progression towards a more enlightened and logical attitude, but (and it’s a huge but) unless there is something to replace it that is as effective as a moderating influence, we as a species could well be in big trouble.

Of course, I’ve always seen education as the key. If you teach young people to behave decently towards and respect others as well as themselves, then you will end up with a society that largely regulates itself, but the current trend in much (most?) of the West is away from that, whatever the do-gooders would have us believe. If we can’t get that right – and bloody soon – then we may well face the breakdown of society and total anarchy, prior to a return to tribalism and a possible end to our dominance on this planet.

Perhaps that would be a good thing, I don’t know, but it could conceivably at the very least put the development of the human race back by two or three hundred thousand years and that would be such an appalling waste of the enormous potential humanity has to explore and conquer the solar system, our galaxy and beyond and maybe eventually even grow into something really special.

Feed The Monster – or Not?

I have no desire whatsoever to further anything that is connected with communism or even socialism, both of which I regard as total rubbish and far, far worse even than capitalism, in spite of all its myriad faults. Socialism simply swaps one set of assholes for a different and frequently even less deserving set of assholes. Nevertheless, to me, this quotation, which I found in a great article on Info Ink is probably one of the best and most succinct summaries I’ve come across of how the economic crisis has been dealt with by political administrations around the world…

Jerry White apparently wrote the following on wsws.org:

Indeed, the administration has provided unlimited resources to stabilize “the financial system,” i.e., the bankers who are responsible for the financial collapse. But this has had nothing to do with a revival of lending, let alone slowing the wave of foreclosures and personal bankruptcies. On the contrary, the big banks have used the public funds to extend their grip over the financial system, hand out billions in bonuses and resume the same type of reckless speculation that produced the economic catastrophe.

That, I believe, is a near perfect description of how the current round of economic disasters has been handled and it’s indicative of how far the various governments around the world have lost control of their own countries – and yes I do mean lost control of their countries!

Nevertheless, it’s my considered opinion that it’s not the banks and financial institutions that are really to blame either. We witter on about businesses behaving responsibly and being accountable and so on and so on… What total bullshit that is! Business is business and it’s doing what it does and nothing more. It’s there to make the best profit it can and simple legislation to stop it telling outright lies is all that’s required. Any other direct legislative control is bound to be ineffective, extremely costly and largely counterproductive.

If you want any business to behave “responsibly”, then the very best and most effective way to fight its worst excesses is by means of competition! Just as it’s true that a young thug will respond best to a smack in his foul mouth (whatever the do-gooders would have you believe), corporations fear and modify their behaviour in response to competition from a similar organisation that behaves differently and is more to the liking of its customers!

Equally, the best guarantee of workers being treated fairly by their employers is a buoyant economy and competition between firms for the best employees. Naturally, socialist supporters don’t like that because, first and foremost, they believe in controlling everything and everybody their way and it does in any even mean that lazy, aggravating assholes will find that no one wants to employ them anywhere – but then why should they? In a competitive society (and humans are by nature competitive, which is why our species is successful), just as corporations must compete with each other for business and the best employees, so must the workers compete with each other for the best jobs under the best conditions by studying and attempting to be the best! What’s wrong with that? Why are we continually trying to make the unemployable employable? Sure, as a wealthy, caring society, we shouldn’t see anyone starve, but we shouldn’t either attempt to pretend that a lazy, ignorant, uninterested, selfish, belligerent asshole is equally deserving of all the benefits that come to a hard working and responsible employee who’s taken the opportunities he’s been given (and found for himself) to work hard at becoming properly educated and knowledgeable – it just doesn’t make sense!

Humans are all equally important and all deserve equal opportunity in a decent, modern society, but what they will achieve with that is not equal and shouldn’t be, because we are all different individuals with differing abilities and desires. If we choose not to take the best advantage we can of what opportunities are offered by our society, then that is our choice (indeed, in my opinion it’s our right), but then it’s also up to us to bear whatever crosses that choice brings with it.

If someone is truly incapable due to a physical or mental disability, then fine, take care of the guy and do it well and above all with dignity, but people who truly fit into that category are few and far between and the vast majority of the disadvantaged are that way because they’re freeloaders and/or don’t want to join the system. As I say, I can sympathise with that and agree that it’s their right, but it should be their problem to cope with the downside of that personal choice and not a burden for the rest of us to bear on their behalf.

So, Is There a Solution?

Well, whether you agree with me or not, if you’ve read this far then surely it’s worth a few more moments of your time to just consider how I would control big business without huge amounts of legislation, red tape and all the normal accompanying (and in my view ridiculous and pointless) bureaucracy that I despise so much…

Firstly, to very briefly sum up, I think capitalism, bad as it is, is vastly preferable to communism, which doesn’t in fact work on a grand scale anyway and I believe that by far and away the best way to control capitalism is by competition.

Since (in the UK at least, although I don’t know how it’s been done in the US) “the people” virtually own one or more banks following all the money that’s been put in, why can we not simply take over what’s left of the one we own most of (a huge, international bank) and run it to behave in the way we would like to see other banks behaving? The competition would quickly force the other banks to behave in a similar fashion if they want to stay in business at all! This, in my opinion, should be done with many of the critical businesses that “serve” both the people and capitalism such as some other financial services including insurance and even education.

The big banks would no doubt scream, “Unfair competition” – just look at the so-called healthcare punch-up debate that’s occurred in the States – it has nothing to do with “freedom” or any of the rest, it’s all about the insurance companies who fear the competition! However, I don’t think they really have a point (which I personally would ignore anyway, whether they like it or not) because there is a snag…

The snag? Governments can’t by their very nature run anything efficiently and successfully. It just doesn’t happen!

What’s that? You don’t believe me? OK, I’ll prove it. The simplest way for me is to deal with the UK, which (being a Brit) I know most about. Let’s take a couple of really important and typical examples: healthcare and education…

On healthcare we have the NHS, which is far more comprehensive than the proposed systems in the US. Free healthcare for everyone as, what and when needed. Sounds great and, in some ways, it is. But private health insurance and private hospitals, consultants and doctors are thriving! Why? Because the NHS is so badly run, over-regulated and hide-bound by legislation and bureaucracy that it frequently fails abysmally to provide the superb healthcare we all know perfectly well that it can and, sometimes, does!

Then there’s education, which is available to every child in the UK from the age of (I think it is) four to… well… basically to the grave, because it’s totally free up to the statutory age of eighteen and grants etc. are available for the poorest at least to go to university, college and more – even when people are older and have to “retrain” because of redundancy and so on. It’s not perfectly free to those beyond school age, but it’s there and the cost can be “offset” in many ways. Yet (again) the private, fee-charging schools and colleges (and boy are the fees mostly something to behold!) are yet again thriving! That’s because, if you want your child to grow up well educated and basically decently behaved, instead of either stabbed to death or becoming an ignorant thug, you’d better find the money if you possibly can. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration because not all state schools and certainly not all state pupils are like that, but many are and the dangers and lack of proper education are often and definitely very real.

But I digress (again) - the solution: If governments set up normal, semi-autonomous businesses as the controlling competitors, with the right balances in their initial remit and only broad further management by government, then it would work. They can’t do that, though. It’s simply against their nature. They have to meddle and fuck up things that work perfectly well – mainly because the politicians involved are largely far too stupid and inept to actually be employed in the outside world themselves, but have an uncontrollable urge to be in command of anyone and everything, which is why they became politicians in the first place.

Oh, well… sigh… back to the drawing board, I suppose…

Screwed Again!

Of course, there have always been freak weather conditions in the UK that have produced exceptionally strong winds, unusually hot summers and unexpected floods, but that’s just life and the unpredictability of our planet (and yet they still keep trying to predict the unpredictable – at enormous cost).

However, over recent years there has been a trend towards high winds and flooding, particularly at this time of year. That, we are told, is because of the early effects of global warming. Personally, I think the flooding at least has far more to do with appallingly bad building planning, which has allowed development after development on the flood plains of rivers and NO serious attempt has been made to ameliorate this failing by improving flood defences and channeling water in alternative directions – that of course is entirely doable, but would cost some of OUR money that the politicians would rather waste on themselves and their self aggrandising pet projects!

Nevertheless, whatever the reason, vast, heavily populated areas of the UK end up underwater every year or two, the insurance companies are (not entirely unreasonably) jacking up premiums in such low-lying areas to an astronomical level, or simply refusing to insure such properties against flood at all, which in turn hugely devalues the said properties.

The authorities have NO CONCEPT of reality! They’re just sitting on their hands (and our money) and hoping things will “settle down”. What arrant stupidity! What happened to protecting the people?

When will these people face up to reality? If this IS to be the trend, then they should start preparing for what’s to come right now – which is why it’s so important to get rid of all the bullshit that’s talked about so-called global warming and its causes and do PROPER science in an attempt to create a reasonably accurate scenario with realistic probabilities. IF it’s coming, then all our stupid little efforts are not going to change that and we should be planning and building for what will be a new reality!

It’s just yet another example of the same old same old – THE PEOPLE GET SCREWED YET AGAIN!

So There You Have It…

So, there you have the result of having a totally undemocratic system for governing the USEU (currently simply called the EU)… Because the EU bosses select their President and Foreign Secretary rather than having them elected by the people, we have two complete nonentities for those posts.

So, who chose them and why? Surely they’d want powerful, well known figures for the first time around in order to make a nice strong statement?

Well, no, actually. The powerful assholes who chose them and then bullied others into accepting the idea, were of course the French President and the German Chancellor. Those two are both high profile, very pushy and egotistical and neither of them would want anyone in those jobs who might overshadow them.

I’m not in favour of a powerful President or Foreign Secretary running the EU, but I’m one hell of a lot more pissed off about having it run by Nicolas bloody Sarkozy and Angela goddam Merkel! Both France and Germany have hankered for dominance over Britain for a very long time. It now seems that what both of them failed miserably to achieve by military means they are managing by deviousness and stealth within the EU which they virtually control between them.

They are an odd couple, but the old saying that beauty is only skin deep must indeed be very true, because they are clearly in bed together over this… ugh! The thought makes my skin crawl!

A Fine Distinction

A post I came across recently on the subject of Scientology prompted me to think about religion and repeat a couple of questions I’ve asked myself for years. For the sake of clarity and honesty, I should admit at this point that I’m basically atheist and religion is not my favourite subject either to contemplate, or to blog about.

However, the post, which you can find here quotes a UK BBC report that the so-called religion of Scientology has been accused and convicted of fraud in France. Significantly (to me), at the end of the post, the writer asks exactly the same question that I always asked – particularly when I have a bad day and am confronted by religion at all…

The accusation is that Scientology is making huge profits and it frequently does that by manipulating people – fraud in fact.

I’m not talking about faith here and, for each of us, I believe very strongly that our beliefs are ours and our business alone and I wouldn’t dream of questioning them, or attempting to dissuade anyone from those. No! What I’m discussing here is organised religions – the churches themselves, or rather the organisations behind them, if you prefer that description.

The question I ask is: How is that description of Scientology different from pretty much any organised religion? Catholicism, Anglicanism, Judaism, Moslem, Hindu, whatever? To me, most of the religious organisations may appear superficially very different, but they are like Einstein’s various forms of energy – transposable!

Organised religions are either about power or money, which are in any event themselves pretty much synonymous and they use mental manipulation as their principle tool in furthering those ends.

If Big Is Not Beautiful

It’s my opinion that it’s sometimes necessary to have cooperation between organisations and even countries to achieve big things. For instance, there is almost no doubt that, unless some trauma akin to Armageddon befalls mankind, humans will eventually one day truly conquer space, matter transmutation and maybe even time travel; we will surely discover a boundless source of clean energy and possessions will be more or less irrelevant when most people can have pretty much whatever they want just by requesting it. Such things are dreams – the stuff of science fiction – and yet a lot of it will come to pass one day. They are, though, all big, in fact huge, undertakings and will require enormous resources that no single group, state, company, or even country, however large, could possibly tackle successfully alone. I do also believe that much of what we as a species achieve in the future will come through commercial enterprise and, looked at in that way, I suppose that these huge global corporations make sense.

However, I’m also a great believer in the idea that small is beautiful and I’m not at all a fan of the big multi-national companies, big government, or pretty much big anything else. The purpose, indeed the duty, of any capitalist business is to make profit – there is no other reason for it to exist. Nevertheless, I think it likely that a lot of small and perhaps more specialised organisations cooperating are much more efficient and likely to come up with the goods than giant amorphous entities that have little entrepreneurial spirit and generally no “soul” within them at all. There are, it’s true, a few exceptions, but they almost always depend for their enterprise and sense of adventure on one person at the helm with the independence, courage and vision to dream and reach for the stars both metaphorically and maybe in reality too. People like Sir Richard Branson who, it seems to me, once he perceives that something exciting might be possible, seems driven to try to achieve it!

But if big is not so pulchritudinous after all, where does that leave us? Where should we perhaps begin to consider downsizing? Well, it’s frequently occurred to me that, in the UK at least (and I believe that the US and even much of Europe are all similar) it seems that it all starts to go wrong with our kids. OK, so that’s not some brilliant flash of inspiration. There’s no clap of thunder to applaud that announcement. But there’s a lot to be said for attempting to analyse that superficially simple statement…

 So, is it because we’re bad parents? Well, no doubt some of us are – probably quite a lot of us – but then there were always bad parents and, in any event, many of the worst examples are themselves just as much products (and therefore victims) of our failing system.

Accordingly, I’d like to put those two suggestions together – big is not beautiful and it starts with the children. All this PC crap we seem to endlessly come up against, together with the “nanny state”, the welfare state – even maybe TV – all have to take their share of the blame for the development of a culture in which people are no longer prepared to accept responsibility for themselves, their own safety and welfare and even that of their children, but most of all, for the consequences of their own actions. Yet to me it’s the education system that is at the root of it and has failed so abjectly. Big, anonymous, unmanageable and thus uncaring schools have produced and are still producing young people who have learned very quickly that they are of no importance to others or the system and have to effectively fend for themselves and frequently fight to survive – as they see it at least. No wonder the younger generation so often has no respect for anyone or anything.

When I was at school, they were all much smaller than today and the teachers pretty well knew all the pupils, who they were, what they were like and mostly how to control them. Furthermore, they mostly knew the parents, at least on a superficial level. Pupils knew that they could get the cane or the slipper and, although it was relatively rare, it was a deterrent that we all knew was there if we stepped too far out of line. We grew up knowing what we wanted and where we stood with respect to others. We had values and had above all been taught to respect ourselves, something that all too few do today. More importantly, we learned what we had been sent to school to learn and our biggest worry was how upset and disappointed in us our parents would be when we were subject to sanctions at school. These days they tell their parents they received a “detention” and one or both of those parents may well go up to the school and attack the teacher. The occasional disruptive child was NOT tolerated for long by anyone because the rest of us were there to learn!

I’m not saying here that older was better (although I think it was), but what I am saying is that smaller was far better and it could be again. Those of us who do care about society and its future may well bring up a relatively well behaved young child – until he or she goes to school! From then on, such parents are continually undermined by peer pressure from little hoodlums who are allowed to behave in a way that was never tolerated years ago in the much smaller, more “human” sized schools.

Maybe Armageddon will in the end be the only answer and the final solution will be for humanity to go the way of the dinosaurs – what a waste of so much potential, eh?

Trust No One – Especially Yourself!

This is not yet another conspiracy theory. Nor (I hope) is it paranoia. It’s more of a collection of facts that most of us ignore, except perhaps in passing or when enjoying a laugh over a drink with friends in a bar.

So… because you have a brain that works, you’re one of those people who’s pretty well informed – right?

Wrong!

Okay, so most of us with a mind of our own like to keep up with events and generally know what’s going on and that’s important. But do we in fact know very little indeed with any degree of certainty? It’s my belief that we actually know almost nothing. We can work on probabilities and likelihoods, but most of that’s based on what we’re told and we all know how unreliable that can be.

We can all look at current affairs and recent history and see a lot of known facts. However, if you analyse events whilst bearing in mind the modern trend towards so called “spin” and even what is believed to be known about the shadowy world of the various secret services, some of the “known facts” seem a whole lot less certain.

As I said, this is not yet another conspiracy theory, but it is inspired by that sort of attitude… that and this short and straightforward post on Info Ink about which there are already a myriad of theories and misinformation that all seems to me to be designed to muddy the waters and make it much easier to come up with whatever eventually best suits the powers that be as a plausible “final” explanation.

Do we truly “know” anything about the mass murders at Fort Hood in America? Actually know? “No, we don’t,” has to be the answer to that question. We think we know stuff from lots of conflicting reports and other information that we’ve been given by the media and others… but really know it for sure? I don’t think so. For a time they couldn’t even decide if the shooter was alive, or dead, disappeared or in captivity.

Then again: Do we know anything about other major events? Not really. There are lots of theories and conspiracy theories and media info and analysis, but real cold, had indisputable facts? Not a lot! No one actually knows who killed JFK, or even why. Was it Lee Harvey Oswald? Take a look at this site for instance, which attempts to separate fact from fiction. Good try, but does it prove anything? Will we ever know? Probably not. Not in my lifetime at least.

But all that’s just politics and stuff and we know about further back – history and so on – don’t we? Actually, the answer to that is, “Probably not!” Much of history – the most significant and memorable events – is about conflict and, as some wise person once pointed out: The history of a war is written by the victors. Take the American War of Independence… it was all about freedom, wasn’t it? We-ell… maybe. But it was probably more about taxes that the rich didn’t want to pay to England at the time, or better trade opportunities – that and the fact that the French had never forgiven us for Agincourt and Waterloo (and still haven’t) and did one hell of a lot of stirring behind the scenes (sigh – nothing changes).

Of course, back into the so called “Dark Ages” little is know about anything, but then there’s further back and that’s clear, isn’t it? An example? OK then…

What’s the date today? Well, according to my computer it’s the 12^th November 2009. That’s the 12^th day of the month of November after the adjustments (of several months) made to the Roman Julian Calendar a few hundred years ago when scientists of the time realised it was way out and Pope Gregory adopted today’s Gregorian Calendar!

However, the really interesting thing is the year – 2009. That is, more specifically, 2009 AD – Anno Domini – since the birth of Jesus Chris. The year has been accepted pretty well world wide as a matter of convenience – certainly when dealing with matters international. To most of us, the point at which we start counting is a nominal date in history. To some though, it is the literal translation which is “The year of Our Lord, 2009″ and that’s a bit of a sham, because no one knows when Christ was born. It’s probably somewhere between 6 BC and 6 AD, so the “nominal” start of our calendar is smack in the middle of that – see this site if you want explanation. The day of the year on which we celebrate Christmas is also nominal and was probably a Pagan festival pinched by Christianity for convenience.

Then, of course, you have the history of the world according to Sarah Palin, where dinosaurs, mammals, humans and everything else walked the Earth when God made it 6000 years ago. Sorry, I don’t have a reference to hand to prove that theory.

OK Then, Let’s Run With This

For a short while at least, let’s just stay with the “Government By Referendum” theme. In the best modern political tradition, we should give it an acronym – how about the obvious, GBR? Or maybe GBPR? That could be Government By People’s Referendum or Popular Referendum, or even Pointless or Pig-headed Referendum. Of course, in the UK it could also stand for Gordon Brown’s Priceless Rabble and a lot more. Nevertheless, since this is my post and I prefer life to be as uncomplicated as possible, I think I’ll stick with GBR.

So – GBR…

I think it’s worth briefly repeating the problem: At present, in democracies across the globe, we are asked to vote for our politicians. Those politicians then form a government. How that government is formed using those votes, whether it’s so by called “first past the post” or one of the many systems of “proportional representation” is irrelevant. The result is the same: Most of us vote for (or against) a party. If we try to do the “right” thing and vote on the issues, then we are forced to vote on the one or two most important issues (to us) and then have to accept whatever goes with it. If I wanted to vote FOR the reinstatement in the UK of the Death Penalty for the worst paedophiles, the wickedest murderers and the most sadistic rapists (which I might seriously just consider) then I’d probably have to accept that the only party that would even consider offering that at election time would be one that is, in my opinion, extremely racist. So, in that case, the only choices I have are to vote FOR racism (which I loathe), or AGAINST the reinstatement of the death penalty and FOR all sorts of other things, some of which I might agree with – and some most definitely not!

Of course, under a system of GBR, much of that could still apply, since the Administration that was elected would decide on what bills to put forward as legislation, and I also fully accept the arguments that the people don’t have enough information to make a valid judgement and perhaps not the political skill either (some say nor the intelligence to do so, but in general I don’t think that’s quite true). However, under GBR, the government of the day would be forced to put much of the major legislation to the people individually as SINGLE issues to be ratified, or not, as the people chose.

Therefore, under GBR, I could vote at the election perhaps on the one major issue that mattered most to me, or even against that issue, just as now, but I could do so with a lot more freedom and confidence knowing that they’d have to get much of the rest of their shit past me and the rest of the people before it became law. THAT is one hell of a BIG PLUS and I’m sure it could be further developed in the future.

As a by-product of this system, public clamour and pressure could gain greater importance and weight, because a struggling government might well feel obliged to draft some legislation and put it to the people, knowing they could wring their hands and honestly say, “it wasn’t our idea – the people wanted it.”

How Hard Would It Really Be?

So, how difficult would it really be to design a system run more or less entirely by referendum? I’m talking here about the UK, but I believe the system would work even better in the US where only major issues are supposed to be the province of Federal Government.

I guess that, for at least some time to come (possibly forever), all the day to day stuff would have to be run by the same self-seeking, self-important morons as now, but could it be changed in the future for the big issues (with the right willingness behind it, of course)? I think so.

Actually, I don’t see it as being logistically all that difficult and the vast majority of the required infrastructure already exists. In fact, I think the people themselves would be the bigger problem by a long way, since most citizens don’t in fact have much of a clue about what goes on in their country politically, or why, but then that’s the job of the politicians and maybe they would for once be forced to explain their preferences in words that normal people can understand.

Quite clearly, it would be a bad thing to have the public gut reaction to situations that arose driving law and political, even international, response to perceived problems. It wouldn’t, for instance, be right to give the public the power to pass a law suddenly and retrospectively condemning all people on the sexual offenders register to death because of some wicked pervert who attacked a child – and I freely admit I’d feel just as most of the public do – hang the bastard! However, such a law would undoubtedly include some unfortunate people who just fell foul of an Ex, or where a sixteen year old boy had sex with a willing fifteen year old girl who might well have lied about her age.

However,  we are here only talking about the public voting on legislation, which Parliament has drafted over specific issues and – if you don’t want the public gut reaction to take over, then don’t legislate about it! That would curb some of the time-wasting, interfering busy-bodies in Parliament, wouldn’t it? Certainly in the early years, this would only apply to “major” issues and perhaps it would be up to the MPs themselves (with a FREE vote!) to decide what should and shouldn’t be put to the people.

I do sincerely hope, though, that such vital matters as the question of acceptance of the EU constitution (they call it a treaty, but it’s a constitution by another name) and the resultant relinquishing of many of our legal an civil rights to Brussels, would have to be voted on specifically by everyone in the UK, whether the politicians liked it or not.

Wouldn’t THAT put the politicians in their place for once, eh?