Usefully Useless

Between the European Parliament and the local elections taking place on Thursday, we learned quite a few things. The first and most obvious is that the people have completely lost their support for New Labour.

This turn of events is not at all surprising as people look for someone to blame for the financial crisis, it’s easy to blame the government. This isn’t all, however. Tony Blair oversaw a fundamental shift in Labour’s political stance. Prior to about 1997 or so, Labour were a leftist party which championed the rights of the common man in contrast to the Conservatives, who sought to undermine those rights in the interest of security.

Now the roles are reversed. Blair’s revolution shifted Labour to becoming a conservative party, politically almost identical to the US Republicans, they removed a great many rights from the people. Firearm ownership was banned (and gun crime went up), police gained the power to search anyone on the street without any form of warrant (and concealed weapon crime like knives went up) while economic regulation was abolished (and we entered the worst economic crisis anyone can remember); These are all very reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s rule.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party has become what Labour once were. Now they champion economic regulation and seek to restore the rights of the people, which is exactly what Labour used to be.

Not only that, but Labour fostered a culture of fear. We’re told to be scared of terrorists and that the police need all these new powers to help combat terrorists, it’s blanket coverage all across the media. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s when the IRA was bombing the shit out of city centres nationwide, the police didn’t need these powers.

The plan was that a scared populace was an obedient one, first noted by Julius Caesar and again stated by Herman Goering at the post-WW2 Nazi trials and by Donald Rumsfeld in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. As people naturally do not want war, the government simply states there is a danger to the people, denounce the pacifists for exposing their country to danger, and the populace will support whatever they’re told to – it worked in the US, Bush gaining his second term – but has not worked for Labour.

It has worked, however. People are scared of foreigners, usually Muslims but anyone who looks a bit tanned is suspect. They do not, however, support Labour, they’ve gone to support the British National Party, a hilariously named bunch of neo-Nazis who share ideology with banned German extremists: They are not British and the core values we hold dear as British values are hated by the BNP. They hate Britain and all it is, wishing to transform it into a dystopian hellhole.

Proof? The BNP gained tremendously in the European Parlimentary Election, even gaining a seat. If they continue their advance, we are all screwed. Nationalism can only work on fear, it always has to be attacking someone who’s different to the majority, so long as it retains the veneer of protecting the majority, it’ll remain in power. The BNP in the past have attacked blacks, Jews and Muslims, blaming all kinds of maladies on them. Their entire political viability is based on the politics of fear.

So let’s say they kick every Muslim out of the country and all the “foreigners” (basically, non-whites) – the BNP have stated they will do this, first by “voluntary repatriation” of non-white Brits, then by forced expulsion. Who do the masses fear then? Probably Jews, Nick Griffin is on record stating his belief they’re everything wrong with the world. So we perform a second holocaust, set up concentration camps and gas chambers (oh yes, part of their manifesto is to bring back the death penalty). Then who do we fear? Likely homosexuals. We imprison them all or just execute them. Then who do we fear? Probably Catholics, so we ban its practise and raze its churches, outlawing public protests. Then who do we fear? The Irish, so we invade and annex them. Then who do we fear? Dissidents who obviously want to weaken our nation, so we outlaw elections and imprison the dissenters. Then who do we fear? Intellectuals, the educated, the “elitists”, so we imprison or exile them. Then who do we fear? Well, there’ll likely be not many people left.

In the process we’ll have lost our ability to get these idiots out of government when they banned elections. We’ll have lost our ability to protest against the government, that’s banned too. All the foreign professors, scientists and engineers we attracted will have fled to other countries during the repression of the elitist intellectuals, crippling our economy and innovation.

Britain would be destroyed and we’d be its destructors, the British values we stupidly thought they’d protect would be obliterated. That is why we cannot continue playing the politics of fear. That is why Labour has lost its support to the BNP.

Sounds like the Government is preparing for an election. Scared, fearful people generally vote for the incumbents (the Americans are great at this) and so the Government is trying to create scared, fearful people.

Oh noes, TERRAR! That article discusses “dirty bombs” which are, to a word, worthless. They are effective terror weapons but very ineffective at killing people or damaging property. The basic design is some conventional explosive and some low-grade radiological waste, such as medical waste. The damage done is perhaps a few windows broken and maybe four extra cases of thyroid cancer in 50 years (when there’d be about 30 cases anyway) because the kind of radiation emitted is as close to harmless as possible and, indeed, places such as Cornwall have higher levels of background radiation than a dirty bomb could create due to radon gas seeping out of the granite bedrock.

However, they spread fear and panic like you wouldn’t believe.

The next scaremongering tactic is being done via the Metropolitan Police with this wonderful piece. Anyone who disposes of household cleaners or bleaches and anyone who doesn’t like CCTV everywhere is a terrorist and should be reported to the police Anti-Terrorist Hotline.

Yeah, I thought so too. So the next time the Met kick your door in at 4 am and maybe shoot a Brazilian electrician, it’s your and his fault for using bleach. Only terrorists use toilets, after all.

Give the government, regardless of what country you are, a power and the government will abuse its intent.

After the global financial crisis took down a few Icelandic banks, the UK government used anti-terror legislation to freeze their assets in the UK which further hastened their demise. They didn’t use an actual “terrorist” part of the law, but the part they used would never have got through commons if it wasn’t piggy backed on a knee-jerk bill. Where’s the connection between financial screw ups and bombs in streets? There isn’t one.

The US recently removed North Korea from “state sponsors of terrorism” because they agreed to a nuclear disarmament deal. Where’s the connection between nuclear disarmament and militia with AK-47s? There isn’t one.

If we give the government a power, they will use it. They do not care why or how. The “spirit” of the law is irrelevant, only its letter. The failure we make is that politicians sell their laws on that spirit, on the “it will save us from the jihadists” and don’t tell us when they use it for entirely different reasons. We didn’t give them these powers to abuse like this, to extort trade concessions.

It’s no secret that the government trying to grant itself more power than it should have and such is the sheer perverseness of holding someone without charge for so long (42 days!) that MPs are quite rightly laughing it out of parliament.

The government wants to be seen as “tough on terror” but they forget that Britain has a long memory. What worked against a far more determined and well funded group (the IRA) won’t work against a ragtag bunch of extremists? Where were these wonderful new laws then? That’s right, as unnecessary as they are now.

The tactic is simple, first the government hugely expands the definition of “terrorism” to include a 23 year old woman who wrote bad poetry, some kid who was just trying to be clever on the Internet. Then it expands what it can do with those people to the point of absurdity, Blair suffered his only Commons defeat when trying to extend the detainment limit to 90 days. Can you imagine being detained without charge and without access to a lawyer for 90 days? It’s something the Americans would (and do) do in quasi-legal internment camps and has utterly no place in any society that dare call itself free and civilised.

The latest development is a laughable attempt at an ineffective “safeguard” to the extended detention plan, by forcing Parliament to approve each and every use of the proposals. Quite rightly, MPs see through the charade for what it is, mere rhetoric intended to get the proposal more support in the House which would have little to no practical value as law or as any form of safeguard and also bring the shadow of Parliament deep into the judicial process.

If someone wants to blow shit up badly enough, chances are they will, the IRA proved that. What we absolutely cannot and must not do is blindly lead ourselves to the yoke of oppression on the misguided path of security. The Government would have us cut our own heads off in a blind panic, just to be sure that the “terrorists” couldn’t do it instead. We should not scuttle our own ship.

Terrified reactionists who just so happen to be running the damned country are widely being reported to have suffered a bloody nose at the Old Bailey as jail wasn’t sentenced but nothing could be further from the truth.

In truth, a young Muslim woman and a contributing tax-paying member of society was arrested, tried and convicted of terrorism for nothing more than a few bad poems she posted online and owning “of owning terrorist pamphlets, including The Al-Qaeda Manual” according to the BBC. Why do we not see similar arrests made for owning copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the various works of Lenin or works that have caused more conflict throughout history than any others, the Holy Bible and the Q’ran? Exactly what kind of society forbids mere information, speech, if the Government doesn’t approve of it? The same kind of society the Islamic extremists want to turn the world into. Our most valued liberty, that of free speech, has not been taken from us by evil bearded turban-wearing terrorists, but by Whitehall and the traitors to Britain in Government.

Those extremists probably don’t realise that they’ve successfully convinced the West to use its left hand to chop off its right hand. In the name of defending our “freedom”, we’re surrendering it instead. We’re not fighting a threat to freedom, we are that threat.