You’ll be no stranger to the messages below, but you may, like I was, be surprised at who is expressing the views and wherein they do so.
First, via UKLiberty, comes George Moongoon in the Graun on the West Lothain question and its relatives.
Three nations in the United Kingdom, as a result of one of this government’s rare progressive policies, now possess a representative assembly. The fourth, and largest, does not. England, the great colonising nation, has become a colony. It is governed by a Scotsman who uses foreign mercenaries – Scottish, Welsh and Irish MPs – to suppress parliamentary revolts over purely English affairs. There is still no democratic forum in which English interests can be discussed only by English representatives. The unfairness is staggering, the silence stranger still.
I’m not sure the rest of the article is so palatable, but it is Moonbat.
Also in the Graun, Timothy Pebble-d’Ash has woken up and doesn’t like the smell of the coffee. Presumably, it’s not fairtrade.
For 30 years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world. I wanted people in those places to enjoy more of what we had. In the last few years, I have woken up – late in the day, but better late than never – to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history.
"Oh, these powers will almost never be used," they say every time. "Ordinary people have nothing to fear. It affects just 0.1%." But a hundred times 0.1% is 10%. The East Germans are now more free than we are, at least in terms of law and administrative practice in such areas as surveillance and data collection. Thirty years ago, they had the Stasi. Today, Britain has such broadly drawn and elastic surveillance laws that Poole borough council could exploit them to spend two weeks spying on a family wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. The official spies reportedly made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, whom they referred to as "targets", and watched the family go home at night to establish where they were sleeping. And this is supposed to be modern Britain?
Let’s be clear: though the Stasi headline is irresistible, such Stasi-nark methods do not yet make a Stasi state. The political context is very different. We don’t live in a one-party dictatorship. But nor is this just "an isolated case", as ministers always protest. Almost every week brings some new revelation of the way in which our government has taken a further small slice of our liberty, always in the name of another real or alleged good: national security, safety from crime, community cohesion, efficiency (ha ha), or our "special relationship" with the United States.
Yes… well, these are things the likes of me have been pissed off about for the whole of this century to date – and yet we have grown quite used to being shouted down by the likes of these late bloomers.
AJ
