The dreadfully stultified pageantry of the British state has been on full display the last couple of days, all mouldy ermine, fraying gold braid and musty velvet. But forms which evolved as a vibrant display of Imperial might have transmuted into rituals of obeisance, as the nonogenerian Prince Philip stumbles behind the Chinese President along lines of men wearing decaying bears on their heads. The sickness of Britain’s monarchical system was never more bluntly revealed than by the rictus grins of the aristocratic clowns balancing their tiaras at the state banquet.
The Chinese are the imperial masters now. Cameron begs them to build a nuclear power station for which the British state guarantees it will pay double the market price for electricity produced, for twenty years. And a government which has just announced the extension of thought crime to the expression of non-violent or anti-violent thought deemed “extreme”, has no locus to talk about human rights, a concept at least as alien to Teresa May as it is to the Chinese Communist Party. Britain has its own war criminals like Blair and Straw running around, immune and very wealthy.
The British state is an immoral entity which I view with disgust. That is what drives for me the imperative to early Scottish Independence to be rid of it. Every day as a British citizen is like bathing in sewage.
On Radio 4 Today this morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06jv3qv
Cyber Security.
12 mins in
‘The Institute of Directors has called for urgent action to deal with cybercrime. We hear from Joe Lynam, our business correspondent.’
1hr 32mins in
‘The Institute of Directors said cybercrime is one of the biggest threats facing businesses and their customers. Rory Cellan Jones is our technology correspondent; we also hear from Oliver Parry, senior corporate governance adviser at the Institute of Directors, and Hazel Blears, former Home Office minister and former member of the Intelligence and Security Committee.’
~~~
Interesting that John Penrose (Harding’s husband) was also on the programme speaking about changes to the voting system. He was speaking from the radio car.
1hr 10 mins in
‘The Electoral Commission has advised the House of Lords to vote against government plans on Tuesday to speed up the process of changing how voters register themselves, moving from a system of household registration to individual registration. Speaking on the programme is Lord Falconer, Shadow Lord Chancellor, and John Penrose, minister for Constitutional Reform.’
Apparently 3 out of 100 people are still not on the electoral register. According to Penrose they could have moved house, died, do not exist, or were put on the register fraudulently. Then the sound cut out from the radio car. Oops. Perhaps he was hacked.
JSD’s joke was a good one, but I thought Mark Golding’s (at 13h38) was better – chiefly because Mark wasn’t trying to be funny.
I thought the images of the “bluntly mentoring” Mr Putin and the “veracious” Peter Lavelle on Crosstalk were especially felicitous.
I had to laugh when I read LibDem branch manger in Scotland Willie Rennie make a plea to yes voters to vote for the LibDems at next May’s elections.
Rennie, who stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories against Scottish independence, also signed off on the dismantling of the welfare system, his party also agreed to savage public spending, and gave the green light to fracking, and backed TTIP.
Like London Labour in Scotland Rennies branch office will be lucky to hold onto the seats they have now, in Scotland.
1hr 10 mins in
“‘The Electoral Commission has advised the House of Lords to vote against government plans on Tuesday to speed up the process of changing how voters register themselves, moving from a system of household registration to individual registration. Speaking on the programme is Lord Falconer, Shadow Lord Chancellor, and John Penrose, minister for Constitutional Reform.’
Apparently 3 out of 100 people are still not on the electoral register. According to Penrose they could have moved house, died, do not exist, or were put on the register fraudulently.”
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Anyone who respects and upholds democracy and civil society will be in favour of any practical action to stamp our electoral fraud. Whereas most people play the game there are some – who have perhaps not fully assimilated British traditions and/or are being manipulated by certain political interests and factions – who, it has been quite clearly revealed, do not.
Of course the best answer to electoral fraud – and indeed many other kinds of fraud – would be for the UK to introduce the general system which applies in most (perhaps even all) Continental countries.
Namely:
– identity cards
– formal registration of address with the local authority (necessitating the presentation of said ID card and proff of addrees, eg a rental contract).
It’s a no-brainer!
Very funny John Spencer-Davis.
It was suggested by Jonathan Dimbleby on Any Questions last night that those waving Chinese flags and cheering the procession of XJ throughout this realm were prominent in the media coverage whereas the protesters for human rights and for Tibet were sidelined. Some of the panel agreed.
How about this for the actions of a fascist cum police state?
Xi Jinping protesters arrested and homes searched over London demonstrations
Met police deny overreacting after IT equipment belonging to Tiananmen survivor and Tibetan women seized
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/23/activists-condemn-arrest-tibetan-pair-waving-flag-xi-jinping-met-police-chinese-president
23 October 2015
564 comments
EVEL may have kicked in already, and the ink isn’t even dry on the bill yet.
SNP MP Tommy Sheppard may have been forced of a House of Commons committee, that scrutinises the Governments proposals on fracking the legislation is thought to be regarding English only fracking.
Mr Sheppard is a long term anti-fracking opponent.
Gerrymandering in the UK is OK. Official.
Labour says millions will lose votes as Government brings forward electoral registration changes
International Business Times – 3 hours ago
‘The Labour party is claiming that millions of potential voters will soon be missing from the electoral register, following the government’s bringing forward the switch from household to individual voter registration. Under the new system, people must now individually register to vote, where formerly one member of a household filled in a form for everyone resident at a particular address.
Labour is saying that a disproportionately large number of its supporters will be left off the new electoral rolls. The new system has been rolling out across England, Wales and Scotland since last year and is due to be fully in place by December. Labour claims that by ending the transition a whole year in advance of the original December 2016 deadline, the Conservatives are gerrymandering before next summer’s elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London mayor.’
/..
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/labour-says-millions-lose-votes-102340861.html#
One can only laugh at mentality of the Tory apparatchiks in Westminster. Take Tory, Heidi Allen for example she stood up and spoke in the chamber of the sheer damage to working people, that the Tax Credits cuts would have.
Her pleas were sombre, reasonably well thought out and relevant, yet when push came to shove to do the right thing, Heidi Allen couldn’t bring herself to vote against the henious bill.
Is it any wonder there’s not much confidence in the regressive Westminster system.
“‘The Labour party is claiming that millions of potential voters will soon be missing from the electoral register, following the government’s bringing forward the switch from household to individual voter registration. Under the new system, people must now individually register to vote, where formerly one member of a household filled in a form for everyone resident at a particular address.
Labour is saying that a disproportionately large number of its supporters will be left off the new electoral rolls.”
__________________
Has Labour explained why?
Could it be that Labour thinks that the the present system – whereby one person can register not only him/herself but others allegedly in the household – works to its advantage….in certain constituencies…?
More generally – individuals have to accomplish most of the formalities of life themselves (driving licences, applications for benefits, opening bank accounts, mortgage applications, signing rental contracts, etc).
Why, then, should it be so heinous – or difficult – to ask peopme wishing to vote to register themselves?
Hinkley Point will cost £18Billion. It will cost consumers £13Billion. Will it be over budget and over time? Finland was over seven years late. Renewables are far cheaper.Coal is plentiful all over the UK and half the cost of imported Gas. CCS would get rid of harmful gas. There is Oil off the west coast of Scotland which can’t be developed because of Faslane.
Will Labour still be able to gerrymander and sign up old folk homes? To lie about OAP’s losing their pensions in Referendum votes. Their EVEL reward from the Tories. The Tories gerrymandering the EU Ref vote by stopping some EU ‘foreigners’ from voting. No taxation without representation. Foreign non Doms own the British Press. They get more than a say.
Fraud? Low-info or one-issue voters? Hundreds of millions continually needed for campaigns full of promises, leading to the same morass?
It’s time for a re-boot.
Habbabkuk,
Keep following your line manager$ orders eh?
Ken2
The only purpose of building a Chinese power station is to put the Chinese under commercial leverage. You sell a laptop and once its warranty expires you are from all responsibility for it. If you install as air conditioning unit you are responsible for the workmanship as well as the product warranty.
A nuclear power station warranty has to be until the safe disposal of the radioactive material, i.e. never. a very bad deal for the Chinese. At least all the 2nd and 10th hand mortgages they bought from the City of London will expire in 25 years.
The Tories have more in common with Xi Pinjing’s China than you think, especially where children are concerned.
Everyone knows China had or still has to varying degrees a one child policy, they may have relaxed it somewhat.
Britain under the Tories are in the process of introducing the two child tax credit system. If you have a third child you won’t receive child tax credits, unless you can prove through a means test that you were raped.
Now how the DWP will enforce this barbaric law is anyones guess, for instance will there need to be a conviction for rape? Or will the women in question just claim to be raped?
It’s a moral outrage that even China would find repugnant, to cross examine a woman who has just suffered an unimaginable sexual assault, in which see has a child, to then be questioned on it by the DWP, is well, I leave it to you to express.
We may not quite be there yet,when it comes to China’s inhumanity, but give it time and Tory rule, and we’ll get there.
Glenn,
Stop moaning cos you got your arse handed to you a few weeks back.
I bet you were the school grass.
I was extremely irritated today that Saudi diplomats are pretending that there has been no set-back in Iraq and Syria as a result of Russian bombing. they are living in Cucloo land, not cloud cuckoo, bird cuckoo. They have thrown out the eggs of the nesting bird, the real Islam, and planted their own takfiri Islam in its place. However huge their nasty sprog gets, they are still going to insist that it is the real Islam.
May Allah’s curse be upon the lying scum of the house of Saud!
RoS
“We may not quite be there yet,when it comes to China’s inhumanity, but give it time and Tory rule, and we’ll get there.”
You may have not got there yet mate, but I got there in 1985.
When writing just now about the clear desirability of ID cards and registration of address (or, to be more precise, residence) I forgot to mention a third essential need which also features in many Continental countries.
That is the National Register, whereby every living person resident or once resident has a national identity number. That national identity number obviously appears on your ID card and the tax data bases of the Inland Revenue as well as, when appropriate, on various other documents.
To be noted that the only personal information which is incorporated in the NIN is the your date of birth – all the other numbers are random.
I should imagine that there could be little opposition to such a NIN since everyone who has worked in the UK (legally, that is) has a National Insurance number and every (entitled) user of the NHS has a NHS number.
Rzepublicofscotland
“If you have a third child you won’t receive child tax credits, unless you can prove through a means test that you were raped.”
___________________
It may just be that it’s a little early on the day, but how can a means test prove that a woman was raped?
Hi Jives, good to see you’ve recovered from last night!
“Anyone who respects and upholds democracy and civil society will be in favour of any practical action to stamp our electoral fraud. ”
well, who’s the dreamer now, habbysockette? So what did you call the grudgingly agreed, worst possible option that was camouflage as a ‘referendum’ in 2011,hahahaha, what a joke. Calling an ultimatum a referendum.
Why did they not offer a choice of electoral system up for a vote to educated people such as you Habby, including a couple of fair proportional one’s? can’t they trust you to make the right decision which favours their electoral racket? Do English voters not deserve a fair proportional voting system?
answers on a stamp if you can manage it.
This from our educated schoolmaster, sufficiently blinkered to either, not know, or, to have nocluewhatsoever about electoral fraud and how party politicians/candidates are using psychological tricks to get voters to fill out postal voting forms.
I have, and in the same constituency Craig experienced a party political reluctance to play by the rules, in this case the Labour party, cheating, ignorance of electoral law and threatening behaviour at election day, oral and mental threats at polling stations, compliance in all these by local administrative offices involved in the election, hallo Kate Hollern and Mr. Burgess, chief of chiefs, chief of police, etc. etc. 34 years of symbiotic relationship with one man, his string pulling ‘guile and cunning’ being well recorded.
I apologise to have diverted the attention away from our new great leader and his puppets to this muppet, please forgive dear reader.
With regard to the introduction of ID cards and address registration the govt should of course commission a no-holds-barred study of practice in a number of representative Continental countries in order to determine the best, most foolproof, administratively most simple and cost-effective system.
In this way various former fiascos involving IT could be avoided.
Nevermind
I get the impression from your rather long post just now that you are in fact opposed to electoral fraud.
But, as always, it’s a little difficult to follow you – my fault entirely, I’m sure.
Just reassure me that you are aware that electoral fraud and the voting system are separate questions, will you?
Vielen Dank, mein Lieber.
Separate but equal questions symptomatic of a broken system needing more than pig lipstick for the Premiere of the next Hog movie.
Conditioning. cont’d.
‘Forget a red carpet, it was Red Square in Manchester today as thousands of Chinese students, marshalled by officials staged another pro-Xi rally in a major British city.
Chinese President ends his state visit to Britain. Play video “Big Money Deals During State Visit”
Many arrived at 5.30 am: Banners, flags and placards handed out by organisers from boxes marked “Diplomatic Bag”.
One teacher called George told me Xi was his idol, and that Chinese students weren’t rebellious because “Xi governs for the people”.
PS I realize Murdoch has an axe to grind for the US in saying this but the whole thing was ridiculous.
Xi Jets Off But Will Things Ever Be The Same?
The visit saw pomp and ceremony and billions in deals – with the Chancellor calling the UK China’s strongest partner in the West.
http://news.sky.com/story/1575328/xi-jets-off-but-will-things-ever-be-the-same
Good chart for analyzing true risk from Fuke rad. 1000 CPM’s sounds bad, but any is bad right?
http://www.fatcatmotorsports.com/Radiation_Dosage_SJA.pdf
“Hinkley Point will cost £18Billion. It will cost consumers £13Billion. Will it be over budget and over time? Finland was over seven years late. Renewables are far cheaper.Coal is plentiful all over the UK and half the cost of imported Gas. CCS would get rid of harmful gas. There is Oil off the west coast of Scotland which can’t be developed because of Faslane.”
Is that real oil or fantasy oil, like the fantasy massive oil field of Shetland the natz kept going on about before the referendum?
In the real world we have real winters, real frost real snow. real old age pensioners who die of real hypothermia if the electricity goes off. Solar doesn’t work in the dark and turbines don’t work without wind we will always have to have enough conventional power stations to meet peak load.
People are against fracking, people oppose underground gasification, environmentalists or out in force against polluting coal fired power stations and we are running out of oil and gas both of which we are net importers of. The experts have considered all the possibilities and decided on the deal for reactors from China is the best deal for Britain both ecologically and economically.
“You may have not got there yet mate, but I got there in 1985.”
______________________
Gyiane, apart from Thatcher, ripping the heart out of Britain back then, what tipped you over the edge in 1985.
Mary
I can’t work out what you’re objecting to with all your posts about the Chinese President’s visit.
Re your latest : are you objecting to Chinese students having been bussed in to “support” President Xi, or are you objecting to the way that the MSM have reported that bussing in (or that they’ve reported it at all)?
*****************
Could the answer be that you’re objecting to absolutely everything as per usual: as the French might say, tu es contre le tout et son contraire.