When the news of the dual attacks in Norway broke, the broadcast media, in their usual rush to appear important and ‘discuss’ matters, were quick to suggest the killings were the work of evil Islamists. Time, as we now understand, proved otherwise.

Yet, one thing which rarely changes, once Islamists have been ruled out, is the willingness of the Left to demonise the political Right. I was immediately struck by the similarity of reaction in leftist media to the atrocities performed by Anders Breivik and those carried out by Jared Lee Loughner in Tuscon in January. On both occasions, the Left were particularly quick to label the perpetrators as ‘right-wing extremists’, and thus tarnish millions of people by association.

In the very sad case of the Tuscon shootings, Loughner targeted the Democrat and House of Representatives member, Gabrielle Giffords at a local advice surgery. During the incident she suffered a severe gunshot wound to the head, while a local Judge and five bystanders, who were caught up in the shooting, died of their injuries.

Initial reports suggested that Giffords had been killed in the attack, though these statements were relatively quickly retracted when it became apparent she had survived, albeit in a critical condition. Yet it didn’t take long before the finger was pointed at the Right in the United States, especially the Tea party movement and its followers.

It was mainly brought to the fore by an outburst from the Democrat supporting local Sherriff, Clarence Dupnik, who said in an interview:

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

Later, Sherriff Dupnik retracted his initial statement, saying that his investigation had not yet found such evidence. But it was all too late – the damage was already done. This spark lit the touchpaper and a predictable Left-wing witch hunt began in earnest.

It was those Tea party fascists wot dun it, screamed Jane Fonda on her Twitter account within mere hours of the incident. She managed to blame Sarah Palin and radio host Glenn Beck for good measure too, while Paul Krugman in The New York Times darkly suggested a nefarious Tea party conspiracy and assassination attempt.

Eventually it became apparent Loughner was neither right-wing nor a supporter of the Tea party, but such facts didn’t get in the way of the Left blaming the Tea party and Republicans for stirring up anger and resentment by using ‘violent’ political rhetoric and symbolism.

A similar process of events have now taken place in Norway. Once it became very clear that Breivik was the murderer, and his so called manifesto had been discovered on the internet, another witch hunt and mass pillorying of the Right began again.

The Guardian’s Seumas Milne took the time to link some arguments Breivik made in his manifesto to the ‘staple themes’ of conservative newspapers, commentators and websites in this country, saying:

The continuum between the poisonous nonsense commonplace in the mainstream media in recent years, the street slogans of groups like the EDL and Breivik’s outpourings is unmistakable.

Right-wingers are all the same and to be viewed with equal levels of suspicion and mistrust. Melanie Phillips was smeared for the heinous crime of being quoted by Breivik, and BBC journos have obsessively pursued the line of investigation that there were solid links between Breivik and ‘right-wing’ groups in Britain. Yet, despite the repeated statements from officials and Ministers in Norway, the BBC hasn’t given up, believing a connection to be only a matter of time.

More worrying still, as Autonomous Mind uncovers, is the threat to our liberties from the European Union. As is usual, the EU are attempting to turn a disaster into a beneficial crisis involving a further transfer of powers and integration. What is more, they are to begin development of an EU network in order to ‘monitor the growth of the radicalisation of discourse on the internet’:

It is frightening that the EU, with its goal of eradicating the nation state, will be deciding whether its opponents are too radical, whether their views can therefore be shared on the internet, and will define what constitutes xenophobia and whether that should be punished – all backed by European courts and European arrest warrants.

Whether or not such a network will be built and succeed in its goals is another matter. But that the EU should even be considering such plans is deeply disturbing. No doubt those same people on the Left who have smeared the Right by association with Breivik will be full of praise for the new EU radicalisation network. This is how freedom can die, in the pursuit of security – of which, in the end, we shall have neither.

Like so many before him, Peter predictably called for the legalisation of all banned narcotic substances by the State arguing, in classic ‘harm reduction’ style, that what British people really need, rather criminalisation, is ‘better drugs education on how to take them safely and where to get help if needs be’.

Where do I start? There are so many comments and observations by Peter in his piece that I take issue with that it is difficult to know where to begin. I suppose, firstly, it should be made clear that even if we, as a nation, wanted to legalise such substances then we could not due to the binding international treaties which Britain has signed. Before we could begin to initiate legalisation in this country, Britain would have to break from these treaties.

Anyway, putting aside the fascinating issue of international law for the moment, it should also be said that North Jnr doesn’t get off to a fantastic start in his article when he says of drugs that:

The evidence that prohibition is a failed policy mounts up year after year but we remain in a constant state of political paralysis.

I would have thought that it really goes without saying that the banning of drugs such as cannabis and heroin in Britain are not in the slightest like prohibition. However, much like the pressure group, Transform, whose spokesman was given a rather soft interview by Evan Davis on the BBC’s Today programme recently, Peter North seems convinced that the British state somehow acts in a ‘punitive, prohibitionist’ way towards illegal drugs.

Rather than explain this point myself I will directly quote Peter Hitchens from his most recent Mail on Sunday column because he rather handily sums up this false analogy far better than I could:

If only our policies were actually punitive. But drug use and possession are almost entirely unpunished, which is why they carry on growing.

As for ‘prohibition’, the drug lobby uses this expression to mislead the gullible into comparing the winnable struggle against narcotics with the doomed war against booze fought by the ‘Untouchables’ and others in Twenties Chicago.

Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilisation. You might as well try to make breathing illegal. But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.

Actually, US Prohibition recognised that the cause was lost before it began. Congress never made it illegal to drink or keep alcohol, only to sell, transport or make it. Our most important drug laws are utterly unlike Prohibition because they rightly ban possession.

And if our cowardly courts and bureaucratic police would only enforce the existing law, we would see a swift decline in the use of illegal drugs.

They don’t, because our establishment – including the BBC – was itself introduced to drugs in the Sixties and still cannot see why they are wrong.

Despite increasingly frequently assertions from the likes of North Jnr and so many others that Britain has lost the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the fact of the matter is that in reality we’ve never fought one. Instead successive Governments have simply undermined their own laws, demoralised the police and made quite sure that the rules were not enforced, with the intended consequence being the practical legalisation of narcotics by stealth.

Peter North’s assertion that these drugs should be made legal is therefore practically irrelevant. They might as well be considered legal at the moment since prosecution for use is rare, especially among the rich and famous. Even if you are stupid enough to be caught and sentenced by a court of law then the punishment often amounts to nothing more than a smack on wrist.

North Jnr also continues to make the assertion throughout his article that people are going to take drugs anyway, so why bother to stop them? Returning to the aforementioned theme of ‘harm reduction’, again Peter Hitchens was spot on when he said:

Virtually everyone else in the official drug policy establishment is a member of the same faction – the one that believes the best approach to drugs is ‘harm reduction’, that rejects any moral objection to self-stupefaction, or the idea that by disapproval and punishment we could reduce the amount of drug-taking and the number of drug takers.

On the contrary, they work on the basis that drug abuse is more or less inevitable and so must be managed by advice (much as the ‘sex education’ zealots work on the assumption that the young will have sex below the age of consent and without any thought for the consequences, whatever we do or say, and so the only thing we can do is pelt them with condoms and morning-after pills). Doesn’t it occur to them that the adoption of this attitude by Professors and Police officers might actually make drug taking more likely?

Quite so – and I really don’t have much more to add to that particular line of argument except to say that taking the attitude of ‘harm reduction’ is not in the least bit conservative.

It has been duly noted, in the past, that North Jnr likes to lecture people on what is ‘real conservativism’. I suppose I am not really one to talk here since I do a similar sort of thing all the time too. Everyone has an opinion on what conservativism is and means, but it is fair to say that certain stances are more conservative than others – and some not even conservative at all.

Furthermore, very early on in his article we get an indication of why Peter North takes this attitude and just what he thinks of drugs, by way of his observation that ‘people take drugs because, for starters, they’re great’. Later on in the article he readily admits to having taking them in the past, describing them as ‘fun’ and, rather bizarrely, as ‘educational’.

This I think feeds into another important point about the debate on drugs policy – one which I have made before – which is that the majority of the time it is self-serving drug users (or supposedly former users – one never quite knows whether they are being honest about having given up or not) who are calling for their activities to be legalised to suit their own selfish pleasures and needs, even if it means that thousands of other people may in future be condemned to harm and misery.

I have yet to actually meet someone who has not once taken these drugs and yet still wants to legalise them. Perhaps this is because I have not spoken to enough people yet, but it certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of those advocating legalisation are doing so with wholly selfish intentions.

This is perhaps a little strange because North Jnr accurately describes the way in which such drugs can lead to enormous problems for society as well as the families and friends of users. Yet, he then goes on to make ridiculous statements such as this:

If you had to obtain recreational narcotics from a chemist and there’s a special queue for them with all the other junkies, kids will see that what they’re doing is seriously uncool.

Is he serious? Apparently so. Anyway, and finally, a question that never seems to be have been answered by the pro-legalisation advocates is what exactly would we lose by driving the use of these substances from our society completely?

Moving on from the legality of certain drugs, North Jnr does make a number of good observations about the increasing retreat of the British political system from policies to personalities. However, in one paragraph he writes of politicians that:

They’re afraid of public debate, they’re afraid of real politics and that’s why we get things like ‘constitutional reform’.

While it is certainly true that, in general, many politicians are increasingly scared of public debate and formulating policies, I think it is a mistake by Peter to underestimate the Left and the power and significance they place on ‘constitutional reform’.

Firstly, how exactly can ‘constitutional reform’ not be considered to be ‘real politics’? Okay, so at face value ‘constitutional reform’ may not seem to be important in directly tackling issues such as immigration or economic problems, but its undertaking certainly doesn’t mean that those politicians and parties that pursue it are not interested in politics, real or otherwise.

The many radical and important constitutional changes that have been enacted by New Labour since 1997, under Blair and Brown, have been seen by them as vitally important in achieving their long term goals, whilst undermining traditions and institutions such as the Monarchy for their social and political ends.

Having said that, I think North Jnr is generally right in his analysis that the Government, whether it be Conservative or Labour, is on a countdown to extinction, and that British people are simply waiting for parties and politics of substance to return at Westminster. Let us all hope that such a day, if it ever arrives, comes sooner rather than later.

New Labour’s ‘classless’ social concept was and always will be a façade and a lie. In whatever society you choose to consider humanity has and always will organise itself into classes. It is in our tribal nature to do so. No amount of social engineering can or will ever do away with this reality.

British society, like all others, still maintains degrees of class; it’s just that they have been noticeably transformed in more recent times. Largely gone are the days of the working, middle and upper classes. Relative economic affluence and prosperity for all has done away with the need for those terms, as did the destruction of the British manufacturing sector in the 1980s and the current rise of tertiary service industries.

Where once class was based upon economic well-being and means by which the man on the street earned his living, now class and our society revolve around the struggle for power, prestige and the ability to influence others. Thus people in Britain can now be categorised into roughly four different classes: the Elite, the Underclass, the Welfare class and Everyone Else.

The Elite, being the smallest group consists of the super-rich, celebrities, media and the political elite. Though they often maintain the greatest financial resources the true key to their position is their grip on the levers of power and influence over the rest of society. Metropolitan, liberal and elitist in their outlook, they are an insular, selfish and often intolerant group by nature whose lives are almost entirely separate to the rest of us.

At the complete opposite end of the scale lies the Underclass which encompasses sections of the immigrant population in Britain, the very poorest and those existing at the margins of society that most people would rather just ignore and hope might therefore just disappear. Their level of power and influence is negligible and they inhabit areas including the inner cities that are blighted by crime and insufferable conditions. At a stretch I would also include in this class those that are unemployed through disability or no fault of their own.

Next up is the Welfare class which consists of those persons who are unemployed and willingly chose to simply sponge off the state benefit system. In general they tend to occupy an area of society where once the lower or working class used to reside – though this is perhaps unfair on the old working class since they did in fact work for their living. Locked in a vicious cycle of deprivation and welfare on Britain’s council and sink estates, with no incentive or reason to lift themselves out of such an existence, their style of living perpetuates and their numbers grow as more people discover the ease with which welfare may be obtained.

And then stuck in the middle is everyone else. Currently the largest class in British society consists of all those in employment, who pay taxes and as a consequence fund (either directly or indirectly) the lifestyles of the Elite and the Welfare classes. Everyone else as a class carries the increasing burden of society as the other classes continue to increase in size, and an ever dwindling proportion of the population are left to pay the way.

Our society, built as it is upon an increasing number of people living at the expense of the rest, coupled with a rapidly aging population means that a tipping point may well be reached in the near future. What is therefore needed is an immediate reform of both the welfare system and the cutting back of state and Government in general.

However, this will not happen under Labour who have used the state as a means to forcefully try and create equality and to maintain their stranglehold grip on power by using state services to employ voters in marginal constituencies. This situation reminds me of two quotes, the first being from George Bernard Shaw who wrote:

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

And the second has been attributed to Alexander Fraser Tyler in a book ‘Elements of General History’ where he remarked that:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The cutting back of the state in this country can only happen on the condition that a conservative government accepts that the state is not there as a means to promote equality and that to rebalance the distribution of power and democracy in society, Britain needs to retake complete control of its national sovereignty by leaving the European Union. Until that happens, elections in this country will be a largely meaningless exercise and the state bureaucracy which traps so many will only grow.

Yesterday, a man died in a London hospital a week after being stabbed and punched by two youths he confronted over throwing litter through his car window. At the weekend, Garry Newlove, died of injuries sustained when he approached a gang of teenagers who were damaging property in the road outside his house.

Sadly, it would seem that these attacks are becoming far more frequent and in certain areas almost common place. This is especially true of the big cities such as London, Nottingham, Manchester and Birmingham.

It is arguable that the increase in violence could be perceptive; that because the media now reports on these cases more widely and regularly than in the past, then people fear a threat which is, in reality, not actually increasing. However, I do not accept that to be true. Independent crime surveys continue to show a substantial increase in violent crime, with even the Government’s own manipulated figures showing a worryingly rapid rise.

It is very clear that we now live in a society where the majority of people are law-abiding while a minority are anything but and have nothing to fear from the law. Confidence in our police force (or as it now is; ‘service’) is at an all time low. Far from being the last of the great unreformed British institutions, the Police have been steadily and quietly bureaucratised and politicised by successive governments for decades. What’s more, as a nation we cannot seem to decide on a solution to this growing problem. The Labour Government has been content to fashion headline grabbing initiatives such as Anti-Social Behavioural Orders and new policing initiatives for the past ten years to little effect.

The ITV evening news yesterday featured one male citizen journalist in the News Uploaded section calling for night time curfews for groups of teenagers, and an increase in police dispersal powers. This just would not have any affect. The children and youths who currently commit crimes at night would just break the curfews anyway, so it would be another unnecessary law with no purpose but to give the appearance of activity while yet further weighing down the statute books – which is why we’ll probably see Labour implement it in a few years.

Most of the solutions put forward today attempt to tackle the symptoms rather than the root cause of low-level and violent crime in Britain. These real problems such as the breakdown of the family unit, lack of discipline in schools and in some areas an increasingly secular and divided society; have been brewing for many years now. In fact I would probably guess more likely decades. They are problems that have permeated our society and consequently there are unlikely to be any quick fix solutions. It will probably take a similar period of time to correct the damage as it did to create.

Unfortunately though, in a country where the government and the ruling classes consider crime a social disease caused by relative poverty, and are totally unaffected by it themselves, then there are bleak prospects for any future improvement.