An Inevitable Outcome

If only the ‘inevitable outcome’ of which I will write were the collapse of the single European currency, whose death throws, like a slow motion train crash, threaten to take the European Union down with it.

Unfortunately though, the rapid demise of Europe’s anti democratic Union has been predicted on many an occasion and, so far at least, failed to materialise. Therefore one now tends to make such predictions with some level of care.

Consequently, I shall, for the time being, pass over the continuing Euro zone crisis and instead briefly comment on the current violence in London – a city that long ago ceased to be English or British.

The death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham on Thursday, who was shot by police during what the BBC describes as ‘an apparent exchange of fire’, is another unpleasant reminder of the failure of our criminal justice system and our increasingly destructive political class.

As our police force have evolved into another department of social services, and its officers have receded from their once prominent position on the streets of our town and cities, the criminal elements in society have become increasingly emboldened.

On the orders of wise politicians, the police have become a reactive service rather than remain a preventative force – and they ceased long ago to be citizens in uniform, instead seeing each other as an elite group, draped in paramilitary equipment and riding around in expensive metal boxes, all utterly removed from the events outside and the people they are tasked with defending.

Far from deterring crime, they appear – if at all – only once the offence has taken place, sometimes to record the transgression, but usually to provide counselling and lecture the public against ‘taking the law into their own hands’. Yet attempt to engage in a political demonstration and suddenly the riot shields come out in force.

But most worrying of all is how the police have slowly been armed over the course of four decades, with the inevitable outcome being violence and bloodshed. It was the abolition of the death penalty in the 1950s to 60s which created the present situation. The fear and deterrent of the noose quickly gave way, and as the figures starkly prove, gun crime has rapidly risen in the years since.

Areas of London and other major British cities have become no-go zones, ruled by armed gangs who kill without mercy or so much as a thought for the consequences. While the police have retreated to the safety of their police stations and squad cars, when the two gun toting groups eventually cross paths and lock horns, the deaths of innocent bystanders are the inevitable outcome.

This really is only the beginning. Unless we restore the deterrent of the death penalty, gun crime will continue to rise without check, as will unintentional death at the trigger finger of the police. Either it is criminals who live in fear of the law and justice, or we who live in fear of criminals. Which is it to be?

News That Makes The News

I did not shed a tear when I learnt of the demise of The News of the World, which is to close next week with a final edition after 168 years of publishing.

It was never my newspaper of choice, being rather light on actual news and rather heavy on the kind of moronic celebrity gossip designed to keep the plebs occupied rather than focused on anything meaningful or important.

Yet, it is highly unlikely that The News of the World will disappear all together, with News International PLC almost certainly planning to re-launch the paper under a different brand. Furthermore, the same journalists working at The News of the World will simply transfer across to the new paper or indeed another paper – so nothing much or substantial will have changed in that regard beyond the image.

However, the fate of The News of the World is not actually the really important matter, but instead the manner of its downfall and what was subsequently brought to light (and I am not referring to the alleged phone hacking – which is rather unimportant and a matter for the police and the courts).

The so-called phone hacking scandal is firstly an absolutely classic example of Westminster-village journalism, and illustrates just how the news corporations make the news and set the public agenda to the exclusion of much more important stories and events outside of the political classes’ bubble. As Richard North observed, did our MPs ever demand an emergency debate over the banking crisis, or more recently the Euro zone and debt crisis in Greece, as they have over phone hacking? The answer is, of course, er, no…

Click here to continue reading the article…

The Trouble With Drugs

Last Friday, Peter North, on his blog Letters from Limbo, wrote about what he called a ‘leadership vacuum’ over the issue of British drugs policy, which then led on to him railing against the many failings of our political system.

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.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Swiftly They Move

The business section of today’s Daily Mail remarks upon a sell-off of Royal Mail taking place as early as April of this coming year. The paper also briefly details a list of potential buyers including TNT, Deutsche Post and the US Federal Express.

This merely points out the true inevitability of the situation – that the future of Royal Mail is in ‘privatisation’. It does not matter what we think about this; whether we agree or disagree with ‘privatisation’, it is not up to us to decide any longer – and it has not been our decision for quite some time.

As I previously highlighted, the European Union Postal Services Directive 2008/6/EC, which amended the previous Postal Service Directive 97/67/EC has decreed that ‘privatisation’ will indeed occur. Furthermore, as Directive 2008/6/EC clearly states:

Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 31 December 2010 at the latest. They shall forthwith inform the Commission thereof.

Therefore the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail from its position as majority universal service provider must occur by 2011. In targeting April for a sell-off, our Labour administration is simply doing as it is being told by our EU masters in the Commission rather than following the advice of any policy groups or reports.

I should also point out that even if the Conservative party were against the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail (which they are not), then it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Our continued membership of the European Union confers upon us the necessity of obeying its legislation which is now part of our own law.