It appears to me that democracy has been devalued to a level not seen in a hundred years or so, harking back to the days of the landed gentry that ruled the lower classes with the iron fist of money and power. Lies didn't matter and the press were fawns to the deceit, as they always have been. Every newspaper has its own agenda. The difference now is the Internet.
The Internet is teaching me "how to see". Conspiracies hide some truth and the dismissal of individuals as lunatics, conspiracy nuts and criminals is the way to discredit and hide the truth. That is not to say that every conspiracy has a truth behind it or every nutjob is being persecuted and tarnished by the powers that be but the more you look, the more you will see the tell tail signs of the corruption and sometimes it is far too obvious.
To use four very transparent and pathetic tools that we have seen, George W Bush and Tony Blair and the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, so much spin without any substance that resulted in an illegal war that has repercussions today. It also resulted in the murder of David Kelly in the UK, an event that has been covered up and all the evidence and conspiracies are on the Internet for all to see, but it seems to point to the British Government. Isn't it shameful when your own Government will murder an innocent man for speaking out on a wrong that he can see is happening and has the information and knowledge to stop it? Just think of all the lives of our military that have been sacrificed to a lie. I am a patriot and support our armed forces 100% in whatever they do, whether it is right or wrong but I call any Government to account when it is wrong, someone must be accountable. However George W Bush insisted that anyone that opposed the war was anti the military and not a true patriot. So powerful was this lie that it shamed people into following his course.
I had a debate with a friend in the US, before the Iraq war and they condoned it because the news in the US reported the issue as crucial. In the UK the press were divided and those opposing the war had all the evidence to show the reasons were flawed and a march through London garnered anywhere from 1/2 to 1 million people (depending on who you believe), showed how divisive the issue was over here. Once the war started and the US started to see the same evidence that we had, I had a conversation with my friend and they felt betrayed and agreed that it had been the wrong decision. It's all about spin and perception and reading the "facts" with a suspicious mind.
My next points are dismissing people, it works very well to discredit their views. We see this in the UK over the HS2, when anyone that opposes it is referred to as a "Nimby" (Not In My Back Yard), a derogatory and offensive term for someone with a valid reason to oppose a scheme that churns up the Countryside, devalues property and creates irreparable damage to fauna and wildlife in the UK as well as cutting huge swathes of green belt land into a railway line that will save a few minutes from the North into London at a cost that is spiralling out of control and for a benefit that diminishes by the second. I guess this makes me a Nimby.
The next is the Badger Cull and policy so full of holes that it leaks like a colander and those that endorsed it, with the exception of Owen "the Patsy" Patterson, have suddenly gone very quiet. Let's remind ourselves on what I
an Liddell-Grainger, the Tory MP for Bridgwater and West Somerset, described anyone that protested against the pointless mass slaughter of Badgers:
“I thought most of them were in the habit of lying in bed until the pubs open, or until the postman arrives with the benefit cheque (or do such things get paid straight into their accounts these days?)
“Either way, since they are all malingerers and scroungers there is no real incentive to leap out of bed as soon as the dawn chorus strikes up,”
Funny, having worked for most of my life, paid my taxes on time, no criminal record, I don't drink and I get up at 5.30 every morning, I never viewed myself as a "malingerer or scrounger". Offensive? You bet and I am sure in a parallel Universe it had the desired effect of tarring all protesters with a blanket brush but all it has done in this instance is make this infantile little man appear as out of touch and simply rude.
Harking back to Dubaya, he dismissed John Kerry as having lied about one of the many medals he received...inconceivable, a genuine war hero losing to a man that served his Vietnam war in Texas because the shirker cast doubts on the validity on one of his medals...Now that is shameless politics and proof that he who shouts loudest is the only one that gets heard, no matter what the lie.
This leads me on to the current crop of power hungry lunatics that run the show. We have David Cameron, a man with the perchance for not making any lasting decisions and allowing others to take the flak for any flawed policies. I am not sure who will take the fall for the HS2 debacle but for the Badger Cull, Cameron is hoping that Owen Patterson will be the only fall guy needed and for the Fracking controversy it is more difficult to pinpoint an individual as no-one is popping their head above the parapet.
It is very odd to think that the Country has naturally recovered from the Labour spending policies of Blair and Brown. Cameron, for all his talk about us all being in this together and all the cuts he was going to have to make, all of it has been lies. He is spending £80 billion on a train line, £2,200 per dead badger as opposed to around £300 per vaccinated badger and still hasn't made any cuts, they are due in next year and yet the economy is showing signs of recovery...DESPITE David Cameron.
When you ask a politician about the economy, vote for the one that says he will do nothing.
Let me make some predictions for you, none of them are difficult to see coming. The Government will try to persist with the Badger cull, moving the goalposts constantly to suit whatever they need to achieve. Free shooting will prove to be a complete failure so they will temporarily trap and shoot but behind the scenes the Government will unofficially trial the gassing of badgers in Cornwall and will then attempt to amend the law to allow this to happen.
David Cameron has already started his campaign to have the fox hunting law partially repealed and this will open the floodgates to illegal hunts (oh wait, that's already happened).
Sabs and the anti cull lobby will turn their attention to the pheasant shooting estates in the West Country and things will become fraught as the £22 million industry starts to get turned on it's head as the protesters manage to stop the shoots by using public byways to interfere with the shooters. The Government will attempt to revise the public byway laws.
The current proposals for revising the Wildlife laws will mean that culls against wildlife increase and the crimes against animals will also increase and won't be investigated.
Further proposals by the Conservative Party will be aimed at legal protest and the right of the individual to have his say and the Government's ability to control the Internet. The ability of groups of people to mobilise quickly for a united cause is the concern for all Governments and as part of the military cyber team that was announced last week, will come the clamp down on the freedom of expression and speech through the Internet.
This whole post is geared towards the political suicide of David Cameron, maybe this could be his obituary:
David Cameron came to power off the back of a coalition Government because he didn't have enough votes to actually win an election. Despite this, he conducted his term in office with the same brazen disregard for the voters and public opinion as Tony Blair. He lacked definition, unable to promote himself as anything when he tried to be everything, except a man with any morals. He was very fond of saying "...because it is the right thing to do." Unfortunately this was superseded by a lie and even more unfortunately, it was a phrase he used often.
He was firmly positioned in the pocket of big business, refusing to allow them to pay their full whack of taxes and pursuing the odd individual celebrity that hadn't broken the law but made full use of the loopholes that the Government left in place, in an effort to name and shame them to show that he was hard on tax dodgers...even though they weren't tax dodgers.
David was passionate about public transport, allowing the roads to fall into decay and taxing the motorist incredible amounts of money in road tax and fuel duty to promote the use of public transport. He wholeheartedly endorsed ripping up the Countryside to lay track so that a train journey from Birmingham to London could save a few minutes and with the end goal to lay track all the way to Scotland. He had high hopes that this would benefit the whole of the Country even though the train would only stop at two or three Cities.
David fully believed that spending money in a time of austerity was the way to put the Country back on track. This appeared very similar to the Labour "spend your way out of debt" policies that had beset the Country previously but as has been pointed out to me, this is not a Conservative policy so it can't be the same. He did get a little defensive when the cost of his little project, estimated at £15.4 billion rose to £42 billion after they miscalculated, an easy mistake to make, however that bounder Boris Johnson has estimated the cost will be closer to £70 billion and those cads at the Institute of Economic Affairs estimate it will be in excess of £80 billion.
David Cameron, a man of the Countryside and of the people. OK, so being born into money, having the finest education that money can buy and never having sampled a speck of poverty except for those people you see shopping at Lidl, Aldi, Tesco or Sainsburys could rule him out of touch with people but as the Sainted David has said many times, "Hug a hoodie, because it's the right thing to do." Or something like that. He is also an advocate of the Big Society, an interesting idea that failed to catch on when it transpired that no-one actually knew what it was but the words are there and it looked good in print at the time. I think this was announced shortly before all the threatened cuts to services and he hoped that other people would do the jobs for free, as part of the Big Society. As with many of his good ideas, it was quickly forgotten.
But his Countryside cred
entials are beyond reproach, a fox hunter. Yep, the man that sits astride a huge horse and bravely hunts down fox cubs with a pack of hounds, a brave and noble sport of the landed gentry as they smother faces of their children with the blood of a fox cub at their first hunt. David was none too pleased that the sport was banned but has taken every opportunity to open the doors to allow it back as a recognised and legal part of Country life and is currently in negotiations to have the law repealed.
David has taken the plight of the farmers and Bovine TB very seriously and has refused to let anything stand in his way in his personal fight to eradicate this terrible and costly disease. Facts, science, morality and voters are some of the obstacles he has had to overcome in his fight to mass exterminate the badger population in the UK. Not content with one fight, David decided that fracking was also a good idea, despite an earthquake in Lancashire that was rumoured to be caused by fracking. But in the words of his best friend's father in law, Tory Lord Howell,
“However, there are large, uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly in parts of the north-east, where there is plenty of room for fracking.”
Yes, we know how desolate and uninhabitable the North East is, I mean no-one goes to the stunning Alnwick Castle or Dracula's Whitby Abbey and Newcastle is only a great City for a night out, no reason to go there and the people from the North East are not really one of my favourite people in the UK with a really cool accent and the most beautiful route from Scotland to the UK is only through the Northumberland. Why would anyone want to retain any of that, after all, it's only a desolate uninhabited dump.
So in closing, this obituary to David Cameron's short but eventful political career, here is a man that never really achieved anything. He never made a real decision, he never won an election yet he became the Prime Minister of the UK and yet managed to piss it all away, losing die hard voters with every wrong turn he made, a man that found himself in a hole and kept digging, lacking the imagination or common sense to stop. A man that held his family and friends close, particularly as advisers to hold senior political posts. A man with his finger on the pulse, a man connected, particularly to the media at around the time of the politician's expenses scandal when very few Conservative MP's were found fiddling, except for the odd scapegoat. Here is a man that was cute enough to sign his text messages to the Rebekah Brooks (of the Sun Newspaper), "lol" because he thought it meant "lots of love", isn't that sweet? Come on, you know Rebekah Brooks, she was Chief Executive at News International, you know, arrested for bribing the police and hacking the phone of a dead child, yes, that Rebekah Brooks, that David signs his texts lots of love to.
A man that wore a thin veneer of civility and possibly was a finer actor than Tony Blair but lacked the ability to be hated or loved. So here we are, an obituary for an invisible man, someone that will be remembered for killing animals and ruining the British land and yet we won't remember anything else about his time in power. He wasn't a winner or a loser, he was simply someone that didn't win an election to become the Prime Minister, a not unremarkable feat by what transpires is an unremarkable man.
I would like to end all of this on a personal note. It is well known that the English are animal lovers and not everyone understands the depth and passion of that love so I think I should try and explain it.
Running made me fall in love with the Countryside. Running is the reason I took up photography, so I could capture the most amazing and beautiful things I was seeing in the morning. I would chat to the swans and ducks on my way past. I still do.
The photography has taken me all over the Country and I am accompanied by birdsong everywhere, it is awe inspiring and humbling.
In the deep beauty of Cumbria I saw a red squirrel and that was the highlight of that trip. Not the incredible scenery, a red squirrel that I saw fleetingly. I love this land with a passion that hurts sometimes and to love the land is to love the nature that shapes it in the way it does, that includes the wildlife, the creatures that cohabit this amazing planet with us. We have a duty of care to them, it is as simple as that. To betray that duty of care is morally wrong and it breaks my heart to see it happening.
Oppose the cull, HS2 and fracking. Oppose any of the legislation that is suggested to extend the right to kill wildlife and curtail our freedom to roam the byways and speak our minds and finally, vote these fools out at the next election, let your voice be heard and take back your dignity and democracy.
