Not a revolutionary prospect but close

You read it here first, a long time ago actually, but the next election will be the election of the so called "fringe". Only difference of course is that the fringe is not longer the perpetrators of the right or the left, they will be the flag-bearers of the left and the right. Why? Because no other political parties do; they have no colours to nail to the mast and no defining streak which sets them apart from the other in the majestic political landscape (notice the sarcastic hyperbole), they are to all intents and purposes 'centre'. Not 'centre-right' or 'centre-left' but bang, slap, middle of the bar, is where most mainstream political parties have set up camp today, and guess what, I reckon that voters will realise this too a much larger extent once the next election creeps closer. Consider why:

Have we had reduced immigration? No

Have we repatriated power from Brussels? No

Is the defence budget being slashed in the middle of a war? Yes

Can gypsies still set up camp wherever they want? Yes

Is the Human Rights Act going away? No

Is health and safety madness still prevalent? Yes

Is political correctness madness still prevalent? Yes

Are the trains and bus-services still too expensive? Yes

Is Britain still being sold off; lock stock and barrel? Yes

Are the pubs still dying? Yes

Is religious insensitivity to every single fucking thing, still clogging the news? Yes

Is there still too much red-tape? Yes

Are the righteous still preaching 24-7 how we should live our lives? Yes

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Now consider why nothing has happened with these rather large issues, it has to with political ideology or maybe it just has to do with vested interests - personally I think it has to with principles or lack thereof rather:

New Labour: Centre-left

Conservatives: Centre-right

Liberal Democrats: Centre-left

The Green Party: useless and pointless

BNP: Left

UKIP: Right

SNP: Centre-left

Now this is what I think is going to happen come the next election. People who at this election were on the verge of not voting for either LibDems, the Tories or Labour wont be on that note again. This time it is abundantly clear that all of their parties have moved away from their traditional ground and into the centre where, as this post so fragrantly demonstrates, everyone hates them particularly those us with a very firm set of principles, and that pretty much entails the entire blogosphere.

The Tories will most likely loose a lot of votes to UKIP because after 13 years in opposition and perhaps two or three in government it is as clear as daylight that they do not espouse right-wing policies. A lot of working class voters will probably shift to the BNP because of 13 years in government they were completely ignored and their two or three in opposition was an abject failure and a complete waste of everyone's time, because they are trying to defend the most abysmal mandate period in British political history. They have not yet succeeded in that goal and if anything it will turn into a pyrrhic victory if they do, but then the party at large will probably disappear as well. Here comes the interesting part; a lot of LibDem voters wont know what to do with themselves. They are at face value left leaning people who were not completely convinced by Labour but they have also come to realise that neither their party nor their most obvious successor, Labour, are going to serve as a reasonable substitute for their vote. Who they go for instead is anyone's guess but probably some really weird party like Socialist Alternative or Trade Unionist & Socialist.

And such is my thesis (and has been for about 1.5 years now, remember you read it here first); The election that really counts was not the one past, but the one we are about to have sometime in the next 4 years.

The Virtues of Meritocracy

I do apologise for having been absent for a lot of time, regular readers will know that I am now the proud subscriber to a bar job, and I am thoroughly enjoying it at that. A lot of heavy keg lifting but nothing that I cannot handle, furthermore a sudden realisation that British people are at large very rude in the pub - something which made me rather sad since the Kiwis and the Aussies are perfectly delightful (the majority) yet the indigenous do not seem to be able to quite handle the pressure of being humble when requesting something as simple as a pint. But alas I digress, I believe what is on the agenda today is meritocracy for the reason that it is slowly seeping back into the roots of Britain again.

'Death of the Fox' is a book by George Garrett, an American poet and novelist. He was the poet laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2006. His novels include 'The Finished Man', 'Double Vision', and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of 'Death of the Fox', 'The Succession', and 'Entered from the Sun'. I am currently reading Death of the Fox and rather enjoying it since it revolves around Walter Raleigh but rather annoyingly all the spelling is american so it is just about readable for any English speaking person. I shall leave the content for the reader himself to google but it centres around Raleigh's life and covers the arrival of the Tudors in England in 1485 to the execution of Raleigh in 1618.

There is a passage which I would like to rip right out of the novel for it is very striking and pertinent in these days as well, even though intended to read of the 14th century.

Great men rise above their peers like the tallest trees of the forrest. Proud, but first to catch the eye, and therefore soonest to be cut down. And down they come with a groan and brief thunder. When they are gone there is only rotten stump and empty space of sky to prove they have ever been there.

Now I ask; is this statement true? Is there such a check to limit the reach of the most ambitious of men? I would say this statement has become largely moot in today's society. We live in an age of celebrities, be they politicians who are famous for the broadside of their jaw or celebrities who are famous for being simply famous but that is just about where their personal agility ends. One must for the sake of society argue that if someone who is reasonably ambitious today would stand up and declare his intentions, people would to all intents and purposes follow that man regardless of the nonsensical ideas that are spewed out of his midst. We do not question what should be and we do not replace dangerous paradigms with our own common sense. I argue that this is down to meritocracy. What is more I take the strongest and most fervent of objections to what we have become: nightingales. We close our eyes when we sing and see nothing and hear nobody but ourselves and it is quite frankly killing the whole foundation of man as we know her and turning our brief stay in this place into a perpetual opprobrium which, no matter how you argue, is detrimental to all of us.

This narrator has had the good fortune to have grown up in more than one country - it gives one perspective and perspective is good for it lets us judge things from two sets of books. "Merit" is a bad word in most of the European continent and Britain today, the best and most suited for a position are not necessarily the most likely final occupants of that post as logic would dictate. Instead rather spurious sets of selectors are used such as sex, skin colour, background, religion and many other very strange denominations which, at least in my view, should be nowhere near the academic process that is selection. This is because of biology and more importantly evolution. I subscribe to evolution and not creationism so if you are expecting an essay on that I bid you farewell for you are not about to get one.

Natural selection is the process of survival: a process resulting in the evolution of organisms best adapted to the environment. You can extrapolate this to the rather mundane task that is everyday life of the hoi polloi, you and me and everyone else in our curious little 16 hour battle period, 365 days a year which we have come to denote as our 'lives'. Regardless of what you might think of the human species we are rather fine example of what natural selection is capable of; there are certainly a lot of deceases but seen in the light of what our species has accomplished it is nothing in comparison. What is more we are able to heal ourselves out of our own means - a mighty feat which few other species can master. Now we think of this in terms of economics and more importantly the private sector and the operators within; namely the companies. The companies that provide the daily bread for million of people around the globe, if not billions. A lot of these organisations are very powerful and are powerful, wealthy, because they work hard and more relevant to us; they select people based on their ability and not their appearance. A single bank interviews thousands of people for maybe just 10 jobs and by doing this they ensure that they will get most profitable person, the person who is willings to work the hardest to deliver most dividends for himself and the company, the sort of person who constitutes and investment in itself. They select the brilliant from the brightest.

If you invest in people you want to make sure that your investment will not go to waste, that said person will come to work for your organisation for at least a couple of years so that all that training is not lost, it is simple quid pro quo economics and is used by most business outfits to reach their combined goal of making more money for such is the marked based economy that we live in today. But, what if you break the system, what if you have a planned jobs market where not only are your employes selected for you but you are obliged, under law, to accept them no matter what whacky nut jobs you end up with. You will loose money, your profits will shrink and your status in the social hierarchy will stumble and fall. Why? Because we are not all equal, we do not have the same motivation, outlook, dreams, background, parents, environments or any other number of factors. We are different and that is what makes us different from any other species. Look at birds; they are homogenous they move the same, look the same and for all intents and purposes act the same. We are omnivorous entities who succeed because of our difference, because it fosters a sense of competition; and urge to be better after the initial failure, an urge to prove to the world that you can do better that you are not part of the dregs that inhabit the lowest pits of this world. Those who refuse to work even though they are perfectly capable, those who betray, those who let others suffer for personal gain etcetera. That list could be made endless of people who have no business in interacting with decent hard working folk but such is the situation in which we perceive; we are different for good and for bad, and if we break that pattern, if we engage in social engineering we are dabbling with powers well beyond our comprehension and understanding. And it is not a matter if something very horrible is going to happen as a result, it is a matter of when.

Turn of the TV - Manly P. Hall's take on the World

I am doing a lot of 'interesting-listening/watching-posting' today simply because the topic I wish to write about will require too much of my time and too much of my energy to be worthwhile. Alas, I shall save that for a later date when I have properly collected my thoughts on the subject matter and shall bring it forth, like a ball of fire, upon the great unwashed that constitute the readers of this blog. Oh, I jest. The readers of this blog I am eternally grateful to, and I might add that their numbers have been going up for some time now - why I cannot fathom but I will extend my sincerest gratitude and hope that you will continue to read the collected ramblings of a university student who is presumptuously sick of the world.

Hence, I give you this from Monty P. Hall where thanks is due to Mr. Fausty who has yet again, with his blistering incisiveness for what is libertarian, spotted a very interesting piece -not the best one from Mr. Hall- but certainly worth listening to;

The Guardian needs to be taken down a notch or two - red, black and white are Nazi colours apparently

Basically I have qualms about the entire article for it just non-sensical and goes against the whole principle of local democracy. But in particular I would like to focus on this part (my emphasis)

The Swiss People's party has tried the trick before, thriving in the 2007 federal election on the back of an even more explicit poster showing three white sheep, standing on the red background of the Swiss flag, kicking out a fourth black one, above the slogan "for more security". No one, in the context of the far right, should mistake the provocative nature of a campaign fought in the Nazi colours of red, black and white.

WTF? Since when did red, black and white in conjunction become "Nazi Colours"?! The Guardian must have seen this one coming though, surely. Anyhow I am going to indulge in this little exercise anyway, letting the stupid little socialist mouthpiece get away with everything is not good sportsmanship in my book. Hence, here we go:

According to the Guardian the following countries are Nazis going by the colour codes used on their sovereign-state flags:

Egypt (OH MY GOD IT HAS EVEN GOT AN EAGLE ON IT! HITLER IS BACK!!!!!!)

Iraq

Papua New Guinea

Syria

Trinidad and Tobago

Yemen

Bonfire on Databases

I am not too sure what I am to write about today. It seems as if most things have been exhausted e.g. there is so preciously little we appear to be able to do about the malaise that infest our daily lives. When freedom and justice has died in the heart of man how are we, who still cultivate this belief, going to raise it from the dead like Jesus did Lazarus?

Why is it that no one cares anymore? Why is it permissible for the Independent Safeguarding Authority to even be set up - which sole purpose it is to check and see if people wanting to work with children are pedophiles or not. You might scream 'child protection' yet for all that we stand for, no other nation in the world has gone this overboard with databases. In Sweden your name appears, on average, on 300 databases ranging from private to public. Are we even to dare to estimate that number for the UK, I certainly would not like to know. It is one of these areas where ignorance truly is bliss where one is happier not knowing how many people know about my first failed exam - ever. Yet do you honestly think we will be safer if we are registered on 2000 databases or even 10,000 databases? Even if our name appeared on every single institutions' databases, that we came in contact with, that is not going to stop a wicked mind from being wicked. How could it?

What is wrong with us? Why is not Dave mentioning this when he is doing very well in making the easy choices, the superficial ones that will amount to a difference for you and me to the tune of naught. Yet the soon-to-be eradicated Labour Government have so much British blood on their hands it is almost difficult not to damn them for every act they have passed since coming into power. People make the argument that we elected them and as such have to stand by our choice. We made that choice on the premise that the people we elected were honest and descent, that is what it previously meant to be publicly elected. Yet we get a government that now is actively indulging in social engineering and is not ashamed of it, take Carol Ann Duffy's poem, 'Education for Leisure'. The exam board AQA has removed the poem from its GCSE anthology, and has asked schools to destroy old copies containing the poem, because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

What is poetry? There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" Emily Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry;" and Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing." Poetry is a lot of things to a lot of people. Poetry is what our heart tells us the words mean together, in their glorious, doomed escapade trying to explain and alleviate life in the eye of the beholder. Even if the message of a poem is so blindingly obvious - that in itself is a contradiction for being obvious is not a necessity of a poem nor is beauty only understanding. But understanding is also a personal concept, like meaning it cannot be thrust upon the stronger minds who seek to question the power lurking behind the cloak of words. That power however is now contained by the government which tells us, through decrees, what we can and cannot read. Recall that most films about autocracy always feature a 'blacklist' were artifacts of culture are hidden away from the public away because they are 'dangerous' and can corrupt feeble minds.

A cull on quangos indeed, all 1,162 of them. But what about these?

ContactPoint: To hold name, address, gender, date of birth, school and health provider of every child in England

National DNA database: Of 4.5m people whose genetic fingerprints are on the database, more than 500,000 are innocent, including 39,000 children

Communications database: Plan to centralise details of calls and websites visited from phone companies and internet providers, open to 510 public authorities

Onset: A profiling tool which examines a child's behaviour and social background to identify potential child offenders

Detailed Care Record: When rolled out, will allow hospitals, GPs nurses and social workers to update patient's records with unmonitored "wikipedia-style" entries

>>>>PROPOSED<<<<

Communications database Would bring together details of emails, telephone calls and web use

National Identity Register Will store biographical information and biometric data linked to ID cards

The NHS Detailed Care Record Will hold GP and hospital records

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, pointed to significant legal and practical problems with a further 29 databases, including the national childhood obesity one and the planned NHS summary care record system...

It goes without mentioning that the ones we "share" with the EU are not exactly libertarian either.

What is wrong with us? Perhaps that is the key question, perhaps that is the Magnus Opus feat of this government, this seemingly Herculean question, not so much the question itself but the very fact that we are now so desperately in need for guidance that the only people who cannot escape from the disaster, unlike this government and its immasculated purpose, who are responsible - we are those people. Their victory lies in us having to ask ourselves that question instead of those whom we elected.