politics: why britain is sick

For the first time I am going to apply for a job abroad. I am fed up with Britain not least because I feel utterly out of contact with the political process. So this page is my futile attempt to show my horror at what the Government is, and is not doing. My points are deliberately brief and simplistic because I do not want to write War and Peace here. The page is party-neutral, I am not arguing for or against any particular political party, I address only the issues that drive me very slightly insane :)

This article is about Britain, but I'm sure many of the points are equally valid in any country.




Illness: crime levels are going through the roof and prisons are overcrowded to bursting point. Cure: make prisons extremely unpleasant places to be. Stop mollycoddling prisoners. There must be no TV, no luxuries, just hard education and especially hard labour. Then even if you shorten sentences (which routinely happens whether we like it or not) at least you are creating a deterrent.

Illness: corruption is on the increase: company directors are awarding themselves far too much money to the detriment of industry and everyone else. Companies are buying laws they want on the quiet. (One example: genetically modified food companies "persuaded" the government to change a law so that it now allows much higher levels herbicides and pesticides to be present in the food we eat. Expect cancer to increase). Cure: reform the system to hinder the instinct of directors to milk companies dry. Do not allow companies or organisations to make huge donations (i.e. bribes) to political parties. It is much better to fund political parties with taxpayer's money in order to reduce the greater evil of bribery and corruption.

Illness: the government does not seem to care about the manufacturing industry. Yet without it their beloved service industries will have a shaky foundation. Cure: the government and the city must encourage long term investment in industry spanning five years, not five months as is the current model. This works well in Germany and Japan, our short term return addiction is damaging. Banks will shut down and asset strip a new business unless it is profitable within a year or so. The government needs to provide tax-based and other incentives to encourage investment.

Illness: kids are leaving school poorly educated. Schools focus on trying to raise kid's morale by giving them artificially high grades. Cure: exams have been dumbed down. Make the exams more difficult again. Straight A's are common place. This is counterproductive and lowers the common denominator. Give the bright kids something to do or they will not reach neither their potential nor a sense of achievement if A's are easy. Objective research is indicating that the modern attempt to make children feel good about themselves is not positively affecting their learning or motivation. It is a gruesome error to substitute attempts to raise kids' moral for difficult lessons. When kids leave school with an inediquate education, no amounts of pats on the back by kindly teachers will compensate them for the failure of the modern, trendy education system. If you look at the history of, say, the great mathematicians, these guys were educated very aggressivly compared to lacklustre modern standards. The country needs smart kids, period. Making kids smart, work them hard by giving them tough material, they're at the age when they can absorb it! Only then can you genuinely raise morale.

Illness: teachers, examiners and kids are stressed and barely able to cope with a huge number of exams kids have to sit these days. Cure: reduce the number of examinations. We don't need lots of exams, we need tough exams.

Illness: there are no plumbers. Too many kids are being encouraged to get university degrees. Cure: Bring back the apprentice system, the most skilled experts are usually the guys who have done a job from age 15 or 16. Allow kids who are utterly not interested in school to leave at 14 and do apprentice work, get into a trade and earn a little money instead. This has the added advantage of allowing teachers to concentrate on those pupils who are interested in excelling at school without the distraction of kids who will leave with terrible qualifications anyway.

Illness: We are short of engineers and science graduates. Increasing numbers of students are studying soft, meaningless qualifications, such as degrees in women's studies. Cure: award lower grants to soft subjects and higher grants to undersubscribed, quality subjects such as engineering, science and mathematics that are much more likely to benefit the nation - and the students themselves.

Illness: Childhood and adulthood obesity is making people ugly, unhappy and unfit. The drain on the National Health Service is severe. Cure: As always, ignore studies funded by lobbies that are a cover for the food industry. Promote exercise (stop selling playing fields to housing developers). Treat fast food as a health hazard on par with tobacco and alcohol, which it is. Ban all fast food advertising and junk food advertising. Use "hard-hitting" advertising to associate fast food with ugliness, unsexiness and lousy health in people's minds, especially kids' minds. Place draconian restrictions on the ability of fast food chains to sell their calories. Place controls on junk food sold in shops. Subsidise struggling healthy, organic foods with easy profits currently made from the sugary, salty, fatty foods that make people fat, ugly and miserable.

Illness: there is too much bureaucracy in the NHS. It is like hiring pilots who know nothing about aeroplanes. Cure: fire most of the bureaucrats/managers. Use the vast savings to hire more medical staff. Train and empower the medical staff to make most of the decisions in the running of the hospitals.

Illness: too much bureaucracy everywhere. Cure: simplify systems. Don't put the empire-building bureaucrats in positions of power.

Illness: Draconian laws removing our rights and freedoms are being passed with far too much ease. Likewise laws are being passed that give more power to corporations and entertainment industry lobbies. Cure: Obviously reverse the trend of passing laws that remove our rights and freedoms. Anti-terror laws are the worse culprit, where terror hype is used to give more power to governments, at our own risk, the risk being that we are at the mercy of an increasingly-powerful, increasingly unaccountable, and sometimes capriciously vindictive "Police State". On the corporate front, patents, particularly "software patents" are being used by large organisations and law firms to bully small companies and organisations into either handing over money in "licence fees" or to put them out of business. In the sofware world, software patents effectively mean that you have to be a giant corporation or you cannot compete, as patents will be used to destroy you. Fortunately Software Patents are not legal in Europe, but the government is not doing enough (or anything as far as I can tell) to prevent their introduction, which Microsoft and others are lobbying for. Another example is the government is not doing enough to protect its people from the worldwide music and movie industry cartels, (which use the reviled MPAA, RIAA and it's international siblings as effective protection rackets to extort money by suing (sometimes innocent) people they suspect have downloaded their copyrighted material, knowing they can't afford to contest their might in a court of law.

Illness: tax laws are too complicated: no one understands them, not even the government. Cure: simplify them. Everyone wants that.

Illness: the government gives proportionally too much money to Scots and Irish. Cure: we are all taxpayers and the English should receive their proportional share.

Illness: English sport is in a mess. Cure: who cares? No cure needed :)

Illness: government is not doing enough to curb smoking. The government is bribed by the income from tobacco taxes. Cure: make it illegal for the governments to spend money gained from tobacco taxes. The money should be given directly to cancer research charities. Disallow corporate "donations" to political parties (which is a point made elsewhere on this page).

Illness: Industrial farming: the countryside looks depressing and horrible due to huge fields. Soil erosion is rife. Rivers are prone to flooding from run-off water from vast fields. Wildlife is in decline. Cure: make it illegal for field sizes to exceed a certain area. Provide serious incentives, both positive and negative to ensure that hedgerows and trees are planted and maintained. Disincentives for drenching our foods in pesticides should also be ramped up.

Illness: there are too many speed cameras. Cure: restrict camera use to calming traffic built-up areas where pedestrians are at risk. Increase the speed limit on motorways except in busy areas and at busy times. The police should then take muggings, fraud and burglaries investigations more seriously.

Illness: There are too many street cameras and there is zero evidence that they reduce crime. It is a Big Brother scenario, being spied on by all those sinister cameras. Cure: remove street cameras for they are an invasion of our privacy and they are a monumental waste of money in terms of the vast cost per arrest using cameras, compared to cost per arrest by traditional policing. The government don't tell you these things, because they are not honest. No surprise there then.

Illness: too much traffic. Cure: increase taxation on petrol. Reduce income tax by equivalent quantity. Results: net gain to Treasury and net loss to taxpayer: zero; less traffic; faster journey times; more viable public transport; unhappy oil companies; more sharing of cars; safer roads and less pollution.

Illness: the government (and most companies are the same) pays many millions of pounds to Microsoft for software licences. Cure: Government must promote non-proprietary products. (See this story). One option is to use free Open Source alternatives, such as Linux and Open Office, for systems paid for by taxpayer's money. That schools give huge sums of cash to Microsoft makes my blood freeze. The government (local and national) spends hundreds of millions of pounds a year of OUR money on software licences alone. Software licence management and audits are also a vast expense. Microsoft pockets the money and every year Microsoft's windfall increases. This is an immoral and insane waste of our money and resources: good money is siphoned out of our country (Microsoft is an American corporation), hence weakening our economy. This worsening problem is not unique to Britain. Fortunately many countries are beginning to move over to open source software to power their systems.

Illness: the government is admirably putting its services online but these services require the user to have Microsoft Windows, IE and other Microsoft products. Why must I be forced to use Microsoft products to access my government's services? I have a low opinion of Microsoft, why must my tax be given to, and spent on promoting this monopolistic, (and, incidentally, non-British) corporation? Correct use of web technology means we can use any browser on any operating system we wish. But the Government is receiving bribes from Microsoft to lock its subjects into Microsoft products. Cure: Make accessing government services truly platform independent using OPEN Internet standards.

Illness: monumental sums of money are given to unaccountable pressure groups to beat us up. Cure: cut back spending of vast quantities of tax payers money on unaccountable politically correct bureaucracies. For example, racial equality organisations are controlled by ethnic groups who have their own agenda and are not unbiased themselves. Other politically correct lobbies such as the homosexual lobby must not be trusted either. They routinely campaign for unreasonable rights such as to indulge in (presumably homosexual) sex in public places and so forth. This doesn't make me anti-ethnic nor anti-gay, which I can categorically state I am not. Disapproving of certain pressure groups is not the same as disapproving of people they purportedly represent. (Here I am merely anticipating some of the usual straw-man and ad-hom attacks people who are sympathetic to such pressure groups unscrupulously unleash against their political opponents).

Illness: far too much money is given to so-called asylum seekers, they have cars and other luxuries and they are remaining in the country. (The vast majority of "asylum seekers" are illegal immigrants, they tend to be economic migrant males, which, incidentally causes another problem. The immigrants compete fiercely for the relatively limited number of available women (native or immigrant), and this imbalance can damage morale for everyone). Cure: without wishing to sound unkind, to be prudent in policy of economics, stretched resources, housing, crime and moral, asylum seekers must be sent back systematically and without delay. The government is doing too little to return illegal immigrants to their native countries. Of 130,000 illegal immigrants that entered Britain in the year 2000 alone fewer than 30,000 had been returned by 2002. Very few people want the rising tide of asylum seekers into the country, the ethnic minorities are of the same opinion. Asylum seekers are paid a fortune of OUR money, cost yet more to administrate, and the rate of immigration is forcing crime up and the cost of houses to skyrocket. (Asylum seekers are routinely given houses, whilst native Brits are left to rot). Objecting to "Asylum seekers" is not racist, which is the cynical attack of those who promote illegal immigration. Objecting to third world immigration is a pragmatic and an anti-freeloader stance that is overwhelmingly common in native Brits, whites and ethnic minorities alike. In summary, the government should remove illegal immigrants immediately. That would save money, curb public anger and give out the right signals at the very least. The government exists to serve its subjects so it should be more responsible in this matter.

Illness: racism is rocketing and that includes the rampant racism by ethnic groups against other ethnic groups and against whites. Because of political correctness the police seldom pursue the extremely common occurrences of racism by ethnics, and ironically this fuels racism against those ethnic groups. There is a huge great sense of injustice that is felt by the majority whose cause is ignored by the media. The media, which exhibits a left wing bias, systematically hushes up racist attacks by non-whites. Cure: Racism should be discouraged therefore ethnic racists should be reviled in the media every bit as much as they love to revile white racists. If only whites are vilified then racism will increase along with public anger at the insane injustice. Just because ethnics are harder to police both practically and politically does not mean they should not be. Non-white racism must not be censored by the media.

Illness: violent crime is rising: our streets and houses are increasingly unsafe. Cure: there isn't an easy solution of course, but preventing the continued flood of asylum seekers/illegal immigrants would help stop the problem accelerating so steeply and prisons should be made more unpleasant. The police must adopt the proven policy of zero-tolerance policy against crime. The softy softly approach has been shown beyond reasonable doubt to increase crime. The government cares about the criminal and the rights of victims are ignored.

Illness: cannabis is illegal. Alcohol is promoted. Cure: decriminalise cannabis, as the Dutch have done for years. I know at least one alcoholic who does not drink if he has cannabis. To my mind alcohol is much worse than cannabis so why isn't alcohol vilified? How many people have their faces permanently disfigured after a session of weed? How many people are killed on the roads by dopeheads as opposed to drunk drivers? The tragedy of families torn apart by psychological abuse and violence by an alcoholic parent is beyond any evil of cannabis. I am not convinced that cannabis leads to hard drugs any more than smoking or alcohol does. The huge downside of cannabis is its association with tobacco. At the very minimum, people who use cannabis to relieve chronic pain must not be prosecuted, as stupidly happens today. Conversely, far tighter controls should be placed on the marketing of alcohol.

Illness: the government uses spin doctors and as a result people feel alienated and bullshitted. Cure: all spin doctoring should be audited and regulated, just as financial institutions are. If you can regulate the misuse of money, then you can regulate misuse of information.

Illness: art produced these days is untalented rubbish. Cure: fire the existing establishment personnel who wield power over art. Hire those who promote genuine talent over gimmicks. Train kids to paint and sculpt in the tradition of the great artists. (It is hard work).

Illness: there is an epidemic in gambling leading to tragic tales of ruined lives. Cure: Cull the National Lottery, which spends many millions on advertising to persuade people, young and old, to gamble. That money should be spent on adverts illustrating the dangers of gambling, and the tricks used to separate the punter from his money. Make it illegal for the government and political parties to profit from the proceeds of gambling, directly or indirectly. Then the insane political enthusiasm for gambling may be mysteriously diminished.

Illness: mysterious government bodies, quangos, have much power but are unaccountable. Cure: audit quangos and publish the reports.

Illness: state funded religion in education: Cure: do not allow state funded schools to promote religion. New Hindu, Islamic and Christian schools should not be sanctioned. Creationism, or "intelligent design" as it is now called, is nothing more than a disproved (by fossil evidence, DNA evidence, etc) supernatural humbug, and must not be taught as a scientific theory, which it definitely is not. Religion should not be allowed to hinder education: classes must not be disrupted by neither Islamic prayer sessions, which revolve around specific times of the day, nor any other religious ritual. The cost in terms of time spent teaching and money is unreasonable.




You'll notice that my favoured policies are a strange mixture of right wing, middle of the road and left wing. I take every point on its own merits rather than conform to the ultimately abstract definition of what is right wing and what is left. And maybe I am wrong on some points. Who isn't? Maybe I will change my mind over time. That is the open-minded approach. The absence of U-turns is as at least as suspicious as their presence.


Some related links:
Campaign against software patents in Europe
Fax your MP (UK)
Tactical Voter guide to your neighbourhood (UK)
Up My Street guide to your neighbourhood (UK)
Great Causes - a collection of political/great causes links on this site


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From:	devnull	Subject:	Prison	2002-10-01 11:37:58
From:	Alex	Subject:	:(	2003-12-13 04:28:26
From:	Alex	Subject:	Ugh!!	2003-12-13 08:07:11
From:	zippey	Subject:	Union Flag	2004-04-18 22:51:45
From:	Alex	Subject:	Re: Union Flag	2004-05-07 18:08:47
From:	samarian	Subject:	All	2004-07-06 17:47:05
From:	Martin	Subject:	I agree!	2005-01-22 21:50:04
From:	Tony Quinlan	Subject:	Britain is finished	2005-03-05 01:47:23
From:	Tony	Subject:	The Sweet Secret of my Success	2005-03-15 07:10:35
From:	stephen	Subject:	st georges day	2005-03-20 01:54:38
From:	Becka	Subject:	exams	2005-10-09 15:40:41
From:	Old Gal	Subject:	All	2005-10-11 22:38:54
From:	Send Them all Home	Subject:	Mass immigration - send them all home!	2007-11-29 21:20:57

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