Thursday 28 August 2014

In a nutshell

Just watching the news channel in which one of the victims of the Rotherham abuse scandal is being interviewed. She summed it up perfectly when speaking about those who did nothing.

"I don't think they're sorry. They're not sorry because I got abused. They're sorry because they got caught out in a scandal that's hit the media"

Right there in a nutshell is it. Everything you need to know about what's wrong with public life in modern Britain. Our institutions and our democracy is broken. This is what we have because we have no meaningful method of holding public servants to account.

The question is what happens as a result. I've seen a lot of outrage both in the media and more importantly the comments from the public. It's palpable and the comments are suggestive that it won't be tolerated any longer.

That becomes a "so what?" moment in that it becomes a question of what they will do about it beyond venting in comment threads. I'm not talking about violence or anything of that notion but the point I make is that there is a small window of opportunity here to start something turn this around, but everyone has to be part of it, because here's the rub.

Look at what this scandal points to. It points to people who tried to keep a lid on a disgusting and vile  practice. They tried to ignore it, hide and generally ride out the problem. They'll try again. They're already playing for time and it won't be long before we start to hear revisionism come in to play.

1400 children. As opined in the Telegraph "let the weight of that number sink in" .  It is the equivalent of almost 50 classes or an average size secondary school.

This is about as bad as it gets and there's a lot of noise. If nothing happens though, it will tell those who work for us, there is virtually nothing that will cause us to take action. If nothing happens they will know all they have to is make mealy mouthed apologies, buy time and it will be business as usual.

So. What will It be?

Wednesday 27 August 2014

The Stench in Britain's Air.

I suspect the blogosphere will be alive with posts around the release of the report into the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal and rightly so. They will cover it just like the mainstream media. There will however be a difference. The mainstream media will have surprise and shock as their themes. I suspect there won't be so much shock in the blogs. Revulsion yes, shock no. This is primarily because blogs have been writing about the poisonous effects of political correctness for a long time now. Whilst the press will write of it as though there was some unintended consequence of this well meaning and benign approach, bloggers will openly point to the deliberate design of political correctness as a tool to smash the societal cohesion of western nations. They will tell you that any degree of thought will show that what came out yesterday was entirely predictable.

But that's only part of it. If you haven't already, read the report I urge you to do so for it tells you something else it tells another story of this nation about where we are. Excuse my language but there's a stench of shit in the air. That stink is our nation and what it has become. Read the report and it will tell you about how pervasive in public life vanity, cowardice and rampant self interest has become. There is evidence aplenty in this report. People who can't recall meetings. Case files that laid bare he problem that went "missing". People in key places when presented with evidence crying out for action and it swept away in various fashions and attacking the messenger. Anything to make it go away and pretend it wasn't happening. In one of the worst examples (and I recall this story from when the scandal first broke) of a father who tried to rescue his daughter from one place where knew his daughter was being arrested by the police in what I can only imagine was a nightmare of kafkaesque proportions given the inversion of his reality. Even now, everyone's sort of sorry but nobody is really paying any price. The council leader has fallen on his sword, but so what he's just out of a job. There are whole lives and families that have been smashed laid waste, but it's just another day at the office for everyone else.

At the heart of this lies a group of people who talk about public service but know nothing of it. The problems here are about people who got in , got comfy and wanted nothing of the responsibility of serving the public. In their eyes, the public are there to serve them. I'm not saying everyone. Just a hard core of people who's rampant self interest trumps everything. No scandal must land at their door. No responsibility must be faced. They must bask in nothing but glory as they shin ever upwards on the greasy pole. The only responsibility they want to is to have eye catching initiatives brought to them, to keep them in their gilded position.  That is why everything inconvenient had to sink in the mud, that's why it had to dissappear. That's why the coercion of staff to go away and come back with the "right" answer happened. That's why files disappeared along with memories. That's why police officers ran away from their oath of office and that's why wretched souls had to go on getting abused both sexually and violently and the lives of they and their families ripped apart. All so vain and inept  people who were never fit for higher office could keep their fragile egos intact. people who should today be prison cells with their self constructed reputations in tatters.

Saturday 16 August 2014

Defensive Positions

For those of us who love our nation and what it once was and what it once stood for, we lament on a regular basis of what it has become. We look around in a bewildered fashion at everything that has gone wrong and it is pretty much everything. I suspect many of us cast our minds to the graves of men who died for us across the world and feel a sense of shame in what has happened to their sacrifice. From the top to the bottom, our nation is broken and it desperately needs fixing.

Many of us know what lies at the heart of it. Our politics and more importantly our culture has been collapsed from the within. Men and women who ascribed to a wrongheaded philosophy that started its journey in Frankfurt have spent decades slowly working their way through every aspect of our lives and our institutions right across the western world. Whilst we stood with guns and armour pointing at the overt manifestation of their political creed, seemingly everyday folk walked through our defences and in to our institutions, quietly coming at us from another angle. We did not notice them in action and here we are today with the result. The subtle were they, their language and viewpoints have become disguised as mainstream thought with even those who would opposed them, inadvertently advancing their agenda.

If we want to conceptualise it for the sake of what I'm about to write let's call it left v right. Yes there are nuances and extremes within both of them, but in order to simplify we'll go with this. They are on the left with us on the right.

When we look at the success on the left we are often bewildered. That's because too many times we're looking in the wrong place when we're trying to diagnose what went wrong. Why? In part because we never examine ourselves on the right as part of that assessment.

Our fundamental problem is our approach. In left versus right arguments and philosophies, we come at form different viewpoints and it's the heart of why we're losing. We tend to offer evidence for our arguments. We think the general good sense of our arguments and proposals are so self evident that others will see the sense of them and follow suit. More often than not, they are self evident so such a belief is not without sense to a point. Except for one fact. The left are not one bit interested in whether such things are self evident. They are fighting by a totally different set of rules in this war.

They brought totally different set of weapons and we're losing. We're on a battleground and we've no idea what the rules are. We're arguing and they're punching. Whilst we don't understand our battleground and any strategist will tell you the inevitable result will be defeat. We don't need a strategist to tell us though, the evidence is all around us. In short, the left get it and we don't. They're winning and we're losing.

Again, to a point, our approach is understandable. Our general philosophy of small state, personal responsibility, general stop interfering in everyone's lives has made it such that the way we have conducted ourselves to this point is an extension of that philosophy. It's costing us however and we will never see our vision come to fruition if we carry on the way we have.

We need to change. We need to wake up and identify the ground we're fighting on. We need to reform and find ways to make forward. Our hands have been raised whilst they've been throwing punches.

It's time to punch back (metaphorically, of course)


Wednesday 13 August 2014

A Prediction

I see from the a Times of Israel that IHH is planning Another Gaza Flotilla.

Oh goody - an aid and relief shipment for the poor impoverished people of Gaza. Once again it will involve the Mavi Marmara. Readers might be familiar that it was the Marmara which was the scene of an incident when the ship was boarded by Israeli commandos, because it would not follow instruction to divert to an alternative port suggest by the Israelis. One aspect of this was the ongoing security operation to prevent military equipment making it into Gaza for use against Israel.

What followed was criticism of Israel. One " UN" investigation called the operation and the naval blockade illegal, citing the San Remo manual of armed conflict at sea. Israel performed its own investigation that many, including UN commentators described as a whitewash.

Well at least that's what you were told.

I suspect with this new flotilla, we're going Israel find itself in a similar position where it will have criticism levelled at it and similar accusations thrown around and the sheep will willingly trot it all out.

There are however a couple of observations that I made following the last incident. In addition, the recent conflict in Gaza has helped underscore an inconvenient truth that shows the Gaza Flotilla as being nothing more that an effort at provocation as opposed to a relief convoy for the beleaguered residents of Gaza.

Firstly the naval blockade of Gaza is legal despite what the UN seemed to think last time. Their original report cited the San Remo manual as the basis for their verdict. Just one problem. The Israeli Turkel commission which produced the report  described as a whitewash consulted one Professor Dr Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg.  Who's he you might ask. Well you can get a summary of the man Here , but the key thing to take away in this context is that he was one of the authors of the very same manual. Israel sought the view,of an expert on the matter, one acknowledged by the international community.

Secondly this latest round of conflict has revealed something that undermines these flotillas as humanitarian in nature, especially with the Mavi Marmara. One of the things Hamas is reputedly pushing for is the proper development of a harbour in Gaza. Even the BBC mentioned it in one of their reports on the situation.

that's right folks. Gaza does not possess a proper harbour. It was a little fact tucked away last time. The Mavi Mamara is too big to dock in Gaza. It needs to dock elsewhere to offload its cargo.

The organisers will know this. They're. To bothered about helping the people of Gaza. If they were they'd head to a port that can accommodate the ship.

No. They want to provoke an incident once again.