A question of priorities

Nearly two months ago I bought a house and advised the local authority and utilities accordingly.

My electricity supplier continues to insist that my property does not exist because their infallible and therefore immutable database has it listed under a different postcode.

Sarcastic enquiries as to whether the Land Registry, council, Royal Mail and everyone else can all be wrong and they alone right have so far produced the unexpected answer “Yes, they can”.

Meanwhile, feeling that the local authority was dragging its feet in the matter of a council tax bill, I put in a call to be greeted by a recorded message telling me that they currently have a 10 week backlog of enquiries to clear, and are unable to help with anything put to them since early April. 

You might say “fair enough” and blame the evil Tory cuts, but for the fact that this same (Conservative) local authority has found the resources to write to me and every other resident in my area four times so far this year, on the vital issue of whether there should be a change in the parish boundaries.

They have also paid several visits to the house we currently rent to put new and improved signs on the public right of way that runs through our garden. A public footpath that no member of the public has shown any interest in using for the last five years.

An odd sense of priorities also seems to afflict those at the political centre. These are the people who apparently cannot be trusted to keep hold of potentially explosive dossiers on historic child abuse by those in high places, or on British complicity in America’s programme of “extraordinary rendition”.

Yet at exactly the same time, and apparently without any sense of irony, they rush through emergency legislation because of the vital importance of keeping a full record of every mundane phone call we make, text and email we send, and website we visit.

No political party is prepared to take a stand against this wholly illiberal legislation. Not even the ones who proclaim their liberalism in their name.

Our politicians are apparently so busy that they cannot even undertake the rudimentary checks that would have revealed that their first choice to lead the child abuse enquiry was wildly inappropriate because her late brother was Attorney-General in the 1980s.

Yet all three major party leaders have find time to endorse a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Women, which has found that Westminster’s art collection is “off putting” for women because it is too dominated by white males.

Not altogether surprising, you might think, in a centuries-old institution to which no woman could gain admission, unless she happened to be the queen, until less than a century ago.

But why let the inconvenient facts get in the way of a no doubt well-intentioned attempt to rewrite history, whether to redress ancient wrongs to the sisterhood or to pretend that recognisable ethnic minorities have featured prominently in our island’s story for centuries, and that Britain has really been gloriously multi-cultural since the time of the Romans?

Personally, I’d prefer my council to stop faffing around with meaningless boundaries and fill the potholes in the roads.

I’d like our MPs to be defending our national independence and protecting our freedom for unnecessary surveillance, rather than fretting about paintings and meekly rubber-stamping the executive’s every whim.

Photoshopped, obviously, but not so far from the truth

“If you’ve nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is the lousiest and most totalitarian of arguments, but it seems that precious few are prepared to defend our freedom and privacy when doing so can be presented as being soft on terrorists, paedophiles and other criminals.

There are always going to be those who wish us dead. Doubtless the maniacal fans of the caliphate are more driven and less likely to bother with such niceties as warnings than previous terrorist enemies of the British state.

Nonetheless, we would do well to remember exactly what it is we are supposedly trying to defend, and reflect on the wise words of Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Where did all the fish and money go?

Britain is famously an island built on coal and surrounded by fish. It helped to make us the greatest and richest power on Earth. So how come we now find ourselves running out of seafood, energy and cash?

The chattering classes currently seem to be more exercised about fish than by their personal trainers. Television coverage has belatedly drawn their attention to the scandal of half the fish caught in the North Sea being thrown back dead to comply with EU quota rules.

It is easy (and enjoyable) to blame this on Edward Heath’s decision to offer up the British fishing industry as a sacrifice to secure the great prize of Common Market entry in 1973.

The argument that joining this apparent trading club would make us all more prosperous seemed pretty persuasive to anyone comparing the relative progress of the British, French and German economies at the time, and came with the assurance that there was “no essential loss of national sovereignty” involved.

This was, we now know, a lie to rank among the biggest of a century that generated more than its fair share.

We foolishly threw open our once rich fisheries to other nations’ bottom-scraping trawlers, which essentially hoovered the seas clean of life.

There is sadly no guarantee that we would not have created this same mess all by ourselves, if left to our own devices. We are guilty, too, of ignoring repeated warnings not to eat endangered species such as tuna and cod, to which we apparently remain as addicted as the Chinese are to the non-existent medical benefits of rhino horn and tiger bones.

In energy, the EU crops up again as the organisation forcing us to close down our coal power stations, though it can reasonably be pointed out that successive British governments had ample warning to come up with an alternative, whether the sane one of nuclear or the crackpot one of covering both land and sea with intermittently wafting windmills.

Then there is the whole cash thing. You will have noted that we no longer have enough of the stuff to fund luxuries like local courts, libraries and municipal flowerbeds, and it can surely only be a matter of time before our council’s only role is to allocate us a time to bring our own rubbish to the recycling centre, and ask whether we would mind stopping to fill in the potholes along our way.

Where has all the money gone? Sucked up in huge trawl nets by rapacious bankers, politicians and Eurocrats? Well, up to a point, though here again sadly many of us are guilty of allowing the lure of easy credit to encourage us to live beyond our means.

Now the day of reckoning has arrived, and some take pleasure in pointing out that the euro zone is in an even bigger mess than we are. This is to misunderstand the whole nature of the euro project, which was never intended to create the economic benefits lauded by its more gullible fans.

It was and is a political project to advance the cause of creating a United States of Europe so that a few well-nourished individuals can strut the world stage claiming parity with the US, China and the other emerging great powers. Disasters affecting peripheral economies saddled with inappropriate interest rates were an entirely predictable consequence, designed to ease the transfer of power from national governments to the centre.

Our politicians continue to dodge the uncomfortable fact that semi-detachment from the European project is untenable in the long run, and we will have to submit ourselves to rule from Brussels or break free. Either course will be painful and dangerous, but only independence can restore Britain’s self-respect. And with it the right to take charge, like grown-ups, of our fisheries, energy policy and money.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.