Many people would like to pay less tax and enjoy more freedom to choose how they spend what they earn. So, even if you like me have little or no interest in politics, the midterm elections in America prompt the question; why do we have no Tea Party in Britain?
Never mind the quaint historical tale about bewigged revolutionaries dumping bales of the brown stuff into Boston harbour. Taxed Enough Already is the part of the Tea Party name that might touch a chord with many in Britain today. Few people now believe that the man in Whitehall knows best or that other people can spend your money more efficiently than you can.
Indeed, you could argue that a fundamental cause of the current economic crisis is that too many bureaucrats in public and private sector institutions have been spending other peoples money too foolishly for too long. Many years ago, the American libertarian economist Milton Friedman noted that very few people spend other peoples money as carefully as they spend their own.
So it is a remarkable fact that no British political party at the last General Election offered voters the chance to keep more of what they earn. Quite the opposite. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour all agreed that we must pay more tax; the only fiscal issue for debate was about how big the increase will be.
#1
In UK the middle class pays for the unwanted levels of immigration alot non EU and in turn the cost involved eg.social housing/free education and free healthcare.No Major party will change that in the UK!
Name me another country can you turn up with no id/no money and get free housing,free healthcare,free education and no need to work?ie Parasite heaven!
Posted by: Paul D ||
11/03/2010 15:59 Comments ||
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#2
Why is There No Tea Party in Britain?
Because it never had the original one in the first place. We stop being 'subjects' and started being citizens back in 1776. When did that happen in Britain?
Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt -- as you do on returning to Britain these days -- as if I were entering a failed state. It's not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It's the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.
God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of "don't tread on me" and "live free or die." Not all of them, obviously -- otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years -- and not just in the US but throughout the Western world -- government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it's not. Government's job is to act as our humble servant.
What's terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this. Sure, we may feel in our hearts that -- as Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe put it in their Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party manifesto -- "We just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others". And we may even confide it to our friends after a few drinks. But look at Australia; look at Canada; look at New Zealand; look at anywhere in the EUSSR; look at America -- at least until things begin to be improved by today's glorious revolution. Wherever you go, even if it's somewhere run by a notionally "conservative" administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state's function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens' lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less "fairness" too, of course.
Rarely have I felt more despondent about the world's future than I do right now, Britain's especially. At least when Blair and Brown were in charge, busily ruining things, there was always the consolation that soon would come the backlash which would see a decent, small-state, conservative administration regaining power and the country's fortunes restored. This hasn't happened. The similarities between the Eton Grocer's Coalition and the New Labour government he ousted are far greater than the differences. All are run by a professional political mandarin class in the interests of the professional political mandarin class. The Big Society -- contra a bizarre leader in this week's Spectator -- has very little to do with rolling back the frontiers of the State. It's about entrenching Tony Blair's Third Way socialism-lite, only under a zappy new name. For even the merest glimmer of hope about the future, the only place to look right now is across the Atlantic.
And this is why I'm more excited than an Englishman has any right to be about today's mid-term US elections. As Scott Edwards, president of Republican Party Animals put it yesterday: "Tonight is a lot like the night before Christmas when you were a kid. You knew the next day was going to be great, but you didn't quite know how great, and you were much too excited to sleep." I agree with him. Not even with Margaret Thatcher's first victory in 1979 or the Gipper's in 1980 was there an election with quite so much at stake. We're talking about the future not just of the US here, but of Western Civilisation itself.
If this isn't obvious, let me explain why. As you all know, since Climategate I've been dedicating far more of my time than is healthy to exposing the great Global Warming scam. This is not because I've suddenly realised I'm a scientist manque who wants to spend the rest of his life obsessing about forcings, feedbacks and solar radiation. It's because I understand that "Environmentalism" is but one strategically significant theatre in a much greater ideological war being waged across the world. It's the same one Toby Young is fighting over education; the same one the likes of Rod Liddle, Andrew Gilligan, Nick Cohen and Mark Steyn are fighting over political Islam; the same one Melanie Phillips is fighting over Israel; the same one Douglas Murray is fighting on pretty much everything. And its ultimate outcome is at least as important as those of the ones we fought in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. At stake is exactly the same thing the Greek alliance fought for when Western Civilisation was born at Salamis in 480 BC; the same thing we citizens of the West have been fighting for ever since: the right to forge our own destinies as free men and women, rather than remain infantilised, oppressed and enslaved as vassals of a tyrant state.
Sure there's no comparison (well not that much) between Obama's US and Stalin's Soviet Union; Coalition Britain and Mao's China; Julia Gillard's Australia and Queen Ranavalona's Madagascar; sure the war we're currently fighting doesn't involve mass destruction like that of World Wars I and II. But it's precisely because the ideological struggle we're currently engaged in is so seemingly democratic and innocuous that it is in fact so dangerous. With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today's encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the steady "engrenage" -- ratcheting -- of EU legislation; of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN's Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America's Environmental Protection Agency; of the stealthy encroachment of the Big Government into the most intimate recesses of our daily lives -- not just under barely disguised socialist administrations like Obama's even under notionally "Centre right" ones such as Cameron's or Sarkozy's. When the Enemy is as sly and insidious as that, it's much much harder for the increasingly oppressed populace to rouse itself to the appropriate state of alarm and rebellion.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/03/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
We will see. In the past 80 years, Europe has done its best to forget how to defend itself and its interests.
#1
Only a third of Tea Party candidates won, and none of the prominent ones. The key will be how well the entry-level winners perform, and whether they can move up.
At this point my favorite is Col. West.
[Pak Daily Times] The NATO and ISAF command in Afghanistan has recently witnessed a new kind of enemy, which, according to a NATO commander, "is not the Taliban or the Haqqani group", Daily Times confirmed. Officials confirm the presence of a new, more modern and sophisticated Punjabi Taliban in Kunar province ... which is right down the road from Binny's house in Chitral... of Afghanistan. They are a more beturbanned goon section of the Pakistain-backed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) who had broken off from their mother organisation and refused to take orders from LeT supremo, Hafiz Saeed.
In reality, this rebellious group, which had just split from the LeT, is the old Tehreekul Mujahideen (TM) and a faction of the previously split Kairun Naas (KN) of the LeT, which had been formed by the more fanatical Ahl-e-Hadith that held the Kashmire Conference in 1990, attended by both Hafiz Saeed and Professor Sajid Mir. Daily Times investigations reveal two reasons behind the split: Pak intelligence agencies have finally decided to split the jihadi groups as a policy to make them weaker, and Jamaatud Dawa (JD), LeT, TM and KN split as they had become too powerful; sectarian and ideological tensions within the Ahl-e-Hadith faction about the concept of jihad, as the more fanatical group fighting in Afghanistan is more into the Arab Mujahideen camp.
It is to be noted that previously a faction split from the JD in 2004 when armed festivities broke out in the premises of its headquarters, and the breakaway faction, KN, vowed to kill Hafiz Saeed, the JD head. Saeed had previously joined the Afghan jihad pretty late in 1987 on the insistence of Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, who had traditionally headed the operational part of the LeT.
Organisational structures of the JD and LeT were severely hurt by accusations from within the JD about Hafiz Saeed's involvement in nepotism, corruption, his second marriage to a fallen comrade's widow, which became a personal issue with Prof Iqbal, a top JD council member, who himself married an underage Baltistani girl. In a series of blunders, Saeed appointed his brother-in-law, Maulana Abdul Rehman Makki, then a teacher at Medina University in Soddy Arabia, second in command of JD, which did not go down well with a lot of people, especially with Lakhvi, as it was seen as an attempt by Saeed to control the finances of JD.
In 2001, Saeed also came under fire when he renamed Markaz Dawat Wal Irshad as Jamaatud Dawa, and separated it from LeT. Lakhvi disapproved of the decision then and Daily Times can confirm that he has finally fallen out with the JD chief now and is in-charge of most of JD's properties in Sindh and directly controls the Muridke centre, popularly known as 'Markaz-e-Taiba'. Lakhvi, said to be the criminal mastermind behind the Mumbai attacks, has developed links with Arab cut-throats in Pakistain, where he married his sister off with the top al Qaeda terrorist, Abdul Rehman Sherahi. He was the one who helped Lakhvi connect with top al Qaeda and Arab leaders, and heavily invested in LeT's infrastructure.
It should also be taken into account that the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith also opposed the formation of Markaz Dawat Wal Irshad (JD) because of possible Saudi support to it, which did not happen. JD was also barred from recruiting students from the Ahl-e-Hadith madrassas as they were under the control of Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith and openly supported by the Saudis. And it looks now, confirmed a former spy chief, "that the new rogue part of JD fighting in Pakistain could well be those who were behind 26/11 in Mumbai, you never know."
Interior Ministry officials confirmed to Daily Times about an American request to probe into the affairs of many Pak jihadis who are joining various Arab and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and FATA to carry out attacks on the ISAF forces, especially in Kunar province ... which is right down the road from Binny's house in Chitral... of Afghanistan.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/03/2010 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
