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Khoodeelaar! The Brick Lane and Whitechapel and Stepney London E1 Area Campaign against the Crossrail hole Bill and the campaign in general for the social, economic, environmental and democratic and constitutional and legal defence of the East End of London
Editor©Muhammad Haque
AADHIKARonline Editor’s note s
Summarised version viewable by
visiting the AADHIKARonline news web site below
http://uk.geocities.com/aadhikarnews/today.html
ADHIKARonline 8th Edn 1250 Hrs GMT [UK Bank holiday] Monday 28.05.2007
POVERTY creation by public funding of degenerators in the East End of London!
Frank Failed again! A review of the latest promotion on the BBC of Frank Field, who confirmed, at last, that he has been a diehard Tory all along, one who actually never believed in the founding values of the former Labour Party and one who was always committed to keeping a divide between those who have and those who are prevented from having!
[Part 1038]
By© Muhammad Haque
1135 Hrs GMT London [Bank holiday]Monday 28 May 2007
In the early hours on Sunday [27 May 2007], the BBC TV [‘News24’] broadcast a bogus slot, fronted by the most outrageously disingenuous face to be found anywhere on any TV screens, Andrew Neil, entitled ‘Straight talk’. It could not be more bent!
The alleged interviewee was Frank Failed, oops! Frank Field.
As a poisonously self-seeking MP for Birkenhead, a UK Parliamentary constituency in what used to be the county of Merseyside until Margaret Thatcher did away with the ‘electoral identity’ in 1986, Failed has been incredibly assiduous in getting his face and his poison on the various ‘mainstream’ British media platforms and slots.
And since being given the sack as a warrior against the people - [Failed was ‘under’ the ‘command’ of the very idiotic and the very ignorant and the very dishonest Harriet Harman] - who are institutionally and systematically pushed into poverty in Blaired Britain, Frank Failed has made it his mission to ‘speak out’ against the victims and the sufferers of poverty.
He of course claims to be engaged in a campaign to ‘reform’ the warfare against the poor!
But then he would, wouldn’t he!
Failed does not have a credible programme against poverty generation. Even if he were to be taken at face value for one second to be a serious thinker on the state of poverty creation in the UK.
Failed is only ever so keen to keep poverty growing.
Deprivation growing. Discrimination growing. Denial growing.
So why does Failed keep being given the slots by the BBC which belongs or ought to belong to the people who pay the licence?
The plain answer is that Failed is actually a tool in the plausibility war of lies that the BBC carries out round the clock every day against the majority of people whose rights and whose voices are kept firmly denied in the UK.
The BBC has been paying huge sums from the licence payers’ ‘donations’ [!] to the immoral preachers of evil such as Andrew Neil precisely in order to suppress the truth.
There is nothing in the huge empire operated by the BBC that has any room for telling the truth on the causes of poverty in Britain.
But there are hundreds of hours given each week to the evil preachers epitomised by Andrew Neil.
It is the likes of the evil Neil who more than adequately justify the BBC being described as the Brothelliser corporation.
Quite literally so!
The contents of the past few years of output – or morally speaking, effluxions – on, say ‘THIS WEEK’, one of several slots given on BBC TV to be fronted [and its evident controlled] by Andrew Neil will show the maligning mannerisms and the contemptible vacuities and the interminable immoralities that Andrew Neil personifies and edifies!
So on the evidence of the BBC’s stuffing the slots with such maligning influences and ethical and moral malcontents, what possible ground could there be for anyone making any claim that the BBC stands for any morality, any ethics as those concepts are recognised and understood universally?
None, would be the truthful answer.
But truth scarcely gets a look in, when it comes to the setting of the agenda at the BBC.
The place is overrun with corruption.
And it is in the perpetuation of corruption that the answer to that question is to be looked for and found.
The BBC wants to perpetuate untruths. The untruths that make up the fantasy image of society as the world’s most civilised or whatever ....... that the BBC pumps into the slots in the physical bit carried by individuals above their shoulders which would in a free thinking equivalent to the 'British society' would be called peoples’ brains!
And as the assumption is that people are mostly without brains or at least without the necessary amounts and calibre of brains, they are unable to see through the ploys devised by the BBC daily.
What this creates is the degeneration of the mind. The degeneration of the minds of the majority. The degeneration of the society where the majority dominates in numbers!
[To be continued]
From the 5th edition, published earlier today ‘UK Bank holiday’ Monday 28 May 2007
The BBC is bragging to the world today [UK ‘bank holiday’ Monday 28 May 2007] about its allegedly exclusive interview with the G W Bush-backed 'World Bank’ president, the soon-to-retire Paul Wolfowitz.
View the Muhammad Haque commentary on the BBC’s complicity with lies and lying to the people by visiting the AADHIKARonline news web site below
http://uk.geocities.com/aadhikarnews/today.html
ADHIKARonline 2nd Edn 0805 Hrs GMT [UK Bank holiday] Monday 28.05.2007
Khoodeelaar! NO to Crossrail hole plot analysis on 'the transport crisis and priorities in London' is vindicated again!
This time, the Khoodeelaar! campaign against Crossrail hole plot lies has been vindicated by the Crossrail hole-plot-backing, Ken Lyingstill-promoting London Guardian newspaper group which is belatedly falling in line with all the independent commentators in warning Gordon Brown NOT to give too much importance to Crossrail in the Comprehensive Spending Review that Gordon Brown is finalising now for publication as currently scheduled to take place in a matter of weeks!
So, at last! The Ken Lyinsgtyill-backing Guardian too falls in line [a wee pun is intended!] because the force of the evidence against the CRASSNESS of the CrossRail hole plot is such that even the lying, Crossrail hole-plot-backing Guardian too must acknowledge it…
Disguised as a business section piece, the lying Guardian says that a London tube trains crisis is deserving of much more attention from Gordon Brown than he [Brown] is being pressed to pay to CrossRail Quoting Terry Morgan, chief executive of Tube line, the hitherto Crossrail-hole-plot-backer Guardian WARNS Gordon Brown NOT to over-prioritise Crossrail at the expense of the serious crisis that exists on thee London underground system! A point that Khoodeelaar! has been making as one of the central arguments against the CrossRail hole liars for more than 40 months now, but a point that the lying Guardian has persistently prejudicially refused to carry in any of its so-called reports promoting the CRASSrail hole plot. To view the item carried on the Guardian’s web site and by-lined to ‘Dan Milmo’ CLICK HERE. Khoodeelaar! campaign will continue to comment further on the Guardian’s confession that the craze for public cash for CRASSrail has been a most irresponsible and damaging one in the field of transport issues affecting and facing London…
[To be continued]
ADHIKARonline 9th Edn of the day 1800 Hrs GMT Sunday 27.05.2007
From the Khoodeelaar! action against Crossrail hole Bill archives of legal, constitutional, economic and ethical agreements against Crossrail hole Bill: A year and two ago this week, on Tuesday 9 may 2007, Khoodeelaar! told the Editor and the publisher of the LONDON EVENING STANDARD that it had lied for Crossrail hole plot on that date. On that date, the Standard published one of its interminably untruthful plugs in an 'editorial' comment. Khoodeelaar! also asked the then just newly appointed 'Transport Secretary' Douglas Alexander, to substantiate CrossRail by providing legal, constitutional and other evidence to justify it. Both those comments by Khoodeelaar! are republished here in light of the London EVENING STANDARD's de facto confession to having lied for Crossrail hole plot [To be continued]
Khoodeelaar! warns new Crossrail minister Douglas Alexander
© Muhammad Haque / CBRUK / KHOODEELAAR / LCAN 2006
Khoodeelaar! The Brick Lane London E1 area campaign against Crossrail hole Bill is already reissuing its legal claims against the New Crossrail hole Minister. This is due to the fact that it personally named Alistair Darling in its previous legal action claims papers and documents.
Today's [Tuesday 9 may 2006] London EVENING STANDARD comments at page 12 that Crossrail is the new Transport Secretary's challenge. It makes another touting, illogical and uneconomic plug for CrossRail and concludes by saying that Crossrail has become a test for Gordon Brown 'as a future Prime Minister' and it is a test for the new Transport Secretary.
What the EVENING STANDARD does not say is that it has acted as a touting outfit for the Big Business interests who want to pocket £Billions of public cash under cover of Crossrail. There is no economic case for the Crassrail plan as it is and the best thing that Alexander can do is to scrap it now. Not get mired in the CrossRail
Khoodeelaar! Today issued the first warning against CrossRail hole Bill Minister Douglas Alexander and told him that he must scrap the Bill and start again.
The Khoodeelaar! Letter to Douglas Alexander will be viewable on the khoodelaar.com web site at 13400 Hrs GMT Tuesday 9 May 2006
There is already a legal action process pending against the Department for Transport, London mayor Ken Livingstone and against the London borough of Tower Hamlets Council
Text of the first Khoodeelaar letter to new Transport Minister Douglas Alexander
9 May 2006
The first letter from Khoodeelaar! Organiser warns Douglas Alexander against following any pro Crossrail hole plans. It advises Alexander to scrap the CrossRail plans against the East End of London
The texts of the first Khoodeelaar! Letter sent to the UK Transport Minister is viewable on the web
http://uk.geocities.com/aadhikaronline/Notoxrailholeminister.html The web page containing texts of khoodeelaar letter to Doug Alexander http://uk.geocities.com/aadhikaronline/MuhammadHaque_Khoodeelaar_to_DAlexander9May2006.htm
Khoodeelaar! No to Crossrail hole OPEN LETTER to London EVENING STANDARD
© Muhammad Haque /Khoodeelaar/CBRUK/LAWMEDIA
To
The Editor and the Publisher of the Evening Standard
Associated newspapers
Northcliffe House
LONDON W8
Dear Evening Standard editor and the publisher
You have today [Tuesday 9 May 2006] printed as “Mr Alexander’s Crossrail challenge” the latest of a series of plugs for the CrossRail adventure
As has been the case with all your promotion pieces, there is no evidence.
There is no substance and there is most certainly no economic sense in your plug piece.
However, you have not been deterred by the paucity of evidence.
You are set on a course of pushing for Crassrail because you are after all an agency for the Big Business, City of London interests and assorted multinational Construction outfits and contactor companies and conglomerates which will be among the first to bray for contracts and they will be also the only ones who will bag the contracts.
If the CrossRail hole plot is given the UK parliament’s formal [whipped up by your ideological chum the Blairist regime] backing then your chums will benefit and profit.
And they will do the standard costs [budget] overruns and the costs to the public will reach even £30 billion.
That is what underlies your apparent passion.
You want loads of public dosh while at the same time deriding the man that in your
Your organ has been consistently promoting the CrossRail hole plan. And it was your publication that took public cash from the then promoters of the CrossRail plan when it carried a paid for advertisement on 30 June 2003.
That item was as false and untruthful as is your editorial comment today [9 May 2006].
We in the East End of London have protested to you throughout and you have suppressed all our objections to your lying and you have refused to print the truth about the real forces that have been pushing for this grotesquely flawed and oppressive line...
And for this reason we are filing a new complaint against you with the Press complaints commission.
As has been pointed out by our local [Bethnal Green and Bow] MP over the weekend, the PCC is a poodle in your Big Business game and is unlikely to uphold our complaint against your touting for CrossRail.
But we are a moral campaign and we shall establish the moral case that you have lied and have given expression to lies and you have chosen to deny the truth that we have sought ton tell in defence of the East End of London and of its people.
Yours faithfully
Muhammad Haque
Organiser
Khoodeelaar!
The Brick Lane, Whitechapel and Stepney London E1 area campaign against the Crossrail Hole scam, scheme, project Bill
And the campaign against a Crossrail hole station at Whitechapel
And against a CrossRail hole Tower Hamlets Council
1500 Hrs GMT 9 May 2006
Khoodeelaar No to Crossrail - Open Letter to London EVENING STANDARD
9 May 2007
View the letter on
http://uk.geocities.com/aadhikaronline/EveningStandard.html
Sunday 27 May 2007
Muhammad Haque exposing Crossrail hole-backers the London EVENING STANDARD [and one of that title’s most persistent colluders in the propaganda of lies for Big Business under covers of ‘ backing Crossrail hole plot for improving transport in London’ , the academic fraudster Tony Travers who has been given a platform at the hugely over-hyped London School of Economics and Political Science [the ‘LSE’] THIS edition of the Muhammad Haque commentary is part of the Khoodeelaar! evidence in the series of court actions that has been filed in a London court against the CROSSRAIL hole Bill plotters and promoters
[To be continued]
From the previous editions of AADHIKARonline as published on Sunday 27 May 2007
How dare the Crossrail hole-peddling, lying London EVENING STANDARD claim that Blair has fantasised over his over expenditure while standards and qualities of public sector services have declined, when the facts are that the lying EVENING STANDARD has been the main propaganda organ in all of the UK [in print] that has been criminally falsifying evidence almost on a daily basis to promote the deeply flawed Crassly conceived Crossrail hole scheme?
In recycling a piece [placed on the ‘thisislondon’ web site that carries some of the contents of the EVENING STANDARD authored by a member of the contributing team of the Mail on Sunday which is owned by the same Big Business company that owns the lying London EVENING Standard-less STANDARD], the still effectively monopoly ‘London evening newspaper is saying that the Blairing regime [this is an originally devised AADHIKARonline and Khoodeelaar! word, not one of the lying EVENING STANDARD’s, has so abused its access to the public purse in the UK and it has so abused that access that it [Blairing regime] has lost all contact with reality. As if this conclusion were not damning enough, the words and phrases used by the ‘Mail on Sunday’ ‘economics’ writer as recycled by the EVENING STANDARD on its internet outlet [26 May 2007] are more than overwhelmingly confirming of what the Khoodeelaar! Movement against Crossrail has said all along…and words and phrases which the lying EVENING STANDARD has racistly refused to publish about the Crossrail hole plot……
AADHIKARONLINE QUOTING THE CROSSRAIL HOLE-PLOT-BACKING, CRASSROLE-PLAYING LONDON EVEBNING STYANDARD IN FACT ADMITTING TO HAVING SUPPOPRTED CRSASRAIL LIES OF THE BLAIRNG REGIME [26 MAY 2007]
FANTASY ISLAND - BLAIR'S 'DEVASTATING' LEGACY
1. 26.05.07
In his powerful new book, Mail on Sunday economics editor Dan Atkinson offers a devastating new analysis of Blair's Britain - a hollow kingdom where we make nothing, but believe anything...
We all know what the Germans are good at. They do precision engineering: all those quietly humming washing machines and sleek cars.
We also know that Germany is a country in serious trouble, failing to embrace the need for flexibility in the tough new global environment.
We know this because Gordon Brown has told us many times over the past ten years that the European model is washed up.
Germany was so abysmally competitive last year that it ran a record trade surplus and was the biggest exporter of any country in the world.
We also know what the Japanese excel at.
In Tokyo and Nagoya there are world-beating electronics companies.
We know, too, that Japan, like Germany, is a country in serious trouble, persisting with an industrial model that may have worked in the Sixties and Seventies but is an anachronism in 2007.
Poor Japan ran a trade surplus of about £50 billion last year as it found a ready market in China for its exports.
And so it goes on.
The French have an ultra-competitive manufacturing base that specialises in food and drink; the Scandinavians are a dab-hand at mobile phones; the Americans do computers, aircraft and films. So what is Britain good at?
That's simple. We count the money and we do the bull****.
Ten years after Tony Blair's arrival in Downing Street, Britain is a place whose default mode for earning its crust is to employ the gift of the gab.
The Germans may have the engineers, the Japanese may know how to organise a production line, but the Brits have the barristers, the journalists, the management consultants and the men and women who think that making up jingles and slogans to flog Pot Noodles is a serious job. It has the deal-makers in the City who make fat fees by convincing investors to launch bids for companies, and the corporate spin-doctors who say that tycoon X will make a better fist at running Ripoff plc than tycoon Y.
It has the publishers and it has the film development' companies, some of which have actually been known to produce a film.
The four iconic jobs in today's Britain, according to the Work Foundation think-tank, are not scientists, engineers, teachers and nurses but hairdressers, celebrities, management consultants and managers.
In fact between 1992 and 1999, our fastest-growing occupation was hairdressing. Before he came into politics, Blair was a lawyer. Brown's sole experience of the private sector was as a TV journalist. Not that the other parties are much different - David Cameron prepared for the task of repositioning the Conservative Party by acting as PR for Carlton TV in the Nineties.
When you get down to it, this is a country that tries to make its living from talk, talk and more talk. But how has Britain fared when it comes to paying our way in the world?
Have the city traders and Groucho Club regulars earned enough to make the UK's age-old problems with the current account a thing of the past?
Sadly not.
Britain still has a world-class pharmaceutical industry and still makes a tidy sum from selling arms, often to unsavoury regimes.
Yet the deficit in visible trade in goods - stuff we make - was more than £60 billion in 2006.
Trade in services - accountancy, insurance, banking, architecture, advertising - brings that figure down but for the past decade, the only thing that has made the deficit manageable is that Britain has been earning more money on its investments abroad than foreign investors have made here.
One way of looking at Britain is as one big off-shore hedge fund churning speculators' money while asset-strippers draw up plans for the few remaining factories to be turned into industrial theme parks.
The truth is that after ten years, Blair's Britain is a fantasy island.
Mr Blair is currently obsessed with his legacy, but it makes most sense to think of him as a dreamer, a fantasist capable of getting millions of people to fantasise along with him. This is not simply a matter of the routine duplicity practised by politicians, but of living and believing a number of literally fantastical propositions.
Even in 1997 there was a strong dose of fantasy, with Mr Blair urging us to vote New Labour because (a) exciting, radical change would follow and (b) things would stay much as they had been. This should have been a warning sign but most voters ignored it.
Since then, New Labour's fantasising has become much more ambitious. As Mr Blair leaves office, it is possible to identify seven deadly daydreams that have marked his period in office.
2. DAYDREAM 1:
The first daydream is the debt fantasy, in which vast amounts of consumer and mortgage debt can now be racked up either because the borrowing is secured on a home that has inflated in value, or because credit-card debt can be painlessly reduced or written off entirely through Labour's quickie' bankruptcies.
And billions of pounds of Government borrowings can be kept off the books by claiming them as part of the private finance initiative - a sort of hugely expensive mortgage scheme for public assets.
Between January 2000 and December 2005, the total outstanding on mortgage debt rose by 94 per cent and that on consumer credit by 65.8 per cent. So what happened to earnings during that time? They rose by just 22.4 per cent. Perhaps it is not surprising that more and more people are declaring themselves insolvent to escape their debts.
In 2000, there were 21,550 individual bankruptcies in England and Wales, and 7,978 individual voluntary arrangements (IVAs), an alternative to bankruptcy in which some of the debt is written off. In 2006, there were 62,956 bankruptcies and 44,342 IVAs, increases of 192 per cent and 456 per cent respectively. More extraordinary is the fact that they have occurred during an economic boom rather than a grinding recession.
Scarcely less fantastical has been the Government's own attitude to debt. Gordon Brown pledged that the State's budget for day-to-day spending (as opposed to investment) would be either in balance or surplus "across the economic cycle".
Given the Chancellor himself decides when the cycle begins and ends, he has been able to move it around to make the books add up.
Initially, the cycle began in 1999 but then was moved back two years to allow Mr Brown to help himself in 2005 to long-spent money from the late Nineties.
When does the cycle end?
Take your pick - the Chancellor has said variously March 2006, March this year and in 2009. .
3. DAYDREAM 2:
The second fantasy concerns that sometime-never future, we will all work for the knowledge' economy, sometimes described by Ministers as the creative' economy. Here, the line is that India and China may bag all the routine production work but Britain will do the clever stuff, whether investment banking, advertising, the media, law, the arts or writing witty scripts for Channel 4.
Now, it is quite true that Blair's Britain has given great importance to these lines of work. Self-promotion is the stock-in-trade of the iconic figures in our post-industrial' economy, whether the management consultant or the talent-free television celebrity.
But there is no good reason to believe that creativity' is going to close our yawning balance-of-payments deficit with the rest of the world, which has gone from being roughly zero when New Labour came to power to £43.4 billion in 2006.
France, Germany and Japan make things that people wish to buy. We do not. It is as simple as that.
Despite the beaming encouragement of a guitar-strumming Mr Blair, our cultural exports are flailing in an ultra-competitive world.
In 2005, we imported more TV programmes than we exported, running a deficit of £332 million. And what of music, a major money-spinner since the days when The Beatles conquered America?
Well, the best seems to be behind us, with the U.S. market share of British acts tumbling from 32 per cent in 1986 to 0.2 per cent in the early part of this decade. The British band that attracted most attention in America last year was not Arctic Monkeys but The Who. At home, numbers employed in advertising and design have gone down. In fact, there are three times as many people working in domestic service than in advertising, television, films, video games, the music business and design put together. Remarkably, there are about four million people in service'.
Britain is not a creative economy, but a cooking, cleaning and call-centre economy in which millions are toiling away in low-paid, low-skilled jobs.
Even were the state of our education system not to make the emergence of a knowledge economy seem rather less likely than an ignorance economy, it is laughable (and derogatory) to imagine that people in developing countries somehow lack our creative spark.
It is almost the mirror image of the Victorian notion of Western practicality and Eastern mysticism.
.
4. DAYDREAM 3:
New Labour's third fantasy concerns prices and earnings. There is no doubt that, across the board, a number of previously costly items and services have fallen in price and are sometimes provided free.
This includes telephone services, clothing, home-entertainment equipment, airline travel and food.
But many of the price falls of recent years have not been quite what they seemed. In May 2004, economist David Hillier identified a new phenomenon - "stealth inflation" - in which the quality of goods declines along with the price.
Mr Hillier identified shirts, garden furniture, napkins, matches and bin liners as examples of products getting even-thinner and less durable.
He could also have cited towel rails apparently made out of silver paper, kettles and CD players that break down shortly after the guarantee expires, and dishwashers that are good at washing dishes provided the dishes have been cleaned first.
Furthermore, the next wave of price reductions may be rather less amenable for Middle Britain, focusing less on manufactured goods and more on services provided by middle-class professionals.
Law, accountancy and design could all be subjected to price-cutting, as in the proposal to let supermarkets offer legal advice.
Ministers have basked in the feelgood factor of lower prices without once bothering to explain that, ultimately, prices and earnings are likely to move up and down together. How could it be otherwise?
It cannot, of course, other than on that holiday haven of unreality, Fantasy Island.
5. DAYDREAM 4
A fourth New Labour delusion is that the public sector has been "reformed" and that colossal increases in expenditure have been prudently spent in carefully structured, "customer-focused" services committed to "delivery".
It is true that they have spent a fortune during their ten years in power, with public spending having increased from £309.1 billion in 1996-1997 to a forecast £586.6 billion in 2007-2008, a rise of more than 89 per cent.
Mr Blair had no doubt this money had been well spent, telling his farewell party conference: "Over the past ten years Britain has invested more in our public services than any comparable nation in the world."
The key word here is "invest", with its associations of rectitude. In this pipe dream, a near doubling in spending has been matched by a near doubling (at least) in "delivery".
This fantasy seems impervious to events in the real world, in which hospitals slide into debt and announce job cuts, in which illiteracy and innumeracy run rife in State schools and in which management consultants and firms involved in private-finance deals effectively help themselves to billions of pounds of public money.
6. DAYDREAM 5:
Work is the focus of the fifth fantasy, the hallucination that despite us living in a tough, competitive world, we can pass huge quantities of employment regulation to make employees' lives ever more agreeable and that it is perfectly safe to expand the workforce, through immigration and other measures, far beyond the economy's likely ability to create jobs.
On Fantasy Island, the labour market catchphrase is: "From next April..." Whenever you hear this, you know that what follows will be some new set of legal entitlements for the nation's employees.
All well and good, but the same Ministers repeatedly warn us that India, China and other emerging competitors mean we have to be ever more flexible and productive.
Of course, it could be that we are looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope and that it is not the muddle-headed policy of trying to combine employment rights with a flexible labour force that is supposed to build a strong labour market, but the strong labour market that allows Ministers to pursue the muddle-headed policy.
On the surface, the job scene is brighter than at any time since the mid-Seventies, with unemployment well below one million, down from 1.7 million in March 1997. But dig a little deeper and things look less cheery.
First, despite steady advances in healthcare, there are now about 2.5 million adults of working age too ill or disabled to hold down a job, four times the figure in 1979. Nor is this the only way of parking' people who may otherwise be counted as unemployed.
Numbers entering higher education have shot up, as has the State's own payroll - up by 600,000 people, or 13 per cent, on 1997.
Were this to be straightforward cynicism on the part of Ministers, it would be bad enough. But it seems they have fallen for their own propaganda and having caused one chunk of the workforce to disappear in a puff of smoke, have then conjured another into existence, encouraging migrants, mothers and older people into the labour market.
In their imaginings, they believe the British economy can bear any burden in terms of regulation and numbers of jobseekers and still produce millions of jobs.
Sad to say, this notion is indeed entirely imaginary.
7. DAYDREAM 6:
Fantasy six involves conjuring up a military role for Britain without paying for it, of trying to fight wars on a peacetime budget.
Mr Blair has wanted Britain to play the part of a latter-day Prussia with military resources more suited to a latter-day West Germany.
While our troops have been despatched to Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq, they have gone into battle on a shoestring.
In 2002-2003, total public spending at the Ministry of Defence was £35.4 billion. The planned total for the current year is £39 billion, a ten per cent rise.
Given the two per cent inflation target, the increase ought to have been at least 14 per cent. In stark contrast is the 54.8 per cent rise in spending on education in England over the same period.
Rather than spell out the costs of military grandeur in terms of either higher taxes or cuts in other types of public spending, Mr Blair has preferred big-power status on the cheap. With troops' lives at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan for want of proper equipment, this could be the most tragic of all the fantasies.
8. DAYDREAM 7:
Finally, there is the illusion that protecting the environment is entirely consistent with limitless economic growth, with concreting over South-East England and with cheap air tickets. New Labour tries to spin the environment, talking the green language of "tackling climate change" while clearing the decks for a huge expansion of house-building, airport and motorway construction and out-of-town supermarkets.
The environmental agenda, it seems, applies only to the little people - they face the new rubbish tax and are banned from replacing broken windows for energy-saving' reasons. Big business and industry are urged to make hay while the sun shines. New Labour's message is that there can be plenty of environmental gain for very little economic pain, a self-evident fantasy.
Indeed, behind each of the seven fantasies lurks the "Third Way" notion that those "tough choices" of which Mr Blair has spoken so often do not really have to be made - indeed, that they can be postponed indefinitely.
To be fair, millions of people have been quite happy to go along with this.
Furthermore, in the harder times that lie ahead, it will be tempting to look back fondly at the Blair years, a time of seemingly plentiful jobs and credit, of cheap flights to interesting places and new consumer gadgets such as wifi, iPods and flat-panel televisions.
The temptation ought to be resisted; the harder times will be the direct consequence of all the ducked decisions and economic daydreaming of the past ten years.
As his time in office draws to a close, Mr Blair is still, just, managing to stay one step ahead of a reality that is rapidly catching up with him and with all of us.
Deprived of the protective mantle of the top job, however, he can expect his reputation to take a dive, as did that of another apparent electoral genius, Harold Wilson, when he left office. Indeed, there are eerie echoes in the Blair years of Mr Wilson's Sixties heyday.
There is the Labour leader who has won elections because he was trusted by the middle class, there is the terrible quicksand of a foreign war led by the Americans, there is the Tory leader modelled on the Labour leader (Edward Heath then, David Cameron now), there is the enthusiasm for constitutional tinkering and the creation of vast bureaucracies, the alternation between panic and acquiescence at youthful intoxication (drugs then, binge-drinking now) and the mania for expanding airports and concreting over the countryside.
The dreamtime of the Sixties ended with the rude awakening of inflation, an energy crisis, terrorism and industrial strife.
All we can say about the nature of the alarm call in prospect today is that it will be a summons to restore two forgotten virtues: thrift and realism.
Thrift is not a synonym for penny-pinching or for genteel poverty or for miserly behaviour. It is a synonym for realistic living.
We have nothing to fear from either thrift or realism; it is when they are abandoned that we have to put our trust in conjurors, people who can persuade us, against all the evidence, that it will be all right on the night.
Striding along the beach on one of his summer holidays in Barbados over the years, Mr Blair has prompted headlines such as Blair's Bargain Break On Fantasy Island. The real fantasy island, however, is the country he has led for ten years.
• Fantasy Island, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Constable at £7.99. To order your copy at £7.99 with free p&p, call The Review Bookstore on 0870 165 0870.
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Take a good look around London and the rest of the country and open your eyes, there are no manufacturing outlets anywhere of any major significance. No electronics, engineering or other science based industries. We have plenty of clothes shops and malls to keep the peasants happy though. Oh yes and lots of booze. What an incredible legacy Blair and the other parties have left for us and our children to enjoy. But never mind we have all those super new fission reactors that are going to be built, now that the planning permission laws have suddenly been made easier. Notice, not very many are being built in Scotland and Wales though. Who would have thought that here I am actually living on fantasy Island it seems so surreal.
- Stephen D., London, England
As a formerly successful scientist (section head of a UK biotech startup sold for in excess of ýýý30 million a few years ago to a US company that shipped the tecnology and jobs to California), and with great expertise in nanotechnology (5 US patents underpining another $300m US industry when I worked in industry and an ivy-league university),
I can relate to "Britain not making anything". I have been unemployed for over a year, have had no interviews despite the applications, and there is no significant south-west regional science park incubator in which I could setup my own nanotechnology company. Government NESTA awards that formerly went to artists rather than scientists, now offers contacts with Venture capitalists instead like some TV show. The DTI is a joke, Canada has a nationional nanoscience initiative, as do many countries. We have indeed valued the many of the wrong things, seed-corn now seems to have no value. I have never held UK research money in my name after 25 years in science but have built new labs with hundreds of thousands of pounds on two other continents. If you are a young and become a scientist in the UK I wish you the very best of luck, as you'll need it.
AADHIKARONLINE UNQUOTING THE CROSSRAIL HOLE-PLOT-BACKING, CRASS ROLE-PLAYING LONDON EVEBNING STYANDARD IN FACT ADMITTING TO HAVING SUPPOPRTED CRSASRAIL LIES OF THE BLAIRNG REGIME [26 MAY 2007]
9.
[To be continued]
From AADHIKARonline editions as published on Saturday 26 May 2007
Khoodeelaar! legal action programme – The Muhammad Haque daily [constitutional law] commentary [Part 2 of the day, Saturday 26 May 2007]
What is the essence of a country’s constitution? IN one simple sentence - : so that those who seek and occupy positions of power do as they promise to do and are seen to be doing what they should do and can be held to account for what they fail or refuse to do.
This is also extrapolated to various lower reaches of the organisation called the state.
But the main test is by reference to the conduct of what is called the peoples’ parliament.
Parliament defined as the democratic expression of the peoples’ legitimate and honestly held expectations!
How wrong that institutionally established mental expectation – and state marketing device is - is seen whenever the peoples’ rights are subjected to violations by the occupants of the offices in the state!
The case is most comprehensively exhibited in the promotion through the UK parliament of the Crossrail Bill.
The legal action programme that I have devised for the Khoodeelaar! movement to expose and to stop that crassly conceived ‘CrossRail hole’ Bill, has been based on the examination of the evidence as contained in the literally millions of words of CrossRail hole-promoting lies that have been produced by its promoters, agents, touts over the past years.
Along side the community-based political and educational campaign to expose the CrossRail hole plot, Khoodeelaar! has been publishing the key points for the past 41 months that on the facts, make up the unconstitutionality, the illegality of the entire Crossrail hole scheme.
The fraudulence the immorality of the liars has been covered by the platforms that they have been allowed to use. Like their being MPs. Like their being councillors. Like their being ‘academics’.
Whatever happened to the ‘solemn petitioners’ from addresses as shown to be in the Brick Lane, Whitechapel and Stepney London E1 area during September 2005 to June 2006 before the ‘Crossrail Bill’ select committee of MPs? Are they taking any ‘legal’ action against the ‘recommendations’ of the Committee?
So far as is known, none of them is taking any legal actions in any UK court against the CrossRail hole Bill.
Why?
Because they are, all of them, ‘loyal subjects’ prepared to worship at the alter of the poodles that Big Business set up [in the UK House of Commons] as 'the Crossrail Bill select committee' by using its [Big Business] influence over the Blairing regime .
To those who ‘appeared before the MPs’ committee, the appearance was the EVENT!
They scarcely showed any ability to understand that the exercise was a charade, that no changes could be forced to be made to the Crossrail Bill by playing the role that the state has set for the ‘subject people’ to play on these occasions.
To anyone in command of their faculties in the ordinary world and presented with a claim by any of these petitioners that they [these petitioners] were taking part in some important act of political representation, the question must arise: what was the point of all those petitions if the petitioners do not wish to challenge the ‘recommendations’ [as published in July 2006] that are evidently against the claims and ‘preferences’ the petitioners concerned were making as they ‘presented’ their loyal petitions in June 2006?
None of the ‘formally listed’ petitioners has made any statement since June 2006. Not in any legally or constitutionally relevant or significant way.
Why not?
Because the petitioners were not, ever, really opposed to the attacks via Crossrail that were plotted against the community. The main importance that these petitioners attached in their exercise was not to the defence of the community so much as to the creation of a reference about themselves as persons who went and appeared before a committee of MPs!!!
And the MPs – the poodles who make up the CrossRail hole Bill select committee, more or less knew this.
That is why they treated most of the petitioners with the manifest contempt that they did do.
That the poodles ceased to be poodles and almost became intelligent for a few minutes was noticeable whenever any of the poodles became aware of the fact that they were being addressed by certain ‘subjects’ from addresses in London E1 area.
Whenever that occurred to the poodles, the poodles came to life and started shouting at the petitioners, or at those of the petitioners who showed any even the slightest temerity to suggest that the CRASSrail Bill had been flawed in any way.
[To be continued]
Khoodeelaar! legal action programme – The Muhammad Haque daily [constitutional law] commentary - Part 1
0840 Hrs GMT London Saturday 26 May 2007
As I have said before, the Khoodeelaar! movement against the Crossrail hole Bill attacks on the East End of London will test the relevance of the claim that ‘English law’ and or the ‘UK domestic law’ has all the remedies that a free and civilised society should afford its ‘citizens’.
The process of finding out just how true that assertion is has just begun. The most recently retired [but not intellectually inactive] ‘Lord Chief Justice’ of England is one of those who are on the record as having said this. That ‘English law’ without including the ECHR and its implications, has had in it the remedies and the protection for the ‘citizen’ that the ‘European law’ provides. The claim has been most elaborately made over the past few years in several opinions and judgements issued by the judicial form of the UK House of Lords [the UK’s Supreme Court or the nearest to a UK Supreme Court in comparison with the highest courts in any ‘sovereign’ country]. The ‘debate’ staged in the UK in the run up to the state’s formal incorporation of the so-called human rights conventions exposed the contradictions of the so-called British constitution. It also showed up as unsubstantiated the [‘judicial’ or, rather, the ‘judiciary’s’] assertion that the UK’s domestic legal system had sufficient protections for the ordinary ‘citizen’. What the incorporated law provides for is not only not the totally provisions that exist under the main ECHR and its world version as contained within the United Nations Organisation.
The UK’s legislation is, typically tokenistic and in the long run dishonest.
No wonder that some of the alleged backers of the statute['The Human Rights Act 1998'] are now among the fiercest of its critics, no! condemners!. One of those being the so-called Home Secretary John Reid.
How long it will take before the series of Khoodeelaar! legal actions is concluded is not possible to say at this stage. But it will take a significant length of time before any definitive statement can be made by way of the ‘final outcome’.
The ECHR is the main framework for the initial court application and attendant actions that Khoodeelaar! has now filed in the London High Court to stop the Crossrail hole Bill attacks on the community in the East End of London
Within that framework fall the UK’s domestic legislation, specially the Human Rights Act 1998.
Also included are the UK legislations listed below
The Freedom of Information Act
The Race Relations Act 1976
The Race Relations [Amendments] Act 2000
[To be continued]
Khoodeelaar! Action against Crossrail hole Bill –KHOODEELAAR! PHOTO NEWS
1. Street action in Brick Lane on Thursday 24 May 2007
2. Hanbury Street, the site of the threatened Crossrail hole, was the location of the latest Khoodeelaar! opposition to the plot. In this Khoodeelaar! picture, Hanbury Street business people joined local residents [Thursday 24 May 2007] in showing support to the Khoodeelaar! legal action programme to stop the Crossrail hole
3.
