Longrider

As I write this, Longrider Towers is awash with boxes, full of possessions gathered over the past two decades. Slowly, the house is becoming depersonalised in preparation for the new occupant. On Thursday evening we will drive to Portsmouth to catch the evening ferry and make our home across the channel.

This is the culmination of an idea that germinated when travelling through the Larzac in the summer of 1990. An idea that grew into buying a house and spending every available holiday for the past five years working to make it a home. There was a point a couple of years back, one starlit night in the quiet moments as one year died and a new one started, when I made the mental adjustment and there was more home than here. Now, looking at the home we’ve known for twenty-one years, I am ready to go.

When we first thought about living in France, our motivation was the countryside, the climate, the pace of life and the French way of doing things. A love/hate relationship with France became more love than hate. In the meantime, my love for my homeland has descended into contempt. Contempt for a population that is so passive that it fails to hold its political class to account. The French will bring the country to a grinding halt if their politicians upset them. They are not always right, but their willingness to say “non!” has my admiration just as the willingness of the British to accept the erosion of our civil liberties with a shrug earns my utmost derision. I have watched in despair as the righteous have eaten away like a cancer at the things that made this nation so great, that made Britain a wonderful place to live. No longer are we free to speak our minds for fear of the industry so willing and ready to take offence, of the righteous who decide what is “acceptable” or not. Thought crime is becoming a reality in 21^st Century Britain.

We live in a country that has reversed the presumption of innocence, that undermines the very principle of justice, where mere suspicion is sufficient justification for the state to seize assets, where law is made on the basis of prejudice and puritan morality rather than reason, evidence or justice, where the citizen is being criminalised and treated as a suspect, where the police are becoming politicised and no longer adopt the Peelian principles, where politicians believe they, not the electorate, are the masters; politicans who treat the electorate with open contempt.

This is a land where youngsters leaving education have A* exam grades yet are barely able to string a sentence together, and mathematical illiterates such as I have to explain to them how to work out percentages. Where our history is being lost or rewritten, a nation that is being taught to be ashamed of its past rather than proud of its heritage.

France is not a common law country, but the French are not followed wherever they go by surveillance cameras, they are not subject to constant demands by the state to poke about in their business. If the state did, they would call a general strike and mean it. The French, when faced with law they do not like, will either get it changed or ignore it. Their national belligerence is something we have forgotten to our cost. I can travel almost all the way to Montpellier and come across only one set of traffic lights and they are switched off. The only speed camera is well signposted and if I take the back road I won’t see one at all. The standard of driving is better, more disciplined and courteous. Oh, and I can sit in my back garden in the summer, in the shade beneath my walnut tree and the loudest thing I will hear is next door’s chickens.

Yes, I’m going for the quality of life. I always was. It’s just a shame, though, that my own country has changed such that I want to leave it behind.

All that said, I’ll be back in December to work…

Occasionally there is good news to be had. It appears that our courts at least have some grit:

The German Government has backed down from its fight to extradite the Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben from Britain, it emerged today.

The controversial historian was arrested at Heathrow Airport last month on a European arrest warrant accusing him of racism and anti-Semitism. German prosecutors were forced to appeal to the High Court after Britain refused to hand him over.

Well done to the high court. It is a shame that it is the courts and not parliament that resists this pernicious EU policy. When I first read 1984 as a teenager, I believed that thought-crime was confined to the totalitarian regimes of the eastern bloc. Never, I thought, could such an evil occur in a liberal country such as Britain.

How wrong I was.

The prison service and the police take a firm stance on this – not surprisingly, given the potentially disastrous consequences should consumers of their services learn of officers holding racist views.

Beyond irony indeed. It would seem that to the liberal left (an oxymoron, surely) freedom of speech and now, freedom of thought, applies only to those who agree with their particular set of “acceptable” prejudices.

It’s worth bearing in mind the comments made when the bill for the extradition treaty and European arrest warrant was before the Lords:

“But when the draft extradition act passed through the House of Lords in 2002, one of the questions was what would happen if someone was arrested on a European arrest warrant to be extradited to a country where Holocaust denial is an offence.”

“The response was, ‘No, that will never happen.’”

No, of course not.

Thank goodness for our courts.

Minnette Marrin in the Sunday Times reflects on Gordon Brown’s failings (and there are plenty to choose from):

History, if it has any sense, will come to judge Gordon Brown with deep moral disapproval. Somehow the man has managed to blind most of us to his obvious faults, but I will take only one – his obstinacy in clinging, with all the force of his moral authority, such as it is, to morally dubious policies, against all advice and in defiance of the evidence.

I’d have thought his obvious faults were… well… obvious. A brooding, sullen man who lurked in the background sulking for a decade because he wasn’t the party leader and when he was, promptly proved that he is an utter, utter incompetent. Not that the level of his incompetence was necessarily obvious and nor for that matter were his authoritarian instincts. There was a brief period when I hoped that he might, just might, reject some of Blair’s illiberal agenda. It was a brief spark of hope rapidly extinguished.

Still, Marrin considers his attitude to presumed consent, a policy that I find deeply repugnant. Not because I have any particular issue about my body once it is dead, but for all the reasons that Marrin mentions:

However, the real objection to the scheme is more serious than the practical one. It is an objection in principle and it would apply even if a system of assumed consent might save more patients. The idea lets in an evil and dangerous political principle – the assumption that the state owns our bodies. Brown and Labour governments before him have tried to nationalise our private lives; now he wants to nationalise our private parts.

Yes, absolutely. When I’ve discussed this issue before, there have been those who tried to argue that we do not own our bodies and that there is the greater good to consider. Sorry, but that’s piffle. If we do not own our own bodies, who does? Certainly I expect absolute autonomy over my body. It does not belong to the state and I will never consent to the state assuming ownership to dispose of as it pleases. The state has taken enough from me in life, I will decide – and I alone – what is to happen to my body on death.

The thinking behind this is pure socialism. You and all your assets belong to the state to tax, teach, reeducate, redistribute and, generally speaking, harvest as it sees fit. It is an attitude that was tested to destruction in the bitter miseries of the 20th century but, like Dracula, it is mysteriously undead.

Indeed. There was a time when I was a socialist, believed in the ideals, in things like redistribution and social justice and equality. I don’t any more. I grew up. I saw the world as it is. I watched the evidence of socialism in action and was appalled. Socialism does not work and can never work. It is a morally bankrupt ideology. I can understand why the young are attracted to it, but life experience (and a little reading of history) should cure them.

And, as Minnette Marrin points out, it is not the lack of donors that is at the heart of this issue, it is the inability of the NHS to cope with the demand for the surgery. The NHS, a beacon of socialist ideology, is crumbling before us, as is our state education system.

Frankly, everything the state touches is tarnished by that touch. The less we allow politicians and their servants to poke about in the better all our lives would be. And, no, never will I have my consent presumed by anyone. You want something, you ask politely and I’ll think about it.

Kerry McCarthy is a nasty little fascist. If there is one thing that the 1984 campaign has succeeded in, it is that it has displayed the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of our elected representatives. It doesn’t matter that their closed minds have not been changed on jot – people can see for themselves just how wicked they are by their own words.

Far from engaging with the views of those they are supposed to represent, they change the subject or simply vilify those who dare to disagree with them. McCarthy turns the issue of civil liberties into a nonsensical rant about prostitution in East Bristol. She does, though, deserve “quote of the month” for this little gem:

I don’t think ‘freedom’ is sacrosanct if by that you mean the freedom to oppress, exploit, abuse, harm others.

Perhaps there should be a new campaign, to send these nasty authoritarians copies of J S Mill or J Locke – because no one is making an argument for freedom to abuse others and only a cretin would think that they are. A cretin or a charlatan. Take your pick, McCarthy is one or the other (possibly both). Her response was, in essence, the same as that of Tom Harris. They cannot win the argument face-to-face because they have raided our civil liberties, they have put into place the building blocks of a totalitarian regime and they cannot provide an adequate justification for doing so. Therefore, they take their ball and flounce from the field in a huff. 1984 campaign, job done, I think.

And, on the matter of our pernicious government, words failed me when I read (via Tim) about Jack Straw’s latest wheeze* to deprive British citizens of their liberty.

The wives of men facing criminal charges will have their wages docked by the Government to pay for their  defence.

And they could even be forced to remortgage the family home to settle the bill for legal fees.

The presumption of innocence means nothing to these people. One of the fundamental human rights is the right to a fair trial – this proposal undermines that principle. I find it difficult to express just how incredibly angry it makes me. Justice is one of the few things that the state should be providing from the tax pot. An innocent man defending himself against an unjust charge should not have to worry about being able to afford it should things go badly and the jury convict.

There was a time when I struggled to convince myself that these people were well meaning but incompetent. In the intervening years, I have gone from party activist, campaigning for Roger Berry, to hating everything that they represent. I will never vote for any of them ever again – and I am far from alone. Kerry McCarthy, Tom Harris and Jack Straw neatly sum up all that is rotten in the state of Denmark. There is nothing well meaning about this proposal, nor does it smack of casual incompetence. This is very deliberate. This is an intentional raid on our civil liberties. This is designed to reverse the relationship betwixt citizen and state with the state’s boot firmly on the citizen’s throat. This is pure, unadulterated evil.

And that stupid cow, Hazel Bears, wonders why we are so negative?

* Yes, I know it’s the Daily Mail, but the essense of the story; that we should be forced to fund our defence, is reported elsewhere. I’m earning close to £40k these days and I don’t consider myself wealthy by any means.