The Enemy Within

Some of the things happening in the UK presently beggar belief. I shall give you a couple of examples to think about.

First in the theatre of shame is the claim by British Members of Parliament to increase their base salaries from £62,000 ($120,000) per year to more than £100,000 (approximately $200,000). This doesn’t include the various allowances and expenses for each MP that adds up to an average of a further £135,850 ($270,000). Who gets to decide these increases? The MP’s do.

The single biggest pig at this trough is the Speaker of the House of Commons, whose name is Michael Martin. The Speaker is the guy who acts impartially to organize the running of the Mother of Parliaments, the House of Commons. This gentleman seemingly has a pension pot of £1.4 million (approximately $2.8 million) a salary of £138,724 plus expenses last year of £82,106. This package all ignores the fact that this puffed up, self-important windbag is hopeless, totally rubbish at his job.

If there were not enough reasons why this type of behavior is wrong, try putting it into the context of the present credit crunch where Joe Average is really beginning to suffer economic distress. I offer this little bit of advice to our elected representatives, we are watching you, and unless you show some self restraint when this is voted on people like me will be recording how you vote and passing this information on to your electors when the next election takes place within the next two years.

At the same time as the price of gasoline for us has gone over £5 per gallon our Government has promised us a more than 10 pence rise per gallon by way of additional tax. Don’t forget that something like three quarters of the price of gas per gallon in the UK is already tax and you begin to see why the truckers started blocking some arterial roads in London and Cardiff yesterday by way of a warning shot across the bows. How could our Government be so dumb? One of the increasingly common phrases you hear about our Prime Minister is, he knows the value of a barrel of oil but not for a gallon of petrol. This guy is totally absorbed by the strategic and macro that he has totally lost sight of the tactical and the micro.

Another paradox in the UK is that our leaders tell us that the crime statistics are reducing. We are constantly told they have been successful in their battle against crime. I have to report that I’m not alone in simply not believing their self-serving propaganda. The other part of this paradox is that we now have more people in prison than ever before, the number topped 83,000 yesterday, which is also the highest number as a proportion of our population for any country outside dictatorships and, strangely, the USA.

Jail guards were quoted as saying that the police are now intentionally going as slowly as possible with processing convicted criminals since there are simply no spaces left in jail. It goes further, with some convicts already in jail, being released after serving only half of their sentence, rather than the usual two thirds. The remainder of the sentence the convict is “under supervision”. How about the idea of building more jails quickly or, alternatively, stop equating crimes against people with crimes against institutions? We have a long British history of jailing people for money crimes more harshly than we do for crimes against other individuals.

I agree with the Bishop of Rochester, the Pakistani born Doctor Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali who was quoted as saying that the country was mired in a doctrine of “endless self indulgence” and blames the politicians and their failed experiments of multi culturalism and in turn quotes others who cite “the loss of faith and piety among women” for the steep decline in Christian worship. This has led, in the Bishop’s opinion, to a breakdown in our society’s set of core values with inevitably awful consequences. He also faces up to the inherent conflicts with some brands of Islam that shows no respect for Western values. There is no accident that it took a Churchman born in a Muslim country to state the obvious. Our society has many enemies, but the worst enemy of all is to be found within us.