Saturday, February 21, 2009

DangersAhead

This week it was revealed that the UK had a debt mountain of £2 trillion, that’s approximately $3 trillion. This is such a huge debt that it is almost unimaginable and unmanageable especially in a country that has a population of a little over 60 million.

Those of us interested in such things also discovered that there have been laws, rules and regulations passed quietly, and without a fuss that enable our central banks to bail out our financial institutions when they deem it necessary, and to keep such an action secret.

There is also further legislation in place allowing yet more breaches of our civil liberties and this has grown with every passing year of our battle against terrorism. Except the laws enacted are not really about that legitimate battle at all, but are much more about controlling us, the British population.

The British, those most relaxed and civilized of people, are just beginning to show a growing antipathy to the countries huge immigrant population as they lose their jobs, homes and prosperity. This catalogue of failures is fanning the flames of hate and envy and that is dangerous since it allows credibility to both the loony left and the far right of our political spectrum.

Observing this sad catalogue in the United States you might well tut and believe this has little or nothing to do with you, other than for your country’s historical links to this, your ultimate mother country. The truth is that it has everything to do with you, because if the battle for liberty is lost here it will inevitably follow all over Europe and the Western World, yes, even in the West’s bastion of democracy, America.

The reasons for this are many but mainly centre on the fact that America faces many of the same economic traumas internally and political battles externally. If these warped experiments in big brother control works in Britain you can bet they will be tried there.

That’s the difference between this Great Depression and the last one in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. First of all, no one in power wanted to admit that we are in recession and the fact is that it is going deeper and further than that. The other huge problem this time around is that this economic collapse is truly global; there is nowhere that is going to prosper in isolation. The best you can hope for is that you will not suffer too badly.

The way to achieve this measure of damage limitation surely starts with our all realizing that this situation must not become the excuse to introduce any forms of isolationism, or protectionism. This would certainly lead to even deeper problems, as countries would seek equally destructive defensive measures.

Perhaps even more vital than this will be winning the fight to protect our liberty and laws so that we don’t sink further into the hands of the very people manning our governments and bureaucracies who put us into this mess in the first place.