BREXIT As A Fault Line In Parliamentary Democracy

"I know of no precedent for any ​​government enacting a policy that will make both our country and our people poorer"

 

"Brexit has been the most divisive issue of my lifetime.  It has divided not only the four nations of our UK, but regions within them.  It has divided political parties;  political colleagues;  families;  friends – and the young from the old. 

 

by Steve Bell for The Guardian

 

We have to heal those divisions.  They have been made worse by the character of the Brexit debate with its intolerance, its bullying, and its name-calling.  I welcome rigorous debate – but there must be respect for differing views that are honestly held. 

 

In this debate there are no 'remoaners', no 'mutineers', no 'enemies of the people' – just voices setting out what they believe is right for our country." 

from a speech given today by the former UK Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Major to the Creative Industries Federation

Welcome to the Age of Surveillance

This is face of the devil today

"They hate us because we are free, we are told. The fact that we've responded by giving up ever more freedom doesn't seem to matter" from 'After Paris, there will be no stopping the surveillance state now' by Neil Macdonald, Senior Correspondent CBC News. Macdonald makes the point that Europe, especially Britain and soon France, are essentially surveillance societies where, if you are in an urban area, your mug shot is captured dozens of times a day by your 'protectors'. 

Having spent my career working in complex and highly regulated advanced scientific businesses where I interacted with a plethora of well-educated bureaucrats and regulators, I can say without a blink that I don't trust governments with anything but the simplest and most obvious data on me and mine. 

To my younger brother, who once worked as chief scientist for the UK military and therefore was part of the hydra which we can think of for convenience as the 'Man', I am an innocent at best, and more probably a deludedly dangerous libertarian. He has told me more than once that I just have no concept about how many bad people there are out there who want to do us all harm. 

Before he got the job as Q's boss, I, as his closest living relative, was 'checked out' by our RCMP. Thus they have a file on me somewhere that I'll never see. Frankly I'd rather they hadn't, especially since compiling it would have involved checks with people with whom I have interacted. It isn't that unreasonable to assume that people in the surveillance business are not that different from the police in that, from experience, they generally assume the worst about the rest of us.

Jihadist psychopaths like the newly-killed Paris mass-murderer Abdelhamid Abaaoud (picture above), a man whose satanic world view is encapsulated in this comment he made about his practice of dragging murdered victims behind a vehicle - "Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God's path, we're towing apostates", want us to lose our freedoms. They want enemies like a Mongol warrior needed them under the great khans. Just like the khans, the more fear they can induce, the more pleasure and profit for them in manufacturing further terrors. Turning free societies into police states through terror is an old, old trick.

Why are we falling for it?

The Tartan Pandora Squirms Way Out of the Box:

Just in case anyone who has a British connection thinks that much was solved by the significant NO vote in last month's Scottish referendum, this blog post is a salutary read. As it's in English it is easier for us to see just how the independantistes over in Alba have now got a tiger firmly by the tail than it has been for their equivalents in Quebec, buried as their comments are in out-of-province newspapers largely in French.

The Modi Anglais in Britain are framed with the same general categories of sins that they are here in Canada. They become the "other" and are no-longer Chez Nous.  ROC (Rest of Canada ) equates to rUK. Moreover our blogger, a civil servant, is for declaring UDI (a Unilateral Declaration of Independence) if that is the only option. Last time the Commonwealth saw one of those was way back in 1965 when white Rhodesians objected to HM Government's plans to give what is now Zimbabwe its independence. A recipe for civil pandemonium of the worst kind. Ask the Irish who remember 1922/23 just how angry constitutionalists and revolutionaries can get with each other!

Snake Oil Sales in Scotland

Many of us in the 4.7 million Scots Diaspora in Canada are anxious at the real possibility of Alex Salmond (memorably characterised in a recent newspaper spread as the ‘ultimate snake-oil salesman’) persuading a majority of voting residents to throw off the UK and the nefarious ‘English’, and so consign our long and world-changing shared history to the dustbin.

As one whose heritage reflects both of the founding cultures of modern Scotland, the Gaelic on my Anderson/MacDonald/McKeddie side and the Lowland Scots/Northumbrian Anglian on my Watson-Weatherburn side, I find the “Kilticisation” and “Braveheartism” of the SNP campaign both deceptive and hypocritical. Unlike Ireland, Scotland was never oppressed by the ‘British’ after the Union of the Crowns and many of the regiments that fought for the Hanoverian dynasty during the Jacobite rebellions were Lowland Scottish or Highland clans. There can be little doubt that firstly Tony Blair, with his cynical belief that a Scots Parliament would support Labour, and then Cameron by allowing himself to be thoroughly outfoxed by Salmond, bear a great deal of blame for the coming debacle. Whichever way the vote goes, the hornet’s nest has been stirred up.