Deeds not words!
2009-01-16 by Kevvy K
Combi – It A Late
Hurrah for the Climate Suffragettes!
Last year, I came back quite bruised from the Climate Rush on Parliament – the 100 year anniversary of the suffragettes storming the House of Commons to demand the vote.
Last Monday, I went to another Climate Rush event – a very civilised picnic at Heathrow to protest against the Third runway expansion. It got good media, involved a very broad spectrum of society, even if it didn’t have the adrenal element of trying to storm Parliament.
Anyway, after Gordon Brown’s ridiculous decision to go ahead with the proposed runway, three autonomous suffragettes, wearing the distinctive red shashes went out and put bricks through the Department of Transport windows in the middle of last night. Amidst all the desparation of the stupidity of the 3rd runway decision, this sort of immediate response gives me enormous amounts of hope as to the massive campaign of direct action that is to follow.
You can check out the bricking take place here:
Dilated Choonz salutes you ladies!
For those who lack that sort of smashing windows in the middle of the night militancy, there’s also a great Greenpeace initiative going on. They have bought a piece of land in the middle of the proposed site, and they are going to divide it up into as small as possible pieces so that the government has to go through the whole Complusory Purchase Order business with as many people as possible. Check it out here if you want in on the action.
Oh yeah – and the tune. This was on my list of top 3 edits of 2008 that never actually materialized. Sorry.
This ones kind of hard to describe.. Don’t go expecting any disco action – it has a gothic, brooding quality with a very 80s guitar thing going on and very androgynous vocals. I couldn;t even really tell you why I like it so much, but I just do. The amazing thing about this is that it embodies one of the maxims of the edit – that is that you can indeed polish a turd. I don’t even want to tell you who did the original version as it would too heavily prejudice the casual listener.
Download MP3 (0:00min / 0MB)
Comments 
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Im guessing its a lil'bit of Cliff..
wicked remix.
A TALE OF TWO PHENOMENA: DEFLATION AND INFLATION
or
WHY GORDON BROWN'S ABSURDLY INFLATED PUBLIC SECTOR AND HEATHROW EXPANSION PLANS NEED TO BE DEFLATED AFTER THE FORTHCOMING GENERAL ELECTION – AND WHY THE PLACE TO START IS THE PAY OF MPs, WHICH SHOULD NOT BE A PENNY OR EURO-CENT HIGHER THAN THE AVERAGE NATIONAL SALARY – PARTICULARLY IF HYPER-INFLATION OR COLLAPSE OF THE POUND STERLING IS ON THE HORIZON
The tyrannical British regime has, as expected, green-lighted the expansion of Heathrow Airport. This provides yet more evidence that an unregulated, unchecked, unscrutinised, and uncontrolled executive composed of Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and their increasingly small retinue of cronies are making decisions based on the interests of a narrow and oligopolistic set of vested corporate interests. Once those decisions are made, a smokescreen of 'consultation' is enacted, none of which makes the blindest bit of difference to the decision. We have been treated in this manner since the inception of the failed New Labour project in 1997. The ballot box awaits along with vindication for all those who have been ignored, bullied, repressed, suppressed and depressed over that villainous time period.
The expansion of Heathrow airport is not needed either financially, economically or ecologically. It was a shambolic idea prior to the shorting of the circuit of illusory derivatives in August 2007. After that, it is as ludicrous, risible, absurd, and foolish as all of Shakespearean, Renaissance and Restoration comedy put together and multiplied by a quadrillion. The Parliament that convenes after the forthcoming General Election must debate the issue immediately and make a genuinely democratic decision that properly takes on board all of the vast multiplicity of voices opposed to it. Decisions on such matters must not be monopolised by the Brown fiefdom or oligopolised between the competing fiefdoms and confused double sovereignty of Brown and Mandelson. Both of those alignments will be surplus to requirements in our new Parliament. Our new Parliament must be a debating chamber that allows for the views of its representatives to be incorporated into decision-making, rather than a closed shop with a level of 'dialogue' that would leave nursery school children red with shame.
The central and dominant issue of our new Parliament will be retrenchment and cost-cutting. The careful, meticulous and forensic slashing of the incredible hyper-inflation in government debt will be at the heart of every single debate, with the central conflict being the battleground between equity and efficiency. The lives of each one of the representatives in that Parliament will have been made a quardillion times more pressurised and difficult than they should have been, given the appalling and absurd legacy bequeathed to it by the collapsing Parliament. The key question will be what how cuts should be prioritised. £75bn earmarked for Trident nuclear weapons renewal is clearly the first place to start. Turning swords into ploughshares can be very lucrative for our tiny little island in the Atlantic Ocean that needs to discard all imperial pretensions immediately and withdraw all our soldiers from their illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.. Beyond that, a thousand thousands savings can be made. They will be the hallmark of our new era.
An enormous generational conflict will need to be represented in Parliament. Graduates from school and university are discovering that they have been lied to – the employment they expected has disappeared along with the illusory derivatives that were virtualised mirror images of mirror images of mirror images rather than real manifestations of underlying wealth. The result will be mass unemployment. We appear to be merely in the early stages of that process, although the real unemployment level is several million higher than the risible figures propagandised by the regime and repeated ad nauseam in the corporatised media. This creates all sorts of troubling ramifications, particularly with the demographics of an ageing population and the ever rising costs of pensions. Such tensions need to be incorporated into democratic debate and real decision-making rather than being allowed to simmer and bubble up into ruinous social conflicts at ground level.
New Labour has been a confused and slapdash shambles of 'triangulation' and the 'Third Way'. This androgynous entity has attempted to fuse together the entrenchment of the ruinous Thatcherite market fundamentalist revolution (relentless privatisation, the deregulation and liberalisation of capital markets) with a clunky and clumsy semi-Stalinist command economy planned by a tiny coterie of cronies and lackeys in the Brown fiefdom in the Treasury. The result, predictably, has been the failure of both elements (particularly given the mutual antagonism and toddler tantrums between the Blair and Brown fiefdoms) and the creation of a regime that is now almost certain to collapse entirely under the weight of its own internal contradictions. That collapse will probably take many of our jobs and our currency with it. It has already wiped out our international reputation: Britain is now nothing but an international laughing-stock. The panjandrum of the Brown fiefdom claims to have the saved the world.. The world remains happily unsaved. At least, perhaps, those people on the planet who did not have to pay taxation into his Treasury were afforded the relief of some laughter at his expense. Being saddled with a fifth-rate impression of a Charlie Chaplin character has not, unfortunately, given those of us who have paid taxation anything to smile about.
For the rest of us, the picture in terms of employment is alarming, and will require genuine sustainable action from the likely coalition administration of fresh faces and fresh names that follows the forthcoming General Election. Currently, as noted in The Graduate Market of 2009, ten sectors out of fourteen have witnessed contraction in graduate employment over the past year, with investment banking leading the way (with a 38.3% fall). The only two sectors to show any meaningful increase in employment have been the public sector (up a vast 51.4%) and the armed forces (up 17.4%). Such increases represent the last resort splurge of the credit binge of the Gordon Brown fiefdom. As with desperate and short-termist measures from VAT cuts to the 'loan guarantee scheme', such binge spending is as economically unsustainable as airport expansion is environmentally unsustainable. It joins PFI (private finance initiative) schemes as well as the 'nationalisation' of banks and building societies in deferring yet more debt to future generations. The regime's policy-making has placed the short-term at the mercy of the long-term in an ever more rapid carousel reminiscent of adolescents fooling around on the social networking site Twitter. We will have to pay for their largesse for many many decades to come.
Cuts in the public sector will be politically contentious and will form some of the most lively, vibrant and visceral debates ahead of us. As well as finding savings in the elimination of such palpable nonsense as Trident or unnecessary aircraft carriers, we must also scrutinise such manifestations of the hyper-inflationary largesse of the Brown and Blair courts as the absurdly inflated salaries of a self-congratulatory, complacent and overwhelmingly inept 'super-class' of 'senior management' within the public sector. There will need to be mass sackings and the replacement of that non-elite with more humble people willing to work for more humble salaries. The ideal will be the promotion of those who are genuinely capable and effective from within organisations to replace the non-elite who have been allowed to bully them for a considerable period of time.
The forthcoming General Election must, however, set the tone from its beginning. Any candidate who demands a penny (or Euro-cent, or luncheon voucher) more than the average national salary if elected should be roundly rejected at the ballot box. That will quickly help to filter out the genuine public servants from the fools, snake-oil salesmen, egotists, and false messiahs who have clogged up the arteries of the 'Houses of Parliament'. Our new Parliament is likely to be barebones. Cuts must be made left, right and centre. Salaries should also be index-linked to the average national salary so that if it goes down, elected representatives experience the deflation in tandem with the electorate. It is remarkable how rapidly a deflation in salary can cut down hyperbole and hubris out of the mouths of inflated 'politicians' and bureaucrats.
The era of the John Lewis list and of Derek Conway-style nepotism is well and truly dead. Salary deflation for elected representatives is a sine qua non of election and representation. This is particularly the case if the shambolic decisions of the unscrutinised, uncontested, unchallenged, unaccountable and unspeakable regime feed through after an unspecified time-lag into Zimbabwe-style hyper-inflation or the death of the pound sterling.
Its actually arguably worse than Cliff, Luke!
c'mon… original is not that bad :)
> suffragettes [...] put bricks through the Department of Transport windows
Not to put their brave efforts down or anything, but having just watched the video I can't help thinking you've overstated the case a bit – "bounced bricks off" might be more descriptive than "put bricks through".
:o)