A short history of the bank crisis
The Losers
A Contrasting Story
Supporting the banks
Financial Services
Deprivation and dissolution
A sustainable low income structure
Bank regulation
Our way of life in crisis
Our productive capacity in crisis
Innocent until proven guilty
Welfare State
Maternity Pay
No win no fee law
Employment law
VAT
Bureaucracy
Performance Targets
Political Correctness
A concerted attack upon the private individual
Human rights, the basis of civilisation
Wealth Production
Wealth Dissipation
A short history of the bank crisis
The news has been all about the banks for months now. This is by far the worst financial crisis since 1930 and probably a good deal worse than that one. The earlier crisis was created by a relatively small number of speculators, mainly in America, who leveraged up the Stock Market on cheaply borrowed money. Many of them got burned and caused industrial, and social, misery for years afterwards.
The present one has many similarities but has a slightly different focus. One of the enabling factors has been ten years of low interest rates. Cheap money naturally encourages people to make more risky investments. In this instance the target has been mainly property, but the boom has been compounded by clearly fraudulent manipulation of the funds of banks to make highly speculative loans. These loans were then repackaged to make them virtually invisible to the rest of the financial world. If anyone did this in any other walk of life they would finish up in jail for a very long time.
Some of the people who have done this have benefited to the tune of billions of dollars, and other currencies, and many more billions have simply gone missing. The mess has virtually destroyed confidence in the financial system, and without confidence it cannot function. Trust always has been, and will always continue to be, the base value of the financial system. The trust of the majority of punters is now missing. The American and British governments have pledged many billions of taxpayers’ money to rescue many banks. They have also asked the rest of the world to support them. They know perfectly well that without that support they will bankrupt their own nations.
This debacle has been staved off temporarily by taxpayers’ money. But the real supporters are the savers, those who have provided the funds that have been ravaged to fund highly speculative investments, pay huge bonuses and leave huge gaps for plainly criminal activities, Those who have worked for years and saved and put their money in what they thought was a safe home, a mortgage company or local bank, have seen their savings compromised. They have had, as taxpayers, to guarantee their own money as savers. Nice one. Now their savings are attracting derisory interest returns several points below inflation. These people are the hard-working, hard saving, principled middle classes and they have been well and truly stuffed. Those who have never bothered to save have lost nothing. The rich are still stuffing huge returns in their pockets.
The politicians supported the financiers to beguile us to agree to the deregulation of the banking and savings and loan industries on the basis that we would all benefit. I received a few shares just because I had saved money in a Building Society (savings & loan) over many years. Three years ago those shares were worth around £12,000. Now they are worth £1500. A scam or what? That is the reward I get for supporting this organisation for around fifty years. Thanks to the endless scams I cannot even identify the original organisation into which I placed my savings. I think it was the Leeds Building Society but I am not at all certain. I offer this only to show how convoluted have been the machinations of the financial sector – and for what? To provide huge bonuses for a few manipulators – that is what. The rest of us have been conned and stuffed.
Those who saved even more probably deposited their savings in the Stock Market to try to beat the inflation index. Ha! Those of us who saved for many years for a pension had no option but to invest in the stock market – the Pension Rules essentially demand it. While this crisis has little to do with the underlying prospects of the manufacturing sector, it has brought the whole market down. Those of us who form the backbone of the nation have taken a triple whammy. We have had to mortgage our future to the banks, we have had to take nearly zero income on our savings and we have seen our investments reduced to rubble. And there are many who will now have negative equity in their homes.
And as of February 2009 the bankers, supported by our taxpayers, money, are still telling us what good guys they are and are proposing to pay themselves over a billion of our money in more bonuses. One has to gasp at the sheer bloody cheek of people who have failed so badly that they have virtually destroyed a huge part of the world’s financial system, they have gone cap in hand to the taxpayers to demand support – and now they are still up to their old tricks. This is obscene.
What these banking speculators have actually done is to strip the accumulated savings of millions of investors which once provided a nice security blanket and depository for use in poor times. The fat has been stripped out of our savings. We have been encouraged to take on ridiculous levels of debt so that we are in fact bankrupt. China has lent us the money to buy its products and now they are calling in the loans. The fat has been stripped out of our companies by just-in-time and lean manufacturing and bottom line accounting so that when hard times come there is nothing to fall back on. We are living on the edge every day and teetering on the brink. When a shock comes, we fall over. There are no reserves to fall back on. We have sold the family silver and called it profit and gave massive bonuses to a few people for organising this huge scam. It should not go without note that one of the trade names for exit terms in employment contracts in the financial services industry is “Golden parachute”. Fuck you, Jack. I’m all right.
For comparison, consider this. I shall tell a very short history of my life. I believe it to be very similar to that of millions of other middle class people who are being victimised by what is rapidly becoming open class warfare. It should not go without notice that middle class pensioners, like me, now form the single biggest voting block in this nation.
I trained as a Chartered engineer and spent ten years fighting the Cold War from the comfort of laboratories and workshops. I never had to fire a shot but believe I helped bankrupt the Soviet Union. I worked in America at that time and we outran them industrially. I returned to this country and ran my own company for thirty years. During that time, in 2009 values, I turned over around £40,000,000, paid around £24,000,000 in wages and costs and submitted around £9,000,000 to the chancellor in PAYE and NIC and, perhaps, £1,000,000 in VAT. I personally earned in those thirty years about £750,000, at 2009 values, I consider that a superb achievement for a kid who started life in a two-up-two-down terraced house during world war two. I once received £100 in the will of an aunt and my dad gave me £25 on my wedding day. Otherwise I have earned every penny I own and have worked extremely hard for it.
My business thrived despite being sited in a city that started losing its auto industry three years after I started manufacturing. Eventually, after 25 years toil, I had a very nice contract making parts for Rolls Royce. They asked me to retool to increase production and I spent £350,000. That was a very large investment for a small company. I needed three years to repay the loans. One year later BMW bought Rolls Royce and three months later I no longer had a contract. Production was taken to Eastern Europe. One year after that I was bankrupt. That was the reward I got for my superb achievements. The maximum salary I ever took was, in 2009 values, £45,000 and I finished with a pension of around £150,000 that the stock market and fees have now reduced to £100,000. That provides a very meager pension indeed.
I object very strongly to having, as a taxpayer, saver, and shareholder, to support bankers who have failed abjectly while the managers stuffed their own pockets with bonuses that are much over the top even in good times. In these conditions they are an obscenity. They have not just destroyed the banks but the whole economic system. A substantial number of them should be fired, not rewarded. Some of them are bordering on criminals. The politicians are still saying “But we need them”. We do not. They have failed. They are no good at their job. They deserve to be fired. Do you understand English? Do I make myself clear?
One cannot lay all the blame on the bankers. They have simply behaved as any person would when given a licence by the government to print money – and then have all restrictions removed by “deregulation”. The banks cannot operate without a government granted licence. The people, though the government, determine the terms under which banks may operate. The bankers have colluded with the politicians over the last twenty years to take away all the safeguards within those licences. The people went along with this only because they thought they would also benefit - but their returns were minimal and their exposure extreme. They were conned. The politicians must bear the prime guilt. They took a system that had worked well for a couple of centuries and changed it too fast. The removal of restraints let in greed, avarice and criminals.
The correct function of financial services is to fund manufacturing and all the other functions necessary to a civilisation. We have come to regard Financial Services as a creator of wealth in its own right. This is utterly wrong. Financial services have never created one penny. What they do is stir the pot and oil the machinery. They create nothing. Farming, mining and manufacturing create wealth and financial services should support them. We have assiduously destroyed our industry over the last 40 years by believing the muck spreading of the financiers that various other countries could do it better.
The inmates have taken over the asylum and supported foreign companies to undercut our own companies and put them out of business. You will no doubt claim this is good capitalist competition. But it is not because ordinary people cannot compete. Vast amounts of our wealth and creativity has been pumped into supporting manufacturing in China and other far places. It is not an accident that China has become the world’s biggest creditor nation coincident with it becoming the biggest manufacturing nation. The idea was that we would export our technology and reap the rewards of cheap labour. The fact that this was obviously a short term strategy was ignored. It is inevitable that those people doing the job, whatever that may be, will soon learn to do it better than those of us who are not doing it and we will soon have nothing to sell to them. They will then be the masters and we shall have to work for them. It will not be long before we have to send our children to China to get a good technological education. I have been saying this for over twenty years but no one has listened. We have eaten our seed corn.
One of the unfortunate side effects of this has been to disenfranchise a large section of the population. I have little use for the shiftless but the problem goes much deeper than this. To illustrate what I mean I will tell you another little story. When I was forcible retired I did voluntary work in the local community, and indeed, took some early modules of a degree course. There was, where I lived, a nearby Council Estate that had been built in the 1960’s. It was close to the city centre, reasonably well built and superbly landscaped. There were, within fifteen minutes walk around 20,000 highly paid industrial jobs, some of the best in Britain. The estate had a five year waiting list and virtually every adult there worked in local industry. It was quite a nice place to live.
Then the car industry died and the telephone industry died and the spinning industry died and the machine tool industry died and the aerospace industry left. This started in earnest around 1980 and within ten years virtually nobody on the estate had a job in industry. Those who had good jobs had moved on to other pastures to both live and work. Those who were left were pensioners, single mothers and unemployed. By the end of the century, when I participated in its community affairs, work was a virtually unknown word, let alone reality. There were by that time three generations that had never worked and had not the faintest idea what work meant or how to find it. Mothering children was a cottage industry and mail drops were legion. The education system was neither interested nor capable of teaching them or their children the advantages of a life of work and propriety. Every second of their existence and every fibre of their being was inundated with litter, bad behaviour, shiftlessness, the dole and the lowest common denominator in everything. They had no other roles models. A very few managed to drag themselves through this system to thrive but the majority succumbed. Then there were always the drugs. The estate became a nationally known centre for drug trading. The police would bust one group and another would arrive within hours.
A sustainable low income structure
The support culture inherent in all current government initiatives simply supports and prolongs the unfortunate lifestyle. Before the estate had been built the area was a run down Victorian industrial suburb. It certainly was not a superb place to live but it had many dozens of back street workshops that provided a basic living for those whose circumstances and ability did not allow them a better one. Any teenager could find a job in a shop or small factory and eventually rise to a useful position. By such means was our industrial strength built in its early days. I am not advocating a return to these Victorian conditions, but it has been apparent to me that the nurturing of small enterprises suitable for employing those not of great academic ability has been decidedly absent for the last fifty years. It is fine to encourage as many people as possible to get a good education but not all can or will. What do you do with them? Abandon them? Normally we now put them on the dole – which is even worse.
My own company trained a quantity of apprentices well above its due quota and my building has incubated around ten small companies in my lifetime. But that all now seems impossible. The nanny state has decided it is much better to keep these relatively low competence people on Social Security rather than encourage them to work. This, I suspect, is entirely the fault of “Bottom Line” economics. As early as 1995 I could no longer get apprentices as all school leavers were signed up to government schemes. I refused to help fund their quangos and was thereby denied access to school leavers. Big Brother had guaranteed that no teenager could learn the huge range of skills available to him in my factory. A friend of mine had to retire very early because he was driven to a nervous breakdown by “pupils” in the once proud Coventry Technical College who attended “lessons” only to secure their dole payments. Such is the unintended and seriously adverse effect of every attempt of government to interfere in the exercise of free life and trade.
If you are tempted here to claim a contradiction in my attitude to regulation, you are wrong. There is no contradiction. The government does not, and should not, licence the vast majority of enterprises – and probably not education or much else besides. It licences all banks. Banks are where we store our accumulated wealth and they should be carefully protected. Those who advocate the deregulation of banks have had their day – and look at the mess.
For the last twenty years The West has restructured its industry to make use of cheap foreign labour. Tens of thousands of companies have sent their production overseas or simply procure their products from there. Many of the remaining industries have had to import cheap foreign labour to stay in business. The results have been to make consumer products so cheap that there is almost never any point in trying to repair them. It is nearly always cheaper to buy a new one. The second result has been to destroy millions of jobs in the western economies. This has released labour to undertake more highly skilled jobs but it has also left a pool of unskilled people who have no chance of improving their lot. The effects of this have been described above.
A yet unrecognised threat is that this could leave us open to strategic threats both economic and military. Our very survival depends upon a very vulnerable supply chain for energy that has many weak points. The vast majority of easily recoverable energy on this earth is located under the deserts of the Middle East or the tundras of Russia.
Russia appears to have become quite westernised in a remarkably short time. This appearance might but superficial. Only a very few oligarchs have become extremely rich by securing ownership of Russian gas and oil. They have secured the support of the Russian masses only by allowing western capitalism to supply the people with a modest consumer lifestyle. If this is threatened by the present financial crisis then Russia will look very much like it did in 1900 when a very few extremely wealthy people ruled a huge peasantry. Maybe their exports of energy will divert a crisis but Russia has had a Fortress mentality for centuries and has always rebuffed western attacks of any sort. They would be capable technically of sustaining a fortress society without reference to the West.
The second largest block of energy lies under Saudi Arabia. For nearly a century the Sheiks of that country have seen fit to accept the “protection” of America. They have traditionally armed themselves with American and British weapons of war and maintained good relationships with the West. This arrangement has made them extremely rich. They are one of the world’s biggest creditor nations – no surprise there then. There is nothing at all in the history books that says that this arrangement must continue forever. Mecca, the very seat of Islam sits in the middle of their country and they have a relatively small population. Islam itself is a huge and vastly varied religion, often divided against itself, but significant parts of it have declared war upon The West and anyone who supports them. The demand for oil will continue to increase and there is no certainty that the present favourable situation will continue forever.
The third largest block of oil is in Iraq and Iran. We have seen at first hand how difficult are matters in Iraq and the history of our interference in the affairs of both countries continues to give ammunition to our enemies. It is very hard to see what will happen here but there is little reason for complacency on our part.
Our military interference in the affairs of Afghanistan will be seen in history as an attempt to surround the oilfields of Iran. The Iranians might actually find this useful as they are anything but friendly to some of their cousins across the border. But it will almost certainly involve us in an expensive civil war for a very long time. And no outside power can ever win a civil war. Vietnam was the classic example of this. It may be that Iraq is another.
The war in Afghanistan will be long and costly and require us to produce much military hardware and fund a massive enterprise. The activities necessary to keep the middle east peaceful so that our oils supplies do not get interrupted will be a huge on-cost on the price we pay for oil. This when we have deliberately divested ourselves of much of our ability to produce military artifacts and our ability to create wealth. We now rely for our wealth to stir the wealth created by others and skim our percentage. We create very little. This leaves us both financially and militarily vulnerable to the whims of the people with whom we must deal. But they now hold all the aces. They create wealth. We do not. They can produce whatever artifacts they want. We cannot. They are capable of self sufficiency. We are not. We have relied upon a financial edifice to support us that was itself built on sand. Now the tide has turned and we are floundering in the quagmire. We have been shown vividly the shortcomings and limitations of financial manipulation.
Our productive capacity in crisis
One of the main methods of the takeover of our nation by a very small clique of very rich individuals has been the growth of the international company. Many of these companies are currently in crisis and that is probably deserved. They have not observed the fundamental principles of human rights and civilisation and they only have themselves to blame if it has blown up in their faces.
One of the things these mega corporations have done is to set national laws to suit themselves and especially their directors. Besides the often obscene salaries these people have been paying themselves, they have bargained with politicians and unions to change the laws of the land to suit themselves. In the process they have had to make concessions, many of which suited them anyway, but their concessions have had the force of law and have been applied across the board to all companies and those that are not mega rich have suffered a whole range of indignities and wealth decimation as a direct result.
The destruction of the power of the unions in Britain was achieved by somewhat draconian legal limitations on their power and by diverting the attention of the unions away from their legitimate concern, the terms and conditions of employment of their members and into a completely different agenda. The unions and politicians were complicit in a long running agreement to carve up the mega profits temporarily available to the corporations who had found ways to harvest the rich pickings of a virgin world. The corporations got very rich as did many of their lucky employees. The politicians licked at the trough of cream.
The subjects for negotiation between this three way network were almost exclusively items that did not hit the bottom lines of the mega corporations but appealed to the unions who could claim they were representing members interests – which often they were not - and the politicians could sell as the way to nirvana.
The losers were those who did not work for the mega corporations and the small companies who had to carry the burdens of laws made by mega rich corporations to suit themselves. In the process the government conveniently managed to pass off many of the burdens of the welfares state onto small companies who could not possibly afford it. The government has never tired of telling us this is for the good of the majority just as they have not stopped telling us about the benefits of deregulation.
One of the first major losses of this process was the fundamental assumption in law – both British and American – that every individual is innocent until proven guilty. This was a most important provision, together with Habeas Corpus, and successfully formed the basis of law for several centuries. The violation of this fundamental right was debated at the time but the voices of reason were overridden in the gadderine dash to the pig trough. If you doubt me just listen to a current advertising campaign on British radio. It threatens to put you in jail if you own a company and do not spend a small fortune on a very expensive piece of, mostly worthless junk, called a Health and Safety Policy. It does not matter a single shit if you run the safest company in the land. If you do not conform to their wishes your are assumed to be a criminal – utterly without any proof. This is a fascist obscenity. It is fundamentally impossible for a man to prove his innocence. It cannot be done.
There are plenty of ways to achieve safe working practices without making laws that would have pleased Hitler. The Health and Safety Executive has power over any company that would have made the Gestapo rub its hands with glee. I submit that the Health And Safety laws have nothing to do with the health of the workers and much to do with fascist government bureaucratic control over those who create wealth.
I have operated companies for over half a century and never seen a serious accident. I have no doubt that there are many situations that merit serious guidance policies but a Health and Safety Policy document never saved a single life or injury. Sensible working practices do that. There are much better ways to achieve this. There can be no excuse for the destruction of a fundamental right of law.
The mega corporations have sold the rest of us down the river. You can bet none of their directors are at risk of prison from this legislation.
A friend of mine has recently had to pay for a Health and Safety Policy for his company of eight people that runs to over 500 pages. This is insane. I know his business intimately and it requires around five pages of sensible operating procedures to ensure adequate safety. This level of imbecility is simply the result of very bad law and jobs for the boys.
An early manifestation of this process was the removal of responsibility of Welfare State provisions from the taxpayer to individual companies. The very first was the collection of taxes. The government very early on put the burden of complicated Pay As You Earn provisions upon the employer. Quite soon after that the government added the burden of National Insurance Contributions. NIC is claimed by the British Government to be a contribution to the National Health Service and Social Services. The rate on the individual is limited to around ten percent of income but the rate on the Employer is unlimited.
The reporting procedures dictated by the Department of Employment have no means of reporting to the employee the, often very high, amounts of NIC the employer pays on his behalf. My company returned to the revenue every month virtually identical amounts that were labeled PAYE (Tax) and NIC.
The latter is a stealth tax because the vast majority of people do not know they are paying it. In most cases the amount of wealth returned to the chancellor as NIC is identical to the tax on that person. NIC doubles income tax payable. NIC is an insidious stealth tax.
The system is now so complicated that the cost of operating it is substantial and itself forms a burden on small companies. The taxes are payable immediately at the end of the month despite the well known fact that most small companies do not get paid for three to six months. They have to subsidise the government.
Most people now take it for granted that they are entitled to maternity leave paid by their employer but this was originally an artifact of the state welfare system. The state could not afford it but decided that business could. No doubt the mega corporations do not find it a great difficulty and it was another useful bargaining ploy to gain them freedom from government control. But small companies find it impossible. If a young girl joins a company and falls pregnant her new boss will have to subsidise her completely for at least a year even if he gets not one day’s work out of her. He has to find someone to replace her and if he chooses unwisely he could easily end up paying two, or more, girls for over a year for no benefit to him whatsoever. There is no limit to his liability. It is not surprising that fertile young women are now virtually absent from small companies. Rather than securing a benefit for these young women the laws have rendered them unemployable. Does the government think small employers are evil or stupid? It certainly acts so.
A burden like this can make the difference between profit and bankruptcy to a small company. The politicians, union bosses, lawmakers and mega rich bosses neither know nor care about the impossible burdens they have placed upon the small company. These companies are the future wealth creators. Without their incubation, nurturing and growth they will die and there will be no wealth creation in future. We have spent twenty years believing the mega corporations will provide for us. They clearly will not. They care only about their director’s bonuses. One cannot help but wonder just what benefits the politicians have had from this process. Recent events have shown that many MP's have their snouts in the expenses trough. If you care to check you will find a huge number of familiar names on the boards of many of the mega corporations that have taken our jobs abroad and sold ordinary people down the river.
The change in law practices to allow these Ambulance Chasers to practice is only possible because of the presumption of guilt against company directors. If there was a presumption of innocence they could not operate. Not one of them could ever prove a case. They win only by frightening the shit out of harassed business owners who refer the matter to their insurance company. The Insurance company will settle out of court. The alleged “Victim” Ha! Ha! Will end up with ten percent of the settlement and the pseudo lawyers will end up stuffing their pockets with ill gotten gains.
A good friend of mine is currently fighting an action for alleged deafness from over twenty five years ago. He cannot refer it to his insurance because he did not even own the company then and all the then directors are dead. As a Chartered engineer I have surveyed his premises and found no noise even as loud as the average car radio. I have known this man and his business for fifty years and I know that the claim is utterly frivolous but this claimant has the full force of the law immediately in his favour because of the presumption that my friend is guilty until he can prove himself innocent. How can he possibly do this? Please tell me. I would really like to hear your answer. I consider this process utterly obscene.
Employment law is a minefield. I had an employee once who did not turn up for work for six years and then tried to sue me for six years of holiday pay. At that time the law was not so onerous but he would probably get away with it today. My daughter has recently suffered one employee who went on a six week holiday three days after commencing his new employment with her. She had no redress.
The law places a huge range of demand upon employers with virtually no responsibilities on the employee. They can get away with the most abominable behaviour and cannot be fired with less than a six month formal process during which time they can cause havoc within the company. The lawmakers make these onerous laws on the assumption that both parties will act responsibly. When the employee proves to be a shit head the employer has no power whatever.
The end result of this is that many people who might have at least temporary job never get a chance because the risks are simply too great. The unions have negotiated all these apparently favourable terms but all they are really doing is reducing the ability of our incubator companies to survive.
Redundancy payments are another death knell for the small company. I seriously doubt that there is a manufacturing company in Britain employing less than fifty people that is actually solvent if you add into its balance sheet its redundancy liabilities. I used to do it with my company years ago and was always shocked. It rapidly became apparent to me that the only way to close a company is to make it insolvent or bankrupt. The profits in much manufacturing have been cut to the bone by modern procurement policies so that the workforces are completely unprotected.
Again, redundancy payments were originally conceived as part of the welfare state but the government could not afford them. Neither can the companies. The government unloaded its obligations onto private employers. The unions no doubt thought they were negotiating good terms for their members but what they have done is ensure that any sensible director will know when his company is to go bust and will ensure there are no funds to pay redundancies. It is not hard if you know how. By this means more potential wealth creating companies are destroyed.
The majority of large companies now employ many of their people through agencies or on contracts so avoiding the redundancy laws. The small employers cannot use these means as they cannot afford the fancy lawyers and do not have cosy relations with politicians.
Value added tax was introduced to Britain at the behest of the European Union. Before that we had a Sales Tax which was levied only on retail sales. VAT requires manufacturers to pay money out with the right hand and recover much of it with the left hand. I suspect that the net effect to the revenue is not much different to that of a point of sales tax. The difference is that the system gives the government the right to examine the books of every company in the land whenever it wants, a privilege that was previously lacking. The powers of entry of the VAT inspector are draconian. He is another with more power that the Gestapo could ever have dreamed about. The amount of legislation associated with this imposition extends to several thousands of pages. Few can understand it and even the civil servants within the system often do not understand it. It gives the government excessive power over the people who create wealth and often makes their life a misery. There are much easier ways to secure taxes. VAT is a con job. Its purpose is fascist control over companies.
There are plenty of other burdens that the state has unloaded onto or imposed upon small private companies. Many companies are run by one or two people and they simply cannot cope. International companies have helped create these conditions in this country while carefully avoiding all the consequent hassle by moving their operations to countries that do not have such onerous laws. They are playing a dirty game and the government and unions have been either complicit or duped. The end result is that manufacturing in Britain has been seriously depleted. We have been told that is a good thing. But there are many reasons to question whether in future this might not be such a good thing. We have not faced such a difficult world since 1945 and we have had almost unlimited oil since then. Those days are now rapidly closing.
It is not clear to me where this idea started but it was almost certainly within Whitehall or its equivalent in America. It has spread through vast swathes of the public service and is now causing the complete breakdown of most of those services. Virtually every employee spends most of their time reporting on other employees. It is a pretendedly beneficent fascism. Its advocates, sorry, they are not advocates because they impose it with absolute authority and draconian penalties. Its masters pretend it will be effective – it won’t - it can’t - it just adds trivial bureaucracy, conformity and mindless form filling to the working day until it takes it over completely. The Police have long complained they have to spend about ten hours filling in forms for a simple half hour arrest. Friends in the local council report the endless and mindless growth in form filling to prove they have done things. They are not actually required to do anything constructive but just tick boxes in stupid forms. Indeed, independent action is totally frowned upon and discouraged by many means – principally the filling in of endless tick boxes.
This has spread throughout the education process so that teachers no longer seem to be in charge of their classes or impart knowledge to our children. Their whole existence is beset by other people’s demands – or more correctly - by the demands of the faceless and unarguable system. Their lives are directed much like we once imagined would be the lives of robots – programmed to work for their master without understanding or demurment or complaint.
Such appears to be the aim of Performance Targets – absolute control of the employee. The best simile I can find immediately is Hitler. He attempted to subvert the whole of the German nation to his personal whim. Every single person had to swear an oath of allegiance to him. He attempted to control every single detail of his military battles by direct orders. He failed, of course. He also had “monitors” living in every city block reporting on every one of their neighbours. Our political masters are directing every single action of very large sections of society by imposing these draconian demands to prescribe their every act and proscribe any deviation at all and to report everything the victims are doing. Failure to obey is not an option. Fascist? I think so.
Political Correctness is pure fascism. Its objective is to force you to do what they want. Whether what they want is good, bad, ugly or just evil is irrelevant. It is a form of force. Mostly it takes the form of moral blackmail. You are not allowed to express any opinion that does not conform to the norm of the group. Indeed the norm is usually quite opaque so it rapidly becomes dangerous to express any opinion. Most rapidly comply with whatever rubbish they have been told. Peer pressure is simply too great. People like me simply have to walk away. It is pure evil.
A concerted attack upon the private individual
Most of the above constitute a direct and sustained attack upon the freedoms of the individual. A direct attack upon our civilised status. The basis of civilisation is philosophically quite clear. A civilised society is the only one in which a man can live by exercising his one legitimate means of survival - his brain. Any attack upon that ability is an attack upon human life itself.
Human rights, the basis of civilisation
To resolve these problems we need clear guidance. The best place to find this is in a clear policy. This is best provided by a theory based upon a firm philosophy. I have spent fifty years of my spare time searching for and developing such a philosophy. My end result has been to adopt much of a philosophy known by its founder as Objectivism. Ayn Rand has been dead for over twenty years now but her spirit lives on. She was an advocate of Capitalism and Milton Friedman was one of her colleagues, friends, pupils and mentors. He, possibly more that any other person, has brought about the present crisis by his advocacy of unbridled freedom in the financial markets. What he failed to realise was that not all members of the system shared his undoubted propriety and that the way was laid open to greed, irresponsible speculation, and plain criminal activity on a massive scale. We will put this right or destroy ourselves. I suspect that Ayn Rand would not have agreed with his advocacy.
Our successful societies are firmly based upon the principles of human rights. Hitler built a superb industrial machine that lasted a whole twelve years before his disgusting philosophy ensured the complete destruction of the nation he had perverted. Freedom has served us very well for over two centuries. The fundamental principle is that you, and I, have a fundamental right to be here. We have a right to be. We have a right to survive. In a civilised society the only way we can do this is by work. We have a right to keep the rewards of our work. Any other principle would involve slavery. Each and every person shares these rights equally. There are a few necessary corollaries such as restrictions on the use of force and Habeas Corpus but essentially that is it. These rights are sufficient to secure freedom for all.
The essence of rights is that they belong As Of Right to all and are not negotiable. All other matters have to be negotiated and are privileges. There are absolute premises that are right or wrong. The right is that which enables all men to secure their equal rights. Anything else is wrong. There can be no compromise between right and wrong. There is no middle way. In a compromise between right and wrong only evil can win. Right is an absolute. Evil is everything else.
There can be no contradictions. An apparent contradiction has either a false premises or a false argument. Only premises based on Right can be valid.
There can be no force in a just society. The use of force is restricted to the police and armed forces and they, and it, are controlled by law. The law is made by elected representatives and operated by the courts which are also controlled by law. The purpose of this system is to secure the equal rights and freedom of every individual.
There is only one way to create wealth. You take materials from the earth and act upon them to make saleable products. You can do this by hunting, gathering, farming or mining and manufacturing. In our advanced and sophisticated society farming has become just another industry that happens to do many of its operations out of doors. Hunting and gathering are little used so that manufacturing is the only effective way to create wealth. Very few of us can be farmers or miners so that begs the question how do the rest of us create wealth? There are millions of functions essential to the maintenance of our society and to support production so how can we know which are valid and which not? The answer is that any product or service is valid if someone else freely wishes to buy it and can do so from their own resources. There are certain products and services that are deemed to be criminal and are thereby excluded.
The maintenance of a productive and free society requires the rule of law. This is a body of philosophy, rules, regulations and practices that allow all individuals to live and thrive together with a minimum of antagonism. The civilisation must allow every person to exercise their abilities subject only to the recognition that they must observe the equal rights of every other person. There is no other acceptable system.
The civilisation we have developed in the West over the last two hundred years has come fairly close to achieving this ideal. In recent years we have seriously perverted the system in the pursuit of hedonistic riches. Where once we pursued invention and production which activities increased our wealth, we have pursued accumulation of goods that we have been persuaded make our lives better. Most of these goods have a very short life so that their accumulation actually dissipates wealth. The production of these goods places massive accumulations of wealth in the pockets of a very few, very rich, people.
Those who seek to create a lifestyle by the accumulation of goods are feeding this distorted system and are, in effect, on a treadmill. The mill is dressed to look pretty, but is still a vicious, unrelenting, life threatening, energy dissipating, abomination.
For a few years we built a society based upon freedom where men could work to earn a good living. Now we have allowed ourselves to be beguiled by apparent riches. Once we built factories and machines and cars and the essentials of life. Now we build property empires and portfolios of stocks and shares and believe this wealth will go on for ever. It will not. Wealth must be forever recreated - it is constantly rotting and reducing and must be replaced all the time. We have come to believe others will do this for us. They will not.
This whole edifice of greed and hedonism is based very firmly on oil. The oil is about to run out. Our house of cards is about to fall down.
9th February 2009
Colin Walker