Thanks to Wikileaks, the power of the internet and the Guardian, we now have some kind of truth about the war in Afghanistan.

A truth that, if we had ever given it more than a moment’s thought in our busy lives, we probably could have guessed for ourselves.  A truth that says more about the state of British democracy than what goes on behind the stories and lies we are fed about a shabby and ill-conceived military campaign.

The expectation of openness or honesty from our elected politicians – and the secret army of faceless, civil servants and Whitehall mandarins who manipulate them -  clearly still has a long way to go before it becomes a reality, if it ever will.     A considerable amount of wool has been pulled over our eyes by introducing a Freedom of Information Act that is simply window dressing and – despite a policy of Open Government – very little has changed in real terms.

We, or rather the politicians, are just going through the motions.  Paying lip service to the notion of a democratic government which is accountable to the people it is supposed to serve.  Theirs remains a world of lies and deceit, of smoke and mirrors, of spin and outright propaganda: not aimed at a terrorist ‘enemy’, but at the ordinary citizens of Britain and America.

The lack of truth is ‘in the interests of national security’, we are told.   However, national security is unlikely to be compromised by information which is months or even years old, and which is already history.    Nor is anyone suggesting that the armed forces’ detailed strategy against our Taliban foes should be given to the newspapers in advance. There is, in any case, enough reportage and hypothesis on Allied tactics in the broadsheets every week. Any Afghan warlord who cares to stump up two quid at his local newsagent can read it for himself.

The politicans miss the point, as usual.  Why do they think we need to know?

It is because our sons and daughters are being killed and our money is being spent by the billion to fight this questionable cause.   We are entitled to more honesty and transparency from our politicians about the reasons for war and the mistakes they have made in waging it – without having to wait to get it from whistleblowers.

Whether it’s good or bad news, we must have the truth.  Only then can we make proper choices about who to elect and who to sack; about what we are prepared to let them to do in the name of our country and what we are not; about whether we want them to build more schools and hospitals for our society, or go to war.

Just give us the truth and let us – the people – decide, through the ballot box, by referendum, gathering a petition or by whatever other means we have at our disposal in order to make our voice heard.

…but of course, that’s what they are afraid of.

As usual, our so-called democratic leaders deal in death in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘homeland security’ without our proper consent as citizens and without telling us the truth. That’s one issue…

But now we are where we are… when it comes to IEDs killing our young men and women every day, why don’t we just end it one way or the other?

Either pull out and let the Afghans get on with doing what they want to do to each other (probably not feasible), or put enough men and equipment in there to finish the Taliban off once and for all.

This has ‘Vietnam’ written all over it… a long, pointless war which we finally lose and live to regret for generations, creating thousands of dead and maimed young people in the process.

1984 arrives in 2009: the State knows best, not its citizens

The world gone mad: No. 2378…

As if politicians and monarchy weren’t bonkers enough, what are we doing to parents and children these days?

This week a dinner lady at a village primary school was sacked for telling parents she was sorry their daughter had been attacked in the playground.  It turns out that four of the little darlings (boys, of course) had trussed up the poor girl like a turkey and whipped her legs with a skipping rope.  Charming…

Even worse, the school had covered up the incident and then sacked the dinner lady for telling Mum and Dad about it. What?!

Yes, this is a new world in which schools lie to parents about traumatic events affecting their children, and yet the only offence committed is by a person who breaks that official secrecy.  The chief executive of the National Association of Headteachers was asked what he thought the dinner lady should have done:  “…she should have refused to comment, and then followed proper procedures and processes”.      WHAT??!!

Parents are also caught out by these ‘proper procedures and processes’. In London a mother was banned from her 5-year-old’s classroom for politely asking another child to stop continually hitting her son.   Repeated requests to the school had had no effect, but she was evidently breaking the unwritten rule that says that no unauthorised adult – not even a parent – can remonstrate with a child.   WHAT???!!!

In Tyne and Wear, a mother asked a group of bullies to stop attacking her young daughter and was promptly ARRESTED IN FRONT OF HER CHILDREN and held in a cell for five hours.   The bullies had retaliated by falsely claiming that it was she who had attacked them.     Once again, the adult was punished for attempting to uphold the rules of civilised behaviour. Nothing in the system supported her.    Just for talking to the children she had been made a ‘legitimate object of suspicion’.

You couldn’t make all this up.

You should read the full Guardian article on what is happening to our society.

It is truly chilling, yet somehow we can’t seem to stop it happening.

Despite the touchy-feely ‘green tree’ image he’s trying to project, the Eton toff Cameron was never going to change the basic Tory animal from being a sleazy, moneygrabbing, self-seeking con-man.

Citizen readers are no doubt as shocked as we are by this revelation.  Who’da thought it?!   After months of revelations over sleazy upper-class Tory MPs defrauding the taxpayer over their expenses, you’d have been forgiven for assuming that all MPs would be whiter-than-white from now on, albeit with a few brown stains around the edges.

Nevertheless, it seems that well over a fifth of prospective Tory candidates who think they have a good chance of becoming MPs at the next election, are already working as lobbyists or public relations consultants on behalf of businesses and other interests.  Would that be in exchange for money, do you think?

“Several acknowledged that they had set up meetings for clients with Shadow ministers, MPs and officials. More said that they had been asked to provide advice on the party’s direction. A few admitted to having pressed clients’ cases to Tory frontbenchers”, says the Times.

So much for Cameron’s promise to usher in a “new politics”.   Once a party of sleaze, always a party of sleaze…

The British Citizen thinks not.

See our own views here.  And from just some of the comments below we’re not alone, so why on earth don’t we do something about it?

Here are the thoughts from a wide range of people:  writers, broadcasters, journalists, musicians, politicians, philosophers and others, taken from the current issue of the New Statesman:

Will Self, novelist
“Despite people’s general willingness to accept the monarchy uncritically – as a species of constitutional wallpaper, the alleged undercoat of our tolerant settlement – the fact remains that it lies at the very apex of a pyramid of hierarchy, one that is mostly comprised of people who have unearned wealth, undemocratic power, undeserved prestige – or all three. Anyone who accepts an honour from the British government, or an invitation to tea at Buck House; anyone who shows deference to the monarchy, or even subscribes to an institution with royal patrons, partakes of this mass delusion: that the only way a modern democracy can be governed is by profoundly anti-democratic means; that the only way to treat citizens is as subjects. In my view, the British people will only come of political age with the abolition of the monarchy.”

Michael Rosen, poet
“The monarchy makes fools of us. It demands and receives deference for reasons of birth. This skews our ability to devise ceremonies and honours for ourselves and blights the running of the state with silly bowing and scraping. More seriously, the politics of monarchy creates a false unity of nation even as our real rulers play roulette with billions while millions of “subjects” worry about their homes and bills.”

Peter Tatchell, human rights activist
“Monarchy is incompatible with democracy. According to the elitist values of the monarchical system, the most stupid, immoral royal is more fit to be head of state than the wisest, most ethical commoner. Monarchs get the job for life, no matter how appallingly they behave. The alternative is not a US-style executive president. We could have an elected president, but a low-cost, purely ceremonial one, like the Irish. This would ensure that the people are sovereign, not the royals. And we get an important safeguard: if we don’t like our head of state, we can elect a new one.”

Roy Hattersley, politician
“The monarchy has three detrimental effects on society: it epitomises and encourages the idea of a social hierarchy; it is based on the belief that blood and birth, rather than personal merit, are enough to justify respect or even admiration; it encourages nostalgia for the past, in which it is firmly rooted, rather than hope for the future. It is also very expensive. But that is a trivial detriment compared with the other damaging effects.”

Billy Bragg, musician
“The most pernicious effect of the monarchy on our society is to be seen in the concept of the Crown in Parliament. It allows the Prime Minister to declare war, sign treaties and appoint cronies to the legislature, among other things, without first consulting MPs. A new constitutional settlement is needed to remove the monarchy from the legislative process and make the people sovereign in their own parliament.”

Richard Eyre, theatre director
“…we crook the neck, we bend the spine, we bob and curtsey, we metaphorically cross ourselves towards the altar of monarchy. And just as religious faith defies the light of reason, so we are reluctant to examine the monarchy with anything more than an irritated shrug. No government will seriously tamper with the “constitution” (whatever that is), so we end up with the monarchy in the position of the monkeys on Gibraltar: a superstitious charm against the decline of our territorial integrity. But we won’t grow up as a democracy until we resist the consolation of the English religion.”

Darcus Howe, journalist
“For former colonial citizens, the monarchy has irretrievably declined in status, ever since the international struggle for independence …where I was born, the anti-colonials’ slogan was “massa day done”, meaning the role of the master is over. We came ashore in the mass immigration of the Sixties with a strong republican sentiment, which resides in our heads and hearts until this day. Bring on the republic.”

Melissa Benn, writer
“The monarchy reflects and reinforces a paralysis at the heart of our political culture. The charm or idiocy of individual royals is merely a distraction from this, although royal antics feed very conveniently into an increasingly trashy culture. We rant against the dodgy expenses claims of MPs but say nothing about millions shelled out by taxpayers to this unaccountable institution. Just ask Richard Rogers if the monarchy wields only token power.”

Agnes Poirier, journalist
“It may have learned to live in harmony with a solid parliamentary regime, but the monarchy in has had many pernicious effects on British culture: most of all it has infantilised its subjects who think very little about citizenship in general and what it is to be a citizen in particular. The fact that the head of State, the monarch, is also the head of the Church has entailed a culture where religion pervades every aspect of society: it is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. It is high time the British grew up and abolished once and for all the Ancien Régime under which they live.”

Joan Bakewell, broadcaster
“The royal family has very little impact now. They contribute a sense of background continuity simply by being there, and that reassures many people. But what is really dynamic and important in today’s world passes them by.”

Johann Hari, journalist
“Having a hereditary head of state has a warping effect that runs through British politics and culture. Huge powers remain invested in the Crown – and we now have an heir to the throne who says he intends to be a “political King”, using the “responsibility” and “wisdom” of his position to promote his own agenda. Of course, passing through Elizabeth Windsor’s womb gives Charles no more “responsibility” or “wisdom” than the next mad person you see screaming at the bus stop – but he doesn’t seem to know it. The powers he will have to promote his ignorant anti-scientific, anti-Enlightenment agenda are enormous. To name just one: if we have a tie-break election – a Bush vs Gore – the monarch picks the Prime Minister. It’s hardly minor, is it?”

“The cultural effects are just as toxic. Having an unchosen aristocratic head of state – surrounded by braying toffs – sends ripples of snobbery throughout the culture. It strengthens the most backward, disempowering parts of Britain against the rest of us.”

Alain de Botton, philosopher
“The monarchy is… a somewhat irrational institution, something for which it seems loved and hated by different sections of society. It asks us to entertain the idea that people could rule over us not because we voted for them, but just because they and their descendants put their stake in the ground before we appeared on earth.”

Susie Orbach, psychotherapist
“A monarch… is an idealisation. The monarchy is the representative of a society still riven with class inequalities and the need to position oneself, always. The monarchy creates insecurities in all, of whatever background.”

A L Kennedy, novelist
“When I was invited to meet the Queen at a garden party, I felt that I couldn’t go, because the monarchy represents so many awful things – not that I think the Queen is an awful woman.”

For more reasons to abolish monarchy and control our own society as free citizens, take a look at the Republic website and join the campaign to rid ourselves of this pernicious and out-dated institution.  No more kings, queens, princes and princesses and the whole ridiculous and divisive hierarchy of dukes, duchesses, lords, ladies and the rest of their class-ridden nonsense.

The game’s up at last.
We always suspected they were self-seeking chancers, and now we know.

Now it’s time to remove them from power and arrest the guilty.

It’s time to make a fresh start.

So the week has finally shown just how many self-seeking, greedy fraudsters make up the Great British Parliament.

What a fine example they make for the citizens and workers of Britain.
What a fine example they make for hard-working families and our children.
What a fine example to the rest of the world.

The leaders of so-called ‘evil’ regimes and the bloody dictatorships over whom we claim such moral superiority must be laughing ’til they drop.

If you were the most anarchic of commentators or the most extreme political revolutionary, you couldn’t find a better way of discrediting Western values and the nonsense of parliamentary democracy.

But leave it to our own politicians and they will find a way.

The blatant and cynical hypocrisy of a group of men and women who claim they want to ‘serve their country’ yet  – when given the opportunity to do so – defraud the British taxpayer by claiming anything from a packet of Maltesers to a porn film or a fictitious second home.
A system which is clearly designed to line the pockets of their own kind: the ruling elite of a bankrupt system of party politics.

Tory sleaze, Labour sleaze, LibDem sleaze… they’re all the same.

In the old days you could always count on Tories to corner the market in sleaze, but corruption and greed know no political boundaries these days.

From Profumo to Thorpe, Paddy Pantsdown to Cecil Parkinson, David Mellor to John Major, Jonathan Aitken to John Prescott, Neil Hamilton to Charles Kennedy and now from Tory Conway to Labour’s McNulty, Blears, Hoon and Smith… they’re all at it.

Finally, New Labour has successfully destroyed whatever credentials it had as the party of the people. They can never be elected on moral grounds ever again.

Blair, Brown, Mandelson and the rest of the gravy train phonies were hypocrites all along and we fell for it.

Never again, you Right Dishonourable ladies and gentlemen – never again.

Cameron IS a toff in the traditional sense of the term because of his privileged background, and trying to shrug off the image is pointless. It is precisely because Cameron, Osborne and many other Tories have this privileged, upper-class experience of life – and an obvious vested interest in preserving it – that their claim to have the welfare of ordinary citizens at heart is so unconvincing.

Why would the Tories be so sensitive about the ‘toff’ thing if they weren’t desperately embarrassed about it in electoral terms?  They know it will lose them the votes of those who just can’t identify with their upper-class values, so they – and Dave – are trying to kid us that he’s one of us really.  That – in their own words – they’re not the ‘nasty party’ any more.   Trying to kid us that what Conservatives are interested in is mending our ‘broken society’.  Right…

If indeed it is ‘broken’, they will desperately want us to forget – of course – that it was the many years of Tory government and sleaze in the 1970s, 80s and 90s which promoted the philosophy of greed and fat profits at the expense of ordinary working people.  This allowed and encouraged the rise of fat-cat bankers and financial chancers who have finally wrecked our economy and made many thousands of us unemployed.

The Tories are wholly responsible for widening the vast gap between the rich and the rest of us,  laying the foundations for today’s society where young people can’t afford to buy a home any more and where there is nowhere near enough social housing to meet the needs of ordinary British citizens.    And yet they now have the gall to blame the Labour government for all this.

(Labour were stupid enough to get sucked in by pandering to the greedy, just to get elected in 1997 and to stay in office, but they weren’t responsible for the philosophy that created these conditions.  It still tries vainly to ‘square the circle’ of  creating social equality while placating the better-off middle classes who are only interested in tax cuts and big bonuses at the expense of the rest of us. But that’s another issue…)

The reality of a Tory government is one where the rich and privileged look after their own.
IF they manage to fool enough of us to get elected to office, then we’ll see them revert to type:  serving the interests of the rich and powerful, of the big businesses and of their fat-cat political sponsors, while paying lip service to helping ordinary working people.

Just look at the way Cameron’s fellow Eton toff, Boris Johnson, is now handing out planning permissions left right and centre to a host of ugly buildings in London that won’t do anything to improve the  lives of Londoners and which will vulgarise the London skyline.
(Wonder if any of his supporters, sponsors and cronies are involved in property development?  We probably know the answer to that one…).

Tune in to BBC Parliament / City Hall or look at it on the BBC iPlayer and watch how Tory toff Boris deals with the business of being Mayor of London.   He’s certainly funny – but see how he obviously has total contempt for the democratic process and treats the Mayor’s question time meeting like a public school debating society.  He waffles and blunders his way through it all, while those he no doubt sees as his social inferiors try to pin him down on anything without success. It’s all a great joke to him, but a frustrating and sickening sight and a good indication of how his privileged kind behave towards the rest of us.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that people have short memories and there are many people of voting age now who have only ever seen this newly-concocted, almost vomit-inducing Tory sincerity, so they know no better.

Everyone over the age of 35 knows the truth about Tory fat-cat priorities, their contempt for workers, trades unions and the millions of ordinary people like us who serve only to line the pockets of them and their cronies.

Once a toff, always a toff  – and forever a fat-cat Tory – however they dress themselves up or use a nice green tree as a party logo.