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.

"Which flat you want? Nummer 33 or Nummer 45? You want rice wi' dat?"

Apart from the fact that they ran a large credit card fraud operation which spread across the world – bad enough in itself – how on EARTH did a gang of illegal Chinese immigrants get free benefit handouts and a council flat in Walworth, London?

There must be thousands of low-paid and other eligible BRITISH families in the Southwark area who should have been living there, rather than these scum.

Southwark is the parliamentary constituency of Lib Dem big cheese Simon Hughes, and the council itself is run by Labour and Lib Dem councillors, so how do they justify their local housing and benefits policy?

Questions need to be asked and Southwark Council held accountable for this cock-up.

This part of the story will probably be buried, but it shouldn’t be.

How many other illegal immigrants and  criminals have council flats in London or anywhere else in Britain when they shouldn’t even be in the country, never mind getting benefits from the British taxpayer?   Now they HAVE been caught, we’ll no doubt be paying for them to stay in our overcrowded prisons, too, rather than getting their own country to bang them up at their expense.

Do YOU want to join us in trying to stop this nonsense happening?
Why not write to your local council under the Freedom of Information Act and find out how many people of overseas birth are being given housing and benefits in YOUR area?
Write to your MP, too and demand action.

Don’t let Britain carry on being a pushover for the whole world to screw us for free money and housing when we need to help our own people.

Some useful links to help you make your voice heard:

www.writetothem.com

www.theyworkforyou.com

www.parliament.uk

It seems that politicians and the media are getting more concerned over a couple of schoolboy emails about Tory politicians than the death of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson after a beating by the police at the G20 rally just two weeks ago.

As predicted by The Citizen, the police ‘investigation’ has turned into a sham and no doubt there will be a fudged outcome where nobody gets blamed and nobody is held responsible.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (about as independent as any of these jumped-up quangos are from their masters in government and the civil service) can’t seem to find any CCTV evidence of anything, even though millions of us have seen images on TV which cannot be disputed.   It has taken the IPCC several days even to get to this stage, when other investigations into excessive police violence – but where nobody actually died – were instigated within 24 hours.

It does no credit to the police force or the IPCC that while the offending police thugs have supposedly ‘stepped forward’, they don’t appear to have been decent or honest enough to own up to their violent beating of a British citizen going about his business, and which is highly likely to have been a direct cause of his death.

WE SAW what was done to Ian Tomlinson.
WE SAW at least one of the policemen removing his identification badge and covering has face with a balaclava before beating Mr Tomlinson.
WE SAW – in newspapers and on TV – the testimony of various independent witnesses to police attacks on the man.  People not involved in the protest rally. People from other countries with no axe to grind against the police.

People who – unlike our own policemen – have no reason to lie.

WHAT MORE DOES THE IPCC WANT?

We must not let the police off the hook on this. Nor let minor political squabbles get in the way of justice being done for this unfortunate man or for the violence which he suffered in the final hours of his life to go unpunished.

Government and the police need a clear message from us that police violence on innocent citizens exercising their democratic rights is simply not acceptable.

Please don’t let this case be swept away in a tide of indifference. We all need to stop this from becoming even more the norm than it is already.

IT COULD BE YOU – OR YOUR OWN SON OR DAUGHTER – NEXT TIME.

So Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, thinks that Pakistan already ‘does enough’ to prevent terrorist students entering the UK.

Well, he won’t mind if we ban ALL Pakistan nationals from entering the UK until further notice, then.

After all, why should the British taxpayer pay for costly screening and monitoring of his countrymen?  The amount we may earn in university and college course fees is no doubt MORE than offset by the COST to Britain of administration, surveillance and monitoring of his would-be terrorist fanatics.

We have no obligation to allow them entry and we can do without the hassle they cause us.

Apart from Pakistani students on fake or trumped-up visas, who have no intention of studying anything other than how to bomb and kill our citizens, we don’t need more visitors, tourists or ‘businessmen’ from Pakistan, period.  A large number don’t return after their studies or their ‘visit’  in any case – which breaks the terms of their visa and which goes largely unreported and unenforced, too.

And these are only the ones we KNOW about.
Who knows (the Home Office / Borders Agency certainly doesn’t) how many enter the UK illegally in the back of trucks or as visiting ‘relatives’ of those who are already here?

The only way in future we should be prepared to allow Pakistanis entry is if their government vouches for them and takes responsibility for their actions, both financially and morally.

So the ball is back in your court, Mr Commissioner.
If you’re not prepared to vouch 100% for your own citizens, then we’re not prepared to allow them in to kill ours.

Write to your MP now and object to any further students entering this country from Pakistan.

Like politicians you mean, David?   We agree.

As if giving the jobs to any foreigners at all wasn’t bad enough.

To make matters worse, we don’t appear to have done anything at all to expel them from the UK.  Only 35 out of 7,729 of the immigrants have been deported so far.

3,275 of those used a false name or National Insurance number when applying for jobs, according to information revealed in answers to Parliamentary questions.

The Home Office was criticised more than a year ago in 2007, when it was ‘discovered’ that basic checks were not being done to see if job applicants were entitled to work in the UK.

It seems that twelve illegals were actually approved for security jobs with the Metropolitan Police, including one found to be guarding the Prime Minister’s car.  

Perhaps with the state of the country as it is, Brown couldn’t be sure that a British guard would actually bother to protect him from his own citizens, never mind terrorists?