treating the symptoms and not the disease

Citizenship ceremonies for schoolchildren: That's the ex-attorney general's suggestion to improve "British Citizenship".

Firstly- and most obviously: I am not a citizen of Great Britain. I am a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as stated in my passport. If you really want to piss the Irish off after decades of bloody sectarian strife, just forget to include them in a statement about the state of our nation.

Secondly: If you even need to consider proposals to strengthen citizenship then you've been up to some fairly stupid stuff that alienated it in the first place. Examine any policy of the UK government over the preceding thirty years to understand this one.

Thirdly: Centralised diktats intended to improve citizenship are blatantly going to be counter productive. In most humans positive emotions such as loyalty and pride result from positive experiences. Personally, I find such positive experiences to be few and far between. Simple comparisons of our nation's state with others in Europe reveal that we have exactly nothing to be proud of apart from winning the Rugby World Cup five years ago. Our public transport sucks, our democracy sucks, our military are falling apart thanks to poor management and overextension of limited resources, our government are responsible for exacerbating climate change instead of fighting it. We have one of the worst records on tax avoidance and one of the most unequal societies in the developed world. And suddenly, this plutocratic collection of corporate whores and incompetent halfwits wants to lecture us on how we should appreciate them? I find this to be a distinctly negative experience and the last thing I feel for Goldsmith and his war crimes are loyalty and a sense of kinship. The words that spring instantly to mind are "get fucked".


PS:

Do I have to mention Goldsmith's credibility here with regard to his role in the Iraqi genocide and BAE debacle?

I thought not.

turbo-capitalism / capitalist fundamentalism / neoliberalism sucks ass

The Media Lens posse rule.

of nukes and bonuses

Two CiF articles to mention today, one on the abhorrence of escalating executive pay and another calling for abandonment of the government's nuclear fetish.

The Generation Gap - part 2 . . .or is it part 1 . . . ?

.
Another couple of interesting articles today in The Independent about the financial generation gap produced by the baby-boomer's legacy and majority vote in the UK due to the aging population. I thought I'd posted something about this after reading this article in The New Statesman but maybe I was drunk. Actually I think that's me on the comments page so maybe I wrote my thoughts there. Yes, for sure its me. Check the angry tone.

Incidentally the most recent post references a speech by some Tory MP called David Willetts. Its- and I bite my tongue as I type this . . . . . . . . quite . . . . . . . good . . . .. . ..

I need a shower now. Gods! Praising Tories, what next? A measured endorsement of rape camps as a means of propagating ethnicity? Ugh!

Here's a quote:

"The difficulty of buying a house and creating a nest means that family formation is delayed. This in turn means that people have children later, and they will have fewer children. It is no accident that the British birth rate fell successively every year from 1997 to 2003 as house prices rose and so did the average age of the first-time buyer."


I am supportive of antinatal policies as I believe there are too many people in the UK and that the remainder will benefit greatly from such a decrease. Excluding immigration this is currently the situation as our birth rate is far below replacement, hence the greying population. The problem is that Labour aren't managing an overall decrease. They are managing a net increase due to immigration. I am an outright supporter of a humanist asylum policy but there is no way that the UK is improved as a country by replacing its already diverse natives with immigrants. Having said that I come across natives every day who I would happily replace with Polish plumbers, Indian students or Czech taxi-drivers. But they are not the people that are being replaced- the feral benefit-fiends, Sun readers and Gala Bingo patrons are the ones who aren't going anywhere except the pub on the corner to complain about the funny foreign types who have moved in next door. It is my social group who are giving up on Blighty as a worthy prospect and looking abroad for a place to call home.

Fuck Brown and triple fuck Blair.