The Road to Totalitarianism ?
Today October the 2nd, 2000 a new Human Rights Act came into force in the UK : the Home Secretary Jack Straw said of the new Act 'it will bring justice home.'As an ex Labour party member my views on the subject were privately canvassed some two years ago. My response to the question,'Do you think that a new Act would be a good idea ?' Was, 'So long as it is printed on soft paper to thereby endow it with a usefulness that it would obviously otherwise lack.'
Now I don't know Jack Straw, I did meet Robin Cook once, but I cannot say whether the comments made by the famous TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright, to the effect that Jack Straw was an enthusiastic Cannabis smoker in his student days has any truth in it ; though the manner in which he dragged his son off to the local Police Station when a major newspaper printed a story about how young Mr Straw had been supplying friends, certainly had the air of a man who was seeking to deflect criticism of his character on such a basis.
I had first become involved in the Labour party some few months prior to my 16th birthday whilst I was still undergoing compulsory schooling ; I was an obviously attentive audience when it came to talk about finance and wealth redistribution. My Father had lost his last professional position in 1974 when I was barely ten years old ; he was a diminutive character with a minor drink problem and the truth is that I lived in genuine squalor for almost all the time that he was my Guardian. in 1980 I was preparing to leave the school I had attended since he moved back into his home county 4 years previously (A school in which I had been habitually assaulted by a Nazi refugee from a distinguished German wartime armaments manufacturing family {Heinkel} who goes by the pseudonym of Wolfgang Powell). Now I'm sure I don't have to tell those of you who have raised children how important the years from roughly 12-16 are in creating an individuals' life chances and so on. During that time my Father had first moved into his sister's bungalow in which I had to share the one spare room with him, and was then forced to move with him to his third wife's house which was already packed with lodgers and 3 children from 2 previous laisons of her own.
Now I dont say this with the intention of creating what the English term 'a sob story,' I didn't have to see much of the kind of life the average person gets to lead in the stinking cities of the Far East to know that I enjoyed comparatively good fortune in the lottery of birth and even of life than most : or with the intention of of seeking to pointlessly embarrass my relatives by regaling the world with unnecessary stories about their, inadequacies : but rather with the intention of venting my indignation about various shortcomings of my own nation and society compared to the sanitised, exaggerated and perhaps rather vain image of it's wholesomeness virtue and deserving which has been accompanied by more than vague statements about what I am supposed to owe to it, in the shape of effectively mandatory forms of duty, that I have been compelled to endure by numerous agents of social services, members of the professions, police & armed forces etc over many years. Which is to say that I really don't feel I owe you anything, you should try any one of the hordes of high tax bracket wage slaves who're sucking your tax money into their bank accounts at this very minute. Anyhow to get back to the two-facedness of it's political leadership. (to be continued soon).