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Making More People Victims Does Not Stop FGM.

19/3/2015

Something that drifted past recently was a change to the NHS guidelines and rules for defining Female Genital Mutilation, something I strongly oppose. Thousands of victims have suffered this crime in the name of Culture, thousands of young girls have been mutilated, often by their own mothers, because it is the custom.

Thousands of young girls who spend the rest of their lives suffering because of a cruel and evil act that after thirty years and tens of thousands of victims and yet:

NOT A SINGLE BLOODY PROSECUTION!

Instead we have had one whole case brought against a doctor who used a stitch to close a bleeding wound. Yet it was brought to court as FGM and then after much media noise was dropped because it was blatantly stupid.

NOT ONE SINGLE PROSECUTION!

Now we have another step in the ongoing national and international effort to ignore this crime against children, while our Home Secretary is busy trying to whip up fears of child abuse in order to push through yet more state control and censorship, her administration has through deliberate action or incompetence or a politically correct motivation to avoid having to deal with women with dark skin has not done nothing.

No they are actively working to make the situation WORSE.

The World Health Organisation updated their definition of FGM and the UK government and NHS rubber stamped the change.

So why am I angry?

Because rather than doing anything to prevent the deliberate mutilation of children they have declared that any woman with genital piercings is now to be categorized as having suffered FGM. Women who for whatever reason have undergone willing piercing, who wear rings or studs or whatever else they have chosen to wear are now to be classified as having been subject to FGM and the NHS rules insist that any doctor or nurse registers this.

It also applies to willing, adult, cosmetic surgery.

So now we have doctors and nurses being ordered to report any woman who has such a piercing as being the potential victim of a crime, the system designed to identify the actual victims is going to be swamped by women who willingly underwent vanity piercings. Creating more paperwork for the medical staff, throwing up thousands of data files to confuse the issue and make it even harder to spot the abused children.

How long before doctors and nurses get fed up and simply stop reporting anything that may or may not be FGM?

What else. Well if such a piercing is now FGM that means the person who performed the piercing has just legally committed an offence, if someone with a genital piercing is the victim of a crime then the person who did the piercing has become the criminal.

How many zealous fanatics are we going to see trying to prosecute these case, how many scumbag lawyers are we going to see crawling out of the slime to bring such cases. How many people who have been running perfectly legal piercing businesses are going to be forced to refuse any genital piercing for fear of the law against FGM being applied to them.

What about tattoo’s on or near the genital region?

What about nipple piercings?

What I see here is the NHS taking a huge step backwards in the fight against FGM, this will not make it easier to protect girls from mutilation, all it will achieve is to create thousands of possible cases that will confuse the issue and take up valuable time and effort that should be used to protect children.

It will spread confusion and affect people’s freedom of expression as adults to have tattoos or piercings where they want.

It will do nothing to stop FGM.

NOTHING.

I can’t help thinking if it were white children being mutilated like this it would have been stopped decades ago!

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Unemployed Or On Benefits, Who Doesn’t Hate You?

17/3/2015

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Caught this early and was not impressed, though I was also not surprised.

Rachel Reeves was doing some pre election sound bite dropping and instead she seems to have dropped a clanger, and I don’t mean the little guys that live on the asteroid and talk by making funny noises.

Sadly it seems that in the drive to compete for voters with the Tories, Labour are now all but indistinguishable from them in policy and cruelty. The same political class, the same attitude towards people, only the colour of the rosette to tell them apart.

Mz Reeves is the labour version of IDS and she certainly seems to be living up to the job. Shadow work and pensions minister, the opposition counterpart to the man who runs the DWP and has become a byword for the harsh and oppressive way he treats the poor and the helpless of this country.

"We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we're not, the party to represent those who are out of work."

That sort of sums up an attitude that is very close to that of the Tories, its the sort of thing that you wouldn’t be surprised to hear from IDS or McVey or Cameron himself, that it came from the lips of the work and pensions spokesperson for Labour shows just how close the two parties are now.

Was this a slip of the tongue so to speak? Well this is the woman who said, shortly after coming to office that Labour will be tougher than the Tories when it comes to slashing the benefits bill, at the same interview in 2013 she also said that under labour the long term unemployed would not be able to linger on benefits for long periods but instead would be forced to take up a guaranteed job or lose state support.

Funny thing, I don’t know anyone who lingers on unemployment and lives a life of ease and luxury, everyone I know is living a life of stress and shortages.

Now the above statement can be broken down into two parts. The first is: We are not the party of people on benefit. Well let me see, that’s five million people on working tax credits, a ‘Benefit’ for those working but earning less than a living wage, then we have the almost 2 million actual unemployed who get jobseekers, a ‘Benefit’ to allow them to eat and pay the bills (just about). Then we have housing ‘Benefit’ for all of those on some other form of ‘Benefit’ who cannot afford somewhere to live, or disability living allowance or Employment and support allowance both of which are ‘Benefits’,

Ten million or so people on ‘Benefits’, ten million or so people that Labour are not the party of. Well thanks for making that clear. I’m sure those ten million people will be happy to know that Labour have the same attitude towards them that the Tories have, one of indifference at best and contempt at worst.

How about the second part: We don’t want to be seen, and we're not, the party to represent those who are out of work. UK population is roughly 64 million people, put aside those under 18s and you have roughly 52 million, about 30 million of whom are in some sort of work though a lot of that is zero hours and part time. So 22 million people in the UK are not in work and therefore not represented by the Labour party.

Wow, I though Cameron’s attitude towards the under 25s was harsh when he said they would be denied unemployment and housing. So Labour doesn’t want to be seen to represent 40% of the adult population of the UK, nice of them to tell us ‘Before’ the election rather than after when it’s too late.

The Greens were given a hard time after an interview so it seems to me fair play to give labour a hard time for the same thing. However that’s not the problem.

Here we have the labour shadow cabinet member for work and pensions, the woman who will become the cabinet member in charge of the DWP if they get into government and she seems to be an IDS clone, or should that be a McVey clone, perhaps she has a big bald headed thug as a side kick somewhere to play the IDA cone.

Still her interviews and attitude says that no matter which party labour or the Tories get into power, the poor, the ill, the disabled, those who need the help of the state, every last one of them will be treated in the same way. Different party in government, same treatment of those least able to protect themselves.

Listening to her speak, reading her quotes, learning about what she really believes and by extension what is official policy of the Labour party raises a question.

Who do you vote for when it’s so hard to tell the two apart?

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Theresa May Whipping Up a Frenzy of Fear Again.

16/3/2015

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For the last couple of weeks I’ve been struggling to write anything, then at four AM this morning I’m wide awake with posts and ideas buzzing round inside my head. Lots of things form the last week or two that I haven’t been able to ficus on and suddenly they all jump out and rob me of another nights sleep.

I’m writing in order of anger, from the things that anger me most down to the mildly annoying.

Which is why I’m starting with the words of our our caring, compassionate, and trustworthy home secretary. Wait, no I’m not, I’m talking about Theresa May.

As the third, is it third I am losing track of how many times this thing has started and collapsed, attempt to launch the investigation into MPs and senior politicians raping and abusing children during the seventies our Theresa has come out with a stunning example of state fear mongering with her statement.

“Tip of an iceberg. The problem is “woven, covertly, into the fabric of our society. Do not appreciate the true scale of that abuse. Our schools and hospitals, our churches, our youth clubs and many other institutions that should have been places of safety.”

Eye catching sound bites, good for making headlines and getting into the news. But what is she trying to achieve with her comments?

To my mind this is simply an expansion of the fear mongering that our political class and coalition government are so fond of, look back over the last few months and years. Islamic terrorists, pedophiles, ISIS. Child abusers, Islamic state, now its back to pedophiles. Oh and ‘The Russians are coming’ gets woven into the fear every so often just to add some light relief.

Fear the enemy within, ‘They’ are everywhere, ‘They’ threaten you, your family and your children, ‘They’ lurk in your schools and churches. You can’t protect your children because ‘They’ are everywhere, only the state can protect you, only the government can make your children safe.

Anyone around you could be one of ‘Them’, the pedophiles are everywhere, teachers, priests, that kindly old man who does the crossing guard outside the school, any of them could be agents of Goldstein, any of them could be the enemy.

Give up your privacy, give up your freedoms, its for the good of your children, do you have something to hide with your privacy demands, when you call for freedoms is it because you are one of ‘Them’, are you a pedophiles, are you an agent of Emanuel Goldstein?

History and fiction shows us clearly the results of any government that seeks to rule through fear and a police state and it never ends well. A population that lives in fear of an enemy within, that spies upon itself and allows the state to control every aspect of their lives because the alternative is ‘Them’, the enemy.

Yet again and again I see our government treading the well walked path to totalitarian rule using the same justifications to impose ever tighter control, to remove more and more freedoms and rights, to reduce the population to servile cattle who exist to serve and no more.

Where exactly is this endemic abuse?

If the home secretary knows about why is no one being arrested?

Where are the long lines of these abusers being marched into courts to be tried?

May says they are everywhere, if she knows this why is she doing nothing about it, other than to perpetuate the cover up of MPs and senior figures who have been accused.

In Rochdale the young victims talk to reporters and say that the men who abused them are still free, still on the streets and still abusing children, an entire new generation being groomed and raped. Yet May and her vast army of police, lawyers, prosecutors and bureaucrats does nothing. Instead she tells us the situation is much worse than we know.

BOLLOCKS!

Complete and utter bollocks. Government fear mongering at its best. They refuse to act on the problem we can see, then tell us that the problem is far worse than we know.

This is a classic pattern of manipulation. The end result is that things become so bad, the fear becomes so strong, that when the government suggests more censorship, more state intrusion, more tyranny and more steps into the police state the population cheers.

Democracy dying to the sound of grateful applause!

The investigation doesn’t touch the political class, they look after their won, no credible politician or MP will ever face investigation nor will any powerful member of society. The men who have been bought up in the rarefied realms of power and influence who think nothing of abusing the peasants and the proles because the commoners are no more than property to be used and abused at will, they will never be held to account until the entire system is changed.

The political class has closed ranks and it doesn’t matter of any genuine investigation is blocked by deliberate effort or staggering incompetence. The friends, family and old school chums have rallied round to protect their own.

Look at the accusations that are being made and then look at who is dragged into court to be tried. How many politicians, how many titled members of high society, how many public school types. The political parties are protecting their own and the other parties as well. A social class closing ranks, after all, can’t allow the unwashed masses to get the idea they can complain about the actions of their betters.

Look at who have been charged, a dead celebrity who is past punishment, another couple of entertainment nobodies, the sort of people who are vaguely known but who lack the power, influence of political friends to protect them.

When it comes to the likes of Cyril Smith, you could write a volume of books about the accusations against him, cabinet level abuse, rape clubs where politicians and the powerful could abuse children away from prying eyes. Police investigations quashed again and again.

Nothing.

Yet her we have May telling us that the problem is everywhere, our teachers are a threat, our priests (well yes but that's the Roman Catholics), the man on the street. May tells us that our children are at risk from everyone, odd that this comes at a time when the huge body of accusations and witnesses are reporting that the problem is specifically coming from two groups of people, one an ethnic and cultural group of immigrants and the other our political class.

One group cannot be touched because of fears of being found to be racist or anti diverse, after all being let off a charge of raping a child because everyone back home does it or because you didn’t know it was wrong is perfectly acceptable. But try drinking six pints and going for a drive through a 20mh zone at 50 then use your ignorance of the law as a defence.

The other group, well they are too powerful to touch, they have closed ranks to protect each other.

Instead we get blatant attempts to spread the blame, to spread the fear, to make us all look at those around us and ask the question, who is the ‘Enemy’, who is a ‘Pedophile’, who is an agent of ‘Goldstein’?

May is using a technique of social manipulation that has been used throughout recorded history, where it leads is well documented. Yet people still fall for it. Does no one study or remember history these days.

No they don’t because they are too busy concentrating on the latest celebrity scandal

“I truly believe it represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity and that once its work is done, we will never look at society in the same way again,”

Sadly this is likely to be true. Because if the population fails to oppose this the end result will be a society very different from what we see today, we will never look at our society the same way again because our society will not be the same way again.

May is heralding yet more government control, more spying, more restrictions, less freedom, less democracy. If we don’t pay attention she and our government will get what it wants, the Lib Dems are hand in glove with this, Labour cannot be bothered to oppose it. All three of our main political parties either openly or covertly support this of will not oppose it.

Rule by fear. Business as usual for Britain’s political parties.

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Trident, What is it Good For?

14/3/2015

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This came up in a conversation and got me thinking.

One of the arguments involved in the upcoming election is who supports Trident and who wants to get rid of it. The SNP are clearly against, the Tories are clearly pro. A large number of Labour MPs say against but Labour policy is pro Trident. The Lib Dems are sitting on the fence and calling for a discussion but it’s the Lib Dems so who cares, the Greens are anti.

As matters stand Trident, the warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles and the submarines are more than a little long in the tooth. Simply bringing them up to date is £20 billion or so. A replacement with a 21st century system, estimates run as high as £100 billion but its a government defence project which means it will take twice as long and cost twice as much as the initial claims.

So do we keep it or do we save the money for something more useful.

I’ll start with the question in the title. What exactly do we, as a nation, gain from Trident?

Deterrence, respect/status, fear, a place on the UN security council?

Let’s start with Deterrence. Trident is a legacy of the cold war, from a time when the West faced the East across Germany and the spectre of nuclear war was a constant part of national propaganda. The fear of the ‘Red Bomb’ let to the concept of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. A more than apt acronym given that the idea was a revenge strike, the ability to respond to an attack by wiping out the other side’s cities and armed forces even after they had destroy your cities and armed forces.

Governments sitting in bunkers using their nations last dying breathe to spit in the other guys eyes.

It’s the sort of weapon that is never intended to be used, after all if you are using it the whole point of MAD failed anyway.

So in the 21st century just who are we threatening with our powerful nuclear arsenal or at least the one missile boat we have at sea at any one time (sixteen missiles, up to eight warheads each), we can certainly wipe out a lot of cities, kill millions of people and reduce any small or medium sized nation to radioactive rubble. Against a major power, say Russia, we can wreck their big cities, kill millions of poor sods, leave millions more facing slow lingering deaths and turn what is left of them into a vengeance crazed mob that will do the same to us in return only we can’t take a few hundred nukes.

What about the nuclear powers that may actually attack us. North Korea, Iran, any other Middle Eastern or Far Eastern nation that can build, buy or steal a nuke. Does anyone thing the leadership of those nations would hesitate to attack us if they could by fear of what we would do to their civilians and cities?

We can’t respond to a conventional attack with nukes, the likelihood of the UK coming under direct attack rather than a Terrorist bombs is tiny at present and very small long term and the few nations that may attack us with nukes seem not to care about MAD.

One final thought, during the cold war MAD was considered such a great defence that NATO maintained millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of armoured vehicles to face the conventional attacks that Trident would never be used against.

So what sort of a deterrent is it after all?

How about our place as a permanent member of the UN security council, all the members are nuclear powers after all. Nope, nothing to do with it. In 1946 as the UN came into being replacing the of League of Nation. The UN created a number of sub organisations, to cover security it created a council that would consist of a number of permanent members and a few temporary members. The post war allied nations, having just won the war, were regarded as the main military powers and became the permanent members. At the time only the US was a nuclear power. Britain didn’t developed its first nuclear weapon till the early fifties.

So Trident and our nukes don’t keep us on the UN security council.

How about fear. Well this is the thing with nuclear weapons, they are called WMDs. Weapons of mass destruction. But they’re not, they are weapons of terror. A single nuke can devastate a city and kill a million people, make the ruins radioactive and kill a million survivors through cancer in their later years. There are smaller ‘Tactical’ nukes though when throwing nuclear warheads around tactical is a word that only generals and politicians would use. But Trident and its big city wrecking warheads, it’s a terror weapon.

Trident says fear us because we can turn your nation into rubble and ash.

But does any nation on this planet honestly think there is any possibility of the UK launching a nuclear attack against them. Conventional attacks, yes, air strikes, boots on the ground or the ever invisible men who don’t wear boots. Since the end of the second world war the UK has NOT been fighting in someone else’s country for only a handful of years.

But nukes, nope. Almost unthinkable. I say almost because in the tenants of Science Fiction or Bond films strange things happen, but as a measured action, debated by parliament. Not going to happen anytime soon.

The reason is that any nation that uses a nuclear weapon moves to the top of a list, a target list. Unless that nation is one of the big three they can expect everyone else to gang up on them very quickly. Airstrikes and men who don’t wear boots will decapitate the government and take out any possible location where other nuclear weapons may be. Invasions, mass airstrikes, a repeat of Libya.

Once you have used a nuke in anger, it’s a bit like Pandora’s box being opened, it’s easy to do it again and again once you get past the fear of doing it the first time. Which means every nation is going to assume that having done it once you WILL do it again. So they are going to make sure you don’t.

Now the US, Russia and China don’t need to go nuclear, they have the conventional strength to crush most nations which means the likely nation is one of the smaller ones, the ones likely to get desperate enough or the ones that don’t care about the consequences. A nation like Britain has access to advanced conventional weapons like cruise missiles and an air force, our government can bomb people back to the stone age without needing to cross the nuclear line.

So we can’t use them and they probably won’t be a deterrent to the people most likely to be attacking the UK. Which raises my original question.

At a time when our conventional armed forces are being slashed again and again and we are being told it will cost £20 billion to modernise Trident or upwards of £100 billion to create our own system from scratch.

What is it Good For?

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Tory Labour Alliance. Impossible, Unlikely or just the Politics?

7/3/2015

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Was there ever a sign so blatant that British politics has become a binary exchange between two parties who are simply flavours of the same political class, the same political attitudes and the same corporate policies.

Former Tory Chairman Lord Baker has said that in order to keep the unity of the United Kingdom intact the Tory party should be prepared to enter into a coalition with the Labour party in order to block an SNP party that finds itself holding the balance of power.

Well well.

What do you say to that. A former party chairman who should have his finger on the pulse so to speak, or given that he’s a Tory should that be fangs on the neck. But here he is saying Labour and the Tories should form a coalition. Not the first time it’s been said, probably not the last time.

The Tories are clearly running scared of the election, are there enough people stupid enough to believe their lies a second time, are their enough people who hate and fear a labour government more than they hate and fear a Tory one? The Tories are not sure, the polls are looking balanced with no-one in a majority.

Cameron is harping on about Miliband publicly ruling out an alliance with the SNP, given the current landslide north of the border a solid block of 50 SNP members of parliament would swing the balance of power in favour of labour. After all it’s not likely that the SNP will work with the Tories, though if they are ice skating in hell the day after election day it’s not my fault!

Labour north of the border is very unpopular but given the choice between saving a drowning Tory government and a drowning Labour government I see the SNP sitting down to bargain with Labour to get a very good deal for rent of the rope while at the same time throwing rocks at the Tories and taking bets on how long till they go under.

Nuclear disarmament is something that resonates strongly with the SNP and Labour, the upwards of £20 billion required to upgrade Trident over the next parliament is extremely hard to justify when compared to the tens of billions of austerity cuts that are causing such suffering. Outside of this single cause there are plenty of areas that the two parties could agree on or seek to compromise on.

The SNP have become the bogeymen of British politics, MPs telling their children to be good or the SNP will take them away.

The face of modern evil is being redrawn as Alex Salmond, the man who wants to break up the union.

After they came close in the vote last year and with the polls showing them looking at an utter takeover in Scotland everyone is doing the MP dance, its where you run around in circles shouting random things which are the opposite of the random things you shouted 30 seconds ago.

Regardless of which party wins or ends up in a collation. The SNP are going to be playing king maker in the next parliament, they will be in an odd position. If they leave the Union as they claim they wish to they will end up worse off than if they remain in the union but grab ever increasing self rule and economic funding under the threat of leaving.

The Tories are openly terrified by this, Labour are less concerned, at least openly anyway. All the austerity, all the oppression, the cruelty, the return to Dickensian social order that the Tories are working so hard to achieve would be undermined by the SNP and Labour having enough MPs to outvote the Tories. Hence Cameron’s demands that Labour rule out such an alliance.

Which is a bit rich, it has to be said, coming from the man who climbed into bed with Clegg. Though given how fast the Lib Dems threw out just about every long held policy and manifesto point.

Is a Tory Labour alliance so impossible, well no its not. Actually given that the front benches of both parties are packed full of pragmatic, deal doing, self serving scum who have happily ignored many votes or voted in favour of clearly unpopular measures to support each other I don’t see the two working together to keep themselves in power and supping at the trough for another five years impossible.

Look back over the last few years and count how many in Labour have actively opposed or voted against Tory / Lib Dem measures such as austerity, bedroom tax, DRIP etc. Outside of a handful of old school labour MPs the majority seem happy to go along with their hated enemy in vote after vote.

So if it comes down to an alliance with the enemy or an alliance with the enemy it is a matter of who do you hate and fear the least. Note that I’m talking about Labour, the Tories and the SNP here, the Lib Dems are hardly going to be in a position to throw any weight around after May.

Still I could be wrong here; the Lib Dems could do well and they could be ice skating in hell on the 8th of May.

But what about that Tory Labour alliance to keep the SNP out?

Is it so unlikely, is it impossible?

If it keeps them in power our political parties will sell their own grandmothers if the price is right.

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Making More People Victims Does Not Stop FGM.

Unemployed Or On Benefits, Who Doesn’t Hate You?

Theresa May Whipping Up a Frenzy of Fear Again.

Trident, What is it Good For?

Tory Labour Alliance. Impossible, Unlikely or just the Politics?

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