Old Labour man gives great speech

[belboid]

again, i must agree with Justin. Sedgemore is defo a 'bit of a leftie'. 15th on the 'biggest rebels' list, including Iraq, asylum, trial by jury and various other stuff

 

[Streathamite]

good lord, I'm surprised. When I lived on his patch, he always came across as v centrist

 

[jiggajagga]

The government's argument is that this legislation wasn't necessary during the IRA's campaigns, but is now because the new conditions are different. And they cite the emergence of suicide bombers as one of the things that has changed.

Ignoring all extraneous issues (like Internment, the right to self-defence &c.), can anyone help me with why this is supposed to justify the new proposals? The concept of a suicide bomber may be more scary than a 'conventional' terrorist, but logistically what's the difference?

I know it's not exactly the central issue at stake here, but I can't follow the supposed logic of it.

Another barmy issue is that if you were arrested under this proposed law you would not be told why you had been arrested...so how could you argue your innocence? Even if you could who would you argue it to...the politician who believed you were conspiring in the first place?
Also let us not forget the the Home secretary would be arresting you on the evidence given to him by the security services....Remember WMD in Iraq anyone??

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Another barmy issue is that if you were arrested under this proposed law you would not be told why you had been arrested...

Which, no doubt, contributes to the mental anguish of the detainees, and presumably to the deteriorating mental health of the people currently still in Belmarsh.

 

[Haller]

who would you argue it to...the politician who believed you were conspiring in the first place?
Also let us not forget the the Home secretary would be arresting you on the evidence given to him by the security services....

It's also worth remembering who else has served as Home Secretary. Apart from those appointed by Blair, you only need to go back ten years to find Michael Howard in the Home Office in the days when even Ann Widdecombe found him scary. I don't fancy the likes of him inheriting these powers.

Even worse, David Waddington in the 1980s.

 

[Barking_Mad]

the people are all stupid shallow cunts eh?

No, I wouldnt say that they're just a product of society. I just find it frustrating that people aren't more angry about this and that they'll probably get more wound up watching tonights episode of Eastenders!

I dunno

Yours,

Disallusioned of Leeds

 

[Barking_Mad]

what exactly should people then do though? i think about the world and so on quite a bit but i'm buggered if i know what i can do to stop all this shit happening. if the whole country rose up as one then possibly - but an awful lot of people feel the same way as me, don't like where things are heading, but simply feel that they can't do anything about it.
maybe instead of judging people as being shallow and vapid, you should look at why people feel so disenfranchised and powerless?

it wasnt my intention to judge people as shallow and im sorry if I gave that impression - its hard not to be angry at most things when this sort of thing happens....I dont have all the answers or even most of them, but I do know that people need to be more aware of this, so perhaps - as I suggested it might be worth forwarding these two speeches on to everyone you know. Its a start.

 

[kea]

it wasnt my intention to judge people as shallow and im sorry if I gave that impression - its hard not to be angry at most things when this sort of thing happens....I dont have all the answers or even most of them, but I do know that people need to be more aware of this, so perhaps - as I suggested it might be worth forwarding these two speeches on to everyone you know. Its a start.

i think pretty much everyone i know (at least well enough to send email news stories to!) is well aware of what's going on. but most people simply feel frustrated because they feel they have no power over the situation at all. so reading about it and watching the news and so on is doubly painful. which is why a lot of people now are beginning to switch off, tune out. not because they don't care but simply because they can't bear to watch what's happening any more.

 

[Asriel]

i think pretty much everyone i know (at least well enough to send email news stories to!) is well aware of what's going on. but most people simply feel frustrated because they feel they have no power over the situation at all. so reading about it and watching the news and so on is doubly painful. which is why a lot of people now are beginning to switch off, tune out. not because they don't care but simply because they can't bear to watch what's happening any more.

Its been the opposite for me, Im by no-means an expert, but have taken an interest in politics in the past few years, and have been horrified at some of the things.

Personally I get very frustrated talking to my closest friends about this sort of thing, and its true, they are bothered about the best clothes and Eastenders, and when you do sit down and talk, its, really, no !, that can't be right, they can't do that, anyway, fancy another pint ?, I sometimes wish though, that I was in that position.

 

[kea]

i think it's possibly because quite a few of my close friends/family are lawyers and they are horrified by the government's hijacking of the role of the judiciary and due process etc etc. it's particularly close to home in that they're professionally concerned with it all.
i'm not saying there aren't people out there who don't give a damn and want to talk about eastenders or whatever instead, btw.

 

[poster342002]

I have to say it does frustrate me when you find people are more ready to get their knickers in a twist over what's happening in the latest series of Big Brother (I mean, why does anyone give a fuck?!) or what happened in a football match (just how does that affect anyone's life in any meaningfull sense?!) or what the latest airheaded celebrity said the other day (do you think they'd be remotely interested in your actual hardships?!) than in what's happening around them and to them.

 

[kea]

yeah but you can understand it, can't you? if you grow up feeling like you're being shitted on from a great height and there's nothing you can do to change that, then a lot of people just kinda focus on other things as a distraction. iyswim.

yes it's frustrating but it's a sign of social alienation. which is a result of political disempowerment.
(incidentally those bold italics musta taken ages to put in )

 

[Asriel]

yeah but you can understand it, can't you? if you grow up feeling like you're being shitted on from a great height and there's nothing you can do to change that, then a lot of people just kinda focus on other things as a distraction. iyswim.

yes it's frustrating but it's a sign of social alienation. which is a result of political disempowerment.
(incidentally those bold italics musta taken ages to put in )

I totally agree, just wanted to point out that when I want to talk to my mates about it, they're just not interested, don't watch the new's, or read about current events etc.

 

[dormouse]

Or 'let's demonstrate against the royal wedding'… as if that matters compared with this.

Like kea said, you just despair really.

 

[XerxesVargas]

It was a wonderful speech and I've emailed him to say as much.

As for the whole, why arent people more pissed off? Well if you look at the reality there are probably more pissed off and political people at the moment than any time in the last 20 years. Iraq served as a big wake up call to many. The fact that Toflon Tone webt through with it anyway is the reason why a lot of them are now losing interest.

I think Keas take on it is spot on, largely.

 

[poster342002]

there are probably more pissed off and political people at the moment than any time in the last 20 years. Iraq served as a big wake up call to many. The fact that Toflon Tone webt through with it anyway is the reason why a lot of them are now losing interest.

Exactly. The ruling class knows that all it has to do is calmly sit out any furore and eventually all the anger just blows itself out.

 

[Slurp]

yeah but you can understand it, can't you? if you grow up feeling like you're being shitted on from a great height and there's nothing you can do to change that, then a lot of people just kinda focus on other things as a distraction. iyswim.

yes it's frustrating but it's a sign of social alienation. which is a result of political disempowerment.
(incidentally those bold italics musta taken ages to put in )

This isn't a new problem... as the final paragraph of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (written in about 1937) illustrates:

And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

[My emphasis]

Except for a few trade unionists, portions of the liberal left and some Muslim activists, few British people will give a damn about the greatest assault on their civil liberties now taking place since the Act of Settlement in 1701.

That is, until their own sons and daughters are locked up - without charge, without knowledge of the evidence against them, and such evidence having been gathered by the same unaccountable and out of control state security apparatus which gave us Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction.'

Yes. That might get them to switch off Eastenders.

 

[FreddyB]

Reading those speeches inparticular and the rest of this thread has made me emotional in an angry, scared, disgusted way.

The two issues on this thread, the governments pursuit of despotism and the public appathy towards it are maddening but without the appathy it wouldn't be happening.

My old man always used to say that the TV was a mind control device designed to keep us passive and our eyes off the ball. I always used to think he was a paranoid cornish communist, I'm beggining to think he was right

 

[belboid]

hardly new is it? Plato wrote about those people who would rather sit around at 'home' watching the shadows from the flickering flames rather than venturing out into the world, over 2000 years ago!

Of course, those shadows are rather more interesting and inventive than eastenders these days, but that's another fishkettle

 

[Slurp]

Reading those speeches inparticular and the rest of this thread has made me emotional in an angry, scared, disgusted way.

The two issues on this thread, the governments pursuit of despotism and the public appathy towards it are maddening but without the appathy it wouldn't be happening.

My old man always used to say that the TV was a mind control device designed to keep us passive and our eyes off the ball. I always used to think he was a paranoid cornish communist, I'm beggining to think he was right

I have faith in the Brits to become uppety, in a Captain Manwaring sort of way, when really threatened.

But they need to have their backs to the wall. This means their own wives, daughters and friends being directly threatened, i.e. locked up on the whim of a spook.

 

[Slurp]

Plus there's no tradition in Britain of the general population giving the state a bloody nose every 5 years or so. Unlike, say, France...

 

[Donna Ferentes]

the final paragraph of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (written in about 1937)

There are similar passages in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and News From Nowhere.

It might not be all that encouraging to say "it has always been this bad!" but it has, usually: and eventually it gets better for a while. Most of the second half of the nineteenth century was much like this - and that was after the riots and uprisings of the first half. Imagine how disillusioning that was.

For what it's worth, it is much easier to expound leftwing ideas now that it was in the late Eighties, where you were hounded through the Labour movement (we had one, then) for rocking the boat if you so much as opened your socialist mouth - which would apparently make you responsible for the 1983 and 1987 election defeats and so on. That's one reason why the Blairites are so arrogant, because they cut their teeth in a party without real debate, where they got what they want just for the saying so.

It's easier now, in some ways - but with no organiastion to back it up, no real Labour Party any more to speak up for society against individual greed, with a whole generation (or two) having grown up without even knowing what a trade union is. So no surprise if hopelessness and ignorance and apathy are the main characteristics of politics today. No wonder the rightwing press seem to have public opinion at their mercy. Even those who stand against them have no confidence in their cause, because we have no real organisation, no numbers to back it up. The physical disappearance of socialist ideas is something I've noticed over the last two decades. There used to be a leftwing bookshop in every major town, trade union offices were easily located, Labour Party offices too. What is there now?

But, you know, one way or another, it has nearly always been this bad...

 

[FreddyB]

Plus there's no tradition in Britain of the general population giving the state a bloody nose every 5 years or so. Unlike, say, France...

That makes me feel loads better.

Some kind of fucking bollocks the whole thing is. It really grips my shit that there isn't a terrorist threat, or at least anything like a threat that justifies throwing the whole concept of freedom (or what's left of it) out of the window.

So why do they want these powers, <insert any kind of loonspud conspiracy here it wouldn't be any more incredible than whats happening> .

We will be unquestioning drones happily supplying our labour without organising ourselves to protect our rights or we will be locked up at home.

<mental note to listen to my old man more, he's starting to make sense>

 

[poster342002]

It might not be all that encouraging to say "it has always been this bad!" but it has, usually: and eventually it gets better for a while.

Unfortunately that doesn't really make me feel better, since it shows that whilst things may look up once in a while, they'll only slump back again.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Yeah, I know. There were a lot of people who were radicalised when they were young in the Sixties who found the Eighties and Nineties very hard to take indeed.

But if that was hard, imagine what it was like for the people who saw 1848 turn into jingoism and working-class Toryism. Or the people who saw the great rtikes of the early twentieth century turn into the Great War.

But in each case, what got worse eventually got better...

 

[poster342002]

Yeah, I know. There were a lot of people who were radicalised when they were young in the Sixties who found the Eighties and Nineties very hard to take indeed.

But if that was hard, imagine what it was like for the people who saw 1848 turn into jingoism and working-class Toryism. Or the people who saw the great rtikes of the early twentieth century turn into the Great War.

But in each case, what got worse eventually got better...

I think this time things are worse in that there isn't any sort of working class movement to stand in the way of this reaction - and nor is there likely to be one due to the nature of the way working and employment structures have been reshaped and manipulated by the ruling classes over the last 25 years - and the wholesale collusion in this of the leaderships of the workers' movements that made it possible. All that currently passes for mass opposition to capitalism and imperialism is reactionary religious fundamentalism. What a choice. What a prospect.

 

[Barking_Mad]

My old man always used to say that the TV was a mind control device designed to keep us passive and our eyes off the ball. I always used to think he was a paranoid cornish communist, I'm beggining to think he was right

'Satan's Dream Box' as Bill Hicks calls the tv.

Problem with tv is that it rarely makes you think. It encourages passiveness and you to empty your brain and emote on a very basic level. I can (obivously) only speak from personal experience, but only recently have I become really aware of this to the point where I cant take half of the stuff seriously and the other half is beneath contempt. Very rarely is there something really worth watching.

As an example of this disconnection I was watching the tsunami on the tv over the christmas period and I suspect like most people who saw it was quite deeply moved. After about half an hour that particular night I flicked from BBC News 24 to ITV and was greeted by Chris Tarrant offering someone the chance to win £1m on Who Wants to Be A Millionairre.

Out of what I can only assume was morbid horror I flicked back and forth between the two channels for a good 5 minutes - people dying, someone winning money - people dying someone winning money - Chris Tarrant handing over a £125,000 cheque, bloke with no house......

I felt my skin creep at the idea that someone could win a million quid for answering a question correctly whilst others had just lost what very little they had in the first place. I know it might be obvious and I really cant write down exactly how I felt because I dont have the words to emote how totally fucked up it all seemed. And I know, people will say, "That's life" but thats just acceptance of living in a shit hole and Id like to think we all might be able to change that........so back to square 1 again.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

I think this time things are worse in that there isn't any sort of working class movement to stand in the way of this reaction - and nor is there likely to be one due to the nature of the way working and employment structures have been reshaped and manipulated by the ruling classes over the last 25 years - and the wholesale collusion in this of the leaderships of the workers' movements that made it possible. All that currently passes for mass opposition to capitalism and imperialism is reactionary religious fundamentalism. What a choice. What a prospect.

Well, that's not entirely true. There's more organisation today than there was, say, for just about the whole of the aforementioned second half of the nineteenth century. If they try and mess about with pensions or the retirement age, it'll be the unions who do the fighting back.

I'm not overstating it, but bear it in mind.

And bear in mind also that across much of the developing world, trades unionism is a growing and militant force. Again, I wouldn't overdo it - I'm a lifelong pessimist - but it has much potential.

 

[poster342002]

Well, that's not entirely true. There's more organisation today than there was, say, for just about the whole of the aforementioned second half of the nineteenth century. If they try and mess about with pensions or the retirement age, it'll be the unions who do the fighting back.

I'm not overstating it, but bear it in mind.

I suspect they'll end up delivering the workers' to the wolves as usual in the end. There's even less grassroots pressure (certainly no means of applying it: vote out one Gen Sec and you'll just get another who'll do the same - and they know it) upon the leaderships than ever before.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

vote out one Gen Sec, you'll get another who'll do the same and they know it

Like Reamsbottom/Serwotka?

They might, but why write them off so easily? When they're the largest and most powerful force we've got? Why be so negative? What's the point?