The idea that Westminster will have English MPs voting on English issues is entirely unacceptable. England like Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland needs its own national assembly and government not a 'special interests section' at Westminster. Like other countries in the UK - England must have a separate parliament/national assembly with a fair and proportional voting system and probably it should be based in Birmingham or Manchester rather than London. It is not (as the government is happy to suggest today in the wake of their Scottish independence nightmare) an Anglisised bolt-on for the profoundly undemocratic and irretrievably corrupt Westminster set-up which has clearly exceeded its use by date if not its sell by date.
This unweildy, clumsy cobbled together sop to popular engagement that David Cameron is now talking about - an English section of the British parliament - is a further symptom of the unhinging of the UK as a concept whatever spin the unionists try to put on it. What Mr Cameron hopes to retrieve from this near miss is the founding of a Tory reich of a thousand years based upon the way the UK politcal arrangements have been stitched up by bankers, civil service apparatchiks and their political mannequins since 1707.
Yesterday we saw a democratic revolution in Scotland whether we like the outcome of it or not, we saw large-scale popular engagement in localised issues which is something that could never happen under the Westminster/Whitehall alliance, because it would be smothered by all the paraphenalia of the British state. The UK has already unravelled and broken down simply because the Scottish referendum would not have been possible if it hadn't, so all the crocodile tears and sighs of relief about saving the nation are somewhat belated I'm afraid.
The Scottish referendum shows how the people can and will choose for themselves and the fact that a massive 45% of them voted against the constant propaganda and brainwashing campaign in the UK corporate media and by the BBC in particular, is a triumph of resilience and self confidence to which we should all take our hats off I think. Given the glittering parade of shallow inconsequential celebrities and clueless stars who supported the UK campaign which Kim Jong-un would have been proud of, I congratulate those who saw through the corporate global spin and made the posh boys and head girls in London sweat a bit. David Cameron's desperate "passion" was like a sketch from a fringe event at the Edinburgh Festival, he hasn't squealed so much since he was last 'roasted' by the big boys at Eton.
THAT is the real victory of the Yes campaign in Scotland and there will be no going back from it now the taste of political blood has sharpened appetites for fundamental change from the grassroots up all across the British Isles.
So... if you live in England and you don't relish the prospect of living in a Tory/UKIP/Disney dystopia, a fiefdom of one-party posh transatlantic managerialism that would have had George Orwell waking up screaming - you must support home rule for England. That message is now getting out and rebounding back in a growing tide of public opinion amongst the 84 per cent of the UK population, the citizens of England the vast majority who are increasingly saying YES to a voice and NO to any more lame manipulation and trickery from Westminster.
If we truly value the historic freedoms of England we must now add our voices to the demand for an English National Assembly and take the Scots democratic victory to the next logical level.
If the majority in the UK are disempowered and disadvantaged... which in the case of un-devolved England they indisputably are... the political system has obviously failed and clearly needs urgent and radical correction. Politically speaking that will be the next big job for the majority of people living in Britain today, well done Scotland for showing the way, but its time now for the resurrection of an independent Republic of England taking a lead as the majority in the dismantling of the [dis]United Kingdom and the creation of a viable federation of regions of Europe in its place in 21st century England and amongst all its Celtic neighbours.
Nato are in Wales planning to screw us all with the help of the Caliphate of America and the Zionist/Wahabi Coalition of raving nutters, torturers and Ukrainian neo-nazi crime bosses. Where are sink holes when you need them? Fracking useless! Here is Deek and all the courageous reporters of the truth only doing their best for us all down at FKN Newz.
We are entering the great political game show again here in the English shires we are going to have local and European elections on 22nd May. This year's procedings have been dominated by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and its leader Nigel Farage, a media constructed bloke of the people whose serial publicity stunts have repeatedly grabbed headlines over the past couple of weeks. Mr Farage is being served up by the corporate media as a sort of anti-politician, a straight talking English bloke who smokes fags and sinks pints of real ale. I should perhaps point out here that the colloquialism fag has different meanings in different parts of the Anglosphere, its use here is in the British sense of the term i.e. a slang term for cigarettes. Although a merchant banker by trade Farage's media image hovers somewhere between bookie and a dodgy estate agent.
UKIP has attracted to it a strange coalition of tabloid reading mostly white working class floating voters to outraged tory eurosceptics who think we're being overun by muslims, Romanians, gays, tree huggers and do-gooders of all sorts, people who want to see antisocial children birched in public and paedophiles hung drawn and quartered, as well as all immigrants sent packing of course. They want out of the EU and independence for Little Britain to be all on its own in the shining emerald sea.... safe from everything except itself, the rag taggle army of lunatics and misfits that stand for the UKIP advertising crusade.
The current Nigel Frarage show represents the turning of a stereotypical Daily Mail reader into a living actor in a way not seen since Alf Garnett in Til Death Do Us Part went in the opposite dramaturgical direction in Britain's glittering media celebtocracy dream farm.
This political pastiche has become popular in Britain during the period of the unelected Con Dem coalition's so-called ahem, rule.
London Mayor and Bullingdon Club buffoon Boris Johnson is a similar such construct, politicians in clowns clothing a silly 'novelty act' to reassure a population sick of politicians in general that some of them are genuine celebrities despite their calling.
The Farage Show could equally be called the Mirage Show and essentially represents a populist putsch by the Conservative Party right wing. The fact that the Daily Mail and other corporate media infotainment outlets create the stories for Farage and his UKIP band of swivel eyed loons - as David Cameron famously called them (he should know) - to act out on TV. It is a perfect symbiosis of advertising and political manipulation that will possibly give UKIP some short-term gains, a part of me hopes that it does because Farage and UKIP is a strategy with a built in obsolescence factor. They cannot do anything but disappoint all the desperate people who give them their support in the belief that this really will break the mould of British politics, it won't. It is and generally remains rotten to the core.
UKIP can only disappoint its supporters because all it really is, is repackaged Tory euroscepticism. It will fall apart in short order and is of course designed to do just that after the coup in the Conservative Party has been effected lurching it even further right and with it all the mainstream partied on the British will lurch further to the right......UKIP is a con, an pyramid selling type scam effected by merchant bankers via the tabloid press spivs that make disinformation the daily diet of the uninformed.
English republicrats are not duped by these advertising techniques, but rather they stand to make gains from the rise and (I predict) the rapid fall of UKIP as a political entity in England today. Personally as a lifelong communicipalist active in the civic arena I look forward to the novice UKIP counsellors replacing some of my more dogged oponents amongst the established political old guard. To see a few of the ancien regíme grandees knocked off by UKIP would not harm anyone in the short term. The skills developed in communicipalism will be useful for dealing with the new intake and for testing their mettle before their feet even touch the council chamber floor. UKIP in local government will walk straight into ambushes that are already in place and awaiting the unwary toen hall neophytes, these mantraps (that work on women too) were crafted out of decades of community activism and the politics and propaganda of the deed.
All UK party-politics is a waste of time and energy. English separatists are not interested in standing for election to British state institutions. The concept of Britain is well past its sell by date anyway as political devolution empowers everyone in every part of these islands except the overwhelming majority. The over 80 per cent of the population of the British Isles who live in England, a country without a government or a parliament... a country run by outsiders and insiders but without any true voice of its own. A country that supports a monarchy even though the people have been impoverished by globalism and the only excuse for a government we currently have includes 98 non English MPs out of a total of 600 in the Commons. Almost one sixth of politicians in Westmnister making laws exclusively for England are elected elswhere and are not answerable for their voting record in England to their own electorates..
This is sheer madness, it is the reason that the United Kingdom is a complete misnomer it is not in the slightest united and since 1953 it has had no king. The UK should be called the DQ the disintergrating queendom.
The role of MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the UK
Parliament has become increasingly unacceptablel now that there are devolved
legislatures and administrations in those areas, responsible for
subjects such as education, housing and health deriving budgets from a communal pot in which England is the perpetual loser..
The so-called West Lothian Question (or English Question) asks why MPs from
the non-English parts of the UK can vote on all English matters, while
English MPs cannot generally vote on Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish
domestic matters (which have largely become the responsibility of their respective
devolved bodies).
One answer proposed by the unreconstructed Westminster UK constitutionalists is to have English votes and an English interest section in the British parliament,....what a bloody insult that is.
It is obviously only a sop and would continue to keep England under the control of Atlanticist governments lacking any national fealty or commitment to the population of England and whose first and only interest is the prosperity of their corporate sponsors..
Although by far the greatest contributors to tax revenue the English face lower public spending than in any other part of the UK. The current arrangements are deeply unfair, public spending per
head is 18% higher in Scotland and 16% higher in Wales than in England. According to the Financial Time (October 3, 2013) people
living in Wales and Northern Ireland pay about a quarter less tax than
people living in England, according to official figures that highlight
the big differentials in wealth and income throughout the UK.
The time is now to call a halt to this skewed situation. It is time England had its own independence from the UK and all of its political apologists like UKIP and th Nigel Mirage Show.We don't need any more bankers helping us thanks all the same Nigel. We don't need to be part of an independent United Kingdom which is an utterly meaningless concept anyway, an empty slogan and advertisinjg hook intended to ensnare the poltically naive in a banker-led reallignment in the Conservative Party, an outdated British institution and rusting relic of the long dead empire.
I support the English republican cause. England can't afford to subsidise British royalty, it is another luxury left over from a by-gone Age that has no place in the future of England. Neither do we need London to be the capital of the Republic of England, it can have a ceremonial role such as the home of the British Experience theme park for example, but as a capital London has become spoilt goods.
The future capital of the English Republic should be either Birmingham or Manchester with regional capitals in the northeast, northwest, central, southeast and southwest regions replacing county councils and devolving powers to the municipalities - i.e. confederated communicipalism in action.
In England today no other political cause is any longer meaningful, they all boil down to a capitulation to Atlanticist globalising corporatism that is strangling our ancient nation and the historic liberties gained over amore than a thousand years of struggle.. UKIP is just another agent of the ongoing insidious attack upon the English identity and an entrist for Pax Americana and another barrier to a soveriegn England able to play its historic part in a wider European people's patchwork confederation of the regions.
Yesterday I was at Birmingham Museum and
Art Gallery looking at and yet again marvelling over the Staffordshire
Hoard....a discovery that has changed our view of the so-called Dark Ages in the British Isles between the Roman's finally leaving these shores completely in 450 AD and the arrival of the Norman invaders in 1066 - or to some historians considerably later than that.
For
many years now I have argued against the idea that there was ever
really a Dark Age in Britain and although by the end of Roman rule the
country was certainly in turmoil with multiple violent incursions by the Picts, the
Angles, the Jutes, the Saxons and the Irish (i.e. the proto-Scots)...it was open season in the struggle to take over these southern fertile lands that later became known as Engla Land....and later still England.
The first point to note
here I think is that later official histories and national mythmakers suggest the period between the two Conquests must have been dark and a cessation of civilisation in these islands because they could not see (or were blind to) any evidence of the complex culture of Saxon England during the period that resulted in the country being eventually founded by King Athelstan as a unified nation state in 927.
This is a theory that doesn't any longer stand up, if indeed it ever did?
The so-called Dark Ages
were not only about events taking place in Britain but also in Europe as a whole in what I have come to view as the imperial history of Britain and the world. According to Wikipedia for example... the Dark
Ages was "originally the term (which) characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or
roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness
between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of theItalian Renaissancein the 14th century." This wider definition is from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the arrival of modernity and the origins of capitalism after the collapse of feudalism in late Medieval Britain. However... when the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today says Wikipedia, "it is
intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of
the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical
records compared with both earlier and later times."
Imperial historiography has a history going back at least as far as Cornelius Tacitus [c. AD 56 – after 117] who was a politican (senator) and a foremost historian of the early Roman Empire and one of the very few sources of contemporaneous information about ancient Britain and its inhabitants, although it must be remembered for Tacitus and for Romans in general, Britain was the ideologicical counterpoint to Rome, the land of Barbarians on the edge of the world. The origin of the noble savage that fascinated and repelled Romans in equal measure, was a sort of imagined ancient Manson Family living in a world devoid of luxury, taste and sophistication and illogically in Roman terms, determined to defend their backwardness even to the death. Britons were the Roman untermenschen with a role in their empire not much different to that of the negro in the much more recent British empire whose founders ironically were thought of as less than fully human by the Roman occupying power at the time. Britain served as a perfect foil to Rome in Tacitus's day that demonstrated just how comfortable and superior the Roman urban elite saw themselves to be in contrast with the barabrians of the far northern isles. Here we find the origins of the 'Light of Rome' theory which contrasted with the assumed darkness that must have happened when that light was finally extinguished in these wild and distant hinterlands of the Roman Empire, according to the official (school/popular culture) history that was hegemonic throughout Britain's own imperial period and in its immediate aftermath.
Modern history and archaeology has progressively disconfirmed the alleged darkness of the period beyond any hope of it retaining any usefulness as a concept today, but nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in the
Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009 in a field in Hammerwich in the English Midlands, the old Anglo-Saxon
Kingdom of Mercia, or the modern county of south Staffordshire.
FACTIOD
As it happens, I used to live in Burntwood, about a
mile from where this treasure was discovered and during the mid-1970s I
used to pass it every day (obviously unbeknownst to me) on my way to
work on the railway in Walsall, a nine mile bicycle ride away. I am
still slightly shocked that this treasure was almost on my doorstep
where it had lain for about 1300 years when I lived in south
Staffordshire during the early to mid 1970s, all the time lying just below the surface of a local field I passed almost every day. Such treasure was so close (to me) and yet for every generation since it was buried and right up almost to now... so very far away.
Makes me wonder what treasure still lies undiscovered beneath our feet?
Here is what I failed to discover but am pleased that now it has come to light we know much more about Mercia and Anglo-Saxon England during the transition from paganism to christianity, a cultural revolution in progress captured in a time capsule that is the Staffordhire Hoard.....Enjoy!
The political scene across the British archipelago has not been as complex nor fractious as it is now since universal suffrage giving (almost) all adults (over 21 years old) the vote irrespective of sex, income or property ownership finally became law in 1928. One problem we have here is an identity issue, who are we? This question is less problematic for our Celtic neighbours, the national identities of the Scots, or Welsh is better defined than that of the English. In Northern Ireland at the opposite end of the spectrum rigid national and cultural identities have at times in its history threatened to tear the place apart. We all have multiple nationalities we are citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the UK), we are also British and also seperately English, (Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish). There is a tendency for some people to use the terms English and British interchangeably and although this is incorrect it is not uncommon in many parts of the Anglosphere.
Then there is the mythology that imagines Great Britain is some ancient land whose history reaches back into the mists of time, the land of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and all that, this is largely a construct of Hollywood and Britain's own popular culture and fiction throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Great Britain loosely came into being with the arrival of James Stuart as king of Scotland and England in 1603 and whose court was in London.
The concept and actuality of Great Britain wasn't completely formalised until the Acts of Union cemented Scottish accession to rule from London in 1707.
The United Kingdom itself didn't come about until 1801 when the island of Ireland was absorbed into the union which is where it remained until 1922.
Some argue that plain old Britain without the Great refers only to England and Wales. The union of these countries can be said to have taken place when a Welsh dynasty the Tudors descended from Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr, that ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms, including the Lordship of Ireland, later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1485 until 1603. (Wikipedia)
During that Tudor period the Principality of Wales came to an end as a legally defined territory and was formally annexed to England with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542.
Today England is by far the most populous of the countries that comprise the British isles with about 84% of the population of the United Kingdom living here. The name England comes from the Anglo-Saxon Engla Land or land of the Angles, the Germanic peoples who started to populate southern Britain in the 5th century AD. It is I think an interesting fact in the face of officially sanctioned xenophobia giving rise over the last few years to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) an extreme rightwing coalition of conservative eurosceptics, neo-fascists and readers of tabloid newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, who would I think be deeply shocked and offended to discover the simple fact that England was actually originally created by immigrants.
Not only was England established by immigrants, but its language is a mongrel tongue comprising of loanwords borrowed from many different donor languages and constructed on a framework of archaic Germanic roots.
England is a construct of incomers after the Romans departed Brittania, they were mostly economic migrants and settlers coveting the fertile lands of the south and east of the British mainland, some of whom had first arrived as mercenaries and auxillaries of the now gone Romans and they just stayed and settled down here.
However, the ethnic makeup was already a mix of Romano British, Brythonic and various other ethnicities some of whom first arrived with the Romans between 55 BC until 450AD when they finally left British shores to address the crisis at home. The Celtic nations to the west and north including Picts, Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Irish and to the southwest the Bretons also had a presence in what was to become England. In the southeast the Belgae from what is now northern France and Belgium had a signifcant foothold in Kent. Waves of subsequent immigration has enriched the cultural canvas upon which the idea of England has been painted and added complex patterns to the tapestry of English life, and all that from well before the word go as well!
Add into the pot the Danes and we see a very diverse population in the territory that became England even before its actual existence as a distinct national entity. The Anglo-Saxons had seven minor kingdoms (the Heptarchy) that with the exception of Wessex, were all devastated and eventually overrun by Viking incursions and by the establishment of Danelaw during the period sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages roughly between the years of 500 and 850AD.
The Scandinavian languages of the Danelaw areas and the Viking invaders brought about the first lexical enrichment of the proto-English language's Anglo-Frisian base, so English is not only a hotch-potch of other languages mostly
from the Indo-European family but, during the 7th
and 8th centuries it comprised of at least four distinct dialects, which were the founding pillars of the language we are using here to communicate now.
Northumbrian in Northumbria, north of the Humber
Mercian in the Kingdom of Mercia
West Saxon in the Kingdom of Wessex
Kentish in Kent
From these small linguistic acorns great linguistic oaks really did grow. English currently has about 300 million native speakers worldwide and is the official or co-official language of 45 different countries. Around another 300 million people are using English as a second language and somewhere in the region of 100 million people who use English as a foreign language in the world today.
19 Days of Freedom
England was founded when The English lands were again unified in the 10th century in a reconquest completed by King Athelstan in 927. Although the Norse threat did not go away and was not roundly defeated by the Saxons until the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066. It is one of English history's supreme ironies that very soon after the final defeat of the Viking armies, followed the defeat of the recenly victorious Anglo-Saxon army and King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, from whence began the Norman Conquest, just 19 days after the decisive defeat of the Norsemen at Stamford Bridge.
Since those times England and the English have been under the control of a succession of non-English dynasties, the Normans, the Frankish House of Anjou (the Angevins), the Anglo-French Plantagenet dynasty, the Welsh House of Tudor, the Scottish Stuart dynasty, the Dutch House of Orange, the German Hannoverians including the thoroughly German pedigree of the current incumbent of the British throne, HRH Queen Elizabeth II.
There is then a reading of history that says England is a country that was invented by immigrants and ruled by foreigners for the best part of the last thousand years. Nothing much has changed. In 2014 England has no parliament, no government and no independent existence of its own.
The former Kingdom of England existed from 927 until 1707, so for a period of 780 years, whereas the United Kingdom has been in existence for about 307 years but is now faltering under the multifaceted pressure of globalisation, regionalism, economic decline and political devolution on the celtic fringes which has left England completely high and dry. English nationalism is not as I have attempted to briefly sketch here - a simple matter. It isn't simple now and it has never been simply a question of racial or ethnic integrity, in that sense the situation in England is much more akin to America than such ethnically homogenous countries as say Japan, or both of the Korea's at the other extreme.
As DNA studies alone have clearly shown, all notions of race and ethnicity are social constructs but obviously very significant ones, particularly in England at the present time for a whole combination of reasons.
England has had to reinvent itself in the wake of political devolution in the UK since 1999 which has given rise to a Scottish Parliament (which had previously gone into voluntary liquidation in 1707) a Welsh Assembly and a National Assembly for Northern Ireland.
The UK parliament in London comprises of elected representatives from all parts of United Kingdom that are making laws for England over which we the citizens of this country have no control, while the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs have no accountability to anyone for the decisions they make about England alone because they do not apply to their own electorates at home and have no effect upon their popularity with the voters that elect them to Westminster.
The British unwritten constitution resembles something from Alice in Wonderland fully replete with grandiose theatricals, but with no real substance and set against the now imminent prospect of Scottish Independence (or at the very least devolution-max) it is increasingly meaningless and has sadly descended further into the realms of the absurd. So here are the basic fundamentals of English nationalism, a concept many right-thinking people shrink away from because of the risk that it might sound a bit fascistic. No such qualms automatically attach to Celtic nationalisms you will note, but when uttered by English nationalists suddenly the terms become suspect?... So I think we have to be clear about a few things. First is that English nationalism, if it is to represent the spirit of the nation cannot be anything other than multicultural. All of England's history demands that and it is indelibly inscribed upon the very bedrock of the people as reflected in the origins and the evolution of the English language. That is to say, it is and must be a nationalism that recognises it co-exists with many other nationalisms and is not afraid to embrace ethnic and cultural diversity in a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance. Its the English way. Xenophobia is not only unpatriotic but profoundly ahistorical, as the 20th century demonstrated in England and indeed across all of Britain, fascism has been rightly regarded as a rather continental excess of sentimental irrationality.... or if not - just downright evil.
Here is a link to a 2012 pamphlet on English political self determination called The Dog That Finally Barked; England as an Emerging Political Community a discussion paper published by the Institute for Public Policy Research.
England was the First and is Now the Last Colony of the British Empire
The most pressing political issue in England today is the question of Home Rule. It is clear from the experience of the Scots that we will never get anywhere until England has its own parliament which in my view, must be located just about anywhere other than in London. England is very strongly regional and its regions must be represented fairly in the English parliament which is impossible unless it establishes a seat well away from Westminster and all the trappings of the failed British state. The English comprise of everyone who lives in England irrespective of cultural or ethnic background and whose interests are bound up with future of the country in Europe and in the world. Our closest political allies are the Scots, Welsh and Irish separatists, it is yet another irony that we are perhaps now more united in our desire to achieve local autonomy than we were as constituents of this outdated imperial throw-back that is the UK today.
The constitutional form of an independent England I would prefer is a republic with greatly devolved powers to the localities, but whatever form a reinvented England takes, it will have its own interests within the wider European community and on a regional basis so that a direct link between let's say the English West Midlands and the Spanish region of Catalonia would be possible without any direct reference to, or involvement of either Spain or the United Kingdom.
A Europe of confederated regions, or to use EU-speak full blown subsidiarity and devolution of decision making to the most appropriate level, a Europe of the regions of which England will one day have a place in its own right. I suggest that this is the model for English nationalism, which is more or less indistinguishable from English regionalism which gives us Geordies, Scousers, Brummies and a whole host of other local allegencies, identities and rivalries (especially in sport).
There is a new national agenda for England which has nothing directly to do with Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland nor anywhere else for that matter, whether an idependent England would apply to join the British Commonwealth would be a matter for debate and discussion. Of course it is quite possible that the secession of England from the Union would cause the implosion of the Commonwealth and the fizzling out of any last vestiges of a long gone empire anyway.
The people of England cannot continue to have no meaningful political voice within Britain and Europe, there is a cultural revolution gaining impetus in this country that has been forced to stop ignoring its own history and culture and to seriously question who are the English and what is England all about?
Some of what I am referring to is captured here in a song, A Place Called England performed (a touch ironically in Antwerp, Belgium) by its composer Maggie Holland. It is an anthem of the pastoral revolution with roots as deep as the 17th century Diggers, its about gardening and allotments growing produce... which in a supermarket economy and consumer culture like ours, is I think a revolutionary act in itself. Enjoy!
George Galloway of the Respect Party gives a view here that is actually quite popular and widespread across Britain whatever the BBC might want us to believe. Because Britain is a three headed one-party-state the views expressed here are suppressed and marginalised in the mainstream British media.
Fortunately however, RT gives a platform for the views that thousands of British people subscribe to today below the official radar and generally out of sight of the infotainment news industry.
So here then is another view from another Britain to the one that is pimped by the BBC and its friends and presented to the world as the way we are.
This is yet another part of the story from inside the UK that you won't get from the mainstream corporate media here or probably anywhere in the English speaking world.
From the very beginning it was clear to me that the events that took place in the United States on 11 September
2001 were not what they were claimed to be at the time nor since that fateful day. You don't have to be a
conspiracy theorist to see that a repeated and drawn out multi-event
airborne attack on America would under normal circumstances have caused air
defences to have been scrambled.
However, back in 2004 the 9/11 Commission determined
that on the morning of September 11, the
FAA did not adequately notify NORAD of the hijackings of Flights 11,
175, 77 or 93 in time for escort aircraft to reach the hijacked
flights. This to me was the first and most obvious flaw in the official alibi.
I smelt a rat almost immediately when the first shock of the events had worn
off and what happened could be reviewed and analysed in retrospect. Why were the F-15s
not scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base just 10 miles from Washington
DC when the Pentagon came under attack and still no interceptors turned up...who exactly
do they think they are kidding? After all:-
These were
well-practiced hijack routines. With more than 4,500 aircraft continuously
sharing US airspace, between September 2000 and June 2001 the Pentagon
launched fighters on 67 occasions to escort wayward aircraft. [FAA news release, Aug 9, 2002; Associated Press Aug 13, 2002]
Not on 9/11 though oddly enough. Since
then the evidence has slowly and painstakingly emerged that really demonstrates beyond
any possible shadow of a doubt that the official 9/11 account is fabricated and in every important detail
completely untrue. I think this has had an interesting effect upon the
corporate media propaganda outlets worldwide who like our own dear old BBC are locked into a
lie they simply cannot escape from. The secret has long been out of course, so these
broadcasters cannot stop repeating the disinformation that has led to
their collapse in credibility. The BBC who reported the impossible
collapse of Building Seven more than 20 minutes before it actually happened has so much egg all over its face that even complicity in the Jimmy Savile
paedophile scandal could not erase the stain.
The majority of world opinion now knows that every BBC
newscaster, every previously respected interviewer is a bare faced liar and
this has done untold damage to the Beeb and many other mainstream
media channels.
It is not only the media that has lost credibility here however,
it is also the government and indeed the whole 'establishment' all
shamefacedly repeating lies that no thinking person can possibly believe and very few
non-thinking person's ever actually hear or even care about.
F-15 an obvious missing link in the 9/11mass murder and robbery trail
Here
is a somewhat more reliable source of information in my view, simply
because unlike the official story it is logical and makes sense. In a
crime as well planned and executed as this one, naturally no one account can be
said to be 100 per cent accurate. I don't really think that can be said
about any man-made construct least of all a forensic investigation into a
network of lies, disinformation and false trails laid by a powerful
gang of international criminals.
But I am happy that there are enough
known facts in the video below to make it by the very same
balance of probabilities that finds the BBC wanting, there is truth in this, a more
accurate and well researched account than anything we'll ever hear from
Jeremy Paxman about 9/11 on Newsnight or anyone on anywhere else on British television.
The stratas of disinformation makes the study of modern America, the self appointed world government residing there and
the biggest crime of not just this, but any century... very much akin to prehistoric events shrouded by
time and covered by detritus.
The only way we can put the global role of America today into a proper historical context is to adopt an archaeological perspective and scrape away
each layer of implausability to reveal what really took place before,
during and after 9/11.
I think this film helps to assemble the findings
to date from a variety of forensic historians, scientist, engineers,
aviation experts and other interested parties and place them into some sort of logical order.
I think conspiracy
theories are always pretty easy to spot and there are a few doing the rounds as always of course,
but this isn't one of them... it is in my view a short film well worth watching for any student of world events and geopolitics.
Maybe
you don't agree with some aspects of the story presented here. I would be interested
to hear which specifics people think are contentious in this report and why that is, but the
evidence is really now so strong that the account we have here is a closer approximation to
the truth than anything you'll ever find in the corporate mainsteam media.
The ultimate result of 9/11 has been a massive, global and ever
spreading legitimation crisis for the tumbling house of lies that can never tell
the truth, but still tries to rather pathetically I think profess authority and insights that informed opinion just does not share. One of the side
effects has been that organisations like the BBC have seen their
propaganda value significantly degraded and have largely been neutralised as an effective propaganda mouthpiece of the British government and by proxy its Washington overseers.
I
don't usually post videos of this length (39 minutes) which I realise
is quite a big ask in the short attention span environment most blogs are designed for, but I really think it is well
worth watching it, for the concise literature review it provides of what is actually known
of that momentous event in a distant (some say mythical) land of democratic America in the days before
the propaganda machine over played its hand and before the gangster coup of 2001 changed everything. As someone very clever once said just follow the money and you can't go wrong.
One of the founding principles of the Transition Movement is the
concept of 'sticky money' preventing a flight of capital from
localities. It is time for us to take back our communities and to create
financial self sufficiency as far as that can be achieved. In previous
posts I have written about local currencies in the UK like the Bristol
pound for example.
In the first video I've posted here we have a glimpse into the
Pennsylvania Public Bank project which gives an opportunity for local
savers and investors to avoid big Wall Street fraudsters like JP Morgan
Bank and the most reprehensible outfits like Goldman Sachs etc ad nauseum.
Professor
William K Black author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry
(2005) is an expert on corporate fraud and white collar crime “JP
Morgan’s frauds are epic in scale, unprecedented in world history," says Black and he goes on to observe. . .
"in these $23 billion we’re talking about, these are frauds that made
Jamie Dimon and other senior officers incredibly wealthy by creating
fictional income that led to very real bonuses.”
There is however,
something we can do about this greed and criminality at a local and a
regional level, establishing a public bank is one of them as the
Bank of North Dakota demonstrates admirably. In order to progress the development of accountable financial institutions as a way of undermining the broken zombie capitalist
global economy, financial expert Ellen Brown is standing in California
(the world's eighth biggest economy) for the position of State Treasurer on a Green Party ticket.
All people of goodwill can only wish Ellen the very best of luck in taking this strategic position
and halting the progress of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve scam meisters. Meanwhile here is some backround. In a week when economic guru George
Soros has warned that China is now in much the same economic position as the US
was in 2008 before the crash and is now the biggest threat to the
continued existence of global capitalism, the jitters is an appropriate response. Soros is like the angel of death so far as national economies are concerned, so China needs to be worried I think.
Nevertheless this warning comes as a timely
reminder that the only really meaningful solution to these problems lie locally and beyond the
reach of the despicable banksters who have stolen everything from the
people to feather their own tax avoidant nests.
A taste of what is possible in the wreckage of capitalist collapse the next video is a message of hope from the near ghost town of Detroit once the capital of the US automotive industry. It is about sticky money, localised economies and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of catastrophe and economic collapse.
This short film illustrates the concept of spontaneous order and self-organisation and provides a glimse of the world after the fall of globalism and the final defeat of the self-styled new world order and the corporate class whose greed and psychopathic violence has dealt so much damage to the world around us.
For a little bit of optimism in the seemingly endless gloom caused by the Wall Street dodgy banking mafia and their hangers-on, here is a tale of resilience and creativity from the ruins of Detroit, a testament to sticky money as a thousand enterprises bloom (to misquote Mao Zedong) in an urban wasteland that looks like something from a disaster movie, almost inconceivable as a reality let's say 5 years ago. Detroit was declared bankrupt on December 3 2013,
with debts totalling $18.5 billion and the city is now under the governance of the state of Michigan.
Stuart McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) died today aged 82 of complications following kidney failure. He has been an important theorist of cultural studies and a significant influence during both my undergraduate and post graduate studies. Our paths ran particularly close in the 1980s but as early as 1968 Stuart Hall became the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) a research centre at the University of Birmingham. At that time I was a mere brat and a member of the Front Against Fascism an anarchist (dis)organisation that spent most of our time reading Kropotkin, spray painting graffiti, marching with the anti-Vietnam war campaign and also with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarment. At that time I knew nothing of professor Hall or his work a couple of miles down the road in Edgbaston, where the campus of Birmingham university was then a place to which I had no right of admittance. As it happens in 1996 I was a postgraduate student at the university for a while but when Stuart Hall started his long and eminent academic career I had no prospect of going to university.
When I did finally gain admittance to higher education in 1980 at Wolverhampton Polytechnic (now the University of Wolverhampton) Stuart Hall was already a luminary and well known (amongst the academic community at least) for his theories on encoding and decoding in cultural communication. He was the director of the CCCS until 1979 when my own academic career was just about to blossom, if that can be said of someone with a second class honours degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in Welfare. Although I've chalked up a few more letters since then at rather more luminescent institutions, this was the best educational experience of my life bar none, although it was also suffused with what seems now to have been s bouts of debauchery... of one sort or another.
Stuart Hall was initially interesting to me because he was the director of The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies concerned particularly with such topics as subcultures, popular culture and critical theory which I as a native of Birmingham remained nearby, in the heart of the Black Country studying much the same things.
I have never actually met Stuart Hall, although I have seen him on a platform at a Marxism Today event.
He was nevertheless an important person to me at the time and I have always counted him as ultimately an ally, so that is why I'm typing this now in his memory.
There is considerably less than six degrees of separation between Stuart Hall and me. For starters during the early 1980s we were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, we both knew journalists on Marxist Today magazine and had chewed the fat with its editor Martin Jacques and many other neo-Gramcians.... with whom I eventually parted ideological company to endorse municipalism without the need of a vanguard party. I think toward the end of his life Stuart Hall came to a similar opinion, but it is often said that Blairite New Labour were created by the editorial line of Marxism Today and by Stuart Hall in particular, but that's a not fair assessment in my view.
Hall’s sneers at Cool Britannia Tony Blair’s “corporatist
and managerialist style”, his debts to Thatcher ended for Stuart Hall in disillusionment with the remnants of the left in Britain which sets him apart from the odious New Labour project (or capitulaltion).
The discourses and conversations that Stuart Hall sparked off were for me, if nothing else, worth marking the passing of this innovative and important 20th century thinker. One other link I like to imagine I have with Stuart Hall is that he was an essayist and unlike just about every other New Left author he never actually wrote a book.
Stuart Hall was a big part of a synthesis in British sociology incorporating the politics of race, feminism and popular culture and this trend led me to the New Criminology and deviance studies, where all of these themes collided.
During the Thatcher years I was a local unemployed activist who stood on picket lines and squatted derelict schools, burning logs we sat in our squat with academics from Birmingham university, members of the Communist Party and for a while fellow travellers in our resistance to Thatcherism and the corporations that created her.
Eventually we all went our own way, but before that parting took place we had fought Thatcherism on the streets and in the lecture hall, we had done our praxis and we were ready to take on whatever they had got to throw at us and did so at Orgreave, Trafalgar Square, Greenham Common and many other battlefields up and down the land.
Stuart Hall was a big part of that story of resistance, he made what I think are some mistakes in his analysis of hegemony but we were on the same side even though he never actually knew that, I am left here today to say it.
He was a special person was Stuart Hall and today we lost someone all thinking people can identify with, acknowledge and take our collective hats off to. But as he says in the clip I don't think any one thing will tell us who he was... or who we are anymore.
I think today the vast majority of people have come to realise that our governments are wrong.
There is a global groundswell of opinion that is set against the corporations, self appointed "world government" of bankers and the rein of raving madmen and madwomen. Greater Bilderbergia is a mythical empire populated by fantasists, not-quite-right-in-the-head corporate gang masters and their brainwashed peons.
This massive failure of logic and humanity corrupts our governments and institutions, worse still it attacks our populations all around the world. Below I've posted a video that exposes the tip of the global psychopathic iceberg that is our government and the military industrial complex that bankrolls the corruption and squanders all of our scarce resources.
This way of life/death is unsustainable and must now be consigned to the cess pit of history.
We resist this insanity as a wave and as a particle because each can do her or his part to bring about change by a billion small acts across the world. We must keep up the constant drip feed of information that serves to undermine the legitimacy of the military-industrial complex and attack the (misplaced) confidence that mutant capitalism and its accompanying militarism depends upon to survive.
This year sees the centenary in Europe of the so called Great War which like all wars solved nothing and was indeed the Great Con Trick of the robber barons and their political puppets, monarchs and gangsters of one sort or another.
We in the global transition movement are taking this opportunity to debunk the 'official' storyline and show what absolute folly our forebears allowed themselves to be drawn into. Bamboozled, disinformed and indoctrinated both sides set about slaughtering or maiming a whole generation Never again!
In 1914 millions were to die in the "war to end all wars" - now a hundred years later people of goodwill are mobilised globally to call in that huge debt to humanity once and for all.
End the destruction, derail the propaganda of war...and take heart - in this country we are enjoying great success in those anti-war, pro-sanity endeavours.
Despite the best efforts of the propagandists and psyop jockies the petrochemical wars have never achieved any widespread support in the UK, the bomber pilots returning from NATO missions are not seen as heroes just the stand-ins for drones as a more cost effective way of delivering WMD, there is nothing heroic about terror bombing a defenceless country like Libya, its just the latest version of Guernica - same shit just different arseholes - that's all.
We the people through the massive pressure we put on elected politicians forced the UK government to back-down on its plan to attack Syria last year, we can and will do it again now the tide of public opinion has moved decisively in our favour.
This video helps to put our worldwide struggle into the wider perspective.
The penny broadsheet ballad was the gossip mill and the advertising jingle of 17th century England. They reached the peak of popularity in the mid 17th century, by 1660 around 400,000 broadsheets were sold in England each year. The broadside began in the 16th century, from 1556 the Worshipful Company of Stationers a City of London livery company originally founded in 1406, tried for force all ballads to be registered, an early form of copyrighting which saw only about 2,000 ballads recorded during the next 50 years. Broadside ballads sometimes called 'vulgar ballads' to differentiate them from more respectable 'traditional ballads' covered all sorts of subjects from news stories, scandals, drinking and love songs they were the tabloids of their day.
Broadside ballads were an early expression of the printed word, they are a barometer of the progress of the printing industry changing fonts and methods from the 16th until the 19th century when they finally died out with the arrival of newspapers.
The ballads were originally collected into so called chapbooks (the forerunner of the paperback novel) which reached the height of popularity in England during the 18th century and which according to Wikipedia included many different kinds of ephemera, popular or folk literature (that) were published as chapbooks, such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children's literature and almanacs.
In many ways chapbooks were the blogs of their day and they were as Wikipedia points out " an important medium for the dissemination of popular
culture to the common people, especially in rural areas. They were a
medium of entertainment, information and (generally unreliable) history.
They are now valued as a record of popular culture, preserving cultural
artifacts that may not survive in any other form."
One of the most popular and influential chapbooks was Richard Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom (1596), believed to be the source for the introduction of the character St George into English folk plays. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapbooks
What we are seeing here is a social revolution, in England the male literacy rate in the mid 17th century was around 30 per cent, within a hundred years this had doubled to about 60 per cent by the 1750s. All this was taking place in the context of huge social changes in England at the time including civil war, republicanism, regicide, commonwealth, the restoration of the monarchy, population growth, agrarian reforms, industrialisation, urbanisation and the origins of what was to become the British empire.
In the midst of the socio-political maelstrom that characterises 17th century England the broadside ballad documents these changes for the benefit of the working classes. The broadsheets cost between half a penny and a penny during the period under consideration here, so not only do they reflect growing literacy they also reflect increased disposable wealth that would allow the masses to partake in the production and consumption of culture that was unprecedentedly on their own terms and in great numbers.
The birth of popular culture as opposed to folk culture was a by-product of urbanisation and the widening division between life in rural more traditional locations and the attractions and novelties of urban living encountered by the recently transplanted labouring poor.
The Enraged Musician (1741) William Hogarth A ballad seller trying to sell ballads as her baby cries and the boy is urinating before the girl’s startled
gaze
Amongst these new cultural artifacts were the bawdy ballads that were sung outside the doors of brothels and stews in the rapidly expanding towns and cities of late 17th and into the 18th century mostly driven by the enclosure of traditional common lands and the privatisation of agriculture.
If broadside ballads and chapbooks were the early precursors of the blogosphere and the internet, then the bawdy ballads were the pornographic element of social intercourse after the English Restoration.
I am no Royalist (and neither would I have been in the 17th century either)...but the dour miserable puritanism of the Commonwealth era when zealots would hang cats on Monday for killing mice on Sunday was doomed to fail. When the monarchy was restored I think there was a sort of 1960s type social rebellion against the strictures of the over paternalistic and micro managing state, people let their hair down and partied with renewed enthusiasm.
According to the impressive Jack Horntip Collection of folklore in a web based commentary upon the ballad UNDER THE WILLOW SHADE a 17th century drollery he says:-
"As early as 1655, when the Puritan interregnum
still had five years to bind up English merriment, the anti-Puritan underground
felt strong enough to publish the first of a long series of poetic miscellanies
whose primary purpose was to disseminate obscene satirs on Puritanism. Called
"drolleries," these persisted forty years after the Puritans were gone as
vehicles for the publication of songs that had too little literary elevation or
dignity to be printed on their own."
It was the Civil Wars in England (1642–1651) that removed the restrictions on land enclosures so that any landowners became rich through the enclosure of the commons, while
many ordinary folk had a centuries-old right taken away. Land enclosure
has been rightly condemned as a gigantic swindle on the part of large
landowners. An offence that remains unaddressed to this day. In the 17th and 18th centuries drolleries had a lot to be droll about I think.
Bawdy songs are an outpouring of moral laxity underlying pretty risky places to be back then in one of the burgeoning towns and cities as a homeless incomer seeking work, play and entertainment. With around 200 hundred crimes for which you could be hanged, troublesome elements if caught, were rapidly and permanently despatched from the urban landscape. In the insanitary conditions diseases were rife, the Great Plague of London in 1665-66 for example killed an estimated 100,000 people, about 15% of London's population.
Gin fuelled lasciviousness was one of the ways the working classes dealth with the stresses of urbanisation, the social dislocation and the squalid living conditions. Brothels and stews provided a welcome distraction for all who invested in them, but the bawdy and the scandalous were accepted forms of theatrical entertainment in the form of both plays and stand up comedians between scenes that were known as
Jiggs, with their 'scurrilous songs and obscene gestures', Jiggs would act as
appetizers for later pleasures on offer.
By Elizabethan times, the sale of sex was a normal part of the commerce of the capital.. The whitewashed brothels of
Southwark which was then London's red-light district were called "stews" because of their origins as steambath houses. These were actually a throw back to the Romans and it was believed that the steam was a cure for venereal diseases, although it was actually the place where you were most likely to catch them, but there were rivals to the stews. Prostitutes were also active in the theatres of the day which often doubled as profitable brothels and which is how actress became a metaphor for a lady of the night, although on reflection actually it is probably a better description of their trade than is the modern term escort I think.
The bawdy ballad was the advertising jingle performed at competing brothels by singers, the lyrics of which are intended to seduce and deprave the passer-by into allowing curiosity to draw him first in to the premises and then undoubtedly also into one of its occupants at the very least. So the purpose was to inflame the passions in an environment where competition was pretty intense. This led to a competative edge to the ballads each attempting to be more offensive, profane and lecherous than the others. Many people approved. Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch doctor in London in 1724
wrote a defence of public stews, "for the encouraging of public whoring
will not only prevent most of the mischievous effects of the vice," he
said, "but even lessen the quantity of whoring in general and reduce it
to the narrowest bounds which it can possibly be contained in".
Interesting I think that this seems to remain the Dutch view of prostitution today, but not to be diverted from our mission here I think the time might be right at this point to look a little more closely at the music itself.
Fortunately thanks to the diligence and dedication of collectors quite a few of these ballads still exist. A couple of years ago I acquired a CD by The City Waites a group of early music specialists called Bawdy Ballads of Old England: The Mufitians of Grope Lane with some great bawdy broadsides from 17th century England.
Unfortunately there are very few of the songs from the album on YouTube the only one I could find was The Jovial Lass, or Dol and Roger which I have posted here.
The thing that I think is interesting about this song (and this is a feature also seen in other contemporary ballads) is the depiction of country folk as naive simpletons. In this song the hapless Roger has to be instructed by Dol as to what exactly goes where, having abandoned milking her cow to have a romp in the grass with the lad. This I think emphasises the way even the lower orders of city dwellers looked down upon what they perceive to be untutored country bumpkins. Undoubtedly an unfair portrayal in the following case because rural farm workers were I'm sure more clued up about mamalian reproduction than the average city slum dweller, but this is really about attitude and lifestyle.
Roger remains nonplussed throughout the whole episode and is even perplexed by sudden appearance of his own semen, but Dol soon puts him right in the verse that goes:-
"Oh foolish Hodge - tis milk" quoth Dol
"Tis pleasant, tis good , tis neat,
though i would rather stroke a man
than draw on a cow's teat"
Milkmaids like Dol often feature as erotic fantasy figures in English folklore, in the William Hogarth print above The Enraged Musician the central female figure is a milkmaid who incoidentally seems to be based upon Jane Hogarth the artist's wife as the model.
Dol is a common stereotype in these ballads an opportunist sexual predator who spends her otherwise dismal existence craving men to sport and play with her in a devil-may-care... live now pay later...obsession and a sort of desperate gin fueled lust.
This is the voice however of the new savvy urban underbelly of England's city life speaking here in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The ones who have left the countryside far behind them and like thousands of other dispossessed and impoverished landless farm workers who have drifted into towns in search of work and the 'bright lights' ...or at least the red lights of the big city.
The ones who avoided being hanged for one offence or another mixed in an underworld of prostitutes, musicians, actors and actresses, cut-purses and pickpockets. Here balladeers would entice men into the houses of disrepute (which were sometimes just a backroom of a pub) with songs that might make a rapper blush, let alone a God fearing soul.
The tradition of performing bawdy ballads was cocking a snook at puritanism, deriding the countryfolk left behind for their innocence and lack of worldliness. It is a view of the world that gives insight into the emerging urban working classes and the stinking open sewers that many inner city streets were at the time where disease and all manner of hazards to trap the unway or kill the unfortunate.
The bawdy broadside ballad was then a sort of rebel song as well as a ribald song the cocky swagger of the streetwise rake and a celebration of drunkeness, indecency and the supremacy of unbridled lust intended to give the proverbial finger to the Puritan killjoys and their successors that eventually morphed into the Victorian middle class... whose attitudes we are still living with here in England to some significant degree today.
One last song from The City Waites which is not a bawdy ballad but is a broadside ballad called Old England that at least gives an brief opportunity to see this wonderful group in action. Enjoy!
