Thirty years on

2009: Ian Tomlinson
1979: Blair Peach

When Britain turns to Fascist methods, it employs them totally incompetently. And this is the Left at work, too; we are led by people who themselves were on the picket line and putting the "chicks up front" so the "pigs" couldn't clobber the guys.

Toll me back from thee to my sole Self

Just caught a minute of BBC1's Question Time, chaired by the garrulous and self-regarding David Dimbleby. Self-regarding literally, this time, as he watched Will Self lay into the career-crazy fascists of New Labour, who now propose to persecute the unemployed after a decade of encouraging them to remain on benefit. As he says, they had the time, the money and the ideology to sort it out, and they didn't do it; and in some damningly characteristic way, they're slapping people who are down already. Lethal. I may have to start liking the white-nosed sleazebag, after all.

His target is the type who may not have realized that they were driving David Kelly to suicide, but probably don't much care that they did, so long as the trail was brushed. My only concern is that the public generally may be starting to feel as I do, in which case we are entering dangerous territory.

A warning from history

Charles I attempts to arrest five Members of Parliament, 6 January 1642

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

I can't hope to improve on Cranmer's piece regarding Speaker Martin's betrayal of the proudest tradition of his office; I can only echo his cry of "Shame!"

UPDATE

Yet, alas, even Speaker Lenthall had his regrets:

In his will, Lenthall asked to be buried without any state and without a monument, 'acknowledging myself to be unworthy of the least outward regard in this world and unworthy of any remembrance that hath been so great a sinner'. The most he would permit was a plain stone carved with the Latin inscription Vermis sum, which means: I am a worm.

What epitaph will Speaker Martin cause to be inscribed for himself?

Handy-dandy, the pigs are the farmers

Place your political parties in the schema below:At first, I wondered what Hatfield Girl was talking about. Now it's one of the news headlines on the morning radio, and in the papers: the Government has taken to arresting members of the Opposition, like tinpot dictators in faraway countries that it's difficult to believe really exist.

Difficult to believe; that's part of the process. Honestly, I have felt since 1997 (and I am no natural Conservative voter, please believe me) that something was obscurely wrong, that we were all inside someone else's dream. It's like that feeling you get that you've forgotten something, but haven't a clue what it might be.

Before 1997, the Government was Them and we were Us: British, muddling through, ready to heave a brickbat at these clowns who pretend to rule us, but all of us bound by habit and tradition. But in Tony Blair's revolution, the Government claimed to represent all of us: it was the political wing of the British people as a whole, or some such typical Toni verbalfluff.

This is how Nazism took hold - and my mother lived through it. No need for the unions, we the national socialist State represent the worker's best interests, etc.

Fascism, Communism - it's all the same, structurally.

Chicks up front!

In the 60s/70s, a fellow trainee teacher told me, the tactic at demos when the police arrived was to call "Chicks up front!"* and have the girls form a protective cordon for the male hairies. The assumption was that the police wouldn't beat up girls (not a safe bet in France, I think).

Now, in London, near the Mother of Parliaments, a 17-year-old girl can be arrested, charged, taken to a police station and regularly woken up at the low point of her circadian rhythm in order to tempt her to make a statement without the benefit of legal representation. All this, simply for carrying a placard. My country shames me.

Anybody reading, who has any influence with the powers that be, please communicate our shame, chagrin and anger.

*corroborated here - and either inspired by, or inspiring, the Viet Cong according to "DreadPirateRoberts" (see his April 30, 2008 5:04 pm comment here)