I stared in disbelief last night as right there in front of me on the BBC's Question Time we were subjected to the sight of Jack Straw still in office. I don't think he did well for himself claiming to be a member of a party of principles since none of the principles have pointed out to him that the only possible honourable act for any member of his party would be to resign forthwith.

Even compared to the fairly bonkers Nick Griffin he came off the loser. The hand in your pocket will never belong to Nick Griffin.

It is obvious, right now, that Labour will not win the next election. It is unfortunate that in order to throw one lot of scoundrels out we have no other mechanism than electing another bunch of scoundrels with fresher faces and more enthusiasm for power and pillaging.
Sean Gabb is by far the most outstanding and least thanked political commentator in England at this time in my opinion. This is a link to a speech he made to a Conservative Association somewhere in the south of England recently. It would have been, I fancy, a fascinating thing to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting.

I know quite a few who aren't so bad. But Duncan Bannatyne isn't one of them.

If we define fascism as the political class wants us to understand it (the mass murder of millions of jews or a similar policy intention) then it would not be possible for later generations than those who lived or died in WW2 to "learn the lessons of history". For this was not Hitler's stated intention prior to being elected. It was not the case that the German people put him in power to murder the jews. He adopted the policy of facism after reading Musolini's book on the subject and he was a fascist from the start.

Fascism is a branch of socialism. Where the socialists took over the ownership of the means of production the fascists took over control of the means of production. The effect is the same only the name of the shop is different. There is nationalisation in both cases. The stated aim is to make the country "Great".

Today in the UK the power elite are not satisfied with regulating every aspect of business. They want to nationalise the people too.

Both Musolini and Hitler held that the individual should live for the state and that sacrificing the individual for the "good of all" was a legitimate policy. And so when Duncan Banatyne says "This isn't nanny statism, Big Brother, or wrongful interference in people's personal freedoms – it's the right thing to do to protect the health of the vast majority of us who don't smoke from the declining minority who do" he is speaking from a tradition with some history.

And his statement begs the question what would he consider "nanny statism, Big Brother, or wrongful interference in people's (sic) personal freedoms"?

About the Tories that is. During the Labour party conference we heard that the public sector was safe in the hands of the Labour party but that the Tories would make huge cuts. Unfortunately that is not so and the latest Tory proposals merely increase government spending more slowly than they would have. George Osborne proposed a pay freeze on those public sector workers earning more than £18k a year.

If the Tories were a valid opposition party instead of a set of new faces there would be no need for any pay freezes. At a minimum huge chunks of the public sector would just be abolished thus enabling the ex-employees to get real jobs where they can receive what they are worth in a true and honest fashion through voluntary exchange with customers just like the rest of us. Doctors and nurses would still have value in the private sector, perhaps more than they do now. Teachers would have at least some skills that many parents would still be willing to exchange for. Police would still be needed to catch people who injure persons or property. Many other government employees might have to retrain to learn skills that are actually wanted by those who would pay for them.

The full value of such a move would be enormous beyond the imagination of many. Those ex tax eaters would instead be productive members of society, producing wealth instead of stealing from the rest of us.

Might it be that the picture being painted of the Tories as being radically different from the Labour party is merely to encourage us to vote for the Tories who will in fact turn out to be so close as to make no real deviation from the road to complete authoritarianism?