It's for your own good and you've got it coming.
Anyone continuing to believe that this government any longer considers itself accountable to the people that elected it - in fact has ever considered itself accountable to the people that elected it - is very clearly soft in the head.
Several years ago, despite howls of entirely legitimate protest from almost everyone that the law would directly affect, and with the only support coming from people whose lives would not be altered by it one whit, this government passed a law banning (or, in retrospect, attemping to ban) hunting with hounds. Its justification for this (as distinct from its actual reason, which was indisputably class vengeance) was that it was apparently the democratic will of the people that the "barbaric" activity be outlawed. Who was this government, went the rhetoric (when it wasn't pushing the envelope of sanctimonious anthropomorphism), to stand in the way of the will of the people? This despite the very obvious fact that most of the people that willed it so didn't know the first thing about the evolution of the practice or the function it performed; still less did they care about its correspondence with the laws of nature (it requires a spectacular moralistic contortion to claim that hunting an animal, which may therefore escape, is more cruel or unnatural than shooting it in the head from a distance or setting a snare for it): the people knew best and that was all there was to it.
The lamentable Douglas Alexander last week gave the lie to that notion in memorable fashion. Presently, this government aims to implement a "road pricing scheme", or "movement tax" to those of us not afflicted with the Newspeak disease. The justification for this, as again distinct from the actual reason, is that our roads are too congested and there's all that nasty carbon to think about. (The first is meaningless, since no-one holds a gun to our heads and makes us go out on the roads. It is drivers' choice to drive. As for the second, China has over 30,000 coal-fired power stations. I wonder how long Britain's drivers would have to sit in traffic jams with their engines running to match the carbon output of just one of those, even assuming that carbon is the bogeyman the watermelons would have us believe it is.) Meanwhile, over on Tony's petitions site, someone set up a petition calling on him to scrap the planned road pricing scheme, which at the time of writing has received 1,594,909 signatures and is due to close tomorrow. By comparison, the next most popular petition, in the equally worthy cause of scrapping inheritance tax, has received 73,820 signatures, or less than 1/20th the number.
But Mr Alexander knows better. He has already announced that it doesn't matter how many signatures the petition gets: it won't make any difference. The scheme will go ahead. He knows what's good for us, see, and all of a sudden the democratic will of the people counts for nothing. Let's not forget that when it comes to actually going to a website and signing a petition, you can take it as read that most people can't be bothered. A good rule of thumb is to reckon that for everyone who bothers to sign a petition, five others are of the same opinion but never get round to signing. The opinion of the thick end of 10,000,000 people, in other words, is about to be marginalised by a junior minister.
Clearly, the democratic will is only respected to the degree to which it enables this government to practise class warfare. Plus ça change....
Several years ago, despite howls of entirely legitimate protest from almost everyone that the law would directly affect, and with the only support coming from people whose lives would not be altered by it one whit, this government passed a law banning (or, in retrospect, attemping to ban) hunting with hounds. Its justification for this (as distinct from its actual reason, which was indisputably class vengeance) was that it was apparently the democratic will of the people that the "barbaric" activity be outlawed. Who was this government, went the rhetoric (when it wasn't pushing the envelope of sanctimonious anthropomorphism), to stand in the way of the will of the people? This despite the very obvious fact that most of the people that willed it so didn't know the first thing about the evolution of the practice or the function it performed; still less did they care about its correspondence with the laws of nature (it requires a spectacular moralistic contortion to claim that hunting an animal, which may therefore escape, is more cruel or unnatural than shooting it in the head from a distance or setting a snare for it): the people knew best and that was all there was to it.
The lamentable Douglas Alexander last week gave the lie to that notion in memorable fashion. Presently, this government aims to implement a "road pricing scheme", or "movement tax" to those of us not afflicted with the Newspeak disease. The justification for this, as again distinct from the actual reason, is that our roads are too congested and there's all that nasty carbon to think about. (The first is meaningless, since no-one holds a gun to our heads and makes us go out on the roads. It is drivers' choice to drive. As for the second, China has over 30,000 coal-fired power stations. I wonder how long Britain's drivers would have to sit in traffic jams with their engines running to match the carbon output of just one of those, even assuming that carbon is the bogeyman the watermelons would have us believe it is.) Meanwhile, over on Tony's petitions site, someone set up a petition calling on him to scrap the planned road pricing scheme, which at the time of writing has received 1,594,909 signatures and is due to close tomorrow. By comparison, the next most popular petition, in the equally worthy cause of scrapping inheritance tax, has received 73,820 signatures, or less than 1/20th the number.
But Mr Alexander knows better. He has already announced that it doesn't matter how many signatures the petition gets: it won't make any difference. The scheme will go ahead. He knows what's good for us, see, and all of a sudden the democratic will of the people counts for nothing. Let's not forget that when it comes to actually going to a website and signing a petition, you can take it as read that most people can't be bothered. A good rule of thumb is to reckon that for everyone who bothers to sign a petition, five others are of the same opinion but never get round to signing. The opinion of the thick end of 10,000,000 people, in other words, is about to be marginalised by a junior minister.
Clearly, the democratic will is only respected to the degree to which it enables this government to practise class warfare. Plus ça change....
posted by Novus at 09:30
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