It’s apathy’s world, we’re only living in it

Hearing how cheques are to be phased out in a number of years has depressed me. So, I want to write an entry on why I hate Google Earth and things of that sort. I may do so later, if I can be bothered…

13th, Jan, 2010

This looks like being a piecemeal blog entry, to which I will add this and that item at different dates.

The first item I want to add is this article from the Guardian, August 2003, by Nick Cohen, concerning the 'anti-elistist elite' of Blair's government. I'm posting the link not only because the article is so good, and manages with the phrase 'anti-elistist elite', and the explanation of that phrase, to express concisely most of what is wrong with modern Britain (if not all), but because it contains some paragraphs about the erosion of trial by jury, which is in the news again recently. Here are some of the paragraphs:

The anti-elitist elite was interested in distracting people, not empowering them. It proved its duplicity when it was confronted with focus groups with genuine power: juries. Authoritarian governments had always hated the idea that a random collection of citizens could gather together and reach verdicts which might contradict official policy. Lord Devlin, a Law Lord from the old Establishment, warned in 1956: 'The first object of any tyrant in Whitehall would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will, and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury. [It] is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.'

…

Blair and Straw assumed power in 1997. Together they tried to implement all the cuts to jury rights that Howard had proposed, and then went further. Three-quarters of jury trials were to go. None of the Government's justifications for the removal of popular power stood up to scrutiny. Only one explanation made sense: the populist elite despised the People, and was a little frightened of them. Obviously, it couldn't come out and say that. So Straw explained that by taking away the right of the People to decide whether a citizen was innocent or guilty New Labour was in fact giving rights to the People. The true elite wasn't a government which threatened liberty, rather it was 'BMW-driving civil-liberties lawyers' who tried to protect juries. It remains a wonder of the age that this line of humbug can still be spouted after all these years.

I don't know why it is, but I cannot look at this face without a feeling of hatred and disgust:

Or perhaps I do know. However directly or indirectly he is responsible for what is happening in Britain right now (whether he is pulling strings, or he is the one having his strings pulled), nonetheless, he presides over it, and is an apologist for it all. To me, his is the face of evil, even though it seems it is not much more than an evil he has inherited and serves.

I expect I'll be looking at different facets of this evil later in seperate sections.