How pathetic it is to watch a nation sing a slavery song to support its national Rugby Team, because it has no national Anthem.
How pathetic it is be waving the Blood and Guts and the flag of David in the faces of people that have risked their lives to get to its shores.
How hipcritically it is to see a class system that built itself on the sweat of slavery watch people sleeping on the streets and queuing up for hands out at food-banks.
How sad is it to see its young generation being sent into the world with a bracket of debts for its education. While huge financial organisations make millions out of speculation on the stock exchange.
How terrible it’s is to have in this day and age a Ruling Royal family living like leeches of the tax payers, owning over 3% of the land the country stands on.
How pathetic the First Past the Post voting system is when the demographic of the country has changed beyond recognition in the last twenty years.
How a country now digitalised by the smartphones has a population becoming more dense and desensitised to the needs of its aging population.
A country that spends millions of lotto money on winning Olympic medals worth buttons
How sad it is to witness Years of stagnant wages, rising costs, and failing public services pushing living standards down. While millions struggle, the ultra-rich keep getting richer.
It’s now a cloning of nations that turned its back on the European Union spending billions on worthless weapons. It’s genuinely perplexing to me why a once powerful nation is so obsessed with destroying itself.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
THE BRITISH EMPIRE TO THIS DAY IS TO BLAME FOR MANY OF THE PROBLEMS WE FIND IN THE WORLD.
(Six minute read)
Why?
Because this is a country that still thinks it’s a global power.
It celebrates its conquests within the walls of its churches and cathedrals by glorifying its wars.
This is a country with no written constitution other than a book written back in the 1215 now trying to introduce digital ID.
Imagine where that is going to lead.
This is a country where it’s governance is subject to royal assent with no national anthem, still singing slaver song as serfs to a non elected Royal Family.
The is a country that has squandered its riches on material gains rather than benefits to its population.
Spending trillions on worthless weapons such as aircraft and outdated military hardware.
This is a country that after two world wars turned its back on its neighbours by leaving the European Union.
This is a country that used genocide long before Israel, killing millions of Irish.
This is a country that sends its youth into the world with an educational bracelet of debt on the region of £50.000.
This is a country which once had a health infrastructure called the NHS to be proud of, now unable to look after its elderly
Healthcare in Britain is now a class divide.
This is a country that has privatised almost all of its natural resources for the sake of short term profits.
This is a country that was once one of richest in the world now with food banks.
This is a country in need of thousands of affordable homes.
Homeless is at the highest levels ever seen.
This is a country where silence does most of the work.
This is a country that needs to cut its system of governance by half.
This is a country that needs to scrap First Passs the post elections and introduce PPR to reflect its changing demographics.
This is a country that needs to Nationalise its railways its waterways, its energy supply.
This is a country that needs to re recognise its self, due to immigration.
This is a country becoming a third world country drowning in debt.
This is a country that needs to recognise its history, not by kings and queens stumping around a parade ring, but by them standing down and becoming a tourist attraction.
2% of the land in England is owned by the crown .
This is a country destroyed its self from the inside out.
————————————
What’s need to be done to change course.?
The first thing to do is open designated immigration centres.
Only immigrants that pass through these centres are eligible for consideration. all that enter the country not through these centres are deported.
All new immigrants must complete a two years community national service program before applying for a residency permits.
This new community national service program would cover assistance to the NHS / Retirement homes/ public parks/ environment cleanup/ etc
To avoid concentrations of groups of immigrants the completion of the community national service program housed in prefab units should be distributed throughout the whole country.
While serving their community national service immigrants would be required (on a compulsory bases )to attend English classes and ware a digital Id tag.
This program could be pay for by a wealth tax that also provides a living wage during the course of the two years.
The country needs to stop wasting trillions on rearming its self with worthless conventional arms and start looking after its people than its GDP.
There are no Donald Trump deals that will replace looking after one self.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
After nearly two year of war and misery in the Middle East, not much has changed.
Peace is no nearer.
To be honest the rest of the world could not give a hoot.
We all know the history of Israel which has in the current war killed 60,000 about 6% of the population and wounded around 149,000 to date.
It ( that is the free world) still stands by while Israel revenge ( in the form of genocide ) is backed by arms from the USA, snd the UK and Russia veto in the UN.
We all know that not all Israeli people are Zionest and that not all Palistians are Hamas.
We all know that like most wars we have witnessed in the last few decades that this war is a paradox that cannot be solved by the gun.
We all know that both the his war and the Ukraine war are wars conducted with more and more atomus weapons.
We all know that the forthcoming Trump president term is only going to add to the woes of the world.
We all know that if we don’t declare war against climate change none of the above will matter.
We all know that profit seeking algorithms are destroying society for short term gain.
We all know that we can leave a worthwhile inheritance.
This coming year is when we make the choice.
Blood or peace.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We now have abject dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, dying silent upon live TV, reducing them to statistics instead of receiving world support we stand by and watch as one group of humans called Jews slaughter another group called Palestinians.
While the free world expect them to die in silence, rest assured it will pay the price one way or another.
It’s time that this monster Israel created by the west is band from United Nations.
What Israel is doing in any language is repugnant .
It remarkable to see the verbal coming out of the mouth of Netanyahu to justify it.
Unfortunately it seems humans are incapable of living in peace.
Investing in nuclear weapons might create employment but only until some future idiot uses them.
Why is one country ok to have nuclear weapons and another not ?
Every country has the ability to persuade nuclear power. Whether it develops a nuclear boom or not is up to god knows what.
We have Dog eat dog world.
With war mongers called NATO knocking on your door. The Ukraine/ Russia war is because of its very existence.
Ukraine wanted to join NATO ( which is an American military run organisation) however Putin won the war in the first 7 days because the Ukraine dropping its demand to join NATO.
With Donald Trump these days to be an enemy of the USA is dangerous but to be a friend is faithful.
Keith Starmer thinks he can sort out the shambles of the UK by supplying more and more weapons to both Ukraine and Israel, opening arms manufacturing plants, ordering fighter jets and nuclear submarines, when in fact his country is crying out for investment into its basic infrastructure, mental health, not to mention its health system, education, housing.
Any country boasting food banks needs to look at itself and get its values right.
Let’s ask the question.
Are we all mentally incapable of understanding what we are presently doing to our world ?
By ignoring what climate change and Artificial Intelligence has in store over the next twenty years. ( All for the sake of short term profit) It’s going to be a rocky ride in more ways than one whether Iran has a nuclear weapon or not.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
This question is going to have a profound effect on all of us.
Donal has indicated that he is not interested in CLIMATE CHANGE, NATO and the EU.
However in relation to all that is happening in the world he is a pivotal figure whether we like it or not whether he is mentioned or not in dispatches.
It’s American first.
We are now once again the most powerful in the world.
Whether you like it or not he says nasty things, turn USA foreign policy in treats .
Politically his election for a second term is nationalistic in the extreme.
A man against basic human rights. He wants to round up 11 million illegal immigrants and put them into camps to be deported. Rwanda is going to become over crowded.
He is going to increase the cost of living by 5% with tariffs.
There is no doubt that countries are going to have to increase defence spending.
It is pathetic that we live in a world that spends more on arms to kill each other than on getting to know each other.
The West Bank in Gaza can kiss itself goodbye along with any two state solution to the conflict.
The UKRAINE can also kiss the loss of substantial territories, and god forbid welcome in return a civil war that will eventually put Russia in total control and face on to NATO.
The expansion of NATO is the real reason that Putin invaded the Ukraine.
This is going to be a grumpy four years with Trump promises in charge of Elon Musk nightmares.
A tweet here and a tweet there could change history.
The worst thing that might happen is that he like many a president before him claims Irish heritage when in fact he is of German and Scottish blood.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Liz Truss was just the last in line. For the past dozen years, each leader has left the country poorer, weaker, and more divided than the last.
In her departure, Truss offered little defence and no apology, confirming her unfitness for office. The fact that she got there at all only reveals the smallness of the regime that awarded her the role.
So now Britain is once again looking for a new prime minister. Johnson is said to be flying home from the Caribbean to enter the fray, dreaming of a Churchillian redemption. The two men who declared him unfit for office—Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove—now also have another shot at power.
The genesis of Britain’s misfortunes could be dated to 1929, when the world economy imploded and a monstrous regime of little men took over in London.
The next prime minister, whoever that may be, will face an extraordinary set of challenges largely of their Conservative Party’s own making.
But when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?
Calamities are always seeded by events that came before.
Some will argue it was the 2016 vote for Brexit, but that lets off the hook those who legislated for it without any plan to enact it.
Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency.
Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.
Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, watched everything explode in the great financial crisis.
For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over. By the time Liz Truss assumed office last month, she evidently had no conception of the damage done by this period of Tory rule, how exposed Britain had become, how fragile, how vulnerable. Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.
Britain is now permanently under the threat of breakup.
Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.
Brexit became Theresa May’s. May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.
In 2019, Boris Johnson finally grabbed the long-sought crown—only to find a way to lose it in disgrace three years later. Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in post-war British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.
Now, surely, it is time for the CONSERVIT party that enabled the guilty of today to heed advice:
In the name of God, go!
Diagnosing the problem is one thing, and finding a way to deal with it is another.
Misperceive the views of one’s rival political identity is formed more by despising the other side than by any particular affinity for the views of one’s own party.
What is now evident beyond doubt is the need for a leader to acting on his beliefs, rather than talking about them to get out of schizophrenia of announcements while nothing moves at the level of the means.
The White Saviour Industrial Complex of London allows white people of privilege to brush aside systemic racism, injustice, and corruption in favour of individual acts of charity..
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
It lack a culture of consensus, and has now lost the means of building and developing one.
Why?
Because it has a democracy that is managed by a narrow elite who for centuries have put power and wealth before its people.
The Brexit referendum and the increasing ideological polarisation in both main political parties are a sign of this.
Britain is about the only country in Europe with a primitive ‘first past the post’ electoral system rather than a proportional electoral system.
Why has this mess developed only now?
I am sure that few people in England are now really nostalgic for empire, although a great many don’t realise just what a hideous mess it often left behind.
Nationalism and sectarian politics feed on nostalgia like vampires feed on blood.
One outcome of the inability to compromise in Britain, has been the ‘austerity’ economics practised over the last eight years. More than anything else this is what is driving so many people into poverty (20% now below the official poverty line) It degraded health and education services, shutting museums and libraries, causing physical infrastructure to break up and much much more.
Britain does not have a constitution.
It is therefore ruled by antiquated institutions such a the Crown.
The set of laws, rules and yes, that great British favourite, the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, that make up what amounts to a constitution has evolved organically over time, but has not developed to reflect a world driven by theological data or a country that is populated by immigration on low wages and benefits.
The system does not cope when politicians that are intransigent and ideological as they are now.
The system is now essentially ‘presidential’, i.e. the Prime Minister has the power and Members of Parliament follow the party line.
There is no expectation that Parliament takes the initiative, so when they have done, as now, there are no rules to call a general election, the ship of state is left drifting and rudderless without the voice of the people been heard, so the elite consensus that managed the binary oppositions starts to fall apart.
Its a country where anyone can call themselves a builder and start selling themselves as such, there are no identity cards so the government does not know who the **** we are.
There is no list of citizens. In fact the citizens are not really citizens at all they are surfs.
There is an electoral register (i.e. who can vote), passports (but if you didn’t travel you wouldn’t have one) and National Insurance numbers, which are about working and tax payments. There has never been a register of British citizens as such so in fact, government does not (or did not) really know who had a right to be here, and who didn’t.
Every country and ethnic identity is racist, that’s part of the human condition, but what is odd about a lot of English racism is that it is not directed so much at black or brown people but at other Europeans .
The ‘wogs begin at Calais’ attitudes, send them to Rwanda.
The EU is seen as a Franco-German plot, targeting Britain.
History shows that It made its wealth on the back of an navy that circumnavigated oceans and seas, which created an empire on the backs of slaves and sugar – a sad truth.
Who owns England?
Behind this simple question lies England’s oldest and best-kept secret.
It’s a secret that goes back to the Domesday Book – and an issue that goes to the heart of many of the biggest problems the country has – affordability of housing, unable to grow enough of its food, not much space left aside for nature.
Rural landowners, meanwhile, are rewarded by the taxpayer for simply owning land through farm subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy has paid landowners according to the area of land they farm, rather than the public goods they deliver, thereby propping up a system of intensive agriculture that has decimated wildlife and natural habitats.
For most of the 20th century, the aristocracy showed itself remarkably indifferent to the welfare of the nation, After democracy finally shunted aside hereditary lords, they found new means to protect their extravagant riches. For all the modern tales of noble poverty and leaking ancestral homes, their private wealth and influence remain phenomenal.
The British aristocracy’s defining feature is not a noble aspiration to serve the common weal but a desperate desire for self-advancement. They endlessly reinforced their own status and enforced deference on others through ostentatiously exorbitant expenditure on palaces, clothing and jewellery. They laid down a strict set of rules for the rest of society, but lived by a different standard. Such is their sense of entitlement that they believed – and persuaded others to believe – that a hierarchical society with them placed firmly and unassailably at the top was the natural order of things.
The secret of their modern existence is their sheer invisibility.
According to a 2010 report for Country Life, a third of Britain’s land still belongs to the aristocracy.
The financial sector is hailed as the crowning glory of the UK economy. A massive financial sector on the tiny island is making a visible minority filthy rich but as it blooms, everything else withers.
The power of London finance is hurting Britain, to the tune of £4.5tn.
Many people in Britain, it is true, are ambivalent about all this. They rightly fret that the City is a global money-laundering paradise, harming other nations, but (whisper it quietly) they like the hot money and oligarchs it attracts to its shores. There is a trade-off, they think, between doing the right thing and preserving our prosperity.
Underpinning all this is the fallacy of composition, of a trickle down economy, whereby the fortunes of big businesses and big banks are conflated with the fortunes of our whole economy.
This is where the myth of great, finally dies.
As Liza Trust now knows economies, tax systems and cities are nothing like companies, and don’t compete like she might think – scrap TAX ON HIGHT EARNERS.
The finance curse of Quantize Easing shows that too much finance harms your economy, then pursuing more finance through the competitiveness agenda only makes things worse.
There is no trade-off WITH CREDITORS.
Blaming the problems on Brexit and the Ukraine war, or the price of energy, inflation, does not close foodbanks, or stop zero- hours contracts, or attract investment.
Rule of law, a healthy and educated workforce, good infrastructure, access to prosperous, thirsty markets, good inputs and supply chains and economic stability. All these require tax revenues.
The race does not stop when tax rates reach zero.
To prosper, Britain should increase its effective corporate tax rates, at least for financiers and large multinationals, plus a surcharge to cover the roaming members of the billionaire classes who won’t.
By leaving the EU and joining the “competitive” global race England has not only been beggaring others – it has beggaring its selves, too.
In order not to be stuck in ugly race to the bottom, THE COUNTRY NOW NEEDS A MASSIVE RESET.
A good place to start to create a future of largely harmonious multi-cultural society, would be to abolish students debt and start educating its young for free.
I recently heard a Labour Politician advocate that England should create an sovereign wealth funds, Fund. With what? It’s too late now:
There is only one way forward simply step out of the race, unilaterally by appealing not just to national self-interest, by mobilise the biggest constituency of all its people and put finance back in its rightful place: Serving Britain’s people, not served by them.
Tragically we are watching a country of Plenty turning to poverty for the sake of short-term profit.
That last word, unilaterally, is key.
The land of the few.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
I have just watched the debate for the leadership of the Conservative party and sadly next prime minister of England.
None of the candidates were asked to address the following essential overriding question England’s future.
Now that England has left the EU – England? – What is it?
Today this is the hard question because Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role outside the EU.
One of the many driving forces behind Brexit, it seems to me, was English/British exceptionalism, encapsulated in the winning slogan “Take back control”.
We are different, we are unique, and we are exceptional.
Unfortunately, it’s now too late to realize that it is a medium-sized relatively unimportant country that has destroyed its manufacturing base in a Faustian pact with financial interests to become the money laundering “world beater” and the conduit of choice for tax evasion.
It’s young, are now on the slippery slope to a new medieval world recreation of taxation to support its crumbling economy and public services.
This time, there might be no way out.
Instead of catapulting it into a better age, modernity in the form of Tech will now be used to keep it in this state – imprison it in a world made by the mega-rich – by manipulating it to keep things exactly as they are.
An awakening is needed.
But I profess to be blind and deaf as to how the masses can be awakened, other than that the message is conveyed to it by the means of a very short, sharp, and deeply profound shock, which will be devastating for many and, no doubt, capitalized on by those who seek to divide it.
In the documentary ‘Social Dilemma’, it is pointed out that most of the recent investment in the world has gone into improving the processing power of algorithms and computing – it has outstripped investment and development in the fight against cancer, and science and technology elsewhere – all designed to predict even better how we will respond and then have us hanging in front of our devices, slobbering like Pavlov’s dogs for the next ‘impulse’.
That is what has been happening in the world – more people are being manipulated – not informed.
On leaving the EU England lost all sense of the common good and now the definition of the ‘common good’ sits outside the reference framework on how one might view the structures for the provision of the ‘common good.
The problem has always been having a democracy, or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few.
You can’t have both so we hear the slogan leveling up.
This cannot be achieved while witnessing politicians like Boris and the X Health Minister Matt Hancock who defend brazen neoliberal exploitation of publicly funded, public health provision for private profit as if it was simply illustrative of a fair free market.
At the top of English society, it is an amoral world where money is the only common factor – up to recently it does not matter if you are Russian or a criminal – it is the size of your wad that matters – money rules.
There is no free market here.
The simple fact of the matter is that politicians have failed to reign these forces in and weakened resistance for example by undermining unions and worker rights.
What we are seeing now is that last grab of what is left.
The collapse of the UK will come because without having a role as an exploiter – whether by old-fashioned land grab or by financial capture of other country’s economies by the City of London and its tax havens – those ruling from London have no idea what role England has.
The politicians who can imagine an England that has its own role in the world, as a separate nation-state, not dependent on the support of the other countries that have sustained it for centuries, are what are required to guide it now.
And I can’t see them, as yet.
The worrying bit for me is that there seems no longer to be any concern that these things happen so bare-facedly these days.
This seems to have happened in plain sight, but too many of our eyes are looking down at our devices being distracted by Apps and god knows what else (gambling, porn, Facebook, etc.,).
And the internet is there to be used as those with money see fit to maintain the status quo.
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I have to live in hope, but now it is much more complex than England which has adapted to less.
A post-colonial, post-financialised, non-exploitative vision of England as a separate country that can survive on its own rather than by extracting value from others is what is required if it is to make it through the long existential crisis that it is now facing.
That hope includes a belief that England can find a future in which exploitation plays no part. That hope has limited foundations. But when the alternative is offered by the far right it is something I have to believe possible.
Survival always requires a will to do so. I don’t think the UK, as a union of four nations, has that will anymore.
It’s why I see independence for Scotland soon, Irish reunification thereafter, and then Wales also thinking there might be a better alternative to rule from London.
Labour sat out Brexit, but can’t sit out this crisis.
It’s going to be too painful to do that. They must have plans they can promote to deal with the immediate issues.
Whatever was normal will have gone by the time this crisis is over. Whatever replaces it is not yet known. It could be fascism. And it could be something so much better. But the better route requires a willingness to imagine it. I only see that willingness in Scotland right now.
No doubt with the pending departure of Boris sanity is starting to prevail in the government in regard to the future of the UK economy not to mention the Union in relation to the effects of Brexit and Covid-19!
This is now a country that agreed to make a series of payments to the EU, as part of the deal when it left in January 2020, often called the divorce bill.
It’s now a country that cannot feed its people, provide medical care, freely educate its future generation, build affordable homes, and create a green generate economy. A country whose history shaped much of the world for both the good and the bad now needs a written constitution to guide it into the future.
From January 2021, there was about £25bn left to pay by 2057.
Trust in politicians has now sunk so low in Britain that it could very well have to adapt to even less than that.
To me, isolation it’s just such a bizarre hill to die on.
When successful, politics goes largely unnoticed, when it messes up, a furor ensues.
So I ask where are the voices of young England.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Johnson has resigned as party leader, but he is still prime minister until his successor is elected.
In reality, there is no set minimum or maximum term for a Prime Minister The PM is not directly appointed by the population, only his political party is elected.
The Conservative Party has the majority in the house of Commons and therefore without a general election, the next Prime Minister to take over will be appointed with a secret vote.
The PM is not directly appointed by the population, only his political party is elected. It is up to the party members to select their leader.
Under Britain’s political rules, the next election must be called by December 2024.
Officially, it’s ‘at Her Majesty’s pleasure’.
So what is next?
A spectre is haunting Britain and Brexit – the spectre of English nationalism.
England is the only part of the union whose people have not been consulted or offered a referendum on how they wish to be governed in the past 20 years.
At its heart, leveling up is about tackling the long-standing inequalities across the UK but has, so far, failed to provide the answers to England’s democratic deficit.
The question of England, its national political and policy identity, and its future governance, simply has not been on the Conservative radar.
If I could see tomorrow today in the context of the changing nature of UK governance, . . . I would slow down and notice . . . what was taken for granted is now breaking apart with England remaining an anomaly.
While the centers of power in the rest of the UK have shifted away from Westminster over the last two decades, for England these changes have been limited. The battle for the first phase of Brexit may soon be over, the political battle for England has barely begun.
England is the ‘gaping hole in the devolution settlement’, and now constitutes ‘the only nation subject to permanent direct rule from Westminster.
English values and interests are the only ones to have had effective reality in UK politics.
This failure of political imagination about England is one characteristic of the wider British power elite, whether aligned ideologically to the political left, right or center.
On the Right, none of the eleven Conservative Party leadership candidates has made a single speech setting out a vision for the future of England, let alone an English nationalist perspective on England’s governance and political economy.
The current candidates for PM are all so far exhibited short-term thinking – Tax cuts, etc while the potential constitutional consequences of Brexit are becoming more evident day by day. Brexit marks not the end but the beginning of a new politics in which the right is transmuting into the party of English nationalists.
Why?
Because English Conservatives would support Scottish independence and 75 percent of the collapse of the Northern Ireland peace process as the price of Brexit.
Far from stoking the alleged strident English nationalism of their party membership, the proposals of the myriad contenders for the Conservative Party’s leadership have simply served to illustrate the degree to which the Conservative Party has remained stranded on the common ground of strident Thatcherite British nationalism and its ambition to bring about a transformational.
Thatcher’s policies ripped apart any possibility for economic stability for the poor and made or caused the divide between rich and poor to grow ever wider. These days, the “s” word, “socialism,” is thrown around like it is a deadly germ.
On the political Left, not one member of the opposition parties has ever attempted to make the case for self-government for England.
The Labour Party, in particular, has gone to great lengths to linguistically cleanse its manifestos and policy documents of anything which might give England a political, institutional, policy, or democratic identity separate or separable from that of Britain, Britishness, or the British state.
Back to the question.
Something must be done to address the lack of democracy across England.
Too often any transfer of decision making-powers has come as an afterthought – and where reforms have taken place these have been driven from the center and done little to genuinely empower local government or the communities in which people live.
It is not for the center at Westminster to decide how local communities should see themselves and how they should be governed but to set out how those communities can choose their own governance, and how citizens can themselves reinvigorate local democracy.
With so many local councilors feeling powerless to serve their constituents’ needs, we must find a better balance between those two levels of government that truly serves the interests of communities across England.
The very nature and existence of local government should not be based on Westminster’s changing whims but should have some form of constitutional protection.
This requires a written constitution removing the Royal family into the realms of a tourist attraction.
_______________________
One of the most basic ways to shift the devolution paradigm is by creating a genuinely empowered local government.
You need to root your local government organization in a place that your community identifies with, rather than some arbitrary travel to the work area.
Far from being merely the ‘delivery arm of central government’, local government plays a significant role in people’s daily lives and is one of the first places in which people can become involved in making decisions about their communities.
Communities need to accept the building block of local government fundamentally to be reconnected to the people.
Citizen involvement should be an essential value underpinning devolution in England – solutions cannot be imposed top-down, but rather should be built up from the local level, and enjoy people’s support and legitimacy.
It is quite obvious that you can not level up from top-down.
It is too soon to say exactly where England will end up.
Here are a few suggestions.
Education should be free.
Long-term plan to turn the economy green.
Tax reform is one of the main levers the government can pull to increase the UK’s economic growth prospects however overhauling the tax system is not a straightforward task.
The real challenge is to make the tax system as it actually exists and come up with practical ways to improve it.
That is not to say that a lower overall tax burden would not have economic benefits of its own.
The UK has a very narrow base for its VAT which leads to distortions and complexity. It is a critical source of revenue, in a consumer society that is converting its purchasing power more and more online. Perhaps the introduction of an online sale tax would be more appropriate than vat. VAT requires strict documentation for every transaction while a sale tax does not. It a calculated as a percentage of the purchasing price of the product as a direct Tax.
Last get rid of Carehomes and build on national trust lands retirement villages.
Get rid of benefits and replace them with Universal basic income.
The current benefits system is partly means-tested and complicated Universal basic income could replace some or all benefits. This would cut down on bureaucracy.
The benefit type of income is not a handout, but an entitlement. which have been appropriated by privileged elites and corporations to generate private wealth.
Unconditional payments are an acknowledgment that everyone has the right to share in a wealthy economy.
An orgy of backstabbing and squeezing those things that lead to Boris’s demise is now on the cards.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Because it is still trying to get over the Empire days that have left it with an ingrained class system of haves and have-nots.
This Ingraining is in its education system to slavery in materialistic capitalism, which is now run by Social media platforms with unregulated untransparent algorithms. (A problem facing most of the developed world)
The United States was built on a system of racial classification.
England was built on the back of slavery and sugar.
They both bought manual laborers to enrich a few.
(As many as 10.7 million slaves are thought to have been shipped to the Americas between 1800 and 1867. All but a few people were chattel slaves, which meant that their children and grandchildren were also slaves. Through the 19th century, slaves were overworked, tortured, and not given the same rights as other people.)
England now has all the INGREDIENTS to brake up, Sleepwalking into oblivion, it’s people need to wake up before it is too late.
Ordinary citizens seem to understand that we are experiencing a revolutionary moment in the world with Technology, Climate Change, and Mass migration, not to mention sustainability, and future pandemics.
The range of possibilities is very broad, and the eventual outcome is thus highly uncertain.
If you look beneath the surface of England what do you see?
This is a country that voted on the back of lies to leave the largest trading block the EU, that now has an economy rapidly descending into a recession, a pandemic that cost billions, surging energy costs, rampaging inflation, spending 205 billion on Trident and 45 billion on a high-speed rail, with over 3 million people using food banks, 12,000 charity shops with approximately 170 thousand registered charities raising around £300m a year.
With a Prime Mister that cannot be trusted. It’s no wonder that Scotland and Northern Ireland will soon be holding referendums for independence.
With over 53 million inhabitants, in a moral panic about immigrants and refugees, it needs to build 340,000 homes per year until 2031. The British royals own almost 247,000 acres of land in England, living in 26 different buildings throughout the United Kingdom home over the years possesses an estimated $28 billion in assets, and according to independent reports that the U.K.’s offshore wind farms belong to the crown as well.
A murder a day, with one in seven businesses teetering on the brink of collapse, ruled by a parliament now only a ‘dignified’ part of the Royal constitution – an obedient (and expensive) rubber-stamp to the all-powerful executive with an antiquated party structure that prevents the popular will from finding proper expression.
These National parties once had some roots in the past, but these alliances are entirely dictated by party leaders’ self-interest, continuing to issue edicts as if they were still relevant.
No one seems quite sure how much all the diamond jubilee celebrations
cost – nor who will eventually have to foot the bill. The extra bank holiday
could cost Britain’s ailing economy £1.2bn.
There are 29.7m taxpayers in the UK paying £11.24 per taxpayer for a Queen.
Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee next year is expected to cost between
£10 Million and £15 Million.
Remember Quantitive easing:
The Bank of England….. printing free money out of nothing and lending it to the government with huge interest, while they, in turn, tax too high heaven to pay back the interest in government bonds…..which then, in turn, need to borrow more.
The trickle-down economics has failed along with a parliament that constantly fails to reform itself.
It has a national debt amounting to £2.59 trillion increasing to over £5,000 per second, equating to 108% of national output (GDP).
This led to a drop in tax revenue and an increase in cyclical spending (for example on unemployment benefits).
At the same time, the government introduced a range of coronavirus support measures. Amongst others, these included its high profile furlough or job retention scheme whereby it covered 80% of the salaries of eligible employees; a prolonged period of business rates relief; a reduction in VAT for the hospitality sector; a stamp duty holiday; a weekly uplift in the rate of Universal credit; a £500 per person working tax credit payment; and its ‘Eat out to help out scheme’.
In 2019, private debt in the United Kingdom was recorded as being 190% of GDP, twice that of public sector debt.
According to the Treasury’s 2019/20 Debt Management Report, as of September 2018, 32% of government gilts were owned by UK Pension and Insurance companies, 28% were owned by foreign investors, and 24% of the national debt was owned by the government itself through the Bank of England’s Asset Purchase Facility referenced above.
In 2011/12, the sums being spent on debt repayment (£48.2 billion) were very similar to what the government was spending on schools (£51.1 billion), four times greater than what was being spent on transport, and 30% more than what was being spent on defense.
At its most extreme, it is suggested that this might lead to some kind of sovereign debt crisis.
A Sovereign debt crisis has the potential to have devastating effects on both social inclusion and people’s wider standards of living. After Greece suffered a sovereign debt crisis in 2009, figures from the World Bank show that GDP per head, for people in Greece, fell dramatically from $29,711 in 2009 to $18,168 in 2015.
This begs the question – is England’s debt just too big to handle?
£5,803 every second. That’s 74,720 £ per taxpayer Or £35,793 per citizen.
UK Government and The Bank of England continue to ‘print money to pay for the debt – this makes everything continually more expensive (inflation), or
UK Government refuses to pay their interest payments or repay the debt they owe – resulting in a catastrophic economic recession.
Cristiano Ronaldo (Centre-Forward) with an Annual Gross Salary of £26,800,000, or £515,385 per week equating to 54 million for his two years contract. On average Premier League clubs spend around £55,000 a week per player not to mention Football managers who also reap financial rewards. Add it all up and you see the cost of a goal.
Cristiano Ronaldo (Centre-Forward) with an Annual Gross Salary of £26,800,000, or £515,385 per week equating to 54 million for his two years contract. On average Premier League clubs spend around £55,000 a week per player not to mention Football managers who also reap financial rewards. Add it all up and you see the cost of a goal.
Britain finished Tokyo 2020 with 65 medals, a funding amount: of £12,084,436.
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To reform its parliament.
On the death of Queen Elizabeth II (which is highly likely in the near future) I would reform the parliament by removing the monarchy from the realms of power to a cultural tourist attraction by replacing it with a written constitution, which would elevate its citizens from subject surfs to people with a genuine voice – from my government to our government.
I would introduce citizens’ assemblies with proportional representation, while reducing the House of Commons, from 650 seats to 300. The entire Westminster operates on them and us basis, costing billions in taxpayers’ money.
I would get rid of its gutter press. Ban Porn. Restrict trial by Television. Remove all TV advertising that promotes unhealthy consumption and make University education free.
I would encourage Scotland independent with a deal on cheap oil and Wales and give back Northern Ireland over a twenty-five-year period.
If I were to do anything to change the direction in England today.
I would reintroduce a year of NATIONAL SERVICE (WITHOUT THE SMARTPHONE) TO TEACH VALUES, RESPECT, AND DISCIPLINE WORTHWHILE HAVING.
By the way, Equiano was born in Nigeria and was brought to England as an enslaved child. He was bought by Lieutenant Michael Pascal. Equiano learned how to be a seaman so that he could fight in the Seven Years’ War. When there was no more hostility, he bought his freedom for $40 from a Pennsylvanian.
This disgusting time still has an effect on our lives today.
Unfortunately, England cannot buy its freedom by leveling up or down.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
bobdillon33blog 
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