Great British Democracy
No one voted for Gordon Brown. And all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the opening of Parliament by the Queen yesterday reminded me that no one voted for her either. Or any of her sauerkraut munching predecessors. It’s a very unique brand of Democracy we have in this country in the sense that it’s not democratic at all.
In the past couple of months, we’ve had the conservatives threaten the EU over their choice candidate for the EU presidency, irrespective of the fact that they’ve not been elected either. We’ve given billions of pounds to failing financial institutions, despite our free market economic policy, although we did tell them that they had to stop paying out gargantuan bonuses, which they’re still doing because at the end of the day, who’s going to stop them. Certainly not the government, and despite the public actually owning the banks now, there’s fuck all we can do either. All our public services and infrastructure were sold off to the highest bidders, without any sort of consideration to the people that owned it, namely, you and I. We’re no longer allowed to protest unless we fill in the appropriate paper work and get permission so the authorities can plan to cope with it, which effectively castrates any sort of protest action, so what’s the point anyway.
Yes, it certainly is a strange kind of democracy / free market / freedom of speech that we have here.
Which brings me to the Digital Economy Bill which serves only to protect the interests of Big Content companies (record labels, movie studios, news organization) and has the potential to ruin completely that last bastion of free speech and freedom of expressions, the Internet.
It’s no secret that Governments around the world are paying for their initial dismissal of the Internet as a gimmick way back in the 90’s, which allowed the precedents and laws to be set that protect it today. They’re now falling over themselves to clamp down on, and shut down everything they can. But not for the good of the country, it’s all for the good of failed business models that can’t survive in a free market economy that has a free and unfettered internet in it. So like the banks that can’t survive without any money, the government is coming to the rescue and simply making up policies and laws that benefit business interests, regardless of the damage they will do to public interests. It’s a helping hand they wont extend to any of the general public either. If you’re in a spot of bother, the message from the government is very clear; “Go fuck yourself minion scum”.
And the language of the Digital Economy Bill is vague and broad in it’s scope. What starts out protecting business interests will inevitably come to the aid of political interests. The only hope we have of staving off the Orwellian future we appear to be on a collision course for is to put some one with strong moral fiber in charge of it, someone we can all trust to work for the public good in the face of heated political opposition. Someone who understands the technology and someone who can’t be lobbied, who we know isn’t in the pocket of big business interests.
What we got is Peter Mandleson.
Peter fucking Mandleson
Honestly, you can’t make this shit up. It’s like watching a slasher horror flick when the nubile young girls walks into a dark house, even though she knows there’s a killer on the loose and you’re thinking “No you idiot, we all know how this ends, turn back! For the love of god turn back!” But she goes in anyway and get’s butchered as we all predicted and there’s blood everywhere. This, is just like that.
This guys been fired twice. Once for accepting and failing to disclose a £373,000 interest free “loan” from a millionaire MP that he was meant to be investigating. The second time he got the boot was for putting the squeeze on the Home Office to give british citizen ship to a shady Indian business man who was, at the time, being investigated for his involvement in India’s largest ever corruption scandal. Hey! Mandleson! Nice bedfellows you shambling parody of a man.
The amount of people Mandleson is taking money and favors from in exchange for services rendered at the upper echelons of british politics is so great that it would be easier and quicker for me to list the people not paying him to be a scum bag.
- Me
- And you
And I’m not 100% sure about you.
Mandleson should not be in politics, he should be in Jail. But as I’ve already pointed out, this is a strange country, and everything in it, the politics, the policy and even the law, doesn’t work as you might expect.
Unless your super rich or a politician of course.
