Utter madness

As you may have realised if you have read this blog before I am not a fan of this government or the previous one. There are a number of reasons for this; I think if you have lived in this country over the past ten years you would have watched as a government nearly bankrupted this country. They did this and blamed everyone but themselves, they governed at a time when this country had unprecedented growth, Gordon Brown did not pay off any of our national debt and left this country, to put it bluntly in a mess.

This new government have come along and have tried to sort out this mess, or on the face of it they have. But if you look a little closer you will quickly see that they are not doing a very good job.

So let's look at some facts, last year the British government gave away over £38 billion to the EU and IMF; £13 billion to the EU bailout, £8.3 billion - our net contribution to the EU, £7 billion loan to the Irish and £10 billion to the IMF, plus billions of pounds in foreign aid. Whatever way you look at it, this is a lot of money, this is bad enough, but what our leaders have decided to do is increase our contribution to the IMF this year by £9 billion, meaning that we will hand over £19 billion. Add to this our contribution to the EU and the ring fencing of foreign aid, is it any wonder that I think this lot have gone stark raving bonkers.

You would think that our economy is growing at a rapid rate, but it isn't, last year it grew at about 1.3 per cent, compared with Brazil's economy growing by about 7.3 per cent, and China and India continuing to see massive growth.

Now all this is bad enough, but the government have decided to carry on with Labour's complete folly and spend billions on green energy (if you want to see what I think of that, please look here
http://evanheasley-powertothepeople.blogspot.com/2011/03/lunatics-have-taken-over-asylum.html ). The government have decided to push ahead regardless of the economic consequences with a policy that makes no sense at all.

China, the biggest global emitter of CO2 has made it abundantly clear it is not going to accept any restraint to its use of carbon based energy, neither has India or the US. A spokesman for both the Engineering Employers Federation and Energy Intensive users Group have warned of investment and jobs going overseas where energy costs are lower. And so have many other large manufacturing companies.

This government has said it was the previous government that initiated the massively damaging policy of severe and legally binding carbon reduction. This may be true, but the simple question has to be asked is, why is the UK the only country to do this?

I have written before about the government's headlong rush into wind energy, but it is very clear that this type of energy is not going to produce enough power for our economy. The wind does not blow all the time so it is intermittent, so when the wind does not blow we will have to get our energy from somewhere else at extortionate rates.

The government have argued that millions of so called green jobs will be created, but this again is total hogwash. The 19th century economist Frederic Bastiet pointed out, 'if jobs are your yardstick, you may as well go round breaking windows so as to create jobs for glaziers.'

The government are creating jobs, but these require a greater amount of subsidy at the expense of genuinely productive jobs that require no subsidy at all. On top of all of this we have still many millions of people employed within the public sector, creating no wealth. There are still about 2.5 million people unemployed in this country, and that is likely to rise as councils and other government departments have to make cuts. Then add to that the continued influx of immigrants looking for work and it does not take long to realise that we are governed by a bunch of nutters that are completely and utterly mad.

Sexualisation and our children

Recently on the BBC TV programme Question Time a question was asked about the sexualisation of our children; there has been a bit of an outcry recently about some of the music videos being shown on television and the selling of padded bras to pre-pubescent girls. Germaine Greer, the feminist answered with some pseudo-Freudian psycho babble about girls flirting with their fathers when they kiss them goodnight. And a number of the other panelists answered with the usual politically correct answers. Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist made some interesting points and was laughed at and lambasted by the audience. But what he said was interesting, and if any of the audience had listened to him they would have realised that he was speaking a lot sense.

Prior to the 1960's Great Britain was a very conservative country, having a child outside of marriage was seen as wrong, being a single mother was frowned upon. Marriage was seen as sacred, and divorce was an unusual event, abortion was illegal and so was homosexuality. During the 1960's a revolution occurred, and in 1967 abortion was legalised and homosexuality was legalised as well. In 1961 the contraceptive pill was introduced and during this decade a change happened within society, a new liberal attitude towards sex and relationships grew and people started to look at the world differently.

Now, I do not think these changes were necessarily bad, but what I have seen happen over my lifetime is peoples attitudes change towards sex and sexuality even more. You only have to look at the graphic nature of many modern music videos. Many films that would have been rated as adult only 20 or 30 years ago are now down graded, and those that were rated for adults only almost look innocent to our modern more progressive eyes.

What concerns me is, as we become more open to new ways of thinking those institutions that held our society together start to look old fashioned and those with an agenda are happy to undermine them, particularly the institution of marriage. Marriage, for all its faults has been the bedrock of society for hundreds of years, but many do not believe in its importance anymore, thus we continue to see the growth of a more fractured and unstable society.

As I have said above, during the 1960's many things were legalised and legitimised, with this legitimisation we have seen the growth of a more broken society. As happens within government, those in charge think they know best, so they then legislate against things. So the government may bring in ratings for music videos, outlaw padded bras for children, but in essence does not get to the root of the problem.

Abortion was legalised in 1967 and in 2009 there were 189,100 abortions performed in England and Wales, I personally think this is an appalling statistic. Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe, yet contraception is freely available. If we are to believe those who are in charge the best way to stop all this is to educate, but since the 1960's the teaching of sex education has increased in schools, but we continue to see the rise in teenage pregnancies and abortions. The growth of one parent families has increased unabated, and the amount of children growing up without a father has continued to grow. The statistics do not show things getting any better, but still those in charge think they know best. I am sure the government will bring in some legislation to try to halt the dire state of our nations morals, but they will not get to the root of the problem.

You would think that with all this sex education, the free availability of contraception and the morning after pill things would be getting better, but as the facts show they are not. Until people realise that marriage and the two parent heterosexual relationship is the best way to bring up children nothing will change, but unfortunately for our politically correct leaders they are unlikely to admit this, and we will continue to see a downward spiral. On top of all these problems the open accessibility to pornography via the Internet and on children's phones adds to these problems. I know this all sounds rather negative but if we continue to ignore these issues and do not tackle the fundamental root of the problem things are never going to change.

Political expedience, exaggeration, truth and lies

Recently David Cameron decided that he would commit this country to ring fencing foreign aid at 0.7 per cent of GDP. This sounds like a very altruistic thing to do, but I have a few concerns about doing this. Over the years Britain, as well as many other nations have given many billions of pounds in aid in the belief that what they are giving is going to change many lives. African countries have received much of what the rich nations have dished out, but as we know most of these nations have remained in poverty. So what is the point of giving aid if it does no good? Well many would argue that some of this money has made a difference, and it may well have done. But in many cases the money that has been handed over to many countries has been used by those in charge (despots) to do more harm and to kill many innocent individuals. Ironically many governments have handed over our money in the belief that it does good but in so many cases causes huge misery.

Dambisa Moyo, a former Goldman Sachs economist said; 'aid programmes have left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more likely to experience conflict and unrest. Aid, she declared is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.'

I believe there is a place for helping the poor, I am a christian and I believe if you can you should assist were possible, but I also believe that so much of what we do, and our rich governments do are done with very little thought to the consequences of their actions. As I have said above, a great percentage of the money that has been handed over to many poor nations has been used by their leaders to buy weapons, which are then used in turn to kill their own people. A lot of money that was handed to Rwanda in the 90's was used to kill many of the people in that country.

David Cameron is a politician, and I believe he has calculated that if he says he is going to ring fence 'over seas aid' it will make him and his party look warm and cuddly. I do not believe it has anything to do with caring for others but is a cynical kind of political posturing. I suppose you could argue that it does not really matter what reason the government decides to give just as long as they give, but I do not believe we should be handing over billions in aid without first looking at what that money should be spent on.

There are so many issues which the government chooses to ignore the people on, and overseas aid is one which many in this country feel uncomfortable about, I do think in this time of austerity this issue should be looked at carefully.

For many of our political elite the issues that concern many people are ignored, immigration is a good example. As you can imagine this issue does not affect those in power, because they have jobs, houses and can afford to send their children to good schools. The EU, human rights, crime, poor education, 2.5 million unemployed, over stretched public services, etc. These and many other issues concern many people, but I believe because these issues do not affect those in power and the 'chattering classes' they do not really care. And because they do not care they will not do anything about these real issues. David Cameron and those around him somehow think that if they are seen to be giving poor people in foreign countries money it will somehow salve their conscience. They believe this is what the population wants, but because of their arrogance and ignorance they will continue to ignore and sneer at those who question the wisdom of this policy.

Many people feel disenfranchised from politics and this will just drive a greater wedge between those who are in power and those who elect them. I can only hope that one day we will have politicians who are willing to listen, but unfortunately for us this is very unlikely whilst we have this lot in power.