The voice of God:

I used to a useful man, a man with a purpose and a future and then I lost my job. Now I live at home with my poor parents and so for me the loss of my job was not some terrible financial loss, I had no dependents to look after so there was only the very minor guilt of living off my parents and so I was content to search for job after job.

I am a very dour Methodist and thus have very low living cost but even I eventually drained my own savings and was forced to claim benefits, something I do with utterly no enthusiasm but needs be when the devil drives an all. I was set the utterly puerile task of look for just three jobs a week and decided to set myself the far harder task of 3 a day; Ironically all to no avail.

It was an agency I applied for ages ago that offered me a job, after one very short interview I was offered a new post. It was a dramatic step down in pay and responsibility but I have always believed a job was a job and I have always believed that you should work if you can. So knowing very little I took the post. Well to my shock it was a data entry position, something my dyslexia did not empower me to but I swore to do my best and to my small surprised I was passible at it, unfortunately I had managed to annoy my manger.

Now I am not a weak man, life has somewhat harden me and I can take allot of stuff but even I cannot take manager who highlights the smallest of errors and who responds to every enquiry with aggression. I concede I was not ideal for the position and certainly did not possesses the readymade skill they required but I tried my hardest, slowly increasing the pressure on myself, silly making myself quite ill in the processes. I would have quit but I knew that I would lose all rights to benefits for six months and thus it was with grateful release that thanks to my boss’s campaign of criticism I was let go.

Now I was sick in body and mind, I was suffering from high blood pressure and a deep depression brought on by the seemingly downward turn my life had taken. Of course I was only aware of the sickness which was very minor and really exacerbated by the secrete sickness. Once again I lived of what small earnings I had gathered in my time in purgatory until they ran out.

So once again I joined the roll call of the disposed and trust me, if you’ve never been in the temple of despair aka a job centre, you should get down on your knees and give thanks. Then salvation, I was invited for a first interview at a firm offering an ideal position where I could use and build upon my existing skills and I hope be happy and helpful there. At the first interview the enormity of the gap between the starting position and the one I would eventually achieve was explained to me. I was lucky enough to be invited for a second one.

So I woke early that morning, before my alarm, and convinced myself that I was wasting my time, that the test (a standard part of a technically oriented 2nd interview) would show I was unable to function and I would be humiliated. This was the voice of self-doubt and of the depression into which I had slipped. This was the voice of the devil or my own personal version. I read many years ago that the devil hides in those corners of the mind that we dear or cannot look and so there rested mine, ready to leap out as the opportunity arose.

Thankfully alongside the devil there spoke another voice, a stronger voice. A voice that spoke of my duty to endure and attend, as if I were humiliated it was my own fault for over stating my ability and a voice that spoke of safety and of love. A voice that rose above the calmer to affirm not that I would be successful but that I should go anyway. This was the voice of God. It seems a rather mundane thing for God to involve himself in but as someone said God is in the detail.

Sometimes we expect vast angels and choirs and burning bushes to guide are path, we especially expect ever greater wonders the darker are situation is but sometimes it is just a voice of confidence or of duty that is the voice of God, God maybe great but often his voice is but a whisper. Anyway beyond the theology I did after a series of disasters that would have level lesser men attend the interview and was offered the job. I cannot know what will become of me or of anyone who reads this piece. I can just reaffirm that God loves them all, that God is with them and that they should listen for that voice of God so often drowned out.

Bretton-woods

I encourage you to read this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system because the post war miracle experience in the Western world after the second world war (and also in the USSR) was based upon the international economic regulations imposed by the Bretton-woods system. I will not in this piece explore all of the policies agreed on at Bretton-woods but the main economic consequence was the nationalisation of capital (or restrictions on the free movement of capital worldwide).

Now the irony of Bretton-wood was that the system which underpinned the free world was not subject to democracy and the bodies it created; IMF, WMF, UN and the EC (read the term of the Marshall funds) are above and beyond democratic control. On the issue of international capital control,the main aim of Bretton-wood was to prevent economic collapse and to prevent the west competing for business with other Western nations and to enable the nation state to properly tax and regulate business. Business where prevented from competing international via the aforementioned regulation of international capital movements (essential for truly global businesses) but they were also internally subject to heavy regulation and could not find new markets due once again to limitation on the free movement of capital.

Now I can think I can read you mind at this point, interesting but what does this have to do with me; well it has this to do without you. The welfare state was funded by two thing, one 60 years of UK debt and two British industries and UK capital held in place due to the strict international capital restrictions put in pace at Bretton woods. In short the Bretton woods conference enabled the high tax economies of the west by preventing capital from moving elsewhere and thus preventing international capital competition and we are posed with the funding of the same welfare state (enlarged due to increased population and technology) after a economics crash and in a world of free capital.

There are those out there who propagate a tax and spend solution to our economic difficulties and point out the irony of increasing benefit expenditure to save state funds by shedding public employees and they do have a valid point but it is a point from a very narrow standard point. The state is not going anywhere, it cannot leave this nation, and private capital aka business can. Unlike in the Bretton woods world, capital is no longer trapped in the nation state and wise and pragmatic state compete for this capital and this capital powers their economies; capital without which the public sector would run itself into a ground and capital and the resulting businesses they fund without which the economy cannot run.

There is of course allot of panicked talk about the flight of capital, caused by Britain’s shameful over reliance on the ever mobile financial services but capital though freed from international restriction will not flee from are economy as long as we offer a market for it and the skills it requires; largely regardless of tax rates and regulation levels, however, there are some very large organisations that will be put off or prevented from stating due to high taxes or over regulation and it is these businesses and these jobs which once trapped by Bretton woods will take off a fly if we try to use them to fund the welfare state.
Of course if we target there wealthy owners of capital or its movers (the share traders and currency movers) both of whom were ensnared by the Bretton woods would simply up roots and move, well some would and they would move their skills and there businesses with them. The point is again that Bretton wood enabled his taxes and regulations by preventing people moving their capital and thus making it easier to tax it. Without this it is economic suicide to peruse a moral which hunt against the very people who by their avarice fund the state and double economic suicide to chase away the capital are state so needs.

Eurosceptic:

I joined the conservative party over ten year ago because of its Eurosceptic stance. I have always seen the EU as an overly centralist, overly bureaucratic and often overly supra-nationalistic organisation. In short I do not like it and I would prefer it if the UK was not any part of its political arrangements but instead dealt with the EU via mutual trading relationship alone. I, however, recognise that even these trading relationship would require the EU some say in are laws.

I was never a Eurosceptic in tooth and claw, yes I oppose it but I also believe the EU is a trading power and represents a large trading power with which Britain must deal, ideally from a position of a wider trading network then we currently enjoy. Also a relationship based on mutual respect and co-operation rather than a relationship built of grudging anger and viscous Eurosceptic rhetoric that has marked Britain’s attitude to Europe since the days of Elizabeth the 1st .

What I see is thus not an angry, embittered and ill thought out total rejection of the EU that both UKIP and the irrational wing of the of the Eurosceptic wing would have, an approach that would harm not only Britain’s economy but Britain future prospects, as we would have really let the lunatic run the asylum.

Instead I believe we must build up a truly international trade centred foreign policy whilst tying to cement an anti-federalist majority within the EU and certainly finding trading partners for are post EU future. We must always seek to reform the EU into accepting more trading partners as well as seeking to create a unlimited trading sphere in which all nations may trade freely with one another, a sphere free from government interference and the massive globalised businesses which have dominated international trade and which has led to support for supra national governments.
My point is just as we should look toward trade as our salvation, we must not look towards supra national governments like the EU to provide this nor look toward supra national business to dominate it. Either of these futures is unfit for Britain and would see it diminishment as an international and sovereign power. The EU is not the sole emery here, it is transnational organisations and their massive powers and centralising tendencies.

Why vote conservative:

There are many reasons why to vote for the conservative party in the up and coming election the clearest is that we are the most honourable and honest party; this bi-election has been solely caused by the illegal activities of the last labour candidate, who cared more for his own election then the social harmony of your constituency.

Another reason is that the conservative party is the only party able to deal with crime; Ken Clark is busying himself to bring prison reform through particle prison based work system; making prisoners pay for both their crimes and there room and board whilst ending the shameful and waste of mass short prison sentences and removing the pointless and frequently broken ASBOS with the right of local community to physically ride themselves of bad neighbours.

In addition to dealing with crime and making prisons work the conservative party has also fought against the tyranny of terror by both fighting terrorist and fighting back an overly intrusive state that has overridden are traditional liberties with massive and overly expensive databases and the imposition of the surveillance society alongside illegal surveillance orders which in vain try to control are enemies but end up simply controlling the decent and law abiding citizens. Unlike some others, the conservative party will not sacrifice are diversity or are liberty in order to fail to curb terrorism but we will fight and tackle extremism in all its forms wherever it may rear its hate filled head.

It is also the conservative party that had saved and will continue to secure the private sector led, manufacturing led real recovery from the shameful overspend of the last regime and from the repercussion of the global collapse. We are doing this by localising power from distant costly QUANGOS and RDA to local development agencies as well as decreasing business taxes and regulations. Indeed Mr. Cameron has been busy creating new trade connections with the new emerging market. It is a notable achievement of the conservative lead government that we have lifted the poorest from paying tax and also are reforming wholly the welfare state to make work pay and talking to businesses to learn how to help them create jobs and to help them, help us out of this mess.

There are many, many other reason to vote for the conservative party; we are the only party opposed to the takeover of Britain by the EU, we are the only party without a particle and merciful immigration policy and we are the only party with an active and trade orientated foreign policy and the party of peace ending the wasteful war in Afghanistan. In the end you should vote for the conservative party because together we will remake Britain, we will make it strong and fair and free once again.

Letter to my MP

Dear Mr Wilson.

I would like a question asked about the lack of dyslexics rights asked in the house.
I was recently made redundant and I am once again looking for jobs, after having previously been denied jobs because they required handwritten work. I again face being denied the opportunity to apply for jobs because they require a hand written application or require a GCSE in maths (a qualification I could never pass as I am dis-calculate but a disability Excel enable me to copes with). Indeed in my employed life I was a data analyst.

The sheer amount of soft discrimination those of use with learning disabilities have to face is further complicated by the DDA which only covers server dyslexics (whatever this means) and only covers us once in employment. Even once at work I have been insulted due to minor errors in grammar with no hope of recourse and even the charities set up for dyslexics fail to seek further protection for learning disabilities under the DDA.

Yours sincerely:

Symon Turner (BA – MA)

Blue feminism:

I start this blog with an admission, I am a man and not only a man a single man with no experience of the world of women which according to traditional conservative norms makes me ideal to write about what passes for conservative feminism.

The first principle of conservative or blue feminism; women are just a precious and worthwhile in any society; Conservatism has often been terribly guilty of treating women as lesser then men, of lesser worth and thus deserved to be relegated to the domestic sphere. This normative assumption has been the curse of blue feminism and those women who agree with it further principle has had to wage war on the grounds of equality.

The second principle; is that the domestic sphere is equal in importance to the economic and political sphere. Without the domestic sphere there is no social sphere without the domestic sphere and there is no civilisation, worthy of its name, without the social and domestic sphere. It is not unworthy simple because it is an unpaid sphere of human activity nor is it subservient to the economic sphere as without an active and attractive domestic / social sphere what is the purpose of the economics sphere.

Are third and most important understanding is that women far from being temptress are moral guardians of the social sphere, it is they by there unpaid labour who create and maintain this space and it is they via their child rearing and social assistance and guidance to those in need who enforced wider moral norms. Indeed one of the worse crimes of modern feminism is by tearing women away from this moralising network, they have made them either immoral or victims of the evil lusts of man.

So blue feminism seeks first; via the organic separation of economics, to refill the domestic sphere and reenergise the social sphere as well as protect and empower women to take their full sovereignty over these spheres and are empowered together to once again take up there moral mantle and led the vanguard in the moralisation of our society.

Civil constitution

I want you to imagine you are the last man standing, the last man of power and authority left in what was once a powerful and dignified nation. You are a general and you have taken up arms in a civil war that left a third of your nation’s population dead, you served in an army that has committed genocide and you presided over a period of moral panic and kangaroo courts. You have removed a king, crowned and king and now as your final act you are now dealing with a foreign power to organise an invasion to depose yet another king. This is the life of General Wolf the man who saved Britain from anarchy and organised the glorious revolution.

I have said frequently you cannot understand the quagmire of British history, culture and especially democracy and what passes for constitution without understanding the civil war period. The first key point to understand is that the civil war was waged against a protestant king and waged for various and often confused reasons, this led to a period of no rule and then iron rule and via the death of Oliver Cromwell led without much thought to the restoration of the monarchy and its replacement (due to James 2nd active Catholicism) with Mary the 2nd which was the beginning of the limited monarchy we know today and is referred to as the glorious revolution.

Now the two acts which created the nation we know; the bills of rights was formed directly out of the civil war and the act of succession is a direct result of the glorious revolution. These two bills were of course passed by parliament (not a democratic one) but they are mainly a result of the peace settlement achieved at the end of this bloody and confused period. It is of course a terrible fudge a bigoted and confusing mess.

A mess it is now time to fix; Britain has always just added on and on to this rotting structure, further confusing the issues and this tradition has continued in the modern era, the era in which Britain is adopting supera national constitutional law, manly from the EU but also from the UN and other transnational organisations. In additions to these external pressures British governments are also trying to adapt to this new environment by passing psudo constitutional bills and even enacting a constitutional law courts all of which in my view has added an intolerable pressure on the rotting structure of British constitutional tradition.

It is time for a new formal constitution, a constitution which can stand equally alongside the constitutions of the EU, UN and other nation states. A constitution which is clear and which everyone knows and stand a reasonable chance of being enforced and a constitution which limits the power of the executive and also formalises the democratic procedures to follow, free from the vagaries of tradition. Most importantly of all, this constitution unlike the civil war settlement, must be subject to acceptance of the people as it is by our will that parliament sits.