Cllr. Gavin Ayling

I have noticed a lot of things change about me recently. A friend tells me, for example, that our tastebuds and so our tastes change every seven years. Whether or not this is true — and if it is whether it is definitely seven years for everyone — my tastes have definitely changed recently.

Last year I started to like apples. Earlier (maybe two years ago) I started to like cabbage and this Christmas, for the first time ever, I liked brussel sprouts.

And it’s not just food, last week I slept much less than normal (and didn’t feel tired). Come Thursday I decided I must just not be noticing the tiredness and so went to bed early. The result? I woke up at 4am on Friday morning feeling fully refreshed!

It’s also extended to politics and religion. On this site in the past I have been strongly against religion. I continue to be frightened by people who will do things in the name of God that I hope normal people would not do in the absence of His influence. But I can also feel sympathy for those people who do believe. I can feel what Dawkins has described — a feeling that God exists — which can be explained by biological means.

So, like all things, religion is not black and white. There are fundamentalist nutters at one extreme, a violent version of Richard Dawkins at the other and myself sitting nearer Richard Dawkins than Bin Laden, closer to the Dalai Lama than the Archbishop of Canterbury and closer to a vicar than a priest.

Why am I telling you this? Well, at almost regular intervals (perhaps the seven-year thing), I have come to see another aspect of life as grey rather than black, or as grey rather than white.

It’s a shame, with these newly discovered shades of grey, that we no longer have the diversity of political parties we once had. SDP, Liberals, Whigs, Radicals, Tories and Independents have now been replaced, to all intents and purposes by the Conservatives and Labour. And neither of these parties, for all their minor differences, reflects the opinion of more than (at a guess) 5% of the population. The so-called centre-ground, is actually the swing vote — a part of the population which has a particular opinion but has not bothered to make a firm decision about whether people should be taxed a lot or a little, and whether people should work hard or have a ‘right’ to the dole.

There’s another problem with the party system. I know Libertarians who would never vote UKIP or Tory even though they ought to be their natural home; and I know socialists who could never vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats because of other policies.

In France, as I was discussing with a colleague the other day, the president must be elected, eventually, by more than 50% of the population through run-offs resulting in just two candidates. But why couldn’t this work when electing a parliament too? It would guarantee a working majority for a particular party (which I believe is important) while not disenfranchising the 66%-ish who do not vote for the eventual winner in most English elections (assuming the FPTP system we currently have provides a reasonable impression of the intentions of the electorate; which is doesn’t).

I am delighted to announce that my motion on the EU treaty and the referendum Mr Blair et al promised us was passed, not unanimously, but with no opposition votes. The text reads as follows:

Notice of Motion - Council Procedure Rule 17
The following Notice of Motion is proposed by Councillor Gavin Ayling:
The “Reform Treaty”, signed by Tony Blair on 23 June, is acknowledged publicly by the leaders of nearly all our EU partners to be virtually the same as the Constitution Treaty. France and The Netherlands decisively rejected that Treaty.
The “Reform Treaty” transfers yet more substantive powers from Britain to the EU and further erodes British laws and the British Constitution.
It will reduce the rights and freedoms of the residents of Adur and the whole nation.
Therefore this Council calls on Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, to abide by the Government’s promise to the electorate in the 2005 Labour Party Manifesto page 84, “We will put [the Constitution Treaty] to the British people in a referendum…”

Read the original on the Adur District Council website.

And I’m also delighted to see that Ming the pitiful has now suggested a referendum would be a good idea, naively believing that the people would vote for massive bureaucratic waste, cultural erasure, pathetic and unnecessary directives and higher taxes (for no gain).

Oh, and Sign the Petition

Just sign the petition

On Friday I started a new job. I won’t say much about my work, as I didn’t before because of the trouble people seem to get into when they blog about their place of work. Saying that, though, I’ve never felt there’s been much bad to say about my employer but hey ho.

Anyway, the reason I told you that is because it now means that rather than driving 15 minutes along the A27 I need to drive for nearer 1 hour 15 minutes including a stretch of the M25 — a round trip of around 90 miles. On Friday too, I started car sharing to reduce some of that burden, petrol etc. (note no spurious mention of the environment). And today was the first journey with only one of the sharers.

I am painfully aware that I can turn on speech/lecture mode very easily and I make serious efforts not to initiate or prolong political conversations. So it was reassuring today that the conversation on the way home was about things that I think ought to concern young, male 20-somethings:

• House prices
• The tax we pay for social sponges
• The war in Iraq vs. the lack of war in Zimbabwe
• The general wetting-down of England
• The worrying increase in religious belief

If the journey had lasted longer, I would expect it to move to the state of the BBC, how Channel 4 are so much better at programming, the worrying rise in uncontrolled internal movement in the EU.

And it turns out that us right-wingers are far more compassionate than the so-called lefty do-gooders. While we believe in Grammar schools which help people achieve regardless of social backgrounds, while we believe that social housing is a gift to the lazy and relatively scant help to the hard-working, while we believe that government money would be better spent (or not raised through taxes) on services that people need rather than on yet another campaign to stop people hurting themselves with alcohol (it’s their body for Christ’s sake), while we believe in free trade with poorer countries not spurious Fair Trade, and while we believe in helping those in genuine need (like the victims of 2005’s Tsunami)… While we believe those things, the left do not.

The Left believes that Fair Trade (helping a few farmers get a non-market driven — and still low — price for their product) is the answer to global poverty. It believes that we should give aid to Darfur rather than tanks to stop the genocide; It believes that the government should look after each individual even down to the nitty-gritty of their lives; And it believes that any different lifestyle that does not result in dreadlocks or prayer (or both) is to be stamped out by the state.

So when the UK Independence Party is laughed at by the BBC (and for obvious, and understandable, reasons), let’s remember that they are the ones who are against Social Housing being FORCED on developers (building on their own private land remember), they are the ones against high taxation and they are the ones who recognise genuine fairness.

When I joined the Conservatives in 1996, it was because I could see that their ideology was based in fairness, merit and (increasingly at the time, though completely thankfully now) genuine equal rights. I still believe that is what the membership believes in and, sadly, UKIP are completely ineffectual at every level, so I remain a Conservative.

But this is a call to those who believe in ideology and fairness: stop using politics as a method of achieving power, and start using it as a tool to convince people of your ideology and stand for election on principles.

I think it is time for a summary of the progress we have made towards the fascist state. Note I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but the apparatus is definitely coming along nicely.

First there were CCTV cameras. The UK now has more cameras per head than anywhere else in the world and, as it happens, we have held that record for quite some time now. As with most of the points I shall make in this post, this in and of itself is not a problem. So long as the state can be trusted to pass laws that are in the common interest and, simultaneously, do not subject minorities to the tyranny of the majority, CCTV does not pose a serious problem to liberty.

More recently, and in the name of terrorism prevention, Labour decided it was acceptable to imprison foreign nationals without trial because a secretive part of the government claims to have ‘evidence’ against them. For reasons that I admit appear sensible, the security services (as they are euphemistically called) are unwilling to reveal the evidence: it would give away how they gained it. But that said, there can never (ever) be justification for those who govern us to imprison people without trial.

Imprisonment without trial is only one step away from imprisoning political opponents. Who could claim differently if the Home Office decided that I, or anyone else who had ever criticised the government, was an enemy of the state? Without a trial anyone can be put ‘out of harm’s way’. At the last election the LibDems claimed that their policy of allowing the vote to prisoners was an angle of attack against this very problem writ small. But their policy included those found guilty and imprisoned by their peers: in jury trial.

But jury trial is no longer guaranteed. Again for good reasons, the state considers that lay juries cannot understand the complexity of a fraud trial. I am told this is true and that there have been people against whom the evidence was overwhelming that were acquitted because the jury was confused. The trouble, again, is that the state only need convince the people once that juries don’t work for subsequent erosion of the right to trial by jury to be a whole lot easier. Each time we accept an erosion of our freedom we accept that that erosion will continue.

I have probably said it before, but I think it’s worth repeating: The Freedom of Information Act (FoI), as described, is an oxymoron. Like the Human Rights Act, the FoI is guaranteeing something that, by convention, had been assumed. The Human Rights Act was the first law that told people what they may do, rather than assuming that everything not written into law was allowed by omission. It has been said (by people more eloquent than me) that this is the first sign of a government that is out of control. Giving people ‘rights’ or specific access to ‘information’ implies that there is some need to safeguard those rights.

On the 18 May this year MPs voted on an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act to stop it applying to those we entrust our governance to. Link. Only 12% of Conservative MPs voted on this Bill even though it was raised by one of their number, but that doesn’t excuse them. The only serious party of opposition, the only party that could replace Labour is tacitly supporting the erosion of our liberty and access to information about those who govern for us.

In the future we will have ID cards. This card, which will be the key to access to all parts of modern life, will be a single switch with which the government can erase you. How simple would it be for a future government to introduce ‘bugs’ to the system so that political dissidents’ cards stop working before elections, or before an important protest near the Houses of Parliament?

But the truth is we don’t really need these cards. Already by 2002 most people were captured on CCTV more than 300 times a day. As technology improves these cameras will be able to recognise you. How simple would it be to record the identity of every person who passes by a state-owned CCTV camera so that their whereabouts can be known in case of an accident or crime? If the State knows where you are the entire time, then a government with the less-than-honourable motives would be able to stop you from protesting etc.

Let’s not forget, either, than the Houses of Parliament are already a no-protest zone. The Tiananmen Square of England is the very heart of democracy.

The internet, though, is the surprising end to this list. The internet has grown organically and is not a tool created by governments to bring about some control. This network which allows people around the world to communicate, even with those they have never met before, is a relatively new thing. Just ten years ago most people had no idea what the internet was and virtually no-one relied upon it.

Now many political groups use the internet almost exclusively. Some groups never meet in person. Other groups rely on the internet to organise themselves and would be severely weakened without access to it. So it is important to note how much power the state has over these communication networks.

The Labour government’s fascist Control Orders, which are the latest way of imprisoning people without trial, allow the State to restrict your access to all modern communication methods including the internet. Whether or not you believe in the threat supposedly posed by Echelon, Control Orders allow the State to restrict your access to communication.

In a future where our ability to move about, protest government actions, vote or even communicate can be controlled so easily, we should be building safeguards. Our constitution should be shoring up the right to trial by jury, it should be turning off London’s Congestion Charge cameras outside of operation and private companies should not be required to hand over information about people who have not committed a crime.

It is so very easy, when discussing Civil Liberties, to sound like one of the tin-foil hat brigade, but the dangers are tangible and, aside from getting the wrong party, V for Vendetta is not so unlikely as we’d like to think.

As probably many other Councillors have, I today received a manifesto from The New Party.

The UK has a major problem with new political parties. Inertia amongst the membership of the other parties (and those who are not members of a party) means that new parties must have some major backing to make any headway at all. UKIP is the only recent new party to have gained any sort of significant political power and the last party to start and gain power from the incumbent two is the Labour Party.

So it is interesting that The New Party is offering free membership; it is interesting that The New Party introduction letter is written by a former Labour Councillor; and when you read the detail you can see a bizarre mix of Labour’s social ideals alongside genuine free market economics to reform, positively, the NHS, welfare, pensions and education. In truth, the economic section shines.

But there are problems:
1) Their policy on drugs is out of date and will, inevitably, fail as badly as the other parties’ policies have. Cameron’s hinted at a more relaxed drugs policy and this is right.
2) The Party notes the ideological and practical problems that Planning regulations introduce. But their solution is odd — very odd. They would allow local Councils to set up Planning-free zones. I don’t think I can say anything helpful about this policy but it strikes me as a half-measure. It would be better to limit planning authorities’ powers in some areas (and strengthen in others)? Actually, in my opinion, the single most important area of planning reform needed is a reduction in the number of appeals processes available to people — it should be simpler and much, much quicker.
3) The lovely glossy manifesto completely ignores devolution and the fundamental constitutional problems that it has created.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great policies in there — some that Cameron would do well to incorporate into a radical first term’s manifesto — but there doesn’t seem to be a single message. I may be wrong here, but I suspect each section was written by different people completely independently of the other sections. The “wills” and “woulds” are particularly jarring.

If you agree with the Manifesto of The New Party you should join it — inertia is a result of people not doing what they should. But you may want to wait for Cameron’s policies to know whether that party reflects your opinions more closely than do the Conservatives. I strongly suspect the Conservatives policies will be excellent with only a very few mistakes (like the Barnet formula’s continuation etc).

It astounds me — actually, “astounds” is hardly strong enough but I don’t know one that is, that the EU can be seen to be a force for good in the UK; it astounds me that anyone at all could find it in themselves to defend it in its current make-up, when it provides us with such blatant arrogance and failure.

Nigel Farage is the best MEP that I know enough about to make a fair assessment of. This video should be, like the last, played to anyone who finds it in themselves to defend this corrupt, expensive, pointless, arrogant, supra-national organisation.

I have cheekily referred to the EU as the E-USSR — I didn’t realise how accurate that was!

Thanks once again to Andrew Kennedy for making me aware of this video.