“The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears down to the ground.”
--Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Posted on 07/03/2007 3:47:49 PM PDT by bnelson44
With British confidence in their leaders at a low ebb, new Prime Minister Gordon Brown assumed office last week pledging to undertake measures designed to restore public trust in the government. Following through on his promise, Brown presented a new plan Tuesday that would dramatically revise the Constitutional powers of the British government, with an eye to strengthening the checks and balances.
In his first statement to the House of Commons since assuming power last week, Brown said he would surrender to Parliament 12 powers traditionally reserved for the prime minister under the "Royal prerogative," including the power to declare war, along with the power to dissolve the House, and the right to appoint judges and bishops.
"I now propose to surrender or limit these powers to make for a more open 21st century British democracy which better serves the British people," he told MPs, to loud Labour cheers.
(Excerpt) Read more at iraqslogger.com ...
This guy hasn't even been in office for a week, and he's already even worse than the low expectatons that I had for him.
“with an eye to strengthening the checks and balances.”
Sounds a whole lot more like surrender than balance. Doesn’t everyone know that a committee (meaning Parliment) is a better way to get things done?
One really does not have to wonder, anymore, about what the world is coming to.
UN-believable.
What a moroon.
The “British Conservatives” will probably end up as the majority party again soon enough.
“The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears down to the ground.”
--Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Help me out here. I don’t know much about British Constitutional history, so my question is, how long has the current system been in place that Brown is attempting to change?
Great Reform Act of 1832?
Sounds like this guy doesn’t want the weight of too much responsibility on his shoulders. Let’s make the hard decisions by committee. Then you can’t blame me if no action is taken and something bad happens.
What a wimp.
The stern Scot's few public statements have been somber, measured and brief. Many Britons welcome the change, saying the lower-key approach may better reassure a rattled nation and prevent racial tensions from exploding.
Wow!
What is happening there after Margaret Thatcher!!
The Winston Churchill philosophy is total out of the window in UK. And they are going down the tube fast!!!
The link below discusses PCism around the world and really gets into how PCism controls the UK. If this POS Brown isn’t ousted quickly, the UK will become another Islamo country.
http://www.angryharry.com/boretreatofreason2.htm
In 1997, Britain began, in effect, to be ruled by political correctness for the first time. The Labour government was the first UK government not to stand up to political correctness, but to try and enact its dictates when they are not too electorally unpopular or seriously mugged by reality, and even sometimes when they are. The previous Conservative government was almost deliberately politi-cally incorrect, and during the previous Labour government political correctness had too little grip on the body politic to hold much sway.
In Britain, at the start of the twenty-first century, political correctness encompasses almost the entire range of policies from women’s pay to race relations, health care to education, crime to child discipline, and almost every institution, society, company and authority.
Political correctness has gained power over public services, from schools and hospitals to local authorities and central government. Political correctness became institutionalised at the BBC, but also started exerting control over ITV and broadsheet newspapers. Politically correct alternative comedians quickly swept to power, becoming the new establishment, while PC triumphed in the literary field. PC triumphed not just in trade unions and charities, but in professional and trade associations, from medical Royal Colleges to business associations. Finally, even multinationals and the police started suc-cumbing to PC.
The long march of PC through every nook and cranny of national life, leaving nothing untouched, was helped by the fact there is little competing ideology: although PC has been ridiculed, there has been virtually no counter-PC movement. A society enjoying unprecedented affluence and no external threats can afford to become intellectually decadent.
PC’s methodology of controlling speech and isolating opponents has been extraordinarily effective in a society that has practiced free speech for so long—and had to fight for it so little—that it has become complacent about it.
Since its establishment as the national ideology, political correctness sets the ground rules for debate, and is the benchmark against which public opinion is measured. When two strangers meet and talk politics, the need for acceptance means that more often than not they will usually stick to the politically correct text, even if they don’t agree with it.
So heavy is the punishment for transgression that few mainstream politicians or public figures would dare to be un-PC unless there is huge elect-oral advantage. Those simply seeking popular approval, such as actors or pop stars, automatically adopt and espouse politically correct beliefs, reinforcing them in the public mind in the process.
Anything that breaches political correctness is auto-matically controversial, and so any institution that wants to court public acceptance and avoid controversy must be PC. Since most institutions in Britain want to be publicly accepted, most have now become thoroughly permeated by political correctness.
The broadcast media, and the BBC in particular, stick to the politically correct text on most issues because it safely protects them from criticism. The BBC can endlessly promote mass immigration against the wishes of its licence fee payers with impunity, but as soon as one Panorama programme pointed to some downsides of mass immigration, it was attacked by the government and left-wing press as being ‘Powellite’. The film industry, both in the UK and US, almost uniformly sticks to the safe territory of promoting political correctness.
PC has silenced many awkward debates, as well as those that oppose them. As the row over Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve showed, the study of racial differences has become almost totally taboo. Groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre have proved very effective at silencing those they deem guilty of ‘hate’.
Amnesty International has been turned by political correctness from a worthy fighter for political prisoners around the world into a knee-jerk anti-Western-govern-ment campaigning organisation that has all but lost sight of its founding principles. Index on Censorship is on the brink of turning from an organisation that campaigns for freedom of speech to one that campaigns against it.
Political correctness has also created a climate that has fuelled a vast growth in charities and pressure groups that support and promote the politically correct world view on almost all issues. From Greenpeace to Amnesty Inter-national, from Refugee Action to the National Council for One Parent Families, a huge non-governmental sector has grown up, all pushing in the PC direction.
They are often taxpayer-funded, or charities subsidised by tax relief, and can campaign for funds from the public without oppo-sition. They are given endless invaluable free publicity from the BBC and most newspapers as objective, independent groups—the BBC repeats everything that Liberty says with such unquestioning respect that they treat it often as a justification for a story in itself, with no counterbalancing points of view, even though Liberty is tied closely to the Labour party and cannot be described as politically neutral. As frequently complained about in the tabloid media, the National Lottery has been reduced to a fund to promote political correctness.
Non-government groups that may have a politically incorrect aspect to their work usually silence it. The Council for the Protection of Rural England campaigns about house building in the countryside, but it would never dare tackle one of the main, and most easily tackled, causes in the growth in housing demand, mass immigration.
In contrast, there are virtually no pressure groups that promote politically incorrect views, and most of those that do, such as Christian family groups, tend to have a low profile and are treated with suspicion by the media, especially the BBC. One example is Migrationwatch UK, founded by the former ambassador Sir Andrew Green, a lone group campaigning for less immigration (a view supported by 80 per cent of the public), against literally dozens of groups promoting mass immigration. In contrast to these other groups,
Migrationwatch gets no taxpayers’ money and is almost totally blackballed by the BBC, and to some extent by the broadsheet media. Political correctness also means that high profile figures are far less likely to support Migrationwatch in public than they are any politically correct organisation, because they will automatically become open to attack.
Political correctness also succeeds, like the British empire, through divide and rule.
While those on the politically correct side of a debate can happily hang together, whatever their differences, the politically incorrect often end up appeasing political correctness by denouncing fellow travellers, in an act of ‘triangulation’ aimed at making them appear less extreme than the others. Political correctness is so powerful, and the guilt by association that it promotes so effective, that even the politically incorrect fear being seen together. This makes it far more difficult for politically incorrect individuals and groups to work together for common causes.
Changes in society have fuelled the growth of political correctness. The growing emphasis on emotion and feelings over reason and logic in recent decades, combined with the decline in the study of science, has given PC a more powerful grip on the mind of the nation. The triumph of a more superficial celebrity culture over an intellectual literary culture has reduced resistance to PC, as shallow celebrities are more likely to succumb to the fashionable pressure of being PC than an intellectual icon. The TV culture champions the personal experience over abstract reasoning, intrinsically giving backing to politically correct ways of thinking.
PC encourages policies that further increase its potency. It encourages Third World immigration to the West, importing challenges to traditional Western values, and dividing society into ethnic groups where identity and grievance politics can thrive. It encourages the growth of the public sector, increasing the domain where it has the most powerful grip.
Political correctness also binds its values into the fabric of a country by laws and international treaties that make it very difficult to challenge. Various human rights laws, charters, conventions and treaties, from the UN to Europe to the Human Rights Act, create an entire international and domestic legal framework that upholds PC values and beliefs, making it very difficult for future governments to challenge them.
When Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, said in 2005 that if elected Prime Minister he would take Britain out of the UN convention on refugees, he was told by the European Commission that he had no legal right to, and Britain would immediately be taken to the European Court of Justice.
Ultimately, political correctness is the luxury of a powerful society. As the fear of Islamic terrorism has shown, PC’s enemy is a society’s sense of vulnerability. When people feel insecure, they more strongly resist what they see as the idiocies of PC because they believe the stakes are too high.
The combination of all these factors meant that PC, one of history’s most wide-ranging ideological revolutions, enjoyed the most extraordinarily rapid advance. Ellis wrote:
Dissenters can expect to be not only criticised, as dissenters always are, but denounced as both moral outcasts and unsophisticated simpletons. Yet this is done on the basis of a viewpoint that coalesced far too quickly for it to have been properly thought through, one that seemed to advance not by its intellectual force but instead by a kind of tidal action that suddenly surged everyone.
It is time to retrace our steps, to do what should have been done initially; we must take a hard look at what this position really amounts to and whether it is sound enough to deserve the commanding position it now has.
Thats what it sounds like to me.
If he hasnt the balls to accept the responsibility of the job he should have refused the job.
Who is this moron?
On the bright side, where is Winston Churchill buried? Hook a dynamo to his spinning corpse and you should be able to light all of London.
LLS
The guy is aiming to be Prime Minister for life. He’s going to turn himself into another figure head ruler to go along with the Royal family.
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