Sleight Of The Political Hand

A rather long cross-post, but well worth the read, from IanPJonPolitics:

"Roll up, Roll up, Roll up, watch the magician make the quangos disappear before your very eyes.. watch carefully Ladies and Gentlemen, because if you can guess where the quango has gone you might get your money back.

Well you may as well for all the good it will do, the Bonfire of Quangos is going to be the biggest sleight of hand ever.

You may recall that from time to time I keep asking the question, Is the UK a totalitarian state, and by that I don’t mean lots of uniformed blackshirts running around with guns making you do lots of things you don’t want to, what I do mean is that every facet of your life is governed by political rules, totally, making you do lots of things you don’t want to do. The simple answer to the question is yes.

The second question that comes out of that is, Is this totalitarian state of our own making, or is it being imposed for the greater good of an emerging empire, the EU. Again, the answer to the question is yes.

Bear with me, and I shall explain.

In order to build an empire its leaders have to subsume the component nations that make up that empire. Historically this has been done through the military, by invasion, war and occupation. But all empires have an underlying weakness, that they are never founded by the popular will of the people, but are created by force and therefore can only be held together by force. All empires fail when eventually the people say no more.

The founding fathers of the EU, with WWII fresh in their minds, decided that war was no longer a viable option in empire building, that it destroyed far more than it built, and so opted for another tack, deception.

Since the signing of the very first treaty and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) which was signed as the Treaty of Paris in July 1951, the populations of the European Nations have been deceived.

Year upon year that deception has continued, sovereign powers given up slice by slice to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels with each new treaty, our politicians either lying outright to people and parliament or simply ignoring the legal basis as each slice of sovereignty is handed over.

And so we are where we are today, a nation politically and socially ravaged, destroyed from the inside out, its once proud institutions discredited, bastardised or dismantled with the functions of state distributed to thousands of quangos, charities and vested interest businesses as it continues its relentless growth to satisfy each new EU edict.

The method and the acceleration of this destruction over the past 13 years is  eloquently described by Sean Gabb in his address to a Conservative Association in October 2009. The method has been remarkably simple, money. Entire industries and selected segments of the population have been bribed with taxpayers money, and now they pay the price.

Which now brings us to yesterday’s news, the culling of the Quangos. Having been set up at huge expense to operate and enforce the functions of running a totalitarian state, the biggest problem has always been on how to finally hand this over to the EU without the public realising that even more sovereignty has been lost.

The quangos were never designed to be a lasting feature, but a method to instil a loathing by the public, at their cost, at their intrusiveness, at their unaccountability. Just as MPs were encouraged to claim expenses, the Quangos were encouraged to build little empires, money not a problem, spend whatever you need, just enforce the new order, the new regulations. And they did so with gusto.

To get rid of them in this game of deception would become an easy political sleight of hand, a point scoring PR exercise, as was the expenses scandal, and the public would lap it up, praise the courage of the politicians who eliminated such waste, and the politically compliant press would whip up public anger for good measure to keep your attention, whilst with the other hand the magicians were deceiving you yet again.

You will see from the press releases carefully crafted by Francis Maude that very few of these Quangos are actually being abolished outright, in fact for the majority of them their functions are being taken into the political structure, whilst the absurd, greedy publicly unacceptable money wasting boards are consigned to history. The heads will roll, the useful idiots are no longer required, their work is done and the public will applaud.

So how does this stage trick work? In the next few months we will see UK government announcements telling us that some of the quangos functions will be distributed to local authorities, that these things can be done more locally, and cheaper through existing council bodies, bringing politics closer to the people, blah blah blah. What you won’t be told is that these will only be the implementation functions, the enforcement functions and the money collection functions.

The important bits, the decision making functions will not be mentioned because they are already being handed over to multitudes of EU institutions located in Brussels or around the 27 member states, depending on where the particular institution or agency is headquartered.

Don’t believe me, then just google ‘News EU’ or ‘News EU Commission’ and read the European news stories (ignore the deception compliant UK press), or visit the Albion Alliance presents website where you will see all the press releases for each EU agency updated every 15 minutes, and you will see that they are already, on a daily basis, making the decisions that should be made here in the UK.

They are making not just policy decisions, but taking individual and specific decisions about businesses, banks, markets, monopolies, take-overs, consumer affairs, goods, trading standards, telecommunications, mobile phones, food standards, colourings, artificial additives, drugs, pharmaceuticals, the arts, vehicles, testing, emissions, GM crops, copyright, IPR, exports, industry training, the film industry, financial reporting, higher education, industrial development, insolvency, regional development, research councils, technology strategy, atomic energy, employment & skills, security, building regulations, infrastructure planning, energy, climate change, waste management, hazardous substances, organic standards, agriculture, horticulture, waterways, water management, environment, forestry, marine management, etc etc etc.

Not only are they making policy on the competency, but many of the localised decisions which the already trained Lisbon programme local authority staff, regional authority and the Committee of the Regions are ready to implement, they are just waiting for Westminster to give them the quangos remits and you won’t even see it happen.

So, whilst the culling of quangos is welcome in theory, don’t be fooled into thinking that this is going to save taxpayers heaps of money, its not. Like Gordon Brown before him all the Osborne will be doing is moving the financial deckchairs. The acquired quango functions still have to be paid for, and as with all things EU, it is you, the taxpayer who stumps up for it. (what’s that? MPs voted through an increase in the EU budget yesterday? hmm)

And finally, we must not forget the coup de grace. The Audit Commission. Politicised and corrupted by Labour to allow this EU infrastructure to be established with a minimum of exposure, and now simply axed by this government rather than reformed. By felling this most important of the quangos, the taxpayer has lost the ability to scrutinise how the local authorities spend your money, giving government the ability to keep hidden what must be kept hidden, it only serves to prolong the magicians trick.

Bet you thought it was all Made in England didn’t you. Unfortunately, it is one of the final planks in the making of the EU empire, by deception. A spokesman for David Cameron said the aim was to “deal with the proliferation and mess of having lots and lots of departmental bodies, some of which will have been set up with one objective in mind but the world’s moved on”. Yes, clearly it has.

I am predicting that just like other Empires that have come and gone throughout history, it will fail under the shear weight of its overloaded regulatory systems, a system that governs every aspect of your life, totally. If you’ve forgotten, go read the question at the top again.

This EU empire has never had the will of the people behind it, and so eventually as people baulk at its continuous biting, ever deeper into your pockets and civil liberties, it too will revert to force to survive. I pray that the people see sense and say NO, no more, and do so quickly, before the wars begin in Europe all over again."

What IanPJ terms a political 'magic trick' and which I term 'sleight of hand' (same thing - I know) deserves to be spread and spread quickly amongst the land!