Hon. President of the Mises Centre, Godfrey Bloom, spoke at the Cambridge Union during Easter Term 2017, arguing that because of rise of legalistic, big government, Britain is no longer “great.”
Free Life
For Life, Liberty and Property
Hon. President of the Mises Centre, Godfrey Bloom, spoke at the Cambridge Union during Easter Term 2017, arguing that because of rise of legalistic, big government, Britain is no longer “great.”
Godfrey Bloom was at his usual exhilarating best at the Cambridge Union debate “Britain is Great”. He focussed on the two factors which made us once great. Individual Freedom and government by consent.
While he mentioned that the power of the State had taken our freedom I found it very disappointing that he then failed to explain to his attentive audience how the State had done it. Though I have sent the information to him he clearly did not think it worth passing on to the younger generation?
The late great Ayn Rand described liberty as “the freedom of action in a social context” (“Virtue of Selfishness”). I find that rather woolly compared to” freedom is the ability to accept OR reject ONE policy at a time” (Major CH Douglas?)
With the latter definition in mind we need to examine the rather subtle trick played upon us by party politicians.
They pretend that we live in a democracy by offering to us at every election a choice between several manifestos or “packages” of policies. The proviso is that the voter, by voting for one or other of the “packages”, CONSENTS to the whole contents without any possibility of opting out of the parts he/she does not like. Therefore the voter has consented to hand over control of his life in all the areas outlined in that manifesto. This a very clever TOTALITARIAN CONCEPT which is immediately obvious when you compare it to the above definition of freedom, “accept OR Reject ONE policy at a time”.
As I see it LIBERTY or FREEDOM has two aspects. POSITIVE freedom which requires you to go out and earn the living of your choice etc in order to survive and prosper and NEGATIVE freedom is the ability to say “NO” I refuse to accept that course of action, that policy etc etc. Of the two the second is the most vital as you can stop someone doing something to you which you do not like by exercising an alternative choice.
At one fell swoop the PARTY SYSTEM has neutralised that scond freedom very cleverly and we can hardly realise that it has happened. Indeed Oswald Spengler in his great tome “The Decline of the West” (this quote is on my home page of http://www.camrecon.demon.co.uk ) wrote” the will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.”page 461 Allen & Unwin Omnibus edition.
So the party politicians have got you to consent to a system where the choice is bogus and only that offered to you by the party.
Your MP is subservient to the party whip and when you write to your MP to complain you get the party line in the reply.
You the taxpayer pay the MP’s wages, the party tells him how to vote.
The party candidate agrees to that condition in order to have a lucrative career for life. We consent to this since we don’t know any better. “In this free AND democratic country of ours” intone the politicians.
The PARTY SYSTEM which they call “democracy” is in fact the “revolution against the legal English constitution” deriving from French Revolutionary ideology and Marx’s Communist Manifesto in that the separation of powers and the constitutional law which our ancestors bequeathed to us and made us once free is cancelled, or, if the laws still exist they are ignored or distorted to suit the needs of party politicians.
In other words, the trick has been to replace the ancient legal constitution with its checks and balances on power (which kept us free) by a “democratic” system controlled by party politicians and their financial backers where the pursuit of power is the openly declared goal, while pretending that the people have a choice. That is what Godfrey singularly failed to explain and he should know better as I have explained it to him. How this trick was done is explained by Sir Lewis Namier on my website and by the folliowing booklet.
May I highly recommend “The British Constitution and the Corruption of Parliament” by Ben Greene( an unfortunate title implying the constitution corrupts Parliament) available from http://www.candour.org. I would be grateful for any correspondence of support to martin.cruttwell@orange.fr or john.cruttwell@sfr.fr