|
HOME WEBSITE.
Political manifesto from Helen Gavaghan, publisher and editor www.gavaghancommunications.com
POLITICAL MANIFESTO AND SITE MANAGER'S POLITICAL BIAS 2011
Letters of opposition or comment are welcome. Your letter will be published only if you say the editing has not altered your intent. Editorial experience prior to this website: See www.gavaghancommunications.com/gcexpertise1.html
I SUPPORT:
1. Political reform in the UK (see suggested details below).
2. Abolition of the Mental Health Act 2007. It is essential that the legislation is seen for what it is: an act of
prejudice and ignorance, enshrined in legislation as fascist and pornographic as any in history in any country.
It is legal tautology and legal obscenity, and no matter how good its intent - actually it is populist, wishy washy bullshit from the rationally challenged - it demonstrates a profound disrespect for law, deep misunderstanding of medicine and no insight what so ever into science. Its view of civil liberty and informed consent is no better than that of savages and it seeks to extend the precepts of emergency medicine in a manner that is the essence of Fascism.
'The bath and luxurious banquet offered their attractions not in vain to the late hunter of the forests, and as Tacitus sarcastically observes "the simple folk called that civillisation (humanitas) which was really the beginning of slavery.'
An extract from The Political History of England in twelve volumes, Volume 1 to 1066 by Thomas Hodgkin. Editors William Hunt and Reginald L Poole. p49 Volume I. Longmans 1931.
I bought this book, a cast off from Leamington College Library, whilst foraging in second hand book shops in Hay-on-Wye in the late 1990s. I really wanted to buy all 12 volumes but did not have enough money. This volume ranges from neolithic man to 1066. Hodgkin evaluates sources and the work of his fellow historians (of whom Mallory is not one), folds in what the archaeology and geology of his day had to say of social history and as a reflection of political conditions, reports a little of the interpretations and meanings attached to observations of the natural world, opens fascinating fields of human psychology, reports that the history of institutions is consonant with his history, highlights some issues he would like answers to, and, as one approaches the centuries after the departure of the Romans, offers a bravura performance that provides the tip of the icebergs of national and international institution and nation building. His work in my mind opens debate about ways of writing history and relationship of the historical work to the sources and invites query as to what constitutes integrity for an historian in his/her rendition of narrative as supplied by his her sources. It would be interesting to know how later historians have told the story of the same centuries.
My quote from Hodgkin is applicable to slavery, and imprisonment beyond the term of a prison sentence, or without charge and trial, or incarceration without freedom to leave a psychiatric institution if no crime has been committed are all slavery. It is not the job of the medical profession to decide who may or may not be free. Nor is it the right of the general public to diagnose their fellow human beings with any kind of illness. Nor is it acceptable to diagnose as mentally ill those whom one does not understand. And if you can't keep your hands to yourself put yourself in prison not those whom you think are vulnerable. And please stop taking metaphors literally or assuming that the literal is metaphor.
The Mental Health Act has no business on the Statute books and is additionally and separately abused by psychiatrists and families working without informed consent. All aspects of mental illness are also still widely misunderstood by the general population and, in my experience, by psychiatrists also. I learned that psychiatrists hear words and attach meaning to words that those words did not have in actuality and or in the mind of the speaker and do not open themselves to respectful, private interaction which could clarify matters. The diagnostic approach is wrong. That is obvious because it is not based on principles of equality in status (which is not the same as equivelence in knowledge set). It is based on the wrong view of: do what I say without question; accept my view without exchange; and of, you are not one of the club if you disagree.
Law is meant to be dealing with citizenship in its larger meaning, not in the issues of stated allegiance. Citizenship in my mind means birthright and one's humanity. Until it is established one is human one can have no human rights and if you take away the birthright of being humen - free will - then you deny citizenship of humanity and law relevant to human rights is irrelevant. I think it is an eternal truth of law that law is a bad law with no business on the Statute book of any country if it denies citizenship in this large meaning, and at the moment it seems to me also that the European Court on Human Rights is, on a number of issues, fiddling whilst Rome burns.
Any legislation that sets aside one group of people and gives them a different set of rights from another group, or which curtails the freedom and damages the life of an individual for whatever reason other than crime is wrong, and, save when entered as a rational, supported defence no aspect of health belongs in the criminal justice system. If one wilfully infects another human being with typhus one can be prosecuted for GBH and if you are susceptible to late onset diabetes for whatever reason there is no justification for prosecuting you should you get married to someone else with the same susceptibility and thus enhancing your likelihood of producing a child with susceptibility to late onset diabetes. I hope I make clear just how dimiwitted the MHAct is. If someone feels vulnerable and can prove they are, or can ask a solicitor to speak for them, then they can seek State provided sheltered accommodation with freedom to leave that accommodation as and when they choose, and not seeking consent, though a courteous message of absence in some situations would be a good idea. The freedom to say no belongs to any adult as far as I am concerned, and if someone wanders out of sheltered accommodation they are not criminals to be brought back by police but individuals to be invited back to safety by those paid to look after them, not to bully them. And if they say no you are just going to have to figure out how to respect that and to negotiate without any threat of co-ercion.
AND THE MOBILITY ALLOWANCE FOR THE DISABLED OR THOSE ON INCAPACITY BENEFIT WITH NEED MUST, MUST BE PROTECTED AND BE CARRIED BY THE TAX SYSTEM, AND EVERYONE IS A TAX PAYER, BE THAT DIRECT OR INDIRECT. THOSE WITH POOR MOBILITY NEED ACCESS TO CASH TO CALL A TAXI AND GET HELP TO GO WHERE THEY WANT WHEN THEY WANT. NOT SEEKING PERMISSION FROM A FELLOW ADULT.
3. Abolition of the Official Secrets' Act, preferably without getting people arrested to suit our political agenda.
4. Introduction of a National Legal Service, an idea I heard from a solicitor who said he would represent anyone. Or maybe he said he was prepared to represent anyone. I asked him if he thought the idea - a national legal service - would work and he said "yes". Well I now think if it does not work we are sunk. But we must also keep a very strong and able private legal sector, preferably playing the stock market to very, very good effect and building up enormous amounts of dosh, and offer a tax structure favourable to pro bono work which solicitors/barristers would take advantage of only on a voluntary basis, and that individual lawyer's pro bono financial work ought to be viewed by all party to the arrangement as a private financial matter between law firm and HMRC, unless the lawyer wanted to make his/her funding arrangements public. A national legal service could be the cornerstone of a differently structured economy.
5. Libel reform. In my personal opinion the best way to accomplish that is for publishers to stop defending libel actions and to turn all their material over to the Crown Prosecution Service. There should be no private criminal cases bought - ever. If the CPS is not on the ball try your MP or go to the press or write a blog. If there is no criminal case to answer by the person or corporate entity allegedly libelled or by the publisher then there is nothing to stop the person allegedly libelled from writing a strong letter to the publisher outlining how and why the publisher is wrong and insisting that the letter is independently edited by a competent editor or lawyer of their choice and paid for by the allegedly libelled, and the letter published untampered with by the original publisher and the response given equal prominence to that of the alleged libel. The allegedly libelled could also blog and use the Internet in self defence, making sure this was not a cloak and dagger exercise. The allegely libelled could/would then also have had access under confidentiality to all that the publisher had turned over to the CPS. Which might get the publisher prosecuted for real crime. If the allegedly libelled individual choses not to do take that course and there is no doubt they know what has been written and published about them presumably they do not feel libelled, or they fear CPS incompetence.
EDUCATION POLICY
6. Reintroduce free tuition for education throughout life up to and including undergraduate degrees and for all UK citizens at any age, but insist on the right academic qualifications for entry to an undergraduate degree. Those of us who took degrees were not dossing and privileged. We worked and worried and often got by on very little. Nor did we fall into well paid jobs. My mistake was in not committing myself wholly to living in the US after my six years there. I had not absorbed what a class ridden, judgemental deriding and belittling society Britain can be. How unutterably offensive is the put down, "You think you are better than us".
And University entry? These may not be three A stars or A levels alone. Oxbridge essays had a purpose. And the right does not have to be taken up. And ought not then to become a charitable donation, but you could offer to pay for your own tuition if you could afford, and then make the entitlement you are not taking up, but are earning through study into a charitable donation. This could mean those from families where there is no or little tradition of academia and/or little money may need more help. Fine. 10 or 12 years of full time tuition paid by the State after primary school (five of them non negotiable, the rest the choice of the individual at any stage in life) seems reasonable to me, and I see no reason why these years cannot be split up and interspersed with self funding to enable the individual to work with the weave of their own nature and life and gain the additional tuition they might need. There should be no discrimination against part time students seeking work to help pay all their non tuition costs nor insistence that individuals must have a degree if they are competent to do the job, nor discrimination in blue collar work or clerical work against those who have a degree if that is a choice they make and they demonstrate ability to do the job (I have in mind that there are still high flying articled lawyers without a law degree, but there does need to a competence test), nor division of traderships into blue and white collar work. Britain is not supposed to be running a caste system. No means testing of any kind for tuition fees and no judgement of anyone not paying for their study if others think they could, thus empowering the student and giving them freedom up to undergraduate level from accidents of birth and wealthy parents trying to steer them into the family business or anyone else with an agenda.
7. Introduce strong privacy legislation making it a criminal offence for any doctor to tell a third party their view of their patient. And that - for the sake of medicine and humanity - includes any supposed or suspected mental illness. I suspect Britain's medical profession says someone who has thoughts turning over in their head is suffering from schizophrenia and creates familial cohorts that ought not to exist because rivalries and old wives tales take on a life of their own. Bankruptcy is fact. Discharge from bankuptcy is fact, absence of bankruptcy restriction orders is fact. Medical diagnosis is not. The patient may share what they want with whom they want as long as they are not slandering the doctor. Communications to a lawyer of whom you are in some way a client is privileged. Or ought to be.
8. No member of the British armed forces to be deployed in a combat zone if they are younger than 21. There is nothing to stop them joining up when younger if they want to do so and are accepted.
9. Still working on an economic policy (but....)
My bias with respect to political economy is that it is the job of the British parliament, and not of gift aided charities or local authorities, to set the target for how much tax revenue is in the national treasury. Is the Treasury the UK's Treasury or is it its devolved regions? I suspect that without the UK as Treasurer we are not going to be able to fully defend out islands and regions within the world of international law and negotiation. Devolved regions and the UK might well be able to co-exist as monetary entities but not if their control of tax and money is weakened by local government or by charities. If as an individual you have amassed a huge fortune perhap Parliament and the very wealthy could discuss what kind of grant aiding structure could be established with such wealth. Government needs to not co-opt charities, nor to allow charities to co-opt government. So I oppose gift aid for charities and tax deductions for charitable donations. I think I might have once gift aided Oxfam - if I didn't by instinct I would have liked to, but I would rather loose the gift aid option and see the budget for Overseas Development increase in real terms as a percentage of national revenue. And I agree with the Greens that we need to increase the proportion of national income (in the largest sense) that is taxed, but must do this in a way that protects reasonable freedom of choice with a dispoable income beyond essentials for living. But The Treasury needs to know how much it really has to spend so the individual needs to work sensibly and maximise their (Real fot false) profit in a given situation and minimise their tax of the time whilst eschewing tax avoidance schemes. Then parliament can figure out how it needs to alter the annual finance bill to optimise revenue and earnings. The regulations of 2006 I encountered - see home page of this website - are - simply wrong. Or they were applied wrongly.
1. POLITICAL REFORM. THE SPECIFICS.
I support: alternative voting rather than first past the post system of voting (if the voter participates by grading all candidates then all voters have played a part in electing an MP whether the MP is their first choice or not, and if the voter does not grade all candidates then that voter has exercised their right to spoil their ballot paper, and a paper where all are not graded ought to be viewed as a spoiled paper. This is the system the NUJ employs when it elects the editor of The Journalist, though I am not sure what the NUJ classes as a spoiled ballot paper); abolition of party whips and total freedom for the MP to vote on every parliamentary issue as he or she sees fit, and strong State protection for them from anyone seeking to damage their lives because of how they have voted or for the views they have expressed or votes taken; a basic salary of £80,000 per year for back benchers working in line with the European Working Time Directive with no effort to control what the MP does in his or her leisure hours; a State-owned flat for every MP free of charge and taxation during their time in office, no matter where their constituency is. The State owned flat should have household bills paid by the State when the MP is in the State-owned flat and that payment should be viewed as a taxable benefit. There should be a concierge to turn the electricity on and off.; MPs' business expenses to be reviewed and audited in line with HMRC rules and regulations and in discussion with the MP's accountant.; Standard redundancy terms to apply to MPs. If they are not re-elected the redundancy is compulsory; Strengthening of party politics through politics and employment contracts or contracts that do not undermine elected MPs' voting freedom. In this way they can prepare personal political manifestos as well as arguing for the views of which ever party they belong to if they are not running as an independent; the MP to be primarily responsible to a constituency not the party which selected them; an MP's right to modify and develop their views post election and in the light of experience. That is we need to free them from restrictive adherence to a party political manifesto or personal manifesto. They are well able to explain and argue for their developing views; the State to pay for elections and to provide each chosen candidate on the ballot paper with an equal basic sum of money (not all of which must be spent and which is non transferrable) for their individual needs to draw against during their campaign and with agreed extra amounts paid to ministers, the PM and secretaries of State and their shadows. MPs belonging to organised political parties with bank accounts and personal donations, or having lots of supporters will in this way have more to spend on their campaign than isolated independents. That's fine. All State campaign expenditure to be audited and returned to the State if unspent. MPs to be dismissed between elections only for gross criminal misconduct proven beyond a shadow of a doubt after final appeal. No effort to be made in anyway to curb what or how within their campaign and for their campaign the candidate choses to spend what they draw of their State campaign allowance, because the control would be an irrelevance if the expenditure is audited and also susceptible to random audits by HMRC. Privacy legislation would apply, though one ought to publish all campaign expenditure drawn against State funding five years after the election and via the national archives. Not sure what is appropriate for personal donations. I suspect up to a certain amount they also ought to be covered by privacy legislation. And I personally think if a friend of mine is running as a communist or a Tory I ought to be free to use my time, effort and money to help them distribute their election manifestoes or buy some decent boots, even if I do not support those views and am unlikely to vote for them. And I think any money I give them within reason is no-one's business but my own.
I think that every citizen of the UK of voting age ought to be enfranchised (including prisoners - no matter what they are convicted of nor how certain that conviction, always bearing in mind they might be wrongly convicted) and irrespective of whether or not someone has a fixed address. You figure that out. I think that voting rights are wholly a matter of citizenship and have nothing to do with human rights at all. I think that making voting rights an issue of human rights rather than citizenship could lead to wars and imposition of values on others and that it could weaken national political structures. I also think that taking the vote away from a UK citizen is the equivalent of exiling them. It seems to me that Socrates had good cause to eschew exile. Our national institutions are not capable of providing internal exile and why would we want to prevent prisoners from understanding the society that has condemned them. The issue of citizenship must come first. If it doesn't then there are no human rights.
Our legislators need their minds free and to be free of local petty and not so petty power plays and of bribery.
My personal underlying political philosophy supporting the above views is that because each individual has only one time span on Earth each individual is entitled to enjoy that to the full at all stages of their life from birth to death and to do so without others seeking to control them, judge them, co-erce them and invade their privacy or castigate them if a particular individual does not behave as a particular group or an individual thinks they ought to behave at any given time in their life. Obviously the issue of convicted people is different in some respects. I suspect the old British Bill of Rights and the American Constitution could make a good legal basis for societal development but only if willingly embraced. And I think UN or State imposed sanctions of non military goods are as lousy an idea as War because all sanctions do is prevent a society from finding its own way forward. They probably extend rather than shorten a period of unfairness in another country.
I am not touching on what constitutes crime. I think that is a separate topic but I know that stealing a morsel of food might in one situation be murder and in another situation be playful flirtation, or childhood distress or lack of insight and appreciation of boundaries. I know that there might be mitigation for murder in the first degree and that murderers can, even when there is no mitigation, redeem themselves before they die. When the death penalty exists in a State it seems to me only a plea for clemency by the injured party can with certainty deflect execution, and in a civilised society the clemency and opponent of the death penalty needs to be the State because the injured party is an individual human and ought not to be forced to give up their hurt or sense of grievance and anger and rebelling against fate and injustice.
2. ABOLITION OF COMPULSORY TREATMENT ORDERS
I oppose compulsory treatment orders. They are an obscenity empowering ignorant thugs. They inculcate in the British psychiatric profession an attitude of arrogance and wilful clinging to ignorance. British psychiatrists I encountered behaved like a nasty little club of lying tittle tattling obfuscators, none of them as diagnostician thinking or acting independently. They all built on the same misreports, misunderstanding, disrespect and poor clinical practice.
The tools and methods and words and methods of mental health in the UK are the tools and methods and words of the rapist and blackmailer. Probably some family member has got themselves in a tizzy and rather than listen to distress decides to get their relative locked away. Holding a knife whilst shouting is not evidence of intent to commit a crime.
So I oppose the MHAct and compulsory treatment orders.
Ideas about economic poplicy.
Economic policy.
I am still striving for conceptual understandings but my underpinning philosophy, as I understand it at date of writing, is that I believe in maximum enjoyment of life for each individual born on Earth and alive on Earth at any given time, no matter what their age, and providing that enjoyment is not because of policies that explicitly, knowingly or unfairly take from the enjoyment of some other individual on Earth. And I think work is very important. There is no reason at all why work cannot be rewarding (emotionally and financially). To analyse each policy against this test would need each country to have a robust international University sector. When a strand shows that your cheap orange juice is sending people in another country to an early grave then the issue has to be addressed, not necessarily in the most obvious way.
What enjoyment means depends on the individual, and their enjoyment is not necessarily mine or vice versa. I love an afternoon at an Art Gallery. You might prefer an afternoon as a premier league football match. My afternoon at an art gallery might be work, yours might be leisure. That does not mean you are psychotic, even if you are trying to disentangle meaning from the British surrealists of the 1930s. Why does the State cater to my inexpensive enjoyment - that is, it is inexpensive to me - and not to yours? Well I suppose it does cater to football fans via the TV licence. And my equivalent of the TV licence, or of going to a pub with such a licence, is bus and train fare and a coffee in the art gallery restaurant. Not that I have to spend that money.
One way of assessing whether nationally we are accomplishing the big picture aim is to test what happnes if a regulation is removed. We have the equality law in place, surely, to enable that culling/assesment of unhelpful regulations?
I would not have been able to articulate this view nor known I held this view had I not had the battles I have had for the past two years and three months with Calderdale Metropolitan Burrough Council.
Where else now is my developing understanding?
Money itself has intrinsic value. The intrinsic value depends on the setting and is measured against an external benchmark. Once that was Gold. I suspect that the UK is again going through an interlinked internal and international economic upheaval that is the equivalent of coming off the Gold standard. What constitutes capital? What replaced Gold? What is replacing our current external international benchmark? I think for now we need to let these external benchmarks be different for different groups and to work hard on the margin at bringing the external benchmarks gradually into alignment. Not forcing them. Forcing does not work. I suppose that is what already the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation does.
I also think that the UK 2006 Companies' Act is a seriously intelligent piece of highly competent legislation that genuinely can provide a guide through this troubled transition. But it needs not to be used against small businesses because it is a very complex work. I do not know whether that is how it was originally conceived. It is a very, very large and physically thick Act - about an inch. And I have not yet fully read and grasped this Act nor, I think, can it be read and understood properly and fully by a non lawyer. It needs, I suspect, to be assessed in context of law fully from jurisprudence to historical development of all UK law, from finance to copyright. My experiences, therefore, tell me the Companies Act of 2006 is War and Peace, whilst the Mental Health Act is blasphemous (whether or not the concept of God is part of your belief system), lawless garbage and if you want a salary at my expense you may sod off. You are doing no good to anyone who is not incarcerated for crime and in their case there is a danger of harm as well as good, where the harm is that you are turning them into experimental animals who may not say no. I think the evidence bears me out and in a very clear way.
So what new ways of conceptualising wealth and value does the 2006 Companies' Act open, what corporate structures does it empower? Within the UK we now create things such as websites. These, though, no matter how elegantly conceived, would not exist were it not for underpinning hardware. But hardware would be no better than a brown field industrial site were the website not on line, working and in good repair and constructed in a manner that is integrated internally in all ways and within national and international apposite legal settings. That takes a lot of behind the scenes work by the publisher and editors. So - and I digress onto a pet beef - it would be helpful to have a proof reader so that I can think of sentence, paragraph and article construction rather than "i comes before e except after c".
Policy musings continued -- and I would be very pleased to be given by readers a reading list of those who have before me thought these thoughts in different ways and sought to articulate them, or who have discerned similar analytic possibilities in their reading of primary sources: OK -- monetary policy (how much paper and metal is turned by a mint into money, and one needs to be certain that quantitative easing is not masquerading as coining) has to be set against real and sustainable wealth -- the nature of wealth changes in relationship to undeprinning knowledge and reified actuality and the size of the workable economy -- the wealth is enhanced or devalued according to how other internally structured and sustainable economies are working -- factors affecting that value are the working of the economy itself -- does it have fault lines such as a black holes into which summons to the Magistates' Court disappear without trace because neither Court nor plaintiff have kept a copy and the defendant just has to accept, as would Kafka's people - that they have indeed been the subject of due process? Again, I digress, but Caldedale Metropolitan Burrough Council has shown me this fault line exists and so it must be addressed and not by me, and I have suggested to them that all individuals, real or artificial corporate structures, paying Council Tax should give CMBC an email address to which PDFs of such things can be sent, thus ensuring that nothing gets lost in the post. You see such black holes are not trivial fault lines. They could in the wrong circumstances bring a PLC to its knees and be the first tiny misstep (I refer back to the Companies' Act) that makes a thousand people unemployed.
Further policy musings: economic structures are not only of the time but also of the past and the future. Money can get dammed in different places, some useful some not. If property cannot be maintained then it falls into disrepair and looses value and the country's intrinsic capitalisation falls. So sometimes one needs to slow down and that ought not to be a recession. But maintaining value was and is behind Council policies that make grants to rescue a property. What today constitutes real and sustainable property? That is what lies behind tax relief. If the Treasury has decided you are due a tax rebate or tax relief it would be helpful to the well being of the country were you to take that money out of the State. Please. Think of it as relieving a heamatoma until a more careful evaluation and correction of the underlying economic problem can be addressed. Your personal social conscience is deeply unhelpful if you do not take the tax relief. Like a patient with an unlanced heamatoma the economy could end up dead. And whether you spend that tax relief on premier cru champagne of £2 per month to Water Aid is your business only. Others in society are not your judge. And - to digress back to the medieval obsecnity of the MHAct - the medical profession and apologists for the Fascist obscenity of the MHAct and compulsory treatment orders (deeply inadequate medics I would think) are particularly lousy judges.
But say you lawfully amass £1 billion in your life because you have the skill and ability to do so. Well I think that is fine. And I do not actually think you need to know why you have done this, and in this opinion I might be diverging from His Holiness Bendict XVI as he expressed his opinion in Caritas in Veritate - though actually I suspect not. How you have amassed that wealth is important. Why can come later as you select among the options a State offers you if you have amassed the money lawfully, administered it lawfully -- or at least to the best of your lawful ablity and within what the law permits. It might be you were the beneficiary of luck, or of temporary regulation implemented like emergency economic medicine. My assumption here is of good not bad laws, and bad law is when a law singles out a particular group for special treatment and turns them into a commodity.
Come the age of 60 you might have a billion accumulated in capital. With luck it will be well maintained and sustainable capital, or capital requiring little effort to bring out of mothballs. That, by the way, is something which the stockmarket ought to enable, and that does not mean culling what is not profitable. Well: there you are with your billion: do you want a large chunk of what you have amassed, simply because you had the skill to do so lawfully - good on you, to go to the State via taxes and death duties and to be distributed according to the collective will as implmented through parliament, or do you want to create --- well what do you want to create, jobs via an injection of capital and a business angel to oversee management of your capital and which creates permanent jobs within human structures?
These are the issues occupying me as I seek to decide what my bias is as a print and on line publisher. But for a publisher I think that the underpinning motivation is always empowerment of the individual. That is another topic on which libararies and Universities are founded.
Helen Gavaghan, 31st December 2010.
A HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS 2011 TO ALL READERS OF THIS WEBSITE.
Why not also visit www.sciencepeopleandpolitics.com, home to Science, People & Politics (ISSN 1751-598X), now relaunched as a humanities' quarterly published by GC.
Proof read and checked 26.1.11.
GO TO THE TOP OF THE PAGE
XX
XX
|