Arresting MPs and nationalising banks happen in dictatorships

The slippery slope towards the Orwellian state, the Socialists are getting more and more bold in seizing power and show the true ugly face of evil Marxism, tyranny, utopist fantasies, perverse social engineering - They believe they have got moral supremacy and thus do what they like the rest be damned, the trend is seen not only in Britain but the US, Canada where the Socialists just did a coup d'etat seizing power like a bunch of Communist thugs so they can grap the tax payers money and use them for their political activities undermining our whole society even further, I kid you not, the reason they did the undemocratic and criminal act is to secure money for their fascistoid utopist fantasies when the elected government would stop using tax payers money for political activism.

“…it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect”

- George Orwell

Britain turning into a dictatorship...

By Janet Daley from the Telegraph

I've never actually seen a cabinet minister caught on camera with his (or in this case, her) eyes tightly closed before. When Andrew Marr began addressing the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, yesterday morning, she looked as if she was desperately trying to catch up on the sleep she had lost over the past three days.

Or perhaps she was just attempting to shut out the image of Kenneth Clarke, who had preceded her on the air. Mr Clarke had just proclaimed that, if he had been told as Home Secretary that an MP had been arrested and detained in the way that Damian Green had been, he would have insisted on issuing an immediate apology. His reaction to being informed that a senior opposition spokesman who was not suspected of any crime, had had his home and office raided by the police would have been horrified fury.

So, Miss Smith was asked, did she agree with this former occupier of her office that Mr Green was owed an apology? Answer: no. Sort of. It was, in fact, rather difficult to discern what the answer was amid a lot of blather, the main object of which was to hang the police out to dry - they apparently being solely responsible for this extraordinary incident. (I suspect that the next day or two may produce some interesting responses to this performance from the police - quite possibly in the form of leaks.)

Miss Smith soldiered on, making a great deal of the notion of "police independence" - even trying rather ingeniously to turn the argument round on those who see Mr Green's arrest as an indication of an emerging police state. What would truly constitute a police state, she maintained, would be for ministers to intervene when the police were engaged in an investigation.

Not that this investigation was being carried out on a unilateral police impulse: oh no, her department had certainly been concerned about the leaks in question. But again, it was unclear in what way that "concern" had mutated into police action, or what happened after the "concern" had been expressed. (Did the Home Office, which has direct responsibility for the Metropolitan Police and for the anti-terrorist force, simply make known its "concern" and then wash its hands of the matter?)

At what point, then, the Home Secretary was asked, had she become aware of the arrest of Mr Green? Not until after it had occurred, she stated flatly in one of her few unequivocal answers. But she had known that there was an inquiry being conducted into what she portentously called "a systematic series of leaks" involving some of the most "sensitive" government information. (You bet it was sensitive, revealing as it did that the Government's handling of immigration was in chaos, it was absolute dynamite.)

Backed against the wall over the grotesque breach of political freedom and constitutional principle that the MP's arrest represented, she resorted to hinting that the four leaks that were in the public domain were not all there was to this story, and that national security might well have been involved in some way that has not yet come to light. She could not elaborate, of course, national security being what it is.

Left at that, her remarks could well be construed as a smear. We shall have to wait for whatever official prosecution might be brought against the alleged Whitehall leaker to find out what basis there was for such an insinuation.

Anyone who thinks that this incident is being somehow blown out of proportion by opposition politicians and an excitable media had better think again. A senior opposition spokesman has been arrested and detained, had his personal possessions and confidential correspondence examined, and his family home occupied, without being suspected of any criminal offence.

The object of the exercise seems to have been intimidation and the flaunting of power. Short of an outright, totalitarian suspension of democracy, this is about as serious as it gets. Freedom is under threat in ways that we would not have thought conceivable a generation ago. The threat seems to be coming in various forms from a government desperate to save its own credibility and to be so convinced of its moral righteousness that it can justify the most blatant abuses of what we had taken to be the fundamental principles of a free society.

Infuriated by the banks' unwillingness to lend money readily (even though it was lending money too readily that got them into so much trouble in the first place), the Government threatens to take them over. It uses the language of moral outrage to justify the threat of nationalisation: the banks are behaving "selfishly" and "irresponsibly" by refusing to offer easier credit (even though it was also "selfish" and irresponsible" of them to offer credit that was too easy).

Such a nationalisation of the banking system would constitute nothing less than the true Marxist dream of "seizing the commanding heights of the economy". And since financial services are now Britain's most important industry, taking over the banks could be understood as achieving the chief communist goal of taking "ownership of the means of production".

But no one is going to put it quite like that. The language of all this is terribly important. The modern parties of the Left make use of the most attractive words, such as "fair" and "progressive" in which to package their attacks on personal freedom and private responsibility.

Gordon Brown and his ministers are busily denying that Labour is returning to its Old Left roots: their only objectives, they say, are "fairness" and "social justice", which they must impose. Alistair Darling insists that his tax increases on the higher paid are not class vengeance: he is just determined to see that the better-off carry "their share" of the load in a time of economic crisis.

In reality, penalising higher earnings is likely to slow economic recovery because their ability to invest is needed to provide future growth, but punishing them through taxation is justified on the ground that they owe some sort of apology to society for their advantages.

Mr Darling reiterates the new anti-Tory mantra, "Doing nothing is not an option", which seems to assume that government action can only consist of seizing more power, usurping more responsibility and restricting more freedoms.

Indeed, there is scarcely a problem facing the country to which this Government does not see taking more power for itself as the answer - even if that involves arresting MPs and controlling the levers of what was once a free economy.