It is of course all but impossible for the average citizen to glean the real truth behind events such as these. We can only filter through the various snippets of information provided by the corporate press and try to work out what’s really happening by reading between the lines; and then hope against hope that what we come up with is a little closer to the truth than what’s being sold. The given reasons by the British government for their actions can obviously be dismissed out of hand, like the bit where Governor Wetherell says “it is not a British takeover” (In fact it’s a pretty good rule of thumb to usually believe the very opposite of what governments tell us). The good governor’s statement was full of the usual professional bureaucrat’s flannel: “We need to stabilise TCI’s finances and help rebuild a more diverse and vigorous economy.” (But according to the Independent, TCI’s economy grew under the leadership of Premier Misick from a GDP in 2003 – when he came to power – of $216m to $722m, and tourism grew from 175,000 visitors per annum to 264,000) And the bit I particularly liked: “We need to clean up public life and start to develop a fairer, more open society” – by sacking the elected administration and suspending trial by jury?

Other news reports suggest that Misick and his government were indeed living the high life – but that sort of thing never usually disturbs the slumbers of HMG; indeed, it’s more usually an essential qualification. So what might really be going on?

For me, one particular sentence stood out from a quite good report in the Independent way back in March (25th): “Sir Robin’s commission heard how Mr Misick and other ministers had grown rich by acquiring publicly-owned Crown land, selling it to developers and receiving commissions.” In the same article another interesting little gem claimed: “Canadian legislators have made regular overtures to unite with TCI. Nova Scotia voted in 2004 to invite the islands to join the province.”¹

Surely those dastardly islanders wouldn’t be presuming to decide for themselves what to do with their own land would they? Sorry, I meant to say HMG’s land?

The arrogance of the British government’s decision to scrap the islands’ democratically elected government is of course reason enough to arouse our suspicions – especially when none of the story has made it into Britain’s mainstream media (like the recent military coup in Honduras); but the real clincher is the fact that the government has also chosen to scrap trial by jury for the next two years. Something very dirty is happening in paradise.

1. This is a little misleading, as indicated in the following excerpt:

   In recent news, Nova Scotia’s parliament voted to offer a Caribbean nation, Turks and Caicos, to join their province if they were to pursue political and economical union between Canada. Although it’s official, no talks have commenced on the topic.

   Canada has had several talks with the Caribbean country, which is a British colony, all of which have led to absolutely nothing. The main factors on Canada’s part has been it’s unwillingness to be seen as a neocolonist. The Caribbean islands have been pursuing a union for almost 100 years, and it has popped up yet once again.

   See Christopher Walsh, “Turks and Caicos move to join Canada,” Canadian Content, 25 April 2004.

You want proof? Of course you do; and quite right too. I’ll give you a little proof – little not because only a little exists, but because there is so much proof that even if I were to write a whole book on the subject I would still only be scratching the surface; and that’s if we only talk about the proven cases of deliberate outright lies our trusted leaders tell us; if we included the full catalogue of half truths, omissions and deceptions we could fill entire bookcases.

Try visiting your favourite on-line book store and typing the words “lies and history” into the search engine. When I did it 690 books were listed. O.K., some of them are duplicated or out of stock, and others are irrelevant to this subject, but you get the point.

Leaders cannot be trusted. The importance of this fact cannot be understated, as our entire society is founded upon the bedrock of trustworthy leadership. Now this is not to say that all leaders are untrustworthy, and certainly not that they are untrustworthy all of the time – but this just makes the problem worse, because we seldom know for certain when we’re being lied to, or intentionally deceived, until it’s too late.

When ordinary people are sacked from their jobs for misconduct – or even just a sniff of misconduct, it’s almost impossible for them to find re-employment in similar work on the assumption that they cannot fully be trusted. But when it happens in public office or corporate boardrooms it seems to serve as an important examination that’s been passed, an essential rite of passage confirming one’s suitability not only for re-employment, but promotion to properly high office. The biggest prizes are reserved for those special rising stars where misconduct is strongly suspected, but cannot be absolutely proven. Ideally these examinations should not attract too much public attention, but even if they do it doesn’t present anything like the same obstacle to one’s career as it would for millions of lesser mortals.

Once properly schooled our public and private sector leaders then assume their rightful places as master puppeteers. Many lead quite uneventful lives and may remain as sleepers throughout their careers and never be called upon to seriously betray the nation’s trust. However, sometimes they are required to exercise the skills for which they’ve already shown a talent, and which won for them their exalted position. They could be required to lead a largely unwilling nation into an illegal war, say – a task requiring reasonable acting abilities, a total disregard for the truth, and psychopathic quantities of inhumanity.

Such is the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s not a new situation – a brief examination of history from the people’s perspective quickly shows that our leaders have nearly always proven themselves completely worthy of total mistrust. So what can be done about it?

First, and most important of all, is simply recognising that basic truth: leaders cannot be trusted. This is not an easy step to take, because the implications are truly immense, but it is an essential step: we can only fix a problem once we actually realise we have a problem.

It’s worth repeating that very few leaders are untrustworthy all of the time. Many, perhaps most, don’t even know themselves they cannot be trusted. These comprise the junior and middle ranking leaders who form the essential glue to keep the whole rotten edifice standing upright. Most of the time this very substantial group sincerely believe in the rightness of what they’re doing for no better reason than they’ve been told to do it by someone who they suppose knows what’s going on. “Just following orders” – that famous defence that was rightly blown out of the water at Nuremberg. How many ordinary soldiers in how many wars would have gone “over the top” to their certain deaths for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the fact that some poor brainwashed fool of a junior leader went over first shouting: “follow me chaps”?

Next, after accepting that leaders cannot be trusted, we need to think about a very important question: what do we actually need leaders for? What ‘value added’ to our lives do they supply? In all the time I’ve thought about this subject (and that’s quite a lot), the only answer I can come up with is that in times of crisis it’s pretty useful to have someone who knows what they’re doing directing or co-ordinating the actions of others. But how often do such crises occur? Unless you work in the emergency services, how often does a real crisis affect your daily life so badly that you actually need a leader telling you what to do? Providing you’ve been properly trained for your job, have the appropriate resources to hand, and have good lines of communication with equally well-provided colleagues, how much do you actually need to be led? Even in times of national emergencies it’s not actually leaders we need, but organisation. Even the greatest leader can achieve nothing without an organisation; but an organisation may function perfectly well without a leader in sight – it only needs well trained, properly resourced people with efficient lines of communication.

Leaders affect almost every aspect of our lives, and the first realisation that they cannot be trusted comes as something of a shock. However, this is more than compensated for with the realisation that we don’t actually need them anyway. Anarchists have been telling the world this for many years, but have singularly failed to get the message across. Not that it’s entirely their fault. Our leaders, some of whom are not very stupid, fully understand the considerable danger to their positions of a world that suddenly comprehends it no longer needs them. Consequently they employ the awesome forces at their disposal to poison the minds of the people to the powerful messages of anarchy. Indeed, the very mention of the word conjures up to most people images of mindless wild-eyed fanatics smashing up anything and everything in their way (individuals who are often paid agents rather than real anarchists anyway), not something that prizes noble virtues such as peace, freedom and equality.

Perhaps the most traditional “essential” function of leadership is decision-making. We are encouraged to believe that our leaders have two very special qualities to enable them to undertake this vital function. Firstly we’re conditioned to believing that our leaders have particular natural gifts that enable them to make extraordinarily inspired decisions – decisions that no ordinary person could ever hope to make. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we’re led to believe that our leaders always place our interests far above their own (the fact they must suffer lives of pampered luxury while the rest of humanity rubs along as best they can is no doubt some sort of penance they must endure for their noble self-sacrifice).

So let’s examine a little more closely this special duty of leaders: decision-making.

Firstly, consider the notion that they might have particular natural gifts and abilities. Undoubtedly there have been one or two leaders in the past with quite extraordinary personal abilities – but usually these talents have manifested themselves in the form of awesome ruthlessness and inhumanity. Upon closer examination, about the only notable quality of your average national leader, like some of Britain’s monarchs and certain American presidents for example, seems to be a quite spectacular lack of intelligence. Even the really bright ones seem unable to demonstrate an original thought they might once have had. How could such people possibly glide effortlessly from one inspirational decision to the next?

Then there’s the notion of self-sacrifice – the view that our leaders are driven only by the purest of ideals: to serve the greater good, a noble desire to do what’s best for us, the lowly mortals who gaze up with misty-eyed trusting awe at our saintly protectors. In other words we are conditioned to believing that the decision-making of our leaders can be wholly trusted because they always act in our best interests.

Armies are quite a good place to look for examples of leadership in practice; after all, they do epitomise the rigid hierarchical control model that is mirrored almost everywhere else in society. But there’s a bit of a problem. If military leaders (or their political masters) are so selfless in all their decision-making, why do they always locate themselves behind expensive desks in comfortable offices at very safe distances from any real danger? Why does their self-sacrifice on our behalf confine itself to sending ordinary people to distant deserts and frozen wastelands to kill and die for their own good? Why do our trusted leaders never lead from the front, or send their own sons and daughters to have a turn at getting up close and personal with death?

Directly related to the principle of self-sacrifice is what I call the payola-paradox. The private sector is the best exemplar of this (although the public sector is not far behind). The payola-paradox says that whilst all the best leaders will naturally be fully committed to self sacrifice, the best way for all that selflessness to be demonstrated is for them to accept top dollar – but the best way for workers to demonstrate their own self sacrifice is by working for nothing. So the greater a leader’s wealth, and the greater the workers’ poverty, the greater must be purity of decision-making and sacrifices everyone is making for the common good.

It’s cruel I know, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and mocking such high-principled self sacrifice just has to be done in order to make a pretty valid point: the only people our leaders truly serve, and have ever truly served, are themselves.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a little self interest; after all, it’s directly related to the survival instinct that’s common to every living thing. The real problems occur when the self interest of some individual, or class of individuals, is awarded grossly preferential weighting to the self interest of others (as it always has been).

So where are we? We’ve established that leaders cannot be trusted, and we’ve established the myth of perfect decision-making by self-sacrificing leaders; but the most significant point to take on board is that we don’t actually need leaders anyway. We’re perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

This is scary stuff; but consider it for a moment. What goes into making a good decision?

There are just three basic components: information, information and information.

First off, you need just the right amount of background information about any situation that requires a decision. This is best provided not by dozens of experts all repeating each other, but simply by two experts – who disagree with each other. Then you need the right consequential information about the possible results of any decision you might make – no chess player worth her salt ever makes a move without thinking about all the possible consequences; and finally you need a reliable means of informing relevant people about what the decision is. None of these components are, of themselves, difficult; but they are often made extremely difficult by devious people serving their own self-interested agendas.

It isn’t difficult to grasp the essential requirements of a good decision – it’s only taken me one paragraph to write it. So instead of being conditioned to rely on people we can never fully trust to make our decisions for us, why can’t we instead be conditioned to just make our own? And the decisions of government should be OUR decisions to make. After all, we pay for them – often with our lives.

Some would rightly argue that oftentimes group decisions need to be made; and that if a group of people is involved in anything it must be led. Not so. Groups need organised systems with a few key individuals providing specific communication functions, not leadership. Ah, but you need a leader to create the organisation. No you don’t. Groups are more than capable of organising themselves when there’s a real need to do so, as tens of thousands of rebel groups throughout history can testify.

But perhaps the most compelling argument for the failure of the principle of leadership, and why we have to abandon it, is this: the world is full of leaders, and look at the state of it. We have permanent war, ecological catastrophe, and a global economy that institutionalises massive poverty and obscene wealth for tiny all-powerful elites who, coincidentally, are the most strident advocates of leadership. Leadership is a failed experiment. The people, properly informed, must be free to manage the governments they pay for.

Bullfighting is a wonderful and very apt metaphor for society. If we think of the greater body of people as the bull and the tiny handful of elites who rule us as the matador, what might be the red cape that so successfully ensures the timeless survival of our tormentor?

It comprises three main components. Part of it is our education, where we are conditioned to thinking the matador is the best friend we have; part of it is the media upon which we rely to keep informed about the world around us and which endlessly confirms that the matador really is our best friend; and part of it is the multitude of leisure activities that are available to us, the device that convinces us the matador’s helping us to have too much fun to spend any time thinking for ourselves, and wondering if we really should trust someone who wears tight sparkly pants all the time.

Education

As soon as we are old enough to learn, we start to learn about our ‘place’. For the overwhelming majority of us, our ‘place’ is that of subservient followers. For a very tiny handful of us, ‘place’ is that of leadership. Just as the majority are conditioned to accept the leadership of others, so too are a tiny minority conditioned to accept their superior status and their right to determine the lives of others.

It used to be obvious to all that ‘place’ was decided by birth. Those born in poverty were conditioned to accept they would never leave it, and those born to privilege were conditioned to accept that lives of pampered indolence were theirs by divine right. The social revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries put an end to all that. A far more subtle device had to be devised to perpetuate ‘place’. So the illusion of democracy was invented.

Founded on the fine ideological dreams of early revolutionaries, modern democracy was supposed to eliminate the gross excesses of ancient aristocratic elites and provide meaningful opportunities to the downtrodden mass of humanity. The masses were taught to believe that if they worked hard enough they too could rise to the top, to lives of unimagined wealth and privilege. The faith was regularly reinforced with true enough rags-to-riches stories, of children born in poverty rising to become famous football stars, businessmen and politicians. If those people could do it, so too could anyone else; all thanks to democracy and the wonderful free society it created. Young people were taught to aspire to be tycoons and university graduates. Producers of food, goods and services were obviously drop-outs and rejects: what happened to you if you failed to become a tycoon or graduate. Thus the new elites became valued and consequently rewarded, fully deserving of ever-rising pay-deals, because ‘you can never pay too much for good people’; as new peasants faced ever-worsening conditions because they were unfortunate ‘overheads’ which always needed trimming. The red cape fluttered and the millions of untold stories of misfortune, injustices and oppressions for every widely trumpeted fairytale of ‘success’, were conveniently ignored.

The Media

Our knowledge of the current events in the world beyond our limited personal experience is supplied by the news media. If we look back at the early war reporting of newspapers and newsreels it’s quite difficult to imagine how the readers and viewers of the time could have been so gullible. The blatant propaganda is so clunky and obvious that we find it impossible to believe that it fooled so many people. Yet we instinctively accept anything we read in today’s papers and watch on today’s TV screens — even though everyone appears to know that ‘you can’t trust what you read in the papers’.

Modern propaganda is as different to its predecessor as modern man to the ape, maybe more so. The subtleties used by the modern propagandist have achieved an art form. From the careful appointments of ‘objective’ editors to the skilfully crafted half-truth, the stories that comprise today’s news are a seismic shift away from those of just one generation ago. Yet with a cynical flick of the red cape our attention is nevertheless simply and skilfully diverted away from the very real and needless suffering of millions, to the non-news of imagined ‘pandemics’, trifling political ‘scandals’ and ejectees from unimaginably banal TV game shows.

Playtime

It has often been observed that one of the most essential aides to the success of the Roman Empire was the Coliseum; for it was the circus that provided the cheap entertainments to distract the attention of the mass of citizens away from the grotesque excesses of their leaders. So too today. In order to ensure that the part of our lives not taken up with trying to survive is not taken up with examining how we are ruled, we are supplied with countless forms of ‘leisure activities’. Whilst it cannot be denied that many of these activities are indeed hugely beneficial, it also cannot be denied that a far greater number are hugely destructive — for they comprise the saddest part of the red cape: that part of the distraction which we choose for ourselves.

For although we can rightly criticise others for the way we are educated and informed about the wider world, we have no-one else to question about how we choose to spend our leisure time.

Watching television probably occupies more leisure time for most first world people than any other single activity. Yet even though there are a multitude of channels to choose from, as numerous as the number of pastimes themselves, none deviate from their main purpose: waving the red cape in front of us, diverting our attention away from our real tormentor and mortal enemy.

Is it any wonder, with so many powerful influences deliberately intended to misinform and distract us, that we, the powerful beast that is ‘the general public’ continually fail, generation after generation, to realise who our most deadly enemy really is? Exactly as fighting bulls are never given the chance to learn how the game works and are thus never capable of winning it (apart from the occasional accidental victory — too rare an event to cause any concern) so too are the general public carefully shielded from anything that might teach them the real rules of the game, and thus how to defeat their most mortal enemy.

Mexican governments are not famous for their compassionate concerns for their own people. If ordinary Mexicans were truly important to their government why do they have to leave their country in their tens of thousands every year in order to be treated like slaves and fugitives in a hostile land? Why would you need to leave the comfort of your home and family and friends for such misery and hardship if you had such a kind and caring government?

But what we see on our TV screens almost every day are images of ordinary Mexicans going about their business wearing pale blue face masks. We see images of uniformed face mask-wearing personnel strolling around the streets handing them out ‘free of charge’ to people not wearing them. It seems a strange thing to do for a government that is so unconcerned about its people that it’s quite happy to engineer its society in such a way that a life of slavery and fear in a racist xenophobic foreign land is preferable to life at home.

The face masks are supposed to be a response to an alleged outbreak of ‘swine-flu’, that supposedly originated in Mexico. At least half of our TV news bulletins are given over to the topic, and it features on the front pages of all the national papers. We see the various ‘experts’ lining up to talk about ‘pandemics’ and to remind us all of the great flu outbreak in 1918 that killed more people than World War One. To bring it closer to home we see a story of a young Scottish couple who recently had a holiday in Mexico and are now in quarantine in a Scottish hospital where they are being treated for ‘swine-flu’. We see reporters going around the couple’s hometown interviewing citizens who might have breathed in the same air. We see the panic-stricken faces of those same citizens as they share their very real concerns about their safety and that of their loved ones. We haven’t quite got people running around hysterically pulling out their hair screaming that it’s the end of civilization as we know it — but that doesn’t seem far off.

Yet if we have a little look at the facts, as far as we know them, you can only scratch your head and wonder what all the fuss is about.

At the time of writing the young Scottish couple who have shown ‘mild flu-like symptoms’ are the only confirmed cases in the UK, with a mere fifty other people being tested. According to The Independent today (29th April) the US has reported a total of 64 cases. In Mexico itself, where you would assume the disease must be completely out of control, about 2000 people are supposed to have it and 152 people are supposed to have died because of it — from a population of about 109,000,000. So this international panic reduces to the possibility of one in every 50,000 Mexicans having flu. Yet intriguingly the same report devotes just half a sentence to the rather conflicting information that ‘the World Health Organization said it had notification of 79 confirmed cases worldwide.’ The report did not tell us how many people had been struck by lightning worldwide since the outbreak of this ‘pandemic’, but the comparison might have been interesting.

In a different article in the Independent we learn that:

The World Health Organization have said the deadly swine flu virus could no longer be contained and raised its alert to just two steps lower than the maximum of six, signifying a “significant increase in risk of a pandemic.” Presumably this is the same WHO that reported “79 confirmed cases worldwide.”

Let’s get back to the face masks. Why is the Mexican government distributing them to all and sundry?

One of the many ‘experts’ gracing our TV screens yesterday, whose name escapes me, informed us that the face masks are all but useless for people hoping not to catch the infection, as contaminated air could pass around the sides of the mask. Furthermore, apparently the masks quickly become unserviceable because they become damp through the moisture in the breath of those using them. So why is the Mexican government distributing them so generously to all and sundry?

Perhaps its intentions are not to help people remain infection-free themselves, but to help stop them spreading the virus. If the outbreak had occurred in Sweden say, one of the few countries that does seem to care about the welfare of its people, I might have thought that a credible explanation. But this is Mexico, whose government really couldn’t care a tinker’s cuss about the overwhelming majority of its people, and doesn’t seem a likely candidate to waste too many pesos on dishing out freebies.

I’m sure there’s nothing suspicious about the fact that Emperor Obama apparently requested an extra $1.5 billion from the US congress yesterday to ‘build anti-virus stockpiles and to monitor the spread of the disease’ (presumably the WHO are not up to that particular job). Or the fact that whoever it is that’s in the business of making face masks is doing extraordinarily well at the moment (according to The Guardian: ‘The Department of Health is also in talks to “urgently increase” stockpiles of surgical face masks, to be used by doctors and nurses if infections spread more widely here.” – even though most ‘experts’ seem to agree the masks are all but useless); or printers (more from The Guardian: ‘The government is today preparing a mass information campaign that will see leaflets about swine flu delivered to every home in the UK as fears grow that the virus will become a pandemic.’) To say nothing of the assorted spooks and spin-doctors whose careers are entirely wrapped up with keeping the public in a permanent state of twitchy anxiety. I’m sure there’s no connections between any of these things.

I predict this curiously named swine-flu ‘pandemic’ will go exactly the same way as the equally curious bird-flu ‘pandemics’ of the last couple of years; that a few more billions of taxpayer pounds will find their way into some dubious bank accounts; that no more people will die from flu than in any normal year without millions of government leaflets and face masks; and that our governments will proclaim this long and loud as ‘major victory’ and a direct consequence of their ‘vigilance’ and ‘leadership’.

Having said all that I might actually try and get myself a freeby face mask if I can — it might screen the overwhelming aroma of pig shit.

However, the very sizeable arsenal of tools of deceit available to their fingertips is not confined to the more obvious porkies such as these few crass examples. Indeed, for everyday purposes there are far more subtle devices available. Take the ‘honest mistake’.

Hardly a day goes go by without a very brief appearance of some important person in a suit on TV informing the nation about some inquiry or investigation into yet another government failure, where ‘lessons have been learnt’. It will always be some earnest-looking individual who appears to be truly shocked at the catalogue of ‘mistakes’ his/her investigation has revealed. The phrase ‘lessons to be learnt’ is now almost as familiar to our daily news as ‘and now for the weather’.

The most obvious and familiar calamity where the words ‘lessons’ and ‘learnt’ are as common as ‘failed bank’ and ‘government bailout’ is of course the destruction of the western economy. Almost every politician in the world, together with the media lapdogs who obediently peddle their lies, is standing solidly behind the cover story that the disaster was entirely unpredictable; that it was the result of numerous ‘mistakes’; and that inevitable ‘lessons have been learnt’ to prevent it ever happening again. Well that’s o.k. then.

Why ordinary people should waste a single second of their time listening to exactly the same people who ‘led’ us into the cesspit earnestly advising us on how to get out of it instead of grovelling for their lives as they should be doing, is a legitimate question that many are asking.

The institutionalised ‘honest mistake’ is nothing new. It has comprised a significant part of US foreign policy for at least half a century, and has been successfully employed internally by that nation almost since its creation. The American sponsored holocaust of South East Asia in the 1960s and 70s is officially recorded for the history books as a ‘well-meaning blunder’ – something that was admittedly disastrous but was an ‘honest mistake’, made by good people with the world’s best interests at heart. It is the sort of deceit that is almost plausible – were it not for the fact that an exactly similar ‘well-meaning blunder’ had occurred not ten years earlier – in Korea. You could be forgiven for thinking that even the slowest mind must have started to smell a rat when the failure of mythical weapons of mass destruction to materialise was basically excused by faulty ‘intelligence’. However, as that great teacher John Pilger has pointed out on more than one occasion, quoting the dissident writer Milan Kundera: ‘The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ (Freedom Next Time, p. 37.) In other words, whilst history continues to selectively ignore the memories of those who can well remember the ‘mistakes’, the ‘mistakes’ may be safely repeated over and over again.

This systemic ability to continue making ‘honest mistakes’ has been noticed by many others of course, and even excused by some such as historian Gabriel Kolko: ‘The world’s leaders and their governments have time after time revealed an ignorance that has cost humanity a price in suffering beyond any measure.’ (Century of War, p. 454) The assumption that the world’s condition of Permanent War is a product of the permanent ‘ignorance’ of our leaders explains how ‘honest mistakes’ may be endlessly made – it’s through honest ignorance.

Ignorance is something with which we can all identify – it is, after all, the condition in which we ordinary mortals are all carefully kept; so at first glance it seems reasonable that our ‘leaders’ might also suffer from the same complaint. Except for one small problem: all our ‘leaders’ have at their fingertips a wide range of very expensive experts who are supposed to guide them from one faultless decision to another. Either these experts routinely fail in their duty, or their guidance is routinely ignored. So ‘ignorance’ cannot be a valid excuse; it is either incompetence, or something far more sinister.

The examples from history of this ‘ignorance’ in practice are truly legion, as Mr Kolko pointed out; but let us focus on perhaps the most recent well known occurrence: the destruction of the world’s economy.

Hardly a day goes by without some ‘expert’ or ‘leader’ commenting on the ruin of the world’s economy in terms of the ‘mistakes’ made and the ‘lessons that have been learnt’ to ensure it never happens again. Included in the long catalogue of ‘mistakes’ is the one that no one saw it coming; the collapse of world banking took everyone by surprise. This is simply a flat out lie; and the evidence is widely available.

The first inklings of a serious problem started to become widely known about twelve years ago; for it was about twelve years ago that tens of thousands of UK home owners with mortgages began receiving letters from banks and building societies telling them that the endowment policies they held in the hope they would pay off their mortgages, in fact wouldn’t. It was about the same time the first major banking scandal of modern times had rocked the world with the revelation that a ‘rogue trader’ – Nick Leeson – had caused the collapse of Barings Bank through his dodgy deals. Dodgy deals that soon transpired to be quite routine and common practice; Mr Leeson’s misfortune being only that he was found out. A few years later, an exactly similar story from Germany demonstrated that absolutely no ‘lessons had been learnt’ from the Leeson saga. In other words, the banking world knew exactly what was going on and, as our ‘leaders’ presumably have access to the same news as the rest of us, we can assume that they did too. They all simply chose to look the other way. ‘Ignorance’ had nothing to do with it. It was simply a question of make as much cash as quickly as possible while the sun still shone and hope the rain stayed away until it was someone else’s problem.

Whether we look at the world’s carefully maintained condition of Permanent War, the destruction of its economy, or the ruin of its delicate ecology we find a common thread: ‘leaders’ making decisions that are later seen to be ‘mistaken’ or ‘ignorant’ by new ‘leaders’ who have ‘learnt lessons’ and ‘moved on’. In fact the most important lesson of all is studiously avoided – not because no one knows about it – but because our ‘leaders’ depend upon it for their existence; and that lesson is this: the whole decision making process of the world’s most powerful figures is institutionally corrupt and designed with the sole purpose of their own enrichment and empowerment. The welfare of today’s ordinary people is entirely irrelevant to them, and the welfare of tomorrow’s ordinary people is even less significant.

This, the single most important ‘lesson to be learnt’ should be learnt not by our ‘leaders’, who know it already, but by the ordinary men and women who alone comprise the only body capable of doing anything about it. For it is only when ordinary people take control of their own lives by making their own political decisions that global institutionalised corruption might be permanently consigned to the blood-soaked pages of history where it belongs.

Given that we know things are broken, surely the debate must now move on to what exactly should we DO about it?

The purpose of this essay is to publish some new thinking, to provoke debate, and to describe three simple steps that anyone could take to properly fixing our broken systems.

George Orwell pointed out more than sixty years ago that our rulers deliberately distort language so that everyday words are used by them in a manner exactly opposite to what they are supposed to mean. Like Ministry of ‘Defence’, for example, which has nothing to do with defence, and everything to do with beating up anyone it can thousands of miles away from home. Terrorists actually mean freedom fighters and vice versa; anarachists are really liberators and liberators anarchists. ‘Encouraging free competition in the market place’ is better translated as ‘promoting tyrannical corporate monopolies’… and so on. However, perhaps the most sinister misuse of everyday language by our rulers is their interpretation of the word ‘democracy’.

Nothing better demonstrates the success of all this elitist propaganda than the fact that the majority of citizens living in the western world seriously believe they have ultimate control over their leaders. The proof of this is the fact that they keep on turning up at elections; they have not yet learnt that it doesn’t make a shred of difference who they vote for — so there’s really no point in bothering. Tom Paine, writing more than two hundred years ago, clearly saw it when he penned:

‘Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in and still the same measures, vices, and extravagance are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and the superstructure of the government is bad.’

Fixing the job is not easy. Not because of the problem of coming up with a better system, but because of the considerable vested interests of those powerful forces benefiting from the existing system, and who will therefore fight tooth and nail to keep it just the way it is. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Indeed, we cannot really look the future in the eye unless we try. Identifying and publicising the problem is an important start; but we must now use that knowledge to evolve a solution.

Although ‘democracy’ as we know it is admittedly better than Stalinism say, it is nevertheless a very long way from good government. The best that can be said for it is that it’s better than any other existing type of government. But we can improve it. After all, we can send people to the moon, and bring them safely back, analyse all the proteins in our bodies, and perform surgery on them; communicate instantly with anyone anywhere on the planet and watch them while we do so — why should we not be able to improve a system of administration that was known to be broken two hundred years ago?

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to do exactly this. The system I devised is called Free Democracy, because I believe that freedom is the most important human condition, and that real democracy (not the existing Orwellian kind) is the most perfect form of government.

Free Democracy is very simple. Its central premise is this: any citizen, properly informed, should be able, if she chooses, to make the decisions of her government. If you start with this basic absolute and then try to devise an administration that delivers it, you’re taking the most important first step to improving what we have.

The most common objections to the notion are:

1. Ordinary people are too stupid to understand the complexities of government, and be entrusted with the responsibility of its proper administration.

Stupidity has never before barred some people from gaining awesome decision making authority — therefore even if this was a legitimate concern (and I don’t believe it is for the reasons shown below), it’s no worse a situation than what we already have.

Truly stupid people are actually quite few in number, and would either be too disinterested in the business of government to bother taking part, or be so heavily outnumbered by reasonably bright people that the effect of any damage they may cause would be cancelled out (unlike our existing system where the actions of truly stupid people cannot be cancelled out by brighter beings, and are therefore regularly catastrophic).

That the citizen should be able to make rational and responsible decisions in a Free Democracy is, of course, essential. This hinges on three conditions: good education, good information, and simple, cheap, trustworthy communications, all of which are perfectly deliverable (although considerable improvements to what we have in all these fields will be required).

Contrary to popular belief there is actually quite a lot of hard evidence for the success of trusting ordinary people to make big decisions. The first example with which we in the west are all familiar is trial by jury. Trial by jury is trusted more than any other form of justice because it relies on ordinary people. Less well known is the Swiss government, which has for hundreds of years routinely had its decisions made by ordinary Swiss citizens. My final example is the almost entirely unknown Summerhill School in England which, for about a hundred years, has been almost entirely run by its pupils whose ages range from 6 to 16, and who manage without any difficulty at all to leave school as well balanced, well educated young people.

2. There’s no guarantee that a Free Democracy would be any better than what we have.

True, but what we have is a leadership obsessed with keeping us engaged in permanent war, and a planet locked into a self inflicted ecological death spiral. How much worse could it be?

3. It’s too expensive to administer.

The taxpayer is already obliged to pay for horrendously expensive government — a government over which he has absolutely no control. There is no reason to believe that a Free Democracy will be any more expensive than what we already have, but at least it would have the virtue of being entirely and directly under the control of the taxpayer funding it.

4. It’s too complicated to administer

Thirty years ago this may have been a legitimate concern. Today, with twenty first century communications at everyone’s fingertips, this issue is not quite so relevant. Although a robust, cheap, simple, secure and trustworthy voting mechanism would indeed be essential, it is not beyond the wit of woman to invent one. We already trust our financial transactions to the telephone system, why not our votes?

The core belief of Free Democracy is that any citizen, properly informed, should be able, if he chooses, to make the decisions of his government.

This belief is all that is needed. No one need join anything or buy anything. All that’s required is that core belief. Designing an administration system that delivers that belief is almost secondary in consideration because the possibilities and various combinations are considerable. Creating a perfect model is not only impossible, it’s also unnecessary. All that’s needed is somewhere to start, an administration system that will then allow the citizen to shape it for himself.

But you have to start somewhere. Therefore the model I designed is simply that: a starting point. It is not meant to be some divine revelation that can never be improved upon. It is, and should remain, a work in progress, a flexible structure permanently open to the people to change as they see fit. Providing the core belief is kept intact, and delivered, Free Democracy will survive no matter how the administration changes.

The particular model I designed comprises two core documents: a People’s Constitution and an Ethical Guide for the Free Democrat. Neither of these is intended as a model of perfection — they are simply suggestions, a starting point.

My People’s Constitution borrows extensively from the Swiss Constitution, which is probably the most democratic model of government in current use. There is much to be learnt from the Swiss. They have one of the richest economies in the world, despite their landlocked position, lack of natural resources, and no empire to plunder. Even though they are clearly wealthy, they nevertheless have a sound welfare system (the preamble of their constitution includes the words: ‘…the strength of a people is measured by the welfare of the weak’), and they have some of the tightest green credentials in Europe, with the use of fossil fuels entirely banned in some areas. In addition they have managed to keep their people free of war for about two hundred years, even when completely surrounded by it, twice.

Switzerland is the only substantial nation I know where the people routinely decide government business, and have done for centuries. Personality politics is almost unknown (do you know who the Swiss president is?) There is much to be learnt from the Swiss — not least of which is that when ordinary people are put in direct control of their government, pretty good things happen.

The People’s Constitution is meant to be the only law the citizen will ever need, a document that outranks any conflicting law and which the citizen could use for herself if necessary entirely unaided by expensive lawyers. It opens with an article on human rights, much of which concurs with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It then mentions citizens’ duties, for rights must always be conditional to certain duties. The constitution proposes a decentralised system of government with national government serving only to coordinate administration and security when required to do so by local councils. The economy is based on the free market model providing certain safeguards and protections are in place (such as protecting small business and consumer, delivering consumer choice and providing secure employment). Taxation is fixed at 15% (including National Insurance), and taxpayers are able, if they choose, to determine which government departments should benefit from their taxes. Justice is wholly administered by public servants and accessible to all, with tribunals and juries of ordinary citizens determining right or wrong, guilt or innocence. There are constitutional protections for the environment, national heritage and agriculture. Social welfare and contingencies for states of emergency are covered… and so on.

My second core document, an Ethical Guide, is included because I do not believe there is any place in modern government for established religion. Whilst the People’s Constitution ensures that people would be free to practice any religious belief they choose, this must be qualified by ensuring that if and when that practice conflicts with any part of the constitution, the constitution must prevail. So the Ethical Guide borrows the humane practices common to most religions, without accepting any of the dogma. It tries to take the good from religion and exclude the bad. It suggests the way people should behave, not because of the supposed wishes of some supernatural being whose existence cannot be proven, but simply because the values are of themselves widely recognised to be good and right; and being a guide and not a law, is not of itself enforceable in law.

I promised at the start of this essay to describe three simple steps to fix our broken political systems. For anyone reading these words that is true; but for most there is one other step to take. Anyone reading these words already knows the system is broken, and therefore doesn’t need to learn it – however, almost everyone else does need to learn it, because the little darlings really don’t know. So the first step (of four) for most people is simply to learn how their world really works. Then they can catch up with the rest of us.

Step One/Two

Become a Free Democrat. This does not mean joining anything or buying anything. It simply means accepting that any citizen, properly informed, should have the right, if they choose, to make the political decisions that affect their life.

Step Two/Three

Join with other Free Democrats and draft a People’s Constitution that could actually deliver Free Democracy to the people.

Step Three/Four

Either stand in elections yourself as a Free Democrat, or refuse to vote in elections unless there is a Free Democrat candidate standing for whom you could vote.

I have stood in two elections, with very minimal publicity (I am unemployed so cannot afford expensive advertising). So far I have not been elected, but the last time I tried (last year) I received one in every eight votes cast, and that was on a campaign budget of about £50.

At first glance it may appear that just one Free Democrat elected to office is not going to achieve much. I would dispute that. Simply competing this way promotes the ideal of Free Democracy, which, to an electorate who has never even considered such an alternative, is a move in the right direction.

When I am eventually elected I will be able to canvass my constituents about any forthcoming council debates and then use my votes in those debates according to the majority wish of those constituents — even if I personally disagree with their wishes. Crude I know, but it would be a start, because although admittedly it would be pretty ineffective, it would be hugely symbolic: it would be the opportunity to start delivering to the voter the service we know they should have — direct control over political decision making.

We CAN fix things. We CAN use the existing system to replace it with a better one. It is time to start doing so.

To economists inflation means the rate that prices increase. The National Statistics Office (NSO) tells us that on the latest figures available (July ’08) the rate of inflation in the UK was 4.4%. If this figure feels a trifle low, it’s because it is.

Inflation is measured by comparing the cost of a ‘shopping basket’ of goods and services over a period of time. The NSO uses over a hundred thousand items for their ‘shopping basket’ — which is one or two more than most of us are interested in. Now, not only are those items continually changed, so no two ‘shopping baskets’ are identical and can therefore never be accurately compared, but a random selection of those items are ‘weighted’ according to some arbitrary measure of their importance. In other words (although I don’t for one minute suggest it is done), it’s perfectly possible to start out with a desired result, say 4.3%, and fiddle with the contents and ‘weighting’ of your ‘shopping basket’ until you get it.

The very term ‘shopping basket’, as used by economists, is interesting. It is obviously chosen to create the illusion that it represents our routine monthly expenses; but how many people routinely purchase more than a hundred thousand different items a month — and then keep changing those items every month?

The government might explain the need for over a hundred thousand items in their ‘shopping basket’ by telling us that no two people have exactly the same spending priorities, and therefore a huge ‘shopping basket’ better reflects a huge range of spending habits. Poppycock.

Whilst it’s perfectly true that people spend their money on different things, there are some weekly expenses which are essential to most of us, and are broadly the same; things like food and water, housing, electricity and gas, transport, communications.

I did a brief comparison of some of these figures for our home, looking at the months of August in ’07 and ‘08 and this is what I found:

   Gas increased 32%

   Council Tax increased 11%

   Water increased 46%

   Phone increased 12%

   Weekly shop increased 37%

   Electricity DECREASED! 15%

Our circumstances between those two months were essentially unchanged. My list excludes the increase of petrol prices because I didn’t keep my petrol bills, and our mortgage payments are left out because we were lucky enough to pay a bit off the capital sum during the last year.

This amounts to an approximate net increase in our cost of living of 25%, quite a long way from the government’s figure of 4.4%.

Now it is not beyond the whit of economists to obtain a rough but meaningful measurement, as I have done, of the real increase in the cost of our essentials. So the fact that they can interpret a 25% increase as 4.4% must be intentional. Why do you suppose that might be?

If pay was increasing by 25% there would be no problem. But of course it isn’t (not for real workers anyway — bosses are getting it, and more). To help ordinary people deal with a real inflation increase of 25%, the government is set to raise the National Minimum Wage in October from £5.52/hr to £5.73/hr, a mouth-watering 3.8%.

It’s fairly clear to see that the government’s figure for the rate of inflation has nothing at all to do with the real increase in our cost of living. The figure is deliberately manufactured in order to crush benefit payments, pensions and workers’ pay rises.

To the barricades mon braves!