Power and privilege

On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be a link between the terrorist bomb discovered on a cargo plane at East Midlands Airport and the European Court telling our government that they have to allow prisoners the vote, but there is.

The fact that a small group of unelected people can dictate the law which our duly elected government is allowed to enact rides roughshod over the principles of democracy. As I've tried to point out many times on this blog, democracy can only exist with the presence of two things - a people (demos) who have a shared interest and common heritage and the consent of that demos. Without either or both of those things you do not have a democracy. The "right" to vote on its own is not democracy - if it were then the old Soviet Union would have been the ultimate democracy and it clearly wasn't.

What all that fundamentally means is that the people of a nation (the demos - as only a nation can have the things necessary for a demos to exist) have to have the right to determine what laws they live by and who enacts those laws. In other words, they must have the power to decide the rules by which we live our lives - and, therefore, the punishment for those who transgress those rules. Probably the most obvious punishment is the one that says anyone who breaks the rules loses the privilege to decide what those rules are to be and how transgressors are punished.

Note that word - privilege. Yes, voting is a privilege, not a right. A right is something that exists without conditions - but a privilege is something you earn. In Britain it is ridiculously easy to earn the privilege to vote - all you have to do is stay alive until you are 18 years old. As with all privileges, the easier it is to obtain, the less valued it is - which is one of the reasons why more and more people don't bother to vote.

But in one stroke of a pen, a group of people with no connection to our nation, our people and our culture have decided that our people do not even have the power to decide who has this privilege and our government - the people we elect to decide these matters - has no choice but to bow down to them. This reveals the reality of where real government power lies - it does not lie with the people we elect (at any level of government) - but in the hands of foreign and unelected bureaucrats. Britain is no longer a democracy, it is part of the new Soviet Union - a place where everyone has the "right" to vote, but very few people are allowed to decide what we vote for.

What has all this got to do with a terrorist bomb plot? Simple - power. You see,government needs power, but a government which has lost most of its power (or in our case, voluntarily given it up) will look for new ways to exercise power wherever they can. Having lost (or given up) the ability to decide on the major things, their only choice is to exercise power in more and more intrusive ways.

Of course the bomb wasn't intended to explode in mid air - what would be the point? Islamic terrorist plots are deliberately designed for high exposure and impact. If the plane had gone down over the Atlantic ocean the chances are no one would ever know it was caused by a bomb. Few people would have died and it would have been assumed to be just another tragic air accident. The only point in blowing the plane up in the air would be if they could guarantee that it was over a major city when it happened - almost impossible to achieve.

In fact, it's quite likely that the bomb wasn't expected to explode at all - the whole point was to cause maximum disruption to the airline industry and in that regard it has succeeded (as most Islamic bomb plots do). If the bomb had reached its intended target and killed some Jews then all well and good as far as the plotters were concerned - but it wouldn't have taken long to work out how the bombs were delivered and still cause maximum disruption to western interests - the whole point of the plot.

But our government - assisted by their agencies (which are equally interested in grabbing or retaining power) have decided to clamp down in ways that will do nothing to make us safer, but does give them an excuse to exercise their power over us. And that is ultimately what they want.