Tuesday, 14 September 2021
Snakes in the Grass
Edward Spalton has written an excellent CIB piece about global bureaucratic threats to nation state democracy. As we know, the threat is far wider than the EU.
CIB chairman Edward Spalton notes that the EU is not the only threat to nation state democracy. Other international organisations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organisation have powerful bureaucracies with officials who aspire to supranational technocratic rule. We must continue to be alert to threats to our independence in all their guises...
The World Health Organisation (WHO), founded in 1948, is in the news today for its role in attempting to manage the COVID pandemic at a transnational level. But had wider ambitions from the start. Its first Director General, Dr Brock Chisholm, certainly aspired to be more than family doctor to the world. Above all he wanted power, writing:
‘To achieve world government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family, tradition, national patriotism and religious dogmas. The reinterpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of old people, these are the objectives…’
Quite a number of these objectives are well on their way to achievement.
It is well worth reading the whole piece as a reminder of just how deceitful our political leaders have been over many decades and how serious the anti-democratic threats still are in spite of Brexit.
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7 comments:
And it's not just international organisations. Sometimes one does not know whether people belong to a Quango, International Organisation, the government, a pressure group, or are (like Cummings) just lucky chancers or SpAds.
Do you remember those five questions the Tony Benn used to encourage us to ask? "What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?"
Well, try answering those when following the BBC's coverage of the government's covid plans. We have Boris; Nadhim Zahawi, Under Secretary of State for vaccine deployment; Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination & Immunisation (JCVI); Jonathan Athow, Deputy Statistician on the ONS; Paul Whiteman of the National Association of Head Teachers; Professor Callum Semple, from SAGE; Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty; Jonathan Ball, Professor of Virology at Nottingham Uni; Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance; Dr. Adrian Boyle, Vice-President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine; Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Jonathan Van Tam; Dr.June Raine, Chief Executive of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency; Chair of the JCVI Professor Wei Shen Lim; and Health Secretary Sajid Javid.
Plus, of course, all the people who appointed the above people.
Still, I'm sure we're in safe hands.
Tony Blair and David Cameron deceitful? Surely not!
I said before the Referendum that if we were able to free ourselves from the yolk of Brussels, we would then have to free ourselves from the yolk of Westminster. Nothing I've seen since has changed my opinion.
I think Tammly might have egg on his face 🤔
I do because I voted to stay in the EC in 1975 when a Univ student. Pardon for the typo.
Two things: First of all the Nation State is a (relatively) recent way of organising ourselves - so there is no need to necessarily treat the Nation State as a forgone conclusion. City States were a big thing a few centuries ago.
Second thing: Despite the political yearnings of those who work towards a World Government, this is even less of a forgone conclusion. Big is not necessarily better, and is certainly more complicated to manage. Plus you would have to convince all the nuclear powers to surrender their weapons...
Third of the two things(!) is that with the Internet we already have a sizable part of the World Government in place. We just need to give a few of the elite some posh World Government titles, push for subsidiarity*, and ignore them while we get on with life.
*The principle that things that should be handled by the most local level of administration possible; central high-level government should only be involved in handling things that cannot be dealt with effectively on a more local level
Required reading. Shall link over at our place.
Sam - yes, the five questions Tony Benn formulated ought to be answered by everyone who reaches a position of significant political influence. We ought to be able to look it up easily.
Tammly - I agree, Westminster has to be more democratically accountable. Current political parties seem unwilling to deliver that or even raise it as an issue.
Graeme - eggsactly.
DJ - I've been mulling over versions of your third point for a while because there appear to be powerful conflicting global interests. It isn't easy to see which interests will prevail and how they will prevail.
James - good :)
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