Madly Busy

Cherubs, I have been busily reading anarchist philosophy, so I have not at all been thinking about the Single state but about governments.

Various Western governments were happy in the past to leave a number of what are now seen to be very important social services in the hands of private benefactors and religious institutions, but now private benefactors and religious institutions are definitely second and third banana to the state. This means that the weakest, poorest people in society, the unborn, children, the elderly and the sick, are at the mercy of the state unless their families advocate on their behalf, and sometimes not even then.

(I think of the three Rotherham children--possibly Polish emigres--who were taken away from their kind foster parents by the agents of the state because the foster parents belonged to the "wrong" mainstream political party. It has been strongly hinted that the birth parents of those children are Roman Catholics.

Now, Roman Catholicism has for centuries has been considered the "wrong" mainstream denomination of Christianity in Britain, and is still so "wrong" Hilary Mantel could get away with saying that it was "no longer a religion for respectable people." There were no cries on the side of the irreligious to strip her of her Booker Prizes for her bigotry, and on the Catholic side I haven't heard calls from the pulpit to burn Wolf Hall in the streets. Indeed Catherine Pepinster of The Tablet merely said she didn't want to be respectable, which is actually the 1963 attitude that inaugurated Britain's moral collapse.

Therefore, it is not outside the bounds of credulity that a mandarin who would decide that members of UKIP were unfit to have the care of European children might decide that believing members of the Catholic Church might be unfit to have the care of children in Britain, particularly if those parents were suspected of teaching those children beliefs the mandarin did not like. The same may hold true of Poles (who usually are Catholics anyway), who sometime espouse views that may sound perfectly reasonable in Poland but could get them into serious trouble should they repeat them in English within earshot of a British mobile phone.

And so not only does there need to be an investigation into the Rotherham Council's decision to remove children from the care of UKIP members, it may also be helpful to re-examine the reason the children were removed from their birth parents. As white foreigners who probably haven't lived here for as much as ten years, the birth parents might not have as much "victim power" as the commentators on the Daily Telegraph might think they have. If they grew up under communism, they might be terrified of the state or terrified of lawyers or simply not know enough about their rights or have enough English to cope against the powers wielded by Rotherham Council. They would not, for example, think of calling up the right newspapers, and indeed those newspapers might not be as interested in them as they have been in a 30 year British Navy veteran and his wife.

Who is to do this investigation, however, is an interesting question because who can investigate the state but either an agent of, or someone contracted in, by the state?)

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Amusingly there were quite a number of hits on the blog from Edinburgh yesterday, which reminds me that one of the eavesdroppers complained, with frowns and furled brow, about being called an eavesdropper.

Why is it that when I desperately wanted men to pay attention to me (e.g. when I was fifteen), they didn't, and when I very much don't want them to pay attention to me, they do? I think we must chalk it up to male psychology and more evidence that there is no point in chasing men, for the ones who are most interested in what you have to say will certainly hang around (however stealthily), even if the Hunchback of Notre Dame is scowling at them from a corner.