Both Whistleblowers and the Silent Majority have a Common Purpose

In recent weeks, there has been a gradual increase in the amount of press time dedicated to the personal vilification of Julian Assange, a man who has not been charged with anything, yet has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in fear of his life. Let us look at the facts:

• He is accused of rape in Sweden.
• He has been handed an extradition order in the UK.
• He has embarrassed Western governments over their sinister activities in the Middle East and elsewhere.
• The United States has put like-minded individuals in a not-too-comfortable waiting room until they come to trial.

There is a link in all of this. The governments are playing the people for idiots. Most other whistleblowers and protestors unhappy with their government's actions (who are worth their salt) have been slowly picked off by governments for various other petty crimes, in a way Stalin and Khrushchëv would have approved of.

The whole planet is engulfed in an unofficial war of governor versus governed, but many do not see it yet. Or are indifferent to it. I wonder for how long. Assange is not alone in his plight, where even some anti-rape organisations do not want to see him extradited.

There is Pussy Riot in Russia, who like Assange, were not accused of their original anti-government "sin"; that of singing an anti-Putin song in an Orthodox church. To be sentenced to two years' hard labour for that is an exaggeration of breathtaking proportions. But during their trial, these three women were put in a glass cage, as if they were King Kong at any minute about to leap out and devour everyone. That is not taking into account the fact that they had the majority of their witnesses rejected by the judge. In the end, that may have been a blessing in disguise, as they could have got themselves into a whole lot of deeper trouble by having them politicise this sham trial even further. But I am convinced, that if they had not sung about their grievances with Putin, they would have just got their fingers rapped for it and everyone would have said the punishment fit the crime.

Then there was Bradley Manning, who leaked over a quarter of a million diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. After festering in various sinister U.S. detention centres for far longer than is legal under several laws and conventions, he is finally about to be put on trial. But for what, actually? For having passed classified information on to a third party; classified information that would put most Western governments on trial for less. Surely, as it was in the public interest, it should have made governments take a step back and look at their abhorrent treatment of poorer countries. But not a jot of it. This man is a liability and he will be hung, drawn and quartered for it.

Furthermore, he is not alone. James Gee, a Guantanamo priest, who blew the whistle on Guantanamo Bay torture, was charged with adultery and pornography on a government computer. How convenient.

Janis Karpinski, a former Brigadier General in the U.S. Army, was charged with shoplifting after revealing Donald Rumsfeld's policy of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Funny that.

Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector, who was adamantly against the invasion of Iraq, having found no evidence of WMD. He was detained for soliciting minors for sex on the Internet in 2001, charges he was later absolved of, but was rearrested nine years later on similar charges.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who accused the Karimov régime of human rights abuses was suddenly accused of trying to seek sexual favours from visa applicants, which caused his removal.

Then there are the show trials in less democratic parts of the world, like that of Dzimitry Kanavalau and Vlad Kavalyou, the "lone wolves" accused of blowing up Oktyabrskaya station in the Minsk Metro in 2011, despite vast amounts of evidence to back their innocence. This includes the fact that a BBC journalist timed the walk from the station to the flat of the accused in just under half an hour, even though the Belarusian authorities claimed the accused had done it in four minutes. Even the Interpol representative was taken in enough to congratulate the Belarusian authorities for finding the perpetrators so quickly. Western governments not so much, but still, Interpol should have known better. Their real crime? They had been "spreading provocative rumours, sowing panic", by bringing up their own theories behind the bombings on social network sites. It was enough to make Lukashenko want to nail them for the charges, even finding evidence that they had committed another atrocity four years earlier at a concert.

But the fact that Western governments questioned the whole nature of the criminal proceedings against the men, and the European Parliament condemned the Belarusian government for sentencing them to death by firing squad, shows the underlying hypocrisy at the heart of Western politics. With Western governments professing to benignly protecting their citizens from cyber-attacks and terrorism whilst at the same time being connected to sinister acts of their own, I would argue that this makes it the most worrying aspect of it all.

We are all now suspects. And it is about to get worse with the attempt by governments to create a central authority that will handle Internet transparency: read this and weep.

If this becomes reality, we will all, at some point, do something that governments and law courts can use against us if they do not like our political views, or feel we are public nuisances, whether it be a naughty rendezvous we organised via Skype or Facebook, or a bill we erroneously forgot to pay, or a flippant remark we make on Twitter. It will also allow governments to crack down on what news we read about, how long it remains online (archiving online will surely mean we won't have backdated copies as evidence so readily available in years to come), and what they can rake up on us if they want to make us out to be persona non grata. It is a tactic used by dictatorships all over the planet, one now being employed indiscriminately by Western democracies, and by taking control of our Internet, our last freedoms are about to be extinguished. People are going to be put on trial for mere nothings simply to discredit them.

Fortunately, many actually see the comical side to this tinpot dictatorial stance by the West, as we saw last night on BBC3. "The Revolution Will Be Televised" is a spoof comedy in which two men drive a combine harvester straight through the Establishment. In one of the scenes, they try to get Tony Blair sainted, and campaign vigorously for it, claiming that turning a short speech into a large bundle of cash is evidence of a miracle. I punched the air with Schadenfreude at this, and when they turned up at Blair's London residence with a stained glass window of him in a venerable portrait with wings and a halo, I could not believe it that the housekeeper (or security) actually lent them a ladder to see if that small object of facetiousness actually fit above the front door. It was a moment when comedy came of age. A moment that said, "we're coming after you, and we're doing it through the medium of spoof television." Pussy Riot meets Sasha Baron Cohen and Monty Python on speed.

Although this type of hard-hitting satire is still possible in Western democracies, I see a slow degradation of our rights and freedom of speech. This process is so slow as to be very difficult to notice for the average Panem et Circences citizen of the silent majority. It is a little like watching a close family member growing up. You don't notice because you see that person every day, but others who only visit every Christmas do. Whether in the supermarket, driving your car, at school, on public transport, or when addressing your local council, technology has already taken the heart out of the procedures it was designed to administrate/calculate/record, by making them rigid, inflexible and often quite intrusive, insulting and undignifying, but just imagine what it would do to your democratic and even basic rights. Under this setup, everyone who is recorded doing something that legally is a grey area, or anyone trying to use their own initiative to speed up a process or help someone get out of a mess which is not the correct procedure, could be subject to investigation or even indictment.

If you want to change a law, the best way is to galvanise public opinion first. Make a scapegoat, get the information, hang it over the piranhas at the press and let them make the most out of it. It is a simple enough thing to do with the right power and money. And these days, governments do not need Berlusconi-esque control over their media to do that, although many prefer it.

Coming back to the main point: if you think the Assange dilemma is about rape, think again. He may have been a cad, he may be accused of having partaken in what George Galloway called "bad sexual etiquette" in a moment of extremely clouded judgement, but for him to prefer to spend what may turn out to be an excessively long period of time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London rather than go to Sweden to face those charges, I think there are some very big fish circling in the waters all around him, and if anyone is going to know it, then that's the boss of WikiLeaks. If this is a sign of things to come, I sure hope the televised revolution promised on BBC3 comes sooner rather than later.

An Olympic Homecoming

Three weeks and two days ago, the country of my birth kicked off the greatest show on Earth in East London's Stratford with a breathtaking, genial and charming, if somewhat trippy, opening ceremony. Some of it was truly inspired, but most of it reflected what Britain is all about, and who the British are. Probably more than any other public demonstration ever staged, transforming opinions of the United Kingdom by removing them out of the thoughts of the provincial-minded and landing them firmly at the door of the cosmopolitan, international, multicultural and the (figuratively) colourblind.

London is a city for everyone willing to give it a try. It has had a permanent stream of immigrants which started in Roman times and carries on today, which is why people from many countries find it hard to understand what constitutes a British person. In the opening ceremony, even some Americans thought the use of a black guy and girl in the dance sequence on the World Wide Web was an attempt at political correctness. That is so far from the truth as not only to be cynical but also patronising to the majority of people in the United Kingdom who do not see someone as a colour but as a human being. And a fellow Brit. And they are. But they can also be something else too, whether Caribbean, Australian, Kenyan, Sri Lankan or Turkish. In fact, the gripe in the British newspapers was that they were chosen due to their ridiculously photogenic features, that no ugly ones were allowed. Colour meant nothing.

This is how it works: you come to the UK with a smile and a wish to contribute, learn the language and join in with local society, and within a short space of time, you'll be just as British as everyone else. Which is to say with a pinch of immigrant in you. Practically everyone is. If you come to rip the state off, claim benefits and make chaos, you'll be a hate figure in the Daily Mail one day. And that is not a pretty place to find yourself.

They say you can never go back home once you've left. And yes that's true. The parental home is a place of your childhood, and to overstay your time or to move back in when you should be moving on is to risk causing untold damage to the relationship you have with your family. It did with mine. I went to university and afterwards, without money or a good contact to give my career a push (who needs linguistic skills in London?), I moved back into my parents' house. I became depressed, I started to neglect myself and I got involved in things which only bored twenty-somethings can get away with calling the madness of youth. When I hit my thirties, I soon got it thrown in my face and resolved to leave. Despite fly-by-night jobs, I was never mentally strong-willed enough to fly the nest. House/flat rentals were still prohibitively expensive, even at the turn of the century, and I didn't feel like flat sharing. An event in my life so disturbing as to make me physically sick occurred just before Christmas 2000, and I felt the urge to get out as life had become not only intolerable, but also impossible. I went to Prague for a few weeks to get over the ordeal and away from the situation. While I was there, I received a call inviting me to live and work in Belgium. Living costs were far lower there, and so I left the very next week for Belgium, where I remained for seven years.

But after nearly 12 years outside the country of my birth, which I appreciated more by not living there, and had only visited for long weekends once every funeral or shopping trip, it came as a surprise to arrive on 9th August 2012, in the middle of the Olympic Games, in the Britain I remembered from the late seventies and early eighties (my early childhood), where strangers said a merry "hello" to you, where station inspectors waved you through in the belief you had been good enough to buy a ticket, where you could leave your bag next to the table at a restaurant knowing it would still be there even if you did not keep an eye on it.

Yet what had fundamentally changed was the skin complexion. And I believe for the better. Living here in the countryside of Germany, it is seldom that you stumble upon a person who is not white. So I was always going to notice the change more than someone who already lives there. It's like an aunt you haven't seen in ten years who says "my my, haven't you grown?!" but your parents don't notice this because they see you every day. Local people seemed to be of all colours and religions. Despite the riots last year, London is still a triumph of integration. I saw a Moslem woman and a black woman sitting on a bench in Greenwich Park chatting and laughing in the manner of old mates, which they probably were; I saw a group of people in Jamaican flags in the shopping centre next to the Olympic Park showing a Polish girl how to get to the Underground station. I saw a guy in a turban draped in the Union Flag, hurrying to his venue. I saw a black woman weeping during the closing ceremony while the National Anthem was being played. The United Kingdom I had gone back to had caused these people to integrate in ways other nations had failed. In fact, I am doing them a great injustice by mentioning integration. A huge amount of them will have been born there. To be honest, even after seven years in Belgium and four in Germany, I cannot think of a moment when I truly felt proud of the places I lived in, and in Belgium I sympathised a lot with the North Africans in my neighbourhood, who had clearly been born there, but were still referred to in Dutch as "allochtoon", or all-comers. That was clearly not the case for these people in London.

Recently, I joined an online forum in Germany to discuss living in Rheinland Pfalz. One asked me where I was from, thinking he had noticed my bad German grammar. I said London. He replied that it would be impractical to meet then, wouldn't it? I told him I lived in Saarburg but I was from London. And there's your difference. People round here don't generally move further than their own WiFi zone. "Where you are from?" and "where you live?" are one and the same for most. But in London, the first question would be phrased, "what are your roots?"

In London, I have a Persian friend who was born in Italy. He's Jewish. I've known him for many many years, and not once would I ever say he was anything else except a Londoner. London made him a successful man and he makes sure he contributes back. I also have a Slovak friend who was a professional BMX athlete, who is still popular enough in those circles to get herself inside the Czech section of the Olympic Village. I met her in Bratislava a decade ago, when I coincidentally ran into a friend of mine and her mother out for a drink. Doing BMX, Slovakia was never going to provide the funding or the facilities to give her the career she deserved. So she moved to the UK. To Scotland first, and then to London. When I left her last, back in about 2003, she had a strong Slovak accent and a problem with articles (the/a/an). When I met her again in London last week, she was glottally stopping and diphthonging like a cockney wideboy. She's still Slovak, but she likes my country enough to want to sell her house in Slovakia and stay where she is, despite her long working hours, the much smaller living spaces and the relatively more expensive cost of living.

Many other nations in the world are frightened about the encroachment of "foreignness" on their culture, the French being the most useful example in their recent banning of Moslem veils, an act that would never be tolerated on the other side of the Channel. What you wear and who you are are not inextricably linked. Although many may find it not their own taste in clothes, most would go very far to assure those people the right to wear what they wanted. Britain vacuums up cultures, religions and colours and redistributes them equally, indiscriminately and fairly, a process that highlights the futility of the actions and ridiculousness of the views of extremists on any side, whether English Defence League activists, BNP marchers, Islamists, or non-integrationists like the parents who murdered their own daughter because she did not want to marry the man they had chosen for her back in Pakistan.

In his book "Johnson's Life of London", Boris Johnson, that most intelligent of merry-makers and mayor, said, "You would expect me to say this, and I must of course acknowledge that great many cities can make all kinds of claims to primacy, but at a moment when it is perhaps excessively fashionable to b gloomy about Western civilisation I would tentatively suggest that London is just about the most culturally, technologically, politically and linguistically influential city of the past five hundred years. In fact, I don't think even the mayors of Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing or Amsterdam would quibble when I say that London is - after Athens and Rome - the third most programmatic city in history." I happen to agree with him. And my friends called it home, because it doesn't feel strange to them. It has an air of familiarity to everyone.

And the same thing happened to me. I suddenly, self-consciously and openly declared I found Britain was my home once more. But not the parental home in Kentish London. No. Too many memories, too many ghosts. But London as a whole. I was charmed by the village-like features of Kew where I have my pied-à-terre; I was beguiled by the noble maritime feel of Greenwich; I was blown away by the magnificence of the Thames as I travelled down it by boat from Hungerford Bridge to Tower Bridge; I was awestruck by the sheer opulence of Hampton Court Palace and its ancient gardens; I was taken aback by the amicable grandiosity of the Olympic Stadium as I viewed it from the top-floor window of a department store in the shopping centre. And it's so green, even in Homerton, Frognal and Bow. But most of all my heart was warmed by the Polish waitress at the restaurant on the South Bank who addressed me as "love" in true London fashion; I was impressed by the command of English of the German curator's assistant at Hampton Court; I was humbled by the local knowledge of the French-Spanish waitress at my favourite restaurant under the arches at London Bridge station; I was doubly impressed by the Persian man who could cook a splendid Full English breakfast at the greasy spoon at Kew Gardens station. There is simply no other city on Earth where inhabitants from every corner of the globe live side-by-side in fairly peaceful circumstances as equals. It is a success story that was highlighted at the Olympic opening ceremony, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the selfless British inventor of this fabulous tool we call the WorldWideWeb that I am writing these words on now, typed out on the stadium's LED pixels, "this is for everyone". How true.

Please learn to use the apostrophe - we're not all greengrocers!!

The famous apostrophe - there are some very simple guidelines; please follow them to make yourself look less like a knobhead:

In English, plurals do not require apostrophes. Nor do verbs in the third person singular (he/she/it).

Apostrophes are used in two instances:

1. Possessives in singular and plural (Jean's book, for our members' convenience)

2. Shortening of auxiliary verbs (like he's and we're, it'll or we've, etc...)

The use of the apostrophe is very important in writing, for the reasons below:

This sign implies there is only room for one guest. When we want to say "of the only guest", we write guest's, but when we mean "of all the guests", we write guests'. Furthermore, why is every word here capitalised? We're not German!

Wrong again. Some plural words do not end in "s", like men, women, children. In this case, it is already evident there is more than one. We don't need to put the apostrophe afterwards like ordinary plurals, so we can write men's, women's, children's. What is the singular of men's, women's, children's? Answer at the bottom.

 

 Above, a supermarket forgets it's is short for it is, and below the other way round:

It's very simple:

his + its = of him + of it

he's + it's = he is + it is.

Funny people know the rule when they use the feminine she's and her...

This is why the apostrophe is important in writing:

 The symbol of everything wrong with the British attitude to their own language, the greengrocer:

Finally, this abomination:

Let us end with this simple lesson on spelling and pronunciation:

The sign above is wrong. Firstly, the word "bench" ends in a sound like "garage", "church", "wish", "stage", so we need to pronounce an extra sound "ɪ" before the plural, meaning these words might need an extra letter: "churches", "wishes", and therefore "benches". The same is true of he/she/it plus verbs of this kind: I fish ==> he fishes; I reach ==> he reaches.

And here, I rest my case:

 

...I guess this guy hates almost everyone - he didn't listen to his English teacher either...

The answer to the question what is the singular of men's, women's, children's? Man's, woman's and child's of course, but you knew that... right?

Bereft of any ideas, politics gets nasty

There is a general rule of thumb in politics - when things are OK, politicians can afford to be nice to their rivals and opposite numbers. Even their enemies. When things are bad, politicians are bloody awful people to be around. And this past month has seen a couple of really awful bad-mouthers in the US GOP swinging verbal punches at each other. It is not pretty. I am not sure if the US is a democracy any more. They spend vast amounts of money on year-long election campaigns, money that could alleviate the poverty in inner-city areas of the north and storm-battered villages in the south. There is the saying that anyone can be elected president in the US. But I would add, "...as long as you've got some friends who are billionaires and you have spent 20 years proving you can lick hide."

Added to this, in the last few weeks, there has been a slow build-up of tension between France and the UK (read: Sarkozy and Cameron). It seems the French president is using French patriotism and Brit-bashing to try and win the election. It is not working, as he keeps getting his facts wrong, which the French press so deftly points out. "The UK has no industry any more," he says. "Well, actually," say the press, "they have a larger industrial base than France." But Sarko's message is clear - he is appealing to his supporters. Both of them.

I think point-scoring, lying and exaggerating to get your own way should be outlawed. I think politicians should be made to say things as they are. I regularly watch political interviews and cannot understand why politicians so blatantly dress things up, try to make a positive out of what is clearly a negative and hide true statistics, relying on the data given to them by their researcher, who is paid to warp the reality of the situation. Politics needs Someone Who Tells It Like It Is. But that is not so easy any more. And there is a reason for it.

We have all been told to follow the crowd. No deviating from the path, no imagination, no inspiration. Just do your job. Politicians see it the same too now, I am sure. Unless you're at the very top, in which case you can just do what you please for the term until a few months before the next election. But even then, European politicians gather in huge groups, trying to decide what crisis to conjure up next and what country to sell to Asia next.

What we all need is a figure to step forward and say, "I have a vision, I think it's a good solution, now let's debate it." But we have such nasty-minded political figures around at the moment:
Alex Salmond, digging up all kinds of skeletons for his one-man campaign to break up the United Kingdom, dredging all the muck he can find.
David Cameron, the banker-in-chief, whose vision for Britain is one where we all look after ourselves and to hell with our neighbours and friends.
Ed Miliband, who prefer jokes at the expense of his rivals rather than any true substance.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the point-scoring, penis-size-measuring buffoon whose time in the political world is coming to an end.
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who cannot keep their debates civilised enough to have a proper Republican candidate contest.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who is trying to drum up more support in her country by waving a finger at the Falklands and saying it's hers.
Any Mediterranean politician who has been twenty minutes in a room with Angela Merkel, and comes out saying "we're so hard done-by" because they spent all their money in the 90s, lived off credit in the 2000s and now they're broke and looking for a scapegoat.
Nigel Farage, who does nothing except blow his nose over the very institutions that pay his wages.
Viktor Orban, who is ruining his country's reputation by removing democratic pillars and filling them with his friends.
I could go on, but I won't.

Well, they can all go to hell in a handcart.

Would some straight-talking visionaries please stand up? You're needed in parliaments, senates and cabinets the world over!

Pick on someone your own size, Salmond!

There is a sliding scale of things it's best not to be if you don't want to be shot at. Firstly, being white. Then able-bodied, followed by middle or upper class, and finally being male. However, there is one heinous crime above all others: being English.
Not any old English, as regional dialects give you an oppressed edge about you. I mean, from the South-East corner, the Home Counties, the bit of England that's rarely covered in cloud. It's the way they speak. It's not cool to be clever in the UK, and it's certainly not cool to sound it, even if you're not. Even within the South East, there is a divide in the perceptions amongst various speakers. Sound like you're ready to go for auditions to EastEnders, and you're all right. Make the most basic of grammatical mistakes (we was, I would of/should of, etc.) and you're immediately accepted to the human race. But do your best to speak properly or lose your regional accent (Andrew Marr, for example) and you're mockfodder to the masses, a pull for the polemic pursuer, a target for the tormentor. When I say speak properly, I don't mean sound like a posher version of Prince Charles, but generally grammatically correct and sounding like you're from the South East.

And so everyone else in the country thinks you are an oppressor, a politically incorrect incarnation of imperial oppression in human form, a grotesque being who likes treading on hungry proles. There are several things that made me sit up and take note this week - one was an article in the Guardian about political correctness (not the article but the posts of left-wing indignity after it) and the other was the merciless right-wing press stories about Scottish independence. Is nobody reasonable any more?

The Scots who want independence, and I do not think there are as many of them as we are led to believe, don't really want independence from the Liverpudlian or the Newcastrian English, but more from the Kentish and the Oxfordian English.

Although I don't profess to being English but British, I have had to follow my geographical birthplace around with me. I remember well the various times I have been confronted with people from different parts of the English-speaking world and there has never been a problem until someone turns up with a chip on his or her shoulder about either my accent or my place of birth. Once, an Australian, a Scot and a Canadian all set upon me because I don't have the accent of a colonially oppressed individual. This was more bizarre because the fourth person was from Manchester. It's a southern English thing. And it's really just jealousy.

Scottish people want independence, do they? I'm not really so sure. I think a lot of English would be very happy to see them go, but despite all their bluster, I think they realise what a waste it would be to ditch England. Some English, though, see them as economic millstones around their necks, or creamers of the milk of social welfare and education.

SNP supporters talk about being independent, but I have a message for them: be careful what you wish for... Have you thought about how your standing in the world will be after separation? You'll be half the size of Belgium, population-wise, and the same size as the Czech Republic, size-wise. Your position now, as part of the United Kingdom, means you punch above your weight in international organisations. Scottish people have the opportunity to be candidates for the UK's seat on the UN Security Council, to be the UK's Prime Minister with all the functions that entails and to be part of a powerful national bloc of seats in the EU which is taken far more seriously due to its size than a country with the population of, say, Slovakia. For England, Wales and Northern Ireland, however, losing 8% of the people will be no big deal.

Concerning your currency, you will need to set up your own, because I do not think a country can truly call itself independent without finding its place in the world financially. It is also terribly unfair to the country whose currency tailcoat you are hanging on to, and I do not think the Chancellor in London will permit you anyhow. The euro may beckon for you, but you would be wiser joining NAFTA or EFTA, I think, and setting up the Scottish Pound to float on its own. While we're at it, I think you should be informed about the Northern Irish question. The Protestants of the proud province of Ulster claim to be mainly of British descent. Many of them were originally Scottish crofters. So as far as the people of Northern Ireland are concerned, you will be the natural inheritors of that little debate too.

Actually, it is starting to look quite sunny for the English. I have personally always abhorred your infatuation with cheering English sporting misery and your openly discriminatory nature towards your southern naighbours, despite benefiting quite nicely from the union, so maybe as a separate country, you will mature and see England as a friendly neighbour, like the Irish, and the English will one day forgive you for being so boorish in the past. I take particular offence in anyone getting picked upon for no good reason, and the English get it from everyone. The French, Australians, Scottish, Argentinians, Spanish and Russians have all recently had a bone to pick with the English, (not the British, please note), and it's time they got a little sympathy. I touched this a while ago with this blog.

I have always called myself British. It is a proud, all-inclusive word that distinguishes us from other European nations in that you can be any colour, have any origin, and still be British. French people have had a much greater problem integrating non-French people precisely because "French" is an ethnie as well as a nationality, whereas "British" means you can be English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish and British, but also Indian, Jamaican, Ghanaian or Canadian and British. I think the UK is stronger in Europe and the world when the whole island is united but I think I am becoming less against the idea of Scottish independence, simply because I am slowly getting tired of Alex "Bravebelly" Salmond and his party wittering on about how they would love independence from the UK. Well, I do not think they really do. And deep down, I don't think the English do either, but they would be less affected by Scotland leaving than the Scottish themselves.

When you really need a hero...

The world is in a mess. The banks and the politicians have made life utterly unbearable for everyone. There will be no cream on the milk of life for a decade or two. And bears go to the toilet in forests. We know. We damn well know. But all that is of no consequence, or need not be, if only someone, somewhere, would have a plan. A decent plan with rules, that we could all agree to and adhere to. A statesman or woman. Or two or three. But unfortunately, there is nobody. Well there is, but it is not in the interests of the plutarchs running our economies to allow them too much space to grow and gain a following. There are brilliant minds with excellent tongues attached that just need to be given a platform. People are truly ready for change, but the current group of scoundrels, leaches and parasites seem not too interested in allowing that to happen, or rather, too scared. Dig under the surface and I think there would be enough evidence to scandalise or even incriminate over half of the world's leaders and their cabinets. Considering the indifference amongst many people (the silent majority, more interested in TV talent shows and the latest gossip from the magazines), these politicians have a huge chance of getting away with it, and that would be not only a crying shame, but would taint the general public in the blood of the victims of this silent takeover.
We are witnessing a new ideological battle, opening across many fronts. On one hand, we have the Euro-ideologists, sleepwalking to their own doom by believing that regulation, protectionism, stifling of the markets and assurance of the French and Polish (but mainly the French) agricultural sector and the German manufacturing sector, will get them out of trouble. This is not going to help anyone in the end. The French-style grand projet to establish the euro, as a glorious symbol of European Unity and (my most hated word) Solidarity will undoubtedly be seen by history as the most ludicrous, expensive, embarrassing and pointless waste of valuable time, resources and wealth any politician anywhere could ever have thought would work, remembering there were (and still are) no safeguards in place, the very ones every City economist worth his/her salt could have told you, even back in 1989, when this idea was originally raised by the French President, who used it as a bargaining tool for German reunification: you reunify, but you must give up your Mark in favour of a unified European currency. This was the first enormous, screamingly stupid step towards our demise as a world power.

On the other hand, we have the plutarchs and economists, capitalists and investment bankers: those shameless abusers of the lobbyist fringes of the political greasing machine. For every shamelessly corrupt politician, there are five shamelessly corrupt economists. And the two groups overlap heavily. The plutarchs are the politicians and the politicians are the plutarchs, but their smoke-and-mirror tactics mean you never see it this way. It is evident that there is a great deal of neoliberal unease about bringing some justice into the world. It would mean their enormous salaries would have to be cut, prompting them to threaten to leave for the Far East. Let them go, I say. If they care more for their salaries than their country and the people in it, then they are the first group of people we need to encourage to leave. Let them make some other part of the world a less safe place to live in.

But what bothers me the most, is still that gut feeling that we could be doing more: politicians meet at summits, conferences and visits all the time. The greatest problem with the EU is that there is no room for a visionary. 27 countries, soon 28, need to sit round a table and debate the immediate future. No one politician really wants to seem like he/she is occupying too much of the sunlight, and so they all stick to their mundane, inglorious, uninspired agenda interrupted by the odd coffee break, to beat out new directives for all the 27 countries to implement. They have forgotten three very important things:

• The EU dream is sucking the life out of democracy by putting power in the hands of the European Council of Ministers, which basically means it matters not one iota who is in national parliaments, who was elected as national and local representatives, because all the main decisions will be taken at this intergovernmental level, so whoever is elected, will soon find out that there is a "process" that needs to be adhered to, and there is little room for fresh ideas, and even less room to have fresh policies at national level.
• While they are navel-gazing in Brussels and Strasbourg, the rest of the world is getting on with the serious business of trade, industry and business. India, China, Singapore, Brazil, Australia and the like are the places to be. This is where we find the action. Whilst the Europeans are slowly receding from the world stage, others are making headway. Europe needs a guide.
• And finally, one size does most definitely not fit all. Buy a T-shirt in a shop, size M. It will fit mediums, but it will be too big on smalls and maybe the most corpulent won't even get it over their arms. The euro is a far bigger burden than necessary.

And this is where the problem lies: Europe does not need more Europe; it needs a cooling-off period, a chance to stop, breathe, look about and decide where it is to go next. It does not need more integration, more isolation from reality, more symbolism. It needs less. Please do not get me wrong: the EU is a very good idea, but as in many relationships amongst people, there comes a time when limits need to be set - where to stop with friends? They can stay at your place for a few days? OK. They can borrow your books for a while? OK. They can use the garage to store a few bits and pieces in? OK. They can take your wallet, use your cards, get shopping on them? I don't think so. They can take your kids home for whole weekends? Nope. They can walk naked round your property. Get lost.

The European Union will not die if we now say "OK, we're obviously not ready for a unified currency quite yet, so let's go back to the old system for a while." Many will applaud this decision. Once this is done, we can get on with doing the things Europe is good at: the sharing, pooling and improvement of cooperation in intelligence, policing, education, manufacturing, food  production, military, tourism, agriculture and food, justice and many other areas of life where we can build a common purpose. While all this is going on, we need to listen to the people. It is the people who vote for the politicians, and the people who will deselect them when the time is right. If one politician oversteps his/her jurisdiction, it is only right that they are evicted. Europe needs some old-style visionaries of the likes of William Beverage or Willi Brandt; realists and ideologists at the same time. People who can see a good idea and run with it, not afraid to stand up to lobbyists and big business.

And we do have people like this around us, but those greasy politicians will not let them get anywhere near them. They obviously have a lot to hide...

People like Deborah Meaden, entrepreneur and straight-talker, an upstanding citizen with business sense and an eye for justice. And this is the cunning naïvety of politicians (yes, an oxymoron) - on BBC Question Time last week,  The government minister on the show was impressed by what he heard, as was the audience, and tried to curry favour by saying that he had often tried to recruit her. This was an utter lie. She said the minister had never even picked up the telephone. What do politicians have against people with ideas?

Finally, I leave you with this thought: David Cameron, the darling of the banking world, did what I would have done last Friday in telling Merkozy where to get off, but he did it for thr wrong reasons. He did it not "in the national interest", but in the banking interest. People think the UK's action shows a country not going at the speed of the others, at a much slower rate. In fact, I beg to differ. The UK is in fact going faster than all the others, but the rest of Europe has just not caught up with the idea yet, that soon they'll all be wanting to go their separate ways. In the coming year, there are elections in Greece, France, Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Lithuania. These elections will mark the beginning of the end for the European dream (if there ever really was one). I, for one, believe that the UK was wrong to ditch the Anglosphere in favour of its geographically close neighbours. British people have more in common with Australians, Indians, Canadians, South Africans and West Indians than they ever did with Belgians or Italians. They would be considered as not really foreign by a large percentage of the population. It is time for the UK to seek them out and ask them to forgive them for the naïve assumption that any continental European had the answers to the UK's need to find a place in the world.

What is democracy?

The world over, there are different ways of viewing, for want of a better expression, "people power". In some countries, this takes the form of a revolution every ten or so years, installing another dictator. In others, it is the complete opposite, where governments cannot so much as change the VAT rate without a referendum. Extremes in the crazy systems governing this planet. What is clear though is that, with a couple of seriously wacky exceptions, in all countries of the world, the system is bigger than any individual.

What, though, is the most bizarre thing, is the sheer number of organisations, corporations, state-owned bodies and self-governing regions that bypass any form of public scrutiny. There's the Bilderberg group, the City of London Corporation, OPEC, any number of multi-billion-dollar company, media outlet or bank to name but a few. These organisations generally accept the widely-held opinion that politicians in democracies (at least those who make it) are malleable, popularity-hungry, attention-seeking, shallow petty criminals, loan sharks and dangerously crooked property owners in need of a place to legitimise, consolidate and widen their shady dealings through networking and rubbing shoulders with other like-minded individuals. A kind of LinkedIn for criminals who want to do everything officially.

These organisations also know that there are those who genuinely come into politics wishing to change the world. Visionaries, fresh-minded academics, talented individuals with imagination and a steely eye on the goals they wish to achieve. Of course, when they come up against the might of the machine, they also find their dreams dashed, their hopes halved and their ambitions annulled, either through being told that the thought is a valiant one but totally impractical, or by being ridiculed, scandalised or hounded out of office by the more sinister factions of politics, and their media buddies. This of course depends on how close to the bone the visionary entrant comes when airing his or her new ideas.

So the large firms single out the right politicians for their dirty work: they give them special deals, assure them of seats on their boards of directors and pushing their candidacies for posts where they can be of use to them after their political careers are over. This is why nothing truly pleasing to the people ever gets done; because it's not in anyone's interest. It's not in the politicians' interests, because they would be putting themselves out of use; it's not in the corporations' interests because they'd not have anyone to represent their shady interests at international level, and it's not in the people's interests because it would make us all jumpy, to think that everything was going so swimmingly well. We'd think there was a catch and start petty paranoid skirmishes with traditional foes.

Leaders in the democratic world these days are so uninspirational, so faceless, so full of themselves, that we cannot really blame the Chinese for viewing democracy with suspicion, when they see how the Greeks behaved. How can you respect a politician who, in order to secure another term in power, promises to reduce taxes, or the retirement age by a year, or unemployment by hiring another few thousand people to do meaningless tasks that could be handled by half a dozen job students? How can you respect a politician who fakes his own country's economic situation in order to join a currency union his country has no hope of keeping up with?
I'll tell you how.

Let's take each country as being a person, and the Eurozone a little like marriage. So before the Eurozone was set up, when each country was in the singles market, so to say, they put on their best outfits for summits and kept the smiles going long into the evening, a little like singles have done for decades. Once they get married, of course, the partners start noticing little niggling habits that irritate them, like too many referenda (Ireland, Denmark) or inability to save money (Ireland gain, Italy, Greece). In the end, what happens to most married people? They let themselves go. They get unfit, lazy, start putting on weight and neglecting their personal hygiene. The same has happened in the euro marriage. Now they're tied together in an eternal bond of "till death us do part" those newlyweds feel that they'll be saved by the others if things go wrong. And then the mid-life crisis sets in, where the man decides to get a Porsche convertible and go trekking in the Arctic. The woman (Germany in this case) stays at home, horrified. No wonder she (Merkel) wants to limit the manoeuvrability of the Greek economy.

Now, returning to the original question - what is democracy? For me, you can' t let the people decide everything, because we'd reintroduce hanging and expel anyone with an accent. That's unfortunately how it goes, because those with opinions, principles or views are usually a lot louder than those who just get on with their lives worry-free, and are more likely to bother to vote in any referendum, which is why David Cameron refuses to give the UK a referendum of staying in the EU. On the other hand, you can't let politicians carry on governing forever, or they get too big for their boots. They get to know the system too well. So well, in fact, they do things like rein in the national media (Italy, Hungary), reduce freedom of speech (UK, France) or change the constitution to make it harder to remove them, or to indict them for any wrogdoing during or after their terms of service (Italy again). This was not planned when democracy was conceived. It was not the main idea.

So, how has this shrinking of democratic values occurred in historically democratic countries where politicians are traditionally accept their fates every four or five years at the ballot box? In Europe, this has happened because the EU has made it necessary. On one hand, the European Council of Ministers has replaced many of the features of national government because a great deal of decisions take place at European level, and are implemented nationally under the pretext that they were actually decided by the national politicians. And on the other, because of the turbulence they knew they were about to unleash on everyone. Don't tell me that five years ago, or even ten, those politicians had no idea of the storm they were kicking up when they introduced the euro, allowing Greece, Portugal and other such ClubMed nations into the club. I cannot believe for one moment that after so many errors of judgement on the way, so many wrong moves, so many contrived agreements and forced referendum decisions in the last decade, that there is no alternative agenda. You cannot tell people "you will have democracy, but only if you vote our way". Democracy has to mean something, and it has to be binding.

On the other hand, what is it like living in a country without democracy? In a country like the People's Republic of Korea, it's probably a living nightmare. I would not wish to spend 24 hours in that country. I think the same about Myanmar and Zimbabwe. But in Belarus or pre-election Azerbaijan or Bhutan, I could imagine living, despite not having much in the way of freedom of speech. It poses the questions, "is democracy over-rated?" and "is democracy something for everyone?" When you look at China or Russia, two vast countries, are either of them capable of further democratising without keeping a firm grip on the people for fear of independence movements springing up everywhere? Would the Chinese people really know what to with full voting rights? Do they really need it? I think they are doing very well with their systems as they are now.

Let us look at something simple: if a little village in, say, Nigeria applies to the EU for funding of a bridge over a dangerous river, the European Commission will firstly send it to a committee, who will then decide whether it is viable or not. Within months, they will dispatch a surveyor, an engineer and a budget analyst to the location to draw up plans and make an offer to the Nigerians. Once this has been approved, it will go back to Brussels for ratification, and within the next budgetary outlay, funds will be made available. Months later, the bridge will be built using ethically sourced materials and properly paid skilled workers, but the whole process will take about 2 to 3 years. Then there's the Chinese. They'll just turn up in the village, ask where they'd like the bridge and get to work. The material for the bridge might not be so stable or Kosher, and the builders might be less capable, but the whole thing would take 3 months, maximum. That is the difference between an ethical democratic process and a one-party state: the bridge might take a lot shorter to build, and the shorter waiting time will mean fewer will be killed whilst the Europeans are still discussing the proposal, and there will be

So, could the slow eradication of democracy in Europe be a necessity, clandestinely being introduced to be able to compete with China and Russia in the long term? Could the lack of transparency at European level be something to do with politicians' need to hide something far more worrying from us? I doubt it. But there's still a little thought cloud in my head which does not rule it out entirely. What I think is most likely, is that the current crop of politicians is grasping at any way at all to distance themselves from the mess they made of the last 10 years.

To finish, when asking what democracy is, we cannot put a finger on it because everywhere is different. In the politically disengaged countries of western Europe, democracy has been compromised. It has shifted from parliament to talent shows, from local government to online polls and customer satisfaction surveys. Panem et Circenses is the motto of our civilisation. With the coming of the Occupy movement and the sudden unpopularity of the European Union and what it stands for, I think the day is coming where people power, in whatever form is most suited to each country, will take back control. But in the end, it's the power-hungry that corrupt the system causing an endless cycle of bad governance. That makes no difference if in Asia, Africa or Europe, dictatorships or democracies: the sharpest elbows win.