Wednesday 19 May 2010

Nick's Great Reform "act"

I listened to Nick Clegg's "biggest shake up since the Great Reform Act of 1832" speech on the radio today.

I was astonished to hear him reveal ...

..... all of the intrusive and unnecessary laws that inhibit your freedom.......Our democracy has suffered at the hands of encroaching centralisation and secrecy for decades...citizens' rights: eroded by the quiet proliferation of laws that increase surveillance, quash dissent, limit freedom...executive authority: consistently increased by successive administrations to the point that we now have a neutered parliament and government that enjoys almost untrammelled control .....
...that we had been living in an oppressed and enslaved sub-soviet enclave until May 6th.

Little did we know...freedom and liberty curtailed and cramped to such an extent that criminals could be photographed and identified on CCTV and apprehended by merely leaving their DNA at the scene of the crime....

....an affront to Liberal Democrats everywhere..... no wonder the people revolted.....

How Nick and Dave bravely overcame the politburo and the commissars to sneak into samizdat (but posh, obviously) fee paying education and then earned an illicit living through the underground economy. To chose to work in such defiantly decadent and deliberately effete anti-soviet occupations such as PR and Parliamentary Lobbying must have taken every fibre of courage they could muster. It'll be a grand tale for their memoirs in the blissful freedom of the post soviet era.

Thank you Nick for that insight....

Or did you just go a wee bit mad...?

As I said, I heard the speech on radio, but revisiting the text confirms first impressions: it's full of generalisations, inanities with a leavening of unintentional humour.

e.g

Generalisation:

This government is going to break up concentrations of power and hand power back to people, because that is quite simply how we can build a society that is fair.
Easy to say, but how? identifying a "problem" is easy....George Osborne was so enraged by the number of quangos that his first act was to set up a quango to tell him what to do next....
Inanity:

Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests. Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.
Is this meaningless drivel, or is droit de signeur ended at last....

Humour:

..... citizens' rights: eroded by the quiet proliferation of laws that increase surveillance, quash dissent, limit freedom.
That'll be the Tory dream of repealing the Human Rights Act, will it Nick?

The whole thing is hyperbolic, bathetic, arrogant and vainglorious.

Actually, quite an accurate character study of Mr Clegg himself....

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