Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

SOME newspapers and internet sites have started ‘watches’ as in ‘House price watch’ and ‘Unemployment watch’ which chart the progress of their chosen target.

Premature it may be, but I’m starting a ‘fascism watch’.

As the cliché has it, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Fascism came about in Germany (and elsewhere, let it not be forgotten) as a result of some well-defined circumstances, some of which are visible in Britain today.

Mass unemployment - tick; a vulnerable and fearful middle class - tick; a government which prints money - tick; contempt for civil liberties - tick; a feeling of national humiliation - arguable, but tick; a fascist party which people feel they can vote for - tick; a helpless minority which can be blamed for these failings - tick many times over.

Looking at these in more detail, last time unemployment rose to the heights we see today and eventually on to three million, it mostly affected the working class, miners and steelworkers and people in manufacturing. Well, those were thinned out in the eighties and now it is the turn of the middle classes. In particular those who rose out of the ashes of the eighties and entrusted their savings to bricks and mortar which many are now losing.

Printing money? This government calls it ‘quantitative easing’. The point of needing a wheelbarrow to transport enough cash to buy a loaf of bread has not been reached but the first steps have been taken.

Contempt for civil liberties? Britain is the most spied upon nation of what we are pleased to call the free world; we are threatened with identity cards which will carry an enormous amount of encrypted information about ourselves; banks have to keep track of our money at the behest of our government which can also monitor our use of the internet. The ability to intercept mail and phone calls has long existed as has that of checking which way we vote through the numbering of voting slips (and, yes, that has happened and no doubt is still happening) to search for ’subversives’.

A feeling of national humiliation? The reasons for that are less stark than losing a world war, but there’s loss of empire and failure to find a role; our inability to make our own goods; our status as America’s poodle. That’ll do for a start.

And there’s no shortage of helpless minorities to blame. They not even be black, Asian or Jewish; think of the resentment against Polish and other migrant workers.

The BNP now has a number of elected councillors. They may be few, but they have a toe-hold and are hoping to win a Euro seat as well as more councillors in June. I read that a poll in suburban Surrey found 15 per cent were prepared to contemplate voting BNP. Hitler started with a lot fewer than that.

At the moment they diligently keep their darker side hidden but it comes out in flashes now and then. Not long ago a BNP member I had irritated promised the fact would be ‘remembered’. Then there was a hastily suppressed document threatening Jews, ‘defined by race, not religion’.

Straws in the wind, maybe, but all the ingredients for a police state are there and as Murphy’s Second Law says: If it can happen, it will.

THE release of prison Sean Hodgson from jail after serving 27 years for a murder he did not commit shows up yet again one of the lousiest tricks the legal establishment plays on the least powerful people in its care, people sentenced to life imprisonment.

Because their sentence is indeterminate they are vulnerable to the ‘justice’ industry’s Catch 22. If they protest their innocence they have failed to come to terms with their crimes and therrefore cannot be released.

Against all the evidence that has accumulated over the years, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice - an Orwellian title if ever there was one - treats any verdict of murder as being absolutely safe. But we all know that they are not, because of the number of belated acquittals that have resulted from new techniques, especially DNA.

The fact that a convicted person is prepared to face even more years behind bars to protest his innocence doesn’t weigh with the Home Office or the Justice ministry. Why should a person have to serve longer because he protests his innocence even if he IS guilty? He wouldn’t if it was a fixed term.

They do it because they can, offering the prisoner the faustian bargain that if he keeps his trap shut and doesn’t embarrass anybody by proving that he has been wrongly imprisoned he may get out earlier.

It is as cruel and crude a demonstration of absolute power as the habit of the former Soviet Union of putting dissidents into lunatic asylums and it makes me ashamed of this country that claims it is ruled by law.

The tragic events in Baden Wurtemburg recall to mind the aftermath of the massacre at Dunblane when some loner shot up the school killing many children and teachers.

When there was a move make hobby shooters keep their toys in locked armouries they became hysterical. When I supported the idea I got more bile poured over me than I have had before or since. The very violence of their irrationality showed they were unfit to be in possession of firearms. It got worse. The shooters had a protest march through central London wearing camouflage clothing. Scoring it from 1-10 as a PR stunt, minus nine about did it.

Tim Kretschmer’s father was a gun nut and not only had a private arsenal of 15 or more firearms but kept the pistol his son used in the killings loaded and under his pillow. This part of Germany is not a crime and violence hotspot so why did Dad have a gun under his pillow? Did he or his wife get a kick out of it?

Let’s face it, people who have guns are tempted to use them, many to keep down vermin or shoot game. Some have darker motivations. If Kretschmer senior had not kept that gun in his bed where his son knew it to be 15 families would not now be in mourning.

Most people will be giggling at the news that chef Heston Blumenthal has had to temporarily close his restaurant, the Fat Duck, amid allegations of food poisoning. What do you expect of somebody who serves up snail porridge? they are bound to ask.

I have eaten only once at the Fat Duck and, yes, I did try the taster menu full of all the weird things for which he is known. I liked the snail porridge, but not the sardine on toast ice-cream. I was glad to have tried it but if I go back I will eat off the main menu. Perhaps I’ll have the eponymous fat duck.

There were six of us on this trip which was by way of being a celebration, and the bill was fairly eye-watering. On the way home one of the group had to call a halt on the motorway and got out to be sick. I remeber thinking with every heave, ‘that’s ten quid gone, that’s twenty’ and so on’. However, she was the only one to throw up and the rest of us asgreed it was a meal to remember.

Oddly, I don’t now remember anything I ate except the snail porridge and the sardine ice-cream. Oh, and a little joke of Heston’s: a tiny square of orange jelly that tasted of beetroot and one of dark red jelly that tasted of orange.

Have you noticed that bankers like Sir Fred Goodwin don’t get pay, or even salary? What they get is compensation.

The bloke who collects your rubbish bins gets a wage - and is lucky if he gets a pension at the end of his working days.

Pen-pushers like me get a salary, and a pension of sorts still comes with the job.

A City trader has earnings (so does a bent copper, incidentally).

But it’s only people at the top of the financial tree who get ‘compensation’.

Compensation for what? For being driven to their plush office in a plush car? Having gourmet meals at top restaurants? Attending top sporting events at somebody else’s expense? Going back to their country pile for a bit of shooting at weekends? Using the company’s private jet to swan off round the world watching Formula 1 sponsored by your customers without their consent?

Most of us would do that for free although it must be hard work forking billions of pounds of public cash on to a bonfire. Naturally one needs a pension nearly 30 times the average wage for all that hard work.

I know a chap in the City who was once quite boastful about having invested heavily in Sir Fred’s RBS bank when the shares were 50p, which is more than twice what they are now.

He said to me recently that now his greatest pleasure would be to see Sir Fred carted off to jail in handcuffs.

In Sunday’s Observer political commentator Andrew Rawnsley wrote of Sir Fred being hanged, drawn and quartered, his entrails being stuffed wriggling into his mouth while still warm. That kind of spleen can only come from having seen one’s life’s savings reduced to ashes.

If government really wants to manufacture a feel-good Britain it could be achieved by consigning a few bankers to Britain’s foulest and most insanitary dungeons for a good long stretch.

So the bank rate is down to a half of one per cent. Why, I wonder, does the Government think that will make the banks lend us money? And why does it think we’d go out and spend it is they did.

At that rate it would pay the bank to shovel up every penny it has and invest it in Switzerland, or Liechtenstein, or anywhere where the interest rate is higher than here in the UK and that means everywhere.

Or not quite. Sharie law forbids interest which would seem to imply that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street won’t even be allowed to investits money in the one part of the world that has money to burn.

In any case, as I have pointed out before, people only spend money when they think there’s more where that came from which is emphatically not the case just now.