The British press was silenced yesterday from a significant cover up, but this morning The Spectator published what it could anyway, at last giving us the subject of what was being hidden if not the details that the Guardian Newspaper had uncovered which started the whole process.

The Spectator article can be found here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/ale ... arliament-seriously.thtml

The story goes that in response to the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast the company Trafigura has managed to supress and control parliament and the flow of news out of it.

The details of why i'm still not sure on, but something smells 'toxic' to me.

That is the smell of politics. new labour means big brother state. Tory means lack of funding for schools and universities (i'm hoping to be there next year) Lib dem just can't decide what they want to do and thus have no real goals.


Would rather see lib dem in but they would still be corrupt. British politics has just stagnated in the past 20 years.

I'm inclined to agree, I grew up under Thatcher and by the end of the conservative reign we where ready for a change as there was just too much corruption and sleeze. Labour's first term was a good one, but then it got complacent, and now it treats us with contempt.

Under labour 40% of our workforce are civil servants! That's just ridiculous, we've too much rouge ribbon and Labour have become too complacent. I couldn't believe they where voted in last term, I still struggle to understand why the country backed them and remain sceptical about the legitimacy of the vote (dead people dont vote by post etc).

As i've gotten older i've become ever more cynical about government and corporations. I've watched the will of business printed into law over and over again and i've watched surveillance and police state practices become matter of fact and nobody blinks an eye.

I feel under a democracy that no party should be allowed to rettain power and should be forced to sit out the next election - but I guess that's just the bitter experience of having watched aghast at the last 30 years of British politics.

Personally i'm in favour of the "Fatalistic Monarchy". See my reasoning is that people who want power are the least qualified to hold it, so we should get rid of politicians and select our leaders based upon random selection from qualifying criterea (I've never figured out what those criterea would be). Then, every 5 years we vote to decide whether to guillotean the selected monarchs head off and get the next one.

No politicians, and a leader in fear of the democratic vote. Just the way it should be.

Yeah would be good. no one believes politicians or in thier ideas. I hate to think if it doesn't improve in the next few years . We are living in George Orwell's nightmare.

The whole country needs a revolution in my opinion so we can shake things up anbd start a fresh. This will never happen though as people are afraid to speak up for fear of the police knocking on the door. They even have the power to detain us for weeks without any form of evidence or even any vague idea of what the person has done.

Oh well we can all dream. Want to become a revolutionary with me haha? we could purge the power out of the rich people and create our own communist run style country. if only humainty would work with communism. Not that I really agree with it, but in theory it would work very well.

Quote from rich uk :

Oh well we can all dream. Want to become a revolutionary with me haha? we could purge the power out of the rich people and create our own communist run style country. if only humainty would work with communism. Not that I really agree with it, but in theory it would work very well.

Well if it did you wouldn't have LFS, and the nice car you drive to work in. You'd live in abject poverty! WTF are some people on.

I remember talk on the street of revolution during the Iraq war, but it never reached critical mass and has since died down.

Personally i'm not in favour of communism because it affords some people more equality than others, and frankly, equality assumes everyone is equal but that is not true. Everyone is an individual. This is the biggest mistake of political correctness.

Democracy is fine provided it is not interwoven with capitalism, which it of course is. The principle of capitalism is supply & demand but this economic is lost when it mixes with government. I would be in favour of a supply & demand driven economy under a democracy - and this is how it is as a small trader. Global business however does not operate on supply & demand, it operates on supply & law.

I never thought I would be against globalisation, especially as i'm personally of the opinion we should do away with countries and national borders as it is (although not in todays social climate, the whole world needs a rethink there), but if anything can be learned from our current system it's that for government to function in the interests of the people it should answer only to the people - so other influences on government must be removed.

Quote from Intrepid :

Well if it did you wouldn't have LFS, and the nice car you drive to work in. You'd live in abject poverty! WTF are some people on.

This makes no sense. LFS is a dictatorship. we do not all own the content and we do not all get the money from it. There has never been a truly communist country where there are no leaders who have more, this why it doesn't work. someone always wants the money/power.

Intrepid some of your replies make me mad and some make me laugh. do you ever agree with anyone? oh unless i say the BBC is wank.

I believe he is infering that under communism the number of luxury goods available decreases. Actually this isn't strictly speaking true, although in practice capitalism appears to have driven technology faster in the consumer market.

Quote from rich uk :

This makes no sense. LFS is a dictatorship. we do not all own the content and we do not all get the money from it.

It makes perfect sense! The advanced computers they use, the TVs, the cars they drive to the office are all there because of capitalism. If you didn't have capatalism you'd still be stuck in the dark ages playing spectrum games....if you lucky! If you don't think so why don't you travel back in time to East Germany b4 the fall of the wall. I'll sure you'll love it!

That's it, I've had enough of this Off Topic nonsence!

I propose a wealth cap, any person or single entity owning 5 million stirling (~$7.9m) or more in cash or cashable assets overflows their wealth into central government.

It would only work if the whole world ruled in favour of course, but it would fix oh so much.

More on the original story, from The Spectator again:

1.20pm: Carter-Ruck have abandoned their attempt to prevent the reporting parliamentary proceedings. The Twitterati and the Blogoshpere have prevailed in the great Battle of Trafigura. But it is ridiculous that such a battle for such an elementary press freedom had to be fought in the first place. The Lib Dems are quite right to call for a parliamentay debate on this.

Quote from Becky Rose :

I propose a wealth cap, any person or single entity owning 5 million stirling (~$7.9m) or more in cash or cashable assets overflows their wealth into central government.

It would only work if the whole world ruled in favour of course, but it would fix oh so much.

Becky what are you on?

So you limit what people earn, and thus restrict them from re-investing into entrepreneurs and new businesses. Do you have any idea how valuable this re-investment is?

Also, with this cap you heavily put off thousands of businesses of ever even starting. The damage to a country and economy would be absolutely massive. It's called the broken window fallacy. it's very simple I suggest you look it up!

Even now it's hard to start a business. The amount of bureaucracy and taxation is massive. Adding a wealth cap will just make the situation worse.

This pop-politics ideas never work and always cause huge unseen damage. It's very very very very basic economics.

No I dont see the harm in limiting what people earn, and i'm not bothered if a person on the cap earns and spends £15m in a year provided their wealth does not exceed £5m.

The idea of the cap is to tackle globalisation without removing the benefits of enterprise. £5m is a hell of a lot of money, and if you can earn more in that time and spend it then you've contributed to the economy, and you can live a very lavish lifestyle, indeed, as personal fortunes go £5m is a lot of money and I cannot imagine anyone wanting for more.

However, i'm also applying the concept to entities, such as corporations. If they can only hold £5m in cash and cashable assets, then there is less need to generate profit on a pan-international scale and large corporations can then start acting in the best interests of the people, or have their cash overflow directed to the government where it can then be put to the same task.

The suggestion that in removing mass-wealth (and we're talking mass-wealth here, not simply wealth) one is removing investment is incorrect, the wealth is simply re-allocated. If it prohibits some large companies from an entreprenurial exercise makes no odds, as companies of the magnitude involved (corporates) are currently above government (in that historically they have used their wealth to increase wealth generation by controlling government in a manner not benefitting the people). However the money still exists, and can still be used, just not by singular entities.

Some details would need to be worked out of course, such as limited companies and what constitutes an entity and the like, but none-the-less the principle is fundamentally in what I consider to be the right direction.

Wealth is not an issue, capitalism is not an issue. Supply & Demand is not an issue. Democracy is not an issue. Globalisation controlling government and wealth being used to buy power to generate more wealth however is a major issue and summises the vast majority of what is wrong with the world.

from just skim reading this thread and the article I see messrs Carter-**** are involved again, these cases are becoming all too common now, the Private Eye was involved in a legal battle against someone else who was trying to halt publication of something about them recently and they won their casse in the high court.

Libel tourism is a growing threat to this country, with courts handling libel cases brought against people in foreign countries in the UK because our laws are so soft. Reminds me of somehting else involving Carter-****, they'd successfully gagged all the papers in the UK from reporting something about a clinet of theirs, they went to America to try and stop it over there but the American media agencies just told them to '**** off'.....or words to similar effect

The Private Eye have a good report on a similar case in the current issue, it's worth picking up

Ah heck it's Private Eye I was thinking of when I posted that the Spectator was anti-government. It isn't, I now remember that I read The Spectator once and found it sickeningly right wing and pro-government.

Thanks for the memory jolt, and yes it was Carter-Ruck who managed to orchestrate the news black out - but failed to control online media and had it thrown back in their faces. Now many more people know of Trafigura's guilt than would have otherwise.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Ah heck it's Private Eye I was thinking of when I posted that the Spectator was anti-government. It isn't, I now remember that I read The Spectator once and found it sickeningly right wing and pro-government.

I wondered where you'd got that from. Boris Johnson was their editor for several years while he was also a Tory back-bencher. He only resigned as editor when Cameron moved him to the front bench, in order to concentrate on his political career.

Guardian reporting significant offpissment. http://www.guardian.co.uk/medi ... trafigura-carter-ruck-gag

At least there is relief in that people have taken notice and are not having it.

Do away with government completely and have the country run be a group of philosophers selected based on their unwillingness to be leaders or seek power. The politicians could be the paper pushers, but all the important decisions would need to be approved by people with common sense and wisdom. I'm sure we would end up with a better standard of living and a country we could actually be proud of which stood up for basic values like freedom of speech instead of selling them out to the highest bidder. As Douglas Adams said "Anyone who is capable of getting themselfs made President should on no account be allowed to do the job".

Who decides who has wisdom or not?

Trouble is, all human beings will be corrupted by power by nature, you could trust machines with the decision making, who will not be tempted or corrupted by power or money, although thinking about it thats a very dangerous thing to do.

Perhaps top government jobs should be made unpaid voulenteer jobs, to bring in people who do things out of kindness and morals rather than money, but how thats going to work I have no idea. Or at least the wages of the top brass could be slashed.

Quote from 5haz :

Who decides who has wisdom or not?

Well that is the hard bit, the people best suited for the job wouldn't want to do it, and they would probably become corrupted by power if they were forced to.