Witterings from Witney pens his observations from a recent seminar in London. He comes away with the predictable finding that professional politicians favour the system which gives them the best chance of personal power and influence, representative democracy.

"It is all very well campaigning for the laudable aim that those who govern us should be able to be 'hired and fired' by the electorate - but what is the point of exchanging one set of 'central controlists' for another", writes WfW.

"In other words", he asks, "what is the difference between a collection of dictators who cannot be hired and fired and the alternative who can?" We still, he laments, "end up with dictators".

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I think the question is "when will we ever learn?"

True ... and it is taking some getting through: we (are allowed to) elect politicians and they screw us - shock!

Well, are you REALLY "allowed to" elect politicians? Or do they merely TELL you that you are allowed to do so? Who decides which candidates are allowed to run? And most importantly, who counts the votes?

Well, I think the old joke is that they would abolish voting if it actually made any difference. The only problem with that, as far as I can see, is that it isn't a joke.

Apparently Churchill made a mistake with the "V" for victory sign,I have seen photos of him using both versions(palm inwards and palm outwards)He was unaware of the rude interpretation of the palm inward salute and changed it to palm outwards after being told about it.........though it being a longstanding tradition it does makes you wonder how sheltered an upbringing he had........,demonstrating even then how the elite live in a bubble from the rest of us.

In the wiki entry, it says he was told about the meaning of the palm-inwards, and henceforth used the palm out - it doesn't say when, though. But considering he started using the V-sign in mid 1941, and this is December 1942, it took him an awful long time to find out. That, in itself, tells a story.

That must have been an interesting day though.Some poor Westminster lacky pushed into the PMs office,


"Mr Churchill it is my duty to inform you that you have in fact been using an indelicate hand gesture from which the working classes would likely construe that you were telling them to fork off"

Churchill slapping a hand to his follically challenged head,

"Oh shit,Ill keep up the V sign though, doing it the other way round,hopefully no bugger will notice,...next on the agenda?"

I'm surprised he didn't send an "action this day" minute to himself ... "stop using fork off fingers".

As you said recently,



The same can be said about a democratic system. Nothing has changed in the last hundred years. All people of the age of majority can vote ever since the Suffrajettes won their case. The length of parliaments has not changed. We have been closer to revolutions in the past 100 years. Our politicos have tried to change our socio-political structure before with amalgamations with France. Have the politicians ever been as corrupt? So what has changed? I suspect it is communication. We get to hear about it more. I have certainly concluded that our political system seems to be degrading and my logic says that it is because there is inadequate external oversight. We are the external force and the only force that can regulate. Criminals can not decide their own punishment and politicians cannot decide their own regulation. They are doomed to degrade over time until crisis point. How is it they have lasted so long?

For someone who was so immersed in history and who believed he had a destiny to play, he should surely have known the meaning of the 2 finger salute since the time of Crecy or Agincourt..?!

Yes ... good point. This is the man who is the expert on the English-speaking peoples.

We can never make the changes we desire. Our ancestors had the skills and knowledge to make weapons equal to those with which those who oppressed them opposed them, and they had compelling arguments with which to attract supporters ('your children starve and walk rickety and barefoot for want of good bread while the lord in his castle buys perfumes and nosegays to protect the delicate senses of his ladies from the stench of those who pay for them' is rather more persuasive than 'the various benefits that take your earnings to circa thirty thousand per annum and buy you new cars, fifty two inch plasma screen televisions, foreign holidays, your own home and the sort of lifestyle Great Great Uncle Fred who died on the Somme would have killed for are not sustainable in the long-run').

We have neither their skills nor their compelling arguments. They grew their own food, made their own tools, had not the fear of the beasts in the fields that too many of us now suffer, made their own clothes, slept without concern under the stars and beneath hedges (as one hundred years ago their descendants slept in flooded trenches) and did not wait for an opinion poll or advertising survey, nor seek the permission of their servants, to make their views known.

People prattle on about Magna Carta, and the Bill of Rights and the Glorious Revolution (even the US Constitution) and so on, however the fact is that eight hundred years later we still depend upon the consent of a monarch, even if only as part of the sham theatre that is 'democracy', to enact what 'democratic' change the anti democratic institution the elected dictators have given us up to still allows us. Despite the 'evolution' of parliamentary democracy we are no further along the road to universal personal autonomy than were our unwashed and illiterate ancestors.

Evolution, even social and political evolution, is a savage process dependent upon failure and the imminent prospect of social, political and economic collapse, or loss of overall control. Change is forced only when elites fail and need to compromise to hold on to some of their grip on power, there is nothing gradual, consensual or democratic about the process, as Mr and Mrs Ceaușescu learned. Had they the sense to take car and kitchen design, and marketing, out of the hands of brain-dead apparatchiks they might have died fat and contented.

We can never make the changes we desire because we have no hope of arousing the 'lumpen proletariat' to the point that using the remote to switch off the HD TV 'stenders/ strictly Big Bruvver brain fuck-fest for just long enough to overthrow the bastards who sign the cheques that pay for the couches and the potatoes is seen as anything more than a waste of time.

The benefits dependent masses wail when their children die because the opportunity to be the object of attention is so rarely offered them; their grief is ameliorated, however, by the knowledge that children are the ticket to certain benefits income, just as those unwanted and unwelcome spawn sent, one hundred and fifty and more years ago, to the mines, the factories, the orphanages or up chimneys were.

We can never make the changes we desire because we lack the advantages those less advanced than us had. The time to stop what is happening to us was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Sadly the term 'Luddite' has come to mean 'an ignorant social and economic Neanderthal ('knuckle dragger' in web speak) incapable of understanding or accepting beneficial change' rather than a skilled and often literate artisan, himself a master or employer, alarmed by the loss of economic autonomy the automation of his highly sought manual skills threatened, and subsequently resulted in.

We can never make the changes we desire because we are completely dependent, for even the most basic of necessities (grain, water, a place to cook, sleep and shit) upon a system the servants of which we have authorised to deny us the ability to provide for ourselves, on pain of severe penalties.

When the elites fail to put bread in our children's bellies we cannot beat our ploughshares into swords and muster unopposed on the village green; we can only rip up paving stones while 'The Police' kettle us, spray us with machine gun fire, gas us, drug us, haul us off, detain us and, when they can do no more to us, release us, having accompanied and assisted bailiffs illegally to assault our castles and illegally to carry off our goods and chattels, before making yet further demands upon us.

And who, living the care free life, would want that?

I cannot afford your book at present, however I look forward to reading it when I can. From time to time I flick through my battered old copies of Penguin Orwells (Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of ... ) and wonder how your picture of the war years compares to his. I know he wasn't the most informed of commentators, and was often hopelessly optimistic, but I think he was not afraid to report rather more of the truth he knew than most of his background.

Churchill knew precisely what the palm-in V-sign meant and his mischievous, impish sense of humour revelled in it. It was in the double-entendre, honi soit qui mal y pense tradition of the English music hall eg Marie Llloyd, Donald MacGill postcards, pantomimes, Max Miller etc that carried on into Round The Horne's Julian and Sandy and Rambling Sid Rumpo. People like things that are a little naughty and like someone who is a little naughty as well - Arnold Bennett's popular 'Denry Machin, The Card. I suppose the V sign was done like that to put a tiny bit of end of term saturnalian fun into an otherwise very dull time. Churchill knew he could get away with it because of his carefully cultivated public persona: he had statesmanlike ballast that could accommodate with ease occasional lightness.

Jag,

I looked it up but don't recall the links I found. Informed opinion is of the opinion that the English longbowman source is a latter day invention. I've known, and occasionally used, the V sign from a very young age (<10 for sure), usually with plenty of vim, but its so-called middle ages origin is fairly recent — maybe the last 30 years or so. That's when I first heard of it anyway.

Apparently your typical war bow had a draw weight of 100lbs (although I recall hearing that some they found on the Mary Rose were over 200lbs) and, apparently, at that weight you need three fingers. I read there was a contemporary account by some Frenchie who fought on both sides but he referred to some occasion where English bowmen were being talked up by Henry to the effect that the French would cut three fingers off. So the two-fingered salute doesn't quite fit.

By the way, I'm not convinced you need three fingers to pull 100lbs especially if you've been forced into practising from an early age, as all good Englishmen and true were. 200lb I'll accept.

It's a nice story though. I like it to be true.