 {"id":48,"date":"2009-12-13T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2009-12-13T00:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/13\/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-then-you-have-nothing-to-fear\/"},"modified":"2009-12-13T00:43:35","modified_gmt":"2009-12-13T00:43:35","slug":"if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-then-you-have-nothing-to-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/13\/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-then-you-have-nothing-to-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>&#8220;<em>No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in<\/em>&#8221; is the title old Neil Innes\/Viv<\/strong><strong>ian Stanshall song, written in the late 1960&#8217;s. <\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a title=\"Bonzo Dog Band\" href=\"http:\/\/lyricsplayground.com\/alpha\/songs\/n\/nomatterwhoyouvoteforthegovernmentalwaysgetsin.shtml\">http:\/\/lyricsplayground.com\/alpha\/songs\/n\/<br \/>\nnomatterwhoyouvoteforthegovernmentalwaysgetsin.shtml<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Forty years later and it seems that today the lyrics of the Bonzo Dog&#8217;s humourous little ditty have become frighteningly relevant. Fact is that our once-proud nation is not far from becoming a dictatorship. Sure the faces in Parliament change from time-to-time. But the policies don&#8217;t. Neither do the lies and cover-ups. For example, have you ever tried to find out how much of our money has been wasted on say Iraq and Afghanistan? Basically you can&#8217;t because of &#8220;<em>national security<\/em>&#8220;. In fact, these are some of the least accountable and most opaquely funded wars in modern history. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Granted they&#8217;ll tell us about the dead, because it&#8217;s hard to hide flag-draped coffins. Besides, nicely-presented dead service-people boost national morale, according to some MOD &#8220;<em>thinkers<\/em>&#8220;. It makes people more enthusiastic about the wars(s), aparently. Personally I find that notion utterly obscene and it breaks my heart every time I see one. But you try to find out how many of our young people have been crippled for life? You can&#8217;t! It&#8217;s secret! In fact, everywhere you look, vital pieces of information are being withheld from us, supposedly &#8220;<em>for our own good<\/em>&#8220;. To compensate, we are fed a never-ending diet of soft porn, crime drama and reality TV by the very media whose job it is to keep us informed. That&#8217;s because in <em>reality<\/em> we actually have no real opposition to Government at all, if you think about it&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Over the last 20 years, we have seen a steady erosion of our civil liberties and freedoms, whilst our Governments and the corporations that line their pockets have robbed us blind and scared us into believing it is &#8220;<em>for our own protection<\/em>&#8220;. I&#8217;m not saying the proverbial grass is greener. I think actually it is worse in places like the United States where the so-called &#8220;<em>anti-terror<\/em>&#8221; legislation has given them the Patriot Act &#8211; meaning amongst many other things that librarians had to tell the Government what books you are reading! So much for the &#8220;<em>Land of the Free<\/em>&#8220;!<\/p>\n<p>But the fact is that right here, right now in Old Blighty, we are sleepwalking our way towards a police state, whilst being forced to pay ever higher taxes for ever poorer services. Today we are expected to tolerate a level of corruption, obfuscation and incompetence from those that are paid to protect us, on a scale that was unimaginable even thirty years ago. Yet anyone who dares to complain is branded a &#8220;<em>traitor<\/em>&#8220;, &#8220;<em>unpatriotic<\/em>&#8220;, a &#8220;<em>terrorist sympathiser<\/em>&#8221; or told simply that he or she &#8220;<em>should be grateful<\/em>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Well I&#8217;m not! <\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Check out Ralph Nader&#8217;s &#8220;<em>Corporate Fascism<\/em>&#8221; video. Takes a few minutes to get going. But stick with it. This guy explains the phenomenon far, far better than I can:-<br \/>\n<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/video.google.com\/videoplay?docid=-4897059404976553130&#038;hl=en\">http:\/\/video.google.com\/videoplay?do&#8230;76553130&#038;hl=en<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Honk! Honk! <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in&#8221; is the title old Neil Innes\/Vivian Stanshall song, written in the late 1960&#8217;s. http:\/\/lyricsplayground.com\/alpha\/songs\/n\/ nomatterwhoyouvoteforthegovernmentalwaysgetsin.shtml Forty years later and it seems that today the lyrics of the Bonzo Dog&#8217;s humourous little ditty have become frighteningly relevant. Fact is that our once-proud nation is not &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/13\/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-then-you-have-nothing-to-fear\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grumble","category-information","category-weblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}