Art from: GUELMAN E-GALLERY : Art for Sale and Rent - Blue NosesJohn Pilger, in The Guardian, 18 December 2007, writes about what is wrong with the United Kingdom (Left for dead by New Labour, liberal Britain must urgently fight back).
According to John Pilger:
1. The UK has the highest personal indebtedness on earth.
2. In 2007 ... the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of inequality for 40 years.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and 'more and more segregated from society'. (Joseph Rowntree Foundation report)
3. The International Monetary Fund has called Britain a tax haven;
corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice the global average.
4. Unicef reports that British children are the most neglected and unhappiest in the 'rich' world.
5. The Brown government, and the European Union, are demanding 'vicious and punitive' free-trade agreements that will 'devastate' the economies of many poor countries.
6. In Iraq, the killing may be worse than in the Rwanda genocide.
The British occupiers 'have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness'.
'The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era,' says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital.
In January 2007 nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.
7. Rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are disappearing. 'Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world'.
A system of secretive justice... imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the 'evidence'.
8. 'In broadcasting ... the unthinkable has been normalised'.
9. 'Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country'.
The UK government has powers 'as effective as politburo decrees'.
Unlike in Venezuela, key issues such as the EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum.
1o. NHS workers ... up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of (the National Health Service) a (former) Labour government's greatest achievement.
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