21/08/2009 by Steve Tierney.

If You Do The Crime …
Each and every one of us has decisions to make in their lives and once those decisions are made we must live with the inevitable consequences.  It’s called personal responsibility.  Some perpetual bleeding hearts don’t believe in personal responsibility.  Everything is somebody else’s fault, or caused by events over which the accused had no control.  I don’t accept that at all.  We each make our own choices.  Many people live in awful circumstances yet never become monsters. 
 
If ever there was an obvious split between the liberal (not necessarily Lib Dem) and Conservative viewpoint, surely the Lockerbie Bomber is it?  Turn on a radio talkshow and you can hear both sides expressed, sometimes eloquently, often passionately.  While I personally believe wholeheartedly in liberty, I struggle to understand the argument that says a terrorist mass killer should be able to claim (and receive) ‘compassionate’ release.  
  
Let’s just recap.  Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi is serving a life sentence for his 2001 conviction : blowing up PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, leaving 270 people dead, in the worst terrorist atrocity and the biggest mass murder in British legal history. 

Compassion is that last thing he deserves.
  
The idea that you can be ‘fair’ and ‘decent’ by allowing a horrific killer to jet home to a festival parade in Libya and spend his last months in comfort surrounded by his family is not compassion.  It is weakness masquerading as compassion.  I’m sure the people who lost family and friends in the original bombing would love to have a homecoming parade for the poor souls who were victims of this man. The fact that this cannot ever happen should have been all the legal system needed to know. 
  
Lock him up.  Throw away the key.  That would seem to be the obvious decision to make.

Instead, the wisdom of the Scottish courts is that Abdelbaset gets to go home and be a hero for what he did.  He’s terminally ill, you see.  And somehow the quirk of fate that delivered the illness means we should forget the two hundred and seventy people he killed and shed a tear for his condition.  Yeah, right.  There are a great many people in the world who are worthy of compassion and pity.  This evil lunatic isn’t one of them.  
  

England Untamed
I’ve just spent a glorious week in the New Forest.  In cohorts with a horde of other credit-crunched countrymen and women - my family and I decided to dodge the jet engines this year and instead to decend Southwards into one of the greatest stretches of wilderness our small island retains.  

In a log cabin nestled beneath the forest canopy three generations of my family had a truly fantastic time.  We barbecued at night under the stars.  My wife and I walked nine miles through scrub, marsh and forest, up and down steep hills, along lane and gravel track (getting quite severely lost for some time).  We saw a calf born.  We had to jump a bubbling brook and climb a sodden hill to get to a road that might help us get home before dark.  We stumbled for refreshment into a quaint wood-beamed pub and quaffed juice, real ale and homemade cider (not in one glass…)
 
We paid a visit to Bournemouth, to Poole and to a Theme Park near Southampton that was packed full of fun.  My son went on his first roller-coaster.  “That was great,” he said as it thundered into the slowdown lane at the end of the ride, and then plaintively: “Is it finished?”  My Mum refused to miss the log flumes despite a cracked rib sustained last week.  We trekked through the “Dinosaur Park” and imagined the roars from the bushes were real denizens of the Jurassic coming to hunt us down.

In the amusingly named “Sandy Balls” campsite we swam in the freezing outside pool, laughing and dunking and shivering.  My son made great use of the adventure playground.  We took the nature walks, following terrible maps to end up in places where I’m pretty sure we were never meant to go.  We biked along silent roads past ponies and cows and pigs and deer all free to roam.  We enjoyed incredible weather, hot day after hot day broken only by pleasant cool breezes and the occasional brief and exciting storm.  We laughed - a lot.  We ate, drank and made merry.  We lay on grass as the sun melted into night on a golden horizon. 

This, I think, is the stuff all great holidays are made of.  I hope you all had a wonderful summer too!
  

Posted in England, Credit Crunch, Conservatives | No Comments »

23/04/2009 by Steve Tierney.

St. George
Every time the question about a national day for the English comes around it seems to get bound up in rhetoric of whether we should, or should not, be proud to be English.  Whether we (as a people) are given to this sort of celebration or not.  Whether we even have anything to be proud of.  Well, I am certainly proud to be English.  I am indeed given to this sort of celebration.  And I do believe that England has a great deal to be proud of.  Times are hard for many and they’re going to get harder.  One of the things that will help get us through is to remember our long, colourful history.  Another is looking at our communities and the decent, proud, generous people who live in them.  We sell ourselves short sometimes, getting bogged down in arguments about benefits cheats, teenage parents, corrupt bankers and knife crime.  Let’s try to remember our good points too.  A national day to keep that in mind is a good thing. 
Happy St. George’s Day!

Stand And Deliver
Yesterday the Prime Minister put on his mask, strapped guns to his hips and laid in wait on the side of the highway.  The first carriage to come along was carrying the Middle Class.  Gordon leapt out into the road and shouted : “Stand and deliver!  Your Money Or Your Life!”  People might be forgiven for thinking Robin Hood had arrived, stealing from the rich (well, prosperous, anyway) and giving to the poor. 

Until the next wagon to happen by.  “Stick ‘Em Up!  I’ll be taking all your jobs, please.” Gordon ranted, aiming his six guns at a bunch of weary working class travellers.  “I know the prosperous employ everybody else, I just don’t care.  The public sector isn’t big enough yet anyway!”  Leering evilly, Gordon smirked: “Don’t worry, you’ll be looked after.  As long as you meet the criteria.  You need to be a teenager, out of work for six months or more, driving an eleven-year-old car, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born on the Sabbath under a blood red moon.”  Or something like that. 

Having now put the lie both to the Big Idea that the middle classes have nothing to fear from New Labour and to their Manifesto commitment against huge tax increases, Gordon Brown finally openly reverts to type.  It’s back to the Seventies with a hit parade of class warfare, economic ruin and social jealousy.  Since today is also William Shakespeare’s Birthday I think a quote is in order. 

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
- Shakespeare’s Othello

I’m aware that my metaphors are something of a mish-mash.  Much like that disastrous nonsense of a fabricated budget.  Give me strength.

The Small Print
At the end of April ‘09 we move officially into Campaign Season.  The run-up to the County Council and Euro-Elections mean that some rules come into force which I am advised I must adhere to since I am a candidate for the Roman Bank & Peckover county division.   As a consequence of this I will be obliged to include an amount of ‘Small Print’ at the end of every blog post detailing my Conservative affiliation and some other campaign-related details.  My posts will also be slightly delayed as they will need to be ‘approved’ by my local organising secretary.  She’s a good sport and I’m not particularly controversial, so I don’t anticipate any problems.  I’m only making this advance notification in case anybody wonders why small print suddenly starts appearing at the end of my posts.  It doesn’t mean I’ve sold out, or am under the dictatorial thumb of Big Brother.  It just means (like any good Conservative) that I want to stay within the law and do the right thing as a county candidate.  Somehow, I doubt that telling readers I’m a Conservative at the end of each post is going to be a big surprise to anybody.  But if it is I’d have to ask… what Blog have you been reading all this time? 

Three Thousand Readers
My latest ‘hits count’ for the blog website is three-thousand individual readers a week.  TWELVE THOUSAND a month?  Bloody hell!  (Excuse my French.)  Who are you all?  Thank you for reading but please… leave a comment once in a while!  It’s exciting to know my occasional rant encourages some inspection.  It’d just be nice to get some feedback!  Speak now, or forever hold your pieces.  <Ahem>
  

Posted in England, St. Georges Day, Budget, Labour Party, Cambs. County Council, My Campaign, Conservatives | No Comments »