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There seems to be a spate of group self-abuse going on with excitement at the prospects of a general election. I do not share this excitement. Indeed I look upon the prospect with dread and depression. I'm a democrat, right? So I should welcome the chance for the people to have their say, right? Wrong.

I'm with Winston when he said:

No!
Originally uploaded by Mig_R

"Look at all the power [Mr Attlee] is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power."

Nobody currently vying for Mr Attlee's job today even remotely proposes sufficiently to reduce what Churchill went on to call "this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, [which] is a violation of democracy."

No!
Originally uploaded by Will...

The stakes are abhorrently high. That you and your coterie of friends and sycophants should have control over the better part of half of the entire nation's income. And with it the power to condone or more frequently condemn the personal choices of millions - more, probably, than lived under the Pax Augusta in Rome's entire empire.

I want a revolution. A revolution of devolution. I want power, the vast majority of it at least, held by people I can go and meet at my local civic centre. If there is anything that needs a joint decision between two or more civic centres let them agree on it mutually, and if, in the very last resort, something that has to be dealt with at a national level, let them send representatives to argue the case on an ad hoc basis if possible but with a minimum of permanent representatives - just enough to give every civic centre a voice - if necessary.

No! Not even you!
Originally uploaded by Ming Campbell

And I want to be able to elect some of them every year so that if they are not doing a good job we can make our views plain on a sort of a "1 year moving average" basis to which they will necessarily have to react by forming and reforming their power sharing agreements to reflect the true will of the electors.

I find it repugnant that anyone believes they are so much greater than any of the rest of us that they believe they can run the country and our lives better than the Almighty gave us the free will to do for ourselves. They should humble themselves to recall again what Churchill said:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

We seem to be at the last roundabout on the road to Serfdom (probably courtesy of some new town super-planner). We must decide to go right round it and head back the way we came.

Coincidentally, overnight I've been pointed to this article by a fellow Georgist, Fred Folvary, on a similar issue on the other side of the pond.

Hot on the heels of a few moans (by me not least, here ) that Chris Huhne needs to produce something like Nick Clegg's comprehensive "Vision for Britain" document so we can all pick it apart and say how good it is, supporters will have received news that Chris will "launch his manifesto with a keynote speech" on Wednesday at noon.

Well...what is a person to do to celebrate the close of nominations when he's already handed his in days ago?

BBC reports that the police and suggesting that Flag-burning could become crime:

Police chiefs are urging the government to make flag-burning a new criminal offence, as part of a drive to crack down on Islamic extremists and others preaching violence and religious hate, the BBC has learned.

The proposals also include action to ban demonstrators from covering their faces to avoid police scrutiny, and tougher powers to arrest demonstrators seeking to inflame tensions.

It might be funny if the call didn't come a few days before half the country goes out and burns a token Catholic, or, as Lewes sometimes does, an effigy of the Pope.

They seem to find it significant that the call has come from the country's most senior Muslim police officer. So bloody what?

Maybe we should have a National Flag Burning Day tomorrow just to assert our liberties. Some might want to burn a blue flag with some gold stars on it, AA members might burn a Green Flag. It could be any flag. It doesn't need to be personally significant. Perhaps you could burn a flag from somewhere you went on holiday and found your hotel half built and had your wallet stolen. Maybe an old apartheid era South African flag. It doesn't matter.

But do it with a balaclava on. Remember those? I had one. Nothing to do with hiding my face, but Aberdeen was perishing when I was a first year infant school pupil and it seemed like quite a fashionable thing at the time.

Jeez - when will these people learn that if we curb our freedoms, the bastards are winning. We do not "pledge our allegiance to the flag". It's a piece of cloth for God's sake. And I resent the police videoing perfectly peaceful demonstrations, like people coming out to protest their pension cuts - you end up with a "file" and a mugshot for complaining that Gordon Brown's shafted you!

I hate the G8, there's no doubt. I find the whole idea a nauseating display of mankind's folly that a few people with power can do more or less anything, from manipulating the world's climate to holding in their grasp the lives of billions whose lot in life those leaders of the industrialised nations can barely comprehend, let alone decree how to change.

It epitomizes to me why nation states are vile, unnatural divisions of humanity and the planet which, frankly, seem to have more to do with protecting the wealth of the few and patronizing the poverty of the many on this earth. Their leaders pose, Atlas-like, for photo-calls after their vacuous pronouncements, like some cabal of gallactic princelings in some dystopian Sci-Fi vision of a future inter-stellar imperial court.

Yet I'm no crusty protester you'll find scaling fences at Gleneagles or taking a bullet in Genoa complaining that these neo-cons and neo-liberals want to sell our world to the most hated capitalist profiteer. Oh no. Business, amongst other examples of voluntary human co-operation, has a huge part to play in addressing the needs of everyone on the planet. If only it could all be carried out on a billiard-table-level playing field.

And this is the greatest power these eight chattering onanists have - they could, if they chose, level that playing field tomorrow, or at least leave Japan this week having agreed to do so. But they don't want that, do they. because they also represent the businesses already raping the planet and its people by dint of playing on a skewed field.

They make me puke when I think of them, quite literally. I am nauseous writing this to be honest. I do not believe there are eight people on the planet, in fact not 2008 nor yet even 200,000,008 endowed with the wisdom of gods and strength of titans who could do any better at securing the future of this planet than the possibility oif billions of us being able to communicate and co-operate directly among ourselves.

At the top of my front page you will find what must be one of my favourite quotes from any politician, in this case the truly radical, Richard Cobden:

"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." 150 years later, like infants only learning to crawl, we still rely on those protectionist, egotistical, smugly self-important governments despite the evidence that they cannot and will not deliver on their promises.

Whilst I certainly do not agree with all their policies, I find the idea of SimPol, in which we use modern communications technology to get ordinary people throughout the world, in diverse and distant countries, to voice together our aspirations and make those same sort of global changes on a consensual and co-operative basis.

Y I H8 G8.