Cash? I’ll be having that, thank you
Britain is our canary in the coal mine. Watch carefully.
“There you are, amiably wandering down the street, and if a policeman so wishes, he can not only stop and search you, he can insist that you divulge where you have been and where you are going. If you have more than 1,000 in cash on you it can be confiscated, you having to prove where you got it from and what you were going to do with it: for the assumption is that such cash amounts are the proceeds or enablers of crime and so the burden of proof reverses. Finally, if you keep silent John Reid wants this to be taken as proof of your guilt.”
“So those confiscation orders of people as yet unconvicted of a crime. They now apply to anyone carrying over 1,000 in cash. And the police force prosecuting them gets 50% of the dosh.
Nothing can go wrong with this, can it?”
“It’s one of the oldest strategies in the book: divide and rule. And few governments in living memory have been so adept at it as NuLabour: it has been at the heart of many of their policies. They have divided the peoples of the Union; they have divided, through QUANGOs and censuses emphasising differences, black, brown and white peoples of the Union. Through jealousy they have divided rich and poor.
“Fear not,” says the government, “for the state—and only the state—can save you!” And then they proceed to divide some more. Devolved governments (but with little power), harsher sentences for “racist” crimes, and the stealing of more money from “the rich” to hand out as gifts to the poor.
The brilliant bit about this tactic, as applied by NuLabour, is that it encourages people to think of each other group not as fellow human beings, but as people below or different from them. “They aren’t a person like I am, they are just a toff/darkie/Muslim/Scot/Sassenach/Taff/idiot, etc.”