Be Afraid

1) Introduction
If you are an ordinary citizen and live in the Ukraine or Russia or China or North Korea, etc, you don’t have to be told what life is like in a dictatorship. You know to fear it and spend your time trying to survive it. The only choices you have are: submit and keep your nose clean or emigrate if you can or resist and be “neutralised”. Of course, you can join the oppressors at a low level as an enforcer or clerk or worker. But it is impossible for an ordinary citizen to join the elite unless you have strong connections or extraordinary talent like Putin’s Chef who organised an army of mercenaries. In Russia, only about 10 per cent of the population is allowed to join the Communist Party.

The word “dictator” includes all forms of dictator such as autocrat, oligarchy, monarch, archbishop, and so on.

But when you live in a democracy, it is very hard to imagine what life is like for the ordinary citizen in a dictatorship. It is hard to imagine how fear affects every aspect of your life; how you relate to other people, how careful you have to be in what you say and what you do. No matter how careful you are, you can still be condemned with or without trial, if it suits someone in authority. Let us see how various dictatorships affect the various stages of your life assuming you are an ordinary citizen. In a democracy, our lack of experience means we don’t appreciate how lucky we are to have the quality of life that we do. We don’t cherish it enough. We don’t resist enough the people around us who seek to undermine it. By not resisting, we train ourselves to become more submissive. This encourages the anti-democrats to become even bolder. If we don’t resist the dictatorships around the world who seek to enslave their people, then the anti-democrats amongst us will assume that we won’t resist them either.

When a democracy is under existential threat, like war, it passes emergency laws that override all other laws and rights. The electorate accept this situation until the threat is no more. Most dictatorships claim that they are under existential threat from their neighbours, all the time. This excuse is used to justify all the repression they use to stay in control. They even use this claim to justify pre-emptive invasions of their neighbours.

The purpose of this article is to persuade you to become an active democrat. Hopefully, your empathy with the repressed people described later, will fill you with resolve to protect our democracy.

2) Life in a Ultra-Repressive State
The worse luck you can have is in live in an ultra-repressive state. There are two situations when the state becomes ultra-repressive. In the early days of a rebellion, the dictator is fighting to get and to keep control of the population. Extreme force is the quickest, most reliable way of doing it. But the nightmare can also occur when the dictator has a dream of building a utopia or communist paradise. When the insurgent Pol Pot conquered Cambodia, he wanted a agricultural, self-sufficient society. However, he calculated that the population was too large and that certain groups were capable of organising resistance. So in different ways, he set about executing those who were educated, disabled, foreign, minority tribes, and so on. Hence, on a daily basis, you would fear arbitrary arrest and death for you and your family, especially if you showed the slightest dissent.

North Korea is another ultra-repressive state. Inevitably, it has a broken economy. It organises vast slave camps and prisons to act as factories whose production generates funds. This dire need encourages the regime to imprison any dissenters along with their families. The ordinary people are so undernourished and uneducated that they have little economic value. Young men are herded into slave gangs that are rented out to foreign countries on the cheap. Threats to their families keep the men obedient. Even then, it is doubtful whether North Korea could sustain itself without Chinese subsidies. The dictator’s actions make it clear what his priorities are. His regime’s security comes before all else. While his people starve, he develops nuclear weapons and whole ranges of weaponry for their own needs and to export. This gives him protection against foreign threats and the opportunity to hold other nations to ransom.

15 years in a slave labour camp – just for listening to pop music

As Kim Jong Un’s Hermit Kingdom is hit by hunger and Covid, he’s petrified of being toppled by the young who’ve glimpsed the outside world from TV. So don’t get caught in a short skirt or with a ‘subversive’ haircut …

Three years ago, North Korea’s ‘Supreme Leader’ Kim Jong Un clapped along to songs at a concert by famous pop stars who were visiting from his country’s despised neighbour, South Korea.
…..But he has since changed his tune. Kim brands such music a ‘vicious cancer’, warning that South Korean pop stars are corroding his country and corrupting his nation’s youth with subversive fashions, hairstyles and slang.
Kim has passed draconian laws to crack down on ‘non-socialist’ pleasures – with the death penalty for bringing such tunes into the country and up to 15 years in a slave labour camp simply for listening to them. …
The reason is simple: this secretive, nuclear armed nation of 26 million people, ruled by a sinister family that relies on fear and death camps is facing its biggest crisis this century as a result of the pandemic.
The country … has seen its economy collapse after closing borders with China (its main trading partner), leading to such food shortages that Kim has warned citizens to prepare for famine.
… The latest crackdown began when the Supreme Leader set up a new organisation to ‘eradicate’ the ‘perverted puppet words’ which the regime assumes people have picked up from watching South Korean TV dramas. Words of endearment such as ‘oppa’ (a romantic term for older brother) and ‘dong-saeng’ (meaning younger sibling) are banned with the traditional greeting ‘comrade’ being insisted on.
There is also a punitive ‘Law on the Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture’ that carries penalties for possession of contraband.
… police ordering parents to change South Korean-style names given to children … squads prowling streets to check people’s clothing and hair styles to ensure they are suitably dowdy.
Men’s hair must not be too long. Women must not wear tight clothes. The young must hand over mobile phones to check for messages that might contain foreign phrases such as ‘See You’ or ‘TY'(Thank You). … Students take care to delete text messages after sending them.
This is high risk: even the two-year sentence in a labour camp for using slang could prove fatal, since many detainees perish amid the brutal conditions in these gulags that hold an estimated 200,000 people.
… Now as belts tighten again in North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s big fear is that pop songs and soap operas might help to destroy this revolting regime that enslaves an entire nation to serve the needs of a single family.

Ian Birrell
The Mail on Sunday, 11 July 2021

Democrat:- Could you and your family, especially the young, discipline yourselves to such a degree for years without end? What fear, you would feel, if a mistake is made publicly.

2a) A Nightmare State
China too has a dream of becoming the most powerful nation in the world. It started with Mao Zedong. Applying Communist ideas that didn’t work and that killed millions of people unnecessarily, he stopped. Then he started the Cultural Revolution instead and killed millions more. Today, China still pursues the same dream, no matter the cost. If you are unlucky, you will be born into an ethnic minority that discomforts the regime. In China, the regime views the muslim Uighurs as a potential centre of resistance and so in various ways intend to exterminate them. In the meanwhile, they set the Uighurs to work in huge slave camps.

China ‘forcing birth control on Uighurs to cut population’

The Interparliamentary Alliance on China cited “mounting evidence” of alleged “mass incarceration, indoctrination, extrajudicial detention, invasive surveillance, forced labour and the destruction of Uighur cultural sites” as the basis for UN action. “This may indicate that the Chinese government is pursuing and enforcing a coordinated policy to reduce the population of minority groups,” it added. … As an independent contractor with the non-profit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, Prof Zenz said population growth rates fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uighur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, declining further in 2019. He added that “documents bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment in ‘training camps’” and “reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilisation in rural Uighur regions, targeting married women of childbearing age”.

Nicola Smith
ASIAN CORRESPONDENT
The Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2023

It has to be said that the Chinese government is popular with a large number of Chinese. If a population is very poor, when the dictator takes over, there is a period while the dictator plays “catch-up with the West” so that prosperity rapidly improves. Hence, the dictatorship is approved. After that phase, the dictator can only stay in power by repression.

3) Life in a Vampire State
The government of a vampire state are noted for their theft of the population’s assets. However, even when they confiscate a business and have stripped it of its assets, they have neither the skill or desire to run the business as a going concern. Born into a Vampire State, you and your family will spend your lives looking for the next meal to eat. Over a period, it is vital to become a member of a group, hopefully containing plenty of young men. Such a group has far more options to staying alive. At one extreme, the group can become a gang ready to do whatever it takes to stay alive. At the other extreme, the group could take over land and cultivate it. However, such groups are more liable to become victims of the regime or marauders. Any display of wealth would be very foolish. Any valuable assets you have, should be securely hidden. Life tends to be short and not pleasant.

4) Life in a Pseudo-Democracy
Life in a pseudo-democracy has the trappings of normal life. There are occasional general elections but the results are know before the vote is taken. There are courts. There are trials but the verdicts are those that serve the dictator best. There is law, but it is of the repressive kind. It bans a whole range of activities that the regime finds threatening. Do as you are told without question, don’t answer back and you should be able to rub by. Some dictators have learnt to give the people some leeway, especially in the marketplace; the more profit the more tax. The more productive the people are, the more there is for the government to plunder.

4a) Childhood
Once you can walk and talk, you will go to a kindergarden. Life should be quite pleasant because the staff are mainly decent people. However, one of their tasks is to encourage you to talk about your family and to report back what you have told them. So unwittingly you may betray your parents and burden them with a black mark or worse.

4b) Junior School
In junior school, the indoctrination begins. Its purpose is to convince you that the regime are like your parents. They only have your welfare at heart and just as you owe your loyalty to your parents so you owe it to the regime. Further, there are various rules to obey, various duties to perform and various attitudes to display. There are rules like “Do as you are told immediately without dissent”, “Report anyone criticising the regime in any way” and so on. Duties will require you to carry out a variety of mundane tasks to teach you unquestioning obedience. The attitudes you will be taught are submission to authority, and praise of whatever the regime does or says and so on.

Chinese pupils indoctrinated with ‘Xi thought’

CHINESE pupils returned to school yesterday with new textbooks peppered with “Xi Jinping thought”, as the Communist Party aims to extend his personality cult to children as young as seven and rear a generation of patriots.
The education ministry has said it will incorporate Xi’s political ideology into the national curriculum, from primary schools to graduate programmes.
Primary teachers must “plant the seeds of loving the party, the country and socialism in young hearts”, a government notice on the curriculum says. …

Our Foreign Staff
The Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2021

4c) Secondary School
In secondary school, the indoctrination continues. Now there is military training and membership of a youth movement along with propaganda with the theme “One nation, one people, one leader”. The youth of every nation are their most important asset. They are the future. The regime tries very hard to get them onside. If successful, the regime gains consent with a submissive, obedient population. A priceless reward. While at school, each student will be under constant appraisal with a view to assigning them somewhere to the regime’s best advantage.

4d) Life for School Leavers
For young adults straight out of school, the most sort-after position is to join the ruling party for a life of relative privilege. In Russia, membership of the Communist Party is highly prized. But only about 10 percent of Russians are allowed into the party. It will be the offspring of party families who will be given preference. If you are a young woman, you will be expected to marry and bring up a family. Dictatorships are male-dominated societies. However, if a woman is exceptionaly talented, she will be able to join a profession. If you are academically oriented, then there are shortages in professions like accountancy, medicine, science especally in technology and computing. But dictatorships are ambivalent towards the educated. They are fertile ground for producing dissenters. In Russia, they build isolated Science Cities, where the scientists can work together better while the regime finds it easier to keep an eye on them. Anyone with a clean record can always find a position in the military, the police or working on the land in communes. These hierarchies have their commissars already in place. The regime is in two minds over the financing of bureaucracies outside the military, police and civil service. Consider the medical profession. Of course, the regime demands the best medical services for itself, but what about the rest of the population? Giving them nothing might trigger a mass riot that the regime lives in fear of. So the regime invests as little as it can get away with. On British TV, they showed public health doctors in Cuba hadn’t been paid for months and were having to be supported by their patients with money and food. There was also a lack of medication. In Moscow, at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, a reporter televised a 9-mile queue of vehicles waiting to take patients to hospital.

5) Anti-Business Attitudes Common
Some will try to set up their own business, but such a path is fraught with difficulties. Officials expect to be paid to grant a variety of essential licences. Suppose you open a small restaurent relying on your culinary skills, then you will be taxed by the local gangsters according to what they think you can afford. They will most probably expect to hold free parties at your place. However, your business is safe from a takeover because without your skills the business doesn’t exist. Suppose you want to expand. Then, it would be wise to seek protection from a bigwig in the ruling party. He won’t be cheap and may require you to make him a sleeping partner. In 2000, when President Putin was converting the Russian democracy into a dictatorship, he summoned 21 of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen to the Kremlin where he told them they would be free to make money and pay taxes, but only if they stayed out of politics. Two billionaires ignored his warning. Later, both were charged with fraud and other things. Both lost their assets. One managed to escape into exile and the other spent nearly 10 years in prison. Other wealthy dissidents had a tendency to leap through the highest windows in an hotel.

I’ve lived in a truly corrupt country – that’s why I know Britain isn’t one

… I know Britain is not corrupt because I lived in the Soviet Union which was corrupt.
… But almost every part of life was oiled and greased by bribery.
If you wanted a decent flat, you paid a bribe to get it. If you wanted your dentist to use anaesthetic, you paid a bribe to get it. Because money was of little use, the bribes took the shape of ‘gifts’, ranging from a video-recorder to a bottle of brandy. At the most basic level, you could not get into a restaurant without bribing the doorman, or get served without bribing the waiter. If the traffic police stopped you, usually for an imaginary offence, it was advisable to hand the officer a ten-rouble note (in those days the normal Soviet salary was about 350 roubles a month) folded into your driving licence. Foreigners paid more. And so on.
I started by resolving I would not do these things. I found very quickly that I could neither live or work without becoming part of it. That is corruption. It corrupts everyone, all the time. …

Peter Hitchens
The Mail on Sunday, 14 November 2021

6) Watch Your Step
All adults need to acquire and practice certain survival skills. Watch every word you say or write. Can they be misinterpreted? Better to say nothing at all, if possible. If you must say something, then never criticise the regime nor use faint praise. Treat every stranger as a spy. If you think someone is going to betray you then pre-empt them by getting in your betrayal first. In any situation when you are not sure what is happening, show a submissive attitude. To digress, I saw a TV programme of a travel writer invited to visit North Korea. His guide and interpreter was an elegant young woman immaculate in her uniform. Any question on geography or pre-regime history, she effused fulsomely and lyrically. Any question that touched on the regime was met with silence and a stony face. Obviously, she couldn’t criticise the regime. But in the debriefing afterwards, she might be criticised for not praising the regime. What would be her defence? She could say that if she spoke, the TV viewers would assume she was an official spokeswoman when she wasn’t. So it was wise to be silent rather give a wrong impression. Silence is a life saver.

7) The Opium of the People
All the media is coordinated to feed the population with whatever it takes to keep them content and docile. Whatever it takes includes fake news, omission of bad news, magnification of good news, threats of foreign forces, vacuous entertainment and propaganda in support of the regime. However, one subject is absolutely forbidden; all ideas about democracies and their benefits. To digress, during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, mainland Chinese tourists were stopping protesters and asking how dare they protest against the government. So protesters were having to explain what democracy is, how it works and why its worth protesting for. Further, China is building its own internet to ensure the Chinese population is insulated from such dangerous ideas.

8) All Dissenters are Neutalised in One Way or Another
Inevitably, some see through the regime’s web of lies. In fact, citizens know that their everyday experiences are not in accord with the paradise the regime describes. A few brave souls decide to become dissenters. Once identified by the regime, they are subjected to an escalation of threats; warnings, beatings, threats against any family, torture, imprisonment, slave camps and execution. If the dissenter has managed to make a name for himself abroad, it will give him some protection. Often, the regime will marginalise him using house arrest with no communication. However, as we have seen with Navalny, the main opposition leader to the Russian government, the regime have resorted to using a form of nerve gas in an attempt to assassinate him. It needs to be made clear that there is a major difference between nerve gas used on the battlefield and the nerve gas used for assassination. On the battlefield, nerve gas is intended to kill the enemy personnel as quickly and as completely as possible. This minimises any possible resistance to the advance of their own troops. However, in an assassination attempt, delayed response time is required to allow the assassin to escape undetected. There is a Russian facility dedicated to the production of delayed response poisons such as Novichok. What is the point of such a factory if its poisons are not to be used? This facility must be kept under the tight control of the Kremlin. If any Novichok went missing, it might be used against the Russian leaders! So these poisons will be handed out to trusted, trained minions if and only if permission from the highest level is given. So Putin is personally responsible for all of these assassination attempts, no matter what the Kremlin says. This explanation is the only one that makes sense.

Horrific sexual abuse filmed in Russian jails

RUSSIAN prisoners were raped and tortured by guards in a “conveyor belt of torture”,according to an unprecedented leak of footage that yesterday triggered a rare official investigation into state-sponsored wrong doing.
One video appears to show a naked man being abused with a stick at a prison hospital treating tuberculosis patients in the central city of Saratov. The man who is tied to his bed, is screaming in pain.
These clips have been released by Russian anti-torture NGO Gulagu.net and are part of what it described as a “secret video archive” of more than 1,000 files documenting systemic torture and sexual abuse at prisons across Russia.
They were obtained via a whistleblower and former prison detainee …
“It is the first time that human rights defenders have obtained such a colossal amount of information proving the systemic nature of torture in Russia”, said Vladimir Osechkin, Gulagu.net’s head, yesterday.
The footage “proves that torture has become a mundane tool for the FSB and the Federal Penitentiary Service and [is] widespread and endemic”, he added.

Nataliya Vasilyeva
RUSSIA CORRESPONDENT
The Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2021

Belarus gripped by fear as horrors of life under the Nazis reawakened

Lilia Suboch startles every time her doorbell rings. Her mother, sister and brother have all been jailed for minor infractions, and her home on the outskirts of Minsk was raided two days earlier, leaving her terrified she will be next.
… Mrs Suboch’s relatives are all being kept at the same infamous detention centre: her sister is serving 25 days, her mother five and brother six days.
… In the last few days, a 13-year-old schoolgirl was detained for spraying a protest slogan on the pavement and a mother of five was jailed and charged with extremism for holding tea parties with her neighbours. Since last August investigators have brought charges against at least 2,300 people for their involvement in the protests.
… Innocuous gestures such as displaying the white-and-red protest colours have become a jailable offence. Holding a blank sheet of paper and waving flowers in the street is what earned Mrs Suboch’s 30-year-old sister Yulia four previous stints in jail.
“The discontent is snowballing and the goal of the government is to crush all forms of protest,” Mrs Suboch says. “We live in a time when you can get jailed for your thoughts.”
… Roman Bondarenko, an activist in the neighbourhood known as the Plaza of Change, was picked up by riot police and beaten to death in custody.
… Lena, a 51-year-old accountant, … who chooses to withhold her surname, has served three brief sentences for protesting. Her neck is dotted with white spots – injuries from stun grenades during the election night crackdown.
Now the government is poised to harshen the repression. one draft law would allow police to open fire at unarmed people “at their own discretion”.
… Mr Halatriann, 35, who owned a bar in … before joining the opposition campaign last summer, was arrested in August, beaten up and charged with organising riots. He was released six months later.
… Mr Halatrian says:”I was surprised by seeing so much fear in other people and myself, too. It wasn’t that scary in jail – the worst has already happened to you. Now, your situation can get so much worse because of the steamroller of repression.”

Nataliya Vasilyeva in Minsk
Dispatch
The Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2021

9) And then there is Mind Control

STASI’S MOST DESPICABLE TORTURE

It was the East German secret police’s most terrifying weapon: mind games that drove its own citizens mad …

… Instead of pounding their suspects into submission, they would send them mad. And so began the policy of Zersetzung.
… There were scores of ways to play mind games with suspects, in a bid to create panic, confusion and fear. Some were obvious. The phone would ring but when picked up there was no one there. Then it would ring again and again.
But Stasi agents were also known to break into suspects’ homes when they were out and change the time on the alarm clock in the bedroom so it went off unexpectedly – and frightenly – in the middle of the night.
Pictures on walls were moved, an electric razor in the bathroom left running, socks moved to a different drawer, furniture shifted to a different position, even the coffee mysteriously disappearing from the kitchen and the variety of tea in a cupboard replaced by a different one.
It was little things like this that freaked people out, leaving them, in the words of the Stasi handbook, ‘paralysed, disorganised and isolated’.
A married target would be sent falsified photographs of himelf in a compromising situation or postcards from another woman demanding child support payments; … a vibrator – which was classified as a decadent Western frivolity – would be planted in his home to incriminate him. All these were tactics to undermine family relations and help destroy him.
… Their homes were bugged, telephones tapped, cars mysteriously sabotaged, bicycle tyres slashed.
… The aim was to ‘switch off’ a person’s supposed dissident activities. The secret police didn’t care whether this happened through disillusionment, fear, burn-out or mental illness.
… As well as against individuals, Zersetzung tactics were also used to undermine organised groups of dissidents, the sort that printed anti-government leaflets or made contact with the West.
Dissent and distrust would be stirred up among members with rumours of collaboration with the authorities, of informants in their midst, until they were so busy suspecting each other that they had no time to be active opponents of the state anymore. …

Based on extracts from
“The Grey Men: Pursuing The Stasi Into The Present”
by Ralph Hope
published by Oneworld Publications

10) A Long, Hard Winter
How are you going to be treated when you’re old? If you were a powerful member of the regime, you now feel vulnerable because your former colleagues covet your wealth. If you have been wise, much of your wealth will be banked abroad in one of those lovely democracies that will protect your money. So now is the time to emigrate and live a comfortable and safe retirement. Even if the you can’t go abroad, your family will still have a nest egg. Of course, the regime will want to look after its old retainers well as an encouragement to its present supporters. However, the rest of the old people are a burden; they cost a lot for no return. Again, the regime dare not abandon them entirely as that might trigger mass riots and their claim to be a “democracy”. So the regime spends as little as it can get away with. Prepare for a spartan old age.

11) Life in a New Dictatorship or in a Failing One
What are the differences between living in a mature dictatorship and an immature one? If the dictatorship has just been set up by violence, then the regime is only concerned in consolidating its control. As we’ve seen with Pol Pot in Cambodia, you can do very little to prevent being arbitrarily murdered. You need a lot of luck or an influential patron to survive.

If the dictatorship is collapsing economically, as many do, the regime concentrates on looking after itself.

• As with Nicolas Maduro in Venuzuela, he concentrates on the export of narcotics while the population starves. Over 10 percent of the population had to flee into neighbouring countries to save themselves.
• In North Korea, the regime uses vast slave camps for cheap manufacture. Once a dissenter is identified, it is not just the dissenter who sent to a slave camp, but also their extended family. North Korea leases out gangs of slave labourers to other countries, on the cheap.
• The first time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they became the world’s largest supplier of illegal narcotics. The set of skills to execute an effective guerilla war are different to the set of skills required to run a successful government. In their second coming, the Taliban are more interested in enforcing sharia law than they are in saving the Afghan population from starvation.

11) Don’t Think It Can’t Happen Here

How fragile is our democracy? When government is incompetent or corrupt, the people try to improve their lives peacefully by protest and through elections. As time passes fruitlessly, the protests become more violent and the people more desperate. Civil disobedience becomes ever more tempting. Democracies are rule-based. With finite manpower, the authorities can only cope with a limited amount of disorder before there is anarchy. Democracy is dead. Any group that is large enough and well-organised enough, can seize power with sweet promises.

So how far along the road to anarchy is England? One could list many aspects of public life that annoy the public intensely like the anti-democrats in Parliament, incompetence of the police, the interference of the judiciary, the corruption of Whitehall, weaponised protests and strikes and so on. But it is how the general public react to these provocations that counts. At the moment, the public appears calm and apathetic so there is still time. How much better if we were calm and actively pro-democratic. However, we are seeing a strong reaction to net-zero projects, rewilding and illegal immigration that are being foisted onto the public without their consent. In particular, the ULEZ project has triggered protest and destruction of cameras.

There are some positive signs that people are trying to improve our democracy. Local authorities are more informative than they were and some even poll their locals for their opinions and suggestions. However, they don’t ask for the locals’ consent. There are examples of locals banding together to throw out the national party members and to take control of their council at local elections.

Whether it’s enough, soon enough, only time will tell.

12) In Conclusion

This ‘Be Afraid’ is just a glimpse of what our lives would be like if we citizens don’t do our duty to protect our democracy. Don’t think it can’t happen here. There are plenty of anti-democrats and anti-democratic actions in Britain. We don’t recognise an anti-democratic action when we see one. We are so accustomed to anti-democrats and their anti-democratic actions that they don’t register with us any more. In fact, we take it all for granted. Have you noticed how many people get upset over right-wing anti-democratic words and actions, yet accept left-wing ones? We are so used to seeing them, they don’t register anymore. Yet by accepting them, we are training ourselves to accept even more outrageous anti-democratic actions. Even when these actions occur, we treat them as single events instead of putting them together to get the full picture. Hopefully, you have felt empathy for the innocent and a frisson of fear for yourself, and that will motivate you into doing something positive like openly criticising anti-democratic opinions and anti-democratic behaviour. Promise yourself that you will never vote for an anti-democrat, no matter what they stand for. Form a local pro-democracy group to scrutinise your local government and local MP and then broadcast your results impartially. It could be a lot of fun and sociable as well!

Please write any queries or any constructive criticism in the boxes below. Thank you.