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The Shape of a Fair Society.

Nearly every society today suffers from the same problem – positions of power. As soon as you make a position of power, you invite a power-hungry tyrant to fill it. The bigger the position, the more psychopathic the tyrant. Tyrants rely on the members of the society willingly, if not knowingly, giving their support. They rely on the members abdicating individual responsibility to the tyrant and the creation of a dependency culture.

For a society to function for the benefit of its members, there must be no means by which positions of power can be established. Power must be retained at an individual level. It is the pooling of the source of power (usually the money) that creates the positions of power. The other side of the coin is that individuals must be prepared to take their own responsibility. If you ask someone to take your responsibility, you must expect them to use it to their advantage.

There are two simple ways to prevent positions of power being established in a fair society:

  1. A fair election system. Most societies need people to carry out different functions on their behalf where it is not practical for this to be done at an individual level. The electoral system in a fair society has one important difference to a 'normal' election. It is a continuous process. There is first an election – the first and the last. The candidate with the most votes takes office, but all candidates (and anyone else who is interested later) keep their votes. Here's the difference: votes can be taken away and put with another candidate at any time and only the one with the most votes can occupy the office. This means that, instead of handing over responsibility for five years to someone who then goes off and does their own thing until they need to come back and get you to vote for them again, they have to keep looking over their shoulder to make sure they are doing what is required of them.

  2. Stop the pooling of resources. We send our taxes to central government. This creates a massive power position of the most dangerous kind. The new society decides, by a process similar to the voting process, on a percentage of income to be allocated to the running of the society. Each individual then decides how much of his or her allocation will be spent on which service. Young married couples might want to give more support to a maternity service, which will be of no interest to retired people. They and their families may want to give more support to care homes. The same will apply to all services required by the society.*

The effect of these two small, but fundamental changes will be to keep 'government' small – the need for intermediaries (members of parliament, congressmen etc.) is eliminated. Individual departments will become leaner and more efficient as they compete to provide the best service with the money voted to them.

It will also have the effect of keeping societies on a human scale – countries themselves are a way of concentrating resources and making positions of power. A world of small units trading and co-operating in their mutual interest will work just as well, or even better than the present system of ever bigger units working for their own benefit at the expense of their members.

This is not to suggest turning the existing system upside down – it's turning it the right way up and keeping the power where it belongs, in the hands of the people.

It is never the people who want war. It's Big Government, Big Business and Big Bankers – those tyrants (that we have willingly put in place) who profit from it and will continually engineer situations to provoke and continue it. It is obscene that half the American defence budget would feed the world. We live in a world of abundance, but that abundance has been cornered by a few, who now convince us that this is a world of scarcity and that we need to endure austerity measures.

I have long said that change, when it happens, will come at such a speed that it will catch us all by surprise. This is it. The UK general election provides the means for the people of the small islands of Orkney and Shetland to put this into practice. I am standing in the election. For the first time ever, the electorate will have the opportunity to either continue the colonial system for another five years, or to say “No thanks, we'll take back our power and make our own decisions”. Electing me will not mean my pledging allegiance to a foreign occupying power and sitting in their parliament. Neither does it mean that I have any 'leadership' role in the new society, although I have plenty of ideas about how it could be run. Electing me means that the people of Orkney and Shetland wake up on 9 June 2017 having laid claim to their rightful inheritance – absolute (allodial) ownership of their land and their seas and seabed out to 200 miles, or to the median line between us and another state. There is no need for negotiation – all the legal work is done. We are no longer in the position of having to plead for powers to be given to us. We have the sovereign right to do whatever we wish.

The government has been asked what does it base its authority on in the islands. The courts have decided that it is based on a magazine article. If we wish to accept that and vote in an MP to continue colonial rule on that basis we are free to do so, or we can politely decline. Any future negotiations will start with: “We own the land, the seas and the seabed – what would you like to talk about?”.

People in Orkney and Shetland say “How will we manage without all the grants and subsidies?”. These are the bribes that hold our dependency. Official figures show that once Shetland has paid all its direct and indirect taxes and got back all the bribes – sorry, grants and subsidies – there is £82 million every year left in the UK treasury. That is our subsidy to the UK, which they spend on illegal wars, bailing out (privately owned) banks, MP's expenses and duck houses, none of which has any relevance here. These are no ordinary elections. What the people of Orkney and Shetland decide to do will ripple out to the world. Societies in countries, whether they are capitalist, communist, or any other 'ist' will follow suit and the existing system will die on the vine. World peace will break out and we will enter that world of abundance. The PTW (Powers That Were) won't like it, but as long as we ignore their invitations to be angry with each other, they have no means of maintaining their positions.

Wasting our energy on allocating blame, working out the intricacies of how the system is maintained and howling about injustice only serve to validate what has been put in place and give it energy in its final death throes. All we need to know is that any action to remove our innate sovereignty was done by fraud and is therefore null and void. We just have to turn our backs.

* I am indebted to Roger Rothenberger for the ideas in Beyond Plutocracy

The Sovereign Nation of Shetland has no party political or religious affiliations.