UK Labour Party Wants To License Journalists, Including Bloggers

I just hope this doesn't give the Left here in the US any ideas, but I'm not holding my breath:

UK Labour Party wants journalism licenses, will prohibit non-licensed journalists.

Oh, yeah, that will go over well. But considering the “shellacking” Labour took during the last election, I'm not all that surprised.

The UK Labour party's conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future.

Given that "journalism" presently encompasses "publishing accounts of things you've seen using the Internet" and "taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them" and "blogging" and "commenting on news stories," this proposal is even more insane than the tradition "journalist licenses" practiced in totalitarian nations.

So the scheme would even ban unlicensed blogging or Internet posts. Of course I can understand why the socialists in the UK would want to do so – control the dialogue and you control the thought of the “proles” and the results of elections. Truth and fact would become a thing of the past because the socialist/statist/authoritarian Left believe they are the only arbiters of the truth.

You know statists like Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid would love nothing better than to control all of the media rather than just the portions of the MSM already in their pockets. If they could silence their critics then everything would be just perfect for them because they'd be able to sell any lie as the truth (Freedom = Slavery, Collective Good/ Individual Bad, and so on).

But there is one big difference between the UK and the US – we here in the US still have our guns and the Left knows it. Our brethren in the UK have been all but stripped of their means to fight back if it ever came to that unless they were willing to emulate the faux Guy Falkes in V for Vendetta.

(H/T Instapundit)