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... and why not? After all, as we now live in a de facto one ideology state (and that ideology is populist utilitarianism), what difference do the antics of what goes on in Parliament really make? The sooner we have the government doing away with this fiction of political process and just start ruling mostly by administrative edict, the better really. Far too many people are just hiding behind comfortable fictions.

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I find the notion that it is news that Tory leader David Cameron is a Blairite so unremarkable that I am puzzled the Telegraph even runs with the story.

The closest thing to an actual conservative party is the UKIP because it sure as hell is not the Conservative Party.

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I have not seen anything written here on what is being called the Abolition of Parliament Bill - the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill that was going through Parliament last week (whilst 'Dave' Cameron was off on paternity leave).

I have heard it finally finishes off the delegated legislation process (the process by which ministers and civil servants pass regulations with power given them under enabling Acts of Parliament) - a process that A.V. Dicey observed before the First World War and Chief Justice Hewitt was the last major establishment figure to oppose ("The New Despotism" 1929). It has taken a very long time to finish the process, but it seems Mr Blair will complete it.

Of course in a modern big government Welfare State having every regulation examined by Parliament is not possible (one extra reason to oppose a modern big government Welfare State).

Still a Statute that allows ministers to alter any regulation (apart from in the field of tax) without coming back to Parliament, and set up to two years in prison as a punishment for failing to obey their arbitrary regulations - well it does seem to a bit much even for Britain.

Have I just dreamed it all then?

Also nothing on our dear friends the Local Government Standards Board - people have noticed them now they have suspended Red Ken from his position as Mayor of London for a month (for nasty things he said to a Jewish journalist).

However, the Board has been doing this sort of thing (and far worse) for years. For example, if a councillor writes to try and expose the "wind farm" con (it is a con because it does not greatly reduce CO2 production - as the wind turbines do not produce much power and have to be "backed up" by coal and gas fired stations which run all the time as a safeguard) they might not (if the Board feels like it) be allowed to speak (or vote) against "wind farms" in council debates.

Ditto saying that Council 'Chief Executives' are paid too much or are useless ('Chief Executives' are the highly paid useless trash who have replaced what used to be called Town Clerks) - if a councillor says that he is in big trouble.

There is no automatic right for an elected councillor to oppose government policy (or 'best practice') in modern Britain and has not been since Mr Blair set up the Board. If the Board will let you speak and vote fine - but they may choose not to.

I am not a fanatical supporter of democracy, but I thought that many people were supposed to be. I have heard very little about what is going on in Britain - most people seem either to not know or not care

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The Guardian's Jenni Russell points out that the attitude of British officialdom is changing subtly.

I find this change truly frightening because I spent the first few years of my life in apartheid South Africa. My parents were political activists, and we lived in an atmosphere of fear. My mother's relations distanced themselves from her, fearing that they too would be targeted if they associated with us. My earliest memories are of police raiding the house at night, emptying out dolls' cots and sweeping books off shelves. People would simply disappear. A black friend left our house to travel to his family in Zululand, and vanished.

After a month of inquiries, someone found a witness who had seen him being picked up by the police. He was being held without charge under the 90-days legislation - the same policy that the government is trying to introduce here. The relief when we came to England was incalculable. This country, these policemen and this government were benign, reasonable and trustworthy. As my father never ceased to point out, a Britain that had fought fascism had a deep-rooted commitment to protecting the individual from the state.

That is no longer true. ID cards are one danger, but there are other measures which are already a reality. [...]

I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom.

However, I think she is wrong about the cause:

This change in the relationship between people and officials can only be explained as a result of the new illiberal atmosphere in which we are living.

That's back to front. An illiberal attitude is insufficient for oppression or we would be living under the dictatorship of the Free Church of Scotland. It is actually about power. Unchecked power will be abused. Not may, will.

You cannot change the culture of the law - Blair minor - without affecting the culture of the land. British police were once famous for courtesy. But then as little as twenty years ago they had few powers not available to the ordinary citizen. They relied on voluntary cooperation for much of their authority, and the reasonable exercise of that authority yielded general cooperation.

Before the merger of the agencies, the Inland Revenue was proverbially gentlemanly and reasonable compared to HM Customs and Excise, though the taxation functions were very similar. The difference in culture wasn't accidental. Customs had vastly greater powers and found it easier to rely on fear to do the job.

ASBO-land is a different place from England. And this is why: as they gain more capacity to order us about, those in office will order us about more. What else?

The PM implies he wishes us to 'respect' one another and social norms. He claims he has given powers to officials to make it so. But respec' on the streets will mean something else. It will mean respec' (in the sense of fawning obedience) towards the same officials who have the powers to make it so. And as we have ever fewer rights - perhaps not even existence - without their say-so, truculence, swagger and oppression by officials will become the norm.

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This pretty much explains the political situation in a nutshell. Serial commenter Pommygranate is writing about Britain but the same could probably be said about almost any western country to varying degrees: the state simply bribes people to vote for a bigger state by making them dependents.

His solution is an interesting notion.

But turkeys will still not vote for Xmas. Some on the right of the blogosphere are calling for voting restrictions for those who depend on the state for a living. Draconian indeed, but it may be the only way round this particular Catch 22.

Things would have to get very bad for that to be politically possible but is is a good idea. I quite like the idea "you can either work for the state and live of other people's money or you can vote, but not both". Not a chance that would happen any time soon but it is a damn fine idea nevertheless. In truth I suspect many people would be happy to make that choice as voting is hardly some blessed sacrament. If so many people do not really care about liberty, are they really so attached to voting? I wonder.

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Gervase Markham, who blogs at Hacking for Christ, works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit "dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet". He writes about his recent encounter with a UK Trading Standards officer:

They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Many people would find the official's reaction to that surprising; but they do not call them disruptive technologies for nothing. The woman replied:

"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

As Carlo at Techdirt writes:

It's unclear exactly what role the Mozilla Foundation plays in enforcing the UK's anti-piracy laws, or exactly why they shouldn't be allowed to license their software however they want, just to make things easier for some civil servants. If nothing else, it merely indicates how deeply ingrained people's preconceived notions about software "piracy" are. And it's disappointing that a government officer whose job it is to enforce copyrights can't seem to get their head around the idea that there is another way to license software than how most entrenched developers and companies handle it.

Disappointing? Yes. Surprising? Not really.

Crossposted from the Engagement Alliance

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I am feeling less of a lone loony than I did. After a decade of my saying the key thing wrong with the demon eyes campaign was that the slogan ought to have been: 'New Labour: Old Danger' because the electorate should not have the purported newness reinforced, more and more people in the chattering classes seem to be accepting that there is a danger. Even such fringe lefty agitators as Clifford Chance LLP have offered severe warnings about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Too late?

The War on Liberty may never end, but it became a general action only in the 90s - just about the time, the Wall being down, and the net routing round borders and censorship, we free-lifers had begun to feel we were winning. Now I find I am doing my bit with NO2ID and we are gearing up for a ten-year campaign. Grand constitutionalist coalitions are being proposed left, right, and centre (which I'm sure are meritorious). The differences between Peter Hitchens and Mark Thomas begin to be indistinguishable when the establishment is of the extreme centre...

What worries me is that this ferment is still superficial, a speck of mould on Mr Blair's Horlicks. It concerns the tiny minority of the population that reads the serious press, say 10% - and of those only the avid followers of politics, maybe a quarter of that. The readers and writers of blogs are fewer still, and more introrse.

The mass of the population of Britain is nescient, complacent, and has no interest in the abstractions of liberty, or the threats from power assumed only to be threats to others, to bad people. Many people are happy to claim the status of an 'ordinary' person, with "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" from officialdom, while being paradoxically susceptible to fears of everything else. Passively concerned with material welfare, security against virtual risks, and gossip, they graze and are milked as the livestock of the state.

This is Foucault's concept of governmentality in action. Not, pace his fans on the left, a neo-liberal order, but a post-liberal order in which the foundational institutions of liberalism - liberty and individuality, rule of law, the separation of private and public life, a civil society and a political sphere distinct from one another - have ceased to have a meaning for even the bulk of the middle-classes.

Where is the cattle-prod that will change the public mood?

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If you are in Oxford on Saturday and want to join a protest against animal rights extremists, check this out. The Research Defence Society blog has more, as does the Social Affairs Unit and Laurie's own blog.

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A year ago, a headline like this was pure comedy. And this Evening Standard headline that I snapped last night even now has a slightly comic, Carry On Farming feel to it.

Alas, bird flu seems to be getting rather serious.

Governments thrive on infectious diseases, because only governments, or institutions that are very hard to distinguish from governments, can contain them. Which is why I always suspect that such "pandemics" (pandemic seems now to be the regular word for an "epidemic") tend to be somewhat exaggerated. But if I were a politician, I would never dare to say such a thing.

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The 2012 London Olympic Games could be hit by electricity blackouts as energy supplies fall off, according to a poll of scientists and other eminent folk in this story by the BBC. Well, pole vaulting and javelin throwing have not been done in the dark before, but I guess it might have a certain novelty.

Seriously though, how should one take these jeremiads about impending shortages to electricity generation? This excerpt from the BBC story makes it clear that many analysts believe that solutions must embrace technologies including nuclear power:

All 140 respondents to the survey said that the best way to ensure energy security for the future lay in a diversified mix of electricity generation, including renewables, coal, gas and nuclear

This story of a few days ago suggests the opposition Tories might, in their quixotic desire to appear Green, ditch the nuclear option. This seems rather ironic given that some figures in the environmentalist movement have started to embrace nuclear energy as a way to cut carbon emissions (while not being blind to the problems of nuclear waste disposal and the large capital outlays involved in building nuclear powers stations).

I am an agnostic on nuke energy. If it can, in a free market, hold its own compared with other energy sources, fine. But given the vital importance of electricity to our modern, information-age economy, it is madness to tempt disaster by shutting down options now.

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I have been 'on the road' again since a few days after the New Year. Travel may seem exciting to some, but it does wear you down when you do it week after week. This is especially true when planning is impossible and you cannot say with any certainty which of several jobs will be next in line. You just adapt and make your arrangements on the fly.

That said, constant travel does lead to unexpected adventures and misadventures. I would count losing my glasses going through security in Toronto among the less exciting and more expensive of these. Although there are some weeks more to go on this jaunt, the event which most stands out happened before I even got out of the UK at the start of January.

Due to contract signings running late a couple layers up the food chain from myself, travel arrangements for my usual January gig backstage at the big Healthcare investment conference in San Francisco were last minute. Translation: they were so late the flights were almost unaffordable so I was booked on a simply ridiculous connection. I left Belfast on an evening flight which dropped me in Heathrow just as the airport closed up operations for the night. My New York flight was first thing in the morning... so I got to sit up all night in the main terminal.

Well, my slogan is "Have Laptop, Will Travel", so after some help from friendly airport staff to move some seats closer to an electric outlet, I settled in for a long, long night of work. Time crawled by. Over the top of my screen I idly noticed a gaggle of armed police wander by and hassle a couple black teens whom I think were also waiting for a connecting flight.

One of the cops walked towards me. I naturally assumed he was going to act as a friendly face to London's major airport; perhaps commiserate on my bad luck in being stuck there over night; or possibly warn me to beware of this, that or the other.

I was wrong. He planted himself in front of me in his best "Clockwork Orange" intimidation posture and proceeded to tell me I was guilty of theft. I looked at him blankly. Theft of services. I was plugged into the airport's electricity. He quoted a section number I was purportedly violating. As I have lived in Belfast through troubled years, I know how to deal with this sort. You smile and you verbally give them squat to grab hold of. They want to provoke a response that will let them play cop.

This fellow was very obviously tired, bored and looking for someone to take it out on. I, being one of the few persons in the terminal was 'it'. He went on. Not only was I 'stealing services'. I was in violation of... of.... HEALTH AND SAFETY REGULATIONS! I did not have appropriate authorization from the Airport declaring my laptop was safe for use with their AC sockets, and if I were to get electrocuted they might be liable!

I quietly studied the hole in his head.

He ranted on that I was still stealing power as he talked. Actually I was concentrating on keeping up a fake smile and non-threatening eye contact so as to avoid serious trouble. I was also dumbfounded, but I snapped out of it and casually reached over and unplugged. Slowly. I was not quite sure of the stability of this character and he was, after all, an armed member of a society in which only his sort are armed.

With the offending laptop unplugged and as he had utterly failed to provoke any sort of lese majeste remark from me, there was little more he could do. He sternly told me he would let me off with a warning and then retreated and joined his cohorts. They had remained some distance away throughout. Backup I suppose. I might well have been armed with sharp verbs and poisonous nouns for all they knew.

The previously hassled white robed African teen was not far away and as our trooper stormed off we caught each others eyes. I shook my head. He wryly smiled back. Wordless understanding passed between us.

Welcome to 21st Century London.

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Reuters reports that the hunting with hounds is more popular than ever despite the move by parliament last year to outlaw the hunting of foxes with hounds. (Incidentally, foxes are increasingly a problem in the cities as they scavenge for food. I used to live in Clapham and the place was full of them).

It makes me wonder about whether the vote by MPs this week to ban smoking in public places, including private members' clubs, will be easily enforced. Let's hope it meets the same fate as the anti-foxhunting measure. I say this as someone who does not smoke or hunt on horseback (despite being a Suffolk farmer's son, hunting with hounds never appealed, although I have shot the odd bunny rabbit from time to time).

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Harry Hutton speaks for many, I am sure, when he says this:

It's been a pretty good week for all you non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tossers. All going your way at the moment, isn't it? Must be feeling pretty pleased with yourselves.

For now you triumph. But you'll get your comeuppance, you swine. That slippery villain is going to ruin us all. You think he doesn't have plans for you too? You think that just because you don't smoke or glorify terrorists you're off the hook? Just wait. You're gonna learn the hard way.

Personally I have never really bought in to this Blair-is-evil meme. Perhaps if I met him face to face I would feel differently, but to me he merely seems desperately eager to do good, but somewhat dim about how to actually contrive goodness, like a trendy vicar. Good at winning elections though, and making speeches, and doing Hugh Grant impersonations. The man knows his rhetoric, and if, at any time during the twenty first century, Blair were to step down from being the Prime Minister, I think his rhetoric will be sorely missed by the next government, assuming it's Labour. Slippery, yes. But a villain? Not really. I don't think so, anyway.

But whatever his motives may be, and however little he may have any deliberate plans to screw the non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tendency, Blair, or the processes he has now set in motion, will still do this. But, he meant and he means no harm.

But feel free to disagree.

While you are still allowed to.

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Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)

Quote:

But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.

Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by "Socialism". That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill's team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek's The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.

And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.

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Heh. Who was that speaker again?

From an email circular promoting think-tank events around Europe:

London

21/02/06 Policy Exchange "Why the Agenda of the Future cannot be delivered by a person stuck in the Past" - William Hague MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary

RSVP: info@policyexchange.org.uk

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Danny Finklestein has had a nightmare. About Britain becoming a despotic state. This one-time advisor to John Major (oh dear, we all make errors), even says this:

"But I have to admit that the legislation being debated in the Commons this week — the new ID cards, the smoking ban, the measure on the glorification of terror — has tempted me to take up smoking and start attending lectures about Hayek organised by earnest men with pamphlets in carrier bags."

Nice patronising tone there Danny - I tend not to bother with carrier bags these days. Welcome to the concept of liberty and limited government.

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I am not recommending this because the Government wants to punish you, although it does, but because it is the only place you are likely to be allowed to smoke in peace for the forseeable future. The Home Office is not about to ban smoking in prisons.

But what about the health of non-smoking prisoners in the confined space? What about passive smoking by prison officers, whose workplace it is? N'importe. The tobacco allowance in prison is a means of control used by the authorities. Removing it would remove something of their capacity for arbitrary reward and punishment of individual prisoners. Plus withdrawing it would lead to riots, both acutely in fury at withdrawal, and chronically on losing the calming effects of nicotine.

So the lesson for prisoners in what Shami Chakrabarti calls HMP UK who do wish to smoke is plain. Threaten violence. You will either get your way as other aggressive sub-groups do, or be sent to the segregation block that is the officially acknowledged prison system - and there you may smoke all you like, provided you behave yourself.

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If ever developments heralded the demise of the television licence fee, it is the ubiquitous spread of the digital media. Now that televisions have spread to the mobile phone, the BBC is not far behind. Whether it be on your PC or your phone, you must pay the pirates for the privilege of not watching them:

As the mobile industry debates the future of television on phones and other portable devices at its convention in Barcelona, there's a warning closer to home that the new technology will still be subject to licensing regulations laid down in the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act.

TV Licensing, the body charged with collecting the £126.50 fee (rising to £131.50 on April 1), said that it doesn't matter whether you are watching television on a PC, mobile phone or old fashioned cathode ray tube, you must be covered by a TV licence or face a fine of up to £1000.

"There is no difference between a mobile phone or a television or any other piece of electronic equipment used to watch live or as-live programming. You will need to be covered by a TV licence," a spokesman for the body confirmed.

It can not be long now before even politicians see the abolition or curtailment of the BBC licence fee as a no-brainer.

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MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.

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Our home grown authoritarians plan to inflict yet more absurd measures which have nothing to do with defending ourselves against terrorism. ID cards would not have stopped a single terrorist attack in the UK: they are a control measure designed to make taxing and regulating people's economic activities easier, nothing more. Yet because there is a genuine threat from Islamic terrorists, the government keeps trying to conflate ID cards with 'doing something about terrorism'. As it is so obviously untrue, this issue makes a rather good quick and easy litmus test to detect people who are either complete idiots or barefaced liars (or both).

Moreover the intend to make 'glorifying terrorism' illegal is not just bound to backfire, it is a terrible idea on every level. You would think people in the dismal halls of Westminster would have learned to leave well enough alone given the comical absurdity of past attempts to ban terrorists saying things in the UK, which lead to such farcical situations as having Sinn Fein/IRA's Gerry Adams' voice being dubbed by other people's voices to get around attempts to stop him airing his views. We need people to actually say what they think and the more vile they are, the more important it is to hear what motivates them.

Moreover does anyone seriously think people are attracted to actively support terrorism because of what they read in a mainstream newspaper rather than opinions closer to their every day life? It is a bit more complex than that and again you would think the experience of Ulster would have shown that when terrorists gain the support of a section of a society, all stoping their spokesmen from talking in the media does is prevent everyone else from understanding what they really think.

The BBC and mainstream media generally has followed the government line that there is a large pool of moderate Muslim opinion which does not support or sympathise with radical and intolerant Islamic views. I too have assumed this to be the case, at least in some measure, and yet as time goes by the theory is starting to look rather threadbare as if there really is a majority of moderates out there, they are more than just silent, they are almost invisible. The organisers of the demonstration yesterday in Trafalgar Square carefully choreographed the event to show the world a moderate face of muslim opinion standing hand in hand with a few dhimmis like Ken Livingston and select useful idiots such as Pax Christi and former KGB front man Bruce Kent. Yet it took less than 24 hours for one of the people behind the demo to reveal his true colours.

But any attempt to shut these people up with the law will not stop them saying whatever they want amongst their own community, unless the government plans to have multi-lingual spies reporting on what gets said in every single mosque and Arabic/Turkish/Kurdish/Pakistani social club in Britain. The only people who will no longer know what these guys really think will be the rest of us. And given that anyone who trusts the what the state says to decide who is and is not 'the bad guys' is a credulous fool, that is not a good idea to say the least. Yet again we see why freedom of expression is not just important, it is essential if we are to know our enemies as well as our friends.

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The demonstration in Trafalgar square, supported by dhimmi-in-chief for London Ken Livingston, was clearly orchestrated to show a homogenised face of 'moderate Islam' for the world to see. An interesting feature of the demo was that no 'home made placards' were tolerated by the organisers. A small group of Kurds turned up with their own signs and were fairly quickly handed the printed blue-white official signs. I was not quick enough to get a picture of the Kurdish ones before they vanished as I did not expect them to be taken down, but the ones in English were fairly anodyne.

Not even in Islamic green!

I would guess maybe 7,000 people showed up, perhaps 10,000 tops, at least by the time I lost interest around 3:00 and wandered off to a nearby computer faire. Many of the usual suspects were there, such as the inevitable socialist workers and CND set...

Quite what wicked old Blair and BushMcHitler have to do with protesting against cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark was not clear



Hands off secular fascist police states and theocratic police states!



You can be sure those naughty cartoons (or that tee-shirt) would not have been allowed in Cuba!

The large official signs were clearly expensive high quality creations and contained all manner of utterly irrelevant slogans designed to appeal to the 'hard of thinking'.

So if some Muslim desires sharia law for themselves, presumably this is what he also wishes for me... Oh I feel much better now!



Tolerance? Sure, it is yours by right. Respect? You must be joking, that you have to earn



Jyllands-Posten did not 'incite' to violence, they just defended free expression, unlike some others we know of. Respect however has nothing to do with it

And just to remind people what this is really about...

The Danish embassy in London under police guard

And one final picture which tickled my sense of irony... a pleasant looking young woman watching the demonstration in her stylish Christian Dior scarf.

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Governments are not know for being truthful, but it would seem sensible to tell lies that have a reasonable probability of being believed - and I do not agree that the "biggest lies are the most likely to be believed" (at least if by 'biggest' we mean thing that are most obviously false).

However, the British government seems to have adopted a policy of telling obvious lies. In the last few days alone we had (for example) the claim that "violent crime has fallen by 23%". This was duly reported by the Independent newspaper (a newspaper that hates the current government, but hates truth even more - and so was glad to support the claim). This was brought out in support of the government policy of allowing "24 hour drinking", I am not much interested in the policy (other than like so much 'deregulation' it has turned out to mean a lot more form filling and other such), but the claim of vast drop in violent crime was obvious nonsense.

If the government had said "contrary to people's believe that violent crime is rising, it is actually saying much the same" that might well still have been telling lies (as violent crime is, most likely, on the up) but they would have been more likely to be believed.

But to say a "23% drop in violent crime"? They might as well have said a 123%.

Then there was the recent launch of a new navy destroyer - "The most powerful ship built since World War II"... actually it is an extremely expensive (£1 billion pound) grossly under-armed ship (part of the government's 'buy European' policy - a policy exposed by Christopher Booker and Richard North). But why say "most powerful ship built since World War II" - an obvious lie even to people who nothing of Booker or North?

Lastly we had yet more claims of super educated school children "the best ever" - almost needless to say the Universities (hardly strongholds of free market people) reported today that the students they are getting are as ignorant as sin.

What is the reason for all these wild lies?

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I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an 'icon of England'... and they have just written back accepting the nomination.

Interesting.

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Muslim Action Committee are calling for changes to the law in Britain to implement an aspect of sharia law and they want the British state to do it for them. What they want is to legally ban people from displaying pictures of Mohammed, the seventh century warlord who founded their religion, because it annoys them. Never mind that showing images of this historical figure does not threaten them with violence or prevent their exercise of religion, they want to make it illegal to annoy them.

They are planning to stage a protest march in London on 18 February, expecting to attract 20,000 to 50,000 people. I hope the number is considerably larger because I am sure as hell going to be there expressing my views as well.

If they get their way, we will undoubtedly be prosecuted as Samizdata's response to this islamo-fascist proposal will be a "Mohammed Picture of the Day", each day and every day until hell freezes over or we run out of server space. Intolerant Islam does not like being annoyed? Well guys, you ain't seen nothing yet, I promise you that. Our Dutch friends at The Amazing Retecool are a fairly good place to start for interesting interpretations of Mohammed's image.

If this ever becomes law and I personally get dragged into court over what Samizdata will most certainly do, rest assured that as we are hosted in the USA we will remain on-line and 'expressive' regardless, even if I have to 'host' myself in the USA a few years earlier that I expected. So to all your intolerant Islamic fascists out there who think it is within your power to silence all the voices you dislike, with all due respect (i.e. none), you are very much mistaken.

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The Cardiff University newspaper Gair Rhydd [link down as of late 7 Feb] reprinted one of the Jyllands-Posten 'Satanic Cartoons' and as a result, the edition was recalled and pulped by the university authorities. Now as the paper is no doubt the property of the university, I do not contest their right to do as they please with their property. However the statements from them make no sence whatsoever

"The opinions expressed in that publication are those of the editorial team independently of the students' union or university. The editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK, and are expected to exercise those freedoms with responsibility."

So they recalled the edition, destroyed all the copies, suspended the editor and are 'investigating' three of their journalists but the editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK. As we say on the internet, WTF?

Several newspapers in Europe and elsewhere (and I do not mean student newspapers) have reprinted the cartoons, so this is hardly an act of unprofessional behaviour seeing as several editors who actually do this for a living decided it was in the interests of their readers to publish the damn things.

Had they said "it is our paper and we will pulp anything that bucks the party line", well fine, but please, I will thank Cardiff University to not declaim as if they were on the moral high ground when all they are doing is covering their politically correct arses.

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This call [original link removed] for a rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday is interesting. Does anyone know any more details of who is behind it? I would like to know more before leaping to any conclusions.

update: question answered - not worth supporting one group of (white) fascists protesting against another group of (Islamic) fascists

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Here is a photo taken of the march by Muslims protesting against Jyllands-Poster and the 'Satanic Cartoons' saga in London earlier today.

click for larger image

The placards read Behead those who insult Islam & Butcher those who mock Islam & Slay those who disrespect Islam etc. etc.

Freedom of expression is quite literally intolerable to them. And we cannot and must not tolerate that. It makes no logical sense to tolerate intolerance.

With thanks to H for the picture

And for those of you who say "It's just a protest"...

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The TaxPayers' Alliance emails to say that there's a programme on British TV tonight this is probably long overdue:

This evening's Tonight with Trevor McDonald (ITV1, 8pm) examines government spending schemes that have spiralled out of control and cost taxpayers billions.

The Bumper Book of Government Waste was the inspiration for the programme and our Chief Executive Matthew Elliott has been interviewed.

Make sure you tune in at 8pm.

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Not only is the state not your friend; it does not live in the same country you do. Failing to keep proper books and records in a business is likely to end in your going to jail, if you do not go broke first. So almost all businesses do manage it.

What would happen to the board of directors of a corporation with a turnover of £10 Billion and 61,000 employees, if it were discovered it did not even reconcile its bank statements during their tenure? Something like this, perhaps? In most corporate scandals the accusation is not defective or absent bookkeeping, but that it was too clever.

Here is the National Audit Office on 31st January 2005:

Sir John Bourn, head of the National Audit Office, reported to Parliament today that the Home Office had not maintained proper financial books and records for the financial year ending 31 March 2005. Sir John therefore concluded that, because the Home Office failed to deliver its accounts for audit by the statutory timetable and because of the fundamental nature of the problems encountered, he could not reach an opinion on the truth and fairness of the Home Office’s accounts.

[...]

Because of the difficulties in implementing the new accounting system, the Home Office was unable to reconcile its cash position during 2004-05, i.e. match its own records of cash payments and receipts with those shown on its bank statements. This is a key control for the prevention and detection of fraud. Following significant work by the Home Office to investigate a £3.035 million discrepancy, it had to make adjustments of £946 million to reconcile its cash position. However the Home Office found no evidence of fraud following this work.

The report points out that the poor quality of the financial statements and the delay to their production reflected a lack of skills within the accounts branch compounded by late recognition by management of the serious problems being encountered. Management procedures to ensure the quality of the financial information produced were also inadequate.

I particularly like, "the Home Office found no evidence of fraud". Did nobody think to call in the Serious Fraud Office just so that they could say there'd been an independent check?

This is government, you see, and the rules for government are different. I confidently predict that there will be no consequences whatsoever for anyone but the taxpayer, who will stump up for yet another incompetent systems review. No minister will be censured, no official will lose his job, and no-one will go to gaol.

Which is just as well, considering how badly the prisons are run — by the Home Office.

The Home Office is an organisation that is currently preening itself before setting out up to become the Master Department, ruling them all through the largest and most complicated IT system ever, anywhere. It is currently asking suppliers what it should do and how much they think that should cost, while telling parliament it will not reveal any cost estimates (See: Lords Hansard 16 Jan 2006 : Column 428) in case it damages the bargain to be got from those same suppliers.

Though I have other reasons for thinking that the Home Office should not be permitted to seize from the Treasury the role of colossus over the rest of Whitehall, this NAO report at least ought to give any sane administration pause. I cannot see any whelk stalls or breweries taking the risk of offering their facilities for the necessary in-house training.

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Today Mr Blair and his cronies will bring their banning Incitement to Religious Hatred (i.e. death to another part of what is left of free speech) idea before the House of Commons.

Normally one must be careful not to use the word "evil" in politics. One must not claim a monopoly of virtue for one's own side in any political debate as one may always be wrong and, even if one is correct, the people on the other side may simply be honestly mistaken. They may be voting for a bad statute, but they are not themselves bad people.

However, the vile scheme that is the banning Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill has been exposed so many times (and in so many places) that no member of the House of Commons can honestly say that they did not know what they were voting for.

There is no question of (say) "the balance of argument" or "people of good will taking different sides". The people who vote for this bill (in the hopes of their party getting some Muslim votes - and, of course, not from tolerant Muslims) are voting for something they know to be evil, and that makes these members of the House of Commons bad people, unfit to serve in the 'Mother of Parliaments'.

I hope that a full list of the Members of the House of Commons, and their constituencies, who vote for this measure is published and widely distributed so that people will know who not to vote for in the next General Election.

I also hope that people who live in the constituencies of the MPs who vote for this bill write to them to, politely, express their horror and disgust with what they have done.

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I recently decided that I wanted to upgrade the CPU on my desktop computer. As it happened, the particular CPU I wanted was in short supply in the UK, and as prices here were substantially higher than in the US I decided to buy it from a shop in Seattle via ebay. It was quite possible that I would have to pay British VAT when the CPU was imported into the UK, but even after this I would still save substantial amounts of money.

So I ordered the CPU, and yesterday it arrived. I received a note in my mailbox telling me that some taxes were owing. Oddly, though, the taxes stated on the note came to about 26% of the price rather than the 17.5% VAT rate. I went to the depot, paid the taxes, and picked up the CPU. A sticker had been placed on the package, and this explained the discrepancy between the amount I calculated and the amount I was being charged. In addition to the VAT I was being charged a £8 "clearance fee". You see, I was not just being charged taxes. I was being charged an additional amount to pay the tax collectors to charge me taxes.

Forgive me for being pissed off by this.

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The Tories could simply abolish entire government departments that the 'man in the street' really does not give a damn about (such as the DTI for example) and save huge amounts of money... but far from cutting pointless state expenditures, Cameron is in the process of making it politically impossible for him to do anything but ape Blair. Why? Because there has been no meaningful attempt by the Tories to even make the idea of a smaller state something that is simply a feature of normal political discourse. They have left the thinking to the other side and now have to fight every battle on ground Tony Blair has chosen for them.

The Tories have had more than a decade to put in the intellectual ground work for cutting the scope of the state and to argue their positions on the basis of several rights, and yet have done nothing of the sort because that is not what most of them believe. That is hardly surprising given the pathologies of the sort of people who are drawn to politics: they do not get involved because they want to wield less power than the previous guys who ran things. Understanding politicians and what they are likely to do is much easier once you realise that almost everyone in politics (even the 'nice guys' who wear sensible cardigans and remind you of Wallace and Gromit) have more in common psychologically and morally with your typical member of a street gang than with most of the people who actually vote for them.

However where does that leave people who do want a less intrusive state and cannot bring themselves to believe the Tory party does not give a damn about them? Well it leaves them trying to convince themselves that Cameron is just playing a clever game because the alternative is just too dreadful. He is the man who will save us from those who are incrementally destroying our competitiveness and strangling our civil liberties because, well, he has to be, who else is there?

But even if his conversion to 'soft socialist' economics is because he is going after LibDem voters who think high taxes and regulations are a good thing, it would at least require Cameron to also make a pitch based on civil liberties, the one differentiating issue where the LibDems make sense, and yet the main thrust of the inconstant Tory opposition to ID cards is based on their cost.

Those of you who think Cameron is just being clever should go watch Peter Sellers in 'Being There' and realise that what you are mistaking for cleverness is in fact just emptiness.

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The 'Conservative' Party is now admitting what any twit should have figured out long ago: voting Tory will not result in lower taxes. Moreover they are trying to make it seem like a virtue. One sound axiom is that whenever a Tory politician uses the word 'sensible', it is time to bend over and think of England because they are using the word as a euphemism for either surrendering power to Brussels or keeping your taxes nice and high, and this is clearly the Tory party at its most 'sensible'.

It always makes me laugh when people like Cameron and his shadow chancellor George Osborne blather on about how they will provide 'stability' as if the economy is something that could not possibly work without constant political interference.

The Tories are quick to tell us how Labour has squandered Britain's economic advantages (as indeed they have) and yet Cameron's boys seem to bend over backwards to assure everyone that a Tory government will be nothing more than Blue Rinse Blairism. Yet if 'stability' is so important rather than a radical change, surely the most 'stable' thing would be to just leave the current Blairites in government.

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John Hutton, Work and Pensions Minister, runs a department that has not improved either. Watching Andrew Marr's impartial televisual feast this morning, Hutton sat down following Fiona Millar's defence of comprehensive schools and Chris Huhne transferring his skillset from journalism to tax increases. A green paper on welfare will be published this week as a preparation for a new bill on the benefits system. Finding a gap between the latest revolution on criminal justice and educational appeasement, Hutton proposes radical measurements. Doctors will have to monitor and report on how many sicknotes they issue.

Doctors could be offered bonuses for cutting the numbers of long-term sick notes they issue as part of a radical plan to slash incapacity benefit claims,.

Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton said that the proposal was under consideration as part of the Government's package of welfare reforms.

"It has been mooted and I think, again, this is something we would like to talk to the GPs about," he told the BBC1 Sunday AM programme.

No doubt league tables and auditing will follow; a harsh judgement but the micromanagement of benefit and dependency that is proposed will not work. Yet again, the response of the government to a perceived problem is measurement and management, in a centralised reporting structure. The policy is reported to have some teeth:

Ministers want to drastically cut the 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit (IB) at an annual cost of £12.5 billion, by getting those who are able to do some form of work back into jobs.

It is expected that the green paper will include proposals to cut IB payments by up to £10.93 a week for claimants who refuse to attend a job interview, rising to £21.86 for a second refusal.

The Government is also planning to install employment advisers in GPs surgeries - with claimants being assessed to see what work they are capable of doing before they can qualify for IB.

Even the name of the benefit is to change in order to underline the new approach.

"Incapacity benefit implies that you are incapable of doing anything, it is completely hopeless. I think we shouldn't take that view," Mr Hutton said.

Such teeth may be drawn in the face of Labour rebels, since many backbenchers will oppose taking money from those identified as incapacitated by the benefits system. Lo and behold! what remains: some spin as 'incapacity benefit' is rebranded, perhaps as 'Brown's munificence' or 'for the trouble you took to vote Labour'; and lots of shiny new part-time public sector positions to reduce the headline figures.

The real solution is more straightforward: privatise provision with incentives to reduce the figures and get those drawing benefits back to work. If you are filmed playing squash on a 'bad back', there may be some bad news: London Transport probably will not employ you but you can still join the RMT.

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One of the contenders for the leadership of Britain's Liberal Democrats is Scot, Menzies Campbell, known as "Ming". I am not sure how he got this moniker. Was it because his friends thought he resembled the villain of the Flash Gordon series, Ming the Merciless?

I feel sorry for his supporters. They are destined to be known as a lot of mingers.

(That's enough adolescent humour, Ed).

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Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.

So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with 'Middle England', is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?

All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say "regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them."

There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron... but of course I would love to be proven wrong.

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I have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk?

The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science.

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The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted 'Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep'. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.

To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?

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To see a term like "Blairite Tyranny" bandied about on a blog like this by people who think things like civil liberties actually matter, is to be expected.

However to see those words in print at all in the mainstream media is quite remarkable! More of the same please.

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It is not much fun being nearly sixty, but it does have some advantages, one of which is that you can just about remember political debates now long dead, of a sort which younger people may have little idea about.

And during the nineteen fifties, I recall, there was a debate, at any rate in Britain, engaged in by diehard free-marketeers, about the long term consequences of the Welfare State. The name of Anthony LeJeune springs to mind, but most of his recent writing nowadays seems to have been reviews of crime stories. Anyway, these diehard free-marketeers said that the Welfare State would corrupt the working class and turn then from the upstanding citizens that they then mostly were into barbarians. Diehard non-free-marketeers genuinely could not imagine this happening, and dismissed such fears as absurd. Most politicians, similarly unable to imagine that times might seriously change, concurred with the diehard non-free-marketeers.

Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.

I concider the Prime Minister's somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point.

The essence of the Welfare State, as was well understood by the people who founded it, was and is that you get your goodies, meagre though they may typically be, as a right. Nobody can take your goodies away from you, unless you do something like rob a bank, get caught, and get sent to prison. Short of that, you have your rights, and you can behave as you please, which for some means behaving very, very badly.

In the decades before the Welfare State, you depended on the people around you - like landlords, employers, neighbours, etc., above all on your own family - for whatever goodies you managed to get your hands on, and bad behaviour towards these people was punishable, and was punished, with loss of goodies.

One should not exaggerate. These pressures still operate on most people in Britain now. Most people still know that if they behave very badly, they will be shunned by polite society, which for most people still exists, even if they now would not use that particular phrase to describe it. Most people have jobs, and many of them want better jobs. If they indulge, say, in football hooliganism at the weekend, they know that this might cause employers (or customers, which amounts to the same thing), potential and future, to look askance at them.

But, for a substantial minority, mostly the minority whose lives are dominated by the Welfare State, there is now no such thing as polite society to be shunned by. The remnants of such a society may still exist, but it no longer has power over the barbarians who prey upon it.

What Tony Blair is trying to do is to recreate a "modern" substitute for such informal social pressures with the force of the law and with the power of the state.

The difficulty with this approach is that it means attacking the problem with only a rather small number of quite large bludgeons, wielded from relatively few power centres, rather than with millions of little truncheons, wielded by millions of different persons of only moderate influence. And these bludgeons are all too likely to end up being a problem worse than the one they are being created to solve. The power of the police to arrest on sight, or the power of welfare bureaucrats selectively to withhold benefits, or of council officials to eject troublesome tenants, creates a world either of arbitrary political tyranny or of endless political and legal wrangling. In practice, both. It recreates informal, social power, but in the negative-sum arena of politics, rather than in the positive-sum world of the free society.

Against one tyrannical landlord, or against one malevolent neighbour who falsely accuses you of mayhem, you may have a chance. You can seek another landlord, new neighbours. You can retaliate by arguing with the community by which you are surrounded that your reputation deserves to remain spotless, and that it is your landlord or your neighbour whose name should now be mud. But now, for many people, there is no "community" within which to establish a reputation or to add a bit of black to other people's. "Community" has become a euphemism for a mere aggregate of persons connected only by being classified in the same bureaucratic category

And if some marauding gang of barbarians has a "reputation", so what? They now glory in this. If a surrounding community does still exists without the need for any inverted commas, it lacks the power to make its judgements of such mayhem stick. It now has no power to reward or to punish.

The state has takes away those resources and that power, at first because it either saw no need for such power or else because it regarded the power as bad, and now because it cannot imagine handing it back. (Who to? How do we "recreate civil society"? Etc.)

Nor would the people from whom this power has been taken away necessarily welcome the upheavals involved in it somehow being re-established. Just as it was impossible in the nineteen fifties for people to imagine the harm that the Welfare State would eventually do, so now, it seems impossible for most to imagine a world without the Welfare State, or how on earth such a world might be contrived.

By the way, I am a libertarian rather than a conservative (of the pessimisitic British sort) because I believe that people respond quite rapidly to incentives, and not just in a bad way. Abolish the Welfare State with a magic button right now, and you would be amazed (and British conservatives amazed) by how very quickly a lot people would at once start behaving better and how quickly they would then inefect most of the rest. "Human nature" is not all bad. Most people instinctively want to be good, and many more have at least be raised to be good. If they did not want to be good, the voters would not be telling Tony Blair that there is a problem, and he would not even be going through the motions of trying to solve this problem.

As it is, there definitely is a problem, and those who merely say that "these people need to be helped rather than threatened" are being idiotic. Those libertarians who emphasise only the bad things (basically the civil liberties angles) about Blair's answers without confronting the problem he is trying to confront are likewise rather missing the bigger picture. ASBOs may indeed threaten the integrity of the the criminal justice system, but in the meantime, many an abused neighbour or gang-terrorised estate is surely thankful for them.

So Blair is by no means totally wrong about this stuff. But the answer to his problem is a whole lot more complicated than most Labourites, and I suspect, the majority of anything-else-ites, are now willing to acknowledge.

More from me (and from Theodore Dalrymple) in a similar vein here.

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William, Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times says:

In Parliament, particularly in the House of Lords, there is a growing reaction against such social control [as identity cards]. Most of us think policemen should not be turned into busybodies, warning people not even to discuss adoption by homosexual couples; arresting them for any trivial offence; threatening smokers and publicans; and galloping after fox-hunters. We resent this on behalf of the public, but we also resent it on behalf of the police.

In the history of Britain there have been many periods when liberty was threatened. The immediate threat is a government with a lust for control, with little respect for liberty or for the House of Commons, but enjoying the opportunity of using new technologies for social control. The British are certainly less free than we were in 1997 or 2001. The fightback will be laborious and difficult, but there is a new mood.

There is small sign of such a new mood on the Government benches. Is there one in the country?

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Crime in Britain is a serious problem even though people will contest the figures and trends. The present government, no doubt aware that the issue remains a hot-button matter for voters, is determined to be seen to be doing something about it, however ineffectual.

In the process, rather than push for tougher sentencing and allowing people to defend themselves, the administration's approach is to overturn centuries of checks and balances in the criminal law.

This is the latest:

Lord Falconer, the Constitutional Affairs Secretary, and Mike O'Brien, the solicitor general, are drawing up proposals to bypass the court process in as many as half the cases heard by magistrates every year.

Defendants who plead guilty to offences such as shoplifting, theft and criminal damage would have their punishment decided by the prosecutor, in consultation with the police, instead of going to court. Ministers believe that about half of the two million cases heard annually by magistrates could be handled in that way.

The plan would represent a revolution in the criminal justice system which has always been based on the principle that sentencing should be weighed in court, with the defence entering a plea in mitigation in response to the prosecution's case.

The article goes on to say that the government aims to save money from this bracing and exciting new approach to law enforcement. Up to £350 million a year is spent on Legal Aid to court defendants appearing before magistrates. 350 million pounds is a large dollop of money although chickenfeed compared with what the government may end up spending - and we paying for - on ID cards. ID cards are likely, I confidently predict, to be largely useless in reducing crime, and I very much doubt that cutting public spending is a great priority of this government.

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Andrew Zalotocky makes a useful point that we need to stop pretending that we have free speech in Britain, we do not. Time for a new description.

Regular Samizdata readers will probably be aware of the cases of Lynette Burrows and Iqbal Sacranie, who have both recently fallen foul of 'hate speech' legislation. The latter case prompted Guy Herbert to comment that "whatever it is, it is not freedom of expression". I propose that we should call it 'permitted speech', in contrast to 'free speech'.

For speech to be truly free it must include the right to say things that others would find grossly offensive. If a government uses the threat of prosecution to suppress speech that it considers offensive it is asserting that the people may only express the views that their rulers deem appropriate. No matter how lightly the government uses this power it is still establishing the principle that citizens do not have a right to speak freely, only a license to engage in the officially permitted forms of speech. America has 'free speech' and Britain has 'permitted speech'.

Of course, the majority of people are not in the habit of expressing controversial views in the mass media and are therefore unlikely to feel immediately threatened by such restrictions. Even cases like that of the student who was arrested for calling a horse "gay" are likely to be seen as a joke rather than a demonstration of how criminalising the expression of certain opinions affects everybody. However, that just makes it even more important to explain why the right to freedom of speech must be defended, and to make clear that permitted speech is not the same thing at all.

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We have recently had a run of posts about the new Conservative Party leader David Cameron. I think it is an understatement of the year to say that we contributors are underwhelmed by the gentleman thus far. The articles triggered off a good deal of commentary, not least from some belligerent self-styled New Labour supporters who openly admitted that Cameron is the most likely heir of the Blairite political tradtion, unlike Chancellor Gordon Brown.

In as much as I understand it aright, Blairism involves a number of elements: competent economic management at the macro level (no repeat of the disasters of yore under Wilson, Callaghan, etc); enthusiasm for blurring the boundaries of business and government; desire to micro-manage personal behaviours (training bad parents to be good parents); an obsession with modernity for its own sake; distrust, and in some cases, open dislike of British history and its tradtions; enthusiasm for transnational progressivism and its institutions such as the European Union and United Nations.

Now like all such things my view simplifies things a bit. But that is pretty much what we have got. We have a fairly reasonable economy - albeit one that has performed sluggishly of late - a fast-rising number of public sector workers; a raft of regulations governing the most minute aspects of personal behaviours, and so forth.

Now to Cameron. I honestly do not know how much of this agenda he supports or whether his recent postures are merely attempts to curry favour with the media and the softer-headed swing voters who vote Liberal Democrat. He may, for all I know, be a devoted Thatcherite looking to pull off the greatest hoax in political history.

My worry is, however, that as politicians fight over the centre ground (an elusive area), a lot of the necessarily radical decisions needed to keep the economy strong, roll back regulations and protect liberty, will not be taken. Quite the opposite. The danger is that we get a sort of Dutch auction in which a Cameronian Tory Party fights to run a corporatist, Big Government model better than its Labour equivalent. And the end-result is the sort of sclerosis we endured in the 60s and 70s.

In any event, I leave this with a fine quote from the Times journalist and economics writer Anatole Kaletsky, who can hardly be characterised as some sort of right-winger, but who is deeply concerned about how our economic vitality could be squashed as politicians fight over some sort of hypothetical "centre ground".

Suppose first that the Tories are genuine in their sudden enthusiasm for high taxes, rising public spending, anti-elitist education and a totally government-financed health service. Britain then faces European-style paralysis in the years ahead. Not only can we rule out any radical change in the structure or the quality of the public sector, we can also rule out even the possibility of a serious debate on the role or the size of the State.

Just as European voters today are offered no real choice by their parties on issues such as EU integration, economic liberalism and the burden of taxes, the only choice for Britain will be big or bigger government, high or higher taxes and public service bureaucracies managed by Tweedle-Dum or Tweedle-Dee. The three most important growth industries of the 21st-century economy — health, education and pensions — will continue to be monopolised by the public sector. In short, the commanding heights of the economy will be dominated by the Government to an extent that Herbert Morrison could only have dreamt of in 1945.

The long-term results are likely to be the same as they were in the 1950s and 1960s: the British economy will move back into long-term decline, not only because government spending and taxes will rise relentlessly as a share of national income, but even more because what should be the most dynamic industries powering Britain’s future will be run by the State. And whatever the born-again social democrats surrounding Mr Cameron may say about the alleged efficiency of a tax-financed NHS in comparison with the insurance-based models employed in other countries, experience suggests that competition among profit-motivated producers for the custom of price-sensitive consumers always beats the “efficiency” of central planning over time.

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The blessed UK government wants to pass a bill to reduce the amount of bureaucracy. This falls into the category of "government pledges to make water flow uphill" bracket, methinks. There have been dozens of widely touted events by governments (of both parties) to cut red tape and yet the amount of regulations that businesses and individuals have to cope with just grows like ivy up the side of a tree. The solution is not to pass another bill but to reverse the laws we have on the books already. Simple.

The actor Clint Eastwood once said that the problem with so many people in politics is that they tended to be folk like schoolteachers rather than people who have had to run a business and meet a payroll. I know what he means.

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Nice and fair piece on the late Arthur Seldon, for years the editorial powerhouse at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The writer, Simon Heffer, is not always to my taste, given some of his Blimpishness, but he hits the mark here. One thing that stands out for me about Arthur is that he was not remotely interested in pandering to the short-term vagaries of opinion or attracting the plaudits of the rich and famous. He was also a representative of a style of liberalism going back to Gladstone, one which Britain is sorely in need of.

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Blair's speech echoed Hayek's warnings that managerialism bypasses the checks and balances designed to prevent the erosion of liberty and miscarriages of justice. Like any good communitarian, the Prime Minister defined liberty as the balance between freedom and security, a political equation that is often on the lips of our tyrannous leaders. The fragile institutions of criminal justice and the common law were dismissed with disdain:

The theory is basically treating Britain as if it were in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The practice however takes place in a post-war, modern, culturally and socially diverse, globalised society and economy at the beginning of the 21st century. The old civic and family bonds have been loosened. The scale, organisation, nature of modern crime makes the traditional processes simply too cumbersome, too remote from reality to be effective...

Yes, in theory, that is what is supposed to happen through the traditional court processes. In practice it doesn't. We are fighting 21st crime with 19th century methods.

Blair criticises the traditional court system for protecting the accused and takes great pride in "reversing the burden of proof". To deal with the communally defined 'anti-social behaviour', the tool of social engineering is summary justice with a right of appeal, presumably to the same inefficient, cumbersome courts that, according to our Prime Minister, do not work in the first place.

Blair and New Labour take pride in smashing the checks and balances which protect civil liberties in this country. If you have misunderstood the man and still believe that he is located in the liberal tradition as some of the comrades do, think again. His first instinct is order, social and authoritarian, covenanted by the community and upheld through the state, in a mantra of rights and responsibilities, derived from Hobbes and cemented by Blair's favourite socialist, R H Tawney.

Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community. It is about the consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant that we have with one another.

More grandly, it is the answer to the most fundamental question of all in politics which is: how do we live together? From the theorists of the Roman state to its fullest expression in Hobbes's Leviathan, the central question of political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state?

Legal stricture will never be enough. Respect cannot, in the end, be conjured through legislation. Government can provide resources and powers. It can do its best to ensure that wrong-doing is detected, that its powers against offenders are suitable, that its systems are expeditious and its enforcement strong. And the British system, like others, in the modern world, has not been good enough against these standards.

Despite the loathsome outcome of this campaign and the manifold injustices that will result, one can pity Blair as an agent who follows the path laid out before him. The transition from a high-trust society to a low-trust society is a consequence of the welfare state and the expansion of moral dependency on the part of many individuals. The state lacks the tools to remedy and offset the pernicious consequences of its systems. It returns to the mindset that has served it so well: controls, shortcuts and arbitrary regulations designed to solve the defined problems. If existing systems like the courts are outside the executive control, they are bypassed for more malleable solutions.

Blair treads the path that has been written for him.

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Britain's Tony Blair has taken a further step in his self-declared role of father, and quite possibly mother, of the nation. He wants to introduce new laws to regulate anti-social, yobbish behaviour and introduce training (this is not a joke) for particularly wayward parents.

Given the recent Orwellian remarks of Lord Gould, this all makes perfect sense. Blair and his ilk have no conception of civil society as a network of individuals, mediated via institutions, evolving slowly across time. He has no idea of how in such a society, values of self-restraint, civility towards others, concern for the weak, can be internalised rather than be handed down by dictat.

This is not to say that yobbery, uncouthness, family breakdown and other pathologies are not serious problems. Of course they are. Ask anyone who has walked through a major UK city centre on a Friday evening. There is now a large and impressive body of work pointing to both the problems and some possible solutions in this regard. (Go and read Theodore Dalrymple or James Bartholomew, for instance). What these books and other studies have in common is an understanding that the top-down model of social reform, with its legions of officials, laws, agencies and so forth, has manifestly failed. There is little prospect of further efforts in this mould working either. Yet for Blair and so many others - including Tory leader David Cameron no doubt - problems of yobbery or mass drunkeness call for an "top-down" set of "solutions". All the while the behaviours that are crimes, such as murder, burglary and violence, are frequently met with police indifference or punished only haphazardly by the courts. The law turns topsy-turvy.

It may amaze some readers to think that Blair was once thought of as a highly intelligent politician back in the mid-1990s, and there is no doubt that to this day, he remains - on tactics at least - one of the most astute political figures of modern times. In terms of his grasp of human nature, however, he presents a pitiable sight as he grasps for that "eye-catching" gesture.

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This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an 'icon of Britain' via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:

The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.

The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain...

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The Telegraph reports that the government has spent £1 million on a website inviting public nominations for English national icons. At time of writing, this vital cultural event, masterminded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is down, though you would think you could get quite a decent service-level contract for one... million... pounds. If by the time you read this it is up again, then look here for it.

Now you may say this is utterly fatuous. Why should we have a dcms at all? (Yes, that's right: lower case initials in the logo. It is modern, you know.)

I beg to differ. This is an opportunity for the English people to express themselves and send a signal to the world about how seriously we take our national identity and native religions, and how much we value this Government's intention to foster them. The last Census recorded nearly 400,000 Jedi in the UK. It is time for them to speak again.

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The loathsome Philip Gould, a man who is like something out of Orwell's 1984, has written a letter to the Guardian pointing out what Tory Blair David Cameron has made obvious over the last few days: New Labour's ideology of regulatory statism and the incremental replacement of several rights based civil society with democratic omni-political interactions has completely won the argument amongst the professional political classes. David Cameron's announcements of 'belief' in the purest form of socialism in Britain (the National Health Service) and his effortless assumption that it is the role of politicians and the state to tell companies what choices of food they may offer to customers to select from are not 'clever politics' but rather the total whimpering surrender to the ideology of Blairism. As Philip Gould points out, his side has won and won utterly. The entire meta-context within which political debate goes on has been conceded by the Tories, dooming them to always fight on ground of their 'enemies' choosing.

I have never been more certain that my conviction is correct that liberty, individuality and several rights can only be fought for outside the democratic political process. Although being in office matters to people like Philip Gould, to the rest of us the truth is we might as well be living in a one party state.

New Labour has indeed won in Westminster, regardless of who wins the next election, but of course as Gould cannot imagine anything beyond politics, there is still a civil society out there that needs to be defended against people like him and you cannot do that by voting for different sections of the political monoculture. I hope his article will be read by many of the remaining Conservative activists who are still quixotically clinging to the absurdity that a Cameron victory would change anything. To fight Tony Blairism first we have to destroy Tory Blairism. If you care anything for liberty and opposing the growth of a panoptic pooled database regulatory state, the worst thing you can do is vote for a Blairite like David Cameron and his intellectually defeated political party.

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There are some things that most people know (or think they know) about the British book trade. For example that books are very expensive compared to some other places, and that buying a paperback can be unwise - due to the system of "perfect binding" where the pages are just stuck on to the spine, so they fall out if one actually reads the book a few times.

However, I do not wish to examine such points here. I wish to point out the simple leftism of the book trade. This may seem a predictable whine from a libertarian like me, but it is more than a whine.

Recently I read a review of Robert Conquest's Dragons of Expectation in The Economist.

The review claimed that Conquest did not understand that his side now dominated the world. If by "his side" the review meant anti-Marxism, this domination does not seem to be in evidence in universities (or, in terms of attitudes, in most of the electronic media and much of the print media in the Western world - let alone in such places as Latin American governments), but let us leave that aside.

I went to bookshop after bookshop in search of Robert Conquest's work. Borders, Waterstones, W.H. Smith - you name the shop, no book.

"But you could order the book or get via the internet" - but why should I have to?

Why should a work by the leading historian of Soviet Russia (the author of "The Terror" and other works) not be found on the shelves, so that I can have a look at it and decide whether I want to buy it? In fact none of Robert Conquest's works were on the shelves of the bookshops of whatever town I happened to be in (London, Bolton, Manchester, York, Kettering - it did not matter what town). And remember Robert Conquest is not a radical libertarian - he is just a historian who did more than any other to expose the crimes of the Marxists.

Take the example of Borders in York - wall to wall Noam Chomsky. Literally wall to wall - a whole shelf full of his political writings (not his writings on the basis of language) and books on the next shelf to. And (of course) the endless works of M. Moore, and all the rest of the 'death to Bush' crowd.

Now I am no fan of President Bush, he has gone along with greater increases in domestic government spending than any President since Richard Nixon (and Mr Nixon had the excuse of a Democratic party controlled Congress). But the legion of Bush haters one finds in the book shops do not attack 'No Child Left Behind' or the Medicare extension or all the rest of the wild spending.

When they attack his foreign policy they do not understand that it is (for better or worse) a continuation of the policy of such men as President Wilson - i.e. an effort to impose democracy overseas. They present the whole policy as an effort to line the pockets of business contractors - or to impose Christianity in place of Islam. And when the authors discuss domestic policy they present a mythical anti-Welfare State pro-free enterprise President Bush.

Just as works on British politics present a free enterprise Mr Blair - rather than the real one of higher taxes, higher government spending and more regulations.

"Such ideas may be absurd, but they are the books that sell and book stores are in business to make a profit".

How do they know that these will be the only books that will sell when they hardly ever advertise anti-statist books? Certainly there will sometimes be a promotion for an anti-statist book (such as the recent Mao: The Unknown Story - although this work seems to blame Mao as a man, rather than socialism as a doctrine for what happened in China), but this is very rare.

If one sees the notice "We Recommend" or "We Highly Recommend" on or near a book, it is a fairly safe bet that the book is bad - full of factual errors and written by someone who would like to nationalize the bookshop and send its shareholders to the death camps [editors note: there are solutions to this].

I am not even sure that such books do sell well. After all, if this so, who does one see (every sale time) great piles of leftist books on sale at half price (or less). I say again, how do the book shop people know that British people do not want to buy anti-leftist books in economics, history, philosophy and politics when such books are hardly ever promoted and are mostly simply not on the shelves?

A person who comes into a bookshop (rather than buys over the internet) is there to see what sort of books are about in areas of knowledge that he is interested in. To physically touch and look at these books - to see what he might like to buy (rather than just trust reviews). And yet a person who entered a British bookshop would encounter (for example) in economics just establishment Keynesianism (with all the standard absurdities, such as the doctrine that an increase in government spending financed by credit expansion boasts long term income) and Marxist (or Marxiod) attacks on Keynesianism. Chicago school works are very rare and Austrian school works virtually non-existent.

The "passing trade" - the people (like me) who often go into book shops to look at books, just can not find works we want to buy. Someone who is not committed politically will find very little in British book shops to challenge the left and open new possibilities to him. And someone who already knows what he wants may as well go straight to the internet (after all the books are not going to be in the bookshop).

"Anti-statist books do not sell" - really? Or is it that British bookshops are dominated by people educated in the universities and these universities are strongholds of the left?

There will be token non-leftist books in the bookshops - but the weight of the left is overwhelming, and I very much doubt that he it has much to do with what sells.

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I have been a bit more tolerant than my Samizdatista comrades about the populist postures adopted by nice Mr Cameron. And being a Conservative Party member, it is me that has to be tolerant, after all. A certain sainted editor has been consistent in urging people not to vote for a long, long time, so a Tory leader really need not care what Perry thinks...

But this has brought me up short. OK, it is speculative bluster about what might be considered by a working party. But how are the 'liberal values', that Cameron has made so much of, served by forced labour?

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The Tories continue to reinforce my view that they are just Labour-lite by saying they 'believe' in the socialist National Health Service. So presumably David Cameron will soon want to extend this wonderful thing that he 'believes in' to other areas of the economy. If command economics are the best way to provide something as important as healthcare, why is that not also the best way to build cars, run banks, make computers etc.? Surely if the Tory party believes socialism works, why are they not planning to introduce it more widely? Is this what comes next?

They talk in terms of how they can be trusted to 'run' the economy, as if the economy was something that requires politicians to function. And what is the 'legacy of Thatcher' if not the move away from a more command oriented economy? Well Cameron says he is breaking with that too.

So, if the Tories are a party which can appoint Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard as leader, probably the only man in British politics today even more authoritarian than David Blunklett, then clearly voting Tory to protect civil liberties from the predations of Blairism is utterly pointless (sort of like suicide for fear of death)...

...and now we see they are also a party which followed with a new leader who is promising to adopt Blairite economic policies, it does not really matter a whole lot which of those two parties actually end up in 10 Downing Street, does it?

Why vote for Tory Blairism when you can vote for the real thing, Tony Blairism?

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Now that David Cameron has revealed to all but the most blinkered that he is just another social democrat who shares 99% of Tony Blair's beliefs, I look forward to seeing how this will be spun by his appologists. No doubt they will still say Cameron's utterences are just a cunning plan to get the Tories into office by stealing Labour's best ideas but really he will rescue us from encroaching regulatory statism and socialist monstrosities like the dismal National Health Service. Oh sure, and how will that work, exactly?

If your answer to my remarks is still "but we need to get them into office to replace the dreadful Blair", tell me why that would make any difference even if it was true? What is the point in replacing Blair with someone who is so similar ideologically? Is trivial window dressing like removing Tory MEP's from the preposterous EPP-ED grouping really enough to buy your vote when he is falling over himself to pledge his loyalty to regulatory interventionist government and expanding the role of the state?

If you want to oppose Blair via The System, for goodness sake stop thinking about the Tory party. If you cannot kick your addiction to democratic empowerment fantasies, at least vote UKIP or even LibDem (who at least are less authoritarian on alleged security issues), but please do not reward the Tory party for becoming NuLabour with a Henley accent if you ever want to see the end of Blair-ism and its poison legacy.

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Some time ago I referred to statistics on reported crimes in the UK, which prompted a rather heated discussion (that's putting it mildly, ed) about the value of such numbers, given the obvious difficulties in knowing whether reporting of crimes gives an accurate picture of just how bad the situation really is. The British Crime Survey (BCS) which takes the public's impressions of the impact of crime through interviews with thousands of people, can sometimes give a quite different picture.

This story shows that reports of armed violence are on the rise, and also contains data showing that experiences of crime have also gone up. A rather sobering set of numbers with which to start the New Year.

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Commenting on the previous posting, RAB says:

Being very non technical, I don't know how to start a thread, but there is a good leader in the Telegraph today on the 800 million quids worth of government non jobs Bliar and co have created. If someone would like to start one, I'm sure Verity, for one, would have a field day!

It is not technology you lack, RAB; it is the right to do postings on Samizdata. But your point is a good one, I think, even though personally I loathe the word "Bliar", because name-calling is the language of loser propagandists, I think.

But getting back to that 800 million quid's worth of government jobbery (as this kind of thing used actually to be called), I think RAB is right to ask us to post about this, and presumably he is referring to this:

There you will see page after page of vacancies on the state payroll: outreach workers, diversity co-ordinators, policy advisers, liaison officers. Some of them come with six-figure salaries. Indeed, the average annual pay for the posts advertised in Guardian Society this year is £10,000 higher than the mean private sector wage.

I seem to recall Richard Littlejohn writing about this years ago, in a book. But that was then (i.e. 1995). This is now.

All governments start out reasonably honest (I speak comparatively), but get more corrupt as they persist, and as the army of camp followers finds its way around and finds out where all the treasure is to be found and how to dig it out and take possession of it. Well, I reckon a big clear out of this lot may now be due any general election now. If not at the next, then pretty soon.

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about David Cameron, but I believe the vital quality that Cameron has which his Tory predecessors and leadership rivals did not possess was that he is not one of that tainted generation of Tories who did well out of Thatcherism, or who thought that they were going to. Cameron got serious about being a Tory when that had stopped being the smart move, the clever thing to do, the good bet, or so he has managed or been lucky enough to suggest. The David Davis generation all had their fingers in the pie of government, whether they actually got their spoons out and ate or not, and the voters came to hate the entire lot of them. The voters came to believe that these Tories were costing too much, and that they were all too bloody smug by half, not admitting that they got as far as they had merely by climbing aboard the Thatcher bandwagon. Too many dodgy privatisations, and cushy city directorships - I seem to recall Lawson, fresh from wrecking the British economy, getting paid colossal sums by some bank - in exchange not for old fashioned work but for the inside track and the inside dope. In a word, the voters came to think that the Tories were corrupt - "sleaze" was the word, I seem to recall, and they wanted that whole generation punished, for as long as they continued to put themselves forward for high office. Hence the succession of Tory electoral humiliations. It was not that the voters disliked what the Tories said. They just did not want to hear it, thank you. Not from those evil twats. But now, it would appear, the voters are ready to listen to the Tories again.

Which means that they will at least be willing to think about Labour corruptions, and about the unearned income and undeserved careers that the Tony Blair bandwagon has made possible. Such as all these non jobs. The Labour Party has for the last decade lived the life of a protected species, in terms of the media coverage of what Labour people actually do all day, and what they get paid for it, and above all how damned numerous these people now are.

As I heard a Tory sympathiser say on the telly a few weeks back, it is not at all impossible that the Tories will win the next election. That mountainous Labour majority was created in one fell swoop, and it would not need nearly such a big further fell swoop to wipe it out and put the Tories back in. The British electorate is more unified than it used to be. It is less loyal to Party, and more concerned about its own finances. It now stampedes this way and that in one big herd. If it now decides that its finances are now being eaten away at by a generation of Labour parasites, it will vote these people into the long grass until they are all deep into their declining years. This kind of thing doesn't help either.

I stopped being confident about my ability to predict election results since the day I accurately predicted, on the afternoon of the voting itself, the John Major victory against Neil Kinnock. Ever since then I have been electorally confused, so do not take my word for all this. I merely speculate.

I also agree with what has been said here that "Cameronism", if it materialises at all soon, may not make much difference. There will be very similar policies. It will merely be that the snouts in the trough will be different, and somewhat different minorities will be victimised, and more so as time goes by.

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David Cameron, newly elected leader of the Tories, has got off to a wonderful start, as I am sure readers will agree. He has signed up Sir Bob "give us yer fokkin' money" Geldof to advise on world poverty; Zak Goldsmith, the environmentalist, has been also approached to advise on how to save the planet, and in a recent masterstroke, Oliver Letwin, a Tory MP, opined that the Tories should be concerned with redistributing wealth. Splendid. I am sure the sort of voters who deserted the Conservatives in 1997 and failed to return will be thrilled at this embrace of what looks like a sort of social democratic touchy-feely product by the Wonder Boy of Notting Hill. Or again, they may not.

All that remains is for Cameron to steal Labour's old Clause Four promising nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then on to victory!

Meanwhile, Tim Worstall is similarly underwhelmed by Cameron.

Apologies for my sarcasm. Been a long day in the office.

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As someone who follows such things I had expected the latest Home Office consultation exercise to go according to the standard pattern, thus:

1. Home Office makes suggestions for changes in public policy...
2. ...'evidence' is taken from interested parties including police in search of promotion, contractors in search of contracts, and researchers seeking posts on the new quango to be created...
3. Home Office considers, announces its plans have 'general support', ticks box marked 'public consulted' and carries on with making legislation for parliament to approve.

So I was gearing myself up to write a piece on the repulsive sight of a department torn between the desire to regulate everything and to maintain PC social norms. Citing the ignominious failure of the Victorian Contagious Diseases Acts, I was going to pour scorn on the futility of a regulatory regime that licensed brothels while denying the most basic economic rights to prostitutes, and created 'zones of toleration' in an effort to buck the market while punishing the streetwalkers it purported to protect.

The Goverment has shot my fox. And it turns out the fox was packed with explosives. Someone has overturned the (paradoxical) regulatory liberalisers and has decided puritan prohibitions are what we need. The move is instead to be to "Zero Tolerance" of 'kerb crawlers' - and quite without comment, the continuation of zero civil-law rights and next to zero criminal-law protections for prostitutes themselves.

The Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart was quoted yesterday on the BBC as saying that prostitution "is child abuse" because many prostitutes begin selling sex below the age of consent. That is an insane argument driven by the demands of moralism. By the same token unpaid sexual contact must also be child abuse, because most people's sex lives begin before that arbitary, if increasingly rigidly totemic, mark. Someone, somewhere, is making David Blunkett, who was responsible for the original pseudo-tolerant proposals, look like a liberal.

Does the devil's name begin with B? The emphasis on cleaning up public untidiness by bullying is of a piece with the respec' agenda. And there have been suggestions that the inate liberalism of the Home Office - not something spotted by many commentators before now - is interfering with the operation of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit.

Just another brick in the wall, perhaps. But turning the public agenda on a sixpence, and producing plainly mad arguments for doing so, are ominous. The Head Boy is ever more a dictator, and ever more the apostle of social conformity.

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Yesterday, while briefly surfing Britain's terrestrial TV channels in hope of something amusing to watch, I came across a film based on the old UK "comedy", On the Buses, which chronicles the life of a bunch of London bus drivers and conductors. Made in the late 60s and early 70s, the series adopted the leery, bawdy humour of the Carry On Films, although unlike the Carry On movies at their best, (like the wonderful Carry on Up the Khyber) lacked the sort of great gags that to this day can make me laugh out loud. On the Buses can be safely relegated to a footnote of British television history, thank goodness.

It was quite a shock watching the film. It was a reminder of how greatly Britain has changed since the early 70s. For starters, the constant leeriness towards women, the assumption that any vaguely attractive woman was nothing more than mattress-fodder, makes even yours truly - no fan of political correctness - feel uneasy. One of the main themes of the story is how the manager, in a drive to improve the efficiency of the layabout male staff, decides to hire a group of women drivers. The men regard this move as a disaster and a threat to "their" jobs (probably correctly). What is particularly striking is how the shop steward of the bus-drivers' union makes it clear that as far as his union is concerned, women have no place in a bus, except either as a customer or as someone he can molest. For any trade unionist watching this film today, the message must be most uncomfortable in that it reinforces the important idea that free markets and competition are in general good news in particular for women as well as racial groups often subject to discrimination, as noted U.S. economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have pointed out.

There were a few good things about the 1970s - although it is sometimes hard to think of any - but watching this low-point of British cinema only made me realise how much life has improved since then.

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I am not a great fan of Max Hastings but he does have a rather good article in the Guardian that makes points which should be obvious to everyone except state apparatchiks. He decries educational utilitarianism and Labour's lack of realism about the dominance of western culture and the relevance of British history in view of that undeniable dominance.

However I think he rather misses the point that this attitude has been a significant element for quite some time under governments of both parties. Perhaps what makes this government more alarming is their taste for depreciating any sense of cultural identity for English people and, most importantly, failing to provide any historical context for the modern world. To have a broad grasp of history is to have an understanding of the present and future possibilities and it would appear that is not seen as helpful for the broad masses of people who the state would rather see concentrate on mere technical skills.

I wonder if there are some in Whitehall who really do think that ideally as few British people as possible should know there was not always a socialist 'National Health Service'? If people do not know of a past without something they are perhaps less likely to imagine a future without it either. Perhaps none would really see things in quite such totalitarian terms yet it is not hard to see the attraction of such a view if you do not want people even discussing things which might reduce your power and influence by questioning certain axioms.

It is often my experience that the very notion that most regulatory planning is a quite modern imposition strikes a lot of people as bizarre. They think that without politically driven planning, everything would be chaos, and that must always have been true, right? Yet before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which was the single most destructive abridgement of British liberty ever, people owned property with several rights that are unimaginable today. Civilization would not end if such conditions prevailed again tomorrow (far from it) yet the meta-contextual reality is that in 2005, most people quite literally cannot imagine a world without planning regulations and that makes it rather hard to have a discussion about the issue if you take a radical perspective (i.e. the mainstream perspective of about one hundred years ago).

Perhaps just as Orwell wrote about 'newspeak' and posited a totalitarian state which wanted to abridge the language to make even conceiving of dissent impossible, there may be some amongst the political class who like the idea of most people receiving nothing more than technical training as the less people know of radically different world views that are never the less relevant to western culture, the less likely they are to imagine society functioning just fine without a great many of the state institutions taken for granted today. What would happen if people start imagining a world which works just fine without much of the regulatory statism that the state wants you to accept as inevitable and natural?

Creating a non-statist meta-context in which such things can even be discussed is something I have often banged on about. By this I mean establishing frames of reference within which one develops and expresses opinions that are broader than those generally found in the mainstream media or academia today. This matters because the meta-context within which most discussions and analysis take place tends to define the basic range of views that are likely to emerge: for example, if the only method for effecting changes people can imagine involves force backed democratic political processes, their views will tend to develop with that underpinning assumption in mind.

I would be curious to know if people like education minister Charles Clarke really think about that sort of thing. I am quite willing to believe that rather than an sinister overarching world view designed to make us all technically trained drones monitored with panoptic surveillance and ubiquitous state enforced database monitoring, we are just seeing the results of dreary political hacks looking for ways to eliminate things they are too limited to see a use for themselves. Stupidity rather than malevolence is generally a more reliable explanation of wickedness than conspiracy theories... and yet when you take the broader view of this apparent dislike of non-technical education within the context of widespread abridgement of civil liberties by both main political parties, well, it makes you wonder.

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Well, Christmas is nearly upon us. I am shortly off to demonstrate my serious limitations as a singer down my local church. (I write this from Suffolk in eastern England at my folks' farm. The weather has been sunny although snow is promised later in the week). One of the things that I certainly valued this morning was my ability to get out of central London by car. People reliant on public transport have been reminded, alas, that public sector trade unions are among the most cussed groups of people around. The London Underground system is threatened with a strike on New Year's Eve, which would seriously mess up many people's celebration plans. And as this story suggests, it may even tempt some people to use their cars, even if they are over the alcohol limit.

Anyway, enough of such glum thoughts. May I wish my fellow contributors and Samizdata readers a very happy Christmas and prosperous 2006.

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If you support the Tories because you dislike the Labour Party's socialist and kleptocratic underpinnings, might I suggest that you are supporting exactly the same policies just with a slightly posher accent.

And a case in point comes from Oliver Letwin, who like most politicians is rarely overburdened with a need to take a consistent position on almost any issue. He tells is that the Tories should be in the redistribution of wealth business. The only bit I find shocking is that he finally openly admits what has been obvious for rather a long time. The idea the Tories will undo anything substantive to repair the damage of the Blair years is delusional and I certainly hope Letwin keeps flapping his lips to make that clear to as many notional Tories as possible.

So as there is clearly nothing to choose ideologically between Labour and Tory, at least those who are addicted to the preposterous notion that they are empowering themselves by voting should stick to voting Labour on the basis the guys and gals from Transport House are at least more honest about the philosophical underpinnings of their theft. Moreover, as ideology is now no real basis for deciding how to vote and choosing who will be the real Big Brother is about as important as voting for who gets the boot on an episode Big Brother, people should shun the Tories because they are just so damn unappealing from a purely aesthetic perspective. The Labour party may lose the next election but it is hard to see how or why the Tory party could ever actually win it, if you get my meaning.

Or if you are one of those quixotic folks who actually think your vote really does matter, you could always vote UKIP on the basis it is without doubt in the long run the best way to destroy the wealth redistributing Tory party imaginable. And the notion of one day putting the likes of Oliver Letwin out of a job is something I really do find appealing.

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Seldom in the course of European negotiations has so much been surrendered for so little. It is amazing how the Government has moved miles while the French have barely yielded a centimetre.

- William Hague

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Tony Blair seems to be trying to make it into that dark pantheon of truly dire British Prime Ministers of the last one hundred years. Although given the procession of craven toadies who make up that list, that is really quite a task he has set himself, he is showing considerable promise of being a real contender.

Still, he has quite a way to go yet. He may have just given away £8.2 BILLION of British taxpayers money in return for nothing whatsoever... and it is nothing as all he got in return was a promise from the weak and politically toothless French government to review their huge farm subsidies in return for the UK actually giving up a huge chunk of money (yes, seriously, the French gave up a promise to do nothing more than review how much they get from the EU)... but he is still in the shadows of those who went before him.

Of course, Blair is minor league in his endless pursuit of surrendering British interests compared to such luminaries as Neville Chamberlain (he after all gave away Czechoslovakia, rather than a few billion quid, in return for another European leader's empty promises), Ted Heath (The Three Day Week and First Great Betrayal to Europe) and the evil twins of Harold Wilson/James Callaghan (joint award for the astounding destruction of British liberty and economy via wholesale nationalisation),. As in all things, Blair is just... lacking... compared to these guys. But he sure shows willing, you got to say that.

In truth, this may well be a good thing in the long run as it brings that day of some sort of 'Glorious Revolution' closer, and for all you history buffs out there, no I do not mean a Dutch backed coup d'etat, I am thinking more along the lines of what Thatcher just hinted at. Let the enemy class squeeze harder and harder and until the nation that constantly votes them into power starts to choke on its entirely democratic stupidity.

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I have come across a press release from Britain's National Health Service. The NHS is currently trying to prevent obese people from having hip replacement operations as they do not "deserve" to have such treatment, despite the little matter of their having been taxpayers like the rest of us.

"The NHS, like any proud creation of a socialist, inclusive Britain, has to operate under certain priorities. Indeed its founder, the great Soviet leader Nye Bevan, stated that socialism is about priorities. Well, there is no place and certainly no priority to treat people, who, by laziness, sloth and lack of intelligence, choose to make themselves ill or incapacitated. In fact ill people are a positive nuisance. It is the fit, able-bodied and alert people of Britain who deserve to be treated by the Greatest Health Service Devised by Mankind. No more obese people. No more smokers. No more drinkers. No more red meat eaters and chocolate fans. Such habits have no place in a socialist Britain. Let such vile habits wither away."

I am still trying to vouch for the authenticity of this release. Looks plausible to me.

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In what used to be called the 'Middle Ages' men of learning got together at various places in England (as they had done before in other lands) - Oxford, Cambridge and other towns (where universities were later suppressed by various means).

At first these scholars operated on a fairly informal basis (this was the tiny element of truth in the old lie about Oxford University being founded by Alfred the Great - Alfred visited the town, Alfred always had men of learning with him [indeed was one himself] such men had students, therefore...) and students paid them for their teaching.

Later such learned men operated from collages (the oldest in Cambridge being Peterhouse) and helped educate students (mainly for the church).

Over time students (or those who helped them) tended to pay the collage rather than individual learned men (although the old idea lasted in Scotland - where Adam Smith claimed it was the great advantage that Scottish higher education had over English) and the direct connection between students going to a master they revered became somewhat weaker.

In the 19th century the University (as an institution, backed by Acts of Parliament) started to rise in importance relative to the collages. And in the 20th century government began to play a much bigger role - first through funding individual students (rather than just setting up a collage with an endowment - as various Kings and other leading people had done) and then, rather later, by increasing regulation of what went on in the Universities (he who pays the piper calls the tune - as the academics forgot to their cost).

However, in both Oxford and Cambridge the idea (if not the reality) of the independent scholar - the man (these days 'the person') seeking truth and passing it on to students lived on.

This week one of the last reminders of the days when men of learning were independent (rather than just employees of the University) finally died.

For 800 years it has been assumed that it a person made a discovery it was their discovery - but now it has been decided that this is not quite so.

The specific matter is patents. Now I know that libertarians have different opinions about patents, but it is not my concern here to take any particular line on whether patents are justified or not - my concern is to point out how the status of individual scholars has changed.

Patents for scientific discoveries are now a matter for the University to have a 'policy' about.

Of course there will be all sorts of 'safeguards' for the scholars, 90% of the first 100, 000 pounds earned from a patent will go to them - and they will get other benefits. But the principle has been accepted - the discoveries of individual scholars are a matter for the 'policy' of the University.

This has been democratically decided by a vote of the university people - of course there would have been no vote if there had not been a revolt against the imposing of the policy by the administration of the University, but there has been vote.

The standard features of modern democracy applied. The people who have already made their discoveries (or know they never will discover anything) have outvoted the creative minority - and those academics who might have moral problems with the whole thing have been convinced by the normal propaganda assault in support of the powers-that-be (articles in the Times Higher Education Supplement, subtle attacks on researchers who "just want to get rich" and so on).

So the climate that produced various business enterprises in the Cambridge area will decline, and those people who stay at Cambridge will become more and more just employees of the University - rather than the independent scholars that such people once were.

Why should I care? After all I am no scholar - I can not even spell, and have no idea about grammar. And, in any case, it is natural scientists who are going to suffer - and my knowledge (such as it is) lies in the humanities and 'social sciences'.

Well I would like to think that I am concerned about the freedom of people very different from myself. I am also sad to see another nail in the coffin of an old tradition (I am a conservative as well as a libertarian).

However, I suppose there is a selfish reason.

I suffered years ago from making the mistake (for which I have no one to blame but myself) of thinking in terms of an organisation rather than individual scholars.

I thought in terms of the 'University of York' forgetting that the Politics Department of the University of York contained no one I would wish to hear speak, or whose writings I valued.

The old view of learning - i.e. that one went to learn from people one revered, would have been a far better view for me to have to have followed, than the modern organization view that I (unthinkingly) held.

The ghost of that old view still lingered in Cambridge (lingered, I am told, more than it does in Oxford), it is weaker now.

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I keep banging on about this subject since it is, in my eyes, a prime example of how the state is not pulling its share of the deal in coercing the citizenry to pay for schooling and for coercing children to spend the ages of 5 to 16 or more in school. Latest official data suggest that standards of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren are not up to scratch.

Schools are not doing enough to improve the literacy and numeracy skills of those pupils who start their secondary education with low standards in English and mathematics," a report from Ofsted said.

The findings were released on the same day the National Audit Office, the government's spending watchdog, said more employers need to invest time and money in teaching staff basic skills such as maths and English.

Tony Blair is locked in conflict with his Labour backbench MPs over his education reforms. From a superficial reading, one would get the impression that Blair wanted to drastically open up the amount of choice available to parents as to where their offspring are educated. In practice, nothing so drastic seems to be on the cards and yet the slightest hint of increased choice seems to send socialists into a frenzy.

The other night, the Institute of Economic Affairs held an evening to honour the late, great Arthur Seldon, who among other reforms made the idea of school vouchers one of his pet issues. It is fair to say that we are as yet a million miles from achieving the kind of choice in education that Arthur wanted to bring about.

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Charles Crawford, the British ambassador to Poland, is in hot water for an e-mail which says several entire true things:

He describes the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as "the most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism".

He also ridicules French leader Jacques Chirac for "nagging the British taxpayer to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa".

He also suggests Blair gives EU leaders one hour to make up their minds on the budget because "If anyone says no, we end the meeting. The EU will move on to a complete mess of annual budgets. Basically suits us - we'll pay less and the rebate stays 100 percent intact".

Oh, but he was only 'joking' of course. Riiiight.

Yes, this guy should indeed be fired from his job as an ambassador... he belongs in 10 Downing Street doing Tony Blair's job!

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Patrick Wilks writes in with an eyewitness account and interesting picture of the oil explosion

We are all fine as the fire is about four miles away. The initial explosion woke us up just after six, my wife thought it was an earthquake but I must admit it did not trouble me and I went back to sleep. Out the front of the house the smoke was very thick and it was like night almost but out the back it was bright sun shine quite a contrast.

A lot of the roads round Hemel Hempstead have been closed which is causing the most problem. One area that was hit bad was Hunters Oak, were we used to have a house in 1990. That location is only about half a mile from the depot.

I drove past this morning and the fires were still very big but not as much as yesterday. In the picture its hard to see but the flames were a good few hundred feet into the air. This was taken on the edge of the village. The kids are pleased as they have just heard that the schools are closed tomorrow.

(click for larger image)

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It is rare for the Prime Minister to provide an insight into his intellectual worldview. Writing in the Observer today, Blair details his views on civil liberties and his differences with the liberal tradition.

These [summary] powers have a strong philosophical justification, from within the Labour tradition. Social democratic thought was always the application of morality to political philosophy. One of the basic insights of the left, one of its distinguishing features, is to caution against too excessive an individualism. People must live together and one of the basic tasks of government is to facilitate this living together, to ensure that the many can live without fear of the few.

That was why it was important that rights were coupled once again with responsibilities. As Tawney once put it: 'what we have been witnessing ... is the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations'.

Blair argues that the tradition of social democracy applies "morality to political philosophy", with the unspoken implication that other traditions are unable to do so. This is accompanied by an attack on individualism with a phrase of much potential: that government ensures "the many can live without the fear of the few".

Recent history has appeared to demonstrate that it is the few who should live in fear of the many. It is not surprising that the Left views the majority as a moral virtue.

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At about 6 am this morning I woke up startled by the sound of a distant thud. It turns out that the noise was caused by a huge explosion at a fuel depot in Hertfordshire to the north of London. A massive plume of smoke is pouring into the sky and traces of it can be seen above the skyline in central London, dulling what would otherwise be a magnificently blue, bright sky.

So far, no-one has been killed in the blast, which happened in an industrial estate rather than in the midst of a densely packed area of housing. Thank goodness. The police are so far treating the blast as an accident. We shall see. The M1 motorway leading north has been closed. If anyone reading this has any travel plans, I'd give the Hemel Hempstead area a miss.

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James Bartholomew, author of 'The Welfare State We're In', agreed to face a panel of unsympathetic critics in a debate held at the London School of Economics and arranged by BBC Radio 4. Whether the structure of this debate met the guidelines for impartiality laid down by the BBC is a moot point, but James Bartholomew conveyed the major points of his argument, despite interruptions from the panel and the chair that truncated the majority of his argument.

Nicholas Barr is Professor of Public Economics at the European Institute, LSE and author of The Economics of the Welfare State. Edward Davey MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson on Education, MP for Kingston and Surbiton and a contributor to the recent Orange Book – Reclaiming Liberalism. Niall Dickson, formerly Social Affairs Editor for the BBC, is now Chief Executive of the King’s Fund. Professor Pat Thane is director of the Centre for Contemporary British History, and author of The Foundations of the Welfare State.

None of the panel disagreed strongly with the facts presented by James Bartholomew. It was clear that disagreement stemmed from two fundamentally different worldviews rather than disputing the contemporary effects of the welfare state. Whereas some consider functional illiteracy of 20% to be an indictment of state education and a sufficient reason for its abolition, the panel viewed this failure as room for improvement. Without making the trite comparison of managerialism versus morality, the effect of politics as the art of the possible on individual lives was made very clear.

The poor may have suffered from insecurity concerning health care before the welfare state came into existence. However, if they felt fear over paying for their treatment, this has been replaced by the fear that they may not be treated at all due to healthcare rationing or professional triage. During his talk, James Bartholomew echoed Perry de Havilland and told the audience that the state is not your friend. He showed the blight that the welfare state has wrought on the lives of many individuals and stated that there were no panaceas which could reverse the social and cultural damage.

More thoughts from the speaker can be found here.

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So the Boy Wonder (same age as yours truly, gulp) has been elected leader of the Conservatives. We have been fairly rough on David Cameron these past few weeks, concerned that Cameron does not seem to stand for anything much other than a desire to be jolly nice, moderate and sensible (ie. to maintain the status quo with a blue tinge). Well, I am at least prepared to repress my concerns for a while and see how he does. With the economy showing signs of cracking under the increasingly oppressive Chancellorship of Gordon Brown, and with Blair seemingly unable to push through his reforms, the time is ripe. Luck has a huge bearing on politics and as Bonaparte said of his generals, luck is as important as ability. The media has certainly been gushing about him, which again gives me the jitters. If the Tories are to win, they must regain some of their lost territory in places like the West Midlands, not just the salons of Islington.

We shall see.

UPDATE: I seem to have hit the post button almost at the same time as our sainted Perry. Great minds think alike!

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David Cameron is the new Tory leader. So we have a 'choice' between two Blairites.

I cannot tell you how excited I am about this development

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The British Government can solve its pensions crisis. But it doesn't want to. Having spent all their lives trying to persuade everybody that they can offer something for nothing because somebody else is paying, all policians find themselves unable to break the habit. Having quietly seized exorbitant benefits at the general taxpayer's expense (on the excuse that they are poorly paid, which isn't true now, if it ever was), public sector employees are not letting go.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
- R.Kipling

An unfunded national pension scheme avaialable to the majority of the population is much like a Ponzi scheme: a pyramid 'investment' trick that is illegal everywhere--except when operated by governments. It depends on ever more suckers paying over ever more money (in this case, compelled by taxation) to finance the unfeasible returns promised to those entering earlier. The trimming of the Turner Commission just beds the con in deeper. We can expect a trivial postponement to distract attention from more pensions, more taxation, and a bigger future squeeze.

The simple (and only) solution is to follow the example of Bismarck when he invented the national pension. Convert an unsustainable Ponzi into a Tontine: a survivor benefit scheme. The pensionable age must be raised above the expectation of life, so that most people do not live to receive it. How much above depends on the benefits one wants to grant.

The corollary is even more unpalatable to politicans. The much more generous unfunded pensions for public sector workers, including themselves--unless they are to take an ever greater and ever more resented share of national income--must begin at *older* ages than the open national scheme. Until civil servants retire at 80+, and unfunded pensions for the general public start at 75, we will know the government (with both sizes of G) only cares about looking after its own, and that the vapourings about "crisis" are a just a smokescreen for more control over private income and savings.

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MP Andrew Dismore has blocked attempts to clarify the law on self defence in Britain being proposed by MP Anne McIntosh, because he thinks it would be 'vigilante law'.

Well I have thought for some time now that non-state use of force in defence of life, limb and private property is exactly what is needed in this country and to make no apology for robustly defending what is yours. Take the law into your own hands because it is indeed yours to take, not Andrew Dismore's to deny. I realise that if you are old, infirm or a small woman living alone, the fact the state has disarmed you means you have no option whatsoever but to surrender your property and just pray the criminal(s) will not harm you, but those of us still physically able should be encouraged to use whatever weapons they can find at hand to assert some self ownership. Just do not make the mistake of calling the Police in Britain after the fact if you can possibly avoid it as they work for the likes of Andrew Dismore and are not there to serve you.

You may not have the legal right to fight back effectively, but you will always have the moral right to defend yourself and what is yours. Look at it this way, if you are the only one left alive after some son of a bitch breaks into your house, well, that means it is going to be hard for him to sue you or contradict your version of events, doesn't it. If they do make it out, then just clean up the mess and deny everything.

Vigilante law? As so many members of the political class in Britain leave us with little alternative, I am all for it. When the state fails in its most fundamental duty, it is time for society to remember whose law it really is. If you are able to, fight back, just keep in mind you will be fighting back against the state as well and act accordingly when the plod turns up a few hours or days later to 'protect' you.

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I receive many emails from something called UK Conservatism, but fear that if I try to stop them I will then receive further emails about sex toys, Asian ladyboy brides and such. So they keep coming.

The latest from UKC contains this easily misunderstood question, from the probably quite soon to be late Lord Tebbit:

The party recently fought its worst campaign ever. It offered cleaner hospitals, better schools, safer streets, limits on immigration and almost imperceptible tax cuts. But who campaigned for dirtier hospitals, worse schools, less safe streets or unlimited migration?

Yes. That is what the Conservative Party should have been saying!

I know what Tebbit meant, and he has a point. But meanwhile, seriously, if we did have a government committed to supplying "dirtier hospitals, worse schools, less safe streets" and "unlimited migration", we would almost certainly end up with cleaer hospitals, better schools, safer streets, and the ideal immigration policy consisting of lots of the right people and far fewer of the wrong ones. Why? Because when we all know that the government is not handling a problem, there is a decent chance that the right things will then get done. By mere people.

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It is always fascinating to watch one's enemies twisting and turning on the spiky contradictions of their own ideology. It is also rather interesting to see your enemies turning on each other.

As Lord May of Oxford put the boot in to environmental activists during his speech to the Royal Society:

[He] said that environmental campaigners risked holding back the fight against climate change with an absolutist approach that refused to consider nuclear power.

"I recognise there are huge problems with nuclear, but these have to be weighed against other problems," Lord May said. "This has to be recognised as a problem by what you might call a fundamentalist belief system.

And we also get to see Tony Blair's speech to the Confederation of British Industry being disrupted by Green activists.

The Greens say we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions and yet when the government tries to adopt nuclear power to do exactly that, the Greens are up in arms.

Face it, unless the world agrees to regress to a pre-industrial level of technology with commensurate mass death of 'surplus' modern levels of population, the Greens will never be satisfied. Never mind that most climate change is probably caused by natural processes.

At least these guys are honest about what they really want.

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It is not hard to understand why the government does not regard mugging as so serious a crime that it should always lead to a jail sentence, provided "minimal force" is used.

As the government have long made it clear that people should not defend their property with force against people who try to take it by force, they regard just handing your money and goods over as sensible and responsible behaviour. In short, they think the way to prevent violent crime is to stop people resisting and therefore remove the need for muggers to use actual violence rather than just the threat of it.

In other words, they want to make muggers more like tax collectors. Is that really so surprising?

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It has been a sad few days in British sport, which has lost arguably the most talented football player these islands have produced in George Best. He died, as many people will know, a few years after having a liver transplant necessitated by a long history of alcohol abuse. For those unfamiliar with his story, he was born in Belfast and played at Manchester United in one of its most successful periods in the mid- to late 60s but left top-class football aged only 27.

I am glad that in most of the coverage about him, the focus has been on the football rather than the messy personal life. And what a fantastic player he was! If even Brazilian maestro Pele called him the greatest player in the world, then who are we to demur? I was born in the year - 1966 - that Best gave what aficionados and team-mates reckon was Best's finest display, demolishing Portugese side Benfica with two goals, the second involving a mazy run past several defenders before sticking the ball into the back of the net.

Best was an alcoholic, which some people regard as a disease that one is born with rather than a condition over which people, possessed of free will, have control. Interestingly, I get the impression, by reading some of Best's own remarks, that he was a man in control of his own destiny and did not, as far as I am aware, choose to play the victim card. There is no doubt, though, that some people have found it hard to conquer the bottle, although others, such as Tottenham soccer ace Jimmy Greaves, managed to give up on booze and preserve their health and live into a ripe old age.

Anyway, I expect DVDs of Best's football brilliance to be hot sellers this Christmas. May he rest in peace.

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I have just finished reading James Bartholomew's fine book, The Welfare State We're In, which lays out, in tightly argued detail and a welter of colourful character sketches, the disaster wrought by state welfare in Britain. One of his chapters deals with the state's actions in the area of pensions, now a red-hot controversial area for politicians not just in Britain, but in much of the industrialised world where populations are greying and birthrates falling.

Today, it appears that Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, may have pre-emptively stiffed a report, due out next week, from the Pension Commission panel. The Commission is thought to be advocating measures such as tackling the disincentives to saving caused by means-testing, and in raising the state pension age to 67 or more.

Whatever happens, Bartholomew's diagnosis of our ills is a powerful one and lays out the brutal fact that our political class, if judged by the same laws as applied to financial firms like insurers, banks or fund managers, would be indicted for fraud on an epic scale. It makes one weep to think of the opportunity that was lost in the destruction of Britain's fast-growing private savings culture prior to the First World War.

I can also strongly recommend Bartholomew's blog.

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A few weeks ago I linked to a speech given by the head of a private schools organisation, in which said individual fretted about the decline in the teaching of certain subjects such as physics and foreign languages. Responses were interesting. One or two commenters thought the system is pretty good. (Yes, seriously). One fellow even claimed to be "genuinely bowled over" by how good it was. More common responses were on the lines that in a free market, if there is a shortage of folk with engineering or linguistic abilities, then sooner or later supply would come through, if not from the UK's own workforce, then from overseas forms of supply. Up to a point I agree. As a free marketeer, it would be perverse for me to bleat about "shortages" or X and Y and then not realise that one person's shortage is another person's entrepreneurial opportunity.

The difficulty, of course, is that we don't have a fully free market system of education in this country, but one in which the incentive impact of price signals and salary levels gets blunted by a predominantly state-run system, with its national programmes, bureaucracies and state-mandated certificates and qualifications. This means that if there is a shortage of say, physics teachers, it may take a while for the shortage to be made up. Learning physics to a high standard can take even the brightest students quite a while. And if the supply of teachers in certain fields drops off, it can take several years to make up the gap easily, though modern technology possibly can help disseminate information more effectively than the chalk-and-blackboard approach of the past.

If, on the other hand, the scarcity of physics teachers changes slowly, then a more market-driven schooling system can react to that more nimbly. People who work in industry but who may want a less stressful life might be interested in teaching science part-time, for example. Among the greying populations of the industrialised world, there might be a potentially big pool of people who might like to teach the young but on a part-time basis.

A story here points to continued worries about what is happening with science education in this country, especially in the field of physics. I am not of course saying that the existing system can be made better by tweaking a few courses here and there. A move towards a genuine market in education is what is required over the long term.

For those who think of schooling in a post-Prussian statist mindset, you can blow out some collectivist cobwebs here and also here

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Like Brian Micklethwait, I have been at the annual conference of the Libertarian Alliance , held at the National Liberal Club, a glorious Victorian building erected at a time when Britain's ruling Liberal Party (formerly the Whigs) was genuinely liberal in the classical sense of that word. Among the topics to fuel the mind: libertarian approaches to the environment, a debate about whether limited-liability companies were a good thing; the contribution to libertarian thought of Ayn Rand and reflections on private enterprise and defence. An excellent collection of subjects.

As some regular readers will know, the founder and director of the L.A., Chris R. Tame, has been fighting cancer and made a great effort to be present throughout the entire conference. Anyone who knows and admires this clever, generous and tenacious man will not be surprised at his determination not only to set up this conference but also to set in train plans for future events. He received a surprise award celebrating his achievements on Saturday night's banquet, and no-one deserved it more. Without Chris, it is probable that Britain's present libertarian movement would not exist, and I don't think I am writing out of turn in doubting whether Samizdata would be quite what it is now, either.

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There is controversy over the fact the Metropolitan Police are using 'dum dum' bullets (which is a term used by people who know nothing about firearms to describe any bullet designed to expand upon impact).

The reason a police force or anyone with a legitimate need to use a weapon in self-defence (i.e. far more people than just the police) would use a handgun firing expanding bullets is to (1) prevent the bullet exiting the target's body and thereby use all the kinetic energy to inflict a wound rather that... (2) leaving the bullet with enough energy that it goes clean through the intended target and wastes energy making a hole in a wall behind them or, much worse, making a hole in an innocent bystander.

It is a scandal that the Metropolitan Police killed an innocent Brazilian man and then lied about the sequence of events that led up to that happening. It is not a scandal that they used expanding bullets to do it. Would the ignorant twits in the media and various clueless Islamic 'spokesmen' trying to make this into a story have preferred that the cops not only killed an innocent man but also killed or injured someone else in the train by using non-expanding military style full metal jacket ammunition? It would be a scandal if they were not using expanding bullets.

The whole point of shooting someone is to cause them serious harm so that they cannot harm you or anyone else. In what way is it somehow morally preferable to use a weapon which does not cause as much harm per round-in-the-target, thereby requiring you to just shoot more bullets into them to kill or incapacitate them?

The only dum(b) dum(b)s here are the various Muslim idiots quoted in the Guardian article and their friends in the media who think this should be an issue.

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Stella Rimington, the Judi Dench of the twilight world, has acted as a conduit for intel's view on ID cards. They will not work.

Asked at a further education conference whether she thought ID cards would make the country safer, Dame Stella Rimington replied: "No is the very simple answer, although ID cards have possibly some purpose.

"But I don't think anybody in the intelligence services - not in my former service - will be pressing for ID cards."

On the same day, Sir Ian Blair gave the Dimblebore Lecture, trying to disguise his support for a single police force a la NuLab, behind honeyed words of opening debate and acquiring responsibility.

First, we want a single police service, not a multiplicity of them. By, that I do not necessarily mean a single national police force but one holistic service to cover the whole of the mission.

Despite calling for a debate which involved the public, Blair betrayed his liberal-left roots, praising the welfare state (namechecking Beveridge) and decrying local constabularies as islands of lower middle class conservatism. He painted a bleak picture of high crime, violence and anti-social behaviour that required the police to act as the moral arbiters of society, All as part of the debate. The conclusion boils down to "We have lost your respect, That is your fault and you must do something about it by having a debate led by us."

Sir Ian Blair's support for Labour's policies of a national police force, obscured by totems of accountability and transparency, ran through this speech. Perhaps he genuinely welcomes a debate, but only if the conclusions are correct. The invocation of the 7th July as 'the event' around which all police work should be organised was another hint at the paramilitary policing which would provide moral comfort to state defined communities. ID cards never got a look-in just to avoid the appearance of bias.

You see, the British never really got to grips with policing because the lack of a written constitution demonstrates our lack of forethought in these and, no doubt, so many other matters:

And here I come to the second question, which is 'who is to decide?' and I return to my story about running back that far.

Despite my whole professional lifetime in policing, I believe it should be you, not me, who decides what kind of police we want. I'll return to the third question - about how - later on.

For nearly two centuries, the British have not considered any of these questions very thoroughly. That is fairly typical.

We are one of the few countries in the world without a written constitution.

We have none of the exact distinctions between the executive and the legislature of the United States or between the roles of central and local government in France; we operate through gradual compromise and evolution.

But, even in that context, the police have a disadvantage.

We have been a service which has always been separate and silent, which successive governments - until recently - and all of you, your parents and your grandparents, have broadly left alone to get on with the job that you have given it.

Two answers: remove gun control and elect chief constables for each county or borough. Easy, isn't it!

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A regular commenter on this blog asked the question of whether the present Labour government is the most corrupt UK administration, ever. It is an interesting one. Blair and his wife enjoy the trappings of office, and at the taxpayer’s expense, with a gusto that is certainly hard to take. Cherie Blair’s activities are particularly questionable, such as the fees she reportedly made for speaking on behalf of charity. The recent demise of David Blunkett, who resigned earlier this month as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in scandal about his financial dealings, underscores how socialists are often unseated by money.

But is this the most bent government ever? I don’t know. It would be nice if there were some sort of mathematical metric to judge the relative probity or venality of different administrations. The previous Major government had its share of pretty corrupt politicians. In the early 1990s we had the Matrix-Churchill affair concerning arms shipments to Iraq. Mrs Thatcher’s governments were relatively straight, although a few ministers did move remarkably easily into the top jobs of industries they had privatised. The Callaghan government, as far as I know, had few major financial scandals, although the Harold Wilson government had its low points, not least in Wilson’s unfortunate choice of friends.

In fact, public life in Britain, at least as far as the history books are concerned, was fairly honest between the end of the First World War and the late 50s. We had the Profumo Affair at the fag end of the McMillan administration and a generation earlier, David Lloyd George caused outrage through the sale of peerages for hard cash. The Salisbury, Gladstone, Disraeli and Palmerston premierships were pretty honest, as was that of Robert Peel. It was during the Victorian age that the civil service was placed on a far more professional footing and the practice of buying commissions in the British Army was brought to an end (the Royal Navy, while not perfect, tended to be far more meritocratic. It had to be. Sailing a man-of-war takes a bit of intelligence).

So arguably, you have to go back to the early 19th Century and the 18th Century before you find governments as venal as the current one. Elections, in which only a tiny fraction of the adult population could vote, were frequently drunken, corrupt affairs. Rotten boroughs, financial sinecures and bribery were commonplace. Politicians as diverse as William Cobbett and Edmund Burke railed against corruption.

A secondary question though, is how much of a problem is corruption? Classical liberals like James Buchanan and the late Arthur Seldon might argue that if the state expands and gobbles a higher chunk of our money and regulates, taxes and disburses more subsidies, then it increases the temptation to bend the system, win favours and bribe officials. Jam attracts flies. In some parts of the world, government regulations and taxes are so oppressive that economies would break down without bribery. I have heard it said – and it rings true to me – that Italian laws and taxes are so bad that about a third of the economy is carried out in the black economy. And Africa is rife with this sort of thing, as all those spam letters you get from Nigeria suggest.

So corruption is as much a symptom as much of a cause of our current woes. It may be gratifying to see politicians like Blair and his ghastly wife brought down over corruption. But let’s not forget that the real challenge remains to cut back the state to size so that these folks don’t have the opportunity. And let’s not also forget that there have been many persons in public life who have been entirely free of financial corruption, but like Robespierre and Lenin, were corrupted by the charms of wielding power over other people to murderous effect.

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P.J. O'Rourke, the Republican Party Reptile supreme, has some caustic things to say about David Cameron, who may become the next leader of the Conservative Party. He is not terribly impressed:

The guy obviously doesn't understand the fundamental truth about politics, which is that the best minds only produce disasters. Scientists, for example, are famously idiots when it comes to politics. I agree with Friedrich Hayek, who said in The Road to Serfdom that the "worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it".

Just once, I'd love to hear a politician say: "We're going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this." The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys. More importantly, they are not going to try to do anything very much. They'll fix lunch or take the dog for a walk before they get on to pressing political problems of the day - and by the time lunch is over, it's time to take the dog for another walk and prepare dinner. That's the right order of political priorities. The greatest danger in politics is people who try to do things.

By coincidence, Cameron has an article bashing Blair in the same edition of today's Sunday Telegraph. It is not a bad article and correctly identifies much of the arrogance and reliance on a Big Government worldview. Like O'Rourke, I really would like this fellow to live up to his own declared scepticism about government activism and place the government of this country on a more modest, intelligent course.

For what it is worth, though, I could not care less about whether Cameron has gone to a smart private school or not. Even O'Rourke clobbers Cameron for this, much to my susprise. Social chippiness ill becomes advocates of classical liberalism.

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Al-Quaeda has called Queen Elizabeth II an "enemy of Islam", not least for her being the ceremonial head of the Church of England. I of course hope that the vast majority of Muslims living in this country do not think the same way. In any event, let's hope Prince Charles takes notice.

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The leader in this week's Spectator kicks off with this zinger of a paragraph:

When history comes to make a final judgment on the Blair government — and we can be forgiven for hoping that moment is not too much longer delayed — there is one key statistic by which to assess the Prime Minister’s performance. Since 1997 the Labour government has created no fewer than 700 new criminal offences. This is supposed to be an age of increasing peace and prosperity. Yet the Labour party has been in such a continuous panic about the behaviour and potential behaviour of the British people that it has found 700 new ways in which to proscribe courses of conduct. In case you are wondering how that compares with any previous administration, Labour is creating criminal offences at a rate ten times greater than that of any other government.

No further comment required, surely.

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Earlier this year the British government overturned the old "double jeopardy" rule, that previously meant that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence. Today, Reuters reports that the first case of a man to face jurors for a second time for the same alleged crime is to go ahead.

This is another step down a slippery slope, precisely because the argument for ending the rule is so seductive at first glance. It is possible to sympathise with victims or relative of crime victims who see a person whom they think has gotten away with it. Many years ago in the course of my then job, I watched several court cases in my native East Anglia and saw people get away with crimes on technicalities. It was maddening.

But - the double jeopardy rule existed for a reason. If people can be repeatedly tried for the same crime, it creates a potential very bad and unintended consequence: police and the Crown Prosecution Service will become lazy in the preparation of cases. Why bother to get a case presented as powerfully as possible and with as much care if you think that if X gets acquitted, one can always have another go, and another, and another....?

The potential for abuse of power from double jeopardy is at the core of why the rule exists. The law in the United States was based on the English model. Hard cases, however appealing, make bad laws, as they say. This is a bad day for justice in Britain. There have been a lot of them lately.

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All over the UK tonight, the sky will be lit up with fireworks and the evening will reverberate with a lot of loud bangs as folk mark Guy Fawke's Night. Here is a nifty website explaining all about the event, what is commemorated and why. I'll be off to Battersea Park later this evening to enjoy the fun. I hope people use their common sense and don't get hurt.

Here is an informative book about the early 17th Century plot to blow up Parliament and the subsequent anti-Catholic crackdown. There is also even something called the Gunpowder Plot Society.

When I was a student living in Brighton, I once went to nearby Lewes, a town that stages a massive series of processions and bonfires every year. It is pretty non-PC in that a lot of people have muttered that such an event, especially one that involves burning effigies of a 17th Century Pope, stirs up ugly prejudices. I can sympathise up to a point with the grumblers. When I went along to the event there was the smell not just of gunpowder in the air but quite a lot of aggressive body language on display (although that may have been due to the potent local ales). I am glad to say that, all this time on, anti-Popery hysteria is mostly a thing of the past in Britain (apart from the odd bit of nuttiness at Glaswegian local football matches between Celtic and Rangers). Alas, it lingers on in Northern Ireland.

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Here are the latest statistics on crime in Britain. Police statistics, according to this BBC report, show that violent crimes have gone up, while another survey shows that violent crimes are broadly stable. (The usual health warnings about statistics obviously apply). However you look at it, crime is high.

Regardless of what one thinks about the potentially civil libertarian worries about millions of CCTV cameras now scattered around the country, it hardly appears that they are very useful in deterring crime, which as far as I know, was the stated purpose for the things.

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Something extremely interesting has just been reported on Newsnight.

David Cameron has apparently been saying for some time now (but I missed it until now) that he is against "opposition for opposition's sake" and that the Conservatives may well be voting for the Government's latest education reforms. David Cameron is and has for some time been the Conservative spokesman on education, and he seems to be handling the Conservative response to these proposals.

Yesterday I did a posting concerning Cameron, and the consensus among the Samizdata commentariat was that nobody knew what Cameron stood for, or what any of his ideas might be. But I think what we have here is an idea of great importance. Maybe not an especially original one, and long overdue, but extremely potent mevertheless.

The Conservative Opposition has spent the last decade opposing everything that the Government has done, a process which I particularly associate with William Hague, but which his successors have not fundamentally altered. And since the Government has been relentlessly "triangulating" – i.e. stealing whichever Conservative policies they think are popular or which they think will eventually prove popular because they think that they will in the meantime work – this has meant the Conservatives suffering from a permanent, yet self-imposed, philosophical incoherence.

One moment the Conservatives would be saying that something or other that the Government was talking about should be more market-oriented. A moment later, some other Government initiative that was more market-oriented would be complained about. Complained about, as Cameron has apparently said, for the sake of complaining. One moment the Government was being not tough enough on terrorists, the next moment too tough, for doing pretty much what the Conservatives had just said they should do in another context. This is not opposition, so much as opposition-ism. It says: whatever they do is wrong! Never mind why. Never mind what we would do, or what we really think of it. Denounce it! We just scrape up whatever mud we can find on the floor and chuck it at them. No wonder the Conservatives have won parliamentary battle after parliamentary battle, but have been slaughtered again and again in the electoral war.

What would the Conservatives do, if they were the Government? For the last ten years, they have offered no sort of answer. And for this reason, there has been, in the competitive sense, no opposition, because no alternative Government that it made sense to even consider voting for. All anyone knew about the Conservatives was that they did not like the Government. Big surprise. But that is not a policy; it is a mere emotion. It has condemned the Conservatives to relentless irrelevance and unending public ridicule.

Now, if this "Cameron doctrine" is what it appears to be, and more to the point, if it goes into action right across the board, with David Cameron imposing it across the board in his capacity as Conservative Leader, New Labour will finally face what you might call a New Nightmare.

Take these education reforms. Blair says they are intended to make schools more independent and self-governed, and less controlled by local authorities. This is very Conservative friendly stuff, and not at all Labour friendly. There is a good chance that the massed ranks of Labour MPs will not vote for these reforms in nearly sufficient numbers, but that a more unified Conservative Party will see the reforms through nevertheless. This will split the Labour Party from top to bottom. We are doing Conservative policy! And with Conservative help! And in spite of our core beliefs!

Repeat that procedure every time Blair presents one of his reforms, but oppose ferociously when they resort to old fashioned, Old Labour, collectivism, and suddenly it is a new Parliamentary ball game.

It gets worse for Labour. In the electorate as a whole, the question will start to be asked: if we already have a Government that does Conservative things, despite its own supporters, and if that is what that nice Mr Blair thinks should be done, then does it not make sense to vote for the real thing, and vote in a real Conservative Government?

This is a tactical switch that the Conservatives should, from the purely political and competitive point of view, have done years ago. Finally, they have done it.

Or then again, maybe they have not. Cameron might not win the Conservative Leadership. Davies might go back to crass oppositionism. Cameron may win, but it may turn out that "opposition for opposition's sake" was just a nice sounding phrase to win him the job, and he will then forget about it and carry on with the mud slinging.

But, this might just be a political turning point.

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An Algerian man was arrested and put on trial in Belfast. We hope the evidence they have is of more substance than the mere presence of 25 disks of downloaded information on explosives. If that were ever to become a definition of crime in and of itself, I fear every technically inclined 14 year old in the Anglosphere would soon be imprisoned.

The defendant was living not far from a neighborhood controlled by Protestant Paramilitaries, most likely due to the presence of cheap housing.

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How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent?

Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story.

But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude – honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which – is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron's type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one's best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate.

The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that these people do not work twenty hour days, day after day after day, year after year, and study the grease on their greasy pole with obsessive attention. But you can work fifty brilliantly accomplished hours every day of your life and still not be Prime Minister or now, anything near it, if you are, to note just one of many uncontrollable political disabilities, bald. Or if the hair you do have is ginger. Maybe those rules will change, but for now, there they are. My point is that maybe, yes, there is a sense in which Gordon Brown deserves everything he has had, and may still have coming. But the same applies to thousands of others just as deserving, who came nowhere near to his eminence.

Democratic politics is an extraordinarily flooky business. Timing, for instance, is everything. One basic reason why Cameron looks like winning the Conservative leadership is that he is younger than his rivals. All of them, but not he, are members of a fatally tainted generation of Conservatives who did well, or who thought they would do well, or who are thought to have thought that they would do well – who enjoyed – Thatcherism. Smug bastards, screw the whole damn lot of them, is the view of the electorate. All the expensively educated charm in the world would have been of no use to Cameron if he had been ten years older than he is, and had spent his early political years feeling – or merely looking – smug about being a member of Thatcher's Conservative Party.

I deliberately did not read this article by Matthew Parris before writing the above about Cameron. I but now have. Parris notes that the toffs are back, but does not really say why.

I have already explained some of why toffs can be more likeable, but why is mere likeability now considered important? As Parris points out, for a generation before Blair, it was not. Ghastly nouveau riche meritocratic peasants dominated the Conservatives for several decades. And Labour has not been in the habit of picking obviously posh leaders, not since Ramsay MacDonald. Only now are the toffs "back in the saddle". What gives?

I think it is that the British now believe that they can afford the luxury of only paying attention to likeable leaders. David Cameron, you might say, is a bet on Britain continuing to have a quiet life of genteel decline, with no events.

But if there is a job to be done, such as trade unions to be crushed and national bankruptcy to be dodged, a war to be won, a welfare state to be built, then disliked or socially inept leaders elbow their annoying and embarrassing way to the top and do whatever needs to be done. Thatcher had her silly voice lessons and her all round overbearingness, quite aside from the amazing handicap of being female. Churchill and Attlee, so different in so many ways, also had unlikeability in common. Churchill, although educated as a toff, was ludicrously over-the-top in manner until an over-the-top job (thwarting Adolf Hitler) hove into view and rescued him from ludicrousness, while Attlee was so far under the top as to be invisible, as Churchill in particular loved to piont out. But they each got their various jobs done, and were then dumped as soon as they had done them, the Churchill and Attlee jobs having been laid end to end.

But when there is nothing important to be done, toffdom is reinstalled, in the person first of the sanctified post-war Churchill, of Eden, and then when that went wrong too, Harold Macmillan. And now, we have nice Tony Blair, the Hugh Grant of British politics, and Labour's answer to Macmillan.

The Wilson/Heath/Callaghan period can now be understood as a series of attempts to do what Thatcher finally did do, namely "get Britain moving", as Wilson put it, with Callaghan foolishly imagining that a kind of Old Labour toffdom ("What crisis?") was relevant and sufficient, when it was neither.

But now, it is believed, we are back to an age of post-ideological calm, or settlement, during which a nice guy who did not do the ideology can surrender to that ideological settlement, gracefully. Hence Tony Blair. And Cameron is the Conservative Party's way of acknowledging that niceness now counts for more than getting anything done, or anything changed.

Interestingly, the prominent Conservative who now disagrees with this most strongly is Ken Clarke. On Europe I find Clarke repulsive, to which he has now added the vice of lying about being repulsive, which he at least used not to do. But of all the Conservative candidates in this leadership election, he has been the one most given to denouncing Gordon Brown and all his works. If the British people ever decide that they again need someone to get Britain moving, again, well, we know how Blair and Brown will fare. They will not. They are the ones now presiding, Macmillan style, over the slow-down. But would Cameron do any better? He is not the type.

Maybe these guys will barge through on the rails. Of the two pictured at the other end of that link, the first looks to be rather ginger, and the other – who seems happy to be known as Vince - is bald.

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Now I am a great believer that any company should be at liberty to hire or not hire anyone they damn well please for any reason whatsoever (contingent on the terms of a freely agreed employment contract, of course), regardless of whether or not the reasons are sensible or utterly capricious.

So when a tax funded body like the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service says...

Members of the British National Party should not apply for jobs in the fire service as there is no place for racists or bigots, a chief fire officer said in a report released today. Martin Chapman, Dorset Fire and Rescue chief fire officer, said: "Membership of the BNP is not itself unlawful, but its core values are considered to be incompatible with those of the fire authority and the role of the fire and rescue service."

... I do not automatically think this is a bad thing. I also do not much care for bigots and racists and personally I would not hire a member of the BNP either. But then I would also not hire a communist, a socialist, an islamist or all manner of other folks, simply on the basis that I find their beliefs monstrous and therefore have no wish to enrich them.

But I would like to get some clarification on a few points from the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, seeing as they are a public sector body... would they take a similar position for regarding someone who was a communist or who advocates other forms of violence enforced collectivism, or is only trying to impose national socialism beyond the pale? What about someone who supports radical Islamist organisations that what to impose Sharia? How about members of Sinn Fein, the political wing of an outfit that has murdered thousands of people? Also, are members of the neo-fascist BNP now going to be permitted to stop paying for the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, or is their money still welcome?

Just asking.

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I am not exactly a fan of David Cameron, the 39-year-old (same as yours truly) who won a crushing majority of votes for the Tory leadership from fellow MPs. Yes, he is obviously bright, telegenic, youngish, and might have appeal outside the Tory ranks, but er, could we actually find out what he actually believes in, please?

What on earth does this mean, for example:

Slipping into the language of the street, Eton and Oxford-educated Conservative leadership hopeful David Cameron urged radio listeners on Friday to "keep it real".

Huh? The rest of the Reuters article offers zero illumination. Now, I realise that expecting politicians to set out their stall in full has its risks. As a regular commenter, Verity, put it the other day, if a politician has a goodish idea, the chances are that Blair will steal it, or at least pretend to copy the policy (what happens in reality is a bit different). Politics is rather like business in that regard.

Meanwhile, Clive Davis wonders whatever happened to meritocracy in politics?

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Just to remind everyone that today is a rather special Trafalgar Day.

Nicely done, Horatio.

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It never takes more than a week or two to have my dislike for the political class resoundingly reinforced yet again.

In particular, those who wish to see a Tory government rescue our civil liberties from the predations of New Labour would do well to read this and this and then ask themselves why they think voting for these people is going to make the slightest bit of difference when push comes to shove.

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Not content to rest on their laurels after defending the British people from the menace of pedestrians, our political masters have ensured that this "Freedom of Information" nonsense will not be allowed to stand in the way of confronting that most implacable threat to our way of life... this will put the cat amongst the pigeons! (sorry)

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The UK government is making it possible -- ahhhhh! - to let new fathers take three months' paid leave off work. How nice. How generous. How could the heartless, flinty Gradgrinds like we libertarian free-marketeers oppose such a fine and dandy state of affairs?

You know the answer. The answer of course is that the cost of paying fathers paternity leave will be born by the employers, and hit small businesses disproportionately hard, as well as those employees who either through personal choice or circumstance do not, or choose not, to have children. And of course the whole issue ignores those subversive capitalist types who happen to be self-employed. What are they supposed to do, exactly?

My father (ex-RAF and farmer for 40+ years) would be chortling out loud at being told, just as the wheat harvest was about to start, that my birth would let him take three months off, far away from the combine harvester, plough and cattle shed. Perhaps we should start compiling a list of which Labour Party MPs have ever run a business from scratch and had to meet a payroll? I bet the list is short.

If our political masters were really wise on this issue, they would cut the overall burden of tax, so that parents could have a higher post-tax income with which to make decisions about family life that suit their own circumstances. Why is such a simple approach so difficult? (And by the way, I expectantly await what the Tory leadership candidates say about this).

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Sorry about the title, a tad misleading...

There was an interesting article on the Adam Smith Institute blog yesterday highlighting the results of a YouGov poll which was examining people's attitudes to wealth, wealth creators and business generally. Whilst I tend not to put too much stock in polls, this does makes quite encouraging reading.

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Kenneth Clarke, the former British finance minister of the 1990s and most pro-EU Tory candidate in that party's race for the leadership, has dropped out of the race. That leaves David Davis marginally ahead of the centrish David Cameron and Liam Fox. My money, for what it is worth, is on Davis to win, but I cannot find much enthusiasm for any of the candidates, to be honest. Tory leadership contests seem to occur with all the frequency of signal failures on the Tube during the rush-hour. There is a sort of wearying regularity about them.

I share the sentiments of this article about the lack of policy content from the candidates thus far. The only positive thing about the Tories, it seems, is their ability to keep the numerous global floods, earthquakes and bird-borne plagues off the front pages of parts of the media. In a way, the feat is quite incredible.

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The scale of identity theft in Britain as revealed in this story ought to be shocking, but it does not entirely surprise me. My other half used to work in the credit card industry and she has plenty of stories to tell about how careless people are in throwing out old credit card bills and other documents. The slack attitude many people adopt boggles the mind.

Of course, when our lovely government gives a grateful nation the new ID card, all be well and we will not have to worry about such stuff anymore. Er, oh, wait a minute...

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Arthur Seldon, one of the founders of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a think thank that has played a crucial role in the fightback against collectivism, has died. Even though he was heading towards his 90th year - he was born in 1916 - his death is still a sad shock to me. I met him several times, both at IEA receptions at the organisation's offices and at numerous conferences. He was a lovely man.

Every time I met him, Arthur always treated you with respect and kindness. He had the ability to make his arguments without implying that people who disagree have base motives, which is a sensible strategy. He regarded the prophets of Fabian socialism, who have wreaked so much havoc in this country, as well intentioned fools rather than knaves (with the possible exception of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whom he loathed). Arthur was, to use an old fashioned word, a gentleman.

His contribution to the re-birth of liberal ideas (to use it in its proper sense) cannot be exaggerated. Many friends of mine, including such fellow bloggers as Brian Micklethwait, have been touched by Arthur's influence.

I shall raise a glass to a great classical liberal writer tonight. May he rest in peace.

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Compared to this disaster in Pakistan, that has killed tens of thousands of people, this story is pretty tiny in the big scheme of things, but by god, it still sucks:

A fire has destroyed the Bristol warehouse containing the theatrical props for the plasticine film characters Wallace and Gromit.

Fire at factory The news comes at the same time figures show their latest movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, topped the American box office over the weekend.

The story does not contain any suggestion as to what caused the blaze, although on a BBC 6 pm news item I saw, it was suggested that arson might, just might, be a factor. If so then I hope the perpetrators suffer some very unpleasant outcome indeed.

We seem to be talking rather a lot about cool movies at the moment and jolly right too (as the film critic Barry Norman used to say). I intend to see this film in the company of some fellow Londoners as soon as possible.

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This is the un-edited version of an article sent in by Diana Quaver, which we published earlier in a reduced form. Diana has been closely following this story, which should be of great interest to the on-line community:

I have recently followed the trial of Daniel Cuthbert. This was the gentleman who was accused of "hacking" into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee. He was recently found "regretfully" found guilty under section 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. He never even lived in Whitechapel. This was the BBC story a few months ago:

Charge over tsunami 'hacking' bid

A man has been charged over an alleged attempt to hack into a website set up to raise funds after the Asian tsunami.

Daniel Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel, east London, has been charged with one offence under the Computer Misuse Act.

Scotland Yard said the charge followed an alleged unauthorised access of the Disasters and Emergency Committee site on New Year's Eve.

Mr Cuthbert is due to appear at Horseferry Magistrates' Court next Thursday.

The disaster fund has raised an estimated £250m to help victims of the tsunami.

Tens of thousands of people used its web pages to offer money to those caught in the Boxing Day tragedy.

Today, Daniel Cuthbert was found guilty.

Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate £30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a computer security consultant, regarded in his field as an expert and respected by colleagues and employers alike. He entered his full personal details (home address, number, name and full card details). He did not receive confirmation of payment or a reference and became concerned as he has had issues with fraud on his card on a previous occasion. He then did a couple of very basic penetration tests. If they resulted in the site being insecure as he suspected, he would have contacted the authorities, as he had nothing to gain from doing this for fun and keeping the fact to himself that he suspected the site to be a phishing site and all this money pledged was going to some South American somewhere in South America.

The first test he used was the (dot dot slash, 3 times) ../../../ sequence. The ../ command is called a Directory Traversal which allows you to move up the hierarchy of a file. The triple sequence amounts to a DTA (Directory Traversal Attack), allows you to move three times. It is not a complete attack as that would require a further command, it was merely a light “knock on the door”. The other test, which constituted an apostrophe( ‘ ) was also used. He was then satisfied that the site was safe as his received no error messages in response to his query, then went about his work duties. There were no warnings or dialogue boxes showing that he had accessed an unauthorised area.

20 days later he was arrested at his place of work and had his house searched. In the first part of his interview, he did not readily acknowledge his actions, but in the second half of the interview, he did. He was a little distraught and confused upon arrest, as anyone would be in that situation and did not ask for a solicitor, as he maintained he did nothing wrong. His tests were done in a 2 minute timeframe, then forgotten about.

He was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which was signed in 1989 when perms were just going out of fashion and mobile phones were like bricks and cost £1000 and we were still using green type on a black background. The word “ Computer” was not even defined as they realised that this area was moving at light speed so they wanted to keep it open. Sadly, it has become open to willy-nilly interpretation and the magistrate decided there was intention to access data as stated in section 1(a), although I may be biased, it is an incorrect interpretation.

Cuthbert was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and convicted under Section 1 (a) of this Act. The relevant section of the Act is:

Section (1) of the Act states:

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if –

a. he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

b. the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and

c. he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

As an expert, if he had true intent (as the judge deemed he did, which is an incorrect analysis) he would have been more than capable of "hacking" and gunning that door down with a digital version of a point-blank range AK47, but he did not. He maybe should not have done the tests that are beyond the knowledge of a regular user and a caution would have sufficed, there was no need for a trial and certainly not 10 months of waiting time. The policeman was smug as he got his browny points and the CPS prosecutor was what one can expect of a CPS prosecutor, patronising, pedantic and uninteresting but sadly successful.

The ../ sequence triggered of the alarm which was set up as "high" for this sort of “attack” at the donate.bt.com website that was set up by the DEC website. This alerted someone that there was something potentially suspicious, this was then passed up to someone who reported it to the police. They found their suspect through the IP address and were able to trace it to his laptop. Well, the Computer Crime Unit (known in the industry as "Muppets") were very happy they got their man.

Mr Cuthbert was convicted under S. 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. It will be almost impossible for him to work in IT, the security industry being totally based on trust and reputation, as they are all freelancers and rely on contacts. That simply is not right. Justice is not always synonymous with legality.

When someone tells you, "whatever you do, do not press the red button" and you are almost compelled, in just that way, I am feverishly tempted to type in the ../../../ sequence in the Ministry of Defence website, and see what happens. Maybe not.

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This may not be the most exciting story of the day, but it caught my eye as an example of how, despite its fine words, the present government has allowed our education system to crumble:

Britain will slide rapidly towards Third World status unless the Government reverses the "unsupportable" decline in maths, science, engineering and modern languages in the state sector, head teachers of leading independent schools warned yesterday.

Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, representing leading boys' and co-educational secondary schools, urged the Government to work more closely with the private sector.

"Despite improvements in state results, the decline in mathematics, engineering and modern languages is unsupportable and has to be reversed," he said. "Otherwise we are heading rapidly towards Third World status."

India and China were turning out tens of thousands of engineers, scientists and mathematicians but in Britain the number of first-year graduates studying chemistry had fallen from 4,000 in 1997 to 2,700 in 2005, he said.

Superficially, it may be a smart move to make it easier for parents to send their children to private schools. My only problem is that if the current Labour government were to embark on such a course, it would demand, as part of such a deal, greater control over what is left of the non-state education system. (That remains a key drawback of education vouchers). Do we really want the half-educated dolts and knaves running this government to get their hands on Eton, Harrow or Winchester?

Update: a commenter disputes whether British state schools are so lousy. Perhaps he should study this OECD report, which contains damning data on illiteracy in Britain. I should also remind readers of the terrific work being done by Professor James Tooley to debunk the shibboleths of statist thinking on education.

Update 2: Here is another link to a site about literacy issues in Britain and other countries. If you scroll down there are dozens of stories, from as recently as September 2005, expressing employers' concerns about the skills of the students they take on. A couple of commenters persist in claiming that our state education system is better than it has ever been. If so, why the company complaints? I presume that CEOs are not making this stuff up.

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Yesterday I went up to Blackpool for a couple of off-conference meetings.

In one of these meetings (a joint meeting - debate with John Redwood) Mr Richards of the 'Independent' newspaper spoke.

Mr Richards stated that everyone should forget about the EU because the Euro was not going to be introduced into Britain and the Constitution had been voted down.

Various people (such as a member of the European Parliament who was at the meeting) carefully explained to Mr Richards that EU was taking more power (in all area's of people's lives) all the time and that even the voted down Constitution was in fact being implemented a bit at a time (for example the EU Defence College is being set up even though its legal basis, the EU Constitution, was not enacted).

Mr Richards simply repeated what he had already said.

So more specific examples of the growth in the activities of the EU, all of which the European Court, committed as it is to "ever closer union", claims, possibly quite correctly, are allowed by the existing treaties. The growth in power is in all areas of life and is going on all the time, specific example after specific example were all explained to Mr Richards.

And Mr Richards simply repeated what he had already said, plus stating that it was "dangerous" not to vote for someone to be leader of the Conservative party on the grounds that they did not oppose the EU taking these powers unto itself. The Conservatives "would not win the election" if we thought like this (as if winning an election to what was becoming a powerless Parliament would interest anyone apart from the most corrupt).

The only other thing (on this area) that Mr Richards said was to mumble about the needs of "enlargement" of the EU - even though nothing that had been said to him, by anyone, had anything to do with the EU having more members than it used to.

What was depressing was not that (as some might think) that Mr Richards was a dishonest crony working for his master Mr Clarke (who sits on the board of the 'Independent'). No, I suspect Mr Richards honestly meant every word he said. It was a matter of his being unable to understand what was being said to him.

Now not everyone who spoke to Mr Richards was on top form or used the exact words they should have done (for example, I was not on good form at all) - but most people did well enough. However, it was clear that argument and evidence simply could not reach him.

Now Mr Richards is an intelligent and well educated man, and so if argument and evidence can not reach him, what about the rest of the population? And remember, Mr Richards was exposed to evidence and logical argument for quite some time at the meeting (most people are not exposed to such things, in matters of public affairs, for very long at all).

Reasoning (not just on the EU - on every matter) depends on evidence and logical argument (in some subjects, perhaps, just on logic).

If most people (even the intelligent and well educated) can not be reached by evidence and logic then libertarians (and other people who try and use reasoning in public affairs) are wasting their time.

Perhaps most people really are at the level of being little above dogs or cats - "I like him, he has got a big belly and a nice voice".

Few here have a deep faith in democracy so they may say "so what, we knew that anyway", but if most people really are at this mental level it undermines rather more than democracy.

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Actually it was a much cheerier gathering than I expected: usually the Tories have a leader who embarrasses them, but this year they have no leader and everyone's full of beans.

- Eamonn Butler at the Conservative Party Conference

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One of the things we quite often tell each other here at Samizdata is that if a new government department is created, then whatever it is of, so to speak, is now in much deeper trouble than before. Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Social Security. Department of Trade and Industry. Those all mean that defence, social security, trade, industry, are all going to be in permanently short supply and in a bad way from now on.

So it was with considerable sadness that, in Victoria Street this afternoon, I encountered this:

Constitution look out. And be anxious also about justice, rights and democracy. Click on the above little snippet of the photo I took to get the bigger context. I do not know why exactly, but I particularly dislike the lower case letters for the acronym. How long has this particular acronym been in existence? Since June 12th 2003, apparently. I had never noticed it before. This dca resides in an office block of impeccable tedium called Selborne House, 54 Victoria Street, the boring side and towards the boring end, which is why I had not noticed it before.

As soon as I started snapping, and in fact after I had only taken the one rather blurry photo that I have here displayed, a security guard emerged to remonstrate with me. Do you have permission to take photographs? No, of course not, I said. You need permission, he said, to take photographs of this building. Is it illegal, I asked, to take photos of this building from the street? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Why? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Okay, got you the third time, but it seems very strange. You need permission to take photographs of this building. Yeah got you mate. I'm just telling you that you need permission to take photographs of this building. He was an African with a very African voice and an impressive physique, and frankly you do not want to get into complicated arguments with people who work for the government. One of my rules. So I did not press my case.

But I press it now. Is it actually illegal to take photographs of government buildings from the street? Probably, these days, it is, sort of, depending on which lawyer you talk to. But how, in the age of zoom lenses, do they propose to stop people doing this? And what will they do about photos like mine? Perhaps, if some aspect of the government sees this, we will have to take these pictures down. It is the vagueness and the intimidation of all this, as much as the rule itself, that I object to. There was a sense of lawlessnesss about the whole situation. I did not collide with the will of Parliament, just with some government diktat that went round Whitehall in about 1999.

Surely, before telling someone out in the street that they may not take photos, the security men should have known their legal rights and been able to assert them explicitly, instead of just repeating that you have to "get permission". If it was fear of terrorism, why could he not have said?

Something about all this makes me think that my suspicions about how little protection the people in this building will actually provide for such things as justice, rights and democracy are all too justified.

I mean, what kind of a building has a sign at the front saying what it is, which it obviously wants you to read and be impressed by, but then says you can't take photos of it? And in the case of this building, it seems particularly odd.

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No, another one quite separate to the festivities in Iraq...

Chief Inspector of HM Prisons Anne Owers has declared that the national symbol of England, the Cross of St. George, is racist and must not be worn by prison guards in case it upsets Muslim prisoners.

And it seems Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, agrees, saying that the Red Cross of St. George was "an insensitive reminder of the Crusades", adding: "...that it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with."

Who is "we"? Perhaps Chris Doyle and his Council for Dhimmitude should spend more time getting Arabs to understand the British rather than the other way around.

I wonder how this organisation would react to calls for Muslims to abandon the crescent moon, the green flag and all other overly Muslim symbols as being offensive to some English people who may associate them with slavery? I mean, if it is ok for Muslims to be offended by English people in England wearing English symbols that remind some people of a series of wars that ended in 1300, how can anyone mind if I object to Muslims in England wearing Muslim symbols that I choose to associate with Muslim atrocities against English people which ended practically yesterday... i.e. when Lord Exmouth destroyed Algiers in 1816?

Completely daft of course but if we accept the logic of the likes of Anne Owers and Chris Doyle, it seems inevitable. Are they sure they want to go down that path?

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I cannot tell you how happy this makes me:

Ms Spelman, who is shadow local government minister, said the public were increasingly taking their cue from Mr Paxman when dealing with politicians. She said the reception she received from the public while out canvassing in her West Midlands constituency was the most unfriendly she had ever experienced. The public had clearly lost trust in politicians and thought they were only "in it for themselves", she added.

No, really? I wonder what gave them that impression...

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Perhaps you think I am talking about Venezuela under the thuggish Chavez?

Nope. I am talking about Britain.

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Mark Steyn observes that an ethnic group in the UK is making its presence felt in the most detailed of ways:

Alas, the United Kingdom's descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and "pig-related items" will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee's box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

As Steyn goes on to write, what will certain Muslim groups demand next: that Her Majesty the Queen be forced to abdicate on the grounds that it is intolerable that a Head of State be both a woman and be bare-headed? Is there no concession, however silly, that the cringeing political classes are not willing to make?

I think it is fair to say that yes, we should not go out of our way to put about images that are designed - key qualification - to be offensive to Muslims, or indeed Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or for that matter atheists, agnostics or whatever. But it surely is a hallmark of a robustly tolerant and orderly society that people should not fly into a rage over something like a picture of Piglet on the side of a council worker's coffee mug. If the Islamists cannot handle that, then what does it say about their own faith and moral fibre? I am an atheist and yet I don't demand that people remove expressions such as "For God's Sake" or "Heaven Help Us" from their vocabulary.

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This story by the BBC lays out how public sector jobs have outpaced those in the domestic private sector for some time, a statement that is hardly likely to surprise regular visitors to Samizdata.

The public sector is creating new jobs at a faster rate than private business, according to the latest official data. At the same time, UK productivity is now at its lowest level for 15 years, further figures from the Office for National Statistics showed.

Analysts have long argued that the government sector trails behind the wider economy in terms of productivity.

Overall productivity grew by 0.5% in the year to July, the lowest since 1990 and down from 2.5% a year earlier.

The ranks of the public sector expand and of course, the government is quite happy about this state of affairs, since people who work on the taxpayer's pound are unlikely to be keen on a drastic rollback of said state. Every additional worker adds to this ratchet effect.

As the public sector balloons, the cost frequently falls on those least able to bear it, such as this retired lady who went to gaol rather than pay a council tax bill that has risen far faster than inflation.

People like this lady probably voted for that nice, vaguely Tory-looking Mr Blair back in 1997 and who knows, gave him a second and third chance in the subsequent elections. But the question for the Tories, now gathering for their annual conference in Blackpool this week, is how to credibly halt and roll back the public sector juggernaut and thus make room for sweeping tax cuts. If they cannot do so, then frankly there is no point to them.

UPDATE: Noted libertarian author Sean Gabb gave an excellent talk in Westminster tonight. One of his central themes is that we will not be able to push back the onslaught on our traditional institutions until we understand the nature of what the "enemy" is. A key point is class. Class analysis is not and should not be a tool only of collectivists. The NuLab "project" can be thought in class terms, and the relentless expansion of public sector employment can be seen as a way of entrenching that class and its hold on society.

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In the last couple days I have written, and then deleted unpublished, several articles about the IRA's much ballyhooed decommissioning (or 'decommissioning', depending on what you believe to be the truth) of its weapons. In short, I am not sure what I think.

To try and make head or tail of what is going on, I have been hanging out at Slugger O'Toole.

And I still cannot figure out if it is cause to celebrate or just another ploy.

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I went out this afternoon to partake of coffee with a friend, and on my way to the coffee house, I stumbled upon a news story, and took some photos of it.

Who is that?, I asked. A Father 4 Justice. Oh, one of them.

Cheap, modern, democratised communications pervade this story, and may also influence the reporting of it. Note that the guy has a portable telephone, which would probably not have been the case a decade ago, and which must surely have influenced how the authorities set about dealing with him. I mean, if you were a copper, it might make a difference if the guy you were trying to arrest was supplying a running commentary of your every move to his pals. Who were recording everything he said, as they surely were.

Other photographers were already out in force by the time I got there.

The professionals were there in strength.

But, so were the amateurs, …

… me included, with my 10x zoom lens and automatic anti-shake focussing, in a camera that cost less than three hundred quid.

One of the features of modern government, or maybe that should be recent government, is that modern/recent government often likes simply to blot stories off the airwaves. I am not saying that they wanted to squash this one. But I am saying that if they had entertained any such censorious thoughts, although they might have got away with this ten years ago, now, they would have far less chance.

They would merely have handed the blogosphere a nice little scoop.

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Tony Blair gave his annual Labour Party conference speech to the party faithful (and not-so-faithful) in Brighton this afternoon. He touched on a variety of issues but this series of quotes stands out and reminds us, as if we needed reminding, that this is one of the most illiberal governments since the Second World War:

We are trying to fight 21st century crime - ASB (anti-social behaviour) drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime - with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.

It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first.

The emphasis is unmistakeable, however much Blair tries to soften the authortarian message with assurances about defending the rights of accused persons. Under this government, the traditional checks and balances of the Common Law, already eroded by the previous Tory government, have decayed at an accelerating pace. The right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, double-jepoardy, admissability of previous conviction details... the list of protections that have been wiped out or been eroded gets longer and longer.

Blair, being the crafty sonafabitch he is, understands how easy it is to portray we defenders of civil liberties as "soft on crime", and so the point to stress must be to challenge the false choice he offers: be liberal or be safe.

Far from making us safer, playing fast and loose with the Common Law protections of the individual are having the opposite effect in the medium and long run. Weakening the right to self defence emboldens burglars. And dismantling traditional legal safeguards will undermine respect for the rule of law among the otherwise law-abiding, to no good effect. And yet when people are convicted of serious crimes like rape and burglary, the offenders often regain their liberty after a relatively brief period in jail, making no restitution to their victims.

Blair, and for that matter the Tories, have still not grasped the fact that it can and should be possible to crack down hard on crime while protecting our ancient liberties. Or is that too subtle for for our political classes to grasp? Is there some great nugget of wisdom in the Blair speech that I missed?

Those so inclined to read Blair's speech in full can go here.

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Just as the NHS is the darling of the British people, it will come as no surprise that its failures are increasingly covered by the tabloids, who have found that the crisis in health provision is a concern to those who have to rely on the state through no fault of their own. High taxes and expensive private health care denies choice to the majority of the population.

One of the latest (and incredible) stories to emerge is a lack of mops in Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow:

PATIENTS spent two days in "grotty" wards - after a hospital ran out of mops.

Cleaners at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow were left stunned after bosses told them of the shortage. And it took two working days for the hospital to replace all the mops.

A source at the closure-threatened hospital said: "We knew things were bad here but this takes the biscuit. Cleaners went to work on Wednesday and were told there were no mops and nothing could be done about it

Only scenes such as these could be caused by a state monopoly of health:

After replacement mops arrived on Thursday, a source revealed that hospital staff celebrated.

The insider revealed: "People were dancing around the boxes, singing and chanting, 'We have mops.' " The source added: "No wonder our hospitals are riddled with MRSA superbugs and such like if they can't get something as simple as this right."

Only the NHS could ration health and mops!

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One cannot say, in general, that there should be more or less legislation: that is for governments to decide. If the present volume of legislation is causing problems at the various stages of the legislative process - and all our evidence confirms that this is so - the first requirement is not a reduction in that volume, but improvements in the process at those stages where it is under strain. The kitchen should be big enough and properly equipped to satisfy the legislative appetite.

- Making the Law, Hansard Society, 1993.

So much for separation of powers in the view of serious British parliamentarians.

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We know that it took Ian Blair a day to find out that an innocent man was killed by his officers. We know that he foresees little difficulty in retraining ex-soldiers on short-term contracts to act as armed police officers, accelerating the trend towards paramilitary forces in British cities.

Sir Ian's suggestion that soldiers could be used as firearm officers is specially controversial after the shooting in London in July of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber the day after the failed July 21 attacks.

A Scotland Yard spokesman later said that retiring servicemen were just one group with pre-existing skills that could be hired on short-term contracts to allow police officers to focus on core policing activities. "It is absolutely not about hiring in soldiers for use on London’s streets," the spokesman said.

We also know that, infected by memes of 'command and control', he wishes to shortcircuit archaic constitutional liberties that protect the individual, reduce the accountability of the police and give them additional quasi-judicial powers:

Radical proposals for a new breed of supercop with on-the-spot powers to confiscate driving licences and issue Anti-Social Behaviour Orders have been put forward by Britain's top policeman.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, whose proposals were backed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), admitted allowing officers to impose instant punishments could blur the line between police and magistrates.....

Director of civil rights group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, accused the Commissioner of behaving like Judge Dredd, the post-apocalyptic policeman-come-executioner in British comic 2000AD, whose catchphrase is "I am the law".

Ian Blair stated that he thought of resigning (as if it were a particularly hard day at the office?) :

However, he told Mr Sakur he did not come "very close at all" to quitting. "Because the big job is to defend this country against terrorism and that's what I'm here to do." He added it would not have been right for the force, "the country or the city of London" for him to resign.

Yes it would.

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If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further... by the British army.

Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.

If Britain's government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail... or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?

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The BBC is reporting that the British film industry - however defined - cut its total payroll by about 20 percent in 2004, caused in part by uncertainties over the future tax treatment of said industry. It is a familiar tale.

British governments, especially the current Labour one, liked to attract the plaudits of the film-buff classes by promising to shower grants and tax breaks on the film business, but the returns on all this activity have been mixed at best. I am not sure whether tax is the prime reason for choosing to avoid Britain or not. Surely the availability of top talent, on both sides of the camera; good locations, ease of access and relatively decent labour market conditions also play a big part in all this. The latter point gets overlooked, particularly given the still-severe armlock on the industry by the acting union Equity, which operates a closed shop system on the industry.

Another thing - far too many British films try to go for the "quirky" or period-piece route and I suspect that the industry is now saddled with a fairly set image. Brits continue to ply their trade around the world - some of the best movie directors, special effects artists and so forth are Brits - so maybe some concerns are misplaced. Film-making is a global industry anyway and I would not be at all surprised if a lot of work is getting outsourced to cheaper locales like India.

I do not believe the government should dangle even bigger tax breaks under the noses of our would-be Spielbergs or Ridley Scotts to get them to make movies here. Cutting taxes overall and keeping labour costs free of regulatory red tape would be a better long-term bet. The film industry is a nice thing to have but it does not deserve and should not get, special treatment from the State.

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Charles Moore on the lamentable Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone:

This man is the Mayor of our greatest city. He condemns the bombing of that city (because it was an attack on "working-class Londoners", not on "the mighty and the powerful"). But he is friends with our enemies. New York had Mayor Giuliani at its darkest moment. We have Mayor Livingstone. We are in trouble.

Thanks to regular commenter Julian Taylor for pointing out the Moore article. Read it all.

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And that would be the law of unintended consequences.

The urge to alleviate the woes of the world can cause people to do great things. However when that urge is coupled to the power of a state, it is a dangerous mixture which can have the opposite effect to the one intended.

The think-tank Civitas has made no friends in Whitehall with its latest release titled Blair government causes child poverty and the UK Treasury is clearly incandescent at the suggestion that big government is actually the problem rarther than the solution.

But then the truth often hurts.

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The Tory party has been an ideology-free zone for quite some time now, defying any but the more internally focused Tory activist to really have any notion of what the Tory Party truly stands for. Not that the Labour Party actually wears its ideological heart on its sleeve any more, but at least the Labour Party clearly still believes in the Labour Party. The Tories on the other hand, well...

There is a very strange article by Peter Osborne in The Spectator in which he marvels that Tories cannot see that Ken Clarke is the solution to their woes, by which presumably he means that what the Tories need is a leader who wants to give more power to European Union institutions and run the economy pretty much as Tony Blair has. He also marvels at the 'lurch to the right' that the Tory Party has taken. Yeah, that had me rather puzzled too. In short, Osborne seems to think that rather that search for ideological purity (!), the Tory Party need to just throw their lot in with Ken Clarke's favour of regulatory statism.

So I guess I must have missed the Tory Party advocating scrapping the NHS and coming up with a non-rationing based healthcare system. I must have miossed the plans to end inheritance tax completely, the bold decision to scrap entire government departments and reduce the state take by 15% in the first term...

If the Tories had quixotically adopted meaningful 'right wing' (whatever that actually means) policies, that would indicate the Tory Party actually believed in something. Yet even flirting with a moderate and rather inconsequential idea like the flat tax apparently makes you 'right wing' in Osborn's universe. I guess departing materially from the post-Thatcher Labour world view seen as weird extremism, which of course means only the CINOs like that clapped out old milker Ken Clarke actually seem 'sensible' to someone for whom politics only ever means arguing over the rate at which the state should grow.

But the Tory party as a whole have not seriously even had that discussion and unless David Davis actually gets into the hotseat, it probably never will. I think Peter Osborn must have had a Tory Party from some alternate reality in mind...

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For all that I am sometimes bemused about the views of the assorted rock stars, media wannabes and other folk gathered around Sir Bob Geldof's "Make Poverty History" campaign, I was a bit taken aback at this story. A UK regulatory body has banned the group from making any television or radio advertising on the grounds that it is a political group.

It would surely take the wisdom of Solomon to figure out the fine boundaries defining what is and what is not a "political" organisation. So many charities nowadays seem to stray into territory that one might construe as political. Many think tanks, which describe themselves as education or research institutes for the purpose of getting charitable tax status, are often highly political, if not in the simple party sense.

In my view, if a charity is deemed unfit to broadcast its views on the telly, it should be banned, full stop. For example, a radical Islamist or neo-Nazi group claiming to be a charity which is banned from spreading its message should also be banned as such (although some libertarians might argue that even such groups should be tolerated unless their members advocate violent acts with a reasonable chance of carrying them out).

The state has no business trying to define the boundaries of what is and what is not a charity. Ultimately, of course, the way to cut through the problem might be to end the tax breaks that charitable status brings and cut taxes across the board so that the designation of "charitable status" no longer is something decided by the Great and the Good but left up to we mortals to decide for ourselves.

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I am not the only one calling for a sense of proportion. The Security Minister for Northern Ireland, Sean Woodward, told Radio 4's Broadcasting House this morning that despite these disorders most people in Northern Ireland were able to go about their normal lives without disturbance yesterday, and we should not get these things out of proportion.

While I am inclined to agree this is not Armageddon, I would suggest that the Government's sense of proportion is a touch selective. Had riots with firearms, incendiaries, and home-made grenades broken out in Blackburn at some march by a Moslem sect, would we expect such a calming response? Not on your nelly.

We might have woken up to martial law imposed on Lancashire and Yorkshire. At the very least Charles Clarke would be appearing on all channels advocating internment, massively increased police powers and speeding-up the Home Office's beloved ID card scheme. There would certainly be nothing else on the news.

Is it that 40 miles of water makes the difference? Is it colour or nominal religion? Or does the security establishment (despite being in a scrap with them on this occasion), still think of Unionist extremists as being somehow on 'our' side.

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This fascinating factoid courtesy of The Times's Gabriel Rozenberg:

Tolley's Yellow Tax Handbook is the standard professional reference on UK direct taxation. Its format has changed little for many years.

1996-1997 edition: 4,555 pages.

2005-2006 edition: 9,050 pages.

As Rozenberg points out, for income tax law to get to the size that a summary filled 4,555 pages took nearly 200 years. Boy, has the present government been busy.

Close observers of the Treasury will know that this has happened at the same time as the Inland Revenue has been piloting a glorious project that could only happen in Whitehall, the Comprehensive Tax Law rewrite. This, the first part of which is about to be enacted, is allegedly designed--this is not a joke--to simplify UK tax law without changing it.

It does serve to emphasise something that is often neglected, even by our friends at the ASI, who calculate Tax Freedom Day on the basis of the tax take. Tax burden, the cost of tax to the payer, is always greater than the actual tax he has to pay. The difference, the compliance cost, is hard to measure. But it is utterly invisible to the Civil Service, to most politicians, and most employees. To them it is someone else's problem, if they notice at all.

But when bureaucratic treacle is poured into society's gearboxes, everyone suffers indirectly. Compliance costs are still costs. Leaving aside the moral case against tax, they produce all the baneful economic effects of higher taxation (a split economy, advantages for tax-planners and those who can afford them, disincentive to work or invest, regulatory distortions), without putting more money into the public purse.

It is not just complication. Many of the more recent reforms (and this started under the Tories) move administrative and collection responsibilities from the government to the taxpayer or his employer, so Tolley's doubling may well be an underestimate of the increase in compliance costs. Taxation has risen fast in Britain. But tax burden has risen, and continues to rise much faster.

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There is an article in The Spectator which perfectly sums up the expression "The state is not your friend" that described the nightmarish encounter someone had with the officious little shits that are employed to police our borders and protect us from middle class Australian women.

It should be only under the most extraordinary circumstances in which an agent of the state should be able to legally refuse to give you their name and thereby avoid personal responsibility for their actions. Read the article and then ponder the thesis that the reason many people take jobs in places like the Immigration service is to satisfy a psychological need to exert arbitrary power over others. This is your tax money at work.

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If the UN says something should or should not be done, it is a safe bet that doing the opposite is most likely the correct course of action. Thus when the UN says Britain must not expel Muslim clerics who incite terrorism, clearly this is indeed the best policy.

It does not matter if a compass always points south, as long as you know that you can use it to find your way just as effectively as with one which always points north.

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So the CCTV camera tapes which would have shown the facts pertaining to tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes were blank. Right. But the IPCC says they have the vital CCTV footage. Ooookay, that is sorted then.

What the hell is going on?

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A truly vile act by animal 'rights' thugs has had the effect they wanted: a farm will stop breeding guinea pigs for research experiments in the hope that the corpse of the owner's grandmother, dug up and stolen by these 'heroes', will now be returned to her grave. In their considerable history of despicable behaviour, this was a new low.

I hope the state does its job and tracks down those responsible (I have my doubts) but there are some insults so dire that were I in the position of the Hall family, I would feel justified doing quite literally anything to find those responsible. I for one would not be prepared to share a planet with them. These animal rights thugs have shown that the courts are not the only way to compel people to do things against their will and courts are also not the only way to get justice. A truly dreadful affair and a reminder of the contempt with which these 'activists' should be treated.

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The Muslim Council of Britain has demanded a public apology from the BBC over the broadcasting of a Panorama programme last night which they have castigated as a "travesty". A quick glance at their statement throws light upon their concerns, namely, that the programme aims to undermine the Islamic faith by presenting imams as extremists and that it is designed to "sabotage" the political participation of Muslims in the British mainstream. The most telling quote is,

It seems that to qualify as so-called ‘moderates’ Muslims are required to remain silent about Israeli crimes in Palestine, otherwise they are automatically labelled as ‘extremists’.

The refutation of the MCB's position is clear. In a society which values free debate, the Muslim Council of Britain should engage with the issues raised. Instead, they have imported the arguments prevalent in the Middle East, which damns all criticism as a Zionist conspiracy designed to undermine Islam. Muslims do not have to remain quiet about Israeli actions that they perceive as criminal. The problem lies with those who justify terror and the deaths of innocents by referring to Israeli actions and tarring every Jew and Israeli Arab with 'collective guilt'.

This rhetoric is not new, but the platform that Muslim political institutions are gaining in the mainstream media provides a testament to the paradox that they are increasingly confident and increasingly defensive. The popular demonstrations of the anti-war movement and the dividends reaped from the flanking alliance that Muslim organisations arranged with the hard left has gained the political wing of Islam legislative promises such as the outlawing of statements that are deemed offensive. By rubbishing the Panorama programme, the Muslim Council of Britain wishes to build upon these achievements by narrowing the public discussion of Islam in the mainstream media and excising a 'critical school' that does not accept their arguments or values.

The terrorist attacks of July 7th have proved to be an opportunity for Muslim organisations regarded as 'mainstream'. Their spokesmen have been co-opted into government programmes providing channels of communication and extra sources of patronage. However, the terrorist attacks have also raised the profile of these spokesmen. Buoyed by the popularity of the anti-war movement, they have overestimated the depth of support for their views in Middle Britain, confusing the liberals who marched against the Iraqi war with the hard left. That is why we hear the overconfidence of Muslim anti-Zionists in our midst and a growing realisation in certain parts of the Labour Party that members of the Muslim Council of Britain hold illiberal views.

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We were told that the CCTV footage of the fatal incident was not available because the media from the cameras had been removed before the shooting so that detectives could examine them for clues relating to the failed 21/7 bombings.

Not so. The tapes were 'blank'.

According to the print edition of tonight's Evening Standard:

Senior Tube sources have told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform at Stockwell station were in full working order. The source spoke out after it emerged that police had returned the tapes taken from the cameras saying" "These are no good to us. They are blank."

A station log book has no reported faults concerning the CCTV cameras which would have been expected to record the crucial moments as Mr. de Menezes approach the train on 22 July.

Ok, so the cameras were working but the tapes are...blank. Of course just because everything else the authorities have said (the victim ran from the police, he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket, he jumped the ticket barriers, he was not restrained when he was shot dead) has been a lie, we should not jump to the conclusion that the videos from these fully functional cameras were blank because some member of The Plod put them in a machine and pressed 'ERASE', right? I mean, without any evidence that would be jumping to conclusions, right?

(2) (10)

While I am inclined to think that flat taxes are not as easy in practice as they are cracked up to be, and I would in any case prefer to scrap personal income tax altogether, a radically simplified tax system would benefit everyone but tax-collectors and accountants. (Even the holy skoolznospitles, and the policemen doing £80,000 of overtime a year, would approve of more net revenue from the same tax burden.)

However, Revenue officials in Britain are trying to censor even the discussion of flat tax:

According to yesterday's account in the Daily Telegraph

The original version of secret work by officials posted on the Treasury website - after freedom of information request - pooh-poohed the claims of flat tax advocates as "misleading".

But large parts of the work had been removed. The complete version reveals that most, but not all, of the elements which were blacked out present compelling arguments in favour of the flat tax.

Some 'freedom of information'!

The Telegraph concluded that since such political excisions must have been at the orders of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown MP, but today this is officially denied in a letter from the permanent civil servant who heads HM Treasury:

The Chancellor had never seen any version of the released documents and no minister had any involvement in the decisions regarding their release. To suggest otherwise is completely false.

Should we conclude that the elected Government is being kept in the dark about its policy options too?

Next time someone tells me that Tony Blair does not run the country, Gordon Brown does, I reserve the right to be skeptical. Government by officials, for officials, subject to no law but Parkinson's, is nearer the mark.

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...is Kenneth Clarke to defy the odds and end up the head honcho of the Conservative Party. Why? Because appointing a Europhile statist would be the absolute best way to split the party so irretrievably that it writes the party off once and for all.

Then maybe we can work on getting a proper opposition party that actually has a coherent ideological position, well, at least as coherent as a main stream party can even be. Hell, it can even call itself the 'Conservative Party' for all I care.

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Please explain to me why there is even any question regarding the facts surrounding the death of Jean Charles de Menezes? I would be amazed if almost every inch of his final journey was not caught on the omnipresent CCTV cameras that disfigure London's streets. Was anything we were told born out by the evidence? It should be quite easy to check.

Clearly the Metropolitan Police is in the midst of a massive crisis in which the most fundamental question needs to be asked: "Can the police be trusted not to recklessly slaughter people who are just going about their lawful business?"

Only complete transparency over the process and the facts leading up to the shooting can even begin repair the damage to Metropolitan Police credibility. As things stand, a rational observer would have to conclude the Metropolitan Police is run by incompetents and liars. Was being in charge of the 'Diversity Directorate' the proper background for Cressida Dick to be put in charge of such work?

And then when John Wadham, the chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission says "The Metropolitan Police Service initially resisted us taking on the investigation, but we overcame that", but Sir Ian Blair, the head of the Metropolitan Police replies that is untrue, well someone is lying then. Is it the head of the Met or the Head of the IPCC? At this point the credibility of the British Establishment is approaching the credibility levels of a ZANU-PF press release.

Release all CCTV footage showing the fatal journey of Jean Charles de Menezes as clearly the words of the police as to what happened are now worthless. If this is not done, one could be forgiven for thinking the reason the state so loves CCTV is only to detect crimes which are not committed by agents of the state. One law for them and another for us?

Release the footage because the 'official line' is now as credible as a Comical Ali war report from Iraq.

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Whilst I always took the view (and still do) that summarily shooting dead someone who was reasonably thought to be a suicide bomber is an appropriate policy, even though it turned out to be a tragic mistake.

However the operative phrase is "was reasonably thought to be..."

The more facts that come out about the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the harder it is to see how these policemen came to that dire decision. He ran from the police, we were told. He was wearing an unseasonable padded coat, we were told. He jumped the ticket barrier and ran onto the train, we were told. He was not restrained and so still posed a threat when he was shot dead, we were told. Well, given the context, like so many others I thought that although this was a terrible error, the guy clearly contributed to his own death by his behaviour.

And now it appears that all of it was just a pack of complete lies. He did not run, he did not jump the barrier (he used his tube pass!), he did not have on a padded coat and he was completely restrained when he was shot dead.

There had damn well better be a very heavy accounting for this with a lot of abruptly and dishonourably ended careers and jail sentences. For a start, just a start, the head of the Metropolitan Police should be out of a job by this time tomorrow.

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The Independent (or 'Al-Independent' as some of us like to call that bastion of Islamo-fascist apologists) has an article predicting nothing less than a full blown domestic Islamic insurgency in Britain.

Whilst clearly we have a problem, I really do not buy The Independent's scenario as presented, implying that the 100,000 or so "totally militarised" Muslims in Britain from various hotspots are just raring and ready to make large parts of the country into no-go areas. However I guess we will know who is correct soon enough.

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Hate the idea of ID cards? Do not keep your views to yourself.

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Via Dave Barry, I found my way to this story, which seems to have escaped the attention so far of such dedicated Euroblogs as this one:

THE EU has declared a crackpot war on busty barmaids — by trying to ban them from wearing low-cut tops.

Po-faced penpushers have deemed it a HEALTH HAZARD for bar girls to show too much cleavage.

And in a daft directive that will have drinkers choking on their pints, Brussels bureaucrats have ordered a cover-up.

They say barmaids run a skin cancer risk if they expose themselves to the sun when they go outside to collect glasses.

A good way – not the only way but a good way – to understand the atmosphere of politics in any particular year in these times of ours is to ask: how old is the Baby Boom?

The Baby Boom is now nearly sixty. The men are at the pub, and the women are shrieking jealously that those strumpets behind the bar should stop flaunting themselves. But because in their youth these same now-jealous frumps scorned such puritanical opinions – and indeed did their share of breast baring themselves, at pop festivals and the like – they have to find a new way to say this boring old stuff. So, rather than talking the language of morals and of traditional decency, like grannies used to, they reach instead for health, the great modern excuse for ancient animosities and prohibitions.

It is partly to feelings like this that the EUroprats, of all ages and both genders, are now appealing. And partly, of course, they just want to boss people around for the sheer sake of it.

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One commentator this week suggested that Mr Blair's administration is taking its anti-terrorism policy from Samizdata. I don't think so. A copy of The Times for March 3rd 2009 has fallen into my hands:

Terror site closed down: Police hold 17

By Daniel Tendler, Stewart O'Neill and Sean McGrory

EVERY member of an international extremist group based in Britain was under arrest last night after an extraordinary day of police operations stretching from one of the smartest parts of West London to the United States and Australia. Charges are expected to be brought soon under the Incitement to Terrorism Act 2006, though police have up to three months to question suspects. The FBI is interviewing more suspects and has raided the group's internet provider.

While police are jubilant following a series of successful armed raids across London, and have seized large amounts of terrorist property including a number of computers, they and their colleagues are still hunting for associates of the "sinister and heavily-armed" group. The organisation, known as "Samizdata", runs a website showing members receiving weapons training abroad and frequently carries approving statements about armed resistence to the state--even its logo shows an automatic weapon menacingly supported on radical textbooks. The website has been shut down and all visitors for the past 2 years will be questioned, say Special Branch.

Home Office sources indicate that after they are prosecuted for indirect incitement, the three foreign masterminds will be deported whether or not they are imprisoned first. They are an American man whose dual British nationality has already been stripped, an Irish American man, and a Croat woman. Exclusion Orders have been placed on a Frenchman, another American and an Australian, but most of those in custody are British, and have been involved in inciting others to threaten the state for several years, the same sources revealed. They are apparently well-funded. In addition to computers, property "worth millions" in Chelsea and in Earl's Court has been sequestered under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

The backgrounds of the plotters are seemingly middle class, and some of them have been operating apparently blameless lives in the City and other professions, while others are associated with radical oppositionist movements and anti-social behaviour for many years. Some of them are Conservative Party members, and the Leader of the Opposition has been called into urgent talks with Number 10. Police are warning the public to keep their eyes open and report friends or neighbours who may have links with this group. People who have inappropriate literature at home, or do not carry official identification or who have failed to register for Neighbourhood Watch are particularly to be regarded as suspicious say Home Office guidelines. A list of relevant publications (those banned by Orders under Part II of the Incitement to Terrorism Act 2006) is available on the Metropolitan Police website, and anyone owning or distributing these should be reported at once. Withholding such information is a criminal offence under the Terrorism Act 2000.

Tony Blair speaking last night said, "Extremist groups like this are a threat to our whole way of life in Europe. They want to turn the clock back to the 19th Century, when there was no welfare state, no social security, no cc-tv, drunkenness and drug-taking was permitted, and British people couldn't even have Identity Cards. In those days, we had no idea who was in the country or what damage they were doing to themselves by selfish behaviour."
"My Government will not hesitate to pass the further laws that are necessary to stamp out this menace for ever. We need to strike a balance between human rights and the future security of our society. It is up to all of us to be vigilant. If we are, they shall not succeed."

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The government's plans to impose ID cards on British people get wobblier by the day and at last they seem to realise that there is no point in pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, it is important for everyone to remember who cast their votes in Parliament and thereby allowed us to get this close to a civil liberties calamity in the first place. We are by no means in the clear yet but it does seem that things are going our way to some extent and so it is important to kick and stamp on this beast hard whilst it is down.

If we are to avoid this issue coming back to haunt us again and again, we need to make sure that forgiveness is left for the afterlife and use the voting record to MPs who voted in favour at any time to question their fundamental morality and trustworthiness, regardless of party. It is essential not just now but in the foreseeable future to make this issue as fraught and unpleasant as possible for all concerned. If we can make 'the ID cards issue' synonymous with political calamity, politicos might just avoid the issue in favour of lower hanging fruit.

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Home Office minister Hazel Blears has met with certain Muslim leaders and some rather 'interesting' things have emerged. In order to assuage Muslim fears, she has said that racial profiling will not be used and all stop-and-searches will 'intelligence led'.

So a nervous looking Asian man with a backpack who is wandering around on the London Underground will not be examined more closely because there might be no special intelligence? Hopefully that is not what Ms. Blears means, though I am not really sure what she does mean.

Now on one level, racial profiling can actually be dangerous if that criterion is over-emphasised: Muslims are not a race and although somewhat unlikely, a blonde haired blue eyed Muslim convert could indeed be a potential suicide bomber. Yet the reality is that the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are non-white and logic therefore indicates that in order to maximise the effectiveness of scarce resources, a degree of racial profiling in entirely appropriate. In fact, contrary to the Home Office Ministers claims, Ian Johnston of the British Transport Police has made no bones about the fact his officers intend to make race one of the criterion they use when picking people to examine closer, noting: "We should not bottle out over this. We should not waste time searching old white ladies". Very sensible.

A news segment on television this evening (I think it was SkyOne but I am not sure) even spoke with an Asian man on the London Underground with a backpack who was not unsympathetic to the fact he likely to be searched given the prevailing circumstances. Perhaps that is not so surprising as he is just as much at risk as anyone else if a bomb goes off on his train. Yet I cannot help wondering of this government really grasps the gravity of the situation and how attitude really need to change.

Another interesting and all too expected thing to come out if this meeting with Muslim leaders in Britain is their annoyance that the government will not discuss foreign policy and Iraq. This seems to answer the question I asked earlier if there are any really moderate Muslim 'leaders' in Britain. The fact they cannot see how the terrorist acts London, far from making it necessary for the government to discuss foreign policy with the leaders of the very community from which the terrorist have sprung, it make its impossible for them to do so or the terrorist attacks will have succeeded in the most clear cut way possible, inviting only more of the same any time the UK decides to do something that displeases some community.

Rather encouragingly, on the same news programme there was a Muslim 'activist' whose name I wish I had caught (was anyone else watching SkyNews?) who said it was a waste of time for Hazel Blears to talk to a bunch of largely foreign born religious leaders in Britain whose mosques had done exactly nothing to combat the extremist memes since July 7th. Judging from his remarks, it is well past time that British Muslims take a hard look at who their purported leaders are and decide if these are the people they really want speaking in their name.

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The oldest "mini-aircraft carrier" used by Britain's Royal Navy, HMS Invincible, is being retired from service. The vessel, from which Sea Harrier jets can operate - as well as helicopters - is more than 20 years old and was used in the Falklands War, among other theatres of operation.

As I said a while back, I have no ideological issue one way or the other about the exact composition of our armed forces, which must change with the times and respond to different threats to this country. Coming from a bit of a navy family myself and being an enthusiast over our island's naval history, I am nevertheless the first to realise that sentiment must not trump hard calculation when it comes to manning our defences. But it bothers me that our navy has been reduced to a level that makes independent military action by this country a logistical impossibility. It is probably quite unlikely that we could mount a Falklands-style operation on our own again. The present government wants, so it is reported, to build two new massive carriers but as is usually the case in these matters, the likely date of construction seems to stretch into the horizon, rather like the prospect of England beating Australia at cricket.

In an age when we fret about islamofascist psychos letting off bombs on the Tube, it may be tempting to think that the Senior Service's role is little more than to patrol the coasts and put on commemorations about the Battle of Trafalgar. How complacent that would be. Given that we are an island nation, still reliant on shipping for a huge amount of our economic and physical wellbeing, such an attitude is fraught with danger. We could run the risk of cutting the fleet so hard that we lose the inner core of skilled men and women needed for the service.

With the exception of anarcho-capitalists, even the most hardcore classical liberal realises that defence is a baseline requirement for a proper state. And for an island nation like Britain with a long coastline, that means having a workable navy.

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Forgive me if I am not breaking out the champagne just yet at the announcement that the ethnic collectivists of the IRA have declared their 'armed campaign is over'. Of course the fact their 'decommissioning' of arms will take place in private, in marked contrast to the indecent haste with which the UK government has started very publicly ripping down its fortifications, just conforms my view that Blair is a credulous fool.

Contrary to the woolly impression some of the media's dafter talking heads are giving (I really must stop watching early morning TV, bad for the blood pressure), the IRA is not disbanding and unless I see large piles of semtex being burned in front of Stormont, I very much doubt anything more than a token number of already unserviceable weapons and expired explosives will be put beyond their reach as an organisation.

I may not be a huge fan of the ethnic collectivists of the DUP either, but they are the ones who seem to me to be exhibiting the most appropriate amount of continuing distain for Sinn Fein/IRA and so are offering only highly contingent acknowledgement of this latest 'breakthrough'.

My guess is there is a lot less to this that meets the eye. Like the song says: "Don't believe the hype."

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Police have now arrested all four of the would-be suicide bombers who attempted a second round of terrorist mass murders in London on the 21st July. This is splendid news. Kudos also to Italian police who picked up one of the targets in Rome.

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A powerful tornado has swept through the city of Birmingham in the West Midlands.

The twister struck earlier today, cutting a swathe of devastation through the districts of Kings Heath, Moseley, Quinton, Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook.

Mercifully, there are no reports of any fatalities but initial estimates put the cost of the damage as high as £7.50.

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A group of Conservative MPs have launched an astonishing attack on liberal values. Their new publication is skeptical of free trade, making them less free market than the current Labour leadership. The front-man of this Tory Taliban grouping, Edward Leigh MP, has previously courted controversy by saying that he wears his anti-gay stance "as a badge of honour".

Tory MP Alan Duncan recently wrote that:

"Our achilles heel, though, has been our social attitude. Censorious judgmentalism from the moralising wing, which treats half our own countrymen as enemies, must be rooted out. We should take JS Mill as our lodestar, and allow people to live as they choose until they actually harm someone. If the Tory Taliban can't get that, they'll condemn us all to oblivion."

Yet a tidlewave of social conservatism is currently bombarding Conservative MPs. The main proponents are the Centre for Social Fascism Justice and Conservative Home, a website run by an associate of the Centre, Tim Montgomerie. The risk for the Tories is that if they go fascist authoritarian, the more moderate Tories will defect to Liberal Democrats, where some quite prominent members of the party are openly talking about moving to a more economically liberal position.

Indeed, the Liberals advocated the abolition of the "corporatist" Department of Trade and Industry in the run up to the last general election. The party's Trade and Industry spokesman Malcolm Bruce said: "Abolishing the DTI and transferring its useful functions to other departments will be the biggest single act of deregulation in history." The Tories opposed the move.

The Lib Dems, if they want to kick the Tories into third place, should be praying that the Tory Taliban is successful.

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To run from armed police who are shouting at you (rather than shooting at you) at any time is an extremely bad idea... to do so at a time like this in London is utter madness.

Anyone running from armed cops who have challenged them first in London today should expect to get shot dead given the clear and present danger we are in... but that does not makes this any less of a horror. If Jean Charles de Menezes just reacted idiotically to the situation he found himself in, that does not mean we should feel distain for him.

We really need to know exactly what happened and why, but shooting a man dead who is suspected of being a suicide bomber and who is running away and trying to board a train(!) when being called on to stop is not the incorrect response. It was a tragedy of execution (in ever sense of the word) but not an incorrect policy.

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It appears that the 'bomber' who was shot by the police yesterday was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is horrendous news.

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It is easy, with all the terrible events going on in London at the moment, to let other significant stories slip under the radar. However, last week the UK senior finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, tweaked the rules of UK budget policy in an offhand manner that takes the breath away for sheer barefaced cheek.

Brown has a so-called "Golden Rule" that stipulates that the government's books must be in balance over the course of the economic cycle. The books are currently seriously in the red at the moment, which would appear alarming given that we have had a relatively decent period of economic growth recently. So what does the gloomy Scot do? He shifts the year in which a key part of the economic cycle is supposed to have started by two years, the effect of which is supposed to show that the Golden Rule has not been broken. This sleight of hand produced fairly scant coverage outside the business sections, but in its own little way illustrates the utter contempt this government has for the financial markets, or the general public.

Brown has done this sort of thing before. And it makes one wonder just how long Brown can go on before the economy, supposedly Labour's strongest card in the last election, turns south.

I never bought the argument that Brown was a great Chancellor, as, with all his faults, was Nigel Lawson, for example. Brown has been enormously lucky to inherit an economy left in fine fettle by the previous Conservative government, and apart from his wise move of making the Bank of England independent, has done precious little right since. He is an ardent meddler and micro-manager, making the tax code into a hideously complex morass that does precious little for growth apart from make lots of jobs for tax accountants.

How the world changes. A few weeks ago the political trainspotters were wondering how soon Brown would take over from Blair. I suspect the likelihood of that happening has been pushed away by quite a distance.

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Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:

Senior Muslims have warned the Government that it needed to revise British foreign policy if it wants to put an end to the violence. Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq. He described the July 7 bombings and the attempted attacks in London on Thursday as "horrifying" but said it was not enough to simply unite in condemnation of the bombers.

People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an 'anti', make no mistake, what these 'senior Muslims' are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up.

And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:

we know this wasn't a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it's urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life.

He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the 'underlying factor' that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of 'moderate' Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word 'but...'). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period.

Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

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British police shot dead a man strongly suspected to have been one of yesterday's would-be suicide bombers as he tried to board a train full of people at Stockwell Tube station.

It has also been reported that British Muslims are worried there is a 'shoot to kill' policy in force. However contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, anytime a policeman shoots someone, they are prepared to kill them (the usual policy is to shoot at the 'centre of mass'). Technically they are 'shooting to incapacitate' and that often means killing the target. If a person who has been shot and incapacitated subsequently survives, that is a bonus.

However in the case of a suspected suicide bomber, once the decision to shoot has been made, taking the extra step of a bullet through the brain of a fallen suspect who under other circumstances would not be shot again may well be justified, given that the ability to so much as touch a button makes them a continued threat. This is particularly true if they have gone down near a number of civilians as was indeed the case this morning.

I am only surprised it has taken Al Qaeda this long to get around to attacking us here in London, given that they thought nothing of slaughtering hundreds of African civilians in Kenya and Tanzania and dozens of Australian civilians in Bali over the last few years since 9/11. We are in a war against an implacable enemy and although we have every right to demand our security services only use appropriate force in our defence, unless the facts turn out to be quite different than so far reported, this looks like it was a 'clean shoot'.

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"It is our obsession with avoiding any occasion for embarrassment which has rendered us virtually incapable of expressing any national feeling without apologising first. In a supposed age of uninhibited self-expression, this is the one emotion that dare not speak its name. And this repression, I think, bears hardest on those who have fewer other consolations in their lives. The snobbish refusal of the bourgeoisie to share in the patriotism of the lower classes is one more estranging element - and not the least important - in the growing gulf between them."

Mind the Gap, page 306, by Ferdinand Mount.

A quote which I cannot help but feel applies in particular to our current concerns about alienated young men turned on by the nihilist posturings of radical Islam.

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It could have been so much worse. Another sunny day in London and another series of attacks. Mercifully, as far as I know, no-one has been killed. My fellow Pimlico friend, Andrew Ian Dodge has a good take on the details. Tim Worstall has views here, including ideas on what the motivation of the attacks were in this case.

It appears that at least one person involved in the attacks has been arrested. Perhaps CCTV recordings of the attacks could yield more evidence. What this latest incident suggests is that CCTV, long bemoaned by us libertarians, can certainly record valuable evidence after a crime has been committed but that is not much consolation to the victims. The outrages are certainly going to give further ammunition to the police in arguing that every cubic metre of London needs to have a camera in it. I think that in public spaces that are paid for by the public and clearly key potential targets for terror groups, CCTV has its uses and it is pretty silly to get oxidised about it. But, and it is a big but, such things are clearly no deterrent. (Thanks to U.S. libertarian blogger Jim Henley for prodding me to write about this).

I was in the Aldwych area of London - near the London School of Economics, when the attacks happened. I first heard by a mobile call from my fiancee. Walking back to the office, it was remarkable how relaxed everyone was. In fact, the strained looks on some people's faces had more to do with the English batting implosion against Australia at the cricket.

Meanwhile, in reflecting on the cultural issues prompted by the current mayhem, go read this fine and no-holds-barred article in the Spectator.

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A figure from the youth wing of the Tory Party, no less, claims that the powers that be need to talk to Muslim extremists in order to bring them into the mainstream political process, otherwise the poor diddums, obviously so sensitive about their plight, might go beserk again and start interrupting our peaceful existence as happened on July 7.

You have got to hand it to the Conservatives. We tend to think of the party as being the party of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Peel. It is also, as this moron demonstrates, the party of Neville Chamberlain.

As I said in a rather angry comment the other day: Britain is a country, not a hotel.

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The Mirror may not be the most august of newspapers but if half of what they are saying is true, this could be very interesting indeed and puts the whole psychological makeup of the 'suicide' bombers in question. Maybe it was not suicide at all!

The evidence is compelling: The terrorists bought return rail tickets, and pay and display car park tickets, before boarding _ a train at Luton for London. None of the men was heard to cry "Allah Akhbar!" - "God is great" - usually screamed by suicide bombers as they detonate their bomb.

Their devices were in large rucksacks which could be easily dumped instead of being strapped to their bodies. They carried wallets containing their driving licences, bank cards and other personal items. Suicide bombers normally strip themselves of identifying material.

So perhaps it was all done with timers and those little terrorist shits were told a porky about exactly when they were going to blow up. If this is true then the more widely this is known, the less likely it will be that non-suicidal Muslim terrorist supporters might not be quite so willing to act as couriers or bomb planters for 'the cause'. Maybe the whole deranged 'Shaheed' thing has rather less resonance with the UK Islamic fringe than we thought. If the facts are correct, it is a pretty compelling interpretation.

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Sales of the sixth Harry Potter adventure by J.K. Rowling have reached 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours. Repeat slowly: 6.9 million copies. That puts this novel - and I am not a great fan, it has to be admitted - up in the sort of league that used to be associated with sales of Beatles albums or Michael Jackson tunes.

6.9 million copies sold in 24 hours. Egads. Those who decry Potter as lowbrow nonsense can spare their rage. (Yes, that includes you, Stephen Pollard). This is a cultural phenomenon we have not seen from these islands for years. As Brian Micklethwait pointed out not so long ago, Rowling has created a character to rival an earlier, very British-but-also-transferable-character - James Bond (I am an unashamed Ian Fleming fan).

I mentioned Michael Jackson a bit earlier. Strange to relate, but has anyone noticed that Johnny Depp, starring as Willy Wonka in the new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Tim Burton, looks just like the Faded One? I presume this has to be some sort of Hollywood in-joke.

Update: latest figures put Harry Potter sales at 8.9 million.

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For years, the French and now the Chinese have attempted to emulate the large-scale efforts of the United States to waste as much of their taxpayers' money as they can in orbit. The vision of a beflagged rocket thrusting into the vacuum is presented as a symbol of national virility.

We British should feel lucky that no government has ever felt the need to put a bloody great big Union Jack on top of a rocket and sling it into orbit. Since the 'special relationship' supplied most of the intelligence that the British required, a space policy was unnecessary and was not developed. Indeed, a civil space policy has emerged in recent years at the behest of the Brussels lunatics.

A quick survey, in an article by Taylor Dinerman, a spacepundit in The Space Review, provided a quick survey of contemporary and future developments in British space weaponisation. Possibilities include the potential development of defenses for new satellite capabilities and acquiring space strike capabilities for the RAF. It is clear that,

...this is not a joke. The UK does have a variety of military space systems and is developing more. It is inconceivable that any British government would ever willingly give up its status as a first-rank, medium-sized military power. Thus, they will have to develop a far more sophisticated and comprehensive approach to military operations in orbit than they have up to now.

The most interesting aspect of Dinerman's conclusions is that the lack of government funding or inspiration in Britain has not prevented the development of a potential infrastructure for space in the UK.

Britain is, indeed, lucky that its entrepreneurial juices have not entirely dried up. Unlike other European states, whose governments have invested massively in space technology and who are struggling to replicate America’s military space infrastructure, the UK has achieved potential military space independence largely through the efforts of small entrepreneurs, such as SSTL’s CEO, Sir Martin Sweeting, and the Starchaser team. It is said that the British Empire was an inadvertent achievement. In the future, it may be said that Britain’s place in space was gained through a similar accident.

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Could this be linked to anything?

Plans by an alliance of rightwing extremists and football hooligans to exact "revenge" on Muslims after last week's bomb attacks are being monitored by police.

The Guardian has learned that extremists are keen to cause widespread fear and injury with attacks on mosques and high-profile "anti-Muslim" events in the capital.

And so another unfortunate spoke is added to the growing cycle of violence. But beneath the predictable roar of indignant outcry, it behoves us all to take the time and trouble to examine the plight of the native British working-classes; a plight which is all too often trodden underfoot in the wholesale rush to judgement.

Over the last few decades, the British working-classes have had to endure the indignity of watching their homelands colonised by foreign settlers, while oppressive "zero-tolerance" policing and so-called 'anti-social behaviour orders' have made them virtual prisoners in the few, dwindling communities that remain to them. At the same time, their jobs have been exported abroad, while the trade unions that used to promote their interests have been politically neutered. Thus despised, impoverished and persecuted, is it any wonder that some of their activists have taken it into their hands to strike back?

Nor should it be forgotten that they have no guns, no helicopters, no batons, no dogs, no infra-red detectors, no CS gas sprays, no tazers or other quasi-military means of defending themselves. Instead, they are forced to use what few pitiful resources they do have in a despairing bid to restore some dignity to their lives.

Of course, violence should not be condoned because it actually further damages the patriotic cause. But the victims of that violence would learn a great deal from an honest reflection of what role they may have played in driving these patriotic campaigners to such desperate measures.

Few, it seems, are prepared to face up to the simple truth, let alone articulate it. Instead, there is likely to be a chorus of demand for more security measures such as surveillance cameras, ID cards and oppressive police powers, all of which will merely add fuel to the fires that rage within the activists, reinforce their sense of hopelessness and humiliation and virtually guarantee further patriotic operations in the future.

We can all agree that the violence has to stop but in order to achieve that end we must urgently and sincerely address the legitimate grievances of the patriotic community.

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This site takes on the issue of a UK national identity card. That puppy is a good advertisement against id cards!

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I have just got in, hot and tired after my trudge back from the office. Flicking on the television, and, behold on BBC 1, is the first night at the Proms, commencing the famous series of music nights held for a period of weeks at the Royal Albert Hall.

The orchestra is bashing out a piece by Edward Elgar right now, a composer associated - not entirely correctly - with brash British patriotism. In the current climate, it makes me smile rather wryly that this supreme genius of British music should be beamed into our homes on this sultry Friday evening, and via those lovely people at the BBC.

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On BBC Radio 4's "Today" Programme it was announced that Karl Marx was the greatest philosopher of all time and a leading Marxist historian was invited on to the show to explain the ideas of my near namesake. This was not an example of bias - simply a result of people e-mailing the BBC in response to the "In Our Time" Programme asking this question.

Of course, people who listened to BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" programme (or any other BBC show) would not have heard a sustained attack on Karl Marx in recent years. And today (July 14) shows this point - on the "In Our Time" programme the presenter (who is a supporter of the Labour party but, by the standards of the BBC, is actually rather fair minded) asked if any of the experts on the show thought that there was a connection between the ideas of Karl Marx and events in Russia, China...

None of three academic "experts" thought that there was. Karl Marx was, in fact, a great supporter of freedom.

A glance at say The Communist Manifesto (1848) would show that Marx favoured (even in the early stages of the revolution) the confiscation of the property of anyone who tried to flee the new regime, and that he also favoured the creation of industrial and agricultural "armies".

For a man who was normally careful to say he could not describe what the future society would be like, this is quite revealing.

Marx believed in "freedom of speech" for himself - not for anyone else (this is quite clear, both from his doctrines and his life). The academics were simply following the tradition of Plato - that of the "noble lie".

Is it any wonder that people who were educated by such academics would have a favourable view of Marx?

But we must move on.

On the 1pm. BBC television news we were told that although the bomb in Baghdad had killed 30 children it was really targeted against the Americans (after all one American had died), and that the bomb in September that also killed about 30 children had also really been targeted against the Americans.

So that is OK then, if one supports killing Americans.

Except, of course, it does not make sense. If a bomber waits till a crowd of children has gathered (to get sweets or for any other purpose) and then sets off his bomb, then the target is THE CHILDREN.

By the 1700 Radio Four "PM" programme, things had got truly bizarre.

A "leading astrologer" was interviewed to examine the theory that the evil Americans had altered our destiny by shooting a space probe at a comet.

Most of the questions were respectful (rather than ironic), and the astrologer said that he did not know, but seemed most concerned at the "arrogant" action of the Americans, which might have pushed us into a "parallel universe".

So we went from Marxism to Islamic fundamentalism, to barking mad mysticism - all in one day.

It would not be true to say that the BBC will support "anything" that has "death to America" at its heart (for example it would not support a return to a strong Monarchy that demanded that the colonists return to loyalty to the Crown), but it will certainly support a lot of rather different anti-American ideological positions.

I remind readers that unlike the "Guardian" or the "New York Times", people are forced to pay for the BBC - via their television "licence fee".

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Watching the news is starting to give me a strange throbbing headache. Most people in Britain realise that just because our enemies are Muslims, that does not mean all (or even most) Muslims are our enemies. Other than in a few shitholes like Oldham, most British folks really do value, or at least accept, the pluralistic tolerant society that largely prevails in these 'Sceptred Isles'.

Ok? Did you get that Messers Blair, Howard, Kennedy, etc. etc? Most of us understand that and those who think otherwise are not going to listen to you anyway. You will note that synagogues getting vandalized in France are such a regular occurrence that it is hardly even news anymore, whereas a stone through a mosque window in the UK makes the papers. Does that tell you something?

So next time there is some hideous atrocity, be it here in the UK, in the USA, in Iraq, in Israel or anywhere else in the world that Al Qaeda or Hamas have infested, can you kindly resist the urge to say "But Islam is a religion of peace...". We heard you before and we have not reacted to previous incidents by torching mosques from London to Lanarkshire. Please. PLEASE...just.shut.the.fuck.up.

Thank you.

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I do not believe that we have a "No shit Sherlock" category for blog postings here, but maybe we should. Here is the explanation that the Evening Standard was offering today of what made those who committed the atrocities of last Thursday in London decide to become suicide bombers:

This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station, at about 3pm this afternoon.

To be fair to the Evening Standard, their actual reportage was somewhat more informative, and more up-to-the-minute billboards revealed that one of the bombers was a primary school teacher. That was news, to me anyway.

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Now that we know what everyone except Tony Blair suspected (that the suicide bombers were probably British born or at least legal residents), perhaps it is worth noting that had mandatory ID cards been in force, they would have been perfectly entitled to avail themselves of one each.

Yes, I can see how this will help stamp out terrorism. Right? Right?

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Here is a project I certainly welcome called We are not afraid. The message is simple, worth repeating and lets you do strange things with a camera.

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Harry Hutton and his commenters very quickly became fed up with people going on about the British Stiff Upper Lip, and the Spirit of the Blitz. I know the feeling, and I am sure they speak for many. A lot of this talk is indeed rather self-conscious and theatrical, by which I mean not arm waving and emoting, but just a case of us all deliberately summoning up our inner David Nivens so that the bits of us just above our mouths will look suitably stiff in TV close-up.

Plus, I wonder how stiff our upper lips would now be if three thousand people had died and London had lost two of its most striking buildings.

On the other hand, the father and mother of Philip Russell, the second person on this melancholy list, were briefly on the telly this afternoon. She was silent. He was a model of considered sorrow. There was no out-of-control display of rage, no "why us?" wailing, just calm grief, and quiet words of appreciation for the character of their departed son. If Mr Russell senior is shedding tears he was not showing it to the cameras, and we were spared those hideous, triumphant close-ups of a person showing more feelings to the camera-persons than he intended. To dismiss Mr Russell's reaction as mere theatricality would be very tasteless, and I would say, mistaken.

But whether you think all this talk of stiff upper lips is a media led posture or the real thing or, as I think, a bit of both, the good news is that it all makes a most refreshing change from the emotional incontinence that greeted the death of Diana Princess of Wales. This, we all immediately realised, is the real thing. Quite enough real people have lost real loved ones whom they actually knew and really liked, without lots of other people piling in with self-indulgent displays of bogus misery concerning people they never knew.

There is also the fact that, whereas the message that all those silly public mourners were sending out when Princess Di died was all about what the Horrid Paparazzi had done, and of What She Meant To Us, blah blah blah, we now all understand that the more we emote about these bombings, the more pleased will the people be who did them, and who helped them, and who are now cheering that they did them. We do not want to give those people any further satisfaction. So yes, it is all a bit theatrical, in the sense that the tone is deliberate. But, good.

Tony Blair, instinctive politician that he is, tuned in to both moods. When Di died, he was on the verge of tears. When these bombs went off, he had already practised a much calmer display, to suit the new, far more serious – far more real – state of affairs.

Emotional continence is not the same as intellectual excellence. A stiff upper lip is no excuse for refusing to use the brain a few inches above it in an intelligent manner. I am not saying that everything Tony Blair and his supporting caste of cabinet ministers and coppers has been correct, just that the tone of voice has mostly been good. What we ought to think – and what we ought to do – is a quite distinct matter from how we should merely feel about all this. (I strongly agree with Johnathan Pearce that last Sunday's Telegraph leader is an excellent place to start. And if you liked that, you will also like this by Mark Steyn.)

But, with all those caveats duly caveated (or whatever it is you do with caveats), emotional continence is entirely the right emotional atmosphere within which to get stuck into the process of sharpening up our thinking about all these matters, and then acting upon those thoughts. It is, in short, an excellent start.

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Sky News and its sister television channel Fox is reporting, along with Channel 4 News, that the bombers last Thursday may heve been killed in the act of detonation. I am watching a police press conference as I write. A number of police raids are going on in Yorkshire, northern England.

I don't believe in the existence of Hell, but if there is such a place, may the mass murderers of last Thursday spend much time in it.

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USAF personnel in the UK have been told to stay out of London because of the bombings. Sorry but this is not just a propaganda gift to the enemy, it is just plain daft.

Firstly, the US was not the target of these bombs, Londoners were. Secondly, London is always full of American visitors and US military folk do not really stand out from the crowd all that much. In fact Americans are probably more likely to form identifiable 'target clusters' in the rural communities around the US bases in the UK.

It was a terrible atrocity but we have seen it all before in London at the hands of the IRA, so please, telling US service personnel to avoid London is foolish and plays to the often held stereotype of Americans as easily scared by such incidents. I am sure USAF people are made of sterner stuff and more than capable of assessing the risks for themselves.

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I am taking the scenic route home at the moment. I know readers will think I am a wimp, but I still cannot quite summon up the courage to go down the Tube again - which is unpleasantly hot in the summer, anway - and have been getting plenty of exercise. My route takes me from Holborn, down Chancery Lane, down to the Embankment and then a long walk up to Parliament on the side of the River, then through Millbank, past the lovely Tate Gallery and then back to my home in Pimlico. (Brian of this parish also lives in the area).

The atmosphere is rather odd. There is the constant racket from helicopters hovering about, over Buckingham Palace much of the time. There are hundreds of police, some armed, outside prominent buildings including Parliament and the big Whitehall offices, of course. There are thousands of tourists, although quite a few appear unwilling to use their cameras for fears of appearing insensitive or possibly even suspicious. A lot of the tourists look even more dazed than is often the case. Most people seem pretty cheerful, though, which is good.

As I walked past Parliament Square opposite the rather scruffy anti-war posters, a young black guy in a posh shirt was shouting out loudly his evangelical Christian message. No offence to Christians but it struck a jarring note. I wish folk like this fellow, no doubt a decent person, could realise that hectoring religion is not quite what London, or anywhere else, needs right now.

A final thought for tonight: I cannot help notice how many stunning women there are walking about the moment. They may not realise it or care less, but in their ravishing way, these suntanned goddesses are sticking one in the eye to the women-hating jihadis.

Hot British crumpet - FUCK YEAH!

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Burning in fear??!!? Ha!! Not this Brit. With my upper lip fixed stiff, I hoot and mock these jihadis. Wankers one and all. I'd like to see 'em on Celebrity Terrorist Island, the IRA'd make mincemeat of them.
- comment number 9 of these ones at Crooked Timber, spotted there by Tim Worstall yesterday

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Next time London mayor Ken Livingston professes to speak for London's outrage at the 7/7 attack, perhaps his long standing support for Islamic extremists (not to mention Irish terrorists) needs to be thrown back at him. Moreover those who continue to support him must not be allowed to avoid these issues either and if the Labour party wants Red Ken 'back in the fold', they must be made to pay a suitable political price.

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I was on my way to hear a talk by Tim Evans in Putney about his work as the boss of CNE. Presumably it was going to be similar to the talk flagged up here.

Anyway, I walked to St James's Park tube station, which was open and functioning but with not many people using it. A train was standing at the platform and I ran down the steps in the hope of getting into it before the doors closed. I need not have bothered. It waited, and waited.

Until eventually, an announcement materialised saying: security alert at Victoria (the next station along the line). Damn. There I was, eager to do my bit to face down those moronofascist terrorists by going about my business as usual, as per the Spirit of the Blitz etc., which in my case meant a sweaty tube journey out to Putney to an evening meeting, but unable to make my journey. Very annoying. I would really have liked to have heard that talk of Tim's, but there was now no way I was going to get to Putney in time.

All those Londoners who would have had to share my inconvenience had they got caught by the same delay, but who had instead decided to give their work a miss today, turned out to have made a wise decision.

I asked the bloke at the ticket barrier I went back through if I could get my money back. He pointed at the ticket window where I had bought my ticket, but said he did not fancy my chances, on account of my ticket being usable to get to my destination by other means, namely two interminable bus journeys or one bus journey and an annoyingly long walk. (Which, by the way, I was not sure about and would have to find out about. Ugh!) So when I nevertheless asked for my refund I emphasised that there was no other way I could get where I wanted to in time. And guess what, he gave me my money back. However, I got the definite impression from all of this that under normal circumstances – no bombs yesterday, the usual crazy rush hour crowds – I would not have been so lucky. They are not usually this reasonable. Has the word gone out to these guys to be nice to the passengers, until we return in sufficient numbers to clog everything up again, and they can resume their normal level of small-print-based nastiness, in circumstances like these?

I can find no reference on the internet to this particular little flap, as of 10pm, which is when I am writing this. The only relevant thing I could find was a reference to "Minor delays are occurring on the rest of the line", i.e. the District Line, which is what it says around now at this Transport for London page.

My guess: jumpy people, chasing shadows, preferring the soft cushion of being safe to the faintest possibility of being sorry. Which is understandable. I am afraid London will be like this for quite a few more days yet.

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So London was attacked and hundreds were killed or wounded by Islamic fanatics (showing incidently why we are utterly right to be fighting these vermin wherever they are to be found)... and having ID cards would have made not one damn bit of difference.

Next time some pontificating dissembling jackass holds up 'terrorism' as why Britain need these odious things, I am likely to spit in their face.

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Despite the byline, this is being posted from London

The train and tube that I caught in to work this morning were significantly less crowded today than is usual - carrying maybe two thirds to three quarters the normal number of passengers. The atmosphere on the trains was pretty serious. People were sitting pretty still on the train with pretty serious faces and eyes even more than normally fixed on newspapers. The British air of "We are going about our business, damn it" stoicism came through pretty strongly. There were more police in London Bridge station than is usual. Advertising placards for the Evening Standard were rather incongrously still proclaiming "London's Victory: How We Did It" or some such. These had been advertising the Wednesday edition of the paper (or perhaps the earliest Thursday edition) and rather unsurprisingly nobody had been selling the Thursday edition inside the station. They have probably been replaced by now with placards advertising the first Friday edition of the paper.

While standing on the Jubilee Line platform, the announcements were fairly normal, except that the standard, very mechanical sounding "Please make sure that you keep all packages and other personal possessions with you at all times" was replaced by a slightly more human announcement of "Obviously I don't need to tell you that you should keep all packages and other personal possessions with you at all times".

The large international bank I work for instituted very tight and very visible security for getting into the building after September 11. It was only two or three months ago that this was relaxed, but I found that the tight and visible security regime had returned this morning. I was required to show my company ID card several times before being able to reach my desk. Upon getting there, I found that about half of the people in the team I work for had come to work - several of the rest have logged into their work computers from home and are working remotely.

However, I hadn't been at my desk long when an important piece of information flashed around - there was free food in the cafeteria. Management were making a friendly gesture to the employees who had made it in today, or something. I went down to the cafeteria and discovered that the number of people queueing for food and eating in the cafeteria was at least twice as long as it would be on a normal day, despite the number of people at work being much smaller than normal. Many of the people in the queue were no doubt millionaire investment bankers, but the opportunity to have free bacon and eggs was clearly not one to be sneezed at. The queue was long, but people remained in it patiently and good-humouredly. And I didn't sneeze at it, having a helping of free bacon and eggs myself.

So, the British people have survived this terrorist attack in good shape. They are still stoic, very angry about the people who attacked their city (although it would be bad manners to show it directly), determined to go on with their lives, are still the great queueing culture they always were, and are still also profoundly cheap. I'm not British, but it makes me proud to be a Londoner.

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I have just had my attention drawn to this rather startling claim:

Preliminary reports from a source inside the Pentagon indicate that one of the operatives involved in this morning's bombings in London was recently released from the prison at Guantanamo.

The link is to a US website called 'Northeast Intelligence Network'. Are they really high-level security operatives or just a bunch of wannabes? And is this 'Pentagon source' actually some filing clerk with 'Deep Throat' pretensions? Even assuming that these people are the genuine article, how can they possibly know this after just a few hours? As far as I can tell, there is no mention anywhere in the UK press about the identity of the suspects at all.

On the other hand, the British security services are notorious for a culture of secrecy and, if the story is true, it is typical of them to bury it, at least for a while (and in some cases for years).

I lean towards the view that this is fabrication, the chaff from the grinding wheel of the rumour-mill. But can anybody else shed any light?

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We Samizdatistas have not managed anything so far by way of photo-blogging of yesterday's dramas. However, those wanting to get a pictorially illustrated feeling of what it was like might like to take a look at Adam Tinworth's blog, starting here, and scrolling upwards.

That is one Adam's photos, which has a nice stiff upper lip feel to it, I think. I also liked the one of people crowding into Dixons, just to watch the tellies in there, to find out what was going on.

With regard to my title above, I suspect that 7/7 is more likely to end up being the name we give to yesterday's bomb attacks than David's 07/07. Either way, a small thing to be thankful for is that it happened on the Xth day of the Xth month, so to speak, and we do not have to get involved in transatlantic bickering/explaining about which comes first, the day or the month.

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I am still feeling pretty shaky after what happened this morning. I was on the Central Line tube train and got off at St Paul's at 08:45, just two stops before Liverpool Street station, near where one of the attacks took place. Like most Londoners I will be walking into work tomorrow. Many will stay at home, advised to do so by the police and their own employers. I regularly use the King's Cross tube station and may want to give the underground metro system a miss for a while.

The atmosphere is pretty strange this evening. As I walked along the River Thames on my way home I noticed a lot of pubs were packed, as people no doubt wanted a drink and a chat and see a friendly face. Traffic is way down, but there are still lots of police cars, ambulances and unmarked cars with blue flashing lights zooming about. Most people I see appear calm and pretty resilient about it all. I suppose it will take a while for things to sink in.

Mobile phones were knocked out, and I was not able to get in touch with my other half, my family or friends for several hours. The Internet has worked well.

No doubt much ink is going to be spilled in the next few days about the ramifications, the likely political fallout, the civil liberties implications, and all the other stuff we scribble about. All I want to add now is my condolences to those who have lost loved ones or been injured in these terrible attacks. And spare a thought for the doctors, nurses and other emergency workers dealing with the human wreckage caused by these scum.

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The official casualty roll from this morning's attack now stands at 37 dead and 700 injured to varying degrees.

It now appears that there were four separate explosions, three of them on undergound trains at Aldgate, Kings Cross, Edgware Road and one on a bus in Woburn Place near to Russell Square.

The BBC website is carrying some photographs of the chaos, many of them taken on the spot with camera-phones.

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The German magazine 'Spiegel On-line' is reporting that something calling itself 'The Secret Organisation of Al-Qaeda in Europe' has claimed reponsibility for this morning's attacks on London.

Allegedly the triumphal claim was made on a website. The article does not link to the website but does include an apparent screenshot of the relevant posting.

This is all unsubtantiated and could be complete bunkum. Who knows?

UPDATE: I have just had a call from a friend who has been stuck down in Aldgate all day. He was on his way to work when the attack occured but was unscathed. Apparently the police are now allowing people to travel home from Central London. The cops he has spoken to have told him that the death toll is now 45 but this is unconfirmed.

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For anyone who may be worried about relatives or friends in Central London, the Police Casualty Bureau hotline number is now open on 0870 1566 344.

UPDATE: 33 fatalities now confirmed. I hope this figure does not inflate but I rather fear that it may.

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Things look pretty normal round here but then I am stuck in the North London 'burbs and the carnage is all concentrated around Central London and the West End.

My mobile telephone appears to be working just fine but the public transport network has been shut down entirely.

The MSM is still reporting 2 fatalities which seems mercifully low given the timing, location and nature of the attacks. Maybe this figure will rise as the day passes, but I profoundly hope that it doesn't.

Tony Blair is winging his way back to London from the G8 summit in Edinburgh and George Bush is about to make a statement.

More later.

UPDATE: Unconfirmed reports that death toll has risen to 10.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The MSM is now reporting 'many fatalities' but no numbers. Either they genuinely don't know or do know and won't say.

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The entire London Underground network is closed following explosions at
Liverpool Street, Aldgate, Edgware Road, Old Street and Russell Square. This
is presently being blamed on a "power surge". Curious.

Update: A bus has exploded in Russell Square and there are reports of two more buses having been bombed elsewhere in London. Looks like it is a terrorist attack.

(Note: This is one of the regular Samizdatistas blogging from the Canary Wharf office district in London - anonymously because he is at work).

Update:Sky News is reporting "90 casualties" at Aldgate. Transport unions are reporting "some fatalities". The Home Secretary has referred to "terrible casualties". There are apparently two trains trapped underground at Edgware Road. I have heard a hearsay report that three unexploded bombs were found at King's Cross.

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to London.

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London has just won the right to host the 2012 Olympics.

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Even in this era of intense news management and political spin, a public figure will still occasionally (and often inadvertantly) let a few morsels of truth slip out.

For the past two decades or so, and by every standard that can be accurately measured, participation in the established political process has been in steady decline. Voter turnout is consistently lower than it was in the 1970's and membership of the main political parties is but a fraction of what it was in the 1950's.

Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a hubbub of worry among the political classes with attendant brow-furrowing and hand-wringing over what should be done about it. Some of the more foolishly optimistic (or perhaps just ill-advised) politicos have launched themselves into toe-curlingly embarrassing campaigns to 'get down with the kidz' only to hurtle smack, dab into a wall of indifference. The less exhibitionist among them have been uttering dark murmurings about 'compulsory voting'.

In the fullness of time, and as the disillusion spreads like sea-fog, I expect that those murmurings will become a demanding roar. In the meantime, the first member of the cabinet, former Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, has added his somewhat more audible murmur to the compulsion lobby.

I am not going to use this article to examine the arguments about compulsory voting, except to say that I am against it. More interesting to me (for the moment at least) is Mr. Hoon's choice of words:

Mr Hoon said: "My fear is that as the older, more regular voters die, we will be left with a significant number of people for whom voting is neither a habit, nor a duty..."

Is that how Mr. Hoon thinks of voting? As a 'habit'? As a 'duty'? Where is the call to democratic arms? Where is the sizzle of enfranchised excitement? Where are the glamourous invocations of citizen empowerment? All long gone is the inescapable truth. Instead we are left with habit and duty.

If I were being charitable, I might suggest that Mr. Hoon chose his words for convenience rather than accuracy and that it would be unfair to second guess him on this basis. But I actually think that Mr. Hoon was being honest. Furthermore, I am prepared to extend to him the rare honour of actually speaking for the nation, or at least that 'significant' chunk of it for whom voting has become a sullen and thankless obligation, rather like slopping out the bedpan of an infirm and elderly relative while trying not to succumb to the guilt upon contemplation of the unspoken resolution that it would be better for everyone if they would just quickly and peacefully die.

Small wonder it is why young people don't vote anymore.

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Popular support for ID cards - never all that evident to me in the first place - has collapsed, according to this story in the Daily Telegraph this morning. The article, citing a YouGov poll, says support has dropped sharply in part due to the likely high cost of the cards.

I am of course pleased that Tony Blair and his oafish Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, are facing a serious setback on this issue. Nothing would give me more pleasure than if this most devious of administrations had to abandon this wrongheaded, expensive and oppressive scheme. But I cannot help feel a twinge of dismay that an assault on our liberties may be thwarted not because the UK electorate have grasped the principles at stake but because of the monetary cost. It makes one wonder whether we would happily sell our freedoms if the price were right.

I hope of course that I am dead wrong about that.

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Here is a list of the MPs who voted in favour of trying to make you have an ID card. Do you see your MP here? Let them know what you think of what they have done.

Special kudos to the 20 Labour MPs who put decency before party and refused to be go along with this disgraceful attempt to control you.

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This appeared in the comment section of the previous post, writen by Michael Taylor. It is just too interesting to leave as a comment:

One thing we in the online community can do is to work to ensure transparency and accountability is brought to this process. We need to find out who has been pressing this scheme from its infancy: that doesn't just mean finding the Labour Party hacks who've embraced it; it does not even just mean finding the Whitehall Committees which pushed it.

It means finding the details of the people who sat on that committee: it means getting their names and track records out in public. I want names and reasons and track records. Where possible, I would want those personal details which they would collect from us out there on the web for all to see. It also means tracking every single hardware and software supplier who is bidding for the work - again, we need personal names not company names. And then these people need to be monitored closely, and lobbied intensively. There needs to be absolutely no place for these securocrats to hide: there must be no secrecy, no privacy for them.

Let us also make sure we use the Freedom of Information Act aggressively to get this information: swamp them with requests for every detail of every person's career who has ever been on any committee which has recommended any part of this scheme. If nothing else, such an intensive and personal campaign of transparency gives opponents of the scheme the best possible chance of keeping these people on the back foot.

Look, for example, at how angry the govt has got with the LSE's report. That should be only the merest footfall, the tiniest ripple of administrative inconvenience and distributed informational opposition they must face. Do this, and we will win.

Michael Taylor.

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Listening to Tony Blair addressing the EU parliament is a rather strange experience. He calls for reform of spending and recognising economic reality whilst at the same time declaring that he is a 'passionate European' and saying that he supports the idea of an intrusive welfare state.

That Blair's views on the need to 'liberalise' makes him a Thatcherite radical in the eyes of many Continental politicians shows how truly doomed to long term stagnation and irrelevance the EU really is. It also shows Blair's wish to be all things to all people and why in the long run NuLabour cannot help but choke on its own contradictions just as the Tories have.

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Peter Hitchens is someone I only intermittently agree with (and this time is no different, after all he writes for that bastion of the right-statism, The Mail on Sunday) but his lengthy article in The Spectator called Conservatives do not have a party had me nodding most of the time.

There is no point in pretending that the Tory party is going to recover. This pretence only delays the construction of a new movement, which cannot flourish until we have said goodbye to the old one. It also gives the Liberal Democrats the freedom to supplant the Tory party, unobstructed, in many of its former strongholds, a freedom they are enthusiastically using.

[...]

So David Davis, who is opposed to European integration if he means anything at all, is compelled to seek the support of federalists. This, the modified Molotov–Ribbentrop pact approach, has been tried before — but only by people who forget how that pact ended. Similarly, Kenneth Clarke is seriously put forward as the saviour of a party he plainly hates.

[...]

You cannot properly defend, say, constitutional monarchy if you have no idea why you believe in it and do not understand why your opponents hate it. You cannot effectively oppose the introduction of identity cards unless your every instinct revolts at the imposition of these oppressive breathing licences on a free people.

Hitchens and I disagree over foreign policy issues (amongst other things) but it is hard not to recognise that the Tories are finished for exactly the reasons Hitchens points out and that it is not in the interests of anyone who cares what happens in Britain to have the current power elite unopposed for any longer.

And before some of our commentariat start muttering that it is unrealistic for someone like me to expect the Tory party to transform itself into a model of libertarian small state rectitude; I am not suggesting that at all. I just think that as the Conservative party is not meaningfully conservative any more and that the party's leadership clearly do not give a hoot about conserving civil society, it needs to be replaced with something that fills that rather large political niche if the current trend towards politically correct populist authoritarianism is to be effectively opposed.

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I was going to write a piece with that title (assuming the allusion would spare me from discipline for scattering the star-field with apostrophes) but it seems Richard Tomkins in the FT has done it first, and, almost certainly, better.

However, that's a subscription-required piece, so I will rehash my main thoughts for those who do not subscribe, and do not still have a venial physical paper habit like mine.

I was dumbstruck by the general soft welcome among free-market types for Alastair Darling's hints at individual travel charges by satellite. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but the only word that springs to mind is - "suckers".

Just because a minister says something is "road pricing" does not mean it is a real live example of a market mechanism. In fact, when a minister in the current UK government says something, one would have thought that by now most people would be looking for the misrepresentation. If the minister seems to be saying something, then the truth is likely incompatible with the impression.

The thing is, it is not a price unless you get a choice. Road pricing as conceived by freemarketeers involves someone being willing to pay the cost of more convenient travel, someone else being prepared to provide it, and a bargain between them established when the buyer chooses to use the road.

The price is determined by the market, and the choices available depend on the costs of the providers and the willingness of travellers to pay. There are geographical constraints, and competition with non-transport uses for land, but politics, though it might influence the course of the roads, has no direct effect on the price you choose to pay. The turnpike company does not care who you are, or how far you go, as long as you pay the toll. It is only selling roadspace.

What Mr Darling offers us under the same name is no choice. The state will ration travel. The state will control the charges on the basis of what it thinks is good for you. There is a monopoly provider, the state. Its nominal purpose is to "reduce congestion", that is, stop travel, rather than assist it. And it insists that total surveillance of - and therefore control of - the individual traveller, is necessary to do it, rather than a disinterested payment mechanism.

Still like the idea? Here is another example of how to deal people who want to be where the government thinks they should not be.

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Let us not blame Gordon Brown for everything. He has learnt the lessons of his predecessors. The wrong lessons.

Compare:

Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember my faults this day:

[...]

And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt.
And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.
And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. (Genesis, Ch.41)

And,

I announced that I had no proposals to touch on the 'anomalous but much-loved tax-free lump sum'

[...]

The side offensive began with the imposition in 1986 of a statutory limit on the size of pension-fund surpluses. This was much more difficult for the pension lobby to fight, and as a result I was able to get it on to the statute book. The dramatic improvement in the financial climate of the previous three or four years meant that many occupational funds had accumulated assets far in excess of those needed to honour their liabilities to their pensioners – in other words, and even on the highly conservative basis used by pension fund actuaries, the funds were heavily in surplus. This was not simply due to inadvertence. For these excess funds enabled companies to accumulate income, free of liability to Corporation Tax, in a gross fund

[...]

The 1986 reform put an end to this: no undue surpluses could be created, and existing surpluses would have to be run down over a period to a maximum of 5 per cent of total liabilities.

[...]

The course taken by most companies was the employer's contribution holiday, whose economic effects were a rise in company profits (and cash flow) and thus in Corporation Tax receipts, coupled with a fall in recorded personal saving, since employers' pension contributions are officially classified as personal savings. (Nigel Lawson, “The View from No.11”, Bantam 1992)

And saith the chief butler to Pharaoh, pay unto Joseph no mind. For the tax-gatherers counsel that ye take any fat kine that ye find among the people and slaughter them. The meat of the unjust surplus shall feed the priests of your temple. If there be famine the people will gnaw on old bones. And they will be weak and not rise up. But the tax-gatherers will be fat and glorify Pharaoh's name.

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Attention all petty, vindictive snitches everywhere, your country needs you:

New powers effectively criminalising smoking in public were announced by the Government yesterday, with the minister in charge promising an "intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law".

Informers will be encouraged to report breaches of sweeping bans on the habit, in which company smoking rooms will be outlawed and places such as bus shelters and the outsides of office blocks made no-smoking areas.

Very little encouragement will be required as there will be no shortage of willing and zealous 'informers'.

What a horrible place this country is becoming.

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As a general rule, whenever you hear or read that teaching unions are 'angry' then you can pretty much bet all your wordly worth that something good and positive is happening in the education sector.

I have yet to encounter an exception to this rule:

Teachers' unions reacted angrily today after the Government vowed to press ahead with plans for 200 privately-sponsored city academies.

This hardly means that the (long overdue) commodification of education is upon us but then these public sector mafiosi possess bloodhound levels of sensitivty that enable them to pick up on even the faintest whiff of threat to their vested interests.

I wholly expect that even if these academies do start sprouting up around the country, the curriculum will still be politically-mandated and the sponsors will (in common with everyone else in the productive, non-looting sector) have to navigate their way through a miasmic swamp of diktats, edicts and regulations on their way to getting something resembling decent results.

But, for all that, they do seem to me to represent the first few, tottering, tentative, baby steps towards the long-term goal of levering the state out of the education business. Good.

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The UK government has floated the idea of fitting GPS tracking devices into cars as part of a way to enforce road tolls, with a pilot project starting in a few years' time before going nationwide. One can immediately see how civil libertarians might object to such a setup, given that it could further consolidate the surveillance state.

Even so, the idea of charging for road use has a strong free market pedigree, as the Adam Smith Institute blog makes clear here. Road toll systems operated by private firms need not necessarily involve the centralised data collection systems that our present UK government might favour.

One little detail of the ASI comment made me grin, in that apparently, road tolls in Hong Kong failed in the 1980s to become law because men feared the toll invoices would reveal they had been spending their evenings down the local bordellos. Okaaaay.

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The Turner Prize competition has become a byword for everything that is, in the opinion of some, trashy, superficial, capricious, and utterly vacuous in today's art world. Amazingly, it is considered a news event that an artist working in the representational tradition has actually been shortlisted to win the prize named after one of the greatest, if not the greatest, painter that Britain has ever produced.

In the meantime, for those that wonder about what has gone wrong in the art world, may I recommend this fine book about art and the theories thereon by the late Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it even to those who are not Rand fans like yours truly.

Of course, I would love it if this man won the Turner Prize, but I guess he probably does not care a hoot anyway.

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Yes, three days later than last year but that comes as no surprise, right?

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We have already had people from the commission this morning talking about how they 'interpret' the French vote. What don't they understand? No is no.

If the government in this country or the commission try to breathe life into this corpse, then we in Britain we must have a say to deliver the final blow.

- Liam Fox, Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary

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... or at any rate prolonged the misery.

I have been reading The Motivated Mind by Dr Raj Persaud, British TV's most familiar psychiatric face. This book is, for me, rather less than the sum of its parts. There is a structure to it, in the form of the assertion that human motivation is often very complicated, and more complicated than many psychologists have said. But mostly it is a mixture of more or less informed pop psychology about how to get on with your career, love life, etc., and references to interesting learned articles. It reads more like a bundle of articles than a real book, and personally I would have preferred it as a blog, but that may just be me. So I have not been reading this book solidly. Rather, I have been dipping.

And near the end (p. 396 of my paperback edition) I did come across this amusing titbit:

For many years the most popular method of suicide in Great Britain was asphyxiation – sticking one's head in the oven and turning on the gas. After the discovery of natural gas deposits in the North Sea in the fifties and sixties, most English homes converted from coke gas, whose high carbon monoxide content made it highly lethal, to less toxic natural gas. From 1963 to 1978 the number of English suicides by gas dropped from 2,368 to eleven and the country's overall suicide rate decreased by one-third. Despite England's varying unemployment rate and social stresses since then, it has remained at this lower level.

Maybe you knew that, but I did not, and I find it most intriguing.

The moral? Plenty of them, I suppose, but one would be the extraordinary mismatch that constantly occurs in life between trivial causes and portentous consequences. Economic analysis that it would be more dignified to apply only to such insignificances as chocolate bar purchases – in the form of transaction costs – turns out to illuminate self-administered death also.

For me, if suicide ever beckons, it will either itself be painless, or my continuing existence will itself have become so painful that one more spasm of further pain will make no difference. So it does actually make sense to me that if you remove what must at least seem like a reasonably painless means of exiting from life, many who would have slipped out by this door, instead remain living until death, by natural causes, reaches out to them.

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A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs - that is to say the "war" on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour - no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out.

Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.

Officers have swooped on nearly 20 homes in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas in the past week as part of Operation Overlord.

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This kind of thing used to enrage me. Then it got to the stage where it embarrassed me. Then it began to perplex me. But now, I am almost entirely resigned.

Go on, do your very worst. Bring it on:

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

Next: Doctors call for ban on opposable thumbs.

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I reckon it was a plot to make us all buy two copies of the Evening Standard.

First it was:

The French are making an audacious bid to take the London Eye to Paris.

And then later in the day it was:

The London Eye was saved today after an intervention by Ken Livingstone.

In my posting about this ruckus last week, I said that this attempt to gouge a hugely increased rent out of the Wheel might be linked to the plans now in hand to redevelop the South Bank in general, and in particular to rescue the acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. Since posting that speculation, I have actually visited the South Bank, and can confirm that building work has already begun.

What I omitted to mention was the Olympic effect. The Wheel is obviously a key part of the attempt to get the 2012 Olympics for London.

Evidently the (for now) South Bank Centre (a government funded quango) boss Lord Hollick reckoned that the Olympic effect would work in his favour, and he still might be proved right. But this is politics he is playing, not business, and it seems more likely that he will come out of this very badly. And the South Bank Centre, instead of getting a substantial fraction of the original absurd rent demand, may end up actually losing money. Hollick, by precipitating this row, has already hurt London's Olympic bid, and Ken Livingstone surely spoke for many, high and low, when he called him a prat. And being called a prat is the least of Hollick's problems. The trouble with playing the game of Olympic blackmail is that you are liable then to be savaged by extremely savage people, in the form of our particular feral (when angry) current batch of rulers. Hollick is going to need all the friends he can muster in the days to come.

I do not know how seriously to take the alleged French plan to ship the Wheel over to Paris and make it the cherry in the cake of the Paris bid. I love the Wheel, and never for a minute did I fear that this French plan, even assuming it was serious and not just cooked up by some friend of Ken Livingstone, or of the Evening Standard, would be allowed to come to fruition. So I laughed out loud when I first saw the headline.

I also had another laugh this evening when I looked at this website plugging the South Bank Centre, and saw this:

Situated on the South Bank of the River Thames next to the popular London Eye, the South Bank Centre is at the heart of an arts quarter stretching from the National Film Theatre to Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe.

If London loses the Olympic bid, as most of us here at Samizdata.net pray that it does, then everything will turn out splendidly. Lots of entertainment, and no actual Olympics to spoil the fun.

On the other hand, if London does get landed with the Olympics, stand by for blackmail like you've never seen before, from whoever decides to give it a go.

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And since we are on the subject of 'Star Wars' this evening, it appears that Our Glorious Leader has finally been seduced by the 'Dork Side':

They are the must-have fashion accessory for the socially aware - and now Tony Blair has got in on the craze.

Whether worn to highlight racism, cancer research or poverty, coloured bands are a familiar sight on the wrists of footballers and pop stars.

Now the prime minister has been photographed wearing a white Make Poverty History wristband during a trip to a hospital in Edgware, north London.

Perhaps he wants to be in a filmy-wilmy with Gwynnie and Braddie?

[Furthermore, for a polished and forensic debunking of this cloth-headed, celebrity-driven codswallop, I recommend Stephen Pollard]

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It is arguable that, despite the radical changes that have transformed the British economy over the last three decades, the political economy underlying the welfare state remains intact. This compact, forged following the swing to the left in 1945, was based upon a universal benefits system, that all members of the national community would benefit from. The postwar Labour government wished to extend the perceived benefits of wartime mobilisation and national solidarity, transforming the People's War into the People's Peace. Such was their success that the underlying principles of the welfare state and the National Health Service, 'from the cradle to the grave' and free healthcare for all, became defining qualities of the British national identity.

Despite the dismantling of the nationalised industries, the third pillar of the welfare state, and the contraction of the benefits system by linking pensions to prices and the use of mens testing, the underlying principles were maintained. Indeed, they were strengthened by the development of the welfare state into a subsidised service for the professional middle classes, with free health and cheap university education. What the Labour government giveth, the Labour government can taketh away.

A striking feature of New Labour policy, or its Brownian version, is the gradual reorientation of the welfare state from its universalist roots towards a structure that favours the public sector professions. This trend appeared during the last Parliament, where the idea that government should automatically finance the university education of the middle classes was broken by the introduction of tuition fees.

Now, in the early days of the Blair administration, there are indications that New Labou is abandoning the principles underlying the universal benefits system in favour of structures and policies that benefit public sector employees. Instead of dismantling the benefits, except where they are financially unviable in the long term, the government has opted for positive discrimination.

This includes the possibility of subsidised mortgages for first time buyers who work in the public sector. Non-graduates will be able to retire at the statutory retirement age, but the government is considering whether graduates, especially private sector professionals should be forced to take their pension state benefits at the age of seventy in recognition of their statistical propensity to live longer. As an aside, this currently favours public sector professionals who will be able to retire at sixty on a defined benefit scheme whereas the private sector pension systems have been crippled by the downturn in investment returns since 1999 and the huge increase in taxation. The immoral viciousness of this government shines through in their willingness to increase the taxes on savings that people put by for their retirement.

Whilst these developments expand the welfare state, they strike at the social contract which supports the system, including the perceived values of fairness and inclusivity. New Labour mouths these slogans but takes steps to discriminate against the middle classes. The governent is closing off alternative routes that were utilised to provide education or an inheritance for their children. A possible example is the removal of charitable status for private schools, a change that may force many of them to close.

Whilst the expansion of the state should always be opposed, the development of overt discrimination within the public sector towards an embryonic nomenklatura, may be a positive development. For, within a democratic system, those discriminated against, will increasingly question why they should pay their taxes for deteriorating or stagnant services that are used to benefit others more than themselves.

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Delightful vignette from the always fascinating Theodore Dalrymple:

The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.

“Did you have to pay the money back?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”

He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.

This is merely the appetizer, though, for a delightful tale of literary "fraud." Tantalizing you with an excerpt might spoil the fun, so I will simply urge you to, as the man says, read the whole thing.

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Christopher Hitchens has to be one of the premier knife artists currently working in the English language. Can't say I'm that big a fan of his post-mortem assaults on Catholic luminaries, but when he lights up a political celebrity, well, its all good.

Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing's too good for the working class: what the English call a "wide boy."

TO THIS DAY, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has "never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of "charities," he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.

Hitch gets in a few licks on our own torpid Senate as well, and is pleased to report being characterized by George Galloway as a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay". Worth the read.

We certainly have our fair share of odious idiots, craven lickspittles, and oleaginous opportunists here in the States, but is there, anywhere in the Anglosphere, a worse human being than George Galloway?

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Britons, even those uninterested in sport, would have to have been ignoring the news for the past few weeks not have seen reports about the audacious purchase of English football team Manchester United by American tycoon Malcolm Glazer. His bid, which looks likely to succeed and will take the club off the stock exchange, has enraged fans, concerned that a man with no knowledge of football or the club's history will wreck the club.

I hope the fans' worst fears do not come to pass. The deal is, however, troubling. Glazer has taken on a vast amount of debt to finance the deal, presumably calculating that he can earn enough profits to service his debt to make the deal - known in the jargon as a leveraged buyout - viable. With concerns rising that the economy could slow down and dent the firm's profitability, such a deal could easily end badly for the club. A number of teams, most notably Leeds United, have fallen on hard times, nearly going under due to mountains of debt.

As a gung-ho defender of free enterprise, I can hardly claim that Glazer was not entitled to bid for this team under the rules of the stock market. He has taken his gamble and who knows, it may pay off, although the financial details don't appear very reassuring. I have noticed more than just a whiff of unpleasant anti-Americanism in some of the reporting on this deal in some quarters of the media.

I follow another team - Ipswich Town FC - but have always had a bit of a soft spot for the team that has given us the likes of Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bryan Robson. I hope that this rather oddball entrepreneur from Florida understands what he is doing and does not wreck one of the most famous, if the most famous, sporting institutions in the world.

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Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:

But respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn't any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don't worry, you're not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic.

As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit.

Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on.

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The recent television programme which has made the most difference to Britain has, I would say, been Jamie Oliver's show about school food. I did not see the show myself, but my sister, who used to be a General Practitioner, did see it, and was hugely impressed by it. She has not been the only one, to put it mildly. Never in the field of human cookery will so much be eaten, so differently, by so many, at the behest of just one celebrity chef.

My sister was especially impressed by the bit of his show where Jamie persuaded just one family to change the diet, for just one week, of their extremely troublesome and badly behaved children. The behaviour of the children was utterly transformed! They became nice, companionable people. Even more striking was that, as a treat for having eaten their meat and two veg (or whatever it was) and for behaving so well, the children were given another junk food meal, and they immediately reverted to being their old monstrous selves.

I have two comments to make about this story, beyond observing that it has had an electrifying effect upon Britain's educrats, and school food providers.

First, it is quite wrong to blame the free market for this sorry episode. In a real free market, schools would fall over themselves to offer good meals rather than bad ones. Insofar as there is something resembling a private sector in British education, it does supply quite nutritious food. (I went to a succession of private sector schools, and the food was pretty good, in the adult sense of being nutritionally good.) When British state schools were instructed, by Margaret Thatcher, to farm out school catering to the lowest bidders, that was an exercise in state diktat, not of the freedom of a free market. In real free markets you are not compelled to buy the cheapest version of what you want. No, you buy what you truly want, and if you choose to buy something good but more expensive, fine. That is your choice.

But when the same old single customer (the government) decides that its purchases shall be obtained from slightly different suppliers, that does not make a free market. One single word, 'privatisation', was invented to blur this distinction, the idea being that moves in a free market direction had to be made one small step at a time, and once you have lots of separate school food suppliers, that might make it easier to move towards having lots of genuinely independent schools. And that may even be true. But the distinction thus blurred should nevertheless be insisted upon.

Second, since this is not actually a free market versus state diktat issue, but merely a good food versus bad food issue, then, if like me you agree with my sister that the kind of food Jamie Oliver has been recommending would be an improvement over junk food, then you will welcome the influence he is now having. I agree that a free market in education, as in everything, would be better. But given that education is largely nationalised, it is good, other things being equal, that the inmates of this system should be well fed rather than badly fed.

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At last, that bastion of idiotarianism the BBC is going to go off the air for a while, God willing! That these grasping tax funded parasites are going to strike during major televised sporting events is splendid news so maybe now more folks might be a bit less willing to shell out £125 (about $240) per year in order to support an institution filled with moral relativists, collectivists, reflexive anti-Americans and pro-Islamofascists.

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Whilst Britain remains fixated on the aftermath of Tony Blair's unprecedented third term victory against their intellectually bankrupt and dependably inept opponents, it would behove people in Britain to pay a bit more attention to the electoral earthquake which shook Ulster which has resulted in David Trimble's relatively moderate Ulster Unionist Party has almost completely collapsing in favour of Ian Paisley Democratic Unionist Party.

Now that the only two significant political players locally are the two extremist parties from either side of the sectarian divide, things look like they are about to get dramatically more... interesting. The message from the Northern Ireland's protestant majority seems pretty damn clear to me but is anyone actually listening? I have a feeling I am going to be spending a lot more time keeping tabs on what get said on Slugger O'Toole, that most indispensable source of insights for all things Northern Irish, to see how things develop.

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This is interesting. It is Maurice Saatchi, in the Telegraph, ruminating upon the Conservative electoral defeat:

It will come as a surprise to my Conservative colleagues, as they absorb the lessons of last week's defeat, to learn that the Tory Party lost the 2005 election in 1790. That was the year Edmund Burke first advised Conservatives to concentrate on: What is not What should be.

With that single fatal distinction, pragmatism became the hallmark of Conservatism. Absence of idealism became its invisible badge of honour. And aimlessness became the pinnacle of its morality. There would never be a romantic bone in a Conservative body - or so Burke hoped.

Two hundred years later, Conservatism has fallen into an electoral slump, because it remains captive to his bleak instruction. At the 2005 election, the authentic voice of 18th-century Tory pragmatism spoke through the medium of the Conservative spokesman who said: "If you want philosophy, read Descartes." He meant that the function of the Conservative Party is to make the trains run on time. That may be so, or at least partly right. But the lesson of the campaign we have just fought is that the mere promise of efficiency is not enough to persuade people that you would be an efficient Government. Mere anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince the voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.

Read the whole thing. And while you are about it, read this Paul Marks paper to see what a misreading of Burke much of the above is. The usual Conservative practice where Edmund Burke is concerned is to misread him to be an unthinking, anti-principled pragmatist, and agree with that misreading. Saatchi misreads in the usual manner, but at least disagrees with the misreading. With the flair of the advertising man that he is, he signals his argument for principle by being a Conservative and opposing Burke. Good grief!! Would Burke himself have been pleased or infuriated? A bit of both, probably.

But never mind about such scholarly digressions. The point about this piece is not just what is being said but who is saying it.

This is a world-renowned advertising guru speaking, not some aging loony libbo policy wonk. Here is a man who knows about how elections are won and lost – and more to the point who is widely believed by your average Conservative Party heavyweight/hack to know about how elections are won and lost – who is saying that pragmatism, purely on pragmatic grounds, must be dumped, and replaced, on equally pragmatic grounds, with things like ideas, principles, abstractions, and even a dash or two of utopian dreaming.

What this could mean is that the sort of ideas which Conservatives have been carefully distancing themselves from for the last decade, ideas like the ones peddled here at Samizdata.net, might just start making some kind of comeback within Conservative ranks. After all, their vote pretty much stagnated in the election just concluded. Whatever shreds of success that Conservatives can now point to came because Labour's vote fell, somewhat. The Conservatives are going to have to put on a far better show if they ever want to win. Being somewhat more disciplined, complaining about immigration, and promising tax cuts without spending cuts does not add up to a winning message. What are they for? What should be?

Much of the drop in the Labour vote can be explained by a war which many Labour voters detested. So if the leading spirit of this war, Tony Blair, is pushed aside, the Labour vote may then go up again. Seriously, Labour could win the next election with a substantially increased majority. If Tony Blair's successor has learnt the lesson of Blairism (as much government as the country can afford but no more), then the Conservatives could be facing their worst result ever (because as numerically sickening as ever and their fourth loss in a row) next time around.

I expect many Conservatives to work all this out in due course. Some may even have worked it out already. Now that pragmatism has been tried and has failed, maybe, next time, they will try something else.

I do not want to exaggerate this. Nothing could possibly persuade me to waste any of what remains of my life urging people to vote Conservative, still less urging them to waste all of what remains of their lives trying to infiltrate the Conservatives, on the off chance that such optimism as the above may turn out to be a little bit justified, and that some of the ideas that the Conservatives resort to prove to be of the sort that I favour.

Many Conservatives will prefer simply to bet that Tony Blair and his successor are screwing up the British economy now and will screw up the British economy more, and that the steady pair of hands that they think they are offering, and that David Carr alluded to in his post-election posting, will suffice to get them back into power. And what is more, they could be right.

I merely note an interesting article, by an interesting man, suggestive of what is at least an interesting possibility.

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Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.

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I have now had some time to reflect on the outcome of last week’s General Election.

In many respects it was something of a non-event. Nobody seriously expected any result other than another Labour victory and the only matter which gave rise to any material speculation was the size of the Labour majority.

As it transpired, that majority was considerably reduced, providing some electoral benefit to both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but nonetheless leaving the re-elected government with a perfectly playable hand.

On the face of it, last week’s elections appears to have changed nothing. Tony Blair is still the PM and his brand of ‘modernised’ social democracy appears to be what the public have again decided they want. Yet, a closer analysis of the voting figures reveals what I believe to be a significant development, albeit one that may take a while yet to manifest itself.

I will expand on this but, before I do, I want to make a few observations about the other two main parties.

I like to think of myself as a reasonably articulate man but I am struggling to find the words to adequately express just how much I despise and abhor the loathsome (and fraudulently misnamed) Liberal Democrats. The most charitable thing I can say about them…No, sorry I cannot find anything charitable to say about them at all. This creepy collection of local government officers, geography teachers and assorted smelly cranks combine the hungry opportunism of a trap-door spider with the prim, bossy condescension of an Edwardian school ma’am, only without the good looks of the former or the moral fibre of the latter.

Even their ostensibly laudable opposition to ID cards was borne out of their instinct for grab-a-headline hucksterism ratherthan any real principle. If they ever got close to getting their hands on the levers of power (God forbid!) they would not only flip-flop on the ID cards but would most likely insist on surveillance cameras in our bedrooms to boot.

But, and on the bright side, their decision to position themselves well to the left of the government means that they have also painted themselves into a corner. The marginal seats where they are the principal opposition are all Labour held and that means that their activists are going to have to tack ever further to the left in their relentless campaign to mop up New Labour’s excretions. But what these stupid sods have forgotten are the very reasons for Tony Blair’s emergence and subsequent success. Much to the chagrin of the Guardianistas (and the principle reason for their thematic self-pity), the bulk of the British public have never had any sort of truck with or appetite for hard left politics.

So, actually, I have got something good to say about the Lib Dems: they are doomed.

Now for the Conservatives. It seems that they have finally finished cleaning up after the wild excesses of the Thatcherite party. The blood has been mopped up from the carpet, the vomit washed from the walls and all the empties have been bagged and binned. Things are back to normal now and the Party has returned to its default, 1950’s incarnation of being a bunch of dull but decent chaps whose job is to convince the voters that they are the steady hands required to steer the tiller on the ship of a bloated and dirigiste state.

The true problem for Tories is that they just do not do politics. Politics is a messy and confrontational business that is best left to others who know how to do it properly and are not so averse to getting their hair mussed. Deep down in their hearts, Conservative MPs just want a very quiet life, a reasonable stipend and a researcher-cum-catamite. All this nasty politics stuff just gives them a headache.

This being the case, the immediate future (for them) looks good because their Party appears to be more durable than many (including I) had previously thought. Due almost entirely to some desperately fed-up sections of the electorate willing to drag the Party out if its grave, the advances made last week are probably just comforting enough to convince the leadership that they are on right track and that this is not time to begin shilly-shallying around with dangerous ideas. Much better (and more agreeable) to carry on cruising and rely on their dependable Shire vote.

The Conservative Party is a benign tumour: difficult to remove but incapable of causing any real damage.

The Labour Party is an altogether different beast. They love doing politics and they do it with a ruthless professionalism, that a part of me at least, is forced to admire and which has enabled them to win three General Elections on the spin (pun intended).

But this last victory may prove to be a pyrrhic one. Last week the Labour Party took 36.2% of the vote on a turnout of some 61%. This means that only 21% of the electorate voted for a Labour government and 79% did not.

These figures do not, of themselves, invalidate the result. Under the rules as they are currently configured, Labour unquestionably won. But, by not-at-all-curious coincidence, 21% is only very slightly higher than the proportion of the electorate that now works, in some form or another, for the state. It is their bloc vote alone which has given Labour their third term in office and formed a government of the public sector, by the public sector and for the public sector.

In some corners, there are already dark denials that this government has any sort of mandate. This is untrue. It has a very clear, nay resounding, mandate to maintain (and, wherever possible, accelerate) the process of plundering the productive sector and transferring the resultant booty to their client-voters in the form of income, status and privileges.

The huge majorities which Labour won in 1997 and again in 2001 enabled them to plausibly present themselves as a ‘Party of the people’ with something good and wholesome to offer everybody. But the result last week has made that snake oil much harder to sell and perhaps even impossible. The New Labour project has not changed. It is the same now as it was then. But last week’s result has stripped it bare of its pretensions and left it standing naked and plainly visible for what it really is: a kleptocracy.

Sometimes a village is inundated by a man-made reservoir. Often, though, that is not the last that anyone has seen of it. In the hot summer months, when the water level drops, a rotting church steeple can be seen poking up accusingly above the water line. If the level drops further, then the roofs of ruined buildings which one housed a thriving community become visible too, reminding everyone of the price that was paid for the reservoir.

Economies are rather like that. While there is plenty of money sloshing around, no one can see the ruins that are mouldering away in the murky depths. But when the money begins to dry up, the hitherto-hidden damage rises up starkly into plain sight. It does not require anything as dramatic as a full-blown recession. A mild to moderate interruption of the good times is enough to uncover the damning evidence of destruction. If that happens, then it will no longer be possible for the government to fool even the most dull-witted of taxpayers as to the nature and methods of those who are wrecking their lives. When that day comes, the government of the public sector, by the public sector and for the public sector will perish from the land.

As to the matter of its replacement? Search me. There appear to be no desirable candidates.

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The Daily Mail's print headline screamed "You gave him a bloody nose!" and the Sun snickered that Tony Blair had been given a "Kick in the Ballots".

Excuse me? Blair wins a historic third term with a good sixty plus seat majority and this is being portrayed as something less than a major political triumph for the Labour party? If ever there was an instance of how the mainstream media has a remarkable talent for making an ass of itself, this is it. This was not a 'vindication' of the Tories (as suggested by the print edition of the Telegraph), it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant. One way to see this is that Labour has pulled off a historic victory (which is an indisputable fact). Another way to look at this is that the Tories have suffered a historic defeat. That even after all these years they still cannot be accepted as a viable alternative shows that they are far worse historically speaking than any other British Tory party for a very long time indeed.

So I got the result I wanted. Sure I loath Labour’s ghastly regulatory statism and contempt for civil liberties but Michael Howard is now no longer leader of his party and the cabal around him which turned the Tories into Labour-Lite has been shown to be losers of quite some magnitude. Now maybe, just maybe, something better can come along as the scale of their failure starts to sink in.

In the comment section of my previous post on this blog, many people seemed to think I was urging 'libertarians' not to vote for the Conservative party because it was not the small government libertarian leaning party of my dreams. Well sure, but that is not who I had in mind. I was really not thinking about 'libertarians' at all when I urged people not to vote Tory, I was thinking about Tories. The reason I am delighted that millions of conservatives did not vote for Michael Howard was that the Tory party is not a conservative party and enough people realised that for the right result to happen. For as long as the Conservative party is peddling nothing more than the same old "give us your money for skoolzandhospitals" crap as Labour and the LibDems, they really should be shunned by millions of people who describe themselves as, well, conservative.

And that is exactly what happened.

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9.30am BST Yes, Labour's 60-65 majority was achieved with only 36% of the vote - an all-time low for a winning party in Britain. That reflects an election in which the traditional party labels didn't quite capture the real divisions in the electorate. Nonetheless, I'd say it's worse news for the Tories - not just because it's an unprecedented third consecutive loss for the party but because such recovery as there was was so pathetic. In the days before the election, a lot of Tories told me that the real measure of their success was whether and by how much they'd break the 200-seat barrier. And even that was a conscious effort to lower expectations. The Conservatives are presently on 195 seats. That would have been regarded as a disaster for Thatcher, Major or even William Hague, and swift resignation would have followed. The Tory leadership's ability to spin this as a great "improvement" is confirmation of just how shrivelled the modern British Conservative Party really is.

- Mark Steyn

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Some brief news about the UK General Election.

With some 40 or so constituencies still to declare, ZaNu-Labour have (as expected) won a third term in office, though with a much reduced majority. Tony Blair looks rather chastened. The Conservatives have done rather better than I (or anybody else) had expected. Michael Howard looks rather pleased. The truly hideous Leninist-Democrats have gained a few seats but, fortunately, nowhere near as many as they were expecting. They are still in third place by some distance.

Oh and George Galloway is back in Parliament.

I will offer up some more thoughts later and as soon as I have some time to spare.

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First impressions that this is going to be a much worse night for Labour than some polls have suggested. Exit polls are pointing to a big cut in the size of Labour's majority. Early days yet.

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Hopefully the Tory party will get hammered at the polls today and take a giant leap towards the crisis they so richly deserve. As I have urged before, if you ever want to get a party which does not share the vast majority of its views with Labour, then for goodness sake do not reward their aiding and abetting of pervasive government by voting for the buggers. Do not hold your nose and vote for Michael Howard's carnival of clowns because they are the less evil because they are nothing of the sort: they are the same evil with the added toxic characteristic of providing an illusion of choice.

If you are going to vote rather than do something useful with your day, and yet you want an end to the European Union's takeover of British politics, a smaller state, lower taxes (rather than just 'less tax increases') and an end to the panopticon ID/database state (or even just any one of those), you will get none of them by voting Tory. If you cannot bring yourself to kick the voting habit altogether, then why not vote UKIP? At least that way you get to indulge your fetish for voting whilst at the same time annoying the chattering classes and not rewarding a collaborationist 'opposition'.

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It takes some nerve to announce this on the day of a General Election. Mind you, I doubt very much that it would at all influence the outcome:

Patients should be refused treatment because of their age in some cases, government advisers have proposed.

Where age can affect the benefits or risks of treatment, discrimination is appropriate, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said.

Charities representing older people said the recommendations were outrageous and sent out mixed messages.

Wrong. The message is quite clear and will gradually become more acceptable. Within five years, people over 75 will be offered euthanasia when they get sick. Within 10 years it will be mandatory.

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Not that anyone would know it from reading this blog, but there is a General Election taking place here in Britain later today.

Of course, I cannot and would not presume to speak for any of my fellow contributors, but for my part, my hitherto silence on this ostensibly 'big' issue is due entirely to boredom. I suppose I could delve into my rhetorical box of tricks and rummage around to find some sound ideological justification for denouncing the whole process as illegitimate and antithetical to genuinely liberal ideas, but I simply cannot muster the enthusiasm to do so.

If there had been anything like a real debate in this campaign or anything resembling a challenge to the prevailing intellectual hegemony then I might have been moved to add my voice to the throng. But, as it is, I cannot recall any national election being so stultifyingly dull, so suffocatingly vapid, so determinedly anodyne and strictly-by-the-numbers that the task of making a difference is rather like trying to move mountains by simply shouting at them. Some battles are not worth fighting.

And the issues? Well, there are no issues. Instead there is one, universal promise, writ large in every syllable of every soundbite of every candidate. It is a promise, nay an earnest pledge, to hose down the public sector with money. To the extent that there is any debate at all, it is merely some sporadic bickering about how widely to open the valve and the direction in which it should be aimed. This is the only constant, the sole electoral standard and the only message (so orthodoxy holds) that the public wants to hear.

I cannot say for sure whether or not this is true. If the bleatings of the pundits are to believed then something like a half (or possibly just over a half) of eligible voters will trudge along to a voting booth tomorrow to endorse the 'new boss' and even among those dutiful citizens, I detect little passion or genuine commitment. They will go through the motions, more out of habit than conviction. The rest merely shrug with indifference and resignation. Not even the revelations that the process is shot through with fraud seems to have stirred any ripples.

This is such a strange place to live right now. A deep wellspring of tired cynicism with the same old, same old runs congruent with an abject fear of the unfamiliar. An apparently universal conviction that none of the candidates are going to improve any single persons life by so much as an iota is inexplicably coupled with a refusal to countenance any public acknowledgement that this, in fact, the case.

For what it is worth, I expect that the government will win the election and win it handsomely and things will just grind on pretty much as before. How long will this last? I cannot say. Maybe this is some temporary trough; a mere interregnum between great periods of flux and change. Or maybe it really is the 'end of history'? It certainly feels like it.

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I first noticed it in about 1975, or whatever was the year of the first referendum about what was then called the Common Market. (The one where they said that Nobody Is Suggesting Political Union.) And what I noticed was that party workers below the rank of Household Word had become superfluous to political requirements. The Yes campaigners and the No campaigners had duly assembled themselves and had begun to harass people in the street, but they were brushed aside, the way we now brush aside charity clipboarders. We already knew, from our TV sets, what the arguments were, and we did not need further interruption to our lives and daily routine when out shopping.

It is a commonplace that television has done terrible things to crime, by showing so much of it, and by emptying the streets of law-abiding, telly-owning citizens; and to education, by making it possible for children to be amused and diverted for hours on end without having to be literate. It would be very odd if television had not done equally deranging things to politics.

The usual way that the impact of television on politics is discussed is to talk about the way that the senior politicians now present themselves, more chattily and less like ship's foghorns, with more charm and less Churchillian bellowing. That is all true as far as it goes, but there is also the destructive impact upon politics lower down the political food chain. Simply, as that referendum showed, party workers have become insignificant. Oh, they are still worth having. But they are no longer essential. They are like actors in provincial theatre companies.

In the old days of Churchillian bellowing, the top politicians were, then as now, the ones who did the important political communicating, but the machine they used to do this was run by the lesser mortals, the party workers, who organised the meetings, arranged the chairs and assembled the audiences. Remember those meetings? You probably do not remember them, because they died out a long, long time ago.

And once the party workers became superfluous, so their opinions started to count for less.

The Thatcher era disguised all this, because the Thatcher era was an era of extremism. But this was not because extremist party workers took over the parties. It was because the times were extreme. Britain faced an extreme crisis. It was about to turn into South America. This required extreme measures from an extreme government, like: the government only spending as much as it could get from taxation; like: shutting down industries that were losing a million quid a day; like: crushing the trade unions that would, uncrushed, have crushed the life out of the country. Extreme policies like that. But all this extremity was imposed by Mrs Thatcher, from the top. And she did all this in a rather Churchillian manner, despite all those elocution classes, which further interrupted the inevitable emergence of the new political world which we now inhabit. For twenty more years, politics remained a furious row between political partisans, some of whom said Britain should have more government than it could afford, and the others of whom said it should have less, with the softly centrist activists being being drowned out by the shouters. Ah, the good old days, when voting counted for something!

The reality underneath all this rowing was and is that the voters want something that few party workers of any persuasion want. The voters want as much government as the country can afford, no more, but no less. And, following Thatcher, this is what they have had, much to the disgust of the party workers.

But, who gives a toss what the party workers think? They are unnecessary. If the Prime Minister or the Opposition Leader have something they want to say to the people of the country, they say it to the TV cameras. They do need to address any mass meetings. The activist classes, frankly, can go screw themselves. It is nice for a top politician when they agree with you, but if they do not, tough. What can they – we – do? Write angry letters to the newspapers? Rant away on our websites and blogs? Yawn.

Thus neutered, we activists leave the political parties free to fight their fights without us, uninfluenced by our opinions, which in practice means them all concentrating on marginal, decisive seats, and with tiny variations on that "as much government as we can afford" theme, with a bit more spending here and a bit less there, a few pennies on or off this or that tax. Extreme statements are carefully avoided, for fear of frightening that precious marginal, middle ground. The politicians raise their millions, and spend them on elaborate television commercials and giant posters that mere party workers have no hand in designing or displaying. Polling organisations measure the results, and ordain where more millions shall be spent, and on what further commercials and posters. Peter Oborne was on the telly last week moaning about all this, and he called it "post-democratic" politics. Tosh. The democratic process is rolling on triumphant. But it is post-activist politics, politics done only by politicians and their staffs, without the footsoldiers. It is different.

Despite perhaps being oversimplified, the above ruminations do, I think, make some sense both of the atmosphere of this present general election, and, in particular, of the extreme reluctance that we Samizdatistas have shown in posting stuff about it. We have had nothing to agree with, and nothing much even to disagree with, other than the usual stuff that we always disagree with. Nothing is being said during this campaign which makes us either particularly happy or particularly disgusted. Hence our relative silence on the subject. We, after all, are fully paid up members of the activist classes, and we do not matter any more. The political argument goes right past us now.

This posting complements the earlier one I did about voting decline. That was about what political activists used to do, but no longer do, for the people. This one has been about what they used to do, but no longer do, for the politicians. The activists now burn the candle, so to speak, at neither end.

Maybe one day, we activists will again count for something. Our now insignificant websites will, I personally believe, eventually add up to something very big indeed, and in the USA you/they can already feel this new world coming into being. But what that something will be for the rest of us, I will leave to future postings.

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I spent an enjoyable night at the theatre watching the musical, "Billy Elliott", based on the film of the same name. It is the tale of a boy with ambitions to be a dancer, who lives in a northern English mining town during the time of the year-long miners' strike of 1984-5 and is full of references to the political controversy of that time. How long ago it must feel to some of us who live in an era of far more peaceful industrial relations.

We have become so used to the relatively low level of strike action in Britain compared with the madness of the 1970s that some people in the audience watching folk cavorting on the stage must have wondered what the issues were about. My fiancee, who is Maltese, certainly did. She was actually appalled at the biased presentation of the then Thatcher-led government in the musical. I pointed out that this sort of bias is pretty standard boilerplate for the sort of leftist folk who tend to dominate the thespian world. It is easy for us, from our vantage point 20 years after the strike, to bask in the sentimental glow of affection for a lost world of pits, working men's clubs, marching brass bands and the rest.

But at the risk of incurring the wrath of the commenters here, I did feel sympathy for a whole cluster of people who, faced with the iron laws of economics and a government determined to shake up the energy industry, faced losing their jobs and livelihoods. Even for a gung-ho proponent of laissez-faire like yours truly, the massive changes to our industrial landscape are not a story of unalloyed joy. It is a major issue for modern economies: how do we fully engage the energies of people who previously spent the years between 16 and 60 hewing coal out of the ground, riveting ships or working on car assembly lines? I cannot help but wonder that some of the problems of modern society, such as the loutish behaviour of young men, for instance, has something to do with the fact that in years past, young men who were not academic high-fliers nevertheless had a source of pride in doing something productive and in the case of mining, frequently very dangerous.

That all said, it is to my mind a great sign of progress that we no longer expect tens of thousands of men to work miles under the ground to keep our ovens, street lights and heating systems working.

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With the price of crude oil holding over $50 per barrel, how long will it be before the more flexible parts of the Green movement start arguing that nuclear power is actually not such a bad idea after all?

I ask this question because it seems to me that Britain, like a lot of other western nations, could be facing a Californian-style energy shortage fairly soon. It goes without saying that such an issue is completely off the political radar right now.

Comment away!

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A few days ago I sat down to write an article about this election that is coming up, to try to explain why neither I, nor the other Samizdatistas, nor, apparently, very many of the British electorate, were getting very excited about it. Last time around, the voter turn-out was way down, and they are predicting the same thing again only more so.

However, I think it is important to distinguish between boringness and the decline of the overall vote, because an election can still be extremely exciting for those who remain excited by it, yet turn off lots of others by the million. Witness recent Presidential elections in the USA.

So, in this posting I will concentrate on the decline in the British voter turn-out in successive general elections, and speculate about why this has happened.

In order to try to understand this, I googled my way to this short piece, which I found very informative.

It shows several things. First, it shows that the vote has indeed declined. See the first graph of voter turn-out for each general election since the war.

Second, it explains where. Basically, the voter decline has been most severe in the Labour inner-city strongholds. The voting decline is largely a working class – or perhaps one should say ex-working class – phenomenon.

What gives? Why are these people not voting as much as they used to?

Let me rephrase the question by turning it upside down. Why did they ever bother to vote in such huge numbers in the first place?

I think the answer is that they voted because people who cared about them, and were of use to them, asked them to and told them to. A sociologist would say that they were all members of a voting tribe, for whom voting was a norm. An economist would say that they voted in exchange for favours that fellow tribesmen gave to them. In practice, such things are but different facets of the same thing, reinforcing one another to the point where separating the two notions becomes impossible.

Not that Britain's working class voted Labour in the nineteenth century. There was no Labour. But they did vote. Individual interest and collective values, tribal and national, both pushed them towards voting, in huge percentages. With the rise of Labour, working class votes flowed towards Labour, but never completely. There were always millions of working class Conservative voters. But this posting is about the total number of votes cast, not who they were cast for.

In the twentieth century, partly in response to all this working class voting, a welfare state has been created.

This has undermined voting, by separating the working class from its traditional leaders and protectors. In the Friendly Societies, and then in the Trade Unions, benefits, both monetary and in kind, flowed to members, and votes flowed from members, in exchange or as part of the order of nature, whichever sort of wording you prefer.

But when you now get your welfare cheque, nobody tells you which way to vote if you want to go on getting it, or even to minimise the fuss in getting it. And, your welfare cheque has the effect of making you less dependent upon favours from other identifiable human beings, of the sort who might have political preferences and allegiances.

Voter decline is especially concentrated among the unemployed. This makes perfect sense, once you stop thinking merely about people's opinions and interests and think instead about where – and from whom – they might, or, now, might not, be getting such opinions abnd being told about such interests, and whether or not they bother to act on them by voting in accordance with them. Sure, the unemployed have all sorts of economic interests and opinions that make them vote this way or that way. But, as many an apathetic non-voter has explained, why bother? One vote will not make any difference.

In earlier times, your one vote made a hell of a difference. If you did not supply it, you suffered tangible losses in the form of grumpiness from known individuals whom you needed to keep on the right side of. Not any more.

But now, look again at that voting chart. The usual way to look at it is to say that it is a flat line, and then a fall off a cliff in 2001. But another way of looking at it is to see it as smooth descent, with a massive plateau-like interruption to that descent. Look at it this way, and 2001 becomes the norm. It is the years from 1970 to 1997 that become the oddity. What were they about? 1950, 1951, 1959, 1964, 1966, 1970 and 2001 are all in that same declining straight line. 1955, which I shall ignore, is an anomaly, for being too low, as it were. And all the years from 1970 to 1997 were, so to speak, too high. What might that be about?

I think that the answer is that in twentieth century Britain there were two welfare states, and not just the one. There was the "individual" welfare state, the one that gives you your individual stash of money, week after week, which more and more people have been gradually sucked into relying on. And if it is true that people have only gradually been sucked into involvement with that, then that would make sense of the underlying steady decline in voting.

However, meanwhile, until lately, there has been another welfare state, in the form of vast industries kept alive by nationalisation, subsidy, and general political coddling. The argument about whether these were a good idea got seriously started after Harold Wilson had added several more such industries to the ones that already existed, that is to say in about 1970. The argument got more and more heated, and became white hot when Mrs Thatcher shut them down.

For as long as this second welfare state lasted, and for as long as the argument about whether it should last lasted, that caused millions to vote. Their work-mates, union superiors, and so forth, told them to vote Labour, if they were in the politically supported industries. And, there was also a tidal wave of anti-Labour voting from people who, given the chance to vote against it, wanted the industrial welfare state done away with. Again, they told each other to do this.

And then, that all stopped. There was one final hurrah of high turn-out in 1997, when three things happened simultaneously. First, millions of people, who agreed with Thatcher's policies but who loathed her personally and loathed even more her ghastly Conservative lieutenants and supporters, were finally able to give the Conservatives a good kicking without rebuilding the industrial welfare state and ruining the country. Second, millions more people, who had become exaggeratedly optimistic about the new entrepreneurial arrangements which Thatcher had supposedly ushered in and who had then got hit badly, also gave the Conservatives a good kicking. And third, people got excited about Blair.

Then, they stopped being quite so angry with the Conservatives, stopped telling each other to vote, and stopped being excited about Blair, and the vote fell off that cliff.

My surmise is that the suddenness with which Thatcher shut down the second of the two welfare states is what caused the suddenness in the decline. Suddenly, all that voting, against it, but especially for it, and after a brief punitive spasm of anti-Cionservative revenge, also stopped.

This time, there may or may not be an anti-Blair vote (we shall see), similar to all those disillusioned ex-Thatcherites who voted Labour in 1997 because their wallpaper companies had gone bust and they were reduced to minicab driving. Lots of Labour people make now vote against Blair and his Iraq war by voting Liberal, or even Conservative. So the result, in the sense of relative performances, may this time be very different. Or it may not. But the decline in overall turn-out looks set to continue, for all the reasons described above.

The one thing that might halt it would be if the number of public sector workers recruited by Labour since 1997, a revived version of the collective welfare state that Thatcher closed down, was big enough to get a whole new slab of people back to the polls, voting Labour presumably. But maybe not, because of the anti-Blair anti-war factor.

Two final comments. First, voting is subject to long time lags between cause and effect. I have written as if what some guy at work says to you yesterday decides how you will vote today. Actually, of course, voting this way or that way is more like a habit, which may outlast the circumstances that gave rise to it by several decades. For that reason alone, I would expect the vote to decline again at the next election. Simply, a whole bunch of people who got their voting habits years ago will be dead and gone, and replaced by another new set of apathetics. That cliff the graph falls off is only a cliff because you put 90 percent at the top and 50 percent at the bottom. If it went from 100 to zero, that fall would be seen as only the beginning of what it might turn into.

And finally, a pre-emptive comment, about the EU. I do not think that the EU has had much to do with this voter decline. Whether the British government is good for you or bad for you, helpful to you and your friends or harmful, is still hugely affected by who that government is, and it will be for quite some time. At present, we have two front benches who more or less completely agree with each other, apart from one liking Blair and the other not. But that agreement is because they agree, not because the EU has forced them to agree.

Besides which, what about the USA? Overall turn-out has been worryingly low there also, for all those who worry about such things, has it not? And for longer. The USA is not a newly conquered province of anything bigger, is it? Well, maybe it is. Maybe, like the rest of us, they are being conquered by a new global elite, of gradually increasing relative importance. To put it another way, there is, maybe, some small thing like an EU factor at work here, but if there is, it is not confined to the EU.

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If I thought the Tories genuinely would spend £35bn less on "public services" I might even vote for them. However....

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Tony Blair today promised that Labour would cut crime by 15% if it was elected for a third term.

Not to be outdone by this bold commitment, the other main parties hastened to make what they believe are equally appealing promises to the electorate.

The Liberal Democrats have pledged to increase intelligence if they are elected. A press release issued by their head office (which nobody can actually find) claimed that "average IQs have slipped dramatically under this government". They promise that the Liberal Democrats are determined to close the "mental wealth gap" by extracting neurons from the brains of very clever people and injecting them into the brains of stupid ones.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have promised to make people taller. Speaking outside Central Office, some chinless mediocrity said that their proposals would help everyone under 5' 10" and would result in an average height gain of 3 inches.

The Greens have poured scorn on the Conservative proposals claiming that the reason that some people are shorter than others is because tall people are hogging more than their fair share of growth hormones. A Green spokesman..er woman...er thingy, said that the Greens are committed to a programme of genetic redistribution.

So the race for election of May 5th is hotting up and if you don't vote you could well miss out on all these good things.

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John K added a comment to the Rover over story here last week which Mark Holland liked so much that he reproduced it over at his blog in its entirety. I agree, and had in mind to do something similar here when I first read it. But now that Mark has already immortalised it, I will confine myself to reproducing the final enraged paragraph of what John K had to say about Stephen Byers:

I know we sometimes make jokes about jumped up Polytechnic lecturers going into Parliament, but Byers really was a jumped up Polytechnic lecturer, a man with no experience of anything outside of the Senior Common Room and Labour Party hackery, and this spineless imbecile, a man so hopeless that despite living up Tony's rectum eventually even el Presidente had to realise he was not up to the job, or indeed any job, and expel him like the compacted turd he was, is and forever will be, this man completed the Labour Party's destruction of the British owned motor industry.

So far so entertaining. We think Byers is a fool. We would. But then last Sunday evening, in the tube, I picked up a discarded copy of the Observer business section. And I later read, on its front page, this piece about the Rover debacle, which contained the following choice invective, also about Stephen Byers:

But there is nothing 'natural' about the Longbridge scandal; it is no act of God. It is an entirely man-made catastrophe, which can be blamed on a relatively small number of individuals. They can and should be made to pay.

The first culprit is Stephen Byers, who pushed the BMW-Phoenix deal through in 2000. Confronted on TV with his guilt, he all but sang 'Je ne regrette rien', while praising himself for keeping the Longbridge workers in employment for the past five years. This is the man who sold the original deal as a way of guaranteeing a long-term volume car business in Britain.

Now we are asked to believe the real plan all along was to ease the workers into redundancy, and to view industrial policy as an extension of the social security department. That speaks volumes about new Labour's attitude to business. Byers, who harbours ambitions of a return to government after the election, is a busted flush who should stay on the backbenches for the rest of his hopefully brief political career.

The other culprits are, of course, the Phoenix Four, led by their still maddeningly smug chief, John Towers. . . .

Something tells me that Byers will not actually pay anything, and incompetence by the standards of normal life is not the same as political incompetence, is it? So he may indeed make a political comeback. However, the fact that Byers is being trashed in the Observer makes me optimistic that this particular incompetent may have had his day.

If so, then I guess he will have to go back to Polytechnic lecturing. If they'll have him.

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Three newspapers caught my attention today, in relation to what they had to say about the Conservative party.

Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the Conservative party was not even arguing against the doctrines of social democracy and therefore could not complain with the fact that the forces of an ever larger government were going to win the general election in Britain. If one will not even argue one can not blame the people for siding with one's opponents.

Mr Richard Littlejohn in The Sun newspaper (sorry, not in on-line edition) also argued that timidness of the Conservatives would mean that they had no hope of victory.

Finally the Financial Times had on its front page the fact that almost 7 out of 10 voters believed that the Conservative party would put taxes UP if elected to government.

I believe that two things are wrong with the Conservative party. One is indeed the timid nature of its policies, as the Economist journal pointed out weeks ago the tax and spend policies of the Conservative and Labour parties are so similar as to be almost indentical.

But it is not just a matter of policy, it is a matter of the arbitrary power of the leadership. In the late 1970's (when the Conservative party was last out of government) many Conservatives showed interest in ideas, they visited the Institute of Economic Affairs, they set up research bodies of their own (such as the Centre for Policy Studies) they freely debated both the practical details of policy and the political principles on which policy should rest.

All this has been much more muted in recent times. First, pressure was put on people to only say what the party wished them to say (and this pressure started long before the election campaign) and now first candidates and then an actual member of Parliament have been turned on - turned on for absurdly mild 'crimes'.

First a candidate was told he must stand down because he had been photographed with firearms (that did not even belong to him) in the background of the photograph - this in the party that once represented not just shooting for hunting but the British National Rifle Association and the Constitutional Club network (once stronger in Britian than in the United States).

Then a candidate was told he must stand down because the socialist Guardian newspaper had attacked his use of the term creative destruction in relation to the public services. It did not matter that the candidate was simply quoting Joseph Schumpeter (the non Austrian school, Austrian economist). It was not a question of the leadership thinking that, say, Hayek and Mises were better economists than Schumpeter - the leadership of the Conservative party were not interested ideas at all. The Guardian had attacked, so the candidate must go.

Then Mr. Flight a member of Parliament (whilst Parliament was still sitting) was told he would not be allowed to stand for Parliament as a Conservative again - regardless of the fact that his Constituency Association and the local voters supported him. His crime? Saying that he thought there was more scope for savings in government spending than the leadership had said.

Mr Flight said nothing about 'secret plans', but he was not just removed from the Shadow Cabinet, - he was removed from the list of candidates for the Conservative party.

It is this "list" that is the key problem.

It is not a simple matter of Mr Howard (the leader of the Conservative party) being a bad man - no person should have the arbitary power to effectively expel someone from Parliament simply because they do not happen to like something they have said.

It is as if President Bush could expel any Republican from the House of Representatives simply because they said that they thought that there was more scope for savings in government spending than President Bush has said.

This arbitrary power of the leadership of the Conservative party did not use to be used liked this (so some fault does go to Mr Howard as an individual), but it is the power itself that must be removed if their is to be a real chance of an intellectual restoration of the Conservative party.

The Conservative party was once called by its enemies the 'stupid party'. Whatever the truth or falseness of this charge, a political party today that is uninterested in ideas, indeed expels anyone who shows an interest, has no chance of returning to power.

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Ian Grey urges people to read the fine print when Greeks politicians come bearing gifts

Through a remarkable coincidence of timing, families are being encouraged to save lots of money on childcare courtesy of that benevolent Labour Government of ours, launched and promoted during the General Election.

Within the Grey household, we are fortuitous enough to have both a private and a public sector employer providing our household income stream and both of them have decided to jump on the employee benefits bandwagon of offering childcare vouchers.

The way it works is that an employee agrees to take some of their salary as vouchers (to a maximum of £2,600 a year, i.e. £50/week) and this sum is free of Tax and NI. (The incentive to the employer is that it is free of Employer NI as well). The vouchers can be paper or electronic, they are given or allocated to the carer who redeems them without penalty to the parent and everyone is happy. Or are they?

Well, I am not. I have read the forms and there seem to be some ambiguities in the process, which is somewhat convoluted. What happens if I want residual money back because I do not need childcare any more? Not covered. What if I want to pay some on one and some on the other? In theory yes, but the forms I have will not cope with this scheme properly. What happens when the third party scheme management Company makes a pig's ear of the payments to my son's nursery (and they will, think every other Government IT project managed by third parties)?

What is even more interesting are the online calculators provided by the service providers, the two of which I have looked at being SodexhoPass and Accor.

Supposedly, the scheme is simple. To quote Accor,

You will save £816 per year if you elect to take £50 per week with paper or electronic Childcare Vouchers and are a standard rate taxpayer. If you are a higher rate taxpayer you will save ££1,066 per year

However...

...if you input random salary figures (assuming contracted out to get these results) then £20,000 salary and £50,000 salary do indeed give these figures (with maximum £2,600/year vouchers). But, if you input figures in the £32-37,000 range then there is a dip in the curve, the benefits fall to only £598. Also, the ramp-up figures between the two models are different!

Why would the Government penalise people on £35,000? Maybe it is an unintended consequence of the transition into 40&percent; tax. Or maybe it is a way of penalising the poor old middle classes (quietly and discreetly) by ensuring that they do not benefit quite as much as the core labour voters at one end of the social scale and the Senior Managers, Directors and successful self-employed at the other.

Maybe they do not penalise anyone at all and the website implementers just did not understand the rules. It does not bode well for them implementing the scheme properly though! My HR team tell me they think it is a quirk of the Tax and National Insurance thresholds (and NI is just another tax) but they are not completely sure. I talked to one of the providers, and the front line chap was about as useful as a chocolate teapot in giving the answer but he did at least promise to refer it on.

Who pays for this scheme? Well, we do of course. It does reduce tax take to the Government (by letting us keep a little bit more of our own money based on social engineering), but whilst employers get to save some money, there are 'implementation costs' as part of introducing such a scheme which could be either relatively trivial or horrendously expensive depending on what payroll package they use. The third party providers are not doing it for nothing and therefore if the parent, carer and employer are not paying for it, it means the Government is. Which of course means that we are, as the only way Governments get money is by taking it off us in the first place.

Then there are the unintended consequences. Whilst the whole scheme is notionally optional, suddenly childminders are going to find that they are going to lose business from parents if they don’t comply. Some schemes are paperless which means the childminder is going to have to get online whether they want to or not. Informal relationships loosely based on co-operation between parents are going to crumble because to get in on the scheme the childcare needs to be registered and/or approved. Some nursery providers are going to regard this as another nail in the coffin of intrusive, punitive compliance, shut their doors and do something else. Some small businesses are going to have to implement it grudgingly to keep staff which is more time and effort for the owner who wants to manage & win business rather than spend increasing time in the office learning and implementing the increasing compliance burden.

Where does it all lead to? The Minister standing up in Parliament in five years time telling us that the voluntary option has failed? ASBOs on Grandparents who look after their Grandchildren? Another Child Support Agency IT "partial success"?

Maybe there was a simpler answer. Maybe the Government should have simply worked out the total cost of ownership of the scheme & simply put it onto child benefit/guardian allowance instead. Or even better, just not taken the money off us in the first place. Regretfully, however, such schemes do not win elections...

Ian Grey

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So that's it then. As Mark Steyn says at the start of this, the surprise is how long it lasted.

Here is how this guy sees it:

Thanks to Patrick for spotting this, but only in the original immobile version.

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Robert Kilroy-Silk is a laughing stock in sophisticated circles, even in those slightly askew sophisticated circles—sophisticated ellipses?—Samizdatistas belong to. But should he be?

A glance at the manifesto of Veritas, the man's own personal political party, suggests not. Not only is it produced in a deep purple colour that readers of this blog will find comfortingly familiar, but some of the views expressed there wouldn't be so far out of place here either.

Let's speed past the tosh about immigration, this year's must-have fearful tic for every pol-about-town, and see what's hidden in the exotic interior...

Look! Almost immediately, in item 3, a diamond. Yes, it's half buried behind a pile of horse-manure about "anti-social behaviour", but there it is:

[We will] cancel Labour's proposed Serious Organised Crime Agency

Most parties have been slavering at the prospect of "supercops", with all the powers of the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, Immigration Officers and the Police, who can do anything they like, to anyone they don't like. Ambitious Chief Constables have suddenly found out how much they approve of government policies. Hardly anyone in public life has dared object.

Then there's the Flat Tax; a local sales tax; large, transferable allowances. The others have noticed that one, and are shuffling uneasily.

And what's this? A political party with a whole manifesto section on civil liberties? In Britain? With our reputation?

WHAT WILL WE DO?

stand for and defend freedom of speech and thought, freedom of conscience and belief

restore and protect our constitutional freedoms, like trial by jury and habeas corpus, which are being threatened

refuse to introduce Identity Cards, which won't reduce crime, fraud, terrorism or illegal immigration, but will cost a fortune and give the state too many powers

repeal the draconian Civil Contingencies Act and the government's Control Orders, both of which give the government unprecedented powers

refuse to introduce a new crime of 'incitement to religious hatred'

end the nonsense of prosecuting traders for selling in pounds and ounces

free ourselves from the power of the notorious 'E.U. Arrest Warrant' - British citizens must never be extradited without a Court hearing

No wonder he's a laughing stock. He's crazy enough to think that freedom still matters, when Tony has told us that civil liberties arguments are "a bit out-dated". He must be joking.

Perhaps not. There's something else:

"Those who see the damage drugs are doing, from social workers to police officers, agree the current drugs laws are not working.
[...]
[We will e]stablish a Royal Commission to examine - and to report and to make its recommendations within a year - all issues relating to the sale and abuse of illegal drugs

Change the drugs laws? He's not joking. This is political madness.

Calm down, now. There's a lot of dull statist stuff on education, enlivened only by the voucher scheme the Tories just aren't quite brave enough to commit to.

But after that we just have to assume Veritas just lost it. Smaller Government, diverse local government, leaving the EU, ending government-to-government foreign aid, exempting small businesses from reduced regulation. Who's going to vote for that lot?

Well, if I weren't personally fond of Margot and putting my vote where my money is, I'd be awfully tempted.

With due deference to the it-only-encourages-them bias of Samizdata, I submit Conservative populism is preferable to, and our only real alternative to, New Labour's populist authoritarianism. There's small choice in rotten apples.

But if all parties are more or less populist, then Kilroy-Silk's peculiar populism has an unfamiliar odour. It has the strange smell of freedom.

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The UK Labour Party, having set in train the laws making possible the recent postal voting scandal in Birmingham, are no doubt hoping voters forget all about it in a day or so. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett, however, has done his bit to keep the light shining on the issue with a typically idiotic proposal: solve the fraud problem with ID cards.

So, let's get this right. The government, having created a system ripe for fraud and abuse, has one of its former members suggest that it be dealt with creating a system ripe for fraud and abuse.

The Tories should give up now. They cannot compete with genius like this.

(Side observation: this whole affair underscores why some libertarians don't believe that democracy is a particularly reliable firewall against the corruption of power).

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Much has been said about the Labour Party's election catchphrase "Britain forward not back". It has been claimed that the phrase was stolen from The Simpsons. As The Times pointed out in February:

[In an episode of The Simpsons] Clinton appears during a presidential debate. "My fellow Americans," he proclaims. "We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

Last night Labour said it had not deliberately appropriated the slogan from The Simpsons, but MPs said it was another example of a Milburn faux pas.

At the time of the controversy, I watched Milburn on the TV saying that it wasn't stolen from The Simpsons. I do believe he was right. It actually came from the Tories. When Michael Howard was elected leader, BBC News wrote:

He urged his colleagues "to look forward, not back" and to recognise that Britain had changed since the Tories first came to power in 1979.

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This sounds like it could have an affect on the forthcoming election, not just on the numbers of votes that go this way or that, but on what gets said during the campaign. It makes our Labour government look bad.

The judge in a vote-rigging trial says the postal voting system is "wide open to fraud" and has strongly attacked the government's attitude to the problem.

Richard Mawrey QC was speaking as he ruled there had been "widespread fraud" in six Birmingham council seats won last year by Labour.

He accused the government of being not only complacent, but "in denial", about the failings of the system.

The lawyer representing the accused in this case has just been on Newsnight, and he came as close as you can (with the look on his face rather than with his mere words) to saying that his clients are a pack of liars. That was a fun moment. This is a ticklish matter for the media, because the people doing these frauds are … er … ethnic.

Now Sion Simon, a local MP right next to where this happened, and something of a Labour attack dog in the Norman Tebbit mould, is saying that there is no systemic problem. Paxman is being quite rough on him. Simon Hughes for the Lib Dems, and a Conservative whose name I did not catch, are saying that there is a systemic problem. And of course, although this row has been simmering for some time, there is now no time to do anything to the system except urge vote counters and returning officers to be extra-vigilant.

Just how bad this will be for the government, I do not know. Maybe in a couple of days it will all be forgotten by almost everybody. But however this particular story plays out in the next few days, I get the feeling that, in Britain now, a political corner has been turned, some time during the last few months.

Whether the electorate as a whole has any plans to vote differently remains to be seen. Many of my friends, such as regular Samizdata commenter Paul Coulam to name but one, have said to me that Blair is about to be re-re-elected with a similar majority to last time around, just as Thatcher was. Coulam certainly said this to me a few weeks back. But governments take a long time to unravel, and what does seem to have happened is that the metropolitan media of Britain have got bored with Labour. They are now more bored with Labour than they are disgusted and embarrassed by the Conservatives, which was not true a year ago. Michael Howard may disgust many Samizdata readers by being just another opportunist political hack, but he is nevertheless, I would say, a much more impressive and consequential figure than his two predecessors at the head of the Conservative Party.

Now, Paxman is talking about what life is like in North Korea. Apparently people who have tried to escape from that hell hole, to heaven, otherwise known as China, are being executed in public, with everyone else in the town rounded up and forced to watch. Someone even managed to film one of these horror shows, and the BBC showed it. "Worst human rights record of any country in the world." Count your blessings time.

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A while ago here I speculated that one of the effects of the Internet – blogs especially – will be to focus attention on what major public figures actually say, and not just to harrass them about their various scandals and cock-ups, worthy though that also is.

Well, according to the EU Referendum blog, Michael Howard made quite a good speech the other day about defence, which the media mostly ignored. The two main points were: that Tony Blair is too keen on EU integration and not keen enough on the Atlantic Alliance, and that he does not give Britain's armed forces the resources to do the many jobs he demands of them.

Gabriel might even be cheered up a bit. Not a lot, but a bit.

Personally I think that Howard's two points are closely connected. The smaller our forces are, the easier it will be for the EU to swallow them up.

You can read the entire speech here.

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Today I heavily undermined my Samizdatista credentials by hanging around the political types. I attended a lunch for Boris Johnson's, MP, supporters and activists from his constituency. Now, you may ask what I was doing there... well, blogosphere works in mysterious ways...

The lunch was rather pleasant and I found those I had a chance to talk to refreshingly switched on and open-minded. The shock was made bearable by copious food and wine.

The politicians' lair

Now, to the heart of the matter, Mr Boris Johnson, MP. I was most intrigued, after many months of Tory bashing on this blog, to find myself on the inside and on the receiving end, so to speak. Although the House of Commons is not an unknown territory, this occasion was different as I went curious to meet the one Tory that seems to break the ranks and is not afraid to mention the notion that dare not speak its name in current politics - freedom.

Boris, the Strangely Illuminated Statesman

The speech Mr Johnson gave at the end of the lunch, before he had to dash off to his statesmanly duties, was... excellent. This is what he had to say (reconstituted from my, by now largely unreadable notes, so please give the man a break and challenge me on the detail):

There were three points to note. The first was that freedom is important and needs to be seen as an end in itself, to stop its erosion for other political ends. The Labour government has been spending an increasing amount of taxpayers’ money while reducing their freedom. This is bad for the society. The result is an even more intrusive state under Labour. [So far, so good.]

Boris called for a new style of government, which would get that freedom back. He mentioned a rather scary statistic, the size of the public sector is now at the same level as in the 1979 - when Thatcher came in, ending an era of rampant and shameless socialism in Britain - and is 739,000 people working for the central government (excluding local government and other public bodies). By the time Labour came in the number had shrunk to 430,000. The Tories' agenda is to shrink the size of the state again.

The second point was democracy. Democracy means that the Tories get rid of unelected regional authorities and the whole tier of government that has not been approved by the democratic processes. The term constitutional non-sense was mentioned in the context of the health secretary having no say about health.

The third issue was taxpayer value. Huge quantities of taxpayer money have been lavished on the public sector and on socially useless projects. New approach to government is needed. [I especially like this one - it was mentioned twice.] Mr Johnson got rather animated when he called for a stop of the ongoing transfer of wealth from the productive sector of the economy to the non-productive. I hope this was a go at wealth redistribution, as his moved on to recommend that the Tories should the party of lower taxation.

Mr Johnson understands that the size of the cake is more important that the equal size of the cake portions