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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 toward