(28)

Blogger and debunker of various economic fallacies, Tim Worstall, points out something that tends to be forgotten in some of the angrier, gloomier commentary about the European Union and the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty. We - the UK that is - can leave if we wish to do so, and it will be a lot less complex than such a process can be made to appear. That surely is the 800 llb gorilla in the drawing room - we can get out pretty fast if the whole edifice becomes intolerable. And there is nothing that any EU bureaucrat or their political allies can do about it. How likely are they to ever use a military option? Hmmm.

(27)

"David Cameron ditches referendum and backs away from EU bust-up" chuckles the Guardian... followed by "Eurosceptics welcome 'never again' rhetoric".

So in effect Cameron is saying "yes I know I said we get a vote before... "iron clad" was the words I used... but if those mean old Euros want to grab even more power than all that stuff you are not going to get a vote on after all, we will have a referendum next time. Really, you can trust me".

Of course the Eurosceptics are happy, because after all, if David Cameron promises something, you can be sure he will keep his "iron-clad" word, right? Amazing.

Never forget that the party of Winston Churchill was also the party of Neville Chamberlain.

(27)

A British court has ruled that environmentalism is 'protected' as it is functionally indistinguishable from a religion and thus cannot be discriminated against by a company.

We are now only one logical step away from disestablishing the Church of England and making environmentalism the official state religion, a mandated one in fact, complete with inquisitors and witch finders.

(6)

Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations.

- David Cameron in 2007.

The obvious conclusion being that he must not be allowed to become Prime Minister as his "cast-iron guarantees" are as firm as limp wet paper. Pathetic.

(7)

Bishop Hill:

Devil's Kitchen has a must-read post up, detailing the increasing use of enabling legislation by the government. And he doesn't swear at all - must be serious.

Indeed.

I daydream that one day, a British Cabinet Minister will grab hold of one of the laws that DK writes about, where it says that, if there is a crisis (and it is up to him to decide), then he, the British Cabinet Minister, may do whatever he considers to be appropriate (i.e. whatever he damn well pleases). I daydream that he, the British Cabinet Minister, will bring into the House of Commons a huge list itemising all the laws that he is now going to repeal, just like that, no ifs no buts no discussion, because he, the British Cabinet Minister referred to in one of the laws, says so, on account of there being a crisis caused by all the damn laws.

Impossible, you say? Very probably. But it is surprising how much of history consists of impossible dreams that were dreamed during earlier bits of history.

(11)

Much garbage has been written about the Professor Nutt affair. The notion that governments hire scientists to make informed decisions is laughable and the fact scientists are outraged that the government fired Nutt for contradicting the official line on drugs is a measure of their self-absorbed pomposity.

Governments hire scientists for the same reason companies often commission consultants to study some aspect of their business and make a report... i.e. to justify a course of action the board already wants to do but which they need to justify to investors. Similarly the job of a scientist on the government lists is to remain torpid until wheeled out in front of a camera to drone the government line with the caption "This man is a SCIENTIST and therefore the government's edicts are incontrovertible and must be OBEYED".

Professor Nutt was a stage prop, nothing more, and he is a fool to be surprised he was canned for being off-message. Of course what he said about marijuana and alcohol was true, any fool can see that. But how is that relevant?

(13)

To the complete and utter surprise of... er... well no one really... Dave Cameron has refused to jump the fence yet again. This worthless Labour-Lite jackanapes will not give Britain a vote on the Lisbon Treaty after all.

Yeah I know he promised we would get a vote. And you believed him?

Vote UKIP rather than waste your vote on BlueLabour and the principle-free weathervane who leads it... and if the powers that be have destroyed UKIP by election day via the courts, stay the fuck home and do not dignify the worthless Cameron with a vote that will simply be an endorsement of more-of-the-same.

(13)

The predicted insanity of "quantitative easing" (i.e. re-inflating the bubble) is laid bare:

Sharp increases in share prices have improved the outlook for pension funds in every major developed nation apart from the UK, according to research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The news coincides with figures which reveal that the deficits in Britain's largest privately-sponsored defined benefit schemes have soared by £15bn to £77bn, wiping out almost all the gains achieved by market increases the previous month. [...] The deterioration is largely an unhappy consequence of quantitative easing (QE). Pension funds' deficits depend on two factors: the value of their assets, much of which are equities, but also the potential amounts they will have to pay out when people retire in the future. These future liabilities have been pushed higher as QE has depressed yields on gilts and other bonds

I would quite like to see the people responsible for one of the greatest rolling acts of theft in recent history hanging from lampposts. Bernie Madoff was a minor league player by comparison.

(21)

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive to the Royal Society of Arts and a former adviser to Tony Blair, recently wrote an article in the magazine, Prospect, on the political potential of new developments in behaviourial economics, neuroscience and related disciplines. Such an enterprise is always difficult, in so far as new research is often part of an expanding research programme and questions are not fully answered. Therefore, one should be careful in the enthusiastic application of such results to the political arena.

Taylor's article marries the politics and selected research results, with section headings such as the Social Democratic brain and the Conservative brain. Without citing too much detail, the aim of the article is to describe and promote this research as a source of justification for policy and power:

Much of this research makes good reading for social democrats. By highlighting our psychological frailties and the way these contribute to market epidemics, behavioural economics makes a powerful case for regulation, paternalism and measures to promote feelings of security. Nor is this the only encouragement for the traditional left.

Given that there is no consensus on human nature, merely a greater understanding of our predispositions and controversy over how they relate to the social sphere, is it not arrogant to presume that existing political ideas have the key to unlock the controversial interplay of the social and the inherited. Such interventions in the past have proved disastrous, as the race science of the twentieth century demonstrates. Caution is a watchword here.

The byproduct of this article is the realisation that neither the Tories or Labour can articulate moral arguments and are reduced to tagging their miserable ideas on to the emergent exploration of human nature for the sheen of scientific authority. Economists and intellectuals working in these disciplines are seduced by the consultation of those in power and turn towards the exercise of application in a political sphere.

This article is a useful reminder of what both parties share. Supping from the same well via 'libertarian paternalism' or behaviourial economics, we begin to see the outlines of a commonality in approach, though there are differences in institutional and political implementation. Neither approach from Labour or the Tories is a friend to freedom.

(6)

Encourage adults to consume alcoholic beverage in a bar setting. Set an arbitrary closing, thus to encourage rapid consumption during the final 15 minutes. Throw out on to the street, inebriated, disenchanted drinkers, mostly young males. And here’s the clincher, all at the same time. Ensure that all other bars in the immediate area follow the same pattern. Then act surprised when incidents of violence and criminal damage spike.

Suppose for one perverted moment that an increase in violence and criminal damage were the intention. The present arrangement could hardly be improved upon.

- The hilariously pseudonymous commenter 'Mustapha Jihad'

(19)

I am in one of my favourite bars, in a railway arch in Peckham in South East London. Good music. Friendly staff and customers. Czech beer on tap. A quite decent Mendoza malbec. Fast and free Wifi (yes, I am hiding behind my laptop. Yes, I am a nerd. If you do not like that, well fuck you). The woman opposite me seems to be staring a little too excessively into the eyes of the man opposite me. Nice for them, no doubt (and yes, I may be bitter, although I am perfectly sincere when I say that this is nice for them and I wish them well).

However, a member of staff just came over, telling me that (sadly) the bar was closing soon (it is 10pm), and asking me to sign a petition, requesting that their licensing hours be increased, so that they can close at midnight rather than the present 10pm.

The story behind this is this. During the first world War, licensing hours in Britain were imposed, requiring bars to close at 11pm. Allowing people to go out drinking after this apparently hurt the war effort. In my native Australia, a 6pm closing hour was imposed at the same time, In some jurisdictions this lasted until the 1960s. But I digress. And this is now generally gone.

My friends from the Latin countries have always been shocked by the 11pm closing hours in England. Coming from countries where they would barely considering going out before midnight, they have always found this odd, to say the least. But the 11pm close was fairly standard, none the less.

However, three or four years ago, things in the UK changed. Responsibility for licensing bars had for a long time been the responsibility of magistrates. If an applicant could demonstrate that he was responsible, then a licence to open a bar would generally be given.

However, the law was changed, so that licensing became the responsibility of local councils - theoretically elected, but much easily bullied by national government than magistrates. Theoretically, this meant more flexibility with respect to licensing hours. At the time, this was sold as allowing bars to open later. In some parts of London, this is true. Generally, the louder and less pleasant places to be are the ones with the later opening hours.

On the other hand, I am in a bar at 10pm on a Monday night. This bar is full of perfectly nice people who are no trouble to anyone. And we are being thrown out onto the street at 10pm.

Why?

Update: As I was on my way out, I stopped and asked the landlord for more details as to the situation. Apparently he has a "facilities licence" allowing him to keep his bar open until midnight, but simultaneously, the council has invoked "planning laws" requiring him to close at 10pm on most nights. He pointed out to me what I knew already, which was that his bar occupies an arch underneath the main London Bridge to Brighton railway, on which (loud) trains run 24 hours a day. My experience is that I was visiting a pleasant bar containing a few perfectly nice people enjoying themselves. Heaven forbid that.

(3)

... and another for 'outsiders'.

When the LibDems take money that is questionable, it is done in 'good faith' and that is the end of the matter... when UKIP does it, they are bankrupted by the Electoral Commission.

Curious, no?

(32)

There is obviously plenty of controversy - seen across the internet and the MSM - about the decision by the BBC, the UK state broadcaster, to let the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the BBC's Question Time current affairs show. For non-Brits, I should explain that QT is a show where a panel of politicians, pundits and the occasional "personality" take questions from an audience. The audience is selected, according to the BBC, from a supposed balanced cross-section of the public. What in fact this means is that such folk are often drawn from a series of pressure groups and the like. The journalist Paul Johnson once said, many years ago, that if the QT audience were representative of the UK population as a whole, he would think of blowing his brains out. I agree. If I ever chance upon the programme, I feel murderous not towards the panelists, but towards a large part of the audience. It fills me with despair.

Even so, the decision of the QT producers to let this man on the show has thrown up some bizarre arguments. This morning, the Labour MP and pundit, Diane Abbott, told the BBC Breakfast TV show that Griffin should not appear. At the core of her argument, if one can dignify it with such a word, was the idea that only "mainstream" parties should be allowed to be panelists. The interviewer did not immediately hit back with the question as to what Ms Abbott defines as "mainstream". After all, one could object to a Labour, or indeed Conservative politician, appearing on the show on the grounds that both parties support the idea of seizing a large portion of our wealth on pain of imprisonment; support wars against countries that, whatever the justification, involve the deaths of innocent civilians; support the UK's membership of an oppressive and undemocratic European federal state, have taken away the right of self-defence for householders; have supported, and continue to support, an intrusive, meddling and yet also incompetent state apparatus. On those grounds alone, one could argue that such politicians should not only be banned from Question Time or any other forum, but hanged from a lampost.

Given that the BNP - a party with a hard-left, socialist economic agenda, by the way - has been elected to several seats in the EU Parliament, it would be odd not to allow the leader of a party that has won a million votes not to be held to account in the run-up to a general election next year. Of course, if we had a genuine free market in broadcasting, the editorial judgement of the BBC, which is funded by a tax, would be irrelevant. But given we have a state-financed broadcaster, that broadcaster, under its charter of incorporation, should enable elected political parties to be put to the public test. The BNP is an odious party for a libertarian, and Mr Griffin is, as his background suggests, a nasty piece of work. What have other parties to be afraid of in putting this lot under the media microscope?

(11)

Yet again, Dave Cameron shows that far from representing an 'alternative' to Labour, he is as one in his underpinning world view. A vote for Cameron is a vote for "more of the same".

So if you think that the sort of identity politics we have seen for years now is a splendid thing, then a vote for Dave makes perfect sense: you will get a younger energetic leader able to apply the ways of ever expanding regulatory statism more effectively... i.e. an end to the neurotic, sclerotic and thankfully ineffective Brown and a return to the much more effectively imposed Blairite Britain... Tory Blair.

No doubt under Cameron we will see more contracting out of government "services", which Tories will hold up as evidence of their "free market" credentials and Labour will howl about Tory vandalism of th public sector... as if making a government "service" more efficient by changing the organisation details of who gets paid to do it in any way reduces the toxic society destroying purview of the state.

Then again, if you actually want to vote for a conservative, you can always vote UKIP.

(5)

Via Iain Dale's blog, I came across this nifty piece of Conservative Party electioneering poster art. As Mr Dale says, this is incredibly prescient. Of course, the glee of Mr Dale in finding this is somewhat undermined by the fact that the Conservatives have not, to put it mildly, covered themselves with glory on this issue down the years, even though, to be fair, that it was Churchill's Conservatives who axed ID cards and the final bits of rationing in the early 1950s. But whatever quibbles one might have, there is little doubt that today, Labour MPs will struggle ever to be taken seriously on the civil liberties issue. That is for certain.

Last night I listened to a great talk by Henry Porter, the journalist and book author, and the spy fiction novelist Charles Cumming. For Porter, civil liberties issues form a part of his latest book. Recommended.

(15)

A number of Members of Parliament are up in arms about the clearly arbitrary rulings by Sir Thomas Legg regarding the repayment of money claimed as expenses by various MPs. It seems obvious to me that the 'rules' being applied by Legg are criteria he has more or less plucked out of the air for deciding what constitutes a 'reasonable' expense for an MP to claim.

And I must say I find this an edifying show. That the apex predators of the looter class are being given a taste of what it is like to be at the mercy of a capricious ruling by some state functionary fills me with delight. Moreover the public perception of MPs wriggling on the hook are unlikely to be one of legalistic understanding but rather a deepening of the perception of a socially remote class squealing over their looting privileges being squeezed.

The notion of taking one for the team obviously does not appeal to a number of the Honourable Members and frankly from my perspective, ideally the MPs will prevail and end up not paying back the money they took in order to yield the maximum effect I would like to see.

But whoever wins the argument in the end, there is simply no downside from my point of view at the spectacle of a cross party selection of bloated hippos noisily snorting and harrumphing and rolling around in the steaming mud piles of public relations effluent slathered across the floor of the House of Commons... oh... fulsome apologies to the world's hippos for that unkind analogy.

I hope this process drags on and on as the already palpable cynicism with which the political establishment class are viewed by most people gradually slides into loathing. From such seeds do interesting fruits grow.

(35)

These guys crack me up. Geert Wilders finally makes it to Britain after a court overturned the disgraceful ban, and he delivers his anti-Islam message in Westminster... and how do his enemies show that Wilders is wrong to characterise them as a threat to western civilisation?

In one TV interview I saw, one of the Muslim protesters said "he should just come out and talk to us and get our point of view"... very reasonable... whereupon a second bearded paragon of the Religion of Peace interjected words to the effect "If he did not have all those police around him, we'd show him what we do to enemies of Islam" (if anyone spots an on-line video of this exchange, please post it in the comments).

I just cannot avoid smiling at these guys who are always so keen to give a televised performance of "Crazed Muslim Lunatics" straight out of Central Casting any time someone sticks a microphone in their face.

Although I disagree with Wilders' ideas regarding banning the Koran, is it not remarkable how when he says profoundly reasonable things, defending the rights of Jews and Gays no less to be free from the threats promised by a great many Islamic commentators, somehow almost all the mainstream media tag him as "far right".

(23)

Nichola Pease, a top City executive, caused a stir last week when she said that state-enforced maternity leave "rights" for women - and for that matter, paternity leave - was a cost that had a bad consequence. If you tell a company that it must pay a woman her full salary for a year while she is not working and raising her child, say, then, other things being equal, fewer women will be employed in the first place, however hard one tries to enforce so-called equal opportunity hiring practices.

This is a simple fact. If you raise the cost to a company of employing a person or increase the risk that employing a woman will be more expensive than employing a man, say, then fewer women will be employed. It is a fact as undeniable as a the laws of gravity. Unfortunately, one of the driving characteristics of many politicians down the ages is a petulant hatred of such facts, and a desire that 2+2 could equal five rather than four. Consider this reaction to Ms Pease's comments by a Labour MP. It is not so much an argument as a tantrum:

"I am absolutely horrified to hear such an old-fashioned view expressed by someone who should know better."

In other words, a City executive has said something that this MP considers to be unsayable. There is no argument given, no attempt to explain how driving up costs will not have an adverse result. End of discussion.

What needs to be pointed out is that every time the government creates some new "right" to such things, such as paid long holidays, long periods of paid leave for child-rearing, or whatever, there is a cost of some kind, that is borne by someone, often those more vulnerable than the group intended for the original benefit. The honest answer is for such MPs to openly admit as much rather than to pretend otherwise. For example, it would be refreshing if defenders of minimum wage laws could state that they prefer a bit more unemployment to the sight of people working on very low wages. Of course the argument is still bad and involves coercively arranging affairs to benefit some groups at the expense of others, but it would at least be preferable to what we usually get.

(15)

The impending strike by Royal Mail workers is a wonderful opportunity to deal with a long standing issue... the essential obsolescence of the whole notion of state mail monopolies.

In this era of highly efficient competing international courier companies, why bother with state letter carriers at all? Do not 'privatise' the Royal Mail as was planned earlier, instead make the workers (very generously) redundant... all of them... then sell off the assets to the highest bidder, end the anachronistic monopoly on letter delivery and get the state out of that business completely: simply wind up the Royal Mail.

El Gordo needs to stop seeing this strike as a 'problem' and instead see it as a golden opportunity to raise some more money to squander from yet another asset sale whilst allowing modern high tech courier companies like TNT, DHL and UPS to expand into an area they should never have been excluded from in the first place... it is a win-win really.

(17)

Britain's National Health Service, so beloved by Michael Moore, is not what (most) supporters of Obama's 'reforms' claim they want for the USA. They are of course lying through their teeth as a single payer system is clearly the desired endpoint (i.e. eventual de facto nationalisation) and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.

Well just look what you have to look forward to.

Yet as every UK politician will say when asked, the NHS is the 'envy of the world' and wanting to do away with it is clearly a sign of madness as the only imaginable alternate to state provided healthcare is, apparently, no healthcare at all, with anyone who is not a millionaire dying in the streets if they get ill.

Seriously, try and have a sober conversation about the NHS and the extent to which people have been propagandised will stun you.

(24)

The destruction of British civil society continues apace...

New anti-paedophile vetting rules will threaten the 90-year tradition of Scout Jamborees, the Scout Association says. It has warned that major gatherings of packs from around the world may be cancelled due to the introduction of the scheme.

Under the controversial rules anyone working or volunteering with children must register for background checks. But organising checks on thousands of foreign Scout leaders was "just not possible", a spokesman said.

Good. I have nothing against the Scouts, but I do like it when people are smashed in the face by the reality of the political order they tolerate. Let people feel the consequences and start to get angry. Of course I want people to stop even trying to comply, to 'go Galt' if you like, to wilfully break laws and subvert regulations, but here we have an example where they really cannot comply, and that works too.

The state is not your friend. Are you starting to get the message?

(3)

The official history of MI5 by historian, Christopher Andrew, has, again, directed us to the potential number of politicians and trade unionists who gave or sold information to the Soviet Union.

Three Labour MPs named in the history, written by the historian Christopher Andrew as Soviet bloc agents are John Stonehouse, who became postmaster general in Harold Wilson's government, Will Owen and Bob Edwards. The three were "outed" by a Czech defector, but there is no evidence the politicians passed over sensitive information....

Andrew says Jack Jones, the trade union leader who the Guardian has been told was the subject of many volumes of MI5 files, was not "being manipulated by the Russians", but the Security Service was "right to consider the possibility that he was". Britain's top KGB spy, Oleg Gordievsky, said Moscow "regarded Jones as an agent", Andrew notes. He says Jones accepted some money from the Russians but there is no evidence that he gave them any information.

Now that remittances for socialist traitors have dried up, does this partially explain why some on the Left were so quick to adopt kleptocracy as a principle of government, perhaps in homage to their dearly departed ideals.

(10)

Dave Cameron "promises to tear down big government", presumably by increasing the size of government.

I have one question for you, Dave... were you lying in January when you promised to increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year - rather than the £650bn proposed by Labour... or are you lying now in October when you say you will tear down big government?

(9)

The Tory conference was designed to bring home to the public the notion of truth and responsibility. Some would say that the release of such headlines as raising the retirement age, freezing public sector pay and “telling it as it as” are a democratic version of spanking. The toffs transposing their public school predilections on the masses.

Yet, the very basis of this approach is paternalist. The public must be schooled and directed towards the appropriate outcome. For the Tories, the outcome is fiscal sustainability, the only time that word appears truthfully in their canon.

However, the majority in democracy have an incentive to socialise their irresponsibility, allying with government to inflate their debt away or maintain redistribution. Such a system is inherently unstable in the long term. After all, under Labour, welfarism has moved onto secondaries. An interesting experiment is under way. Do turkeys vote for Christmas? Short-term slaughter and, possibly, long-term satisfaction.

(18)

Tory politician and London Mayor Boris Johnson bets that Tony Blair will not get the post of European Union president, a role that will carry enhanced powers if or when the Lisbon Treaty (or Constitution) gets rammed through. He argues that countries such as France will not tolerate having this former big mate of George Boooosh take the role, representing not just France but 500 million souls across an entire continent.

Boris has a point: Blair is still heartily detested in France for arguably the one act that makes me think quite well of Blair - his determination to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, even if one would choose different justifications from him in that course (an argument that continues to divide libertarians, by the way). Nevertheless, Boris's underlying logic is strong: it is monstrous that a man who played a part in ensuring that Labour failed to honour its 2005 election manifesto pledge over a EU referendum on the EU constitution should be in the frame for the job that this Lisbon Treaty stitch-up has made possible. And as the Treaty is more or less the same as the Constitution, the position taken by Blair and by Gordon Brown represents their contempt for the democratic process.

But remember, however much one might loathe Mr Blair and the transnational progressivist, corrupt politics that he represents, it is the very idea that the EU needs some grand president at all, not simply the personality of this rather creepy individual, that should be kept front and centre. Even if the holder of the office is some drone from central Europe given to vacuous pronouncements on "good governance" or whatever, no such post should exist. It is hard, I know, to play the ball and not the man.

Of course, there is another theory: if Blair is elected to the job, his strutting, fake-charm might actually help discredit the idea of a EU presidency per se. Perhaps, though, that it is being too clever on my part.

(6)

I have not laughed so hard in weeks.

David Cameron has declared his intention to be a radical prime minister who will deliver "massive change" to Britain if elected, in an article for The Sunday Telegraph [...] So this week in Manchester you will see that far from playing it safe, the Conservative Party has a radical agenda for returning power and responsibility to people.

Thigh slappingly funny stuff! At least the Telegraph put "massive change" in quotation marks. Given that Dave has been bending over backwards for years now to make it clear he is the embodiment of ideological continuity and to promise nothing without wiggle room for backtracking later once he gets what he wants, the latest rebranding as daring radical saviour is truly our old chum "The Big Lie" in use once again.

So lets fill in that "memory hole" that Dave knows all his previous statements have vanished down...

The "massive changes" he plans are more Blair/Brown style regulation and political direction of the markets:

But we must also stand up to business when the things that people value are at risk. So it's time to place the market within a moral framework - even if that means standing up to companies who make life harder for parents and families.

And this is the jackanapes whose "massive changes" involve promising to expand the bloated state, just a wee bit slower than Labour, and I quote from earlier this year:

Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year - rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers. He warned voters not to expect an incoming Tory administration to slash public spending and cut taxes, saying: "That's not what they should be thinking...

So guys and gals, about that promise of "massive change"...

Thank God we have those valiant seekers of truth in the media, so key to our sainted democracy, to challenge the utterances of politicians and confront them with their own contradictory remarks when they make them and... oh... hang on...

(29)

Here is an article on how the UK-based artist, Tracy Emin, wants to leave Britain because of the upcoming new 50 per cent top income tax rate. It kicks in by the start of next April and once changes to pension and national insurance are taken into account, the effective marginal rate is nearer to 65 per cent. The tax will be on annual earnings of 150,000 pounds and above. That sounds a huge salary to someone like yours truly, but the sort of entrepreneur we need to fuel an economic recovery is likely to make that sort of money if things go well. A marginal bite of 65 per cent is likely to force such entrepreneurs to cut back on the necessary risk-taking that such ventures require. And as the article I linked to suggests, the additional revenue that officials claim will be raised will be just 2.5 billion quid - and arguably, the disincentive effect of the tax hike will reduce revenues. And never mind just the utilitarian arguments against steeply progressive taxes. As FA Hayek memorably put it in the Constitution of Liberty, there is no objective rule that would allow anyone to decide why a person who earns, say, X per cent more than the median income should pay, for example, 50 per cent on earnings, or 60 per cent, 70 per cent, or whatever. One might as well toss a coin. The "principle" of progessivism should be seen for what it is: legalised looting.

It tells you everything you need to know about Britain's plight that people are now thinking of going to live in France because its taxes are, at least in some respects, lower. Given all the other benefits of living in France, such as the greater land area and fabulous food, the idea of heading south across the English Channel has a lot to recommend it. And I am typing these words in Malta, where the weather is - mostly - miles better than in England, although ironically we had a massive storm on Thursday evening - the same one that has hit southern Italy. But the place is economically quite lively now, judging by the sheer racket from the construction sites everywhere.

Oh, by the way, my blogging activity has been slack these past few days but I have the excuse of having done my PADI scuba course, which was successful. We haven't yet worked out how to blog under water. Not even scuba enthusiast and internet maestro Glenn Reynolds seems able to do that.

(8)

David Cameron seems determined to not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity...

The Conservative leader also gave an interview to the Spectator magazine in which he said he would use the conference to show his party had "the grit and determination to turn the whole country around".

But in terms of the deficit, he added: "I want to be realistic - both for what a government can achieve, but also realistic in terms of taking the country with me." Labour has said it plans to introduce a 50p rate of tax for the highest earners - a policy Mr Cameron said he would honour.

Nevertheless, he told the Spectator he thought high marginal tax rates were "a fantastically bad idea" and if the 50p policy ultimately drove Britain's rich to move overseas, "clearly it would be painless and advantageous to get rid of it at an early stage".

If it is "a fantastically bad idea" then with Labour reeling around like a punch drunk boxer, why oh why not just say "Britain... are you fucked enough to be paying attention now? We are going in the WRONG DIRECTION... we will immediately repeal this tax and simply tear up every single page the fantastically bad socially and economically toxic legislation enacted over the past decade, and try to restart civil society before it completely flatlines"...

...but no...

Instead we get the usual timid drivel about being "realistic". Why? Well it is obvious. When it comes down to it, it is really only the details that Cameron disagrees with, the basic notion of a vast profligate regulatory state is only bad when it does not have Cameron's "safe pair of hands" (or some such similar nauseating Tory form of words) on the wheel of state.

(50)

When two working women who look after each other's children are told they are breaking the law by doing so because they are not registered with the state to do that, the only sane and moral thing to do is to break the law and to urge as many other people as possible to do the same.

Oh yes... not that it should matter, but the two women in question are policewomen.

(29)

To look at this from a UK perspective, I have given this a lot of thought as we have a general election next year (Civil Contingencies Act permitting). Abstention or a vote for a party other than Cameron's "Conservatives" runs a real risk of preventing the eviction of the Labour party that has done so much damage in the past 13 years. Given another 5 years they could add incalculable damage to an already impressive list.

The question I asked myself was: do I think Labour can do more damage in 5 years than Cameron's "Conservatives" can in 10, 15 or more? My answer was no, another five years of Labour is less threatening than an indefinite period of Cameron "Conservatism". Once defeated Cameron would be dropped like the proverbial hot brick and then it will time to start working for a new leader with Conservative beliefs.

- Commenter MarkE

(10)

Here is a quick thought: in the aftermath of various financial crises - the 1997 Asian crisis (remember that one?), Long Term Capital Management (1998), various business blowups (Enron, etc), and of course, the latest excitements, one invariably hears from the Great and the Good that what we need to stop is the "box ticking mentality" when it comes to regulation. We need, so the argument goes, to rely a lot less on making sure the correct forms are filled in, and to require people in business and enforcers of laws to use more common sense. So true.

And yet. Every time a new problem emerges, what happens? You guessed it right: more box-ticking. Take the case that this blog has written about in the past few days concerning the attempt to put a quarter of all UK adults under some sort of oversight in case they come into contact with children, and other groups. What is a distinguishing feature of such a bureaucratic, and in fact dangerous, development is that it is bound to involve people answering various forms, entering various answers into a sort of database. In other words, box-ticking. So if you pass the test, then voila! you are in the clear. And so certain crooks and villains will continue to get through, because they have passed the test.

So the next time you hear a politician piously informing us that we are going to "get beyond the box-ticking approach", do not believe them.

(20)

"We have an incoherent attitude to freedom in this country. We imagine that we value freedom above almost everything else and yet at the same time we are neurotically averse to risk. Every time something terrible happens, such as the murder of a child, the public clamours for something to be done to ensure that such a thing never happens again. Such unspeakable suffering must not have been in vain; inquiries must be held and systems must be put in place; all such risks to children must be eliminated. Yet the harsh truth is that risk is the heavy price of freedom."

Minette Marrin.

She points out that the development - as elaborated below on this blog by Natalie Solent - will poison civil society and discourage volunteering. I think that is actually part of the idea. I have long since abandoned any notion that such developments are introduced by well-meaning but foolish people. Their intentions are to Sovietise British society, to put all law-abiding adults under a cloud, and rip up the autonomous, private spaces that make up civil society. There is a comment I remember being made by the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen: "Old Labour wanted to nationalise things; New Labour will nationalise people."

(28)

Parents who ferry children to clubs face criminal record checks, reports the Guardian.

Parents who regularly ferry groups of children on behalf of sports or social clubs such as the Scouts will have to undergo criminal record checks — or face fines of up to £5,000, it was disclosed today.

They will fall under the scope of the government's new vetting and barring scheme, which is aimed at stopping paedophiles getting access to children.

Other interesting quotes from the article:

A total of 11.3 million people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to register with the ISA.

All 300,000 school governors, as well as every doctor, nurse, teacher, dentist and prison officer will have to register because they come into contact with children or "vulnerable" adults at work.

And

Unlike previous lists of barred individuals, everyone registered with the agency will face continuing monitoring, with existing registrations reconsidered if new evidence is disclosed.

And

Martin Narey, the Barnardo's chief executive and former director general of the Prison Service, said: "If the vetting and barring scheme stops just one child ending up a victim of a paedophile then it will be worth it."

I do not know if this will actually come to pass. The proposal is massively unpopular on all sides of the political aisle, judging from the comments to this Guardian article and indeed the comments to this Daily Mail article, and this BBC Have Your Say forum. But a moribund Government can convulse in strange ways; they may not care very much about popularity.

(22)

Regular commenter here, IanB - who now gigs over at CountingCats - bashes those doctors, who, claiming to speak for all doctors, want to ban alcohol advertising.

Authortarian creeps, the lot of them. If one thinks about it, the number one addiction in the world that needs to be curbed is the habit of trying to tell grownups how to lead their lives morning, noon and night.

Inevitably, they do this in the name of protecting children, so it is not censorship, you see. How conveeeenient. Look, I like children and feel parental control and guidance is fine, but can we just remind ourselves that as kids, we managed to grow up into relatively sane creatures without being mollycoddled and protected by state censorship from adverts for beer, gin and plonk? Considering the risks that send our so-called medical "establishment" off the edge, it is a wonder we made it to adulthood at all.

(15)

There have been a flurry of articles in the press in recent days about the significant risk that in a decade's time, possibly sooner, the UK will suffer from power blackouts as electricity generating stations fall out of use and as there is nothing - apart from some renewable energy sources such as windmills - to pick up the slack. The trouble for the Tories, of course, is that assuming they are in power by then, the blame for the disaster will fall on their shoulders, rather than on those of politicians who have chosen to play to the Green gallery by not giving the go-ahead to new power supplies, such as from nuclear energy. Of course, Mr Cameron's own flirtation with the Green movement may come back to haunt him.

The problem, as I see it, as that not only do we not have a genuine market for energy in this country as the current setup is heavily regulated. Even if the industry were freed from worrying about complying with Green restrictions on CO2 production, there is still not enough of a genuine market to ensure that supplies keep up with demand. To say this is an urgent issue for any incoming administration next year is an understatement.

A question that I have is there anything that can be done to generate electricity on a smaller scale. rather than on the model that has operated for decades? I mean, could a group of firms join up to pay for a small nuke station, for example? (I am assuming that the security issues to that will not be a barrier).

Here is a new blog on the issue by the politician, Greg Clark. Meanwhile, Christopher Booker is in fine form on the same topic here.

(62)

"Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable."

Nick Cohen, who loathes the alleged "comedy" programme Mock The Week as much as I do. An interesting theme, that Cohen does not explore much after raising it, is how entertainment thugs such as Frank Boyle consider it now acceptable to be extremely unpleasant about the elderly, and why this might be. Now that so many groups of humans are considered politically off-limits for jokes, only the old are left, provided they are middle class and white. Cohen muses that this trend of being vile about the old might be a sort of pent-up frustration about the rising costs of paying for an elderly population. He may have a point. But Boyle should remember that he is going to be old one day. And by the time he is in his dotage, who will remember him?

Cohen evidently loathes Mr Boyle. I rather enjoyed this piece of invective:

"Boyle is the show's strutting cock. A gaunt, aggressive, slit-eyed Scotsman with a neurotic determination to be heard first and always, he seems to have grasped that the critics will hail him as "edgy" if he courts the porn market."

Dearie me. Oh for the days of Dave Allen, a real comedian who understood that making people laugh is not the same as drawing blood. Well, at least I now have Family Guy to look forward to later on. Right now, Britain does not produce many funny people, in my view, with the possible exception of the cast of The Fast Show. There is a seething sort of anger and thuggery too much in evidence. I struggle sometimes to wonder where it has all come from. Explanations?

(24)

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I found out via US blogger Coyote about events in Richmond upon Thames. I used to go into Richmond every Saturday with a gaggle of other eleven year old girls to shop for three hours and eventually buy a notebook with a picture of a cat on it for seventeen and a half pence. Perhaps the place has gone downhill since I knew it: now it seems that the police of Richmond are taking valuables from unlocked cars "to drive home an anti-theft message." It's all right, you get your valuables back. Eventually. But you have to go round to the station to do it. You know, in some circumstances, that might be troublesome.

Can anyone versed in the laws of England explain whether this is, if not theft, at least "taking without the owner's consent", as the charge sheets for joyriders used to say?

On the same theme, Longrider has a story about the police in Northamptonshire impounding cars if the same car with foreign plates is seen twice more than six months apart. A Mr West writes:

I live in Spain for about seven months of the year and France for the other five. My Spanish-registered car was impounded in March after two short visits to the UK within nine months of each other.

At the start of 2009, a pilot scheme called Operation Andover started in Northamptonshire, with any foreign vehicle seen just twice, more than six months apart, being impounded without warning.

(7)

There have been so many incidents that some have described as being the death blow to the current UK government that one wonders whether any single news event will finish this lot of creeps off. But for a glimpse at the sheer, wanton corruption and venality of this administration, the story of the various relationships between those involved in handing over a convicted mass murderer to Libya gives you some idea of the morality of this government. It is appropriate that the article was written by Andrew Neil, a proud Scot and Anglospherist who is justly appalled at the behaviour of both the UK and Scottish administrations.

And yet the capacity of such stories to shock, while it should not be underestimated, needs to be put into some sort of perspective. Let's face it, governments of Left and Right, be they French, American or British, have sold weapons and munitions to often odious regimes in the past, or done commercial deals that don't bear too much scrutiny. Remember the UK Matrix-Churchill "supergun" affair of the 1990s? Remember the 1986 Iran/Contra kerfuffle that marred the second Reagan term, or the recent issue of British defence firm BAE Systems and sales to the Saudi government? There has been a history of Western governments willing to set aside certain scruples in the name of exports.

The Libyan affair is a grubby business, to be sure. But there is, alas, nothing remotely surprising about how the various parties have behaved.

(3)

Michael Yon emails Instapundit, "The British Ministry of Defence cancelled my embed after today’s dispatch. Please read Bad Medicine."

(9)

It is always rather foolish to invoke misty eyed national wells for values. One can always point to counter-examples.Now we know that Alex "a touch of the" Salmond and Gordon Brown have one thing in common? Is Macavity a 'Scottish' value?

There is one person in the SNP administration, however, who appears to have worked out just how sensitive this situation is: and that is Mr Salmond. Usually, the First Minister has to be restrained to stop him pushing in front of his ministers when there is an announcement of any import to be made.

However, with this decision, Mr Salmond has been remarkable only by his absence. Mr MacAskill was left to face the world’s press yesterday, on his own, not with his First Minister sitting by his side.

(13)

This is pretty poor stuff from the normally astute James Forsyth. In fact, his remarks about Dan Hannan's recent blunt comment about the UK's Soviet-model healthcare system smacks of cowardice:

The last week has been one of the worst the Tories have had in a while. As Pete said on Friday, a bad week in August is unlikely to do lasting damage. But the Tories should learn from the events of then past few days: they have been thrown onto the defensive not by clever Labour attacks but by their own unforced errors. Alan Duncan was a fool to say things to a prankster who he had never met before that he did not want made public and Dan Hannan should have realised that a Tory politician criticising the NHS in the context of the US healthcare debate was going to be grist to the left’s mill.

Oh I see. So Dan Hannan, and indeed any other Tories, are to be urged to only talk about the problems of state command-and-control healthcare/whatever in the most muted, domestic terms, without any reference to how such issues are handled overseas. Marvellous. Such timidity, when the Tories are way ahead in the polls, means that they will lack much in the way of post-election credibility in making any changes to the vast moneypit of the NHS if the Tories get into power. Hannan, by reminding Americans of the great mistake their elected representatives might make in going down the socialist path, is also doing his party a favour. One wonders whether Hannan, who famously raced up the YouTube rankings for his wonderful denunciation of Gordon Brown, has made some of his UK colleagues - Hannan is a Tory member of the European Parliament - rather jealous.

Then James Forsyth goes onto say:

"You can say that in an ideal world both Duncan and Hannan should have been able to do what they did. But however disappointing it is that people abuse a politician’s hospitality by breaking confidences or that policy debates get reduced to 140 characters, Duncan and Hannan should have behaved more sensibly. Their actions suggest that some Tories have yet to acquire the discipline that is needed if the Tories are to fully capitalise on the opportunity that the next few months will present them with."

That Alan Duncan is a bit of a buffoon is true, but the Hannan example that James Forsyth seizes on worries me. Does he think that the Tories are going to win an election by saying as little as possible about their intentions, or by coming out with a relentless, mind-numbing set of Blairite soundbites, and hope that nobody notices or cares? The danger of Forsyth's analysis - and this is something I have noticed from some of the Coffee Houser's commenters in recent months - is to reduce politics to nothing more than a form of sport, like football or cricket. It goes a bit like this: "Mr X dropped a bit of a ball by saying Y the other day. Such unforced errors means that both parties go into the election/match/tournament with a point to prove". There is no real difference between this sort of analysis and my reading about why Manchester United is a bit short of defensive cover or why Tiger Woods' knee injury is proving a problem.

And of course, as some of our commenters like to point out, the politics-as-sport schtick is all part of a broader, "Metacontext" where the same, broad, statist assumptions about what is thinkable are ringfenced, with a supine MSM aiding the process, even driving it. Certain issues are "difficult"; certain comments by MPs or officials show they are "not team players" or mad, or whatever. It is terribly corrosive of serious thought about the problems that the UK faces, such as frighteningly high levels of public debt. If the Tories feel they cannot talk with any honesty about the huge cost of socialised medicine, it does not say much about the rest of their agenda, or suggest there is much chance of progress on any but the most superficial of fronts.

And people occasionally ask why we have little hope for any improvement under a Conservative government.

(20)

"The British haven't lost their fondness for liberty. We never had it."

(Taken from this comment by Ian B)

(20)

Old Holborn considers the new disposition of the state and highlights, in that Hayekian warning, of the extension of the state through arbitrary fines and the presumption of guilt. What is forgotten is that the agents of the state are still few and far between: without the ballast of a mass party to back them up, they remain an irritant, rather than a overarching totalitarianism. One can live without hearing or seeing these actions in person.

Nevertheless, state functionaries will wish to find 'efficient' ways of exercising their power. The database state is meant to replace the mass party as a vehicle for co-ordinating and controlling all activities. Yet, some means of identifying and punishing perpetrators is still required, as technology is still insufficient to achieve this goal. Hence, the rise in channels for informing and denouncing those who dissent.

After all, East Germany required ten percent of the population...

(16)

According to Radio Free Europe,

Rovshan Nasirli, a young Eurovision [song contest] fan living in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, says he was summoned this week to the country's National Security Ministry -- to explain why he had voted for Armenia during this year's competition in May.

"They wanted an explanation for why I voted for Armenia. They said it was a matter of national security,” Nasirli said. “They were trying to put psychological pressure on me, saying things like, 'You have no sense of ethnic pride. How come you voted for Armenia?' They made me write out an explanation, and then they let me go."

(Hat tip to Gene of Harry's Place and Robert Wright of the The Daily Dish.)

In other news, Health Secretary Andy Burnham has accused Tory MEP Daniel Hannan who said on US TV that the US healthcare system was generally better than the NHS of being unpatriotic. Senior figures from both the Labour and Conservative parties have denounced Hannan and demanded an explanation.

(22)

Sheila Lawlor, director of the think tank Politeia, is concerned that the status of teachers is low and that too few people apply to become teachers. She regrets that in Britain it is rather easy to get a place in a teaching course whereas elsewhere in Europe the entry qualifications are strict. In an article for the Times entitled Get higher grades from teachers first, she writes:

Would raising entry standards at least to those of comparable European countries help to improve matters? Or would, as one union threatened some time ago, a GCSE Grade B in maths mean that applications to the profession collapse? Probably more terrifying for the Government than bad teachers is the prospect of no teachers. Yet far from threatening the supply of teachers, higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places. In France five candidates compete for each job. Here the highest entry levels set for medical school go along with the most sought after university places.

This is an interesting argument. Well, not exactly argument, since having raised the question of whether making it harder to become a teacher might not reduce the supply of teachers as common sense and two and a half centuries of observed economics might lead one to expect, she simply asserts that the converse is true: "Higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places."

I think the bit that is meant to be the argument is the next sentence, saying that in France - where, as the article has said earlier, the status of teachers is high, and the qualifications required to become a teacher are also high, there are many people who want to be teachers.

Back in 1974 the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture in which he described the beliefs of certain primitive tribes:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.

See, the tribe of the French get the cargo. Let us do as the French do and surely the cargo will flow to us!

Ms Lawlor, like the cargo cultists, is persuaded that by imitating some of the forms (runways, men with headphones, high entry qualifications for teaching) associated with a desired state of affairs (free goodies from the gods, high status of teachers) one can cause that state of affairs to come about.

To be fair to Ms Lawlor, economists do speak of certain goods for which demand, contrary to the usual way of things, goes up as the price goes up. I think they are either called Veblen goods or Giffen goods but trying to nail down which might apply here is giffen me a headache. I will concede that just possibly increasing the entry qualifications for teaching might conjure down a little status from the sky. Perhaps one or two easily-led souls might be induced to apply for a teaching course as a result. But compared to the numbers put off from doing so by the frequent unpleasantness and occasional danger involved in teaching in a British state school, this is very minor magic indeed.

Sorry. No airplanes land.

(34)

What does one call a state partially ruled by a club for police chiefs and 'law enforcement' bureaucrats who do not wish to obey the law?

(20)

In a perhaps understandably nasty tirade about Harriet Harman, Rod Liddle, the Spectator's resident yob, we get this paragraph:

"The reason we should have disquiet about Harriet is because she is either thick or criminally disingenuous. My guess is thick. Being a bit thick should not disqualify someone from leading their party, I suppose, as both Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Salisbury would concur."

Well it may be true that Ms Harman is as dumb as a stump, a moron of heroic proportions, completely out of her depth, etc. But Lord Salisbury? The gentleman, who was prime minister for long periods at the end of the 19th Century when the British Empire was at its greatest extent, was hardly thick. Wrong, maybe, but thick, no. His shrewd handling of foreign affairs for certain periods, for example, puts him considerably ahead of most contemporary politicians. And he was quite libertarian in many ways, a skeptic about the efficacy of government power to improve human lives. A sign of wisdom, I'd say.

In making such an assertion about Lord Salisbury's alleged thickness, Mr Liddle comes across as a bit of a thickie himself. And in wondering out loud about the sexual desirability, or lack, of these various New Labour women, he also undermines what might have been a good essay on the awfulness of their ideas by being so incredibly crass. But maybe I am just old fashioned or something. "That is the trouble with you, Johnathan, you're not "edgy" enough."

(18)

"As for politicians' personal conduct, I doubt it is much worse, relative to other professions, than it has always been, and it is not — or should not be — the main cause for concern. Personally, I would much rather MPs had numerous extramarital affairs, their hands in the till, or lucrative second jobs exploiting inside knowledge, than that they cavalierly abolish yet another civil liberty that took hundreds of years to establish. As far as I am concerned, politicians are welcome to be not only greedy, but also dull, unapproachable, ugly, pompous, clubby, elitist or socially inept, just as long as they do not consider it their job to reform society by making up a few more laws and rushing them through parliament as quickly as possible. Sadly, the people who agree with me appear to be a very small minority."

Fabian Tassano. His blog is required reading, in my view.

(11)

Sir Bobby Robson, former manager of Newcastle Utd, England and a brace of successful European clubs (such as PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona), has died after a brave fight against cancer. But the club that in many ways will feel the pain of his loss the most is Ipswich Town FC, the club I have supported since I was a young boy

He took this relatively unfashionable club on the UK's east coast to the heights of success in the FA Cup and in European competition, coming also very close to winning the old domestic First Division. His teams were glorious to watch. He conducted himself with grace, good humour - apart from the occasional tiff with the media - and had an infectious love of the sport that inspired football fans and players from all clubs. RIP.

(12)

Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

The way to absolute power is to dress up empty cruelty as public virtue, and have the organs of propaganda promulgate it for 'carers' to inflict on children. Finally they have an excuse to take Teddy Bears from toddlers.

(11)

The alternative news-agency SchNEWS, frequently offers inchoherent and borderline-mad stories, but it does carry some interesting stuff from time to time, including this well-composed and entirely plausible account* of how even hippy festivals are now closely regulated by the authorities:

In spite of these setbacks, [the Big Green Gathering (BGG)] managed to scrape themselves back off the floor with shareholder cash and some potentially dubious corporate involvement. Every effort had been made by the gathering’s organisers to accommodate the increasingly niggling demands of police and licensing authorities. The procedure lasted over six months – just check out www.mendip.gov.uk/CommitteeMeeting.asp?id=SX9452-A782D404 for the minutes of meetings held between organisers and the authorities. Demands included a steel fence, watchtowers and perimeter patrols, having the horsedrawn field inside a ‘secure compound’ and wristbands for twelve undercover police. At a multi-agency meeting on Thursday, police took those wristbands in order to maintain the pretence that the festival stood a chance of going ahead. A catalogue of other obstacles were also continually placed in the organiser’s path.

All of the businesses associated with the BGG came under scrutiny, licensing authorities contacted South West ambulances, the Fire Brigade and the fencing contractors and asked them to get payment up front from the BGG. Needless to say this caused huge problems.

For their own good, of course. One cannot just have hippies hiring fields from farmers in order to have a place to enjoy themselves as they see fit. Someone might not get hurt. And that would open the floodgates to anarchy in the UK. Or Wessex, at least.

hat-tip: Dr Geraint Bevan
----
* Though they do get the date of the vile Licensing Act 2003 wrong

(5)

Iain Dale, the UK politics blogger, has interesting things to say about how Sir Trevor Phillips, head of the Equalities & Human Rights Commission, has come under attack from the far left over his not being sufficiently on-message with their agendas. Well, as Mr Dale eventually states, it is probably about time that this quango - quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation - was scrapped. Far from soothing racial or other tensions, it seems at times to require their continuation to justify its existence. As any student of Parkinson's Law will tell you, such a bureaucracy will endlessly look for new things to do, new causes to embrace, or new dragons to be slain. Sir Trevor is, by the standards of such organisations, relatively sane, which no doubt is one of the reasons why the hard left hates him. If he had sense, Sir Trevor should commend the government, any government, to heed Mr Dale's advice. This organisation needs to join a long list of quangos for annihilation.

(17)

The decision by the UK government a few months ago to use anti-terrorism powers over the case of Icelandic banks in trouble has caused deep resentment in Iceland. As this article suggests, such a tactic is hardly a way for Britain - now in deep debt - to make friends with foreign investors. Of course, Mr Brown may have made the calculation that he will be out of power in a few months so why care? But even so, the use of such powers represented a new low for UK diplomatic relations. It also proves the age-old truth that if governments acquire new powers, they will use them in ways far beyond their original scope.

(18)

In Britain, you probably are.

Both the Shetland Islands Council (101) and Corby Borough Council (90) - among the smallest local authorities in the UK - have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department (71)

That's nothing, it seems. We learn today that a single school in Stockwell, south London, has 96.

(22)

Dominic Lawson tears into the moral cant and dubious economics of those who want to festoon the UK with windmills as a solution to so-called man-made global warming. As he says, other countries, such as Germany, have spent large sums on such alternative technologies but have not, yet, been able to retire conventional power stations at all.

I am quite a fan of tidal power, as alternatives go (although I think that no serious energy policy that sidelines nuclear power is worth considering as a practical one). Unlike the wind, which is dependent on weather, tides are as regular as the orbit of the Moon. Reversible turbines could be powered by the regular, big currents that sweep to and fro in the coastal waters of countries such as the UK, France, Germany and Spain. And unlike windmills, they would not, hopefully, create a bloody great eyesore or hazard, either.

(4)

Apparently it is news that the UK is still in recession, or as the headline says Economic recovery in UK 'on hold'.

On hold? The government is debasing people's saving as quickly as possible and stripping money out of productive sectors and pumping it into unproductive sectors, and generally trying their damnedest to drive businesses and wealth creators out for years now... and the fact this is tearing a huge hole is surprising to who exactly?

(15)

It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.

The mainstream media are always telling us how 'essential' they are for 'our democracy'. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today...

But no. This is 'ground breaking' we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?

State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:

"This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we've been able to demonstrate that you've got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows."

Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as "incitement" if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.

This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail... actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.

Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.

Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba'athists for example... and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too... and certain Serbian nationalists)... and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles 'inciting' not just 'violence' but calling for full blown wars.

Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as 'freeborn Englishmen' (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, "social cohesion" than a couple comically wacko racists.

Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and 'essential' media guardians of our liberal western order.

The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better... ten years tops... except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their 'essential role' and the 'public interest' of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.

(18)

Two men have been convicted of thought crimes by the state for daring to express what they think. I very much doubt the Human Right Industry will rally to the defence of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle because the two men in question are a couple deeply unappealing white racist scumbags.

Had they merely been scumbag imams preaching in a mosque rather than scumbag white males handing out leaflets and publishing a website, I wonder if the 'head of diversity and community cohesion' in Humberside would be crowing about the latest demonstration of the British police state's ability to tell people what they can and cannot say? Just askin'.

(13)

In response to a US article that talks about David Cameron, Conservative Party leader, and some other prominent figures, such as Iain Duncan-Smith and his own brand of Toryism, I left this comment:

"I am not sure what is so libertarian about Mr Cameron's brand of soft-paternalist Toryism. For sure, they are tolerant on certain social issues, but as we found a year ago on issues like Green taxes on cheap airlines, the instincts of this lot are to regulate, to tax, to "nudge" us unwashed masses in the direction they want us to go."

"IDS may moan that Mrs Thatcher and others were unduly focused on economics; what these critics miss is that the underlying problem in the UK right now is, still, about the relationship between the individual and the state. The state takes about half of our wealth, and regulates a good deal of the rest of it. How anyone with a claim to be called conservative can defend this state of affairs, or criticise those who would push the state back to a more modest role in our lives, is a total mystery."

While the Tories may have pledged to shut down the odd quango and scrap ID cards (but not, as far as I know, the underlying database), anyone expecting the Tories to lead us to the sunlit uplands of freedom is a fool.

(14)

Needs must and the Romans acted. We can add one last item to the list of what ever did the Romans do for us. Although we are more civilised (measured by less blood!), we can gainfully deploy their policy of decimation, on an annualised basis.

Forget wishy-washy arguments about repeals or sunset clauses. Every year, cut one in ten who receive a payment from the state: one in ten able bodied citizens who idle their lives away and receive a pay as you go pension afterwards (an idea that only ever worked on mobile phones!); one in ten quangos (or just abolish them all in go); one in ten departments of state; and one in ten Members of Parliament, either from the Lords or Commons. Ringfence defence personnel for nightwatchmen status and we have a blueprint for a downsizing classic.

(7)

Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.

- 'National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis - Outcome', the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.

The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.

(6)

Thanks to our vigilant commentariat, I read this excellent, pithy demolition of central banking by Jamie Whyte, the banker and writer on philosophy and other subjects. Good on the Times (of London) for running it. It's a healthy antidote to the flawed semi-Keynesian nonsense of Mr Kaletsky.

(13)

...says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.

Amusing comments.

(2)

Some speculation is already generating about who might get the top job at the Institute of Economic Affairs, the think tank in the UK that is, in some ways, the grand-daddy of free market think tanks in the UK. John Blundell is going, having been in the post for some time. Guido has some rather barbed comments about Blundell. Guido mentions an old journalist friend of mine, Allister Heath, as a candidate. Allister would be great - but he is anyway going great guns at the financial paper, City AM, and may also have his eye on other journalistic positions in the future. But he would be a very strong choice for the role, although selfishly, I'd prefer it if those few of us who are libertarian journalists stayed in the profession.

In some ways - these things are not easy to measure - I get the impression that more focused groups such as the Taxpayers' Alliance have been making far more of the running in recent years than the IEA, while the Adam Smith Institute has been doing a lot of outreach work with universities and colleges, which is vital. But the IEA has a tremendous pedigree and it ought to be a coveted position to go for. The only reservation is whether it can command enough of a budget to get in someone at the right level.

(9)

"Brown's claim that he'd increase public service spending year after year is not an exaggeration, it is a lie. I cannot think of any modern Prime Minister who has based his strategy on a demonstrable lie - but Brown thinks no one can add up enough to expose him. After all, he got away with it as Chancellor. Why not now? As I have said before I believe the internet will hound him. We have infinite space to print the tables, the data, the proof. The table above spells it out, and we will keep reprinting it every time Brown repeats his lie. He is going for broke - in every way."

Of course, politicians have always, with varying degrees, told lies or only partial truths, and Brown is hardly an original in this regard. Arguably the greatest lie, or set of lies, told to the UK electorate were told in the period leading up to the UK's entry into the-then EEC, later European Union: namely, that our entry into the Community was in no way a loss of national sovereignty. In fact I am sure that I recall reading - sorry, cannot find the source - such pro-EEC journalists as Hugo Young saying that it was admirable and necessary for the likes of the late Edward Heath (curses be upon him) to bullshit the public.

Even so, Brown's denial of his own budget arithmetic, when it can be so easily checked, is a jaw-dropper. But what is encouraging is that parts of the media, even the fairly lefty bits, are not buying the line that there will be no cuts in spending over the next few years.

Of course, if Brown is refusing to make spending cuts, then I guess that fits with the whole "scortched earth" idea that he has: he knows Labour will lose the next election, probably quite badly, but out of a mixture of low cunning and sheer evil, he wants to bequeath a terrible inheritance upon the next government.

Yes, I said evil. Mr Brown is an evil man. In fact his invocation of his puritanical Scottish religion is part proof of that.

(6)

Is there no U-turn that this shameless government will not indulge, helped by their handmaiden, the Daily Telegraph? At least, Brogan fences the slurry in, although it oozes and drips through the cracks in the fence. Now, casting my mind back, I seem to recall that targets, micro-management and huge public expenditure without gain are all hallmarks of one G. Brown Esq. So how can this 'target culture' be derided as Blairite?

In an interview, Mr Byrne said: "We need a power shift from Whitehall ministers and civil servants that currently have the power and move it to citizens.

"We know the argument for public services has got to change so we have been developing a strategy that takes public services away from a target culture to giving people rights and entitlement to core public services."

What will this shift entail? Liam Byrne describes this latest stage of reform, and when did we never have a period of reform, as giving individuals a set of rights and, if they are not met, you get to complain.

Well, as a member of the public, I would like to demonstrate near Parliament, wear a "Bollix to Brown" T shirt and ensure that nephews could read. And I can complain to the people who buggered up in the first place. And what do people want when they complain? They want redress. If they can't get the rights, they get the compensation.

A new way of using your money to puff up Brown's largesse and promote dishonesty. Incentives to lie and cheat by crying that rights are infringed, to be bought off by gold, all helped out by that nice Mr Brown, who understands my needs. This is one last ditch effort to bribe the electorate at the expense of widening compensation culture and increasing something for nothing expectations.

Good thing the money has run out.

(32)

In France a group of MPs has said that France ought to investigate the possibility of banning the burqa.

In Britain, 'More than 700 "controlled drinking zones" have been set up across England, giving police sweeping powers to confiscate beer and wine from anyone enjoying a quiet outdoor tipple.'

If you want to keep your freedom to drink what you please on the public street then fight for the freedom to wear what you please on the public street.

But what about public drunkeness, then, and the fear and misery of those whose nights are blighted by drunks fighting at their windows and pissing in their gardens? And what about the cloth-entombed women, projecting an image of both slavery and Islamic aggression, who may or may not have chosen to wear the black bag?

My answer is substantially the same to both social problems: as a society we have chosen to deny ourselves the very tools of private social action (no, that is not a contradiction in terms) that could make things better.

For decades we have denied ourselves disapproval. For decades we have denied ourselves property rights. For decades we have denied ourselves the right to free association, which necessarily includes the right not to associate.

These tools are the ones we have the right to use. They are also the right tools for the job. They, unlike the tools of coercion, will not turn in our hands and cut us.

Bad form to quote oneself, I know. However it saves writing time, so tough. Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I said:

In general, I would say that strong private institutions are a bulwark against the type of creeping Islamification - or capture by other minority groups - that concern many of the commenters to this thread ... Contrast that with the position of state institutions, which includes state laws. These are a much more realistic target for capture by determined minorities. If, say 3% of the population feel really strongly about some issue and 97% are apathetic it is actually quite a realistic proposition for the 3% to get laws passed to steer things their way. Much easier than out-purchasing the other 97%, certainly.

However that brings me back to the main point of the article: the best (perhaps only?) long term defence against unfair treatment by "the authorities" is to keep the authorities out of our daily lives.

(25)

Brown does not really understand libertarianism, but this is an accolade:

One of the words Brown uses most often in private to describe the Tory leader is "libertarian": a word that conveys his belief that Cameron's "compassionate conservatism" is mere window-dressing, but also hints at a decadent strain of Tory libertinage, drug-taking and yacht-fondling.

I expect I shall be arrested for loitering around marinas as yacht-fondling will be outlawed in the next Parliament.

(136)

Tim Worstall - back in harness after running for office as a UKIP MEP - writes about the Labour government's stated desire to ensure that not a single tract of the UK is without broadband access. It is the sort of techie, practical measure that Mr Gordon Brown thinks will help win him a bit of respect in the traditional Tory and LibDem shires.

As Tim says, the logic of this idea is questionable. There are geographical, physical reasons why broadband access, or indeed other forms of communications, are not available everywhere, all the time. Also, as the comment thread attached to Tim's piece reveals, there is this argument, that I have raised before - also prompted by one of Tim's articles - about why people feel that because X or Y wants a road, canal, power cables, whatever, that therefore the state should be able to use compulsory purchase powers, and taxation, to pay for whatever it is that is wanted. I have referred to this mindset as "brute utilitarianism". Also, it is a cost of living in the countryside that one does not always have the same degree of speedy access to certain things that one has living in a town or city. That's life, so folk should deal with it. (One of the few arguments for land value taxes is that people living in such remote places would, other things being equal, pay less taxes also. However, there are other problems with LVT as the Austrian school of economics points out, attractive at first blush though the idea might be).

I pay more to live in my rabbit hutch apartment in Pimlico and for the same outlay I could live in a big place in the sticks. But for the benefit of living in SW1, I get quick access to airports (a short trip from Victoria to Gatwick); the Tube, buses, taxis, broadband access, etc. This is part of the cost "package", if you like, that comes with my locational choice. A person who lives in a remote area and who demands Pimlico or New York-style communcations is demanding that the citizens of a city should subsidize that preference. And yet many of the people who migrate from the towns to the country are quite well off; as I have noted in my native Suffolk, as soon as the townies settle in, they start demanding all kinds of amenities, not realising, or caring, that such things don't exist because they are relatively expensive to put in rural areas, which is precisely why Mr and Mrs Chartered Accountant can afford to live in their nice village cottages in the first place.

Sometimes such debates are as easy as this: if people want something, then damn well pay for it yourself, and do not use the robber powers of the state to grab it off someone else.

Rant over.

Er, not quite: my reference to LVT brought out a crop of Henry George "land-is-special!" types on the comment board. Several of us have responded to them, but I came across this nice essay by Jan Narveson, which I think is one of the best smackdowns for the land value tax mob that I have ever read. Excerpt:

Now, the point of this little essay is that that is basically all there is to it, and there doesn't need to be anything else. The idea that we all have an equal right to the land is amazingly arbitrary, and contrary to all human experience while it's at it. It's arbitrary in that it has no basis. The fact that we don't make the land is irrelevant, as already seen: we don't make the natural part of anything we have or own, no matter whether we have "made" it or not. But the point is, it doesn't matter. For things are just things: they do not come with labels saying that they "belong" to some people or that some people, somehow, have a "claim" on them, nor in turn that everybody has a claim on them, equal or otherwise.

(136)

Tim Worstall - back in harness after running for office as a UKIP MEP - writes about the Labour government's stated desire to ensure that not a single tract of the UK is without broadband access. It is the sort of techie, practical measure that Mr Gordon Brown thinks will help win him a bit of respect in the traditional Tory and LibDem shires.

As Tim says, the logic of this idea is questionable. There are geographical, physical reasons why broadband access, or indeed other forms of communications, are not available everywhere, all the time. Also, as the comment thread attached to Tim's piece reveals, there is this argument, that I have raised before - also prompted by one of Tim's articles - about why people feel that because X or Y wants a road, canal, power cables, whatever, that therefore the state should be able to use compulsory purchase powers, and taxation, to pay for whatever it is that is wanted. I have referred to this mindset as "brute utilitarianism". Also, it is a cost of living in the countryside that one does not always have the same degree of speedy access to certain things that one has living in a town or city. That's life, so folk should deal with it. (One of the few arguments for land value taxes is that people living in such remote places would, other things being equal, pay less taxes also. However, there are other problems with LVT as the Austrian school of economics points out, attractive at first blush though the idea might be).

I pay more to live in my rabbit hutch apartment in Pimlico and for the same outlay I could live in a big place in the sticks. But for the benefit of living in SW1, I get quick access to airports (a short trip from Victoria to Gatwick); the Tube, buses, taxis, broadband access, etc. This is part of the cost "package", if you like, that comes with my locational choice. A person who lives in a remote area and who demands Pimlico or New York-style communcations is demanding that the citizens of a city should subsidize that preference. And yet many of the people who migrate from the towns to the country are quite well off; as I have noted in my native Suffolk, as soon as the townies settle in, they start demanding all kinds of amenities, not realising, or caring, that such things don't exist because they are relatively expensive to put in rural areas, which is precisely why Mr and Mrs Chartered Accountant can afford to live in their nice village cottages in the first place.

Sometimes such debates are as easy as this: if people want something, then damn well pay for it yourself, and do not use the robber powers of the state to grab it off someone else.

Rant over.

Er, not quite: my reference to LVT brought out a crop of Henry George "land-is-special!" types on the comment board. Several of us have responded to them, but I came across this nice essay by Jan Narveson, which I think is one of the best smackdowns for the land value tax mob that I have ever read. Excerpt:

Now, the point of this little essay is that that is basically all there is to it, and there doesn't need to be anything else. The idea that we all have an equal right to the land is amazingly arbitrary, and contrary to all human experience while it's at it. It's arbitrary in that it has no basis. The fact that we don't make the land is irrelevant, as already seen: we don't make the natural part of anything we have or own, no matter whether we have "made" it or not. But the point is, it doesn't matter. For things are just things: they do not come with labels saying that they "belong" to some people or that some people, somehow, have a "claim" on them, nor in turn that everybody has a claim on them, equal or otherwise.

(8)

David Mitchell's own opinions are a bit right-on for me (right-on generally being the opposite of right, in either sense). But unlike the ordinarily right-on, he is prepared to countenance being mistaken, and frequently an acute critic. This bit of his latest Observer column is lucid and perfectly to the point:

Gordon Brown is either so short of ideas or so despises the electorate that he thinks the best way to demonstrate that the government is coping with the biggest business crisis in a century is to make it the responsibility of a man whose day job is telling self-regarding mediocrities that they should take off their Mexican hats before trying to put on their jumpers. A man who has made himself rich, but whose career as a tycoon has gone sufficiently quiet that he's got time to do TV.

Top-end billionaires are too busy for that - Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson don't have their own programmes, they have their own channels. Alan Sugar is no longer primarily a businessman - he portrays one on TV. Brown might as well have given the new tsardom to the bloke who played Boycie in Only Fools and Horses

What is even more depressing than Brown thinking that this might impress people is that the Tories, the only plausible alternative government, agree.

Sir Alan's TV role is caricature capitalism. (Am I the only one who hears the the Fry & Laurie Dammit sketch, itself mocking business-set melodrama, when the apprentices talk?) It is alarming if the Tories think that the public might think that the appointment is any more than more window-dressing, and more alarming that they are engaging in manoeuvres to reinforce that impression. They should be mocking a Government that holds reality TV to be a model for reality.

But what if both Mitchell and I and all the other cynical commentators are wrong, and the Conservatives are wisely containing a real threat? What if the public is impressed?

(15)

From: *.*@westminsterforumprojects.co.uk]
Sent: 12 June 2009 09:50
To: enquiries@no2id.net
Subject: The future role of the third sector in the UK: Don't Miss the Westminster Legal Policy Forum Keynote Seminar: The Future of the UK Third Sector - proving 'public benefit', Morning, 18th June 2009

Westminster Legal Policy Forum Keynote Seminar:

The Future of the UK Third Sector – proving ‘public benefit’

with

Helen Stephenson
Deputy Director, Third Sector Support Team
Office of the Third Sector, Cabinet Office

and

Claire Cooper
Deputy Director, Communities Group
Department for Communities and Local Government

and

Peter Wanless
Chief Executive, Big Lottery Fund

and

Simon Blake
Chair, Compact Voice

Morning, Thursday, 18th June 2009
Princess Alexandra Hall, Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street, London SW1A 1LR

[...]

For the attention of the Director

I hope you won’t mind this final reminder about the above seminar, taking place in Westminster next Thursday, but you don’t currently appear to be represented, and I do believe the issues being discussed will be of interest.

This email is being sent to a general email address because I wanted to pass along information that I thought may be of interest but was unable to secure specific contact details. Please forward this to the appropriate person, and we would be grateful to receive precise contact details if this is possible.

Whereas I thought readers of this blog would be interested, given we have previously discussed the creeping nationalisation of charities and other voluntary organisations by Britain's Borg-state. For foreign readers I hope it throws light on an icy subtle totalitarianism.

What makes this doubly creepy is that it is a legal policy seminar. That hints at further powers perhaps to coerce the 'third sector', as well as to co-opt and to corrupt it. Though the new Companies Act 2006 constrains the independence of action of commercial firms and non-profits in unclear ways, it is yet a shadow in the corner. So if you are a voluntary organisation but not a charity, don't spend money on party politics, and don't accept government or local authority or quango or bound-charity money, then you are currently still beyond state control and not obliged to provide a 'public benefit'.

Please note there is a charge for most delegates, but no one is excluded on the basis of ability to pay (see below).

Seminar

The third sector - charities, social enterprises, credit unions - have an increasingly prominent role in the delivery of services and economic development in the UK.

But now the ‘rules of the game’ are changing as the Charity Commission imposes new duties on charities to justify ‘public benefit’ and the recession threatens to squeeze much-needed donations.

This seminar takes an in depth look at the effects on charities themselves and those who support or benefit from them, at what the third sector will look like in the future, how significant a role it is set to play after the recession and at implications for UK society as a whole.

With contributions from the Office of the Third Sector outlining the Government’s strategy, and from the Department for Communities and Local Government, the meeting will bring together key policy makers in Government and Parliament with charities, their advisors and supporters, citizen groups and others with an interest in the issues. It is organised on the basis of strict impartiality by the Westminster Legal Policy Forum.

Planned sessions include:
* The current level, range of activity and scale of the third sector in the UK;
* Challenges for the Third Sector – a funder’s perspective;
* UK society’s expectations of the third sector in a recession;
* Third sector involvement in providing public services, now and into the future;
* Consequences for the sector of the Charity Commission’s guidance on ‘public benefit’ across the range of charities, from the largest to the smallest; and
* Latest views from the Office of the Third Sector.

A copy of the agenda is copied below my signature to give you a feel of the sessions planned. Updates to the agenda can all be viewed ‘live’ here.

Speakers

Keynote speakers at this seminar are:
* Julian Blake, Partner, Bates Wells & Braithwaite;
* Simon Blake, Chair, Compact Voice;
* Claire Cooper, Deputy Director, Communities Group, Department for Communities and Local Government;
* Akhil Patel, Audit Manager, Third Sector Business Development Team, National Audit Office;
* Helen Stephenson, Deputy-Director, Third Sector Support Team, Office of the Third Sector; and
* Peter Wanless, Chief Executive, The Big Lottery Fund

Other speakers include:
* Ann Blackmore, Head of Policy, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)
* Craig Dearden-Phillips, Chief Executive, SpeakingUp;
* Tris Lumley, Head of Strategy, New Philanthropy Capital;
* Professor Peter Luxton, Professor of Charity Law, Cardiff University;
* Mark Lyonette, Chief Executive, Association of British Credit Unions;
* Dr Richard Marsh, Independent Consultant, and former director, Impact Coalition;
* Professor Cathy Pharoah, Co-Director, Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy, Sir John Cass Business School;
* David Walker, Managing Director of Communications and Public Reporting, Audit Commission; and
* Simon Watson, National Officer, Local Government Service Group, UNISON.

Nick Hurd MP, Shadow Minister for Charities, Social Enterprise and Volunteering Sector and Jenny Willott MP, Liberal Democrat, Spokesperson for the Third Sector have kindly agreed to chair a session.

Attendees

We expect further speakers and attendees to be a senior and informed group numbering around 100, including Members of both Houses of Parliament, senior government officials, representatives of third sector organisations, local government and their support services, as well as representatives from law firms, campaign groups, academia, and the trade and national press.

We have already had places reserved by several senior officials from the Department of Health and the HM Treasury. The Charity Commission are also represented at this seminar.

Places have also been booked for representatives from: Accenture, Allen and Overy, Allergy, Berrymans Lace Mawer, Bird and Co, British Lymphology Society, British Waterways, BS Social Care, Cambridge House, Children England, Citizens Advice, Commission for the Compact, Crossroads Association, Diabetes UK, Eduserv, Ernst & Young, Geldards, GHK Consulting, Hampshire Adult Services, Hill and Knowlton, Housing Associations' Charitable Trust, Linklaters, Loughborough University , Mental Health Matters, Menzies, Moorhead James, National Foundation for Educational Research , NCB, NSPCC, Penningtons, Play England, PSS, Scottish Disability Equality Forum, The Disabilities Trust, The Girls Day School Trust, and YWCA.

Press passes has [sic] been booked by Society Media and Third Sector.

Output and About Us

A key output of the seminar will be a transcript of the proceedings, sent out within a week of the event to Ministers and officials at the Office of the Third Sector, Department of Health, Home Office, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Cabinet Office, Central Office of Information, National Audit Office, and other departments affected by the issues, and Parliamentarians with a special interest in these areas. It will also be made available more widely. It will include transcripts of all speeches and questions and answers sessions from the day, along with access to PowerPoint presentations, speakers’ biographies, the attendee list, agenda and sponsor information. It is made available subject to strict restrictions on public use, similar to those for Select Committee Uncorrected Evidence, and is intended to provide timely information for interested parties who are unable to attend on the day.

All delegates will receive free PDF copies and are invited to contribute to the content.

The Westminster Legal Policy Forum is a recently established division of Westminster Forum Projects. Following the successful model of its sister Forums, it aims to provide an inclusive and impartial environment for constructive discussion of key issues in this increasingly important area for public policy. The Westminster Legal Policy Forum is grateful for strong initial support from within both Houses of Parliament. All our Forums benefit greatly from the support and active involvement of Parliamentary Patrons.

(10)

London is today in the grip of a tube strike. Tube as in underground railway. For a brief summary of the anti-strike arguments, try Burning Our Money. (Burning Our) Money quote:

Here we have a reeling dispirited government who no longer care if they give away the shop. They're way beyond that. Their main aim now is to minimise the scale of their defeat, which definitely DEFINITELY means no Winter of Discontent style public sector strikes.

Sure, if they give in to big union demands they'll be increasing the problems facing the next government. But why should they worry? They don't care if they make life more difficult for Dave and George in 12 months time - in fact, that would be a positive bonus.

And the union bosses ain't quite so dumb as they look ...

In other words, another bit of earth will get scorched.

(9)

Here is a highly thought-provoking article in Forbes magazine about the phenomenon it refers to as "gentry liberalism" - a term designed to capture the mindset of the sort of person who has voted for New Labour in the UK and Mr Obama's Democrats in the US. It is, of course, such a shame that the word liberalism has been bent out of shape to mean something rather different, but the underlying logic of the article is hard to contest.

Of course, Mr Obama has a while yet in power, but if I were one of his campaign managers, I'd look at the massacre of left-of-centre parties in Europe with a certain amount of forboding. He's not invincible, not at all.

(14)

I would hope, however naively perhaps, that a forthcoming UK government, after the current shambolic one, might take the axe to some of the quangos - quasi-autonomous governmental organisations - that cost so much and do relatively little that is of any use. So it is frankly laughable that the Conservative Party's idea for controlling public spending (you mean hopefully cut it, Ed), is to set up something called the Office of Budget Responsibility. Oh please. What the heck is the Treasury department supposed to be for? The problem of controlling, and cutting, public spending is both simple and hard: simple to understand - there's way too much spending, and we need to slash it - and hard, in that it will involve facing down various vested interests. Previous governments that have cut spending, or tried to do so, such as the Thatcher administration, did not have to set up some daft "office" to address the issue.

The trouble with this idea is that it shows how the current Tory party feels it must distance itself from the harsh decisions that will have to be made to shrink public spending from its current horrific levels. But this is an impossible task - far better to be blunt with the public.

(20)

In an earlier piece here today, Perry de Havilland referred to the great fuss that Britain's broadcasters are now making about the rather small successes of the BNP in the Euro elections, and their relative silence concerning the much bigger success achieved by UKIP. True. UKIP is indeed being ignored, and the BNP is indeed being talked up. But I don't think it's right to dismiss the talking up of the BNP entirely as tactics. I think that genuine fear is being expressed by our former gatekeepers of correct thought. The rise of Adolph Hitler has been obsessively taught in British schools for the last generation or so, as the very definition of that which Must Not Happen, yet now, something not wholly unlike it appears to be happening, here in Britain! Calamity!

I say "former" gatekeepers of correct thought because that is surely the other thing now happening that scares these people. The internet, as we enthusiasts for it have been saying ever since it got started as a mass phenomenon a decade ago or more, entitles people to say whatever they like. They no longer need the permission of anybody more important to reach a quite large audience with an opinion that quite large numbers of people agree with but which the Gatekeepers disapprove of and want suppressed. Very suddenly, in a matter of a year or two, servile and carefully crafted letters to the newspapers, that conceded almost everything but cunningly managed to slip a tiny few incorrect thoughts past the Guardians, could be forgotten about. A blog can now be cranked up, and the blogger can tell it exactly how he reckons it is. Potential supporters can be directed with a link to the manifesto of whatever crank party the blogger happens to approve of or find interesting. If a Gatekeeper now wants to quote a "crank" out of context, Google ensures that the rest of us can read the opinions of said crank, in context, whether the Gatekeeper himself deigns to include an actual link or not.

My eldest brother is a UKIP activist, and I sense in him none of the frustration that he and his UKIP brethren used to feel, about being ignored by the masses, because then ignored by "the" (there then being only one great lump of them) media. When he now knocks on a door, the householder knows just what Elder Brother stands for. Conversation can immediately proceed to the matter of what a splendid front garden or front door the householder is presenting to the world, thus establishing that although firm in their opinions, UKIPers are still humans, able to see the world through eyes other than their own. Seemed like a nice enough bloke. Yeah, maybe I'll vote for him, if I don't fancy any of the others. That the big media are still trying to ignore Elder Brother now no longer worries him. The Gatekeepers now have to convince him, and all the other people who think as he does, that he and they are wrong. Good luck with that.

As a radical libertarian activist, I built the entire early first half of my career (if you can call it that) contriving to navigate, with cunningly photocopied pamphlets, around Gatekeeper assumptions that such opinions just could not be sincerely held, by anyone who mattered. I helped to contrive a local internet, you might say, for London libertarians, and I helped to feed libertarian memes into low-grade BBC local talk shows. Ever since the real internet came along, I have had a great deal to say for myself, but have nevertheless been feeling somewhat at a loose end.

All of which means, as the title of this posting proclaims, that the burden of proof has now been reversed. It used to be that someone who favoured radical tax cuts, or bringing immigration to a halt, or expunging the EU from British life, or that Jesus Christ is Our Saviour and gayness is evil, or that Islam is not welcome in these islands, or any other such challenge to Gatekeeper orthodoxy, had to prove to the Gatekeepers that his opinion was worth being heard and had some flicker of merit, perhaps because (see John Stuart Mill) it ensured that the Gatekeepers were at least prodded from time to time into keeping their orthodoxies in full working order. Now, the Gatekeepers, their gates electronically melted, have to explain why such notions do not have any merit, and why people should not vote for them. Since the Gatekeepers have spent all their lives loftily refusing to participate in any such arguments, instead only contriving verbal formulae to demonise all such notions as "extreme", "selfish", "old fashioned", "racist", "far right", and so on, they are, not surprisingly, very frightened at suddenly having to overturn the habits of a lifetime. What, they wonder, if they make even greater fools of themselves than the internet, by telling voters directly about all these wickednesses, has made of them already? What if they join in these arguments, but then lose? Well, indeed.

Last night, for instance, I watched a lady cabinet minister carefully refusing to reply to what the man from the BNP was actually saying, and instead insisting that the BNP is "really", "essentially", racist. By all means throw that last point in incidentally, but ad hominem attack and nothing else no longer works as an argumentative technique, because the argument is now raging anyway and Milady Cabinet Minister can only decide whether or not she joins in. The BNP can decide what it will now say, and say it. It does not need permission from Her Ladyship, or from her friends in the BBC or in the big national newspapers, to say whatever it wants to say, to anyone who wants to listen. The man from the BNP oozed confidence. The Lady Cabinet Minister looked uncomfortable.

As it happens, I share quite a few Gatekeeper objections to some of these "extreme" ideas, even as I am enthusiastic about others of them. I quite like immigration, especially from Eastern Europe. Jesus Christ is not my saviour, and gayness is fine by me. I fear that if Britain leaves EUrope, economic freedom (let alone any other kind) may not erupt, but rather something far nastier and stupider and more xenophobic and more economically wrong-headed. And so on. But, I do favour radical libertarianism. And I do not like Islam at all, and believe that the only defence of its unchallenged presence in our midst that makes any sense is based on believing that what it actually says will be almost unanimously ignored by its supposed supporters in favour of far kinder and far gentler mis-readings of it.

But then, I am not saying which opinions I think should be allowed and which not allowed. I say: allow them all. In fact, the nastier and more belligerent they are, the better it is for us all to be able to acquaint ourselves with them. Where I agree I will say so, and where I disagree I will say so. I just did.

And when it comes to voting, vote for one of the little parties, that actually believes in stuff. Don't waste your vote on the Conservatives, LibDems or Labour. What will voting for them accomplish? How will voting for those people tell anyone what you actually think and actually want?

(12)

"The irony is that no other leader could have led Britain so skilfully through financial crisis. Without him, the banks might have collapsed, and the G20 would never have happened. His work on development ensured that thousands of children did not starve and did not die because the rich world deemed them worthless."

- Mary Riddell, in the Daily Telegraph.

So tell me, Ms Riddell, can you perhaps explain why the financial crisis, that has sent many British banks into the arms of the UK taxpayer, has not had a comparable impact on say, Canada, which shares a rather large landed border with the country at the centre of the credit crunch, namely, the US?

And why do you think that the government that presided over this disaster, that allowed public finances to run into the red, and massively so, before the credit crunch, can claim merit for what has happened since?

Does she not think that the way the Bank of England sets interest rates, or how banks have relied on the "too big to fail" assurance of public support, might not have had a teensy-weensy bit to do with foolish lending, for example?

Just asking, Mary.

(23)

The media and chattering classes are agog that the BNP, a fascistic and racist party, have gained some electoral success.

So what?

The Labour and Tory parties have been broadly fascistic (a corporatist 'soft fascism' whose symbol is a CCTV rather than the goose-step-and-armband kind) for the best part of a decade. Thus the way I see it, the BNP is just a more overt and perhaps more honest expression of the sort of mainstream democratically sanctioned tyranny that has been steadily and remorselessly stripping away civil liberties for quite some time now.

I cannot help thinking the real motivation for the aghast shrieks about the BNP is that it means the mainstream media do not have to dwell unduly on the far more ideologically antithetical-to-the-establishment and strategically significant growth of UKIP.

The truth is the world view and policies of the (truly vile) BNP is not that different on 95% of issues than the (vile) Tory, (vile) Labour Party and (fairly vile) LibDems, all of whom, once you strip out the overt racism of the BNP, broadly agree about the role of the state. That is to say all their statist-regulatory world views are more or less fascistic when it comes to matters of economy and civil liberties.

The gasps and finger pointing at the thuggish scrotes of the BNP give many an excuse to avoid focusing on the electoral success of UKIP, because unlike the profoundly statist BNP, UKIP is a party filled with people who actually do want a less intrusive and smaller state. UKIP may not aspire to some libertarian minarchist paradise, but they actually want less net regulation and dare to talk about civil liberties as something that matters (as opposed to the LibDems, who strongly believe civil liberties matter and yet want to regulate the crap out of everything, as if somehow that has no bearing on liberty).

In short, the fact UKIP thinks that the liberties of individuals is something to shout about and they want to shrink the state at all, rather than just keep expanding the state, but just a wee bit slower than the other guys... well... in the context of where we find ourselves today, this verges on revolutionary.

No wonder the mainstream would rather emote and declaim about the ultimately irrelevant BNP.

(3)

In a comment thread on this posting, the question came up, from the commenter "Laird", as to why Samizdata has not written about the local UK/European Union elections. Part of the answer, for my part, is that a little bit of me dies whenever words such as "EU elections" come up, but also there has been a lot of commentary and head-scratching analysis, in the press and other blogs, on this issue for the past week or so. What could I say that has not been already said?

Anyway, for our non-UK readers who have not been following it, the ruling UK Labour Party did very badly in both the local UK elections and the European one. In the latter case, Labour came in third place (15 per cent of votes cast), behind the Tories and United Kingdom Independence Party respectively. UKIP is a party that wants the UK to leave the EU. I voted for it - partly because I did not want the Tories to get a larger share of the vote and hence get complacent, partly because I broadly agree with UKIP on things like cutting state spending and the EU. UKIP is not a hardline libertarian party but it is the best of a bad lot, generally. And I happen to know one of its MEP candidates, Tim Worstall - who is a member of the London bloggerati - and I always say it is a good idea to vote for someone you know, trust and like (I also know Syed Kamall, a Tory MEP, but just could not bring myself to vote Tory. Sorry Syed).

As for the aftermath, well, UK PM Gordon Brown has managed, by a mixture of party membership cowardice, shellshock, bullying and flimflam to persuade his colleagues in Parliament to give him another chance in the job. Labour has suffered the lowest share of the vote since the First World War, albeit on a very low turnout of voters. The national socialist British National Party, a party which, let it not be forgotten, holds to fairly hard-left views on economics, has picked up two seats in the European Parliament, and did so by playing fairly hard on the grievances of traditional Labour voters in run-down parts of the UK. There has often been a streak of "sod the foreigner" in the makeup of the UK left, although it has been tempered by a sort of transnational progressivism, at least from the Fabian middle classes who have provided Labour with some of its intellectuals (if that is not too grand a word to describe such people).

So there you have it - Britain is on course, if poll data are accurate, to have a Conservative government by the middle of next year, when a general election must be held. Europe has moved, politically, to the right, with concerns about immigration and economics driving some of that. But the UK Conservatives, while they have benefited from a mortally weakened government, have not convinced me that they have a serious intent to shrink the state. It may be that when or if David Cameron gets the keys to 10 Downing Street and has a chance to read the financial books, that the full horror of what he sees will necessitate spending cuts. We shall see.

And in the meantime, the US has, at least for a moment, moved to the left under Mr Obama, although for how much longer, it is premature to say (bring on the mid-term elections!). Ideologically, the Atlantic may be widening. We live, as they say, in interesting times.

(6)

Doubtless politics has always had its dark side. But the depths to which it has sunk over the last 12 years under New Labour has been unprecedented in this country. Of all the legacies left by this Government the poisoning of political discourse is surely the worst. Gordon Brown, foul-tempered and intolerant, has been at the very centre of this mess.

Gordon Brown never was fit for Number 10 and, given the wreckage of the economy, the public finances and the financial regulatory system, was never fit for Number 11 either.

- Ruth Lea adds to the admosphere now being created by the WAGS. Have those Blair Babes finally justified their existence?

(11)

I guess it is a sign of the times that when the UK ruling Labour Party is in such a mess, the appointment of a character such as Sir Alan Sugar, the businessman and brash TV show main man, gets a collective raspberry, rather than the coos of applause and "well dones" that would have been the case say, five years ago. It is a largely pointless appointment.

Sir Alan, who is also the front-man for the BBC TV talent show, The Apprentice - modelled on the US one fronted by Donald Trump, is a Labour supporter, believing that there is a large, possibly even larger, role for the state in business. For all his image of the self-made man, he is in many ways quite a corporatist in this sense. And in his demeanor, he represents what a lot of leftists think business is: cut-throat and aggressive. Socialists often buy the idea that commerce is not a positive-sum game, so when they go into business, they behave like the worst caricature of the cliched 19th Century mill-owner. The whole vibe of "The Apprentice" is dog-eat-dog, pandering to the worst impressions that many people have about business.

And make no mistake, Sir Alan, even if he is a nice guy in his private life, comes across as a bully. And this is not a snobbish point, by the way, about his London accent or razor-dodging demeanor. I watched a BBC TV programme the other day when he was asked about his trip to see Gordon Brown, and the media outlets were rife with speculation on what he was doing. Sir Alan could hardly be surprised to be asked about it. Instead, he brushed aside this situation by almost telling the news presenter to shut up. "I'm not gonna talk abaaat it." For one minute I thought the BBC was going to cut the interview short. It should have done so.

In the fag-end of Labour's days in power, the elevation of this man to the peerage and a pointless job in "enterprise" will be seen as a rather bizarre footnote.

(23)

To quote David Davis MP, three months ago, "How will we know we are living in a police state?"

Is it when the police conduct a systematic campaign of false arrests in order to gather information on people who might commit a crime? Is it when they do that, and public reaction is no more than a shrug? A couple of days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported discoveries made by my local Liberal Democrat PPC, excellently living up to the first bit of her party's vaguely oxymoronic name:

Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.

The alleged practice is also described as part of a "long-term crime prevention strategy" to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future. [...]

A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.

The officer said: "Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence.*

"It is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.

"We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future."

Acting "on intelligence", that is, hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, and prejudice, when they know they have no evidence let alone reasonable suspicion of any actual crime — for intelligence is not evidence, it is a substitute for evidence in its absence — the Metropolitan Police are making unlawful arrests, in order to take samples (fingerprints and DNA), that it is deemed by the human rights court to be improper for them to hold in any case. And that fact has not caused public outrage. It has yet to reach any broadcast news service, as far as I am aware.

A quiescent, compliant public and a quiescent, compliant media, are the handmaidens of a police state.

(19)

"Food, we are told, is the new sex. It is certainly true that food has taken over from sex as the principal concern of what I call the "interfering classes" - the nannyish, middle-class busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of the nation's culinary morals, and who are currently obsessed with making the working class eat up its vegetables. We no longer have the prudish Mary Whitehouse complaining about sex and "bad language" on television; instead, we have armies of middle class amateur nutrionists and dieticians complaining about all the seductive advertisements for junk food, which are supposedly corrupting the nation's youth. By which they mean working-class youth; everyone knows that it's the Kevins and Traceys who are stuffing their faces with fatty and sugary snack foods, not the Jamies and Saskias."

Watching the English, pages 306-307, by Kate Fox. A sharp passage from a perceptive book on the inhabitants of this odd, damp island in north-east Europe.

(39)

The meltdown of Gordon Brown's Labour government continues. I was struck by this passage of resigning Cabinet minister James Purnell's letter to the Prime Minister. It is very revealing in what it says not about the differences between these men, but their similarities:

“We both love the Labour Party. Party. I have worked for it for 20 years and you for far longer. ‘‘We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing. I owe it to our party to say what I believe no matter how hard that may be. I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more not less likely.

That would be disastrous for our country. This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy. It calls for a Government that measures itself by how it treats the poorest in society.

Quite how one can "love" a party responsible for so much mayhem is an interesting question. There is something distinctly creepy about a man who says that he owes "everything" to a political party founded upon socialist principles. Everything? Does this man have no conception of a life beyond party politics? Does he not understand the concept of civil society, of a world outside government?

And although one can possibly agree on the need for better public services and open democracy, there is something revealing in his call for "stronger regulation" and an "active state". We have, as this blog likes to point out with reference to the financial crisis, for example, had a bucket-load of regulation and state activism, and these have arguably helped create many of our problems, not solved them. I am also not aware that Mr Purnell, or his peers, would be any better than Brown in their stance on issues such as civil liberties and the database state, for instance. They might simply try to make it a bit more palatable.

So although one might be glad that this man has helped plunge a dagger into Mr Brown, it is not entirely clear to me that this fellow would represent a significant improvement. He wants the NuLab regulatory, interfering state to continue. I see no awareness of the disaster caused by runaway public spending. In other words, he's not much of an improvement. A spell in the private sector, away from the party machine he claims to "love", would be the best thing that could happen to Mr Purnell, if he wants to develop a wiser worldview.

Meanwhile, the BBC is asking the question about Gordon Brown: "Why has the man once regarded as one of Britain's finest Chancellors [finance minister] in such trouble?"

Hilarious. This is a man who, as Chancellor, took hold of a relatively strong set of public finances, and over a course of 10 years, ran the UK into the red even before the credit crunch hit. Far from having been a "brilliant" finance minister, he has - apart from his keeping Britain out of the euro, arguably - been a disaster.

Update: the political situation in the UK is now having direct effects on financial markets.

Update: more resignations. It could all be over for Brown by the end of the weekend. Goodness knows what other countries must make of this.

(11)

Two fun comments on this brief report of the resignation of Hazel Blears.

From "Simon George":

There is a term in electrical engineering. It refers to a kind of power failure that instead of occurring instantly, can take a long time to occur. It plays havoc with equipment and is usually much more damaging that a normal blackout

It's called a 'brownout'.

And this little snippet from a spoof speech by HB, penned for her by "The Penguin" (10:56 am, worth reading in full):

"My politics has always been rooted in the belief that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary expense claims, ..."

I'm also dipping in and out of Prime Minister's Questions, on the telly. It all illustrates what I more and more feel about how The Universe works, which is: that there are two kinds of questions. There are those that the questionee can ignore. And there are those that he finds he really must answer, because if he doesn't answer them convincingly, something he is desperate to prevent will happen. Outside of Parliament, all kinds of questions are being asked of Gordon Brown, and not answered, and this now looks like costing him his job. But PMQs is a monument to the first kind of question. Brown is, it would appear, browning out, although I have learned the hard way not to state when the process will be completed. But you wouldn't know it from watching PMQs.

(24)

I have said it before. I am trying to remember if I lacked the nerve to use the full obscenity last time, or whether an editor removed it.

Once again, though, I cheer the demise of a loathsome Home Secretary, but acknowledge that it will make little difference.

There was a time that I thought that Michael Howard was an unusually and unpleasantly illiberal Home Secretary. In truth, that was a fair estimate of the man, but I did not know what was to come.

(11)

At this rate, predictions that there will be a General Election in the UK by the end of this year look pretty credible. It may be that we will get a poll by the autumn, particularly if the meltdown of the government directly affects things like the UK's debt credit rating. Another day, another bunch of Labour politicians head off.

(10)

"In many ways, Cameron faces a task far harder than that which confronted Margaret Thatcher. She was elected three years after the IMF bailout, and so the public finances were being restored to health. She was chosen as leader specifically to bring radical change, and had four years to assemble a team and prepare for the ordeal. Mr Cameron originally assembled a team for the political equivalent of a game of croquet; the same people now find themselves dropped on a rugby pitch."

Fraser Nelson.

(10)

As I was saying before, the real poison of the MPs allowances system is not that they get 'free money'. It is that it insulates them personally from the bulllying of officialdom that they would have the power, had they the motivation, to curtail. The Guardian reports:

A Labour source said: "The fees office green book which sets out the rules and advice on behalf of the parliamentary authorities states specifically that professional advice, for example from accountants or solicitors, is an allowable expense.

"In order that MPs comply fully with all the relevant requirements relating to tax, and to ensure they are properly meeting all their tax liabilities, many rightly seek professional assistance and advice where this relates specifically to their role as members of parliament."

But,

Under tax rules, most workers are not allowed to claim the cost of paying an accountant to help them to fill in a tax return as a legitimate business expense.

HMRC is deliberately discouraging ordinary people from getting professional help with a complicated and secretive tax system by disallowing personal accountancy as an expense.* That is calculated to keep a naive segment of the taxpaying public on the margin in subjection and overpaying. In my experience an accountant is not expensive. The psychological pain he protects you from is at least as important as the financial benefit of getting it right.

The sums they claim for it are trivial, but that MPs are encouraged to get that analgesia (100% free to them), whereas the ordinary voter is discouraged from it (paying out of their own pocket, with at best 40% counting against the tax they pay, if they fall into the category where accountancy is allowed as an expense, which they won't find out unless they employ an accountant in the first place), is another corrupting influence.
.....

* My idea of 'tax justice', unlike that of the various organisations that campaign for people to pay as much tax as possible and for more arbitrary power for the authorities, is one in which the system is transparent, there aren't different sets of rules for different people, and the rules themselves are fair and set out in law.

.....

BTW, on the subject of tax, readers might enjoy this letter in The Times.

(11)

I love the headline on this piece in the Spectator by Matthew Lynn. I don't think he is talking about our own Brian Micklethwait, but he could be.

Mr Lynn is talking about the risk, now rising, that the UK will have its sovereign debt ratings cut, a fact that means the UK government has to pay higher interest rates to investors wishing to hold UK gilts. I suspect the US could be headed for a similar fate.

Hopey-change!

(20)

William Hill, the betting firm, is offering 5/2 odds that Gordon Brown leaves the office of Prime Minister this year. I guess if you want to finesse it, it would be worth knowing what are the odds that he has gone by the end of the party conference season in the autumn (ie, by the end of September in Labour's case).

Dozens of MPs, such as from Labour and Conservative, could be de-selected by their own local party members over expense abuses that have come to light; it is likely that the issue will be one of the very top questions that a voter will have of a candidate who is up for re-election, whenever the polls are held. As far as I know, my local Pimlico MP, Mark Field, is a good guy in this expenses issue, but I'll have to check. Here's some data on him at the "They Work for You" website, an invaluable resource. Mr Field, is, by the way, sound as they come in opposing ID cards.

As a side-issue, I hope, as Guido says, that Douglas Carswell gets re-elected for his East Anglian seat with a good majority. He's been one of the undoubted good guys of this whole sorry process, not something you will usually read at Samizdata. Here is Mr Carswell's blog.

And thanks Samizdata readers! It turns out that there has been a fair amount of foreign coverage of this saga. The reports generally do not address what is the 800 lb gorilla in the drawing room: the fact that Parliament is as ineffectual as it is in large part due to the transfer of great powers to the EU. And the expenses of European MPs in Strasbourg will no doubt make for fascinating reading.

(9)

It is often a useful question to ask: who benefits from this? Senior Libertarian Alliance honcho Sean Gabb, who not surprisingly is grimly satisfied at seeing the discomfiture of this partly corrupt, oppressive and pointless bunch of political boobies, asks whether his one-time adversary, a certain Boris Johnson, might be a prime long-term beneficiary from the current expenses crisis. Mr Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator, a Daily Telegraph journalist and former member for the safe Tory seat of Henley-on-Thames, is now Mayor of London. Being outside the House of Commons, Mr Gabb argues, confers upon the colourful Mr Johnson the chance to pose as a man untainted. Quite possibly so.

But maybe Mr Gabb is in danger of being caught up in his own cynicism, understandable thought that may be (full disclosure: I am an old friend of Sean Gabb whom I have known for more than 20 years). Mr Johnson, does, of course, have other potential skeletons rattling in his cupboard, as do many of us mere mortals who do not happen to be moral saints. But right now, all that I want is a politician with the sense to roll back the state to the extent that Sean Gabb and I share. In other words, roll it back a long, long way. That surely has to remain the prime focus of our energies, long after stories about expense fiddling have faded from view.

(22)

The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, is due to speak about his position at 3:30 pm today (about an hour from when I am now writing this). There is a high chance he will resign in disgrace, rather than risk the even greater ignomy of being forced out by a vote of no-confidence from MPs. It appears that even fellow Scot Gordon Brown will not explicitly back him. The scandals over the outrageous arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, and now the relentless series of stories of MPs abusing expenses for things like mortgages on second homes, has damaged confidence in Parliament so badly that fringe parties such as UKIP and the British National Party - a party of hard-left economic views, let it be noted - may do relatively well in the upcoming June European Union elections.

This whole saga demonstrates the truth of the thesis that politicians increasingly have come to regard their own interests as set apart from the country as a whole. It adds to the notion, put forward by Sean Gabb, of an "Enemy Class" that is quite consciously at odds with the more conservative (small - c) values of the country. Of course, there has always been an element of this - it is naive to imagine that Parliament ever quite met some Greek ideal - but it is now in a particularly bad way.

Let's hope Mr Martin sees sense and takes the proverbial bottle of whisky and the loaded revolver into his study. He will be the first Speaker to be ejected from his role in more than 300 years. Not a record to be proud of.

As an aside, it surprises me still how little this whole saga is registering in the foreign media. Anyone got any examples of US, French, German etc coverage of this? It might be nice if even Instapundit mentioned it.

(25)

Norman - now Lord - Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido's take on the matter.

Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers' money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP's claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.

(14)

As a book it has its flaws - it does not pay enough heed to the role of Web 2.0 media - but in the light of recent events about politicians' use of taxpayers' money, Peter Oborne's study of UK politics reads better than ever.

A question worth asking, in the light of all this, is whether a less corrupt political class would be better, or worse, at reining in public spending? In the 18th Century, for instance, the UK parliamentary system was deeply corrupt; there was a vast network of jobs and sinecures doled out to enforce political loyalty. And yet despite the drawbacks, the UK managed to forge an Industrial Revolution, build a large and effective navy and help to defeat Bonaparte and all those supposedly more efficient Frenchmen. The central point that needs to be remembered is that the corruption and venality of the UK political class of today coincides with a point in our history when about 80 per cent of the laws and regulations affecting we great unwashed are not written in Westminster, but in the EU; and further, that the state exerts a vastly greater degree of control over our lives now than was the case in the era of Pitt, Burke and Fox. So this stuff is both a sign of the unseriousness of our political class on the one hand, and also a sign of how much more the state and its functionaries matter, on the other. Cleaning up politics will not address the central problem that the state plays far too big a role in our lives in the first place. Take away the jam, and the flies will not be such a pest.

(13)

The first 10% off public spending could be painless for the public and popular.

- John Redwood

(16)

There has been endless fuss about MPs expenses. Most of it is either with a tone of envy, or focussed on the apparent dishonesty of some claims. I'd like to suggest thet there has been a much more malign effect in the massive inflation of the parliamentary allowances system in the last 20 years.

Career politicians with no outside interests have been effectively exempted from the tax system as it applies to everyone else. Their tax returns are even dealt with by a special office. (For a while the Revenue has produced a special suplementary return form for parliamentarians. I saw one in the early 90s when helping an MP with his bookkeeping.)

This makes it easy for them to tighten the screws: raise rates and rake-offs, increase the tax-collector's powers, without caring to comprehend the consequences. It also gives them the idea that everyone else must be milking the system: that rich people have got rich by postitional parasitism, since that's how you get rich either as an MP, or as one of the providers of government services that they deal with among the quangocracy and PFI tsars.

The Prime Minister's reaction to this: to try to isolate MPs further, by 'naming ang shaming' those who make money honestly in the outside world, and do therefore have some idea what things are like for the rest of us.

I couldn't give a damn about peculation. It is the isolation of politicians, particularly, but not exclusively, politicians of the present ruling party, as cushioned servants of the state that is fundamentally corrupting. The theory of parliament, the root of its legitimacy, is that it stands between us and the rapacity of the crown, and holds taxes to what are fair and reasonable and are applied in the interests of the kingdom as a whole. That was the ground for the Great Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution. It was the ground on which de Montfort set up the first parliament, attempting to settle an earlier revolution.

Once parliament was filled with the independent rich, well-heeled professionals, and the sponsored, among the latter the old Labour members whose unions or philanthropy paid for them to live in Westminster. They had interests, they had views, but they were self-chosen, not neatly alligned with one another, not bound by a party machine, not tied to the public purse-strings or the rehearsal of instrumental populism.

That is what has been corrupted away almost completely. MPs have been reduced to gold-edged agents of the state, and have prospered the more, the less resistance they have offered the executive. Ministers are often closer to mouthpieces for their departments than their masters. They don't control the state for us, because the state devotes our resources to keep them in a distanced shadow-world, immune to the effects of what they do at its motion.

I can't wait for Mr Brown to publish what he thinks are damning details of member's outside interests. We have had quite enough of inside interests. It will be an excellent guide who to vote for.

(12)

On the day that the UK starts to roll out its planned and useless ID card project, in Manchester, there are pictures all over the web of the Prime Minister. The background seems appropriate. I mean, it was obviously not deliberate but how the f**k did Brown grin away in that ghastly way of his and not realise what was in the background? We have to face the rather sad fact, in my view, that the PM has lost it.

I bet the Private Eye picture editor is working hard to come up with a nifty headline and quotes for its next edition.

(6)

I guess it was inevitable. Football, like other aspects of life, has been hit by the credit crunch. In the case of Southampton, a team that once graced the top flight of the English league and has boasted some notable cup wins - famously winning the FA Cup in the 1970s - it has suffered terribly. It is now in danger of extinction. My own team, Ipswich Town FC, was in administration a few years ago although it has been since taken over by Marcus Evans, the man who owns the eponymous conference organising company. Ipswich also has appointed former Manchester Utd and Ireland international player Roy Keane as its manager (gulp, nervous laughter).

Henry Winter, one of the main football scribes in the print press, believes Southampton's local council should buy the team. He argues that the council and the lucky taxpayers of the south coast will be getting a bargain. Maybe. But it is not the business of councils to be spending money on what has been the money pit of professional sports, particularly when a place such as Southampton has many competing demands for public funds, such as policing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on. As I said, when my club was in financial dire circumstances, no doubt some people would have been happy to see the Suffolk taxpayer foot the bill to put The Blues back on top. But wiser heads prevailed.

The sad fact is that football clubs can die if the finances run out. We have seen teams like Leeds Utd hit by unsustaintable debts in far happier economic conditions. Even mighty Man Utd has heavy debts stemming from the leveraged buyout by the Glazers, while Chelsea is kept in the lifestyle to which it is accustomed due to Abramovich's huge Russian oil wealth. The economics of sports clubs are a murky affair at the best of times. So my message to Southampton fans is that it is better for a hard-nosed private investor to sort out the club than a bunch of politicians. If Southampton really is a bargain, why are public funds needed - surely a canny entrepreneur will spot the opportunity? I hope someone does.

I sometimes wonder why as, a football fan, I put myself through all this heartache. My wife shakes her head in wonderment.

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Mary Riddell, who seems, as it was once said of Oxford University in the 19th Century, to be the home of lost causes, has a column with this glorious headline in the Daily Telegraph (WTF?) today:

"Brown is a better hope for Labour than his rivals".

In other words, all the other remaining senior figures in the party are even worse, even madder, more delusional, more statist, tax-grabbing, unpleasant, devious and venal than this guy.

That's the end of that lot, then.

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Hazel Blears (not one of our favourite people here) has just, in among a lot of ignominious verbiage about what a fine job the government is doing, done something unignominious, by contriving the following deadly soundbite, in today's Observer:

YouTube if you want to. ...

Which echoes Margaret Thatcher. This lady's not for tubing, it would seem. (LATER: Except that ... she is.) This collapsing government has been, like all collapsing governments as described by their members, failing to get its message across. No, the message has well and truly got across, but people don't like it.

And the YouTuber himself has contributed another memorable one-liner, in the form of this outburst to a journalist last week:

"You are impugning my integrity."

Well, yes.

Many have declared themselves baffled by Brown's protestations concerning his own extreme moral excellence, which they often take as true merely because Brown himself appears to believe them, and his actual moral depravity, as if the two things together make no sense. Well, if you agree with him that he really is morally excellent, then indeed you will be baffled, because clearly he is morally repulsive. Actually it all makes perfect sense. He is, in his own hopelessly non-functioning eyes, a morally excellent person, doing an excellent job. Therefore all means, however depraved - intimidating colleagues shamelessly, robbing the rest of us blind - are excusable, obligatory even, to keep him in that job, and to prevent anybody else, obviously truly depraved, from trying to take the job away from him. Gordon Brown's moral excellence in his own eyes and his moral depravity in all other eyes are logically intermeshed, his delusion of moral excellence being just one more item on the long list of all his actual depravities.

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Taxi drivers have a place in British political life not unlike the Oracle of Delphi in the affairs of Classical Greece. And they are now, based on my admitted rather small sample, speaking with one voice. Following my mother's death earlier this year, I was yesterday lugging possessions from home to home, so to speak, and had need of two such oracles. Both, without any encouragement from me, even as they were steering me from and to Egham station, also steered the conversation towards the expenses being run up by Labour MPs. Specifically Labour MPs, please note. "My grandad who was in the miner's union - Labour all his life – know what I'm saying? - must be turning in his grave ..." "If any of us did that kind of thing, we'd be up before the Old Bill." Shouldn't that be arrested ("nabbed") by the Old Bill and up before the "Beaks?" No matter, he was in full flood and in no mood to be interrupted about side-issues.

I recall being a bit scornful here about how this issue seems now to dominate the thinking of so many voters. But, as commenters pointed out, there is a direct connection between the grand larcenies being committed by our government in its panic reactions to the banking crisis and the petty thievings of our MPs. MPs should have their minds on All That. Instead they have been contriving second homes for themselves, and fourth giant flat screen televisions, and are now most concerned not about the state of the nation's finances, but about being caught out in their own little thievings. Recently I read somewhere – link anybody? - about a Labour MP saying something like: "I don't care if Gordon Brown ruins the world economy; but he should keep his hands off my expenses." The failure of MPs to exercise oversight over the big stuff was directly related to their over-concentration on their own little living arrangements, and I apologise for not seeing that more quickly. It's a variant of that Parkinson's Law (so many of these are now relevant) about how people who are fussing about their new headquarters building are going to do that actual job rather badly for the duration of the move.

Can it be an accident that (a) one of the most splendid new pieces of sports architecture in London in recent years has been the resplendent new curved stand at the Oval cricket ground, the home of Surrey CCC, but that (b) the mere Surrey cricket team has gone from heroes to zeroes during the period of this new stand's construction and opening? I digress, although not that much, because another even more striking (if far less handsome) recent addition to the London architectural scene has been the brand spanking new office block that has recently been constructed across the road from Parliament, for ... correct: Britain's MPs.

Maybe unfairly, those oracular taxi drivers, as I say, and contrary to what I talked about in my earlier piece (where I suggested that it is now MPs of all parties who are in the firing line), homed in on Labour MPs. Labour MPs, they said, are supposed to be better than that. What's happened to them? Conservatives look after themselves better, but at least they do this, at least partly, most of them, with their own money, which they have obtained either by inheriting it, or by doing more elevated versions of driving taxis.

But one bit of that earlier posting about the smallness of MP thieving compared to the bail-out thieving at least stands up very well, namely the bit that said that it is electorally very portentous when the voters decide who the biggest thieves are, and if it is true that the voters (as represented by their spokesmen the taxi drivers) have decided that it is actually Labour MPs, then that spells electoral doom for Labour. Sacking Gordon Brown won't save any of the doomed, which is perhaps why they may not now bother to sack Gordon Brown, despite all my recent imprecations. No wonder they're feeling suicidal. This government is not just topped by a spectacularly rotten Prime Minister; it is backed by a rotten party.

I realise that I owe Samizdata a separate piece about why I take the particular rottenness of Gordon Brown so much more seriously than, according to strictly libertarian notions, I am supposed to. Surely they are all just as bad. Briefly, my argument will be: no they aren't. There are degrees of rottenness among politicians, and it is foolish to deny this. As for the other argument I hear here, that we need a spell of absolute darkness in order to educate The Masses and build a Movement truly capable of ushering in a genuine New Dawn, well, that kind of talk scares me. Briefly (this is a huge subject I know) what if we get the absolute darkness, but not the dawn? I say that the sooner this country switches from the deepening gloom of Labour to the relative if flickering and fitful illumination that might (although I agree: might not) be the Conservatives under David Cameron, the better. If that means (which actually I don't think it does mean – see my future posting if it ever materialises) that it takes rather longer to find our way to the Promised Land, well so be it.

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A great article on why the opposition Tories need to have the cojones to take on the flat-earth economics of confiscatory tax.

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"As bad as things are at the moment, it seems a mite premature to write off policies in the 1980s as an abject failure. We have not lost 30 years of wealth, and living standards have increased for billions of people since the 1980s. Income inequality has increased, and that can be undesirable, but the welfare of many low-income people has dramatically improved."

The Economist.

The 1980s were only an "abject failure" in the eyes of those whose political ideas never developed beyond a sort of bastardised Marxism. They were not a failure for those who enjoyed, say, the ability to get a phoneline installed in 24 hours rather than six months, or not be forced to join a trade union, or no longer pay cripplingly high taxes, or be banned from taking more than a paltry sum of money abroad on holiday. The 1980s were a good decade in my view across a number of fronts with two main, glaring exceptions here in Britain: the-then Thatcher government did not truly uproot the Welfare State and the "enemy class" that ran it, and she did preside over what was later to become a relentless assault on the checks and balances of the English Common Law. But generally speaking, that decade goes down in my book as a good one.

Talking of Mrs T, it is now 30 years since she came to power.

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Michael Caine, one of the UK's best-known actors, is thinking of emigrating due to the UK government's recent decision to impose a new, top-rate income tax of 50 per cent, which once other changes are taken into account, will be nearer 65 per cent. Iain Martin, writing in the Daily Telegraph story that I linked to, points out how Caine is just one of the more recognisable examples of the sort of person looking to hit the exits. It is often useful, if one's constitution is strong enough, to read the Daily Telegraph comments sections these days, which are sometimes even worse than those of the Guardian. Several people moan about Iain Martin's article that the 76-year-old actor has made his fortune so he should shut up and be grateful, etc. How lovely. The fact is that Caine, while he may not employ philosophical abstractions to denounce the looting intent of such a tax rise, is at root repelled not by the economic stupidity of such a tax hike, but its essential injustice. What a top-rate tax like this says, in effect, is that no-one should be allowed to rise above a certain level of wealth because it might make others envious. It makes a mockery of all that progressive-leftist talk about removing "glass ceilings" to advancement, etc.

Funnily enough, it was Caine, along with his UK film star buddy and working-class-boy-made-good pal, Sean Connery, who first legged it out of the UK back in the 1970s when the-then governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan introduced tax rates of more than 80 per cent on the "super rich". He's done it before, and he is quite prepared to leave again. Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal FC, has warned that many foreign footballers will think twice about playing in the English Premier League. No doubt football fans of a nationalistic bent may applaud this trend if it gives local players more of a chance to play for their clubs, but it arguably will roll back one of the benefits to domestic sport in having talented overseas players strut their stuff here in the UK.

It will be interesting to see whether the acting profession's traditional love affair with the Left shows the strain. I remember reading that Ray Winstone, another English East End boy to have cracked Hollywood, is running out of patience with the tax situation in the UK. And a few years ago, I watched a chat show when David McCallum, who used to star in the 1960s Man From Uncle TV series, vowed that he would only return to the UK when it spurned socialism. And for whatever reason Peter Sellers or Richard Burton chose to live in the Switzerland, it was not for the cuckoo clocks.

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You are now signed up to this petition. Thank you.

If you'd like to tell your friends about this petition, its permanent web address is: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/

- This is what you get as soon as you click on the second of the above links, fill in your details, and then confirm it all by clicking on the link in the email they immediately send you. I was impressed by the ease and speed of it all.

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As I have already confessed, I have incurred the sympathetic derision of commenters here with my various and variously expressed hopes-stroke-predictions that Gordon Brown will, within a matter of days, or weeks, or just soon, no longer be our Prime Minister. But just when I had resigned myself to Mr Brown's non-resignation, that is to say to him not being ejected from Downing Street with whatever would be the necessary degree of force by a delegation of Labour Party heavies appalled by the damage that Mr Brown is doing to the Labour Party (even as they remain stubbornly indifferent to the damage he might also be doing to the mere country), and thus resigned also to the consequent hell of Mr Brown remaining our Prime Minister for another fourteen months, this happens. This being a petition to the Prime Minister, begging him to resign.

Even if it fails in its ultimate purpose, this petition may surely do some good. It may, for instance, show the Labour Party rank-and-file something of the odd mixture of fear and contempt now felt towards Mr Brown and his hangers-on (hanging on being all that they now seem able to think about) by almost all British non-tax-guzzlers, and many others besides. This in its turn may cause Labour supporters to join in by adding their own names to the electronic heep, if only to earn a few shreds of national gratitude for their now apparently supine and utterly corrupted Party.

Better yet, this petition, if it takes off as I think it might, may put a rocket up David Cameron's rear end, to tell him to stop merely waiting for the country to fall into his lap like a rotten apple (while carefully refraining from telling us what he would then do with it other than allow the rot to continue), and get him instead to start saying that the rot should stop, and saying how. (Basically: which government activities should be closed down, now.) In due course, and I realise that it goes against the grain around here to be saying such a thing, Mr Cameron might even become the kind of Prime Minister who might actually stop some of that rot.

Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale have already linked to and given their support to this petition. Both have insisted that they don't usually 'do' government petitions, but both of them sense that this one could be something else again. No doubt other bloggers have already added their voices to what I trust is now a chorus, saying similar things, and if they have, I think that all of them - Guido, Dale and all - are right. This could get very big, very fast.

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One of the few financial journalists who rumbled Gordon Brown years ago, Allister Heath, gives his verdict on yesterday's UK budget. Devastating detail all the way through.

Allister is also pretty scathing about UK Liberal-Democrat economics spokesman, Vincent Cable, who tends to be deferred to as the "politician who talks sense on the economy".

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The title of this article written some months ago by noted US economist, Arthur Laffer, has never been more apt after I finished reading through the UK government's latest outrage, its annual budget statement.

A new, top rate of income tax of 50 per cent comes in from next year, applying to annual incomes of £150,000 and above. The government, which probably knows it is doomed anyway, has made the base calculation that the Tories won't dare to repeal it. I actually am not too sure about that: while £150,000 a year is a lot of money, for many self-employed folk with lumpy income streams, such a new tax band will hit them very hard in marginal terms, encourage further emigration from the UK, deter anyone with any entrepreneurial brio from entering the UK, and probably reduce, not raise, revenues. It is also a boon to the tax-planning and accountancy profession, since anyone who can restructure their affairs to convert income into a capital gain - CGT is just 18 per cent in the UK - will do so.

Update: I share Guido's reaction. No wonder, by the way, that the G20 nations - hypocritically - chose to attack "tax havens" and create a global tax cartel. If you are someone like Gordon Brown or The Community Organiser, the last thing you need is for your high earners to escape abroad. But I'd be willing to bet that there will be quite a rush now of people out of this country. Expect to read lots of stories about how "Mr X, who runs a small business in the Midlands, said he was heading off to Australia/Canada/wherever to get away from high-tax, high-crime Britain". Expect there to be a relentless, drip-drip of such stories in the months ahead. (Mr Jennings snorts about my mention of Australia: yes but at least there are other benefits to moving there).

Update: Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute and some top wealth management folk give the budget a thorough hammering over at CNBC. The guy from Denton Wilde Sapte is particularly good.

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This afternoon, outside Waterloo Station, I photographed a couple of Members of Parliament. One was attending to his constituency paperwork, while the other was rolling a joint.

I wish. Whenever they introduce a new scheme the idea of which is to make things cheaper, they invariably end up making things more expensive. The only sure way to cut government spending is to shut things down. The idea that things can be made cheaper by being streamlined but perpetuated is folly.

The Evening Standard is jumping to all sorts of conclusions with its headline. Its actual story includes things like this:

Both Labour and Tory MPs could rebel over the plans, as many would stand to lose substantial sums currently used to pay their mortgages.

Plans. Nothing has changed yet.

However, some critics claimed that there would be big winners as well as big losers under the new scheme. Those who have paid off their mortgage on a London flat or man and wife couples could gain by claiming the maximum daily rate.

What's the betting that there will be big winners, and little winners?

The present system means MPs have to produce receipts, which they hate. The new system that Gordon Brown is proposing sounds like it will simply do away with the receipts and, by the time the dust has settled in a few weeks or months time, double their salaries. They will get a salary on account of being an MP. And they will get another salary for turning up.

The idea that this will put a stop to muckraking by the likes of Guido Fawkes, by cleaning away all the muck, is very fanciful.

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Coffee House links to the latest example of a government minister/official leaving potentially sensitive information on the train. As usual, one expects such stories to undermine yet further the credibility of government-created ID systems and databases. But I think it was our own Brian Micklethwait who wrote, a few months back (cannot find the link, sorry) that there is a chance that such "cockups" are deliberate.

What if such papers are being left lying around to create a false trail? Fanciful? Maybe. But it may just be that such officials are not quite as moronic as these stories suggest, or at least that another intepretation is worth thinking about.

Oh scratch that: they are all morons!

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The account of Gordon Brown's vile political career will not remotely surprise Samizdata regulars but this summary of the man who is now, hopefully, in the final phases of his career before reaching oblivion is a great read. Tom Bower's article reads like a judge's sentencing comments about a particularly nasty gangster.

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I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job.

- Simon Heffer

I remember the newspaper parliamentary sketchwriter, Edward Pearce (no relation) once remarking, apropos the late Tory grandee William Whitelaw, that no-one would be Home Secretary if they could get a job refereeing sumo wrestling.

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Guido's commenters are becoming like a collective character in their own right - scurrilous, sweary, obscene, libelous, sexist, gay-innuendonic, very eighteenth century. I particularly like comment 14 on this, a classic in the modified cliché genre:

Something in the air?…yes, and it stinks: there was shit hitting the fan last week but we could soon see a pile of shit with a fan beneath struggling to cope.

I have been making a bit of a prat of myself here lately, predicting that Brown will go any day now, any week now, within a month, etc. The trouble with predicting a Tipping Point is that you never know exactly when it will happen. You only know that it will. It's like knowing that there will be a stock market crash, but not knowing exactly when to switch all your bets. Yes, indeed, there will be a crash, but when? Only if you know that do you make your killing.

I think this story, about an old-school Labour ex-MP from T'North saying I quit is rather significant. There is no talk from this woman of the scurrilous Tory media or of what a tragedy Brown is enduring – this is as close to F*** Off You Mad Bastard as it gets. This is important because it goes to the matter of Labour's core vote. Things for Labour could just go on getting worse and worse. There is no price, to put it in stock market terms, beneath which Labour now cannot fall.

I am now waiting for the next clutch of opinion polls. They could be the Tipping Point, because these may include evidence that even hitherto incorrigibly Labour voters, utterly devoted to the nincompoop idea of the government controlling everything and subsidising everything and hence ruining everything, are now going to sit on their hands for as long as Brown continues. There is a feedback loop at work here. Some core Labour voters are already disgusted about the smearing, and more will be as they learn more. But others will be (are?) disgusted that the smearing may be causing the core Labour vote to collapse, and will decide that they also need to join the chorus to get rid of Brown, even though they personally do not dislike him that much and quite like it now that it is Tories who are being smeared. This is the essence of these landslide things. At a certain point they feed on themselves. But ... when???

I quite take the point made by Thaddeus yesterday, that a government falling for merely being horrid to other politicians is not nearly as good as a government falling for being an insanely bad government, of us. I would not be making half so much fuss about this Smeargate thing here if the charge against the Brown regime was not being lead by a hardcore libertarian. I'm now digging out my small collection of Guido photos, to exhibit here.

Guido even linked today to that wonderful Libertarian Alliance piece he did in 1991 about acid house parties. (See also this piece about The Benefits of Speculation, which now makes very interesting reading.) The LA is getting richer now, what with all us Gold Subscribers stumping up a hundred quid a year, year after year, but it will be many decades before it will be able to buy publicity like that.

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One of my hobbies in recent years has been photoing tourists in London as they indulge in photography. And, given the harassment I am starting to get from uniformed persons as I wander about London snapping whatever I feel like snapping, I have for quite a while now been wondering how long it would be before I ran into a news story about the police harassing foreign tourists for taking photos and hence undermining London's reputation as a nice place to visit.

The wait is over:

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

He described his horror as he and his 15-year-old son were forced to delete all transport-related pictures on their cameras, including images of Vauxhall underground station.

"Google Street View is allowed to show any details of our cities on the world wide web," he said. "But a father and his son are not allowed to take pictures of famous London landmarks."

He said he would not return to London again after the incident, ...

You know how really shitty governments don't care what their own citizens say about them, but can sometimes be slightly shamed by what the foreigners say? Well, I tried googling "Klaus Matka", and got to a number of foreign versions of the same story, so this harassment is already being somewhat noticed elsewhere. The forbidding of photos of London's famed double decker buses ("bus rossi a due piani") is being particularly talked about. I hope this story goes right round the world, carrying with it the message of just what ghastly people now rule us.

I wonder what London Mayor Boris Johnson thinks about this.

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Gordon Brown and his pack of malignant ZaNulabour jackals do not deserve all this negative sentiment and opprobrium. No, really they don't. They deserve far worse.

I regard ZaNulabour as just about the worst thing to happen to this country since the Black Death and I share Brian's manifest and meritorious glee at the now-very-likely prospect of Mr. Brown (together with his toadies and his cronies and his aunts) being given their marching orders and sent packing off to political obscurity. If we lived in a more civilised world then this story would end with each and every one of them staring up at the glinting, merciless blade of Madame Guillotine. But we don't, so I will have to content myself with some sincere and noisy expressions of satisfaction at their demise together with a toast to Guido Fawkes, who did so much to bring it about.

But, what then? What follows next after Mr. Brown and his minions have been given the big, national elbow? Well, in due course (and perhaps even short course) Mr. Brown will be replaced by Mr. Not-Brown. And what lessons will Mr. Not-Brown have learned from the rise and ignoble fall of Mr. Brown? He will have learned that you can relentlessly plunder the wealth-producing sector of the economy in order to provide booty for your clients and be regarded as a visionary leader. He will have learned that you can establish a pettyfogging, pecksniffing, bullying surveillance state and be called a great statesman. He will have learned that you can hack at a once-prosperous economy with punitive taxes and onerous regulations until said economy collapses in an anaemic heap and be praised as an economic genius. And, crucially, he will have learned that you can get away with doing all of that, as long as you observe parliamentary protocols and refrain from seeking to smear your political classmates. That is unacceptable.

So Mr. Not-Brown has had his very simple manifesto handed to him on a plate, courtesy of his predecessor. All Mr. Not-Brown has to do is to pledge to 'clean up' politics and put a stop to all this lack of propriety and he is home and hosed. He doesn't even have to keep his pledge because everyone will be so relieved that Mr. Not-Brown is not Mr. Brown that they will believe him. They will want to believe him and so he will get a free pass to do pretty much whatever takes his fancy. All Mr. Not-Brown has to do (for a couple of years at least) is to make sure that his toadies and his cronies and his aunts keep their cards closer to their chests while they get on with what everybody agrees to be the praiseworthy and important business of stamping on our faces.

In the fullness of time, Mr. Not-Brown will also be humbled by some scandal or other (brought to light, I am sure, by Guido) but by then he will have had his fun and he will shuffle away only to hand the baton of national-ruin over to Mr.Not-Not-Brown.

I am already celebrating the unfolding ZaNulabour train wreck and I cannot begin to tell anyone just how pleased I will be to finally see the back of them. But my joy is tempered with the melancholy realisation that a change of government on the basis of sleaze means no real change at all.

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You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido's, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:

Downing Street in 'meltdown'

PRWeek - David Singleton 15-Apr-09

Downing Street was this week in 'meltdown' as Gordon Brown's inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.

Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.

Brown's close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp - or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.

One Downing Street insider said there had been 'endless conference calls and crisis meetings' since the story of McBride's plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.

The source added: 'This is a full on disaster for Gordon - Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown's inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.

'The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed - until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.

'It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour - by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.'

Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: 'Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.

'The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.'

Which they will, because it did.

In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown's ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it's too late.

These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.

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It occurs to me, reading this item about the decision by the authorities not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative MP, over his farcical arrest, that they decided that picking on this guy now that the UK government is in such a terrible mess might not be a runner. The police/Crown Prosecution Service might have been more confident of doing the government's bidding when the government appeared all powerful. Now, I get the impression that in Whitehall, and across much of the government machine, arses are being covered, positions prepared. The police have probably woken up to the idea that soon, perhaps sooner than some imagine, their masters will be different, if only by political colouring.

This is how regimes die. Their toadies and functionaries start to turn on them.

Meanwhile, I wonder if we can persuade our American blogger friends to notice that the government of a G7 nation and NATO ally is, er, about to implode. I mean, I think that might even be of interest to The Community Organiser. Or maybe not.

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Classic:

"I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately."

This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can't now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido's commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn't. Not yet, anyway.

The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.

Brown's problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.

The BBC's caption under the video of Brown's latest bout of self-strangulation says this:

Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics

LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.

You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don't care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what's happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.

See also: this.

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The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the "Westminster Village" (see also: "Westminster Bubble") somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, "Westminster Village", right there in the title.

So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?

Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn't be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention - if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against - to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must "move on". We mustn't be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.

And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various "reforms" of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do is drop dead, not just because of Smeargate, but because of, well, everything.

With far greater force, as was appropriate to a far greater evil, I felt this about the old USSR. The USSR, I believed, was smashable, and I believed this before it was actually smashed. I further believed, during the 1980s, that smashing the USSR was one of the very few big yet almost unambiguously good things that the world then was capable of administering to itself. Magic buttons in politics are rare, but here was one. The USSR, then and ever since it had begun, blighted everything. Nothing else could be effectively dealt with until it was dealt with. All the other problems (notably Islamic terrorism) were being inflamed by that one big problem, namely the apparently relentless arm-wrestling that then dominated world politics, between the USSR and the civilised world. And, to repeat, that one big problem, the continuing existence of the USSR, had one huge advantage over most other problems then or since. It was fairly easily solvable. The USSR was worth breaking because, in the word of Gordon Gecko, it was breakable. A few more well-aimed shoves and over it would crash. Accordingly, I and all other anti-Soviet elements at that time brandished whatever weapons we could find at that evil empire, threw whatever mud at it that came to hand. In my case that meant writing and publishing little pamphlets about such things as how the USSR was both worthy of being broken and breakable. (I probably contributed even more by have an unusual surname and a father, "Sir Robert" if you please, who was once upon a time in MI6. What else was I doing? Nothing as it happened. But they didn't know that.)

In my recollection, nobody accused all us anti-Soviets at that time of being obsessed with the "Moscow Bubble", but we were certainly accused of being obsessed with the USSR, and told that there was a world out there, full of "real problems", and that we should stop being so monomaniacal about just the one mere government, disagreeable though it was. I agreed entirely about all those other problems, but believed that a huge step in the right direction, a huge step towards making all those other problems that little bit easier to get to grips with, would be to sweep the USSR from the board. Just smash it to rubble. I rejoiced then when that was done. I rejoice still that it was done. The post-Soviet news agenda hasn't been a hundred per cent good, but it would take a month of blog postings to even begin to count all the ways in which the USSR's collapse has made the world a better place.

On a far smaller scale and in a history-repeating-itself-as-farce kind of way, I now feel the same thing about the Gordon Brown government. Yes, there are a thousand problems out there that the British government and the wider British political debate ought to be addressing. Of course there are. And I will continue to try to find time and brain-space to blog about them too, just as I often wrote about other things besides the desirability of smashing the USSR during the 1980s. I would be very sorry if all other Samizdatistas were as monomaniacally fascinated by Smeargate as I now find that I am, and note with satisfaction that they are not. Nevertheless, here is a battle that both should be won and can be won. Quite soon now, it will be won. And the sooner it is won, and the more completely and dramatically and unforgettably it is won, the better. Once it is, we can all get back to arguing about all the other important stuff, without the chaos that is this present government screwing everything up, by the simple, sordid fact of its continuing existence.

So now, about that Derek Draper fellow ...

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A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog's coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon's time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.

Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration - I am a defender of free migration BTW - this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.

Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don't say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green's behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential "whistle-blowers" on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.

I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.

Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.

Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?

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"There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest."

- Blognor Regis

And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton.

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Alice Miles in the Times:

The media are all chorusing now: we knew, we called him McNasty and McPoison, we had nothing to do with him, he sent us foul messages, we didn't like him. But the point is, we did know. We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it - and we did nothing to stop it.

Mr McBride used the system of anonymous briefings under which political journalism operates to spread dirt about Labour opponents of Mr Brown. Should journalists still be under a duty to protect their sources when those sources are abusing public money, or should we have been bolder in exposing it? Mr McBride did not poison the well on his own. There has long been a "dirty tricks" cabal around Mr Brown that any Westminster journalist or minister could name - Ian Austin, Tom Watson, Ed Balls, Mr McBride and, formerly, Charlie Whelan, who is now political officer of the Unite super-union (and working hard to place favoured candidates in winnable seats for the next election).

The poisoning was at its worst in the run-up to the leadership noncontest two years ago. Yesterday I spoke to somebody who balked at challenging Mr Brown then, because he couldn't face the poisoners. "It's the reason why Gordon came to office untested," he said. "When I considered challenging him for the leadership, people warned me it would be a very unpleasant campaign; and it would have been an unpleasant campaign because Gordon's people would have run it in an extremely vicious way."

Which makes quite a change from:

Mr Brown is a good, decent man but ...

See what I mean about the dead tree dog pack? These people just are not scared of Gordon Brown any more, or of his dogs. They are now more scared of him getting booted out before they have each stuck their knives in. I can't see Brown lasting into next year now, I really can't. I give him a month at the most.

UPDATE: Here's Guido. Summary: Now they tell us. Watch the film clip and note that the Cameron machine gets mentioned, not at all grovellingly.

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This, as the robot bomb in Dark Star said to the astronaut who was trying to persuade him not to explode, is fun. I think that things are now developing on the Gordon Brown front very fast.

As I have already commented today (I've recycled my comments earlier today here, and have added relevant links) on an earlier posting, I think that one of the key moments in this was when this got said, two days ago now:

The spokesman added that nobody in Downing Street knew of the e-mails and that it was Mr Brown's view that there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind".

If Downing Street had left it at "nobody in Downing Street knew of the e-mails", all might have been well. I say "well", for these things are relative. Well as in Brown might have been able to stagger on for another year. But, I think fatally, they continued to the effect that it is Mr Brown's view that there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind". This is a flat lie, and we all know it to be a lie. The spokesman knows it. Brown knows it. We all know it.

Worse, from the purely tactical point of view, this lie turns the story from one of merely a few particular and, approximately speaking, deniable emails, into one where anything nasty presided over by Gordon Brown, and the longer ago the better, becomes relevant, because it proves that the Prime Minister not only does now believe in dirty tricks, but always has done. Suddenly, every newspaper hack in Britain knows what to ask, of anyone he can find with anything remotely like an answer. You were at school with Brown, were you? What was he like? Ran the University paper with him, did you? So, how did that work? Tell me about Scotland back in the eighties, the nineties, the noughts. Hm, sounds nasty. What's that you say? Wales as well, well well. What exactly did he say about Blair? How exactly was Blair toppled? ... The whole miserable litany of nastiness going back about three decades suddenly roars back into the centre of British politics, right now. The Prime Minister, with his fatuously excessive denial, has made this happen. (As always with these things, it is not the thing itself that does the fatal damage, it is the denials. See the prediction to that effect in this, although I had no idea then how quickly the fatal denial would come.)

For all the surreal daftness of the Daily Telegraph printing Guido stories after he's blogged them, but mentioning him only to call his a "Tory blog", Janet Daley does have a point when she says that this story only really got seriously going when the clunky old dead tree media got around to printing it. But now, printing it they are. The dog pack has now assembled and is baying for blood.

Even Brown's demise will not quieten them, for as soon as he is gone, which I now think could happen very soon, the next cry will be: general election, general election, general election. Not only might the country soon be slightly less disastrously governed, it might be less disastrously governed before this week is finished. Because if a general election campaign does start in a week's time, there is at least the faint hope that the politicians will - and call me a mad dreamer but I just cannot help saying this - stop doing things.

Well, maybe. We shall see. What I do definitely know is that when The Sun starts saying that Brown must go, that must count for something. The story is adorned with a picture of one of the mere Brown creatures (an MP and Minister called Watson), but pretty soon it is clear who is the main target:

The Prime Minister HIMSELF needs to be taken away by the men in white coats.

Men in white coats? How Guido, who has been blogging for month after month about the Prime Mentalist, must be loving that. The Prime Minister is not just disastrous. He is mad.

Every Labour politician in the country must now be in despair. Will this despair finally cause them to make the decision they should have made about Brown ("Oi! Brown! No-o-o-o-o!") decades ago? Maybe, maybe. I really think that this time, they might. If you doubt this, do what these people are now doing. Consider the alternative.

UPDATE (see the update here): Watson is about to resign. He will spend the rest of his life being the ex-Minister for Digital Engagement, which according to a commenter on this was his actual, no really, title. CLANG! "Isn't going to resign." The wish was father to the thought. Sorry. He just didn't know about the emails. Blogs eh? No quality control. Apart, that is, from the fear of looking like a prat, being told one is a prat, etc. etc. Here's the story.

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This Daily Telegraph story, which if true, implicates Gordon Brown directly in the recent scandal about a brutish plot to smear political opponents, is dynamite. (Guido writes to point out that he got the story first. But of course).

If this whole affair helps accelerate the demise of Gordon Brown, a conceited, foolish and ultimately rather revolting character, and hence speeds up the day when we might just improve some of the things that vex us, then I am going to send Guido Fawkes a bottle of some very good red wine. That's a promise, Mr Staines!

It is a strange atmosphere at the moment. Such has been the oppressiveness, but also clownishness, of this government, that it resembles that of Charles I. His time did not end well.

Update: Since we are in the process of jumping up and down on Mr Brown's soon-to-be-dug grave, I should add that one thing that has bugged me about him is this whole schtick about his being "the son of the manse". What is a "manse"? I understand it is a sort of Scottish vicarage. Like this commentator, I have had to search for enlightenment. "Manse" is - with apologies to Scottish friends of mine - not a terribly attractive word. For a while, we were given the line that Brown, while he may not have the charisma of Mr Blair, had this sort of Calvinistic, godly work-is-good-for-the-soul quality, which meant that he would not use the sort of sordid, Renaissance Italy-style tactics that have now been exposed. And I am afraid that one side-effect of this whole sorry mess will be a further estrangement between the English and the Scots. Mr Brown is not a great advert for a nation that has given us Adam Smith, James Watt or this even great man.

Update: I see that EU Referendum blog, which I recall has actually partly defended the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green by anti-terrorism police officers (remember that story?), is now arguing that all the blogging about Derek Draper, or whoever, is playing the same game as the MSM, which is to encourage the real, underlying problem of mediocre people rising to positions of power because anyone who has a spicy private life cannot survive.

I disagree. If mediocre people are so rising, it is surely because a political class has deliberately emasculated itself by enabling a situation in which about 80 per cent of laws in this nation are not made here, but in the European Union, a point that EU Referendum points out regularly. Mediocrity is what you get if serious power drains away from an institution such as Parliament, leaving only perks and minor stuff behind. The 900 llb gorilla in the living room is the fact that Parliament, and backbench MPs, are far less important than they used to be. By discrediting this statist monster of a Labour government, and keeping pressure on a Cameronian Tory Party, bloggers such as Guido are not fostering mediocrity or timidity, but quite the opposite.

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I see that Tony Blair's former master of spin is trying to put as much distance between himself and Gordon Brown's henchmen as possible. Truly glorious stuff.

I have been deliberately avoiding the internet these last couple of days as I have been enjoying a lovely Easter weekend with my relations. We sank a bottle of Rhone wine last night that was particularly enjoyable. Having caught up on the news via Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, I am decanting another one. Oh yes.

Happy Easter to believers and non-believers alike.

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In my posting here yesterday about what is being inelegantly called "Smeargate" (aren't you sick of this "gate" stuff?) I tried my best to keep up with events as they were already happening. I have a lunch date today, but just about have time to fling down some rather link-lacking thoughts (and done in ignorance of Philip Chaston's previous posting) about what might happen next. (Later on today, I might just get to go through this and pepper it with links, but: I promise nothing. Meanwhile, sorry for all the typos and grammar screw-ups.)

I have long regarded Guido Fawkes as a genius, ever since he wrote this gorgeous pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance. The thing about Guido is that he doesn't just believe in liberty in an abstract this-is-the-best-system sort of way, although he certainly does believe that as well; he really loves liberty, his own liberty. His throwaway remark yesterday to the effect that he started his blog "on a whim" captures this quality very well. Tactically, this makes Guido worth about ten ordinary Guidos, because of the ten things he just might do tomorrow morning to make you wish you'd never been born, you just don't know which one he'll pick, if any of them. (He might just stay in bed.) Why don't you know? Because he doesn't know himself. Oh, he has schemes afoot. "Plots have I laid", as Richard says at the beginning of Richard III before he acquired his numeral. But just when the knife will go in, just which applecart will be upset, which bandwaggon will have its wheels ripped off, which establishment forehead will disintegrate in the face of an oncoming sniper bullet, you never really know. I would hate to have him as an enemy.

Lots of people still woefully underestimate Guido. Perhaps they do this because he is not a "team player", as indeed he is not. About every two or three weeks, I get an angry phone call from my friend Tim Evans, the joint head honcho of the Libertarian Alliance, and general think-tanker on the up-and-up, about the latest Guido betrayal. (More to the point, Tim Evans is an expert think tank fund-raiser. Not many think-tankers are even adequate fund-raisers.) The latest phone call was a classic of the genre. Guido, said Evans, is "impossible to work with", a complaint that assumes that Guido is part of a team which includes Tim Evans, which he is, in an ideological sense, but is actually, in the meantime, not, as Tim Evans well knows in his less distracted moments.

The particular problem Tim Evans has with Guido is that Guido is very suspicious of free market think tanks and their relationship with big business. As far as Guido's concerned, that is just another applecart that needs to have its wheels bashed off. So now, the Institute of Economic Affairs is - get this - is in favour of "monetary easing". Why? Who knows? Don't they bloody read their own output? If the IEA doesn't stick up for Austrian Economics, who the hell will? So, about every three weeks, Guido shoves a well-deserved cricket bat into the spokes of the IEA's wheels. This enrages the likes of Tim Evans. This is not "helpful". This is not "useful". (Yeah, Tim, but it is, as you angrily say yourself in some of your private moments, true, isn't it?) The long game that the Tim Evanses of this world are playing is to build and build things like the IEA until they rule the entire known universe, and in the meantime try to stop them being trashed in gossip blogs when they talk trash. Guido "doesn't see the big picture". Guido is "biting the hand that feeds him" (???), blah blah. But I think that telling the IEA to damn well talk sense about economics, whenever it doesn't, is doing it a huge favour in the long run. That, in my book, is feeding the hand that feeds you, and absolutely understanding the biggest of big pictures, which is that "monetary easing" is a catastrophe, and having been for it could, in not many years at all, be the end of an otherwise highly effective think tank.

Closely related to Guido's non-team-playerness is his suicide bomb (wrong - see comments 1 and 2 - make that Errol Flynn) nature, which Tim Evans understands extremely well, because Tim Evans is the one who, more than anybody else, has explained this to me. How can I put this? Well, I once was acquainted with another Errol Flynn type, who used to say it this way. I want, he used to say, to die with blood in my mouth. Guido loves the taste of his own blood, maybe not in a literal way but in the sense that he wants to live, and in due course die, in a blaze of glory, not quietly plodding away in some damned team. He doesn't want to die. He loves his life, and his wife, and his baby. But, the fact that, right now, he just might get stabbed with an umbrella on a bridge - his commenters are now queueing up to tell him to "be careful" and "watch your back" - is, for him, all part of the joy of being Guido. You never live more completely than when death might be just seconds away.

This also makes him mega-formidable, because Guido doesn't react to threats in the normal way. Most of us, when threatened by people who, according to the official rules of who is powerful and who is not (job titles and salaries and who they know and what they know basically), back off in fear. Not Guido. He greets threats with genuine pleasure. What did you just say, mate? Yeah that's what I thought you said. I love it! And the creature who did the threatening has accomplished a minus quantity because now Guido is seriously interested, and the creature has just told Guido to his face exactly what kind of a creature he really is and what he really does for a living. Factor in that with who the creature works for and reports to, and the creature has just told Guido that his boss is a similar creature also, and probably his boss is as well. Interesting. Very interesting. Threaten Guido, and you are liable not to win small, but to lose big.

Guido's adopted persona as an anti-establishment desperado who ended up (a) trying to blow up Parliament and (b) as a result getting executed, but as a consequence then (c) never being forgotten is no mere random pose. It goes to the heart of Guido's view of himself and of the world, and of his place and purpose in the world.

There are about three dozen things that I might now put as following from the above cogitations, but here are two. First, this McBride resignation could be but the first of a row of dominoes waiting to fall. Does anyone now doubt that, in a deniable I-knew-nothing-of-these-emails way this particular story goes right up to Gordon Brown himself, and beyond him to the entire Labour Party who let him take over in Number Ten, unopposed? He is the engine at the heart of all this smear-mongering nastiness, and the Labour Party stands condemned of having known all about this for a decade, but of having let him get a top job, and keep it, and keep it, and then get the top job, and keep it, and keep it ...

Yesterday I passed on the widespread gossip to the effect that a government minister by the name of Tom Watson could be the next domino. Another name to look out for is Charlie Whelan (I know, links, links – try googling the news), who has been Brown's rumour-monger and muckspreader-in-chief for over a decade. He is in the loop with these emails, and no less a personage than Alastair Campbell has just fingered him as culpable. Campbell and Whelan are old enemies in the same kind of dysfunctional way that their bosses, Blair and Brown are enemies. I know, ferrets in the sack. And my point is: why should this stop until Brown himself, and the very Labour Party itself, is thoroughly trashed? The smart thing for Labour would be to do now what they should have done to Gordon Brown in about 1972, namely take him out into the yard and drown him like a superfluous kitten. That way, Labour at least minimises the damage that Brown is doing to them, as much as it now can. But they probably aren't enough of a team to do that. The nightmare scenario for Labour is far worse than that, far worse. Brown fights the next election campaign with "Smeargate" having worked itself methodically up his chain of command, and with the same exact sense of timing that caused Guido to break these emails during the Easter break, the denials being far more damaging (as they always are in these things) than the original trivialities that started it all, and with the journos asking Brown when he first knew whatever piece of shit they know he knows but which he still says he doesn't know, while his party stares electoral doom in the face like an enormous gang of rabbits trapped in a huge World War 2 searchlight.

But then, as I said in my similarly hasty ramble yesterday, it gets truly interesting. Because then, Guido settles down to rescue the forthcoming Conservative government from its own likely folly, the folly of just steadying Britain as she goes down the plug-hole of history, into a life of perpetual debt for us all. Then, Guido sets to work on them, and on who is paying them to go on doing such things. Just which bankers prefer ruining Britain for ever to ruining themselves? Which supposedly free market think tanks are keeping the faith, and which are merely putting their faith up for sale?

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because Guido doesn't believe in the same things you believe in, to do with being a normal person, that he believes in nothing except being abnormal. He is a libertarian, but not just for Guido. He believes in a world as little deranged by scumbag politicians as he or anyone else can possibly contrive. He does his "they're all at it" stuff for a reason beyond the reason of it being fun to wipe the smirk off these people's faces. He does it because the meta-message, the meta-context, as our own Dear Leader would put it, is that these people should not be running our lives. Look at them. Is this the world you want, the world you get when these people, all of these people, whatever label they stick on themselves, are deciding everything. You want the government to regulate everything? So, you want Derek bloody Draper telling you how to run your life, do you? Do you? Because that is what you are saying. Some lady cabinet minister recently said (again sorry about the missing link) that Guido is a "nihilist". Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is all part of how these people, in his words, "don't get it". Just because Guido doesn't believe in what they believe in, which is them being in charge of everything, that doesn't mean he believes in nothing else beyond stopping them being in charge of everything. Guido is not just hacking away at the world as it is. He wants a massively better one in place of the world we have now. As I say, the important stuff starts after the next election.

Or, if they're stupid enough and angry enough and sufficiently agreed about it (as well they might become) they might kill him, or try to. They might make, or try to make, a martyr out of him. Which, for Guido, sort of, would be the ultimate Mission Accomplished, the ultimate tribute paid by the scumbags to him. In which case it will be up to us normals never to forget Guido, and to use the myth of Guido to help us accomplish approximately what the fact of Guido might have done. Not least because the threat to do all this, and in the meantime talking like this about him, might just help to keep him alive. I know, I know. Crazy talk. There's "no question" of any such thing happening. Too fevered. Tinfoil hat, conspiracy lunacy.

But sort of fun, don't you think? Or, to put it another way: let's all hope not. I'm late for lunch.

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Guido's scalp may place further problems for the blogosphere. Labour's line has been to blame the medium and the messenger, spreading the slurry of 'dark arts' to Guido and even Cameron, though they are the primetime guilty party.

Now that the monopoly of the mainstream media has been blown right open, Labour MPs are demanding regulation and trying to put the lid back on Pandora's box. Hear their complaints: the blogosphere is an arena of tittle-tattle and gossip, compared to the comforting blanket of reporters and the NUJ who will take you out to lunch and treat you with respect. They will want to turn the clock back.

Well, it is the goodness of blogging sunshine that reveals the dark arts. Time to start flaming the political vampires who suck the lifeblood out of Britain with their lies, expenses, and hypocrisy. Time to follow up with garlic and the stake.

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This posting will tell any Brits who care about it absolutely nothing, but perhaps our many American readers should be told about this. This being the downfall of one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's closest advisers. A certain Damian McBride has "resigned" because of some emails about smearing various Conservatives that he sent to another Labourite, the widely despised Derek Draper, who tries to blog for Labour.

Blogger Guido Fawkes is being credited with this outcome, not least by the guilty men themselves. They have spent much airtime today jabbering away on Sky News, the BBC, etc, about how "disgusted" they are that their emails have been read. Disgusted that they were caught was how it sounded. Guido's numerous commenters are exulting. "Good on you Guido", "we must mark the date in our diaries", but "mission definitely not accomplished" until such time as this government beast or that government beast (a certain Tom Watson MP is apparently next in line for the chop), or the King Beast himself, are nailed to the Guido wall.

King Beast Brown, I mean. For there is indeed something very Nixonian about this, or at any rate it feels that way today. The thing to get is that Damien McBride is not like some College Republican ratfucking prankster. He is much higher up the greasy pole than that, far nearer to the H. R. Haldeman end of things, talking every day with the Big Beast himself.

By the way, the sneer quotes each side of "resigned" two paragraphs up are because when heavyweights in this government "resign", all that happens is they change titles and move office. They keep their actual jobs and they get even huger pay-offs than otherwise, if only to stop them telling the truth to the media instead of the dribbling evasions they are pushing now.

The resigned one and his various defenders, including Draper, are asking us all to believe that their Downing Street computers were hacked into, and for all I know that may be true. But if that is so, what does it say about the wisdom of creating a Database State, given that these are the plonkers who will be in charge of it? As Guido has just pointed out, this was the week the government awarded itself the right to read all our emails.

Anyway, my basic point is: remember that big cheese TV guy in America who got caught making use of a forged letter that said something bad about someone, and remember how it was bloggers who blew the story to bits. And remember how people said during all that that this was blogging really making itself felt for the first time in real world politics. Well, that moment just happened here in little old Britain. Tomorrow, this will be all over the Sunday papers. Guido's face and Guido's blog - the actual blog, how it looks - is being flashed all over the TV news as I write this.

The most telling moment for me was when I dialed up Guido Fawkes, and instead merely got a big message saying: "Error establishing a database connection". A lot of people, a lot more than usual, are tuning in to Guido just now, or trying to.

What a shame that the end result of this and other such dramas will merely be a Conservative government presided over by David Cameron. I still live in hope that such a government might be rather better than the present one, but I am not counting on it. Which makes me rejoice particularly at this, from Guido:

McPoison accuses Guido of having Tory backers - it just shows that they just don't get it - this blog was started for free, with no committee behind it, no plan, on a whim. It is Guido's plaything. The Tories are rightly wary of Guido and incidentally they have a PR problem tomorrow - the last thing they want are half truths mixed with smears getting out into the open uncontrollably.

The really important stuff will come when Guido gets stuck into the Conservatives for being too statist.

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Why are the Liberal Democrats not called the Illiberal Democrats if they are not liberals either? Maybe they should be called the Lino party, as in liberal in name only.

- Commenter Chris H

(35)

It is has surprised me that David Cameron's Conservative Party, even though it has been pretty hopeless at resisting or promising to overturn whole assaults on UK civil liberties, has not embraced the idea of a mass repeal of such odious laws more enthusiastically. A commenter called KevinB has raised this point just now.

Consider the benefits: it would appeal to liberal-leaning folk who might otherwise not give the Tories a second glance and weaken the challenge from the LibDems; it would go down well with younger people normally less inclined to vote; it would be the right thing to do anyway. So why do they not make a manifesto commitment saying that in the first session of the next Parliament, a Great Repeal Act will be enacted that sweeps away hundreds of encroachments on UK civil liberties, such as the Civil Contingencies Act and the National ID database?

Of course, some of this might require the government to pull out of certain EU laws, but remember that the vast bulk of the laws imposed by New Labour have been domestically generated and cannot be blamed on the EU, important though that dimension is.

Now at this blog we are not exactly very nice to the Tories, to say the least. But it strikes me that a Great Repeal Act, or Restoration of Liberties Act, would be a nice, catchy idea that even the most authortarian cynic in the Tory ranks might feel would be worthwhile.

(13)

Following from Philip Chaston's post immediately below, is the point that needs to be repeated as to how bad it is that the authorities are now trying - in vain, hopefully - to ban people from photographing the police. Had such photographing been prevented, then this incident, which threatens to engulf the police in further turmoil, would not have been recorded.

I cannot believe I am now writing stuff like this. This is Britain, right?

(6)

The state spends vast amounts of money, yet the deficit is 'more that predicted'? And the recession will be 'more severe than forecast'?

Well mate, I must be an god-damn oracle then, and Paul Marks too in fact, because it is all going pretty much exactly as we predicted and forecast.

Government policy is to suck out vast amounts of wealth from the economy and then redirect it themselves... and borrow money from whatever mugs will lend it to them... and to simply print more money like crazed counterfeiters... so the deficit grows by leaps and bounds and the economy tanks.

I find it utterly laughable that this was not the predicted, forecast and indeed desired outcome as no other outcome was even vaguely possible. Economic health was never government policy, either in the UK or the USA. The policy objective is increased political control of people's lives ('regulation') via de facto nationalisation of the economy. The fact some investors actually buy into the notion such lunacy actually benefits them just adds some comic relief to the unfolding tragedy.

Government policy is working just fine.

(12)

The political atmosphere in Britain is rather peculiar just now. One of the more interesting things to ask of public opinion at any particular moment is: Who exactly does public opinion think are the people who are most blatantly and most undervedly robbing us. It was a decisive fact about the 1979 general election that public opinon's answer then was: The Unions. It was a decisive fact about the next big electoral upheaval, in 1997, that public opinion's answer then was: the Conservative Party. Now, public opinion seems to be arriving at another answer to the who-are-the-biggest-plunderers? question. It seems to be deciding that the answer now is: Members of Paliament of all parties. If this opinion solidifies in time for the next general election, it will be very interesting to see what it does to the Conservative vote in particular. What if all the major parties do worse? Since they have all done so badly, this would make sense, I think.

But surely the plunderings now being contrived and the further plunderings being attempted by the people who are politically well above the average MP in the plunder pecking order make the petty pilferings of our Members of Parliament look very petty indeed. Has any MP put in a claim for even so much as one billion pounds, to pay for a second West Indian island? If so, I missed the news. It's almost as if the powers that be want the mere MPs to take all the blame for everything. It's all a dastardly establishment plot, orchestrated by evil pseudo-libertarian Guido Fawkes!

Of course, it could just be that regular people can get a handle on the fraudulent expenses claims of MPs, because these are the kinds of amounts they deal with themselves, and sometimes even pilfer themselves with morally questionable expenses claims of their own. On the other hand, the sums of money being slung at dodgy banks and political-donation-wielding bankers, and now being further unleashed by "monetary easing", well, these are just way beyond all normal experience. Pile up all those bank notes and they reach far off into the Solar System, or deep into our own galaxy, or the next, or to some such unimaginable never-land. (Thus also does a council planning committee debate a patio extension for an hour and a half, before letting an oil refinery through without further discussion, that being another insight, to add to this one, that we owe to Professor C. Northcote Parkinson.)

Speaking of the really serious plunderings that are now being perpetrated, by those at the Obama/Brown level of operations, the other odd thing I have been reading lately, this time said by commentators like Peter Oborne and Fraser Nelson, is that Mr Brown is bad, because he is not stealing as much money as he is pretending to steal, in order to "stimulate" (the new word for wreck) the world economy. Oh Mr Brown claims to be stealing a thousand gazillion pounds! He would, wouldn't he? But in fact it's only a hundred gazillion pounds, because he has counted most of the gazillions in question twice or even three or four times. Most of the gazillions he is now promising to steal anew have either been stolen already or won't be stolen at all. Bad Mr Brown!

But surely this is a case where words on their own are greatly to be preferred to words followed by or accompanied by actions. Our best hope now is that, when Obama and Brown and the rest of them promise that they are now taking decisive, radical and above all very big and very expensive actions of various kinds to save the world, they are lying. Heaven help us all if they are telling the truth.

(11)

The blogger at Devil's Kitchen has been doing fine work, as have others, in exposing "fake charities" - those organisations that while claiming to be autonomous, voluntary organisations, receive a substantial amount of funding from the taxpayer via grants and as a result, frequently take positions in terms of public policy that, unsurprisingly, fit in with the fashionable bromides of transnational progressivism, health fascism and environmentalism. The Fake Charities website does sterling work in listing those organisations that should be closely watched. The site is a great resource and well worth bookmarking.

I do not give a voluntary penny to any of them. An old girlfriend of mine used to work as a fund-raiser for the NSPCC. She told me that it was a bit like working for the government. The tragedy of all this is that charities, like other once-autonomous institutions drawn into the arms of the state, are valuable parts of a civil society. Opponents of liberalism will sometimes claim that we are "atomists" who have no interest in co-operative ventures. That is mischievious nonsense: a libertarian is in favour of, or at least tolerates, all forms of voluntary interaction and charitable, philanthropic activity is absolutely vital to this. Without a Welfare State to care for the inevitable casualties of life, such organisations are obviously important. In framing the case for moving towards a truly free society rather than the mess we have now, it is in fact particularly important to highlight the examples of where philanthropy, as properly understood, has made a positive difference to people's lives. It is all of a piece with trying to set out positive, constructive examples of what a free society actually can look like, rather than just moaning about the situation we now find ourselves in.

(72)

Reported by Lucy Bannerman in today's Times:

Fire kills child, 3, and parents as police prevent neighbours from trying to rescue them

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.

By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.

Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.

“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety.

“There were four or five police officers. They were here before the fire brigade. We heard the sirens and we came across to help but they wouldn’t let us.

“I thought the police were there to protect lives. At one time they would have have gone inside themselves to try and rescue them.

“When a family is burning to death in front of your eyes, rules should go out of the window – especially with kids. Everybody wanted to try and help.”

Seems like the poison has worked its way well in. Note: I do not know whether the Colly family could have been saved had the attempt been made while Mrs Colly was still alive to scream for someone to save her kids. A spokeswoman for the South Yorkshire Police said, “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.”

One of the lesser known sights of London is the Watts Memorial in Postman's Park. I gather it featured in the film Closer, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. No, I am not being funny, suddenly veering off into a travelogue in the middle of a post about the deaths of a family. I wish there were something to laugh about. The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he "Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas" would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force.

Perhaps the police spokeswoman was right. Perhaps if health and safety had been less comprehensively assured and the Colly incident handled rather less professionally, we would have ended up with more than the three "deceased bodies" - no, make that four, when you count the child expected to be born in two weeks - that we did end up with. Still, more than four dead bodies is quite a lot and quite unlikely, I cannot help thinking. And I also cannot help thinking that there is more to this than just counting the dead under different scenarios. If the critically injured five year old girl does survive she will be burdened by more than just the fact that her family died. She will eventually have to know that those who might have answered her mother's last desperate appeal were held back on grounds of "health and safety." Not theirs, obviously.

UPDATE: Other accounts give the spelling of the family name as "Colley". They confirm that the police actively prevented rescue attempts.

FURTHER UPDATE: There is a thoughtful discussion in the comments regarding several moral and practical questions, and whether the press accounts are to be trusted. Quite possibly not. Yet I must add that if the South Yorkshire police are trying to convince me that they are not abdicating responsibility in order to follow rote "health and safety" procedure (as commenter "sjv" put it), then best not claim, as they appeared to in the Mail report linked to in the word "other", that the reason they will not tell us exactly how long elapsed between the arrival of the police and the arrival of the firemen is "'data protection' rules."

(20)

I would not want to get on the wrong side of this scribe when words don't fail him:

But this? This hole in the air encased in a suit of clunking verbal armour? This truck-load of clichéd grandiloquence in hopeless pursuit of anything that might count as the faintest apology for an idea? Words fail me.

Thus does Matthew Parris muse upon the oratical inadequacies of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. If Brown is now the main object of your rage and loathing, then read the whole thing. You will surely enjoy it greatly.

But what matters to me is not whether Brown is now a doomed and hopeless failure, for clearly he is. But how much more of my country will he quadruple-mortgage? How much more of my country's earth will he scorch? And, later, how much of the Labour Party as a whole will he take with him into the history books and nowhere else? Not that much more, not that much more, and the more the better, is what I am now hoping (against hope) for.

Now is as good a time as any to confess that I was one of those people who used once to accuse Samizdata sage Paul Marks of not "getting" New Labour.

My problem was that I did really believe (and do still believe) that when Blair said that he was not in favour of wrecking my country's finances, he did truly mean it. Time and again, Blair outfaced his party with that very proclamation. I don't believe in ruining Britain, he would shout at his massed ranks of idiot followers. So fire me, he kept saying. And the massed ranks of idiots, despite being enraged by this exasperatingly sensible talk, kept not firing him.

My problem was not that I was wrong to notice these protestations of fiscal virtue, or wrong to consider them significant. Where I went wrong was in understanding their actual impact.

I didn't think that Blair was ushering in any sort of libertarian nirvana, no way. Nor was I relaxed about the damage being done by Blair to the legal system and to the criminal law and to the regulatory regime. Europe was, as it remains, a continuing disaster. But at least, I thought, this time around Labour will not smash up everything economically. But actually, the whole Blair "political achievement" made it possible for Labour to break Britain with a ferocity and completeness that has no parallel in recent British history. The more we trusters trusted Labour not to scorch Britain's earth, the more earth they were able actually to scorch, and this scorching, of course, continues.

Old-style socialists were not trusted, and as soon as the danger signs appeared, as they inevitably did as soon as each successive attempt at a socialist-inclined government had got its flamethrowers working and scorching, voters and investors reacted accordingly. This time around, too many (me included) thought that it would be different, until such time as even we could not doubt the unique scale of this particular disaster. To the precise degree to which we thought things would be better this time, they were actually worse, and it was cause and effect.

Did Blair do this on purpose? As the catastrophe started to unfold, did he realise what he had done, sticking his killer grin on the front of the latest and greatest Labour assault on Britain's economic viability? Did he care? Does he care? Frankly, I don't care. I now, still, regard Blair more as a destructive force of nature rather than as a deliberately evil man, but in practice, what does it matter? What matters, as we have become used to hearing as other pettier disasters have unfolded in recent years, is to make sure that nothing like this can ever happen again.

The point is not just that Brown has been and is still a catastrophe. That's a given. The point to ram home, now and for as long as his name is ever remembered, is that Tony Blair was also a catastrophe, and arguably a much bigger one. For without Blair, there could have been no Brown. Burying the Labour Party for ever, as it deserves, does not merely mean keeping the horrid memory of Brown and his cloth-eared blunderings alive. It means remembering how Tony Blair made those blunderings possible.

So, let us learn the big political lesson of this catastrophe, to ensure that, indeed, the catastrophe can never happen again. And it is this. When the Labour Party sounds bad, it is bad. When it sounds good, it is even worse. Only the idiots in the Labour Party now can be blamed for Brown, and not even they really voted for him. But they did allow him to clamber unopposed into the driver's seat of the wrecking and burning machine, and for that they all deserve their particular places in hell. But many more Brits voted for Blair, because they thought that even if things were not automatically going to get any better (as the idiots were singing – remember that?) then at least, fiscally speaking, they wouldn't get that much worse.

Clearly Britain will never "vote Brown" in the future, any more than it did this time around for Brown himself. But Britain did "vote Blair", and this it must never do again.

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Talking of protests - see Perry's post immedately under this one - there are a number of protests going on in London to coincide with the pointless and expensive Group of 20 meeting of major industrialised and developing countries next week. There could be some serious clashes. It makes me wonder, given the Tea Party anti-bailout protests in the US at the moment - which are starting to get more coverage from the MSM - as to whether there is any understanding on the part of the G20 protesters that they actually might share some common ground with the free marketeers of the Tea Partiers. After all, do the anti-globalistas understand the rage that many Tea Partiers feel at having their hard-earned cash used to bail out banks that were run by often quasi-state institutions and highly paid executives? Of course, a lot of the G20 protesters are Naomi Klein-type socialist buffoons who want to replace what they mistakenly think of as "unregulated capitalism" with central planning etc, but it seems to me that the might be a section of the protesters who might be open to understanding the real causes of the crisis and understand also the injustice of the prudent bailing out the imprudent.

Of course this may be unwisely optimstic and that all of the G20 protesters are statists of one sort of another, out to bash at a "system" that they do not comprehend. If there are ugly scenes in these protests and people working for banks are targeted and hurt, I hope that Gordon Brown, a prime minster of a government that once used to fete the City when it suited, feels suitably ashamed for pilloring those same bankers now that the credit crisis has hit. It is now another reason why my loathing of Gordon Brown and his brand of politics has reached hurricane-force level.

(5)

I will certainly not be the only one now pointing out the similarity between what this gang of counterfeiters got up to, and British government policy. The biggest difference between the two groups of transgressors is in the scale of it. Our government's currency printing binge will be on a far more grandiose and scale.

(12)

The Labour blogger Tom Harris is upset that the Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, dared - oh the impertinence! - to attack Gordon Brown the other day. The horror. A politician attacks another politician and about policies too - what is the world coming to? But as Alex Massie puts it, this is tosh, and Mr Harris, if he has any self respect, must surely know it. It also makes me wonder what Mr Harris thinks MEPs should do, or if they have any rights at all to criticise leaders of the countries whence they come?

I have often watched, in recent times, Labour ministers berate opposition politicians for "playing politics" for having the temerity to criticise some policy or other. This is a totalitarian mindset. In an adversarial system such as the Anglosphere one, rhetorical combat and debate is all part of the system and a necessary part, as well. It is probably also a sign of how the ruling UK Labour Party is now frightened that, when confronted with an example of blazing eloquence by a European MP like Mr Hannan, the best that NuLab can do is moan about the MP's "lack of patriotism".

At this blog, over the years, we have argued long and hard about the dire state of the Tory Party and the sort of people that have advanced within. I am sure that libertarian purists will be able to unearth unflattering political details about Mr Hannan. But in the current environment, his speech - now a YouTube phenomenon - is like a dash of brandy to a half-drowned man. I hope it galvanizes his colleagues to follow suit.

When it comes to drowning, the gurgling guy you see vanishing beneath the waves is Gordon Brown. Developments such as the insufficient bids for UK government bonds suggest the end is now very close.

(25)

Does anybody know where the words of this can be copied and pasted? I would hate to have to type it all out - or maybe that should be 'in' - myself, but somebody definitely should, and if I or any commenter does find it, I will maybe add it to the bottom of this posting. As Peter Hoskin of the Spectator's Coffee House blog says, Dan Hannan "absolutely skewers" the PM. (Can you kick someone with a skewer? Never mind.) Guido also piles in.

As my fellow scribes here say from time to time: I love the internet. In fact I love it even more than I hate Gordon Brown, and that's saying something.

ADDENDUM Monday morning: Here it is. Thank you commenter Simon Collis, and blogger Stuart Sharpe.

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.

Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising - like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things these things - it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.

They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.

It will be interesting to see what Britain's mainstream media make of this. My guess is that the blogosphere will be all over this speech not just today but for a longish time, with constant links back, and that many newspapers will also refer to it during the next day or two. But how will the BBC respond? They are in a lose-lose situation, I think. Mention it, eventually, they lose. Ignore it, they look like Soviet-era buffoons, just as Hannan said Brown is. A bit like the US MSM and those tea parties.

Presumably, by the time the BBC do mention it, the story will be that the Conservatives are divided. Divided, that is to say, in that some of them think the Prime Minister is mad and evil and believe in saying so, while others merely think it.

(13)

I am not exactly a great fan of Richard Curtis' films - here is a hilarious spoof of the film, Notting Hill - but this looks like a bit of fun to watch. Radio Caroline, the radio station that was based on an old lightship vessel off the Suffolk/Essex coast in the 1960s, embodied that glorious, British two-fingered gesture at overweening authority that, when allied to a bit of entrepreneurial dash, often explains the rise of many a business sector. It is hard to believe that in a world where radio was dominated by the BBC, that listeners to rock and pop music of the time had to resort to listening to stuff broadcast by a bunch of sea-sick DJs on a boat. Radio Caroline, alas, closed in 1967 when the BBC unveiled what was to become its Radio 1 station. On the television last night, the-then government minister who presided over the old monopoly, the "national treasure", Tony Benn, claimed that shutting the station was necessary since the buccaneering RC station was "messy". It is an example of the Soviet mindset that lurks beneath the infantile grin of that old man.

There are obvious parallels with the current assault on the citadels of the MSM by Internet-based writers and broadcasters. As Patri Friedman, grandson of the great Milton Friedman, prepares to head out East to tell us all about seasteading, the story of how a group of DJs briefly enlivened the airwaves via the North Sea is very timely.

Meanwhile, on the whole subject of radio and the rebellion against state-backed monopolists like the BBC, here is a good American perspective from Reason magazine's Jesse Walker. Recommended.

(22)

David Cameron, Tory leader, appears determined that it will not be just the current government that comes out with serious errors on policy. This refusal to not state that a new, higher tax band of 45 per cent "on the rich" will be repealed is a serious error. The error is to ignore the history of what happens when marginal tax rates are cut - these cuts lead to more, not less, revenue. Now of course, as small-government folk, we support tax cuts because we want taxes to fall, and not because we want higher revenues. But if it is revenues you are worried about, then raising taxes is dumb.

The UK and many other economies are falling down the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. It is profoundly depressing that the lessons I thought had been learned have been so totally lost. It makes me wonder whether any senior politician has a clue about economics whatever. On an earlier Samizdata discussion thread following on from my post about the Kevin Dowd lecture, was a long and very involved debate about the issue of fractional reserve banking, for example. You commenters are a smart bunch and I say, without false modesty, that we rate consistently above many other UK blogs in that respect. I wonder whether there is now a single major politician who has a clue about FRB, the arguments for or against, etc. Seriously, does anyone in the major parties understand even the most basic concepts of economics?

Maybe the most gloomy answer is that some do understand but are too frightened or cynical to do anything about it.

Maybe someone should put this on Mr Cameron's summer reading list.

(15)

Jacqui Smith on "The Politics Show" turned in another performance in evasion and Newspeak that I was unsure what she actually said. Not as bad as Simon Sion about the Further Education Councils but a mirror of distortion nonetheless. She is being interviewed prior to the publication of the government's updated counter-terrorist strategy. Part of this agitprop approach allows Gordon Brown to write his hyperbole in The Observer, claiming credit for the success of others.

Part of the problem on counter-terrorism strategy is assessing its context, its capabilities and its outcomes. If you read Brown's article, his assessment of the threat from Al-Qaida is straightforward: who would disagree that they are our primary threat. Zero in on his statements and we become more sceptical of the claims and the results.

They are motivated by a violent extremist ideology based on a false reading of religion and exploit modern travel and communications to spread through loose and dangerous global networks.

They are an ideology; they are a religion: their beliefs are more widely shared than Brown states, especially amongst the British Muslim population. Jacqui Smith identified the rise of extremism as a root problem but was unwilling to define an extremist. First, know your enemy. When we read Brown state that our defence is the duty of every individual, we heartily agree. In practice, this is piety shrouding inaction:

And there is a duty on all of us - government, parliament, and civic society - to stand up to people who advocate violence and preach hate, to challenge their narrow and intolerant ideology - in public meetings, in universities, in schools and online.

But accept that our arbitrary laws on hate speech may leave you open to arrest and detention. Who arrested the Islamic extremists in Luton? This doublespeak permeates the entire article with faint aroma of Brownie beans: expenditure, exaggerated claims and comparisons, and the image of Britain as a world-beater. When was Brown ever misperceived as humble?

I believe that this updated strategy, recognised by our allies to be world-leading in its wide-ranging nature, leaves us better prepared and strengthened in our ability to ensure all peace-loving people of this country can live normally, with confidence and free from fear.

In the world of Jacquistan, the words on the page protect us; in reality, their attempt to make political capital of this duty leaves me suspecting that policy is subject to increased political meddling and control.

The more we move into the world of Jacquistan, the more I fear another attack.

(31)

To date, we have been fortunate.

I say that because, given the consistently submissive nature of the British public, we have been blessed (yes, I do mean blessed) with a ruling political class that has been, relatively speaking, both modest in its ambitions and cautious in its actions. If they only realised how much more they could get away with we would, by now, be living in a hell on earth. This is why I say that we, so far, been very lucky.

But luck always runs out and I think ours is about to do just that:

Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade.

Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called "booze cruisers" who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.

In addition, weekend sailors and sea fishermen will be caught by the system if they plan to travel to another country - or face the possibility of criminal prosecution.

The owners of light aircraft will also be brought under the system, known as e-borders, which will eventually track 250 million journeys annually.

Even swimmers attempting to cross the Channel and their support teams will be subject to the rules which will require the provision of travellers' personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel plans.

Another database for the sake of it? Well, possibly. But I think we all know that it will not stop there. This is, of course, a prelude and a 'softening up' process for the eventual introduction of a requirement for exit visas (Soviet style).

So, a word of advice to any of my compatriots who are planning to emigrate abroad: settle your plans as soon as practicable and make your move within the next 5 years. After that, you may well find that your escape routes have been walled off.

(27)

This is a tremendous rebuttal of the claim that British manufacturing is in decline. Of course, there is nothing specifically wonderful in having a large or small manufacturing sector, but for those who care about such things, this article nails a lot of cliches about how Britain is supposedly losing the art of making stuff well. In fact, a lot of the manufacturing that goes on in the UK is first class. Take the aero-engine business, for example.

Well, it is nice to grasp at positive news that is going.

(27)

From time to time (on this blog and in other places) I call for the abolition of the BBC. Often, someone smug and patronising in the comments will say something along the lines of "Only you heartless and uncultured libertarians would fail to realise that there are some worthwhile/needed/educational programs that will not be produced by the market.

My usual response to this is that we will never know, because the market has never been allowed to demonstrate what it might produce. I have written before about the weird history of British television and how owners of private television channels had little if any control of their own programming. But in some ways radio is even weirder. For one thing, there were no privately owned and/or commercially funded radio stations in the UK before 1973. There are many today, and some might argue that this proves some sort of market exists, but this is still a weird, weird world.

For instance, the highly self-important telecommunications regulator Ofcom, which helpfully "exists to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age", made a particularly delightful ruling.

Ofcom staff listened to Bristol radio station GWR FM, and determined that 53% of the music it played was more than two years old. As a consequence, they threatened to take away the station's licence and force it off the air. This is a commercial, privately owned radio station.

Really.

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I posted this item almost as Brian hit the button on his own entry on the same subject. But I think it is worth a second bite at this cherry.

Great work by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator for revealing that Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now almost totally owned by the UK government, has been asking prospective clients about their political affiliations. The exact term is to ask whether a wannabe client is a "politically exposed person". Now, this maybe more of a cockup than a sign of anything more sinister, so my trigger finger may be getting unnecessarily twitchy, but still. This is, as the commenters on the article Fraser writes says, a classic demonstration of why state-owned banks are bad and ripe for corruption. Special favours will be demanded by the ruling party's clients. In France, remember, the former state-run Credit Lyonnais bank was a sink of corruption.

RBS is also the parent of Coutts, the private bank, and RBS Coutts, the international version of said. These banks provide clients with offshore accounts. The risk is that such a bank could be put under political pressure to deliver details about its clients, a fact that becomes particularly relevant with so many governments currently trying to shut down so-called "tax havens" such as Switzerland.

If it is the case that RBS has been trying to prize out details of potential clients' political affiliations, then at the very least the management responsible for this dim-witted idea should resign. In fact, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, should serious consider his own position. On his watch, the once very solid, in fact gloriously dull, UK banking group Lloyds has been pressured into buying the debt-laden UK banking group HBOS. Result: Lloyds' share price has crashed and most of that bank is now owned by the government. (Full disclosure: I bank with Lloyds).

Unbelievable.

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Fraser Nelson:

Some of the worst events in history take place because no one is really in charge. That RBS could blunder their way into this is almost as scary as the idea that they did it deliberately. I accept it was a blunder: God knows, RBS has made enough of them already. But the banking industry should urgently review and clarify the way it handles the issue of "politically exposed persons." No one in this country should ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank.

Fine prose, I think you will agree. At first I had in mind to make that first sentence there into today's SQOTD. But think about it. To Nelson, it is obvious that nobody should "ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank". Excuse me? If I am wondering whether or not to lend you money, I will ask you any questions I feel like asking, and if I don't like the answers, then it will be no deal. If you don't like me asking such questions, you are free to look elsewhere for the funds you want to borrow, even if I say yes. If you don't like a bank you lend money to asking such questions, then don't lend it to them. I am talking about the right to discriminate, both by lenders and by borrowers. Discrimination is, or should be, at the heart of banking. The attempt to drive discrimination out of banking has been at the heart of our recent banking woes.

That Fraser Nelson, a man most definitely on our side in the broad loves-capitalist-success hates-socialist-slums way that we regularly here celebrate, should write something like that, with no apparent sense of self-contradiction, tells you just how debased - how nationalised - the state of banking already is now in Britain, and has been for some while. It's not that Nelson favours state micro-management of banks in the deliberate manner which I do agree is suggested by my heading. It's worse than that. He just takes it for granted. His only question is: how should it be done?

Because you see, what makes this question about whether you are a "politically exposed person" scary and Soviet, which is Nelson's point, is that the banks already are nationalised, in the sense of their databases being, you know, like that (hands brought together into a combined, intertwined, two-handed prayer fist) with government databases.

If banks operated in a true free market, banks asking about politics, or for that matter being suspected of having (and in fact having) political preferences which they make a point of not asking about, would just be stuff discussed in Which Bank? magazine. And the readers of such magazines would have plenty of banks to choose between, just as they now have plenty of magazines to choose between.

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Following on my from recent SQOTD about property rights, it seems poignant to link to this item by Roger Thornhill.

This issue is also related to that of compulsory purchase/eminent domain that I wrote about some time ago. It is also somewhat related to the idea that the government is entitled to take money out of "dormant" bank accounts if, after a certain period, the account-holder does not use the account. The assumption seems to be, that if in doubt, it belongs to the collective.

Well sod that, quite frankly.

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Well, full marks for trying, I guess. Ross Clark - a columnist whom I enjoy reading - argues that the fuss about proposals to reduce certain speed limits on UK roads are unwarranted. This is his argument:

It didn't take long for the militant motorists' lobby to get into gear to attack the Government's proposal to reduce the national speed limit from 60mph to 50mph.

That's true.

To lop 10 mph off the speed limit on country lanes, apparently, is tantamount to declaring a fascist dictatorship. “These corporate Nazi New Labour bastards are intent on turning law-abiding citizens into criminals,” began one of hundreds of angry posts on the website of a prominent motorists' pressure group yesterday - before, bizarrely, imploring his fellow petrolheads to vote for the British National Party.

A classic bait and switch. For sure, some opponents of speed limits might like to clam they are the equivalent of bringing back the Gulag, but for most of us who do not see the logic of ever more draconian controls on the car, the case can be made without invoking images of Soviet Russia or Hitler's Germany.

That the leaders of the motorists' lobby are not quite the defenders of liberty they often profess to be is obvious from reading their output over the years. They have never been slow to demand the prosecution of cyclists, jaywalking pedestrians and motorists who drive too slowly or in any other fashion that impedes their progress.

That has probably something to do with the fact that a lot of pedestrians and cyclists do not think the highway codes in countries such as the UK applies to them. But he does make a fair point, but so what? Just because some motorists are hypocrits does not undermine the broader point.

Unfortunately, Mr Clark descends into nonsense:

The assertion that tighter motoring law is tantamount to dictatorship is further confused by a paradox. The world's most illiberal regimes happen to have some of the most anarchic and dangerous of roads, while the most liberal nations tend to have the strictest traffic enforcement and safest roads. For all the conspiracy theories, Morgan Tsvangirai now says that the car crash that tragically killed his wife on Friday was an accident. It shouldn't come as a surprise: reporters who have used the road between Harare and Beitbridge paint a terrifying picture of speeding, overloaded lorries and complete lawlessness - this in a country where if you criticise the President you can expect a rapid visit from Robert Mugabe's thugs.

He's right that consistently enforced rules of the road are hardly the same as political oppression, forced labour or torture. Of course. Rules of the road are a bit like etiquette: if consistently followed, it helps us all to rub along, which in a small island like the UK is not a trivial matter. But Mr Clark needs to think this through. Take countries such as post-war Germany or France, with their excellent motorways. Speed limits are, and can be, quicker than in the UK and in the case of Germany, some of their autobahns have had no limits at all (this may have changed, I'll have to check). When that fella with the silly moustache was in power, the autobahns got built, and the quality of driving in Germany is, in my experience, high. But that example, when set against the chaos of Zimbabwe, proves little. In India, which is a democracy and fairly free place, the driving is absolutely terrible. There's no correlation between oppression and driving like Jeremy Clarkson on crack. None.

Local authorities would love to reduce speed limits on a great number of roads, but they are hampered by bureaucracy. Whenever they want to designate a limit on a rural road lower than the default 60mph they must justify it through accident statistics. It may be obvious that motorists are driving too fast on a stretch of road, but a council must wait for the required number of people to be killed or injured before it can take any action. And even when, finally, sufficient coffins have been filled to justify a speed limit on a rural road, it remains legal to drive along surrounding lanes at 60mph, giving reckless motorists an incentive to divert on to even more dangerous rat-runs.

Well obviously, if we had privately owned roads, r