"If “happy” means that you have satisfied your desires, then the claim that people seek only happiness is no more than the triviality that people want what they want. On the other hand, if “happy” refers to some particular state of mind, such as the apparent contentment of the Dali Lama, then we obviously do not seek only happiness. No one believes that a Rolex watch will put him in the mental state of the Dali Lama, but many still want one. Dave may seek some special mental state for himself. That’s fine by me. Alas, he will not pay me the same courtesy. Like others in the grip of an enthusiasm, he is convinced that people who do not share his vision suffer from “false consciousness” or something else in need of correction. Dave’s adolescent moment will remain amusing so long as he doesn’t try to do something about it."

Jamie Whyte, contemplating the desire of David Cameron, UK prime minister, to make us benighted Brits happier.

It is hard to disagree with the view of Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds that we currently suffer from the worst political class in living memory, if not for longer. It is not so much that this generation is particularly vicious or stupid - competition for that sort of standing is strong. Rather, it is that there seems to be a massive gap between the scale of the problems now faced by some Western nations, and the calibre of the people whom are being expected to do something about it, and the fatuous preoccupations of these people. We live in an age where we, for example, think a way of dealing with the banking crisis is to strip a senior former banker of his knighthood, rather, than say, address the underlying problem of fiat money, high taxes, "too big to fail" and so on.

But silly me - it is all about how we feel about things. There is a great line in The Iron Lady - the movie about Margaret Thatcher - where the great lady berates a doctor for asking her the question "how do you feel" rather than asking her about what she is thinking. Thinking is just so 1980s, dahhhling.

Hartnett wants the citizenry to stop giving cash to their cleaners, gardeners, and to small tradesmen and other potential tax cheats and economic criminals so that they can no longer avoid paying taxes. Hartnett’s vision of Britain is a society of snoops and denunciators. “Households have a duty to ensure that other people do not evade paying their share of tax. The people who are worried about it should use our whistle-blowing line to tell us. We are getting better and better at finding people who receive cash.” Nice touch. A tinge of the former GDR’s Stasi culture for the British way of life?

- Detlev Schlichter

"Nationalising RBS was a monumental error; no bank must ever bailed out again. Resolution and bail-in procedures to properly wind-down even the largest institution must be ready for use the next time there is a crisis. The government’s takeover of part of the banking industry in 2008 – combined with a stagnant economy and a flawed narrative about the real causes of the crisis – has triggered a cultural shift that will turn out to be disastrous for Western capitalism and prosperity."

- Allister Heath.

This is also very on point:

It is impossible to run a bank – especially one with a large investment bank unit – as part of the public sector. One can only do it for a very short period of time, as the US institutions found during the Tarp episode; they paid the money back very quickly to liberate themselves from the state’s shackles. Permanent state ownership means political considerations take over; and the pressure builds to pay bank employees like civil servants.

By the way, while I was relaxing after a nice weekend in the country last night, I watched the DVD of the Atlas Shrugged movie (it shows the first third of the story, or thereabouts). I quite liked the film, although it lacks that sparkle I like to see in a big topic like this. (The actress who played Dagny Taggart is good, as is the actor who plays Hank Rearden. The rest are so-so). But even so, one thing that grabbed me from the start was that this might have been a documentary about the financial problems of the West, rather than a piece of fiction.

From the latest Radio Times:

9.00 Wonderland: My Child the Rioter

Last August's riots provoked a legal backlash that has seen often lengthy prison sentences handed down to those involved. This documentary enters the homes of the some of the families affected, including that of Eileen and Alan Bretherton whose son Liam recently served in Afghanistan but got caught up in the unrest while home on leave. Now he is an ex-offender with a promising military career in tatters.

"Legal backlash" is, I suppose, one way to describe a severe punishment.

But the phrase that really caught my eye in this was where it says that son Liam got "caught up in" the unrest. You hear this phrase a lot these days, to describe what someone did, in a way that suggests that what he did was really done to him, by a malign outside force. The Unrest, you see, forced him to go out looting. The Unrest called round, knocked on his door, dragged him out into the street and there compelled him to misbehave. Liam didn't do rioting. The rioting "involved" him. There the Unrest was, catching Liam up in itself. How could Liam himself be held responsible for what Unrest did to him?

Truly, we do live in a Wonderland.

And what of that "legal backlash"? (There goes another phrase which makes a bunch of decisions appear like a mere collective emotional spasm.) Well, next time Unrest decides, for its own inscrutable reasons, to reach out and grab people, more of them will surely decide to resist being caught up in it, now that there has been this legal backlash against the last lot of those picked on by Unrest.

Some Christians I know or read about claim to be concerned about the long-term health of society and the future welfare of generations yet unborn, as well as the current one, and yet all too many of the senior figures in the Church of England, say, make asses of themselves by unthinking repetition of Big Government thinking. Case in point being the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

It is, therefore, a pleasant break from the norm to read this, from Dr Williams' predecessor, George Carey:

"The sheer scale of our public debt - which hit £1tn yesterday - is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today. If we can't get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren."

(H/T, Suboptimal Planet: a new blog that I thoroughly recommend).

On the subject of the UK's debt problems, Martin Durkin, the documentary maker, put together a programme for Channel 4 a while ago which is well worth viewing, with comments from the likes of Allister Heath, Mark Littlewood, Kevin Dowd, James Bartholomew, Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe and, for some light relief, Brendan Barber of the TUC (Trades Union Congress).

Guido:

Even if the GDP numbers are not entirely unexpected, they are still a failure, a failure to grow the economy. The deficit can only be paid down if the economy grows, we can’t borrow our way out of a debt crisis. It is time for a supply-side revolution, why is the government implementing a policy of selected regional enterprise zones, why not make the whole economy an enterprise zone? It was a mistake to hike VAT and it is a strategic error to burden industry with crushingly high green taxes, penal marginal income tax rates of over 50% discourage entrepreneurs and investors from coming to Britain.

If the government is going to miss the deficit target, and it is, miss it because the government slashed taxes to grow the economy. The international bond markets will forgive a finance minister with a growing economy who misses his deficit target, they won't forgive a finance minister with a contracting economy in any circumstances. Chancellor Zero knows that with no growth there is no hope for the deficit.

Whether Guido is right that there is any hope for the deficit, under any circumstances, is a proposition I leave to others to ponder. I quote the above posting because it illustrates something important about Guido himself.

In among all the knockabout gossip about who is sleeping with whom and who is cheating on their expenses, Guido regularly slips in more thoughtful stuff. He regularly, that is to say, drops in explicit libertarian messages, in among all the merely implicit libertarianism about how they are all conspiring with each other to rob us blind. This is why they all hate him so much. He is absolutely not one of them. They want to believe that he is only a gossip monger, and a mere partisan Tory, with no principles other than that he wants his particular team to be in charge of all the robbing and conspiring. But those of his pro-state (I often think more fun than is might be had with that hyphen) enemies and victims with any antenna or honesty know that he is something far more dangerous to them than that. He is a principled libertarian with readership numbers and influence most of them can only dream of. He, more than anyone else in Britain, is responsible for the widespread perception in British politics that the arrival of the internet was a breakthrough for libertarian ideas. Before Guido, we were talking amongst ourselves, which was good. Now Guido regularly shoves it in front of them, which is even better.

Okay, a simplification. Others were doing this before Guido. But none so entertainingly, or to such a wide readership. One of Samizdata's prouder boasts, I think, is that before Guido found his own blog persona and his own voice as a blogger, he was briefly part of ours.

Here is a photo I took of the great man, at a recent gathering at Samizdata HQ:

A fine if rather blurry addition to this collection. (This is my favourite one of these.)

By the way, do you remember the posting I did here a while back about how so much of what happens in the world is down to two-man teams? Well, these days, anyone who cares knows that there are now two Guidos. I asked original Guido about this at the party where I took the above snap, and the partnership between him and Harry Cole is definitely the real two-man team deal.

Mark Wallace, recently "seen elsewhere" by Guido, makes a good point, in response to a piece by Tim Leunig in the Guardian, about the nature of the mixed housing economy:

Leunig’s Guardian piece claims to calculate that the benefits cap would leave people living on 62p a day. The most crucial element of his workings is that a 4-bedroom house in Tolworth costs £400 a week. That’s true right now, but it wouldn’t be the case once a cap has been brought in.

The truth is that some of the main beneficiaries of overly high benefits are private landlords. They may not get payments from the DWP direct, but they reap the cash anyway through inflated rents, secure in the knowledge that every time they put the price up, benefits levels are raised to pay them. This is a racket, exploiting the foolishness of officials in pumping more and more money out and the absence of taxpayer power to rein in this behaviour.

Tim Leunig is right that if rents were fixed as they are now then his hypothetical family would pay £400 a week. But rents aren’t fixed, they are fluid. If you remove a large amount of cash from the system then prices will fall. By arguing for the system to remain as it currently is, rather than accept a cap, this supposed "progressive" is effectively fighting the corner of benefit-farming landlords.

Government hand-outs to "the poor" enriching the not-so-poor is a familiar story. It explains a lot about the current state of politics. In fact politics generally, down the ages.

Tom Clougherty has an interesting graph up at the ASI blog, taken from this McKinsey report, of the movement in combined public and private debt for the ten biggest of the world's developed national economies, from 1990 until now. Follow either of the above two links to get a bigger and more legible version of this graph:

Since 2007, of course, all have lurched upwards from wherever they were to quite a bit more.

To me the interesting bits are those between 1990 and 2007. The general trend was a general increase in debt, from somewhat troubling to somewhat more troubling. But three countries bucked this trend: Japan started very bad and merely stayed very bad; Canada started okay-ish and stayed okay-ish; Britain started okay-ish but became very bad. In terms of the direction things went in, Canada has the best graph of them all, and Britain has the worst. Between them, these three graphs, the grey one along the top (Japan), the green one in the pack towards the bottom (Canada), and the dark one moving most determinedly upwards (Britain), make a kind of big and elongated Z.

One other deviation from the norm worth noting is that just before 2007, Germany, unlike any other country, went (see the yellow graph) definitely downwards. It did what Keynes said, in other words, and paid down its debts when times were good, or at least when they seemed good. In Britain, the "Keynesians", public and private, just carried on running up more debt.

I know that as a fan of Austrianism I am not supposed to get too excited about national economic aggregates. But this set of aggregates and aggregate movements looks to me quite telling. Make of it all what you will. For me, it confirms the sense that many now have that Tony Blair's government was one of the worse ones that we've ever had.

Anyone looking for evidence that the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat government in the UK has the same tidy, but severely limited intelligence of its predecessor need do no more than read this story suggesting that thousands of jury trials held in the country could be axed to save what appears to be a relatively paltry sum, when measured against the dangers and cost to individuals of being wrongfully convicted.

I can understand why jury trials can be an easy target. In my distant past I had a spell covering court cases in the UK and watched several juries at work. It struck me - especially in the more complex fraud cases - that there are clear problems. And maybe - although no politician will dream of saying so - that the British are not as law abiding as they presumably were 50 years ago and therefore the average jury panel reflects this fact. But historians would point out that juries in, say, early 19th Century England could be an awkward bunch. But therein lies the strengths of trial by jury - it is one of the few elements in which ordinary members of the public can be brought into the affairs of civil society by sitting in judgement on the alleged guilt or innocence of their fellows. Juries remind the powerful and the legally sophisticated about the proper order of things.

As I remarked the other day about the dangerously misconceived move by the previous Labour government to scrap the double-jeopardy rule, the ongoing attempts by administrations of all political hues to gut the English Common Law, and the checks and balances of the system, remain one of the most foolish trends in our public life. And that such an idea is being contemplated makes a mockery of the idea that having the Lib Dems in the government coalition will increase, in any way, the supposed liberality of this administration.

Hey, "tyranny" was his word, not mine. Sid Ryan writes in the Guardian:

There have been some serious incidents at the camp in the last few months including: thefts, tents being slashed and minor assaults. These problems are not of Occupy's making, but they're happening on its watch. When anyone is challenged about people's behaviour they're quick to cry "persecution" and appeal to the founding principles of inclusion. If Occupy can't solve the problem of behaviour on-site, a hostile media and the police will end the movement before it gets going.

Even people who aren't aggressive or violent can derail the movement. The very nature of the general assembly (GA), whereby everyone can wield a veto, makes it inevitable. A block should be used only if the blocker feels so strongly that they would rather leave the movement than see it carried through, but it is rarely used as such and rarely with a full understanding of the issues at stake. Occupy proudly states that the GA is "real democracy", in fact it is a tyranny that makes it possible to drown out a hundred rational voices with a single irrational one.

Schadenfreude aside, Mr Ryan's article provides an interesting case study of an attempt at non-coercive organisation, a subject that interests many libertarians. Perhaps what stops it working for them is Original Sin. I refer to the sinful desire, shared by both the reformist and the revolutionary wings of Occupy, to coerce others.

Added later: Guardian commenter Forlornehope mentions the Seige of Münster. One hopes events will not come to such a pass that St Paul's ends up being adorned in the manner of St Lambert's Church:

Vigorous preparations were made, not only to hold what had been gained, but to proceed from Münster toward the conquest of the world. The city was being besieged by Franz von Waldeck, its expelled bishop. In April 1534 on Easter Sunday, Matthys, who had prophesied God's judgment to come on the wicked on that day, made a sally with only thirty followers, believing that he was a second Gideon, and was cut off with his entire band. He was killed, his head severed and placed on a pole for all in the city to see, and his genitals nailed to the city gate. Bockelson, better known in history as John of Leiden, was subsequently installed as "king".

Claiming to be the successor of David, he claimed royal honours and absolute power in the new "Zion". He justified his actions by the authority of visions from heaven, as others have done in similar circumstances. He legalized polygamy, and himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded one wife himself in the marketplace; this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Community of goods was also established. After obstinate resistance, the city was taken by the besiegers on June 24, 1535, and in January 1536 Bockelson and some of his more prominent followers, after being tortured, were executed in the marketplace. Their dead bodies were exhibited in cages, which hung from the steeple of St. Lambert's Church; the cages still hang there, though the bones were removed later.

Exposed: Taxman's 'illegal' war against Britain's small businesses. That is the title of a most interesting report in the Independent. Not so much a war, I would have said, as a shakedown.

The Government is unlawfully using late-payment penalty fines against tens of thousands of small firms who do not file their tax returns on time as a "cash-generating scheme" for the Exchequer.

In a damning judgement, the Tax Tribunal has ruled that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is operating a policy of "deliberately" waiting months before alerting businesses that have not filed their tax returns so that late- payment fines stack up.

...

"It is no function of the state to use the penalty system as a cash-generating scheme," said the judge, Geraint Jones, QC. "We have no doubt that any right-thinking member of society would consider that to be unfair and falling very far below the standard of fair dealing expected of an organ of the state."

While applauding his judgement in this case, I question his expectations of standards of fair dealing by an organ of the state. It's not as if they didn't try much the same with speed cameras.

I gather HMRC are to appeal*. Confusion to their knavish schemes.

(Via Englishman's Castle)

*This sentence originally read "I gather HMRC are appealing." Edited for accuracy.

Jeremy Warner, a columnist at the Daily Telegraph, has a short, thumb-sucker about what happens if Scotland becomes independent, as many Scots (and many English voters and taxpayers) want. Given that the Euro is a partial disaster, no sane Scottish politician would want to campaign to join it, at least not yet. The idea of Scotland staying in the sterling zone is also bit, well, problematic if Scotland breaks free of any fiscal union with the English, or if the English decide to give the Scots the elbow. Could Scotland go back to an old, Scottish currency of its own and would that be viable?

Of course, the land of Adam Smith and David Hume could adopt a gold-backed currency and set a magnificent new trend, but given the socialistic nature of most Scottish politicians seeking independence, that does not seem very likely, but you never know. I always felt that if the SNP wanted to really pull a trick, they should seek to turn Scotland into a sort of northern Switzerland.

Here is an old essay by Lawrence White about Scottish banking.

I listen a lot to Radio 3, the classical music channel, especially first thing in the morning. This inevitably involves listening to BBC news bulletins, which can be quite an ordeal. This morning, as my brain surfaced into consciousness, I heard a strange item, about how the government intends to switch the subsidies it gives to the British movie industry towards more popular movies, presumably away from whatever unpopular movies government subsidies had hitherto been encouraging.

Two questions immediately present themselves.

First, how does the government expect to be able to foretell which films will be popular, before they are made? Many very highly paid, very clever people routinely fail in this task, despite such people entirely concentrating (in extreme contrast to people run governments) on trying to be right about such things. What makes our government suppose that it can do any better than such persons?

And second, are not "popular" movies the exact sort of movies as would be encouraged in a totally free market? So what is the point of such subsidies? Would it not be more sensible simply to get rid of them altogether?

This seems to be the story that my half-awake mind latched onto this morning. For once, I agree with Ken Loach, who appears briefly in the video report. This is indeed typical Tory crassness. Many "mainstream" movies, or at any rate movies intended to be maintream, fail. But, and here I presumably do not agree with Ken Loach, all other government movie subsidies are also crass.

It is surprisingly easy to get the sign wrong when reasoning about quantities. Consider this old riddle:

Three ladies go to a restaurant for a meal. They receive a bill for $30. They each put $10 on the table, which the waiter collects and takes to the till. The cashier informs the waiter that the bill should only have been for $25 and returns $5 to the waiter in $1 coins. On the way back to the table the waiter realizes that he cannot divide the coins equally between the ladies. As they didn’t know the total of the revised bill, he decides to put $2 in his own pocket and give each of the ladies $1.

Now that each lady has been given a dollar back, each of the ladies has paid $9. Three times 9 is 27. The waiter has $2 in his pocket. Two plus 27 is $29. The ladies originally handed over $30. Where is the missing dollar?

To get the missing $1 in the question we have done this arithmetic: 10 + 10 + 10 - 1 - 1 - 1 + 2 - 30 = -1

The correct arithmetic is: 10 + 10 + 10 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 2 - 25 = 0

Positive numbers represent payments from the ladies to the restaurant, and negative numbers represent money received by the restaurant. The result should obviously always come out to zero. That +2 should be a -2. Okay, there is a 30 where there should be a 25 as well, but only because the +2 yielded an intermediate result of 29 which is close enough to 30 to cause confusion.

This getting the sign wrong is the same mistake that means Tim Worstall has to point out that jobs are a cost. The new widget factory will create 1000 jobs, we are told. If it produces 1000 widgets per year, that means we get one widget per man-year of time. The man-year of time is a cost. If we could somehow arrange for the widget factory to create only 100 jobs for the same output, we would have just as many widgets and 900 man-years left to spend on some other useful thing. We would be richer.

This mistake crops up in trivial ways all the time. My friend recently gave up full-time work to look after the children for various financial and logistical reasons. Think how the economy is losing out, she mused. Not only am I not producing widgets, I am not paying the nursery workers or buying train tickets for my commute. Well it is true that the widgets my friend used to make are no longer made, but the nursery workers do not count: the same amount of childcare is being done as was being done before. It is not correct to add the childcare previously done by the nursery worker to the childcare now done by my friend. At worst there is now an unemployed nursery worker who will go and do something else instead, but that is just a market optimising everyone's activities to match the level of demand. The train tickets were just part of the cost of getting the widgets made.

Ah, train tickets. We are going to get a new high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. The government is going to 'invest' £32.7bn in order to reap up to £46.9bn of 'economic benefits'. I wonder how many of these benefits have the wrong sign. Counted among the benefits are "hundreds of jobs", but these are already included in the cost figure.

Also counted are ticket sales. Which makes sense if the 'investment' was really an investment. But invest here really means to steal from the British public £32.7bn so that they can then pay, say, £40bn for train tickets in exchange for £40bn worth of train travel. I make that -32.7 - 40 + 40 = -32.7. Where is the missing £32.7bn?

Author's note: It seems that we have started Monday in full "let's shoot at Cameron" mode today. Well, it is still the game shooting season.

The comments from UK prime minister David Cameron, saying it would be wrong to scrap the UK top income rate of 50 per cent on incomes of £150,000 a year or more (which when other changes are taken into account, means a marginal rate of more than 60 per cent), are typical of this regime. The government knows that the tax rate is well on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, but this, remember, is a regime that cares with almost pathological zeal about the image it projects. The key is to show that those evil, high-earning bastards (like the sort of people who start businesses and run them) take their "fair" share of the current pain being inflicted in the name of deficit reduction.

The Tories played a high price for an inept general election campaign that required them to ally with the Liberal Democrats, a party full of people whose hostility to entrepreneurship and wealth creation is even more severe than it among parts of the Labour Party. And this hostility to high earners comes particularly ill from politicians, such as Mr Cameron, who have enjoyed the benefits of a rich inheritance rather than having to get their hands dirty by creating a business from scratch. Very ill, indeed.

As I commented on previously, David Cameron wants shareholders to vote on directors' pay packages. Another problem with this occurs to me.

Right now I can value a company on its past performance and what I think its future performance will be, and part of this evaluation comes from my opinion of the decision-making abilities of the people in charge. If I know who they are, and am confident that they will hire the right people into the right positions, I might value the company more highly.

If shareholders make decisions I have the problem that the performance of the company depends on who the shareholders are, and I do not know who the other shareholders are.

In the specific case where shareholders can vote on directors' pay, if we assume that the highest pay attracts the best performing directors, then the best performing companies will end up being the ones with the least left-wing shareholders.

As I commented on previously, David Cameron wants shareholders to vote on directors' pay packages. Another problem with this occurs to me.

Right now I can value a company on its past performance and what I think its future performance will be, and part of this evaluation comes from my opinion of the decision-making abilities of the people in charge. If I know who they are, and am confident that they will hire the right people into the right positions, I might value the company more highly.

If shareholders make decisions I have the problem that the performance of the company depends on who the shareholders are, and I do not know who the other shareholders are.

In the specific case where shareholders can vote on directors' pay, if we assume that the highest pay attracts the best performing directors, then the best performing companies will end up being the ones with the least left-wing shareholders.

Says David Cameron:

Government can't tell people what they should be paid but...

His excuse for meddling is that there has been a "market failure", as indicated by a Guardian article that says that FTSE 100 directors' pay increased by 49% last year. And that is not right. People just will not stand for this sort of thing. What about the shareholders? The board should be forced to let them vote on pay and termination packages, he thinks, otherwise it is just crony capitalism and stealing from shareholders.

It is perfectly obvious that all of this is factored in to the share price already, and perfectly obvious that there are no principles on display here. From Cameron's Tory party we get the same envy politics as from the other parties. But I repeat Perry.

The maths doesn’t add up; this is just sinking capital into a loss making project. If you’re going to use the power of the state to do that, then you shouldn’t be surprised that this country is getting poorer.

- Steve Baker MP denounces the plan for a new stretch of high speed rail, quoted (behind a registration wall) at the Financial Times.

I make this today's QotD here not in spite of Guido having already featured it as his quote of today (and maybe also of the next few days) but because of this. Baker's soundbite is getting around. Good.

Lots of Americans who read Samizdata but not Guido, and who are also confronting idiot plans to waste their money on high speed rail foolishnesses, will now also read this soundbite. Good again.

Meanwhile, as the FT's headline proclaims, "economists insist" that this piece of Keynesian pump priming that won't should go ahead, damn the expense. Well they would, wouldn't they?

Nicholas Wapshott, a columnist and book author about Reagan and other historical figures, has seen the film, "The Iron Lady" (about Margaret Thatcher). I am going to see the film this evening with my wife and two friends, both of whom are pretty big fans of the lady. Wapshott, writing over at Reuters, hated the film. (Reuters carries signed columns these days, and its writers can be far more open about their biases, which is all to the good).

"But it is the chilling image of a once dominant leader reduced to a fumbling, mumbling old crone that is the movie’s main theme and, while it may pass muster as a sly piece of brutal political theater, as a record of Thatcher and her many achievements, both for good and ill, it is a pitiless, poisonous travesty. Streep has lent her extraordinary acting skills to perhaps the most shameful and cruel piece of political revenge ever to have made it to the screen."

"Would Henry Fonda have volunteered his name and faultless reputation to “The Deranged Mr. Lincoln”? Anthony Hopkins dignified Oliver Stone’s somber “Nixon” by trying to get beneath the skin of the paranoid president brought down by his private demons. Even Josh Brolin in Stone’s hilarious “W” made America’s most contentious president in recent times a likeable, surprisingly complex eldest son yearning to show his father he was worthy of winning the White House."

Another paragraph from later in the review:

"It is in the context of Thatcher sharply reducing the size of the state that the violence between picketers and police and the poll tax riots that punctuated her reign can be best understood. There is a high political price to be paid for redrawing the boundaries between the private and public sectors, and for deliberately provoking a recession, in the face of well organized opposition. In “The Iron Lady,” the newsreel shots of cars burning and mounted police beating miners with batons are left unexplained."

Wapshott's review is interesting because, as I noted a few weeks back when discussing a review I read in the Spectator, some reviewers from the left have had their brains scrambled by a film that makes them sympathise with a person who has lost some of her mental powers.

So, having read this review, I am still going to see the film with an expectation that this will be an interesting production. For the subject of this remarkable person continues to fascinate, a fact no doubt given heightened interest due to how, for example, the disaster of the eurozone has given some of her old skepticism about the hubris of Eurofederalism new relevance. Her old preaching about the importance of thrift, saving and hard work is hardly irrelevant.

The changes that Margaret Thatcher wrought in the UK are profound, but it is also worth pointing out that she fell short of what she might have hoped for on a number of fronts. The state continues to take a huge chunk of our money; our higher education system, much of the media and chattering classes are reflexively anti-capitalist and at odds with some of the key features of Western civilisation. Even today, there are those who pine for the old, brutal certainties of Soviet-era collectivism. And from a libertarian/classical liberal point of view, the Thatcher era disappointed: no real change to the Welfare State; erosions of certain civil liberties; imperfect privatisation; missteps on Europe (such as, arguably, the Single European Act). Welfarism and the associated creation of an underclass of feral, uneducatable youngsters, was not really addressed during her time in office (but then again, it has not been addressed for the past 20 years, hence the kind of violence that hit the UK last summer).

And yet those of us old enough to remember what a mess Britain was in during the 1970s, with its hideous inflation, endless strikes, shabby goods and services, eroding willingness to confront foreign aggressions and general crapness, cannot fail to be struck by the scale of what was achieved in Thatcher's term of office. In the private sector, the union closed shop is no more; inflation, while still a serious problem (as this blog often points out), is not in the double-digit levels it used to be. Some of the old, inefficient state-run industries have been put into mostly private hands; the City of London, despite some criticisms that can be made of the "Big Bang" deregulation, is unquestionably one of the greatest financial hubs on Earth. And consider this detail although it comes across as a bit crass at times: even a state broadcaster such as the BBC has a show called "Dragon's Den", which is about would-be entrepreneurs pitching for venture capital funding on TV. Such a celebration of business would have been unthinkable on such a channel 30 years ago. Mrs Thatcher told the British that it was okay to make the most of yourself. For all her faults and errors, that is one of the "vigorous virtues" (to use a term from a book on Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin) that endures.

And to call oneself a socialist is still, let's not forget, not nearly as easy for a politician to do today if he or she wants to get elected. Somewhere during the 80s and 90s, I think, that term was discredited to a significant degree. Not just by Thatcher, granted - the fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated discrediting of Soviet-style central planning did for that. But her relentless attacks on socialism and central planning, and her championing of the free market, played a significant part.

Here is a good book on Mrs T by Claire Berlinski, published some time ago. Recommended. Another book worth checking out is the new opus on the history of the Conservative Party by Robin Harris. Charles Moore, whose biography of Thatcher comes out after she dies, has a good column up at Vanity Fair.

Anyway, I'll write about my own impressions at a suitable point.

For me, by far the worst aspect of the recent re-trial of the Stephen Lawrence murder case has been the fact that it demonstrates the dangers of the decision, by the former Labour government in the UK, to end the old double jeopardy rule. Some of the perpetrators of the crime may now be behind bars, but the wider issues worry me.

The writer Brendan O'Neill, a Marxist who writes at at the online journal Spiked, sees this in class terms:

"It is clear from the orgy of post-conviction self-congratulation amongst the chattering classes (Dacre says yesterday was ‘a glorious day for British newspapers’) that the trial of Norris and Dobson was a political trial. It was a showtrial, or at least a showy trial, which was relentlessly used to advertise and entrench the morality of the new political elites. Just because Norris and Dobson are lowlifes, whom no one will much miss when they are banged up, doesn’t mean we should give the nod to this bending of the justice system to the whims of the cultural elite."

And another:

"It is fitting that the Lawrence case should end with a political trial, because this was the most cynically exploited and politicised murder in living memory. Lawrence was not the first young black man to have been murdered by racists, nor was he the first black murder victim to have been failed by a seriously botched police investigation. But he was the first black murder victim whose tragic demise was cynically milked by the cultural elite and used as the lynchpin of a moral crusade against Old Britain and its foul, backward inhabitants. In a triple whammy of murder-milking, Lawrence’s death was used by the elites to demonise the white working classes as the new ‘brutes within’; to redefine racism as a disease of the brain rather than as a relation of power; and to dismantle long-standing legal principles that were once seen as central to the justice system."

He's got a point, although I would add that, not being as het up about class as Mr O'Neill is, I don't see the disgust that many feel about race-related murders as some sort of ruling-class plot to stamp on lots of white proles. There is more than just a whiff of a new victimology here of the sort that far-right groups like to pander to.

There is real danger in ending the DJ principle, as it means the Crown Prosecution Service will not be under the same pressure in future to get all of its legal and evidential facts lined up as strongly as possible when bringing a case for trial, because it knows there will always be a chance that if it does not get a conviction on the first occasion, it can always have another crack at it later if something new turns up. It is a bit like European Union referendums: if the voters don't give the "right" answer the first time, they can always be polled again. (As argued by a commenter on Tim Worstall's own post on the issue).

A real concern for me is that the original case is over 18 years old. That is a long time and all kinds of issues about memory recall arise. Like I said, I don't doubt that the guilty persons are the scum that they are but there are broader issues of due process of law at stake.

Here is another look at double jeopardy. And there has even been a film made using the title, Double Jeopardy. The CATO Institute has written on how this issue plays out in the US legal system.

...the phrase that Geoffrey Howe used when discussing the best policy for Liverpool in the 1980s?

Yes, that's right: the word "managed". It is not for the state to decide where people should live or where they should do business and certainly not for the state to use violence to force them to do so.

Dan Mitchell, of the CATO Institute and an excellent defender of those much-maligned tax havens, has a list of predictions for 2012 about the global scene. I agree with all of them apart from the sports one. Here are mine:

Obama will be re-elected by a whisker, but the GOP will cement its control of Congress. Hopefully, a credible, free marketeer Republican will be chosen in the next election who does not carry some of the baggage of Ron Paul regarding his more unusual supporters or his flaky views (in my opinion) on foreign affairs. But in fairness to Paul, his achievement in getting the libertarian message out there on issues such as the economy, role of the Fed and the bailouts will continue to resonate, for which he deserves great praise.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged will continue to sell lots of copies; Detlev Schlichter will continue, hopefully, to spread good sense among the financial community and among some policymakers.

China's property market and wider economy will slow down markedly, though I think it will avoid a hard landing. I am not sure that the country will fully float the yuan in 2012, although it should do so.

The UK coalition government will struggle on, although at least one high-profile Lib Dem minister will resign. I hope it is Vincent Cable, who is an idiot.

Brazil's economy will continue to grow rapidly. The Latin America economy will gain momentum, apart from such wrecks as Venezuela.

The London Olympics will go off largely without incident and as predicted, the British taxpayer will be paying for it for many years. Boris Johnson will try and milk it for his own political purposes, probably with some success.

Sarkozy will lose the French presidential elections unless the economy improves. The French National Front will again get a lot of votes.

Mobile technology will continue to change the banking industry.

Italy's public finances will remain a mess. And yet in spite of it all, the northern part of Italy will continue to be the rich, beautiful place it often is, confounding some of the doomsters.

Greece will leave the euro; possbily one more country may do so. Turkey's efforts to join the EU will continue to founder.

The issue of the "education bubble" will remain one of the biggest domestic policy screwups in nations such as the UK and US. Policymakers will tinker with it.

Cheap flights will remain one of the main positives about living in Europe.

Pope Benedict's failing health (he looked absolutely shattered in his Christmas address) will become more of a talking point.

AGW alarmists will continue to lose ground. A major politician in a big country will take on the Green lobby. (Well, we can hope so).

There will be continued big advances in areas such as nanotech and medicine, mostly shockingly under-reported.

Parts of Africa will get more prosperous.

Commercial space flight will loom even larger as a reality. Hooray!

Piracy in the Indian Ocean might abate as countries adopt harsher methods to deal with it. More merchant vessels will be armed or escorted by vessels that are as insurance premia adjust.

Argentina will occasionally make sabre-rattling remarks about the Falklands, which will be largely ignored.

England might actually do quite well in the European Championships soccer tournament; England's cricket team should have a decent year. People from Northern Ireland will continue to win lots of golf majors. Roger Federer might - as he has shown from recent form - win Wimbledon again, confirming he is the greatest sportsman of our time and the most famous Swiss person in the world.

Lady Gaga will start dressing demurely as a way of shocking her fans (I am one of them).

The quality of driving in Malta will continue to get worse.

Latin will make a comeback as a subject in UK state schools.

Finally, more of a hope than a prediction: Hollywood will make a decent hard science fiction movie this year and Ipswich Town will avoid relegation, just.

Happy New Year to you all (apart from the trolls).

A reminder of earlier dramas in London and surrounding parts this year:

A court on Wednesday sentenced a rioter who was caught on video pulling a man off his scooter during the summer riots to almost six years in jail.

The footage of Ryan Kitchenside, 18, chasing his victim before yanking him to the ground during the August riots in Croydon, appeared on video-sharing website Youtube, leading to his eventual identification.

Equally depressing is how other rioters joined in to help, as in to help Ryan Kitchenside.

It won't end up as six years, but it will still be something. I recall reading elsewhere, somewhere, that the regular criminals are beating up rioters in prisons, because regular prisoners don't like their own neighbourhoods being trashed either, and because regular prisoners are having to be moved around to accommodate the new arrivals.

Read the story and view the video here.

Here is the same video at YouTube, with added sound. That video looks like it was done by a human, rather than any CCTV machine. I am not YouTube savvy enough to find out who held the camera and what the story was there. Anyone?

When I heard Gordon Kerr speak in the House of Commons a week ago, I wished that he had done so with a microphone attached. Very early this morning he spoke in public again and this time he did have a microphone attached, because he was on Bloomberg Television. Turn up the volume on your computer and you'll find it a lot easier to hear what he said this morning than I did last week.

Kerr confirmed my definite impression that the Austrianist team is now starting to win this argument. (By "this argument", I mean, approximately speaking, this argument.)

Whereas regular academic economists talked about how this banking crisis was all over bar the recovery in 2008, the Austrianists have consistently predicted further disasters. As these disasters have duly occurred, the books and writers and ideas that the Austrianists keep referring to in their increasingly frequent public performances (Kerr mentions Hayek in this performance) are now breaking out of their academic-stroke-hobbyist ghetto and reaching the mainstream.

My favourite moment in this quiet little early morning Bloomberg TV conversation was when the man whom Kerr was arguing with said: "But if banks told the truth about the value of their assets, that would cause chaos." His argument being that therefore making the banks tell the truth is a disastrous policy. Which it sort of is. But Kerr's point, the point made by all Austrianists, is that disaster can't now be avoided. The decisions that have made disaster inevitable have all now been made. By postponing the recognition of disaster, you only make it all the greater when it finally erupts.

Intellectual self-confidence is hugely important in a battle of ideas, such as we are witnessing now. The Keynesians, anti-capitalists, the more-of-the-samists, the borrowers-and-spenders and the rest of them, all want to believe that capitalism has to be managed by them if it is to work properly, in approximately the manner in which these people manage it now and have been managing it for the last few decades. Some of them still want to believe that capitalism itself ought to be smashed up, and entirely replaced by a planned economy. But how many people really think that this kind of thing would actually make the world more prosperous? The point is: the hatred of truly liberated, untramelled, uncontrolled, un-managed capitalism is all still there. But, the conviction that there is a superior statist alternative, not strong before this crisis became evident but briefly puffed up by the early stages of the crisis, is now fading away in front of our eyes.

Passionate and sincere belief in a viable, partly or wholly statist alternative to capitalism used to exist, in the early part of the twentieth century. Then, Marxists really believed that capitalism was colossally wasteful and inefficient, as well as colossally cruel and unjust and unfair, and that replacing it with a world run by small clumps of smart people with dictatorial powers, based in small but dictatorially powerful offices, would genuinely be a colossal improvement. They really and truly thought this. They believed it with the same certainty that naval tacticians, then and since, have believed (rightly) that vulnerable merchant ships are safer, during a merchant shipping war, if they all sail together in a convoy, rather than if every merchant ship sails alone. That being one of the arguments they used. This colossal Marxist and statist intellectual self-confidence was contagious and, when crisis hit Russia during World War 1 and the West at the end of the 1920s, it was hard to resist.

Now it is the Austrianists and only the Austrianists who have any genuine confidence in the correctness of their own ideas. Tiny in number but growing in number by the day, we Austrianists (I count myself a very junior member of this team - a fan rather than any sort of player) truly believe that we are right about how the world works, and about how it could eventually be made to work a lot better. This is why we are winning.

By winning, I don't just mean convincing of our rightness third parties with no stake in how things are being done now and no power to make any difference, although that also will happen, in the fullness of time. I mean making our now hugely powerful opponents (powerful in the sense of having the power to go on doing huge damage) realise that they themselves are entirely wrong, and that we Austrianists, who until recently they had never even heard of, are right. I mean especially them. The bewildered onlooker tendency, vastly more numerous than any of the intellectual teams directly involved in this debate, is likely to remain confused about all this for a much longer time. They'll only hear about this argument after we have won it. But the powerful people who presided over this long catastrophe, and who made and continue to make it ever worse with their ever more panic-stricken decisions, are mostly going to emerge from the wreckage with no doubt in their minds that their Austrianist critics understood everything far better than they did. They may not admit it out loud, still less formally surrender, although there will probably be some very public changes of mind. But most of these people will know in the privacy of their own minds that they were utterly defeated, by events, and by those who proved with their prophecies, observations and post mortems, that they understood these events, as they did not begin to until it was far too late.

It was like this with that earlier collapse of statist power, the fall of the USSR. The people who presided over that collapse had no doubt concerning the inferiority of their own economic arrangements, which was a big part of why those arrangements collapsed. It wasn't merely that Soviet communism collapsed because it was hopeless. It collapsed because the Soviet communists who ran Soviet communism themselves came to realise that Soviet communism was hopeless.

Perhaps this is why Gordon Kerr talks so quietly. He is right. He knows he is right. He feels no need to shout.

Allow me also to remind you about Jamie Whyte's recent radio performance. He also spoke with utter certainty in the rightness of what he was saying, and he never once felt the need to raise his voice either.

LATER: Steve Baker MP comments.

Why don't [union leaders] be selective and call out only those members who can cause damage to the government? There are places in the public sector that could go on strike for years and it would make little difference."

- Letter in the New Statesman, 12 December 2011

Assuming the unions were to agree with that—which I suspect they dare not, and is indeed one strategic reason why one-day strikes are preferred—in what places in the public sector would staff striking for a significant period damage the government more than the unions? Maybe there are some. But it is hard to think of any.

“Putting Meryl’s performance aside – I’ve raved about it enough, plus it was only a pie, and there was no custard – you do not get any sense of Thatcher’s political coming of age. Why did she believe what she believed, and why so vehemently? Why go to war, for example, over an island no one in Britain cared about? You also get no sense of the human cost of her policies, how she disadvantaged the poor and took a hammer to the society she did not believe in.”

Deborah Ross, writing a review of the film, The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher), page 88, The Spectator (behind the paywall). Here is the Spectator link for those who pay for the thing.

It is quite amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see how a writer such as Ms Ross is torn by her admiration for the film as a piece of moviemaking art and its sympathetic portrayal of Lady Thatcher, and her own leftist opinions concerning the alleged impact of this person on the United Kingdom (her remarks about the Falklands presumably indicate Ms Ross would have let the Argentine junta just take the Falklands, but she never tells us in the short space available).

As a free market liberal, I certainly do not revere this politician (the government share of GDP at the end of her time in office was barely different from at the start and some thumpingly bad domestic legislation, like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, got passed), but it is nevertheless rather striking how certain film critics have had their heads messed by this film.

I am definitely going to see it. US-based movie reviewer Kyle Smith really liked it, and for the sort of reasons that, I suspect, upset Ms Ross.

I rarely write about party politics as I think it is a waste of time, given that the two and a half main parties in Westminster are largely interchangeable and simply despise them all with an icy passion. But I will make an exception today...

Cameron, far from being a smart political operator, could not even gain a majority for his party against a detested Labour government at the last election. But by saying 'no' to Merkozy, he has actually done something that almost 60% of the country appear to approve of. And it has made his LibDem coalition partners publicly incandescent with rage... and therefore also uniquely vulnerable.

So the smart move is to finally tell Nick Clegg to get stuffed and to call a snap General Election. Go 'nuclear' and do it right now, whilst the advantage is for once very clearly in the Tory Party's court. If the LibDems and Labour want a shot at forming a coalition, well give them what will be a 'hospital pass' and let them try.

But then this is the Tory Party we are talking about of course, and it would be fair to say they rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. More likely he will just sit there looking smug and wait for the initiative to pass over to his political enemies once again.

I am on the Cobden Centre email list, and I have to be careful about confidentiality with regard to many of the emails I read. However, the one I just got today from Jamie Whyte is presumably intended to get around:

I'm on BBC's Radio 4's PM programme tonight, discussing the report on the FSA's failure to notice that RBS was about to fail - up against some former official of the FSA. I am afraid they are going to edit what I said (fingers crossed on that) and also that I cannot tell you the exact time my item will come on the programme, which starts at 5pm, I think.

The FSA is the British financial regulator. RBS is the Royal Bank of Scotland. According to the man from the FSA, the Royal Bank of Scotland's woes were caused by poor decisions.

I'm guessing that Jamie Whyte will be a bit more informative than that. I am out and about this evening, but it looks like there'll be a recording available, for a while. If nothing else, this is further evidence that the Cobden Centre gang are putting themselves about.

LATER: I managed to listen to Jamie Whyte's performance, and better, to record it. Here is what he said in his opening statement:

[The FSA] did fail. But I don't blame it on the individuals of the FSA. I think that they have an impossible task. What's happened in banking is that because of government guarantees to those people who lend money to banks, explicitly in the case of retail depositors – you and me with our ordinary money in the bank, and implicitly and pretty reliably in the case of wholesale lenders to banks, because they're government guaranteed, there is no price mechanism any longer in the banking market for risk. So banks can take as much risk as they like and without paying a price for it. Normally what would happen in a free market is that it would become more expensive for banks to borrow money. And that doesn't happen. There's no risk premium for banks taking larger risks, because the people lending the money realise that the government will bail them out.

Now the effect of this is that basically the government is subsidising bank risk taking on a massive scale. And the job of the FSA is to counteract that. There are these rules – the Basel rules and so on about capital requirements. And then there are supervisors, regulators, people who go into the banks and check they're complying, and their job is to counteract the massive incentive towards risk taking that the government has already provided. Now the question is: can they do it? They obviously failed to do it. Can they, if they do a better job? And I think they can't.

And the reason they can't is that there are almost infinitely many ways that banks can take risks. The rules will always specify some particular ways, and regulators will go in, looking at that stuff. Are they doing this or that? But the bankers are very clever and they can always come up with other ways of taking risks, and I just think it's a hopeless task that they've been given.

Whyte's opponent in the debate, a Mr Jackson, got off on the wrong foot at the start of his reply:

I think it's very easy to blame the regulators.

Which many are indeed doing, but not Jamie Whyte. His point was that their task is impossible.

Mr Jackson went on to say that he thought that the regulators could do better, by, you know, doing better. And the BBC gave him the last word. Which was him saying that the regulators could indeed … do better.

But Jackson never really said why he thought this. There was talk of cats and mice, and of how the mice are very numerous and very incentivised and the cats unable to cope. The general idea was aired of making regulators less numerous, better paid and above all "better trained", and of having these few regulatory titans apply only one simple all-embracing regulation, rather than lots of regulations (with lots of omissions), namely: Banks must behave well! Putting the regulators entirely in charge of banking, basically, although that was not quite spelt out. It was classic Road to Serfdom stroke Economic Calculation stuff, with one guy saying that calculation is screwed and should be unscrewed by the state retreating rather than advancing, and the other guy saying: we can still regulate better in the future (despite the evidence of the recent past), by making the arbitrary power of the state even more arbitrary and even more powerful (and hence even more likely to screw things up on an even grander scale in the future).

Just who "won" this argument is anybody's bet. I think that Whyte made a much stronger case than his opponent, but I would, wouldn't I?

More to the point, anyone generally inclined to favour free markets, capitalism, etc., to favour rational economic calculation and to oppose serfdom, would definitely have scored it a win for Whyte on points. Such a person might even want to dig further into the argument with some internet searching. At which point the fact that Whyte is spelt with a "y", and that Whyte was introduced only as a "financial commentator" (rather than being from, say, the Cobden Centre) won't have helped any.

Perhaps this posting will help such searchers after truth rather more.

Knowing my fondness for pictures of London's Big Things, taken from irregular places, South African blogger 6k (a scroll down there is recommended) has just emailed me with a link to this Daily Telegraph picture, which is a view from near the top of London's BT Tower, of such things as the Gherkin, the more distant Docklands Towers, and the now nearly completed Shard. Yes indeed, well worth a click and a look. I know I've said it many times before, but I love how, with this new internet thing they've installed recently, people six thousand miles away can email you to tell you about interesting things in your own back yard.

But the real story here is not the view from the BT Tower. It is what the view of the BT Tower is going to look like from now on, and why:

BT Tower press officer Ian Reed said: "The huge dishes are synonymous with the tower and it truly is the end of an era. With the introduction of fibreoptic cable, the satellites have been defunct for many years and have reached the end of their lifetime. People will remember the dishes from when they were children - they were responsible for 90 per cent of the TV shown in the country. They were a landmark and could be seen all over London."

I had no idea this was going to happen. [LATER: And either the DT or Ian Reed has it wrong also. As commenter Roue de Jour explains: "They're not satellite dishes they're microwave dishes. They point to similar dishes on masts on a line-of-sight. Satellites are not involved in any way."]

Here are a couple of before and after shots of the Tower, how it looked and how it now looks. And here are two shots I took of this tower, with its big dishes, in February 2006.

I wonder what will happen next? Will they just fill in the gaps with dreary windows and office space? Or will new and different high tech contraptions be installed? I fear and expect the former, but hope for the latter.

LATER: See also another amazing London tower picture, the very first one of these. Those are the Docklands towers.

Unless, of course, you are saying that people can freely come to these islands providing they are not ill, don't ever require homes or need education then it is fine because these services are not benefits.

Pretty much, yes. I think that people should be able to freely come to these islands to earn a living, and then should be required to pay for their own housing, schooling, and healthcare in the free market when they need it. As should the natively born. The government spends huge sums of money on these things, and all three of them are worse in quality for almost everybody than they would be if the government did not spend any of this money.

- Michael Jennings, spelling out exactly what folks in these here parts most certainly do think.

Here is what London's Metropolitan Police say about stop and search:

Being stopped does not mean you are under arrest or have done something wrong. In some cases, people are stopped as part of a wide-ranging effort to catch criminals in a targeted public place. A police officer, or a community support officer must have a good reason for stopping or searching you and they are required to tell you what that reason is.

Reasons include that the police officer thinks you are carrying drugs, or there has been violence or disorder in the vicinity.

It is safe to say that stop and search is a really bad idea. It is reasonable to expect to be left alone by the authorities when you are going about your lawful business. However:

Of the Reading the Riots interviewees, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the past 12 months – they were more than eight times more likely than the general population in London to have been stopped and searched in the previous year.

Reading the Riots is a report by the Guardian and the London School of Economics who interviewed 270 rioters to find out why they said they rioted. One could argue that cause and effect are reversed; the rioters are criminals and that is why they get stopped and searched a lot.

Theodore Dalrymple, who I do not think is right about everything but is right about a lot, analyses what he calls the underclass in his book Life at the Bottom. Reading through some of the quotes from rioters in the Guardian, his analysis rings true. The essence of it is that people have decided that bad things just happen to them and it is not their fault. Their view of themselves as victims is reinforced by their social workers who get their ideas from articles in the Guardian.

From the Guardian's report of the research:

Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others.

This sense of being treated unfairly is exactly the victimhood mind-set. As for jobs, Dalrymple writes:

the unemployed young person considers the number of jobs in an economy as a fixed quantity. Just as the national income is a cake to be doled out in equal or unequal slices, so the number of jobs in an economy has nothing to do with the conduct of the people who live in it but is immutably fixed. This is a concept of the way the world works that has been assiduously peddled, not only in schools during ‘social studies’ but in the media of mass communication.

So stop stopping and searching because it is a good idea anyway, but they will find other excuses to riot.

Leo Hickman of the Guardian is apparently angry (as Bishop Hill mentions here) that the Spectator published an article by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, an article I recycled the concluding paragraphs of as a(n) SQotD here on Thursday, and Leo Hickman isn't the only one. The general mood in the CAGW camp is: get Mörner!

To this end a commenter ("schoolswot" – today 11:10am) at Delingpole said this of Mörner:

This is the guy that claims that dowsing works but doesn't actually want to prove it?

To which commenter "rastech" (circa 1pm) replied:

Dowsing does work, and you can prove it yourself (everybody can do it, some are just better at it than others).

The guy that taught me how to do it (yeah I was surprised I could do it), was a water well driller. He told me exactly where the springs were that he was going to drill, where two springs crossed, their depth (18ft and 24ft), how much water an hour they would produce to start with (it improves the more you pump), PLUS, where there was an even better spring to drill, if those two didn't work out (it would have been twice as expensive to drill it, as it was almost 50ft deep) too reliable, as they were both in sandstone (but ideal for drinking water as it is beautifully filtered - you should taste the tea!).

He was spot on (you know when you hit a spring as the colour of the rock changes as you go through it - I watched every stage from start to finish on many wells with him, as all my neighbours had boreholes drilled by him and I helped him with them, as he got me practicing the dowsing on them).

Let me guess, from a position of complete ignorance and inexperience in the subject, you are an 'expert', right?

Well don't feel bad about it, I felt exactly the same until I felt that damned divining rod dive for the deck with me holding it.

PS. What convinced me to try him, wasn't a money back guarantee. I didn't have to pay him AT ALL until he had delivered a good water supply. He got years of work in the area from that borehole, and he never let anybody down.

So, it's now officially official. Dowsing, like cold weather, is now right wing.

All this in a comment thread attached to a Delingpole piece about Jeremy Clarkson, and about how all the shouting about Jeremy Clarkson is really about diverting attention from the fact that the recent public sector strike, some time last week, was a failure. Although, Guido reckons Clarkson is now laughing all the way to the bank. They haven't so much diverted attention from the failure of their strike as given a ton of free publicity to someone who said, admittedly in his characteristically OTT manner, that the strikers were idiots.

Please try to keep your comments on topic. The topics being: Leo Hickman, the Guardian, Nils-Axel Mörner, dowsing, whether tea really does taste better if made with water filtered through sandstone, James Delingpole, the BBC, public sector strikes, Jeremy Clarkson, whether it's okay for Jeremy Clarkson to joke about people being taken out and shot without really meaning it, Guido Fawkes, how to get tabloid publicity by the ton, paper money collapse … well, I didn't mention paper money collapse until now, but I thought I ought to.

Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Tim Blair have described the universe. Blair's Law is "the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force".

On the 15th November, the Guardian gave over its comment pages to people from Occupy London. Most of the resulting articles were produced by earnest but weak-minded hippies. Two of the articles made the hippies look sensible.

The first of these was sad. It was the last of a set of three mini-articles by Occupiers on welfare, education and law; the law part being by written by a person "commonly known as dom." It is important to him that you use that formulation, including the lack of an initial capital letter. He says,

Most days I walk around the site teaching people about the legal system, about the law, about how they're being enslaved by a body of rules and statutory instruments. The prison without bars is made by bits of paper.

Bits of paper like your birth certificate. All registered names are Crown copyright. The legal definition of registration is transfer of title ownership, so anything that's registered is handed over to the governing body; the thing itself is no longer yours. When you register a car, you're agreeing to it not being yours – they send you back a form saying you're the "registered keeper". It's a con. That's why I say I've never had a name.

I must stress that I do not dispute the right of the entity commonly known as dom to call himself what he pleases, and in politeness I shall act in accordance with his preferences if ever I meet him. Apparently he wears one of those jester's hats with bells on it. Later in the piece he suggests that we google "lawful rebellion". I did, and soon it came to me that I had heard that phrase before, on this post and others on the EU Referendum site. That post in turn links to a site called The British Constitution Group. One glance at the site is enough to show its appeal to libertarians, Tory Anarchists and allied trades. I want to like it. I'm usually a complete sucker for a bit of Magna Carta and the Rights of Englishmen. But on reading around the various links within the site, not that complete. Someone has been reading too much Artemis Fowl. In those books, if you recall, a fairy cannot enter a human dwelling unless invited in. In the British Constitution Group website under the heading "CONSENT - The Most Important Word in the English Language" you will see the following:

An essential part of the arrest procedure is to read you your rights and then ask you ‘do you understand’ – the word ‘understand’ is synonymous with ‘stand-under’ – they are asking you whether you are prepared to ‘stand-under’ their authority... and when you answer yes – you are giving your consent.

...And because Persephone had eaten food in Hades, be it only six pomegranate seeds, she was doomed to return there. The concept of the hero being safe so long as he does not inadvertently perform some symbolic act that gives his enemies power over him is an ancient one and has great mythic power, but do not try this on irritable cops late at night.

The second Guardian article, by one Jon Witterick, was more clued-up and more sinister than the one by t.p.c.k.a.dom. Its title is Yes, defaulting on debts is an option. At first I thought it was about the financial situation in Greece and passed on to another story, thus nearly missing the tale of how Jon Witterick has avoided paying his debts and how, he claims, you can too. The key idea seems to be that debts cannot be sold on, and once again we meet the concept that you are safe so long as you do not speak the forbidden words:

I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed

Topping and tailing this admission of fraud and theft are a genuinely pitiable account of what it is like to be pursued by debt collectors and a genuinely repulsive attempt to argue that his decision not to pay what he owes is Iceland writ small. He does not say what he spent the money on, back before he decided it was not real.

Witterick's website, to which I prudishly will not link, contains the following message:

Your Credit Card Agreement is an unlawful contract as it is ONLY signed by you- constituting a unilateral agreement. (Contract Law)

All contracts, in order to be valid, must be signed by someone able to bind the corporation in contract. (Contract Law)

Banks create money out of thin air- they have no money to lend you. (Fractional Reserve Banking)

It is not possible to actually pay the outstanding amount as the currency is based on worthless paper and 'electronic funds' on computers. (Fractional Reserve Banking)

You do not have to pay statements, only invoices. (Bills of Exchange Act 1882)

You are not lawfully bound to pay anything which is unsigned. (Bills of Exchange Act 1882)

The uppercase name on the credit card is not your name, but a 'corporate entity'. (Blacks Law Dictionary)

The banks have been so desperate to get us into debt, that they sold people mortgages, who they knew could NEVER afford to pay them back.

The governments are so desperate to keep this racket going, that they will bail out ANY bank that gets into trouble! Being in debt is one of the consequences of playing the game

Why do you think your government is in debt?

There is not enough Money in circulation for everyone to pay off ALL the debts!

The whole system is totally fraudulent...

There are a few small nuggets of sense floating in a stew of foolishness there. You can see why Witterick was welcomed to lecture at Occupy's Tent City University, and you can also see why it might appeal to some here.

However if anyone reading this is in debt and desperate, be advised that following his legal advice will make your situation worse. (You would be far better off speaking to The Consumer Credit Counselling Service. You will not be charged for their advice, and, for those who care about such things, this body is funded by the credit industry, not the taxpayer.) The strategies Witterick advises might have worked for the first few people who tried them, as debt collectors decided to go for easier targets. But they, and judges, can spot a "freeman" a mile off now. Calling yourself "john:smith" or "John of the family Smith" does not hack it any more. The Guardian partly redeemed itself for publishing Witterick by also publishing this response by a legal blogger. The comments to both Witterick's piece and the response are also well worth reading. Even Guardian readers normally sympathetic to the Occupy movement thought Witterick was a charlatan.

I wish I did not have a presentiment that some people with whom I share many beliefs will be hurt by this post.

Nice comment at the Bishop's, on this, about "Climategate 2", from "simon" (4:35pm):

I so hate it when my vicar quotes from the Bible. I can't take such quotes seriously as they are out of context.

Perhaps the institution of the Samizdata quote of the day should be abolished. Time and time again, we here quote quotes, out of context.

Not all of the snippets that are now doing the rounds of the anti-CAGW blogosphere strike me as being as damning as some of them are. But, if anyone chooses to wonder about the degree of wickedness revealed by any particular snippet, it is the work of a moment for that person to find the context, this being one of the features of the internet. Provided, in presenting your preferred snippet, you supply the means of inspecting its context, then you have at least supplied the means by which your interpretation of the snippet may be challenged. And some of the snippets are very damning indeed.

If you are caught saying you are guilty only half as many times as the prosecution lawyer says you have been caught, that still makes you guilty.

Earlier in the thread, Viv Evans (4:02pm) says:

This 'out-of-context' excuse is favoured and generally used by shifty politicians who try to defend their misdeeds.

Indeed. And shifty politicians is exactly what these people are.

I trust that simon and Viv Evans will forgive me for quoting them out of context.

... because "This is private property" or any other version of "You have no right to be here" are open to some fairly obvious ripostes.
"We were here first" - "Er, not quite first. The actual owners of the space were there before you."
"We are the 99%" - "We're poorer than you, you middle class ****-ers"
"We represent the 99%" - "Who voted for you, then?"
"We are the official accredited Occupiers" - "We refuse to be defined by your oppressive structures, and hereby declare ourselves to be Occupying this Occupation!"

I have been reading the minutes of the General Assembly of the Occupy protesters who have taken over the empty UBS bank building in Sun Street, Hackney. One area of concern does seem to be people "abusing the space".

If people want to stay over night (sleep-overs) they need (1) to be part of a working group (2) They need to have an on-going task that warrants their stay. There will be ‘monitors’ to make sure sleep-overs are not abusing the space. Individuals that stay over and are found to not be working will be given one warning before being asked to leave.

And if they say no, what then? When a warning is given, it must be a warning of something. Presumably it is a warning that the bigger group of Occupiers will eject the smaller group of Occupiers - because they can.

Unless, of course, they can't. If a fight develops, what then? Call the cops? Problem with that.

The Daily Telegraph has an article defending the idea that general practitioners can and sometimes do out-earn the banking business. Of course, people have not traditionally gone into the medical field looking to make millions, although some innovators of medical patents, for instance, may have done just that. Generally speaking, I take the view that so long as doctors are operating in a free market, then what they receive is a matter of indifference to me. Good luck to those who do well, I say. If we had a genuine market in healthcare, then the high salaries paid to the best doctors would, in time, attract bright people to become doctors rather than say, derivatives traders, or whatever.

Of course, this is not the present situation. With many doctors, their pay is partly driven by their membership of a restricted profession and in the case of the UK, by the money spent by the taxpayer. And as for bankers, or at least some of them, they too benefit from the privileged access to central banking funding of their employers, from bailouts, from barriers to entry erected by regulators, and so on. So if people in Wall Street and the City do get sniffy about how much the men and women in white coats sometimes get paid, remember, they are not quite operating in a free market world, either.

"This sub-prime revival is part of an alleged "growth package" which will have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. It will further stoke inflation, inflict more misery on savers (pensioners especially) and further distort the market mechanisms whose proper functioning is vital to our economic recovery. One might expect this kind of crazed Keynesian recklessness from President Obama: he does at least have the excuse of being a Marxist, hell bent on destroying the US economy, with Paul Krugman as his adviser. But Cameron? Please can someone, anyone, explain what exactly the point is of voting in a conservative prime minister if he won't cut taxes, won't deregulate, won't support free markets, won't promote sensible energy policies, won't defend Britain's interests in Europe, won't in fact do anything that Ed Miliband wouldn't have done in the same position. And at least Ed Miliband has the decency to admit to being a socialist, so we'd know more or less what we were getting."

James Delingpole.

Our own Perry de Havilland had Cameron more or less figured out in January, 2006. I have had no reason, and neither has Perry, to change my mind about him.

“As the Church of England keeps telling us how much it shares the aims of the St Paul’s protestors, I notice an advertisement in the Financial Times. The Church Commissioners need a chief operating officer. He will be paid a `six figure salary’, says the advertisement, to manage their `£5 billion multi-asset portfolio’. There is no mention of anything Christian, or even anything ethical. The language is all management-speak. The ideal candidate will have a `proven track record of driving continuous and consistent operational performance’. The job’s responsibilities include `to build and maintain internal controls and process and to lead a no-surprises culture’. Although it is pretty hard to reconcile a `no-surprises culture’ with the mystery of the Incarnation, one must admit that it might have come in useful in dealing these various `occupations’. As well as St Paul’s, there is no one else outside Bristol, Exeter and Sheffield Cathedrals. You have only to study the websites of the various Occupy groups across the country to see that they, too, stick to a no-surprises culture. Events include Palestine Solidarity Campaign rallies, performances by Billy Bragg, strikers’ benefit gigs, meetings of the Anti-Cuts Alliance. They are not forerunners of a Second Coming: they are the usual suspects. There is nothing unchristian about rounding them up (caringly, of course).”

Charles Moore, page 11 of Spectator, 19 November. (This is behind the magazine’s pay-wall. Be grateful to your humble Samizdata scribe for re-typing these words from the dead-tree version).

I like the point about Billy Bragg. He’s in danger of becoming a “national treasure”.

I remember, about a quarter of a century ago, speculating that the way things were heading, in Britain, all "drugs" would eventually be legal, except tobacco. We seem …

All smoking in cars should be banned across the UK to protect people from second-hand smoke, doctors say.

The British Medical Association called for the extension of the current ban on smoking in public places after reviewing evidence of the dangers.

… to be on course for exactly this arrangement:

Ex-MI5 chief Baroness Manningham-Buller is set to call for cannabis to be decriminalised in a speech.

The crossbench peer believes that only by regulating the sale of cannabis can its psychotic effects be controlled.

She is also expected to say the "war on drugs" has been "fruitless".

I am reluctant to urge consistency in these matters. That might mean them banning the lot, which actually seems a rather more likely outcome. And note that the Baroness favours legalisation because illegal drugs are the sort over which They have less control. So both proclamations are consistent with one another, in wanting Them to have more control.

"A paramedic was also told to remove his harness and halt an attempt to reach Mrs Hume because he was not familiar with fire service equipment"

That is from a report in the Herald on the Fatal Accident Enquiry carried out by Sheriff Desmond Leslie on the slow death of Alison Hume while the Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service read up about "the parameters of their engagement" and concluded that these did not include her rescue. She was eventually pulled out by a police mountain rescue team, but by that time hypothermia had taken hold. She died of a heart attack in hospital.

Sheriff Leslie said that some degree of “imagination, flexibility and adaptability were necessary” in conducting a rescue of this kind. He described “a preoccupation with adherence to Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service policy which was entirely detached from the event with which Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service was confronted.”

He said: “There was clearly a balance to be struck between the interests and safety of the rescuers, and those of the casualty they were there to rescue.”

Sheriff Leslie directly criticised two senior officers, group commanders Paul Stewart and William Thomson, for their attitudes at the inquiry. He said they were “focused on self-justification for the action or non-action taken by them”.

The sheriff said: “I found their evidence to be bullish, if not arrogant, in their determination to justify the subservience of the need to carry out a rescue to the letter of Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service Brigade policy.”

It is good that the sheriff has named names. There is precious little penalty other than public shame that will touch a public sector employee who has adhered to procedure. Although the report says that criminal charges "may be brought", I have a presentiment that the route between the Procurator Fiscal's office and the criminal courts will turn out to be full of deep holes that an embarrassing report can fall down.

The Fire Brigades Union also made a contribution:

John Duffy, of the Fire Brigades Union Scotland, said: “If we are going to do these specialist rescues you need specialist teams who know what they are doing and know how to use the equipment. We have three statutory functions – to fight fires, prevent fires and deal with road accidents. The problem is we are being asked to do a whole range of duties with no more funding.”

As a commenter to the Herald story suggests, specialist equipment sat there unused and highly trained men sat there debating while Alison Hume slowly died beneath their feet.

Some past Samizdata posts that are also relevant: Alameda County Cowards, We have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety, and my first Loss of nerve post.

This evening I dined with a friend, and on my way there took this snap of an Evening Standard headline. A couple of years ago I thought that the Evening Standard itself - never mind these billboards - would soon be extinct. But although diminished in number, these headlines are still a familiar part of the London scene, now as then usually telling of catastrophe of one kind or another, public or personal. This evening's offering was no exception:

Here's the story. Depending on your preferred explanation for this sad circumstance, you'll pick out a different bit of the story. I pick this:

The shocking new total was published today as Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King warned Britain is in danger of sliding back into recession.

He downgraded his growth forecasts again, saying the economy will expand by one per cent this year and next, a fraction of the hoped-for rate.

As Instpundit would say: Unexpectedly! It would appear that quantitative easing is proving less than completely stimulating. We here are not shocked by this bad unemployment news.

For a little light relief, here's a snap I took later, on my way home:

The advertising trade was bound to take advantage sooner or later of the wave of health and safety signage that is such a feature of British life just now. This is the first time I've noticed it, but I'm sure others have seen such things many times already.

I have long thought, first, that the United Kingdom has for some time been heading towards being the Non-United Kingdom, and second, that this would probably be a very good thing.

If such a separation is indeed happening, then what is causing it is the end of the British Empire. That and what followed around half a century later (i.e. around now), probably as an inevitable next step, namely the abandonment of the English-stroke-British attempt to remain a top ranking Great Power.

The British Empire meant that lots of Scots wanted to be attached to England, to get in on all the deals involved. Then Britain, empireless but still trying to remain a Great Power, needed Scotland to remain in. Scotland provided and still provides military manpower, and projected and still projects British power in northerly and westerly and easterly directions, in a way that England without Scotland will never be able to match. Could England without Scotland (to say nothing of Northern Ireland) have won the Battle of Atlantic? Hardly. Could England then have even threatened to win the re-run of that battle that from the end of WW2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, dominated British naval thinking, and Britain's strategic thinking generally? Again, hardly. For as long as the Cold War lasted, the English plus whichever local allies went along with them, were determined to square up to the Russians and thus keep their seat at that Top Table that politicians are all so very keen to be seen sitting at. A dis-United Kingdom was a non-starter, for contriving all that.

But now? Russia remains a looming monster, or a huge wreck if you prefer the Perry de Havilland take on Russia, which I think I probably do. But even if you think that Russia remains very strong, it no longer fancies itself as a global ideological magnet, bankrolling and talking up every nutter in the civilised world with a mad plan to derange civilisation. It no longer even goes through the motions of attempting to conquer everywhere else. Russia is now just another Problem, along with government debt and bank turmoil, the Euro, the Dollar, the Pound, China, energy shortages or "climate change" (again according to taste), crime, schools'n'hospitals, etc. etc. etc., rather than The Problem.

The global ideological derangement torch has now been seized by Mad Mullahs, and they won't be re-fighting the Battle of the Atlantic any time soon. Nor do they have nearly so many nuclear bombs, or nearly such potent means of chucking them about in the world. They require very different strategies. Given the weaknesses and difficulties faced by the Mad Mullahs, and given the weaknesses and difficulties faced by us, their enemies, I wouldn't now want to call them anything more than just another Problem, among all the others.

Other career paths for English politicians to that Top Table have since been identified, based less on British power and more on personal skills and individual contributions to the new global elite. To put it bluntly, you don't need to be part of one of the old empires in order to participate in running the New World Order.

England's Great Power-ish inclined warriors and foreigner-scarers, of greatly varying social grandeur from Air Marshals to ex-army pub landlords to army-fan dog-owning T-shirted denizens of south of England housing estates, are being presented with a fait accompli. This warrior tendency has traditionally been very pro the Union with Scotland, but is now being being starved of resources and humiliated by its consequent failures to make very effective uses even of those resources that it does still receive. Its last serious throw of the dice was the Falklands War. Since then, Britain been militarily "powerful" by supporting America, which is not nearly so satisfying, or so impressive to spectators. Britain's more recent military escapades, against those Mad Mullahs, seem to have accomplished, and to be accomplishing, less and less with each passing year. Chasing terrorists in foreign parts is all well and good, but it seems foolish to be trying to impose democracy upon such places as Afghanistan, given the problems we now have domestically. And even if you don't agree about that, you can hardly deny that most English people surely now do think thus. The Will to Great Power, to adapt Nietzsche, seems more and more to be lacking in Britain. Too costly. Not worth it. Time to consign all that to the history books.

And with it, the overriding imperative for England and Scotland to remain politically attached to one another.

Meanwhile, that strand of English opinion which favours trade, free markets, and so on, is, in the absence of any continuing great power logic to justify union with Scotland, likely to become ever more irked but it. This tradesman tendency, so to speak, of free market inclined businessmen, City of Londoners, shopkeepers, and bookish students who like reading Hayek and Friedman and, these days, clicking onto mises.org, has lately suffered a severe dose of Scottish moralistic … I don't think anti-Englishness is too strong a phrase for it, at the hated hands of Gordon Brown. More and more they (and count me in too) now think: well Jock, if you want out, then you just go ahead and get out. We might then get the sort of government we want, instead of having our choice vetoed by you all the time.

The above thoughts were triggered again in my head just last week, by a recent report (thank you Bishop Hill), which said that if Scotland does go independent, it will as a direct consequence have to stop being nearly as crackpottedly ridiculous as it is now about "renewable" energy, i.e. the sort of energy of which there is not now and for the foreseeable future never will be enough. Suddenly, I found myself becoming a passionate Scottish Nationalist, if only to put the wind up the idiotic wind-farmer tendency. Although, Bishop Hill jokes that such greenery in Scotland is actually a plan to keep the Union with Scotland going, by making Scottish independence impossible.

For wind-farming in particular, read Scottish economic thought and policy generally. Libertarians like me have another reason to want to see Scotland separate itself from England, which is that once the indignity of being told by annoying English people like me to favour more rational economic theories and economic policies has been removed, the Scots, once independent, will then almost certainly become far more ready to tell each other to think and to behave in an economically more sane manner.

If Scotland goes independent, then Scotland will, for reasons of sheer economic self-preservation, have to stop being a huge drag on the global pro-free-market tendency in general and the libertarian movement in particular, and might even become a net contributor to such tendencies. Again.

Final thought. Where will all this leave UKIP? Changing its name for a start. But then, as the EIP, much more likely to get what it wants. And that's another reason for England to eject Scotland from its union with England. It would then be a lot easier for England to eject itself from the EU.

Given the proximity of Remembrance Day (11 November), there is something particularly nasty about the theft of metal from war memorials. With prices of some metals at high levels, thieves are tempted to desecrate such things, as well as steal bells from churches, and so on. Boris Johnson is in trenchant form on the subject today.

Once again, I am reminded of how awful a lot of the comments on the Daily Telegraph now are, as shown by much of the commentary linked to BJ's piece. A lot of the sentiment is to the effect that all this thieving is caused by immigrants. But as one person put it, to steal scrap metal, you need scrap dealers, and they are, often as not, from the indigenous population. It is not as if thieving is something invented by people who come to this nation from abroad.

Via CityAM, here is an interesting article about the UK's own space industry. It is bigger than might be supposed from first glance.

(Thanks to my good friend Tim Evans, over at the Adam Smith Institute and the Cobden Centre, for the pointer).

BTW, one of the big places for registering space-related companies these days is the Isle of Man. No doubt, in centuries to come, the Tranzis will be trying to shut down tax havens in outer space.

Favourite climate-related quote of the week so far:

The claim that AGW is consistent with heavier snowfalls wasn't mainstream until it needed to be true.

It's a comment, from Nicholas Hallam, on this, at Bishop Hill. Heh.

Although, actually, the recent Bishop Hill posting that I find most interesting is this one, which is about a bunch of solar power grant guzzlers begging to have their grants renewed at the level they have become accustomed to. Something along those lines. The absence of any widespread public support for these chancers will reveal just what a propaganda beating the greenies have been taking for the last few years, not least from blogs like this one. Most people will react to these green supplications, if they react at all, only by saying something like: "Oh you're losing your jobs, bad luck, join the club, but actually what we really don't like is our fuel bills doubling."

Until now, it's all been sane people begging the politicians to stop chucking money down the green drain. Now the politicians are starting to rearrange things a tiny bit against the interests of some of the politically less well connected greenies, and these greenies are now also starting to beg. Yes, folks, it's the reversing of the burden of proof. We no longer have to convince them that all that "settled science" isn't so settled after all. They have to convince us that they aren't scam artists. Or deluding themselves. Or a bit of both. Good luck guys.

Billions are still being tipped down the green drain. This is only the very beginning of the end of the great green scam, which will probably never completely disappear. But, once the politicians realise how little support there is for green subsidies, they will get bolder, and cut them some more. And the greenies will scream some more. And the arms of the general public will remain folded, their faces blank with contempt.

About time.

LATER: More:

"We built a business on the back of David Cameron's promises. He has betrayed us twice. Anybody thinking of investing in government-sponsored green opportunities, I would advise them to run away."

Or government-sponsored anything else, come to that. Welcome to politics, mate.

This is priceless. It is a Friday, and it is good to have a laugh, even of a dark sort. Halloween’s on the way:

“Sir, I am saddened by the naivety of William Cash in juxtaposing wind farms and housing development as comparable threats to “our heritage”. If we do not tackle climate change there will be no heritage worth preserving, and probably no one around to appreciate the old piles. Not to mention, in the interim, the untold suffering caused to countries more immediately affected, such as Pakistan and the Horn of Africa. Opposing means of reducing carbon emissions is little better, where the likely consequences for human beings are concerned, than appeasing Hitler. Wind turbines are not, actually, particularly ugly, and certainly less so than the pylons we have lived with for decades.”

A letter from “Antony Black”, of Dundee, published in the 22 October print edition of the Spectator, page 30.

I love the way that this man likens skeptical views on Man-made global warming, and resistence to things like giant windmills, to the appeasement of a proven thug. It is worth quoting people like this man, not because it will have the slightest effect in changing their views, which constitute religious belief in its mix of fervour, self-righteousness and faux-rationality, but because it is important to show how such seemingly articulate people can believe such tosh, and get it printed in what is a relatively respectable publication.

James Delingpole, the British journalist, has a good take on the sort of folk that form part of the Climate Change alarmist crowd.

Snapped by me earlier this evening:

One of the key arguments in Detlev Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse concerns the oft-repeated claim that the world's central bankers won't allow inflation to get out of control, because they are fully aware of what a very bad thing it is. But what if they also fear something else that they regard as even worse? Like the monster economic correction that a decades-long policy of easy money is now demanding, from the entire world?

The huge pile of paper next to this Evening Standard billboard seems rather appropriate, I think.

Instapundit chooses the first few sentences of this piece about the Occupy Wall Street … thing, to recycle. But my favourite bit is where George Will summarises the OWS position:

Washington is grotesquely corrupt and insufficiently powerful.

I also agree with the following comment, which was attached to this:

The reason why these occupiers are getting so much attention is that the mainstream media think they're not idiots and are advertising them, and the right wing alternative media know that they are idiots and are advertising them.

Which says part of what George Will said, and which I agree with because I wrote it.

It is, when you think about it, easier to write about something that is rather small. When you encounter an OWS event, you can listen to anyone there who wants to say anything in about ten minutes. Compare that with working out what the hell everyone thinks at a Tea Party get-together. To do an honest job on that you have to be there for hours.

But then again, these protesters are not, perhaps, all of them, complete idiots. They are very right that things have gone very wrong.

We're due an OWS copycat demo here in London this weekend. Someone called Peter Hodgson, of UK Uncut, is calling for, among other things, "an end to austerity", by which he means him and his friends keeping their useless jobs for ever. Good luck with that, mate.

There is actually some overlap between what some of these Occupy London characters may or may not be saying this weekend, and what my team says about it all.

Laura Taylor, a supporter of the so-called OccupyLSX, said: "Why are we paying for a crisis the banks caused? More than a million people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of homes have been repossessed, while small businesses are struggling to survive.

"Yet bankers continue to make billions in profit and pay themselves enormous bonuses, even after we bailed them out with £850 billion."

It's like the Tea Party in Britain is too small, and has to climb aboard Occupy London. Well, maybe not, because Laura Taylor neglects to mention the role of the world's governments in setting the various trains in this giant train-wreck in motion. Who caused the banks to cause this crisis? That's what my team wants to add. The banks were only doing what the politicians had long been incentivising them to do, and the banks are doing that still. The banks are only to blame for this mess in the sense that they are now paying the politicians to keep it going. But that is quite a big blame, I do agree.

So anyway, the British government, like the US government, is now also grotesquely corrupt, and it should jolly well pull its socks up, its finger out and itself together. And then be hung from lamp posts.

Seriously, I remember back at Essex University in the early 1970s how the Lenin-with-hair tendency thought that the answer to every problem in the world then was to occupy something, fill it with rubbish and then bugger off and plan their next stupid occupation. They were tossers then, and they, their children and their grandchildren are tossers now. Farce repeating itself as farce.

Maybe I'll dress up (as in: down) in shabby clothes and sandals with no socks (which I would never dream of doing normally) and join in, with a camera. Although, I promise nothing, because this weekend there is also the Rugby World Cup semi-finals to be attending to.

Somehow, this man, Eoin, appears to be so thick (he's a Doctor, apparently) that I fear he should be banned from handling heavy machinery:

"We are taught by Cameron to regard small businesses as the engine room of entrepreneurial spirit in the UK. We are led to believe that their inventions, wealth creation and profits lead to employment and growth. But this is the stuff of fantasy. Three quarters of the 4.5million businesses in the UK employ no one. Their wealth creation serves their own ends. They create no jobs and do nothing to solve youth unemployment. The vast majority of small businessmen are in business for themselves. Evidence of civic virtue or a desire to create jobs is in preciously short supply and thus Cameron was wrong to shrug off record rises in youth unemployment as something that could readily be solved by small business."

So my wife, for example, who set up her own business (marketing for SMEs) has done nothing to reduce unemployment. So all those people who, for example, lost a job at a firm and who set up on their own are not doing anything to reduce unemployment unless they employ someone? Is this man for real?

Of course, given the job-destroying impact of red tape, employment protections on full-time and part-time staff, taxes, and so on, it sometimes is a marvel that anyone ever gets a paid job at all. I am a minority owner, and employee, of a small business in wealth management/media sector and every decision on hiring someone is taken with the utmost care, since it is difficult to fire someone if they are not up to scratch.

There are times when I fear that some people out there are so fucking stupid that Darwinian ideas of natural selection are in need of revision.

Thanks to Tim Worstall for spotting this piece of lunacy.

Yesterday afternoon, I attended the meeting at the House of Commons that I flagged up here a few days earlier. It was a fairly low key affair, attended by about thirty people or more. Not being a regular attender of such events, I can't really be sure what it all amounted to. Things happen at meetings that you don't see. Minds get changed, in silence. Connections are made, afterwards. You do not see everything.

But what I think I saw was this.

The first thing to clarify is that this was the Detlev Schlichter show. Steve Baker MP was a nearly silent chairman. Tim Evans was a brief warm-up act. Schlichter's pessimism about the world economy was the heart of the matter. He did almost all the talking, and I believe he did it very well.

It's not deliberate on his part. Schlichter just talks the way he talks. But his manner is just right for politicians, because he doesn't shout, and because he so obviously knows what he is talking about, what with his considerable City of London experience, and that flawless English vocabulary spoken in perfect English but with that intellectually imposing German accent. He foresees monetary catastrophe, but although he has plenty to say about politics, and about how politics has politicised money, he is not trying to be any sort of politician himself. Basically, he thinks they're boxed in, and when asked for advice about how to change that, he can do nothing beyond repeating that they are boxed in and that monetary catastrophe does indeed loom. But what all this means, for his demeanour at events like this one, is that he doesn't nag the politicians or preach at them or get in any way excited, because he expects nothing of them; he merely answers whatever questions they may want to ask him. He regards them not as stage villains but as fellow victims of an historic upheaval. Despite the horror of what he is saying, they seem to like that. He didn't spend the last two months cajoling his way into the House of Commons. He was simply asked in, and he said yes, I'll do my best.

Present at the meeting were about five MPs, besides Steve Baker MP I mean, which is a lot less than all of them, but a lot more than none.

One, a certain Mark Garnier MP, seemed to be quite disturbed by what he was hearing, as in disturbed because he very much feared that what he was hearing might be true. Mark Garnier MP is a member of the Treasury Select Committee, which I am told is very significant.

Another MP present, John Redwood, was only partially in agreement with Shlichter. He agrees that there is a debt crisis, but doesn't follow Schlichter to the point of seeing this as a currency crisis. In other words, Redwood thinks we have a big problem, but Schlichter thinks the problem is massively bigger than big.

Redwood was also confused by Schlichter's use of the phrase "paper money", by which Redwood thought Schlichter meant, well, paper money. Redwood pointed out, quite correctly, that paper money that has hundred percent honest promises written on it, to swap the paper money in question for actual gold, is very different from the paper money we now have, which promises nothing. Redwood also pointed out that most of the "elastic" (the other and probably better description of junk money that Schlichter supplies in the title of his book) money that we now have is mostly purely virtual additions to electronically stored bank balances. We don't, said Redwood, want to go back to a world without credit cards or internet trading! All of which was immediately conceded by Schlichter, and none of which makes a dime of difference to the rightness or wrongness of what Schlichter is actually saying; these are mere complaints about how he says it. Such complaints may be justified, given how inexactly "paper money" corresponds to the kind of money that Schlichter is actually complaining about. But Redwood seemed to imagine that what he said about what he took "paper money" to mean refuted the substance of what Schlichter said. Odd.

For me, the most interesting person present was James Delingpole. (It was while looking to see if Delingpole had said anything about this meeting himself that earlier today got me noticing this.) The mere possibility that Delingpole might now dig into what Schlichter, and all the other Austrianists before him, have been saying about money and banking was enough to make me highly delighted to see him there, insofar as anything about this deeply scary story can be said to be delightful. But it got better. I introduced myself to Delingpole afterwards, and he immediately told me that he considered this the biggest story now happening in the world. So, following his book and before that his blogging about red greenery, Delingpole's next Big Thing may well prove to be world-wide monetary melt-down. I would love to read a money book by Delingpole as good and as accessible as Watermelons. If Delingpole's red greenery stuff is anything to go by, the consequences in terms of public understanding and public debate of him becoming a money blogger and a money book writer could be considerable. So, no pressure Mr D, but I do hope you will at least consider such a project.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

- From the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the Congress of July 4, 1776 to the London E.17 postal district and a very expensive cardboard box is something of a comedown, but there is a common theme. I used to live in Walthamstow, East London, a place with what they call "character", i.e. a bit of a dump. Sorry to any loyal Walthamstowites out there but think about Hoe Street on a Saturday night and deny it if you dare. Apparently it is even more of a dump than usual at the moment because of fly tippers. So one would hope that the council officers would zealously pursue the fly tippers, would one not? Nope. That would be too much like work. Much easier to persecute and prosecute one of the diminishing number of successful business people in the area for giving away a cardboard box to a passer-by.

'My hell after council took me to court over a cardboard box'

A businesswoman told of her "months of complete hell" after a council took her to court for giving away a cardboard box.

Linda Bracey, 54, was asked for some boxes by a passer-by at Electro Signs in Walthamstow last October.

But Waltham Forest council prosecuted her firm for disposing of business waste illegally, in a case that cost the taxpayer £15,000. The council lost this month, and was condemned by a judge for causing "a monumental waste of public time and money".

Mrs Bracey, a mother of three and grandmother of five, called the town hall's campaign "mad", adding: "It's been nine months of complete hell and sleepless nights.

How many years on average do you reckon it takes for a newly instituted Government to decline to this level of simple predation?

Yes, on Tuesday 11th, at around teatime, at the House of Commons, Steve Baker MP, Tim Evans and Detlev Schlichter (the links because both of the gents in the bold and blue lettering have had recent (favourable) mentions here) will be asking: Is the global economy heading for monetary breakdown?

I'm guessing the answer is going to be: yes. Although, I'm already imagining a comedy sketch where the first two say, actually, we've changed our minds, the answer is no. The world's currencies are all absolutely in the pink. Quantitative Easing is working a treat. We can all relax. And Speaker number three finds himself forced to agree with the first two. "Guys, you're right. My book is rubbish." If only.

Please spread the word about this event, not just so that people in the London area who are able to attend it may be persuaded to do that, but so that people all over the world may learn that ideas of monetary sanity are being argued for inside the House of Commons.

I've said it here before and I am sure I will say it here again. Steve Baker MP is a remarkable man.

Last week, Steve Baker published, in a new Spectator venture, this list of books that he admires, with very brief notes saying why. The list contains several books by authors of the sort that no normal MP would admit to admiring, whatever he might privately claim. Nozick, Jesus Huerta de Soto, Schlichter (Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse being Baker's answer to the question: "What book best describes now?"), Nigel Ashford (an excellent populariser and clarifier of libertarian ideas), Bastiat, von Mises (the books of those two authors, along with the King James Bible, being the ones that Baker would snatch from a British library fire). Amazing.

I thought I would die before I witnessed a British Member of Parliament publishing a list of books like that, as opposed to merely chatting about such things between ourselves, dear boy. Baker is out and proud about it. He knows what are the big ideas that matter the most just now, and he doesn't care who knows that he knows.

"He just kept on trucking. When unable to get a haircut because the barber would not cut the hair of black people, he bought himself a pair of clippers and cut his own hair. He does so to this day. (Take that, John Edwards!) This is the same man who put himself through Morehouse College majoring in math, got a masters in computer science from Purdue (while improving academically), plotted rocket guidance for the Navy, started in business at Coca-Cola, then went on to turn around the fortunes of Philadelphia’s Burger King franchise, take over the aforementioned Godfather’s Pizza chain, become the head of the National Restaurant Association, be appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and host a radio show into the bargain. And, of course, he defeated the Big C."

Roger L Simon

I cannot see him in David Cameron's inner circle, somehow. For all my worries about where it is headed, the fact that someone like Mr Cain (has to be one of the best surnames in politics) can reach such levels says a lot about what the US is in terms of how people can surmount obstacles to build a successful business despite prejudice and the rest.

I live in the Westminster area of central London - Pimlico to be exact - and I am planning to get out of London next year when the Olympic Games are on and spend some time with my Dad and also travel abroad to get away from the mayhem. Luckily, my job enables me to work remotely for a while.

Sometimes, when friends ask me about this, they ask if I am thinking of letting out my property for a couple of weeks or whatever, and earn a bit of extra cash to compensate for the cost of paying for the Games and the associated hassles. In general, I am against the idea of letting my place to strangers, and would only consider letting it to people I know and trust. (I am worried about strangers stealing my entire Robert Heinlein collection, 50th anniversary Playboy album and cufflinks. You know how it is). However, it turns out that Westminster City Council has decided to kill the idea anyway - people who let properties for short periods without permission will, it says, be fined. Other London boroughs are taking a more liberal line.

I was not aware that to let out my property for a few days or weeks was something that the council had any power to prevent. Now we know better, alas.

Suppose I decide to let my Dad house-sit my place for a few days, or let other relatives use my place and possibly reimburse me for the electricity, gas and water bills. It appears that the council officials are entitled to check who is in properties during the Games and make sure they are not being used illegally as rentals.

Of course, some people will chance it and let their places out. I must say, Britain is becoming more like East Germany. That country liked its Olympics, if I recall.

The next time anyone talks about the UK and property ownership, please try not to laugh.

Update: The commenter Laird asks if we could legally challenge this edict. I suppose it is possible.

"...Journalism is a trade, not a profession; the idea that its practitioners should be licensed, that it should be a closed shop that only people who have passed a test can enter; and that a politically created quango can determine who is “right” and who is “wrong” and should therefore be banned is appalling and dangerous. It is a sure route to eliminating free speech and ensuring that only “approved” views can be aired. These days, there is a continuum between a lone tweeter or blogger with a dozen followers to a star broadcaster who speaks to 10m people every day. One cannot arbitrarily draw a line between journalism and non-journalism any more. All should be protected by free speech; all should be held responsible for what they write or say."

Allister Heath, talking about the disgusting idea of a UK Labour Party shadow cabinet member to licence journalism. It is important to note - as Samizdata regular Guy Herbert has from a Facebook comment I saw, that the sins of someone like Johann Hari would not have been picked up had he ticked all the right boxes by attending a J-school.

As Brian Micklethwait notes below, it appears the Labour leadership has disowned the idea - so far. You know how it goes: an idea is floated, is immediately rejected by the senior folk, but gradually keeps getting more and more traction.

I cannot overstate my loathing for the political class in this country. Glenn Reynolds says of the US equivalent that it is the worst political class since before the US Civil War (not exactly an encouraging thought). God knows what sort of epoch we can compare this lot to in the UK.

Jack Straw, sometime Justice Secretary, is on a campaign against referral fees in accident insurance claims. Claims management companies (CMCs) busily ferret out details of accidents that people have suffered, and sell on the details to solicitors who will encourage the victims to sue, on a no-win-no-fee basis. Mr Straw and many like him claim this pushes up legal costs that will eventually have to be paid by insured people generally. Furthermore, it encourages that wicked thing, the 'compensation culture', the habit of demanding that someone be to blame for every misfortune we suffer and should pay up accordingly. Mr Straw says referral fees are:

a lucrative and self-serving merry-go-round in which the personal information of anyone involved in any collision with another vehicle, no matter how trivial its effects, is traded like a commodity, typically for £600 to £800 a shot, with the aim of pursuing a claim – any claim – provided that it brings rich rewards to all those involved in this industry.

He reckons that whiplash injuries claimed by car occupants after being shunted from behind are largely fictitious – it seems they're difficult to diagnose, so such claims are hard to refute.

In fact, one Dr Simon Margolis, CEO of something called the Premex Group, while trying to counter Straw, ends up by making him seem more credible:

There is no blood test or imaging modality currently in existence that can prove or disprove an injury was sustained or whether symptoms are being experienced. That is why a combination of the taking of a history and the laying on of hands during clinical examination by a medical expert remains the appropriate approach. Much can be learned from the general demeanour of the claimant and the way the history is delivered.

"The laying on of hands"! I love that. Much can be learned from the general demeanour of industry apologists.

Straw's beef seems to be another instance of the ancient complaint against middlemen in general: people can't see what service they provide and think they just push up prices. I compare the referral-fee example with the old complaint against advertising: when I buy a can of beans I have to pay the costs of the advertising that persuaded me to buy it. Outrageous!

The same answer applies to both cases, I suppose: in claims management, the middlemen actually reduce costs and push up the effectiveness of the whole system by matching up buyers and sellers, and encouraging buyers (accident victims) to buy (sue). If CMCs are squashed, lawyers will have to do the job themselves, or use other means to attract custom.

Jack Straw's proposals are bound to make the whole process of getting justice less efficient – if that's imaginable. But his private member's bill has been read in the Commons without opposition, regrettably.

To bring legal costs down we need the process of linking up providers and consumers to be untrammelled. We also need police, judges and lawyers who do their jobs efficiently. Fat chance of that in the oldest of nationalized industries.

Maybe whiplash injury claims are largely a scam. I'd rather leave it to the people with a direct financial interest in showing this – namely, the insurers – to sort that out, rather than to the medical expertise of Jack Straw.

A lot of people are sceptical about whether no-win-no-fee improves the quality of justice. It may not be the whole answer, but it's certainly part of the answer. If I ever found myself inside an ambulance I would want to see an ambulance-chasing lawyer hard on its heels. And I'd want some clever type in a sharp suit to introduce us.

The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the 'Yeah, but what they're really saying…' tendency. The 'tea' stands for 'Taxed Enough Already' but, if you relied on the BBC and the Guardian for your information, you might not know it. Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it's against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They'd much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda.

- Daniel Hannan, writing about the extraordinary abuse heaped on the Tea Party crowd. Well, they want to cut taxes and push back the State. I guess they must be psychotic or something.

This is interesting:

"As the EU debt drama continues unspooling like a perversely watchable soap opera (the FT’s Neil Hume describes it as ‘eurozone crisis porn'), an intriguing sub-plot has emerged: Britain is suing the European Central Bank. The Treasury is unhappy with an ECB move to limit the kind of euro-denominated products that can pass through UK clearing houses, suspecting it’s a bid to shift financial activity from London to Paris/Berlin. So it’s taking legal action, the first of its kind by an EU member state.)"

Via the Spectator's "Coffee House" blog.

I enjoyed this paragraph:

"On a wider level, there’s some irony in the fact that the UK and the EU are squabbling over euro-denominated transactions. Who even knows which countries will still be using the euro by the time the year is out? Exactly what kind of euro will be cleared in clearing houses come Christmas?"

Someone explain to me why we are in the EU. I am sure there is a reason, but bugger me if I can remember now. Old age creeping in.

Propaganda 'own goals' are always interesting. A couple of self-described anti-fascists from United Against Fascism produced a happy, confident video in which they laughed at the beating administered to a female English Defence League supporter by members of the UAF. The left-wing site Harry's Place described it as horrifying. In the Telegraph, Brendan O'Neill called it "A glimpse into the class hatred at the heart of the anti-EDL clique".

The woman concerned is a racist. She gloated on Facebook over the death of a Muslim woman whose burka became caught in a go-kart. But that's not the point, as the author of the second post from Harry's Place makes clear.

In the Independent, Laurie Penny writes Class snobbery about the EDL won't halt the far right. Lady, that ain't the half of it. The upper middle class laughter - oh, yes, in England laughter has a class - of Ben and Anthony as they call the victim a "the most tattooed horrible scrote of a woman" and their Rag Week chuckles as they say, "Never hit a woman - but they are not women" and "Never hit a woman – but DO kick a dog” will be like salt on raw skin to many working class men.

Anthony and Ben put this video on YouTube themselves, before the EDL got hold of it. They did not forsee how it would look to others. Like 'No Pressure' with real violence.

There is a further twist. The boiling surface of the internet has thrown up what are claimed to be the full names and personal details of Ben and Anthony. However one of the men named strongly denies that he is the person who made the video. One act of mob violence may give rise to another.

I get all sorts of emails, and this one, from a fairly well known money manager in the UK by the name of Terry Smith, is worth reading in full. It is the text of a letter he has sent to the Financial Times newspaper. The FT is behind a paywall so I reproduce it in full:

From Mr Terry Smith.

Sir, I refer to the debate being conducted in the pages of the Financial Times between those who propose further Keynesian measures, such as Martin Wolf ("Struggling with a great contraction", August 31), and those who do not accept that they will work, such as Wolfgang Schäuble ("Austerity is the only cure for the eurozone", September 6).

Such so-called Keynesian measures as advocated by, among others, Ed Balls, Samuel Brittan, Paul Krugman, George Magnus and Barack Obama as well as Mr Wolf have not worked to date, and they will not work. Their advocates seem to assume that their repeated failure to solve our economic problems just means that the medicine must be repeated, which reminds me of Richard Nixon's motto that "if two wrongs don't make a right, try three".

I say "so-called" Keynesians because these advocates seem not to realise that Keynes' theories did not rescue us from the Great Depression. They are also asymmetric in their application of his theories - calling for ever larger deficit spending, having overlooked the bit about running a surplus in a boom. But above all, they do not seem to realise that they cannot work in a period of debt deflation in which a recession is preceded by the collapse of the banking system, as their current failure is demonstrating.

To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.

The first step in rectifying this situation should be to make a clear and unambiguous statement about the actual debt the UK is carrying.

To give a lead to this, today we have circulated to every member of parliament a tin can emblazoned with the UK debt figure - £3,589bn including commitments for public sector pension commitments, private finance initiative and banking sector guarantees, so that they can see what it is they are metaphorically "kicking down the road" with their present policies. This, ahead of the party conference season, I hope might spur some considered and honest debate on this issue.

It is time for those who wish to lead us out of this crisis to tell people how bad the current situation really is and the painful remedies which will be needed to remedy it.

Terry Smith, Chief Executive, Tullett Prebon, London EC2, UK

I get the impression that this man is not looking to be elevated to the peerage. Good.

To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are [he/she is] possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.

- Terry Smith

When I first saw the headline, I thought this was a touch of exaggeration by the Daily Mail (hardly my favourite newspaper). But it turns out to be fairly solid. Here is an AP version. My apologies to readers as this item is a few days' old:

Scottish officials say they may take four heavy children away from their parents after warnings to help their kids trim down have apparently failed. The children are aged one to 11. The parents are obese and have three older children who are also heavy. For the past two years, the family has lived in government housing and had their eating habits scrutinized. Last week, officials in Dundee told the family their four youngest children could be taken into foster care or adopted. A government spokesman said they would act in the children's best interests.

In the U.S., there have been several cases where obese children have been taken into care after their parents couldn't help them lose weight.

Now, the issue of whether or when third parties - not just states - should intervene if children are thought to be at risk is not an easy line to draw. (It is one of those issues that I find can divide libertarians, such as intellectual property and immigration). But this case does seem a particularly egregious example of state over-reach. There is no suggestion that the parents of these children are cruel, or unpleasant, nor is there any suggestion that the children are unhappy, or held against their will. None of the usual markers of harm seem to apply, unless there are facts of the case that have not been issued for reasons of confidentiality or legal reasons. About the most that might be said is that the elders are not very successful in encouraging their offspring to be fit. And that might be fair, but I tend to regard much, if not all, of the current obesity obsession as another of those moral panics about which writers such as HL Mencken famously wrote.

This is a bad case, and I hope the children can be restored to their home as soon as possible. It seems bizarre, at a time when, in the aftermath of the riots, we are told about the importance of families, that certain people in governments should be so determined to break them up even where the problems do not appear to be particularly severe. If a child grows up with a loving mother and father and happens to be a bit on the chubby side, that is surely infinitely better than a generation of fit young thugs without fathers.

"Scottish Conservative Party set to disband" screams the title of an article...

Well why not? Scotland already has two Mega-Statiist major parties (SNP and Labour) so what need is there for a third? Indeed perhaps a new party north of the border might actually be, you know... conservative! If that comes to pass, perhaps someone might decide England needs a conservative party too because gawd knows it does not have one at the moment.

Nothing has changed from the riots and nothing will.

As usual after such shocking events, we had two or three days of moral clarity where you could get away with saying things that normally you can't - like pointing out how many people live lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness.

Then we had the essential moment - known as "the Gitmo moment" - providing a cause around which confused lefties could rally (in this case the harmless but poorly expressed mutterings of a TV historian).

The next step is to draw ludicrous moral equivalences - burning down shops and killing people is, apparently, no worse than wearing a dinner jacket and getting drunk, or fiddling expenses. I don't often agree with David Cameron but it was good to see him having a pop on that point at the BBC.

Finally you just keep repeating idiocies about how rioters were "deprived" and bringing it all back to "inequality" and such notions. It doesn't matter how stupid it is if you say it often enough.

This is just how it works. In a few months I bet you'll be able to call it the Tottenham Spring. We'll "reach out", we'll open some youth clubs, our policing will become even more limp-wristed, vendors of steel shutters will do well, and small shopkeepers will, bit by bit, give up to take up lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness.

- Samizdata commenter m2p

There was an item on the local London TV news early last night about a bunch of cooks who, when confronted by a bunch of crooks, defended themselves, their restaurant and their diners. Yes, here is the story, from earlier in the month, at the time of those riots. Remember them?

Chefs and waiters leapt to the defence of members of the public enjoying an evening at The Ledbury, an upmarket restaurant in Notting Hill, London.

Thugs and rioters armed with bats and wearing hooded tops forced their way into the two star restaurant before demanding diners hand over their wallets and wedding rings.

But staff and others fought back with kitchen tools before leading customers into the wine cellar for protection.

Later in the evening, the looters returned, and the diners were ushered by the staff to the safety of the downstairs wine cellar. Which seems like a craven retreat, and in a way it was. But the personal cash and valuables of the diners were what the looters were after, and they were again thwarted.

The significance of the TV coverage I saw this evening wasn't just that all this happened, but that the TV coverage was so sympathetic to the restaurant staff for doing what they did. The Ledbury (which I had never heard of until now) has apparently won some kind of vote of excellence for its food, organised by a restaurant guide, and the general atmosphere radiating from my TV was: hurrah! Good for them, and the perfect excuse to tell the story, again, of those heroic deeds by the heroic Ledbury staff a few weeks ago.

A few further thoughts occur to me.

They are going to have a very hard time disarming people who cook for a living. Better yet, incorrigible optimist that I am, I sense that the penny may at least be starting to drop that the Police can't be everywhere.

I wrote a piece here at the time of the riots, in which I regretted the way that all the Police could say at the time of the riots was for honest citizens to stay off the streets and not get involved and generally keep their heads down and not behave as these restaurant guys did. The thinking of the Police being that if members of the mere public confronted rioters, how would the Police know who to arrest? But the defence of civilisation against barbarism cannot be organised merely to make like convenient for the Police. Battle must be joined, and the footsoldiers in this battle are, or ought to be, us. If that complicates things for the Police, tough.

I don't blame the Police for the wetness of their public pronouncements at the time of the riots. They have to take their lead from the politicians, and I don't think most of us would want it any other way. Nor, more fundamentally, do I blame the Police for the fact that they can't be everywhere. If the Police were able to be everywhere, they would have to exist in numbers so huge that they would themselves constitute a huge threat to the rest of us, to say nothing of a huge drain on all of our resources. "More bobbies on the beat" just cannot be the answer, and if this little spot of TV coverage is anything to go by, that notion may finally be getting around.

The essence of the crime problem in the UK is not an insufficiency of police; it is a whole crop of utterly wrong assumptions about how we, the public, should, that is to say should not respond, and not be allowed to respond, and should be disarmed to the point where we are helpless to respond, to criminals. We, not the Police, are in the front line of this thing. We should not be urged to flee the field. We should be positively encouraged to go into battle, no matter how much this may complicate the paperwork that the Police then have to trudge through after we have done our bit. There is nothing wrong with us taking the law into our own hands. On the contrary, the more of us do this, the better. Taking the law into our own hands, and enforcing it, is good. This should not be confused with taking the law into our own hands and breaking it, by becoming criminals ourselves. It should not be a crime to defend one's own person and property, as forcefully as will achieve this.

In particular, those looters who, after their first attack had been beaten back, returned to the Ledbury should then have been ambushed and arrested, with whatever degree of force would have done the job, regardless of whether any mere Police were present or not. For that to have happened would require a transformation in the attitude of our rulers to the rights of the public when confronting criminals. The sooner such a transformation occurs the better.

Those riots, I am now more and more convinced, did us all a favour. By dramatising the lawless state of Britain, and dramatising it in London, in places like fancy restaurants patronised by people with wallets and adornments seriously worth stealing rather than just in a few already-underclass-dominated housing estates, the riots created a set of circumstance where the only answer for our rulers was for them to start thinking along the lines I expound in this posting. And if members of the public are heroes when they square up to rioters and looters, why are they not heroes when they confront criminals of the more usual sort, by similar means and in accordance with similar principles? Exactly the same principles apply to small skirmishes between the public and those who would prey upon them as apply to riot control. Again, when it comes to preventing crime, the Police cannot be everywhere, and it is daft to imagine that they ever could or should be.

If the transformation I seek does occur, one of the reasons will surely be that the politicians have now run out of our money, with which to pay even the policemen that they now employ. They are even now cutting Police numbers. Fine by me. As I say, Police numbers are absolutely not the point. The point is the rules that we are allowed to play by, by which I mean fight by, against the criminals. (Just imagine how very differently that riot would have turned out if we here in London enjoyed the blessings of concealed carry laws.)

If you are a regular reader of Samizdata, then you will have read similar arguments to these many times before here. I do not apologise for the repetition. If important ideas are to be spread effectively, they have to stated not just the once, but again and again and again.

I am a sarcastic cow, I am used to being a sarcastic cow and I am comfortable being a sarcastic cow. When the time comes to simply recommend an article in the Guardian my non-sarcastic mooing sounds all funny in my own ears. But, here goes: I recommend you read 'Freedom of information is for businesses too' by Heather Brooke.

A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university's Centre for Tobacco Control Research.

The UK's FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public's name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.

It is right to ban the English Defence League's march, argues Lutfur Rahman, the leader of Tower Hamlets council. How sensible and moderate he is. Observe how he calms the fears expressed by the left wing feminist writer Nina Power that the power to ban the EDL today is certain to be used against other causes tomorrow. Mr Rahman writes,

So while I applaud the Metropolitan police and the home secretary in listening to the many voices from our community in banning the EDL march, I will support the right of community organisations to hold some of the events that Power fears might be banned. However, I feel sure that good sense will prevail, and that the authorities will be capable of distinguishing between community events and demonstrations designed to whip up racial and religious intolerance.

Pernickety people might argue that once the "right" to demonstrate is dependent on your organisation falling within the authorities' definition of a "community organisation", then it is no longer a right. Really, though, who can be bothered with such far-fetched ideas? We have the assurance of a local politician that good sense will prevail.

Richard North and Christopher Booker are having a go at the more unpunished sort of looting, by overpaid local council employees. Says North:

Loot a shop, and you go to jail. Loot council tax payers and, if they don't pay up, they go to jail.

I can't remember who said it, but what whoever it was (Kingsley Amis?) said was that the rot set in when they stopped calling the Town Clerk the Town Clerk, and started calling him the "Chief Executive".

LATER: See also this posting, in which trooper Thompson quotes a big chunk from Right-Wing Populism by Murray Rothbard, including this:

Why then did communism implode? Because in the end the system was working so badly that even the nomenklatura got fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have correctly pointed out that a social system collapses when the ruling class becomes demoralized and loses its will to power; manifest failure of the communist system brought about that demoralization. But doing nothing, or relying only on educating the elites in correct ideas, will mean that our own statist system will not end until our entire society, like that of the Soviet Union, has been reduced to rubble. Surely, we must not sit still for that. A strategy for liberty must be far more active and aggressive.

Hence the importance, for libertarians or for minimal government conservatives, of having a one-two punch in their armor: not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the corrupt ruling elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more specifically how they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is "negative campaigning" at its finest and most fundamental.

Indeed. I'm not saying I agree with everything in this Rothbard piece, but I do agree with that. But I also believe that if I, and others of my inactive disposition, spread the correct ideas, it is automatic that the kind of people who, unlike me, refer to themselves as "Trooper" are going to want to join in on my side, but more aggressively.

Children will be banned from watching shooting events under Boris Johnson's Olympic ticket giveaway.

London schoolchildren are eligible for 125,000 Olympic tickets but these will not include any featuring guns, as Games organisers and City Hall fear a backlash from the anti-gun lobby.

The sheer idiocy of this speaks volumes of the rot at the heart of British society and its decadent political class. A different take on this can be found here.

I am now, as if regular readers of my recent stuff here need to be told, paying at least as much attention to the final game, which began this morning, in the England India test match cricket series as I am to such things What To Do About The Deficit. England are already 3-0 up, and are now looking to make it a 4-0 thrashing. This morning England, batting first, made another good start. But then it rained for the rest of the day.

Which meant that the radio commentators and their various guests had to talk amongst themselves, rather than commentate on the mostly non-existent action. And one of the things they talked about was the contrast between the general demeanour and attitude of the two teams, as illustrated by how they both warmed up at the start of the game. Compared to the quasi-military drill in perfectly matching attire that was the England warm-up, India looked, they said, like a rabble, and have done all series. The biggest recent change in how the Indians actually play, they all agreed, is that the Indian fast bowlers are now significantly slower than they were two or three years ago, and several inches fatter.

Why the contrast? Well, it seems that the top Indian cricketers now play too much cricket of the wrong kind – limited overs slogging basically, which encourages run-restricting rather than wicket-taking bowling, and careless, twist-or-bust batting. And they play not enough cricket of the right kind. Hence their arrival in England in a state combining lack of preparation with apparent exhaustion and general lack of fitness. But, you can't really blame them, said the commentators. The Indian Premier League now pays its players more in a month than cricketers of an earlier generation would ever see in their entire careers.

The reason I mention all this, apart from the fact that I personally find it all very interesting, is that, in among all this cricket chat, somebody said something very Samizdata-friendly that I thought I would pass on. Former England cricketer, now cricket journalist and pundit, Derek Pringle, threw in the following, concerning the impact of the Indian Premier League on the attitude and physical preparedness of the top Indian players:

The IPL has become a bit of a welfare state for them.

You might reckon it odd to compare the predicament of men who are being paid rather lavishly to do too much work, but of the wrong sort, with the very different circumstances of people who are being paid very little by comparison to do next to nothing, beyond go through the motions of looking for work without actually doing it. You might also want to ask whether limited overs slog-fests really are "wrong". After all, if that's the sort of cricket that people generally, and Indians in particular, will now pay most readily to watch, what is so wrong about it?

Good points both, but not the point I want to make now. What my point is about the above soundbite is that Derek Pringle was simply assuming, when he said it, that state welfare makes you fatter and lazier and less industrious than you otherwise might have been. Pringle, famously inclined to being a bit of a fatty himself, just knew that we all knew what he was getting at. It didn't have to be spelt out. Simply: state welfare rots the body and the mind and the soul. Anything else which, arguably, resembles state welfare in its financial impact upon the individuals concerned is likely to do similarly debilitating and demoralising things to those individuals also. If you are one of those eccentrics who still thinks otherwise, the burden of proof is entirely on you to explain your bizarre and contrarian opinions.

The argument that state welfare corrupts - physically, mentally and morally - is not, to put it mildly, new. When the modern British welfare state got under way after World War 2 this argument about the potential impact on its recipients of state money was already centuries old, and it was duly re-presented in opposition to the new welfare arrangements. But, the old argument was dismissed, with scorn, and also with, I believe, much genuine sincerity. These were the days, remember, when the masses of the British people were at a unique summit of mass moral excellence. (Thousands upon thousands of them used to turn up to watch county cricket, in other words the kind of cricket those cricket commentators are saying the Indian cricketers haven't been playing enough of.) Are you seriously saying, asked the welfare statists, that a bit of help when times are bad is going to turn these good people (good people who had just won the war, don't forget) into barbarians? Not, as Americans now say, going to happen. Yet, as a crude first approximation, this is what did happen, if not to them then to a horrifying proportion of their descendants.

And before any anti-immigration commenters pitch in, let me answer them with two questions and my two answers. Given the same welfare arrangements but no mass immigration, would there now be similar barbarism? I strongly believe so, even if maybe not on the same scale. Given the same mass immigration but no state welfare to speak of, would there now be similar barbarism? Much less, I think.

Realising that state welfare corrupts is one thing. Taking state welfare away from the millions of people whose entire lives are now organised around the assumption that state welfare will continue indefinitely is quite another, which is why this radical change of opinion has been somewhat subterranean. So far it has had little practical effect. But, as Derek Pringle's casual aside illustrates, this changed opinion is now well in place, and sooner or later this will surely have consequences.

As has been noted before, the disaster of the eurozone is, in the eyes of some policymakers, as much an opportunity for further pan-European empire-building as it is an occasion for shame and embarrassment. This week, Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy (remember him? He's the one who married one of Mick Jagger's old flames), came up with this barnstormer of an idea, in the form of a European-style "Tobin tax" and a form of increased economic central government. It has the ring of inevitability about it.

The problem for the UK is that said tax, which has been assailed by the likes of Tim Worstall before, would apply not just to the eurozone, but to the UK, which is not in the euro. And given the relative size of London as a financial centre compared to Paris, Frankfurt or Milan, guess which place takes the biggest relative hit? You guessed: London. Never mind, of course, that banks that can do so will put some of their activities outside the EU, or that the costs of the tax will be borne by savers, borrowers and users of financial services generally, in the form of lower rates of savings interest - already negative in real terms - more expensive costs of hedging forex transactions, and the like. This is what is known as tax incidence. Politicians are not, as we know, in the business of understanding the Law of Unintended Consequences. Indeed, we might even define today's political class as people who defy this law.

Of course, Cameron, Osborne and others (but not their LibDem allies) will protest about such a tax on London's financial sector, but look how far such protests got us before concerning sovereign debt bailouts by the UK. And such men have shamefully pandered to such anti-capitalist sentiment in the past, so there is a sort of brute justice if they fail to prevent this latest move now. Such men, of course, have enjoyed the fruits of financial wheeler-dealing when the going was good, such as financing of the Tory party by the likes of Michael Spencer, the founder of derivatives powerhouse ICAP. (As an aside, I see that the odious Vincent Cable, Business Secretary, wants to slap capital gains tax on housing transactions of wealthy properties if the Tories decide to ditch the top 50 per cent rate of income tax. Even a land value tax is better than CGT, although not by very much. There is no such thing as a benign tax.)

Alas, banker bashing has reached such heights of hysteria that some might even try and argue that such a tax on the evils of speculation is a jolly good idea. It pained me to see that even that otherwise fine book on the recent market disaster by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson, floated the idea.

Allister Heath weighs on the latest eurozone wheeze. He's unimpressed, not surprisingly.

Update: Here is a twist on the issue of tax incidence and taxes on companies. Milton Friedman is magnificent.

Okay, back to the recent violent disorder. Eating in a local cheap restaurant for lunch, I grabbed a copy of the Daily Mail and was pleasantly surprised at this remarkably non-hysterical piece on the recent controversy about David Starkey, the historian. But of course, if you want a reliable mix of social conservative rant and shafts of lucid insight in the same piece, there is always Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher) on hand. In the article I link to here, I broadly agreed with some of it but as usual, there is always the equivalent of a crack in the pavement.

"Say to him [Cameron] that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock."

Interesting. So Mr Hitchens thinks that mass immigration should be "reversed". How exactly? There is often, I find in some of the denunciations of mass immigration, an unspoken assumption, never fleshed out, as to what said denouncers want to do about it. Does Mr Hitchens think, for instance, that those who have been living in the UK for some time, and who hold UK passports, should, if they fall into the "wrong" demographic groups as he might define them, be deported? To where? How? Never mind European "human rights" legislation, how can any supposed "conservative" such as Mr Hitchens, with his famed love of "family values" and the rest, countenance a reversal of mass immigration without spelling out the details? Casually referring to "reversing" X or why without saying how is foolish, in my humble opinion.

Of course, there are tens of thousands or more people who emigrate from the UK every year in pursuit of a better life. And I suspect the recent mayhem will only add to the shift. But I get the impression that such folk are not the ones that Mr Hitchens has in mind.

A letter to yesterday's Times (link behind a paywall):

Sir, Statistics indicate that 100,000 children sleep rough in the UK every night. Evicting rioters from their homes would only add to this shameful number and it would fall on already overstretched charities to protect them. It will also create a disaffected underclass as can be found in countries like Brazil and Mexico.

Trudy Davies
Co-Founder of the Consortium for Street Children charities (CSC)
Wimbledon SW19

There are about 11.8 million children under sixteen in Britain, so according to the statistics cited - or at least mentioned as existing somewhere - by Trudy Davies, about one in 118 of them sleeps rough every night.

Strangely, a six year old document produced by Charlie Bretherton, a Trustee of the very same Consortium for Street Children Charities, gives a less alarming picture, although it does also include a figure of one hundred thousand. It says:

How many young people are involved and where are they?

‘Runaways’: The Children’s Society estimates that about 100,000 children under 16 run away from home every year. Most stay away for between one and three nights, but some stay away for longer. The Social Exclusion Unit estimates that at least one in eight runs three times or more. Most do not travel long distances; only one-fifth travel further afield than the nearest city. The majority will stay with friends or sleep in garden sheds, fields or bus stations.

Homeless: There are few statistics on youth homelessness. Centrepoint in London provides a place to stay for over 500 young people every night; in 2000 one in five were 16 and 17 year olds.

Street Homeless: The last rough sleeper count found only two under-18 year olds sleeping rough on the streets. However young people who run away often choose to sleep in dangerous places.

Emphasis added. From two to a hundred thousand in six years. I blame the Tories.

Whenever a senior political figure, such as David Cameron or Boris Johnson (the London mayor) writes a newspaper column on some issue or other - and Boris Johnson does this a good deal, being a good writer - you can bet that in light of recent events, at least one commenter will make some remark about the politicians' holidays. You see, it was terrible, apparently, that our Prime Minister was sunning himself in Tuscany or that BJ was carousing in Canada, rather than working 24/7 in their offices. To delay coming back to our Sceptred Isle for a few days when the disorder broke out is inexcusable, just the sort of lazy, arrogant stuff you can expect. Etonians. Bullingdon Club. These bastards probably did PPE at Oxford! (Sarcasm warning).

As you can see, I find all this type of commentary tiresome. It suggests an inability to realise that in the age of the internet, video conferencing and the like, that things don't collapse when a political leader is away. The Prime Minister is not my Daddy.

And from the point of view of someone who believes in minimal government, the free market and the open society, this mindset is very foolish. While I don't want to pay for their holidays, I happen to think that the idea of politicians taking time off from their politicking is a very good idea and should be encouraged. A century or more ago, the Peels, Palmerstons, Gladstones and Disraelis holidayed a good deal, and their backbench members of Parliament holidayed even more, or ran their estates. In the USofA, Congress was deliberately located on the swamps of the Potomac in order to discourage people from meeting during the hot, malaria-filled summer months. (Arguably, the governence of the US went down the tubes when air conditioning was invented). And London stank so badly because of the lack of drainage that getting out of London was a good idea for anyone who could do so.

As I said, I don't mind politicians taking time off so long as we, the taxpayer, don't have to pay for it. But in principle, the idea that Civilization will come to an end unless Dave, Boris or Barack are constantly at their desks or in the assembly is barmy. There is much to be said for a bit of time out from these people. As the saying goes, we should be grateful we don't get all the politics we pay for.

(Aside, the commentators on the Daily Telegraph site are truly awful, arguably worse than the Guardian. Take a look at the moronic stuff regarding BJ's latest article on the riots).

Peter Oborne is not exactly one of my favourite commentators (to put it mildly) so when I saw people praising an article he wrote called The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom, I was expecting the worst. And sure enough, he falls at almost the first fence:

A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.

Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?

So Branson and Green get tired of having so much of their wealth confiscated that Branson moves some of his operation to Switzerland and Green takes his profits off-shore, and Peter Oborne sees that not as a sign of the confiscatory state's moral decay but rather... Green and Branson's moral decay?

That is a bit like saying the shopkeepers who defended their shops from looters were being 'greedy' because they did not want the product of their hard works taken by looters... or in Green and Branson's case, the looting tax man working at the behest of the parasite classes.

Oborne gets it right when he describes the corruption and hypocrisy of the political looter class class, but his failure to grasp the difference between the looter classes and the people they loot means I will not be joining the Amen Chorus praising this article even if I agree with some parts of it.

It seems to me that he misses the obvious target. Sure, politicians are hypocritical and corrupt but when has this ever not been the case? Surely the real issue here is not the predictably dismal behaviour of the generally dismal sort of people who are attracted into politics in the first place, it is the de-socialising nature of the policies that have been followed by both Labour and Tory since 1945.

There exists a broad consensus between so-called 'conservatives' and the 'democratic left' across the western world that capitalist wealth producers exist to be taxed to fund 'social' welfare, which in turn produces a huge class of people benefiting from these confiscations and this, not the crapulous personal greed and behaviour of MPs, is the root of the problem from which everything else springs.

Moreover, it is worth noting that the looters were not in fact the primary recipients of the 'largess' (of other people's money) being collected and redistributed by the state... it is the huge army of people who find their employment via the Guardian's public sector advertisements who are the actual main beneficiaries.

Just as war, as is sometimes said, can be the health of the state, so can domestic civil disorder. One of the arguments we can expect to hear in the coming days, and are beginning to hear already, is how much of the recent mayhem has been driven by Britain's evil "consumerist" culture, our "market-based materialism", and suchlike. The implication being that we need to have more and more controls over our lives (that is not the same as saying people need to understand self-control and save rather than rely on credit. That is a separate argument). I am willing to stake a few pounds that there will be calls for some sort of National Service for youngsters, if not in the form of the military (who'd want these scum in charge of weapons?), but something else, perhaps. (Again, I have nothing against clubs and groups set up to help youngsters grow up a bit into adults, so long as this is voluntary.)

A random example of the kind of "if only we had powerful leaders" line comes from John McTernan, in the Daily Telegraph. He starts off with this:

"Churchill redeemed himself, and saved the world, during the Second World War. Margaret Thatcher defeated fascism in the Falklands war, and ultra-Leftism in the miners’ strike. We are a better and stronger country, at home and abroad, for her undeviating will and courage. It wasn’t just Britain – the post-war world was full of examples. Nixon and China. Reagan and the Russians. Gorbachev and perestroika. Mandela and de Klerk. These were big figures who made bold choices, shaped the future, called the shots."

Well, maybe. I find the Nixon example dubious. Sure, he may not be the devil of lazy historical analysis and he unfroze relations with China, but he also, remember, imposed wage and price controls in a panic about inflation and was hardly a consistent advocate of small government, at all. I'll come to Mrs Thatcher in a minute.

"Evelyn Waugh used to criticise the Conservative Party because it had never turned the clock back by a single minute. But at least it was properly conservative. Harold Macmillan would be shocked at the modern party’s Maoist commitment to revolutionary change, just as Tony Crosland would be aghast at Labour’s obeisance to capital."

Harold Macmillan is a man who wanted Britain to join the EU; his essentially paternalist version of Toryism, and his deference to the legal privileges of the trade unions, helped breed the kind of complacent attitudes that saw the UK lose its industrial edge. In certain ways, "Supermac" and that whole generation of Tories up to Mrs Thatcher advocated a form of controlled retreat. As for the awful Tony Crosland, why praise a man who once infamously said he wanted to destroy those "fucking grammar schools?". I hate it when a certain kind of commentator gets all misty-eyed for the political leaders of days of yore, such as the ghastly Nye Bevan, the Labour politician who saddled this country with the National Health Service. We can do without that kind of "leadership", thank you very much.

"The connecting thread is that Left and Right have accepted not merely market mechanisms, but the market’s ultimate mastery. For more than 30 years, politicians have told industries, communities and voters that you can’t buck the system. In doing so, they have internalised their own advice, and ended up enslaved by these new gods themselves."

One of the people who said you cannot defy market forces, or fail to heed what Kipling called the "Gods of the Copybook Headings", was of course, Margaret Thatcher, whom the author of this article claims to admire. In fact, Mrs Thatcher's greatness, in my opinion, in part stemmed from her willingness to tell people that water did not flow uphill, that if you want to distribute wealth, you have to create it, and that defying the laws of supply and demand typically made problems worse, as in the case of trying to fix the value of sterling. That was one of her best traits.

"George Osborne’s mantra is that if we don’t face up to austerity, then we’ll be like Greece, at the mercy of the markets. Would any Conservative politician, in any previous administration, have compared our great nation to a failing southern European economy (rather than a modern-day Athens or Sparta)?"

I have no idea. I think that pointing out that if the UK fails to get its house in order then we will have the kind of disaster as seen in another country, is a good thing for a politician to do. It is about describing hard reality, not coming out with some sort of guff about "we are a great nation and can do what we like" sort of line.

"Our former leaders would be shocked by the willingness of Cabinet ministers to talk down our country. Accepting your own powerlessness is a characteristic of weak leaders throughout history: always managing, never transforming."

It is not about "talking down", but facing reality. To change, you first need to accept where you are now. In the UK, many people, some of them holding quite diverse political views, have been slapped hard with that reality.

People going to fancy dress parties do it. The blogger Old Holborn does it. I am talking about face masks.

Face masks have been targeted as one of the things that the authorities may try to ban in the wake of the riots. Enforcing such a rule, even if it makes sense, strikes me as difficult. Perhaps the only way to interpret and enforce such a law would be to say that anyone wearing an item obscuring most of the face during a time of public disorder would be at risk of prosecution. (Wearing a ski mask should be illegal in the middle of a riot, but not on the slopes of Chamonix, for example). But again, how to decide when to impose the rule? Perhaps a public official, preferably a magistrate, has to read out what used to be called the riot act and after the reading of said act, anyone wearing a mask or suchlike is in trouble.

But it may not be so cut and dried as that, alas. There is the issue of public versus private space to consider. Owners of private property, such as shopping malls and the like, are entirely within their rights to insist that people entering the premises should show their faces, and comply with whatever codes of behaviour might be stipulated, however rational or otherwise, just as private members' clubs and other places ought to be able to insist on dress codes, for example. Banks will typically insist that motorcyclists take off their helmets, if I recall correctly. (That makes perfect sense, for security reasons).

But as I know some regulars will ask, how does this ban on face masks apply to Muslim women who cover their faces behind a veil or other such form of costume? If such a person enters a shop, say, does this mean the police will now insist they show their faces? I'd like to see how that's going to work. What about Islamist demonstrators against, say, military actions in the Mid-East? I cannot honestly see how the cops are going to successfully enforce a mask ban without a serious ruckus.

Like a lot of ideas that sound good to politicians in the heat of the moment, the notion of banning people from obscuring all or part of their faces is difficult as a general aim of the law, even if owners of private spaces are entitled, as they are, to make such demands. I can see all kinds of issues of interpretation coming up: what about a guy who wears a baseball cap with big sunglasses - is that illegal, or not? What counts as a "mask"? Surely, any law would need to consider the full context here, but it is not always obvious whether wearing a certain item signifies intent to avoid detection.

Instead of such silly measures, the government must focus its attention, as has been pointed out ad nauseam here, on the following areas:

--T ougher sentences for crimes of all kinds, including theft, which in far too many cases is treated as a minor matter. Such punishments must include restitution of the victim(s);
-- Drastic cuts to welfare benefits combined with a big rise in tax thresholds at the bottom of the scale to make work pay. Even the dimmest thugs operate under some sort of cost/benefit analysis. Make work pay;
-- Lowering the compulsory school-leaving age; change to labour market rules to encourage apprenticeships, vocational training;
-- Allow people to use force in self defence, including firearms;
-- Legalise (most) drugs. Yes, this is probably the most controversial idea, and maybe I would not enact this until the moral hazard-machine of the Welfare State has been seriously changed, but it is a key issue. If gangs don't control the drugs trade, it undermines the gang culture more generally;
-- Tax cuts more generally so that married spouses don't feel under such pressure to both work to keep a decent income. This may also reinforce marriage and provide a better environment for children;
-- Scrap the various quangos, race relations organisations and other tax-funded institutions that far from alleviating tensions, often inflame them by the manufacture of various grievances for classic bureaucratic empire-building reasons;
-- Zero tolerance policing. Get some guys from New York over to London for some rapid tutorials.

I am sure there are more ideas on how to strengthen the family, encourage positive behaviours and deter bad ones, but it seems to me that trying to regulate dress codes in the streets is one of the most pointless unless the conditions can be very clearly defined in law and avoid arbitrariness. Not a good idea, Prime Minister. There are other, more urgent things to do, and time is short.

"The public’s mood has changed irrevocably; on crime and punishment, social attitudes will have hardened permanently as a result of the past week’s events. Strong speeches from the prime minister are a step in the right direction, as is the much more effective policing of the past 48 hours, but the public wants real, permanent change, not just temporary, emergency measures. A YouGov poll found that 85 per cent of the public believe that most of those taking part in the riots will go unpunished – they have lost faith in the system. This is understandable: it also reflects the perception of the thugs themselves. Criminal activity is far more rational than people believe, especially in wealthy societies such as ours: there is a lot of empirical and statistical work that shows that criminals implicitly weigh up the costs and benefits of crime. A high probability and cost of detection reduces crime, all other things equal; a low likelihood of detection, a low likely cost (such as a negligible prison sentence or a caution, as has too often been the case in the past) and a larger payoff (flat screen TVs or expensive trainers) raises it. Many of those storming shops made that very calculation this week, albeit implicitly and in some cases incorrectly."

Allister Heath, editor of CityAM. Read it all.

The political party that most intelligently grasps this change of mood, and responds to it by a re-assertion of the right of individuals to defend themselves and their property, and which unravels the disaster wrought by welfarism, supine policing and a hopelessly over-regulated labour market, should win the next election. The question, as ever, is which party has the nous and courage to do this. So far, the signs have not been very encouraging.

I am delighted to see that some people are 'taking the law into their own hands' and not just abandoning their communities to the barbarian thugs...

When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.

The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney's burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm
[...]

"We were outside ready and expecting them," said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named. "But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I'm scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two."

Firstly, to those blaming 'immigration' rather than the welfare state, and the utterly grotesque way the state demands you do not protect what is yours, well people would do well to emulate the Turkish and Kurdish community in Britain. Indeed the looters we see on television and streamed over the internet are so multi-racial it must gladden the hearts of the Welfare Statists who created them.

So when the police decry 'vigilantes', I would point out that communities can often do a better job at protecting themselves than the police can and the folks who got out on the streets, not to loot but to defend their neighbourhoods, well they are the real heroes here.

The safety of you and your property is only tangentially of interest to the state (certainly they want to tax what you own, so to that extent they do indeed care about your life and property), but as demonstrated starkly over the last few days, the state also created the conditions that led to these riots and is therefore rather uneasy about punishing people who, after all, only do what the state does every day only without having to smash any windows.

A community of few people with rifles and something worth protecting are not such a soft target to thugs, even armed thugs, compared to a disarmed general population looking vainly for the Plod to save them. But for all sorts of reasons, the British state has so effectively propagandised this country that to even suggest armed self-defence puts you on the lunatic fringe... so crowbars and cricket bats it is then.

If these last few days shows anything it is that when push comes to shove, only you and your neighbours can defend against what can only be called barbarian scum. Contrary to what the state would have you believe, you have the right to defend yourself and your property that morally supersede any law that would deny that right. The rioters 'took the law into their own hands' so I applaud those Turks and Kurds (and many others whom the Guardian would not be so keen to report on) who did the same... they took the law back from the barbarians with and put it where it belongs: in their own hands.

The state is not your friend, so do what you have to do and if you drive off some thugs, do not call the police after it is all over as nothing good will come of that.

An Englishman's Castle:

As far as I can see no one seems to be pointing out the essential cause of all these riots. Rioting is fun, exciting and you get to pick a prize at the end. Even young bloods at Oxford have been known to smash stuff up for the hell of it. It relieves the tedium of it all.

Talking about "the" essential cause is silly. I can think of about a dozen "essential causes" of these riots, as could you, each as "essential" as each other (this being one reason why there have been so many recent postings here on the subject (this being the ninth consecutive one)). Causes do not work alone; they combine, in clusters. For "the" read "an". "The" Englishman, as he signs himself at the bottom of each posting (is there only one of those?), himself immediately proceeds to add some more "essential causes" of the rioting, like the fact that the penalties for rioting are now too small, along with the fun of it being fun.

Another essential cause of the rioting is that the rioters don't think that rioting is wrong. They are, in short, scum. Why are they scum? Partly because so many of them have no live-in dads, which is another essential cause of all this.

Another essential cause of the rioting is, as was much discussed by me and the commenters here, that we, the non-rioting classes, are severely discouraged by our rulers from defending ourselves and counter-attacking against the rioters, which is one of many reasons why rioters now face too few penalties for their rioting. (Such defending and counter-attacking might also be fun. Different posting.)

Another cause of the rioting is that the rioters are stuck in a welfare trap. They are paid and consequently trained to do nothing, and have become incapable of doing anything more honestly lucrative. The Englishman alludes to all this by quoting at some length from a piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams. Her description of what it's like being stuck in a welfare trap is quite a good one, and should not be dismissed as mere "guff", as the Englishman dismisses it, merely because Zoe Williams's opinion about welfare is (I presume) that there should be more of it, and hence that more should be sucked into welfare traps. She describes the problem well.

Nevertheless, the Englishman has a good, big point here. Rioting is fun. This is not the only or "the essential" cause of the rioting, but it is definitely one of the causes of it.

There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.

- Philip Johnston, journalist.

Read the whole article.

If you have been unfortunate enough to be following the UK media's breathtakingly awful attempts to say something useful about the riots... such as tut tutting about 'social media' for enabling the looting to be organised (cue calls from that hideous Janus-faced Guardian/Daily Mail Chimera to "Do Something")... well you might get a giggle from Alec Muffet's take on that subject.

Sound fellow, that Muffet bloke.

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – where the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.

- Brendan O'Neill.

You don't have to buy some of the slightly misty-eyed stuff about working class "communities" to see that he has a strong point. As I often like to point out, an open liberal society requires a modicum of basic respect for the lives and property of others, a certain amount of fertile soil for particular virtues to take root in and flourish.

When you read this kind of thing in a newspaper, it's bad. But when you read it at cricinfo ...:

The riots and looting in Birmingham were copycat incidents following events in London over the previous days. The vandalism was concentrated around the city centre, with masked young men and women going on a rampage from early evening, looting shops and destroying property.

They started by snatching mobile phones and handbags from pedestrians, followed by kicking, punching, breaking windows of shopping centres, banks, pubs, restaurants, forcing people to shut down these establishments. Groups of two or three suddenly grew larger and created an atmosphere of panic and fear. Through the evening and night riot police were on the main streets, armoured police vehicles and other cars scanned the roads, and a helicoper hovered overhead.

The headline above this says: "Test likely to begin despite riots".

One of the more depressing things about these riots is the way that the only thing that the Police can think of to say to us non-looters and non-arsonists is: "Don't join in" and "Let us handle it". If the bad guys start to torch your house, let them get on with it. If they attack your next door neighbour, don't join in on his side. Run away. Let the barbarians occupy and trash whatever territory they pick on and steal or destroy whatever property they want to.

There was a fascinating impromptu TV interview with some young citizens of Clapham last night, not "experts", just regular citizens, one of whom stated the opposite policy. Law abiding persons should get out of their houses, he said, en masse, and be ready to defend them.

The trouble with "letting the Police do their job" is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won't start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon. The Police, as we advocates of the don't-disarm-the-victims-of-crime policy have been pointing out for decades, can't be everywhere. They cannot instantaneously attend every crime, and magically prevent it. Only the potential or actual victims of crime can sometimes immediately prevent or immediately punish crime, provided only that they are not forbidden to.

Says Instapundit:

Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.

Precisely.

The best thing about these riots is that they have distilled and aggregated the folly of the "let the Police see to it" policy into a large and combined event, and they have done it right next door to where our political class lives. These riots are not confined to Birmingham, or some such second-tier city. They are happening in the backyard of our rulers, even as they hurry back home from Tuscany.

For the last few decades the don't-get-involved, let-Them-handle-it policy has applied only to more isolated crimes, or to riots only way beyond our capital city, which has meant that its doomed nature has impacted only upon those individuals or local populations attacked by criminals, not on the nation as a whole as perceived and lived in by those ruling it. Now our rulers can see this policy in vividly dramatic "action" (i.e. inaction), live on TV, and near enough to where they live for them to be scared, along with everyone else. And the rest of us will see them turning into the kind of vengeful right wing monsters they despise, as soon as their own houses are attacked. Which they well might be.

I recall reading about a yob who stole something from a street stall in Nigeria, many years ago. He was promptly set upon by a mob, of stallholders and their customers, and beaten up. Are you civilised? It depends which side your mobs are on. All our mobs, except the little mobs that are the Police, are anti-civilisation.

I own a cricket bat, inherited from my late Uncle Guy (whom I wrote about towards the end of this ancient blog posting), with "G Micklethwait" written on it. I hope I don't find myself thinking about using it during the next few days, but I have already checked where it is.

Of course the predator political class are going to use the behaviour of the predator social class they created to justify their continued existence... no surprise there.

But all it takes is a look at the footage or a walk down the right street if you live in London, to see that the thugs in question, with a Blackberry in one hand and wearing expensive trainers, are not doing this because "Haringey Council has lost £41m from its budget". Does anyone seriously think these rioters are doing what they are doing because their 'Youth Services' Danegeld was cut back?

Just look at this...

... these are the bastard children of Diane Abbott and David Cameron... and their lineage goes all the way back to Clement Attlee...and all the other members of the political class who created them as the Welfare State progressively hollowed out civil society. These are the product of the demon seed that was planted in 1945 and progressively watered ever more lavishly each year.

So yes, the largely fictitious 'cuts' are indeed to blame. Far far far too little and 20 years too late.

UPDATE: But I quite like this effort.

My area of central London - Pimlico - has not, yet, been hit by the mayhem engulfing many boroughs of this great city. My friends who live in or near these areas are safe, as far as I can check. (I heard from Michael Jennings, who lives in Southeast London, and he's okay). I have been interested in the sort of reactions from Americans and others from abroad. Clearly, fewer than 12 months ahead of the Olympic Games, this violent disorder comes at a terrible time for the organisers of that pointless junket:

"As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones. This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now. There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill. One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night."

(Via Instapundit). Another point is that UK homeowners and business owners are not allowed to use deadly force in self defence, a point that has been made regularly, of course, by this blog.

In the meantime, these books are worth reading, in my view, if you want to understand what has gone wrong in the UK:

Life At the Bottom;
The Welfare State We're In.
Mind The Gap.
Guns & Violence: The English Experience.

I'd add that a common complaint - sometimes made by libertarians and conservatives - is that our police are more interested in political correctness than enforcing the law severely. There may be some truth in that, but I am not sure that this is the issue here. And I am struck by the BBC's coverage. The Labour MP, Diane Abbott, was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast television and instead of making any sort of excuses, such as the usual crap about Tory "cuts", was pretty blunt about the need to deal with these thugs. Interesting.

These riots could be Cameron's Falklands War. That's what just occurred to me, as I was watching my television, as the arson and rioting spreads throughout London and beyond.

Some man on the telly - I don't know who or what he was - has just said, very uneloquently, that we are about to learn what David Cameron is made of. His decision concerning when to come home from his holiday (arguably he left it far too late), in Tuscany, will pale into insignificance beside the decisions that he will have to make in the course of the next few days.

Enoch Powell said something very similar of a previous Prime Minister, a great deal more memorably, at the time of that earlier war. You can read here what Powell then said, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page:

"The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the 'Iron Lady'. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the Right Hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made."

Nobody has ever made any such observation about David Cameron, or not in my hearing, but a similar examination of him is now about to occur.

It could actually be the making of the man. But then again, ...

Alas, this kind of thing is the Health of the State.

LATER:

Labour politicians and spokespersons are out in force, if only to make it clear that they too are against it all. Smart move. The trick in these situations is to blame your political opponents, but without seeming to blame your political opponents.

Kevin McGuire, a journalist close to the previous political regime, has just said something rather more memorable:

"If he comes back from holiday, and it makes no difference, what's the point of having a Prime Minister?"

In other words, if he makes no difference, we should have a different Prime Minister. As indeed we should. Nicely put.

Writing in today's Times behind a paywall, Natascha Engel, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire, relates how she stood in the rain outside a miner's welfare hall smoking with a angry but partially mollified constituent.

...he told me about his father in law who used to come to the welfare every night and spent all evening drinking one pint of Guinness. He was a chain smoker. Since the smoking ban he's never been back.

"He's can't stand outside in the rain like this. He's an old man." He told me about how his father-in-law never goes out any more. "He's lonely and miserable. And he still chain smokes."

Natascha Engel now says that, given the chance again, she would not vote for the ban. It is good that she has the empathy to see and the courage to state that reason the smoking ban is wrong is that it makes people more miserable than they would otherwise have been. Just that. That is reason enough. Arguments about health are very interesting, and I have no doubt that the dangers of passive smoking have been exaggerated, but the fact that an old man has had the solace of smoking in company with his friends denied him trumps all that. I do wish Ms Engel had been able to perceive this at the time when her vote might have done some good, but better late than never.

The riots in London over the last couple nights can be condemned as assaults on private property by predatory opportunists. That much is easy.

What is rather harder is commenting on what sparked them off and I have felt no urge at all to swiftly form any opinions.

The police say the dead man was shot after shooting at a policeman and that said policeman's live was saved by the incoming round lodging in his radio.

Well... is that true or is it a self serving fantasy to exonerate the use of deadly force by the police? I have no idea. But in the aftermath of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, where just about every single 'fact' provided by the authorities turned out to be either mistaken or a total fabrication, quite simply how can anything said by the Met be taken at face value until it is corroborated by multiple sources?

Was this a 'righteous shoot' of a gangster who fired first or another cack-handed murder by the state justified by a flood of lies?

Only time will tell and my unwillingness to give the police the benefit of the doubt is entirely the fault of the police's handling of the appalling Menezes affair.

This paragraph from a good posting by Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review's Corner blog, applies not just to the US, but also to the UK:

"The strangest thing about the current paradox of cash-flush companies and little or no economic growth is the administration’s puzzlement over the lethargy — as if no one outside Washington ever listened to what the administration has said or noticed what they have done the last three years."

Exactly. I'd also add to VDH's list of things that have stymied recovery: the still-lingering and damaging impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on things such as initial public offerings and the foolish FASB tampering with share option payments that have crimped venture capital startup businesses. (I can, by the way, recommend this book by Dale Halling about why US entrepreneurship is stalling - it controversially argues that a key problem has been the erosion of patent law in the US, an argument that is bound to get some libertarian opponents of IP excited).

VDH's points apply in Britain, too, such as what he says about demonisation of some businesses, as well as things like bailouts, Green regulations and so on. Of course, a key problem here is the European Union and all the red tape that comes from that.

Regime uncertainty, if I can use that term, is a big problem. We have a tax authority (HMRC), given the power to decide, as it goes along, what constitutes tax "avoidance", so that avoidance is now seen as wrong, as is tax evasion. This relates to a wider problem of uncertainty. Even the daftest tax laws are more tolerable if they are predictable. The problems get even worse, though, if officials have the ability to retrospectively decide that this or that business practice is wrong and should be shut down. Our tax code remains one of the longest and most complex in the world.

We need far fewer laws, and those that remain should be simple, easy to understand and enforce. Sometimes though, doing things the simple way seems to be so hard.

When I first began to read that David Cameron could soon be toppled by all this News of the World stuff, I was amazed, just as I was amazed when I first heard about the News of the World itself being shut. I still don't know how badly Cameron is threatened, but if he is threatened, he has only himself to blame.

Cameron got the job of leading the Conservatives because enough of them thought that he would make a satisfactory Blair the Second, to replace the original. The question was, remember, during the Blair years: How shall we spend all this money? The answer was: nicely. Blair is the answer to the question: What sort of chap do you want your daughter marrying? A nice one, that's what sort.

But well before Cameron became (only just) the Prime Minister, the questions had all changed, from being about niceness to being about what the hell was happening and what the hell should be done about it. Yet Cameron exudes no sense of crisis. On the contrary, he makes a point of not doing so, of suggesting that all will be well provided we don't panic and just carry on carrying on, when in reality the situation is very troubling and getting worse and worse by the day. It's as if Stanley Baldwin was still the Prime Minister in 1939.

I have a friend whose take on Britain's political party leaders has been an infallible guide to their success or failure, during the last two decades or so. Blair? Nice one. Major? No. Hague? Thumbs down. The next bald Conservative chap, ditto. The next Conservative bloke - Howard was it? - ditto again. Brown? A definite thumbs down. But Cameron? I remember particularly asking her about Cameron. What do you make of him?

Shrug.

Nothing. Not nasty. Not especially nice. Just, you know, not the answer. Only the answer if the question is: Brown or anybody? - and the answer is: anybody. Which, by a whisker, it was.

Cameron seems to have few passionate enemies, but few friends either. Speaking for myself, I am unable to remember anything - anything - that David Cameron has ever said, beyond that ridiculous Rorschach test verbal blob: "big society". To me he comes across only as perpetually calculating how to triangulate himself into perpetual occupation of Ten Downing Street, while remaining sublimely unaware that things might have to be … decided. Friends rallied, enemies made, irrevocable steps taken, Gadarene rushes halted, cudgels taken up. Liberal Democrats, and many Conservatives, maltreated and betrayed. If Cameron is aware of the need to do such things, then he is daily proving himself utterly incapable of it.

As Perry de Havilland has repeatedly pointed out here, if you actually read Cameron's speeches you will detect absolutely no such awareness – none whatsoever, merely the calm, dignified conviction that as we meander towards the precipice we must all remain calm and dignified.

Any hope I had that Cameron would be an improvement on his predecessor depended on the hope that Cameron was lying about how feeble his policies would be, and I do indeed believe that lies are not unreasonable to at least hope for, from a front bench politician. Alas, it turned out that Cameron was telling the truth.

Douglas Carswell describes the things that now do and do not matter quite well:

Forget about which politicians hang out with which media people for a moment. Our closest trading partners are in grave trouble. A number of European countries are on the verge of bankruptcy, their governments having borrowed beyond their means to fund unsustainable welfare programmes. In perhaps weeks, rather than months, the credit carousel will come to a stop, with various EU governments simply unable to pay their bills by borrowing more.

Across the Atlantic, something like $800 Billion has been squandered in an effort to stimulate the US economy, with little besides a credit ratings downgrade to show for it.

Far from saving the world, Western policy-makers have compounded the mistakes they made in the run up to the 2007 credit crunch with a catastrophic borrow-and-bailout splurge. It was supposed to stimulate the economy and allow us to grow our way out of this mess. It was, they told us, necessary to bolster the banks and buy them time to recover. On both counts, it has failed. Entire governments, not just banks, are now on the brink. Some economic cure it's been. ...

And Cameron's response to all this has been, what?

Carswell again:

Being outside the Eurozone has spared us from quite the feckless public spending seen in parts of Euroland. Not having Obama as leader means we've not yet managed to blow several years budgets in one. But in more ways than many care to consider, Britain’s economic policy has changed little from the approach that got us into such a mess to start with.

Monetary policy has remained entirely unaltered. Nothing has been done to change the course charted by the Monetary Policy Committee, with their ruinously low interest rates and inflationary print-more-money agenda. We should tighten monetary policy and create incentives for people to save.

Fiscal policy has been adjusted very little, with tax and spending following much the same trajectories that were set by the previous administration. Despite the talk of deficit reduction and cuts, UK public spending, borrowing and taxation are all up. Indeed, the Coalition spent more money in its first year than Gordon Brown did in his last. We should cut public spending and borrowing, rather than just talk about it.

When it comes to bailing out banks and the Eurozone, the current administration has more or less carried on with the policy it inherited. ...

Prime Ministers who bob about like corks on the ocean of events are vulnerable to scandal. A Prime Minister who is visibly battling a crisis, the nature of which and cure for which he himself repeatedly proclaims in a way that approximately convinces, generally gets to carry on with his battle, whatever people think of his mere morals or his friends or his accent or his taste in suits and ties. A Prime Minister who is leading the charge against an enemy can turn on carpers who moan about such things as unsavoury newspaper friends and cry: Okay, okay, I get it, you don't like my friends. But keep on about it and I will soon suspect you of being another enemy yourself.

Thatcher, in the days of her pomp, defined her great enemy as inflation. Anyone who flung the same piece of mud at her for too many days running was accused by her of being in favour of inflation, and it worked like a charm, not least because the accusation was quite often true. But what evils are the people who are now complaining about Cameron's newspaper friends going to be accused of, by Cameron or by anyone else? Undermining Britain's foreign aid programme? Being anti-Eton? Opposing wind farms?

Like Carswell, I thought that Cameron was at least a better bet than Gordon Brown. Brown had definite plans, all of them catastrophic, and I would have voted for a hamster in a wheel rather than him. Now that the catastrophe has got bigger, and Cameron's plans, insofar as they exist, are proving equally catastrophic, I now feel the same about Cameron. Would Ed Milliband, or Nick Clegg, or William Hague, be any worse? Very possibly, a bit. Might they be better? Most unlikely, but you never know your luck. Better the devil you don't know, than the futile waste of space that you do.

I don't find that I now hate Cameron, the way I hated Brown. What's to hate? But I really would quite like it if another Prime Minister now took over, picked with whatever constitutional pin or random cabal of parliamentary beasts would do the picking. Such an upheaval would almost certainly fail to accomplish anything positive, but it would at least add to the sense of a crisis. Since we do actually face a crisis, that would be something.

"Revulsion, however justified, is a dangerous counsellor."

- Bruce Anderson, on the continuing saga of Rupert Murdoch. A good article overall, somewhat spoiled by a daft remark about Australia.

Steve Baker, the MP whom we here actually rather like, has a piece in the latest Jewish Chronicle, which makes what seems to me like a very important point. I have this point alluded to vaguely, but never spelled out. It is that the outrageous behaviour of the merchant banking fraternity in recent years is as much a product of bad bank regulations as it is of mere capitalistic greed.

It being the Jewish Chronicle he's contributing to, Baker alludes to some scales that are criticised at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 11 (which American readers may consider rather appropriate, what with the times we (and they) are now living in).

The particular rules that Baker zeroes in on are the accounting rules that define profit:

Among other problems, IFRS accounting rules incentivise trading in derivatives by enabling unrealised, perhaps fake, profits to be booked up-front, leading to large but unjustified bonuses and dividends. They grossly inflate profits and capital and discourage banks from making prudent provision for expected loan losses. They also discard the time-honoured principle of prudence embodied in UK company law. In doing so, IFRS gravely weakens the audit function and the vital check it imposes on bank management. This undermines effective corporate governance in banking. The upshot is that IFRS makes bank accounts highly unreliable; no-one has a true view of our banks' financial strength. All this contributed greatly to the financial collapse. IFRS made banks appear more profitable than they were. This led them to imprudent expansion, to payments of bonuses they could ill afford to make and to inadequate provisioning for likely losses.

I am not qualified to second guess Baker on this. But I do know, as a general principle, that when one observes something going wrong with the world, one should not immediately assume that yet more laws and regulations are needed to curb whatever it may be. Rather, one should ask what laws or regulations - laws or regulations already in place - are causing or at the very least greatly exacerbating the problem in question, and should accordingly be got rid of.

Well, the reactions to the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World, and try and halt his empire collapsing, continue. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, used to have a weekly column for a paper once known as "News of the Screws" (for non-Brits, this paper was obsessed by the sex lives of the rich, powerful and celebs). Nelson has thoughts about it at the Spectator's own website. I think he gushes a bit too much and as the comments suggest, readers are not happy at Nelson's defence of much of what the NoTW stood for over the decades. But never mind that. The great thing about the Spectator commenters is that they are often splendidly barmy, if not quite as consistently rude as over at the Guido Fawkes site.

This one, by a "David Lindsay," wins the prize for me. I quote it all, for its genuine insights and wrong-headed, state-worship of a kind that might make an old Soviet functionary blush (although it is entirely possible that Lindsay is a certain kind of "High Tory" who sentimentalises working class life). This comment reminds me of a piece of dialogue of that brilliant Peter Sellers film, "I'm All Right Jack", when Sellers, playing the union shop steward constantly at loggerheads with "the bosses", is praising life in Stalin's Russia. Take it away, Mr Linsday:

"In the farewell souvenir edition [of NoTW ed], it was heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers' educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either."

As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own final back page indicated, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers' Educational Association, the Miners' Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.

For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.

Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People's Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers' Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.

What are they doing "to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention"?

I loved the patronising lines about brass and silver bands. I wish Peter Sellers were still alive now; how he would have loved this sort of comment and used it for his material. I am not sure if Mr Lindsay would get the joke.

"Poor old Dave, he tries to mix with some common folk and look what happens."

A commenter, "Percy", at the Spectator's Coffee House blog, talking about the arrest of Andy Coulson, former press advisor to David Cameron.

It has been a bit of bad summer for Mr Cameron. He's lucky he has been up against such a weak opponent.

You see what's happening? Two separate grievances and two separate targets - one totally justified, the other largely not - are being joined together. The "journalistic culture" Campbell has spent the past 10 years complaining about is not newspapers that have invaded people's privacy - but newspapers that have been too unkind to important public servants such as himself.

- Andrew Gilligan, under the headline: "Phone hacking scandal: enemies of free press are circling". Indeed.

I've just discovered what many must have known for years, that the true test of a real news story is when you just don't believe it.

When I read just now, at Guido's, the news that the News of the World has been closed, I thought, you're 'avin' a laugh, and I was merely puzzled as to why. What, I thought to myself, is the point of concocting this bizarre joke (in the form of a fake press release), and at such bizarre length? Newspapers that are making tons of money and which have lots of readers don't just close, merely because they've done something wrong. Newspapers die, but that's entirely different.

Yet, it appears to be so. The News of the World is indeed to shut.

The only serious attention that I have ever given to the News of the World was when it broke this story about Pakistan cricket corruption. I was grateful for that sting operation then, and am accordingly a bit regretful now. Although I do agree that if you want to make your newspaper hated by everyone, then it is hard to think of a better way of doing it than to get caught busting into the phones of a murder victim and her family.

The NotW is being shut, I presume, to enable Rupert Murdoch's various television plans to proceed profitably. Will this dramatic step do the trick? Might it not make Murdoch look even worse, by drawing yet more attention to the skullduggery that he presided over and surely knew all about, and to the fact that he only closed the NotW when the skullduggery became public knowledge?

David Cameron, because of his close connection to the NotW gang, is also looking very bad. The line here at Samizdata on that will presumably be: oh dear, how tragic.

Yesterday, there was a mini-rebellion in Parliament, to be precise in one of its Committee Rooms. Britain's (increased) IMF subscription was being discussed, and although it got through, there was a little flurry of excitement, as Guido reported:

Something very rare happened in what is usually the dullest of committees. A dozen or so Tory non-members of the committee came and spoke against affirming the instrument. Government whips cajoled the pliant Tory and LibDem members of the committee to vote to affirm the instrument while Tory MPs spoke from the floor against it. Promising new boy Steve Baker and backbench eurosceptic Douglas Carswell were among those who spoke against affirming the instrument.

You can now read what was said in Hansard.

When these kinds of things are argued about, everything depends on whether the contrariness on show is a genuine argument that we should switch to an alternative and better policy, or merely grumbling. If all that is happening is that people don't like whatever it is, what with them not having created the problems (or so they say) with their decisions, and what with all the cuts they are having to put up with now, well, frankly, that doesn't count for very much. If the powers that be are able to say: Well, what would you do that would be any better? - and if you don't then have an answer, you might as well not have bothered. All you are saying is: This hurts. And all that the government has to say in reply is: Yes, we hear you, we feel your pain, but we are going to do it anyway, because despite all the pain, we remain convinced that this is the best thing to do.

Scroll down at Hansard and you can read, in particular, what Steve Baker MP had to say. The thing about Baker is that he really is arguing for a paradigm shift in economic policy thinking. He even quoted a chunk out of Human Action, which I think I will quote here, again:

The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion.

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” (Human Action, p. 572)

Baker is not just saying: this is a crisis. Everyone knows that. He is also saying: and we need to have the crisis, now, all of it and get it over with as soon as we can.

Hayek also got a mention, as did Jesus Huerta de Soto, who gave the Hayek Memorial Lecture last October.

This is the kind of politicking that is capable of having actual impact. Not now, and certainly not right away, but … in the longer run. In the longer run, ideas can change.

LATER: The Cobden Centre blog now has a more user friendly version of Steve Baker's words, here.

The Prime Minister of China has just been on the television news (more on the story here) telling "Britain" (by which he seems to mean the British government) not to indulge in "finger pointing" about China's human rights record. He loves Shakespeare, he said. Do any of China's critics know anything about Chinese literature?

It's an interesting idea, that you need to acquire a love of Chinese literature before you can reasonably complain about circumstances like this (just lately linked to by Instapundit):

... Workers complained they were forced to stand during 12-hour shifts with only two toilet breaks, forbidden to drink water while on the job.

They also charged that the factory, operated by Simone Ltd., was feeding them blackened rice and other substandard food, for which deductions were made from their wages. "The Korean management treats us less than human beings," said one worker. "The male managers walk into female toilets any time they please; we can’t contain our anger any more." ...

But it is not enough of an explanation of such events to say that the people of Guangdong don't like being horribly treated. My question is: how come they now feel able to be so angry? I mean, it's not like they have never been maltreated before.

Answer:

Long-term social trends and the problems of authoritarian rule explain much of the restiveness, but there is another principal reason.  Employees these days have much more bargaining power.  Back at the Simone factory in Panyu, management said it would fire those who did not return to work.  That threat used to be effective, but not now.

Why not?  For several years, Guangdong has been short of help.  Some residents have become relatively well-off and no longer need mind-dulling employment in factories, something evident in Shenzhen, the booming city bordering even-more-prosperous Hong Kong.

It sounds as if finger pointing by the likes of David Cameron won't be necessary to make China's bosses, political and economic, start to become a tiny bit nicer, year on year. Supply and demand, of and for labour, is now working that trick.

The Forbes piece, with its headline about "Conflict handbags", implies that soon there may be calls for boycotts of handbags made in China. But is it not the willingness of richer people to buy such stuff that is bidding up the price of labour in China, and making such things as the denial of toilet breaks so unsustainable?

Meanwhile, where is the voracious demand for the services of Britain's public sector workers, who are also threatening strike inaction? The government is going to stop! State teachers will stop teaching! Here is a case where a strike is being triggered by a fall in demand for the relevant labour. The paymaster is feeling the pinch, and wants to cut their pensions. I wonder what the Prime Minister of China thinks about that? Seriously, I would like to know this. Even better, I would like to see him doing some finger pointing. That would be a real laugh.

I don't know how many illusions Britain's state pen-pushers and button-pushers have about how loved they are by the rest of us. When we encounter them we tend not to discuss any feelings of rage towards them that we may be engulfed by, which is all part of why we often get so enraged with them. On the other hand, they talk about the "front line" services that they supply, like they know they are in a war, rather than serving anyone besides their bosses. Their calculation has to be that the government needs them, in order for the government to go on being the government. But, the threat by them to stop the government … spending money, won't necessarily come over as much of a threat to the nation as a whole.

But those state teachers might also want to be a bit careful. If they go on strike too enthusiastically, they might find that people might work out how to get along okay without them, and maybe with humiliating speed.

It has emerged that the Provisional IRA, rather than its deniable offshoot the South Armagh Republican Action Force, was responsible for the 1976 Kingsmills Massacre. If you do not know about that event, the grim story is here.

On 5 January 1976, the 10 textile workers were travelling home from work in the dark and rain on a minibus in the heart of rural County Armagh.

....

A man asked their religions. There was only one Catholic left on the bus. He was identified and ordered away from his Protestant work mates. He was able to run off.

The lead gunman spoke one other word - "Right" - and the shooting began.

Mr Black was the only one to survive.

It seems almost indecent to let such an event be the starting point for a more general line of thought, but that is the way the mind works sometimes.

I had remembered the Kingsmills massacre. The last question put to the men and the awful choice of what to answer when you did not know whether the terrorists asking were Loyalist or Republican had stuck in my mind. Today I have advanced a little further in knowledge: I now know that analysis of the guns used confirms that it most likely was the IRA after all. The thing is, though, that my level of knowledge, which I tend to think of as average, is actually way above average. I have known for three decades that this massacre occurred. I knew that a few days previously five Catholics had been murdered and that the Kingsmills massacre was carried out in reprisal for this. And here's the point, I know that there are Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Republicans and Loyalists, and could give you a basic account of which side is which and how that situation came to be.

My own background is Irish Catholic. My family loathed the IRA. So I grew up paying a slightly above average amount of attention to Northern Ireland and I noticed over the years that plenty of people in the world literally did not know that there were any Protestants there. These people thought that that it was a case of "the English" occupying Ireland. Partisans on the Republican side also spoke thus, but selective rather than complete ignorance was their problem, as it was for partisans on the Loyalist side. The way in which those soaked in the history of a conflict can blank out the other side and talk of "the people" when they mean "our people" is tragic but a quite different phenomenon from that of ordinarily well educated members of society who simply have no idea - but not, alas, no opinion.

I have explained the existence of a Protestant population in bad French and worse Italian. I remember reading of angry editorials in American newspapers of thirty years ago that appeared to be unaware that the Republic of Ireland was an independent state. Colonel Gaddafi of Libya - now there's a name from the past, wonder what happened to him? - at one time was visited by a delegation of Protestant paramilitaries who convinced him that this was not a straightforward anti-Imperialist struggle and got him to cease sending arms to the IRA.

I think a few of the commenters to this article still literally do not know of the existence of the Protestant population. If they do know of it, they ain't showing it.

The ignorance that is rational for individuals can do great harm.

What are your experiences of spectacular historical ignorance? What effect does that ignorance have? To count, examples should not be the ignorance of the illiterate and semi-literate. There are millions on Earth who do not know the world is round. That is sad but not interesting. What is sad but interesting is the state of those for whom some basic historical fact is an "unknown unknown", to use Rumsfeld's formulation.

On second thoughts, why confine ourselves to history? A Scottish friend of mine relates that some of people she talks to in her part of the world literally think that the financial crisis of 2008 arose because bankers took "all the money" for bonuses. They think the government could get all the money back and make everything OK again, had it but the willpower. Discussing the matter, she modified that slightly, and said that if these friends and acquaintances were ever to articulate the idea I have just described they would probably see that it could not be correct, but they never have articulated it. This is in a Labour-voting but by no means deprived area near Glasgow, but I would not bet on the proportion of people thinking thus in my Tory part of Essex being much different, for all that 'banksters' keep the local economy going.

These holes in peoples' knowledge will have their effect in the end. One could call it trickle-up ignorance.

Ever before I wrote this, I was on the lookout for Fixed Quantity Of... theories, and even more since then. Usually these theories are fallacies. Often, changing how something is done, and in particular changing the rules or the overall setting within which something is done can quite dramatically change, for the better or for the worse, both the quantity and the quality of whatever is being argued about.

Here is another such theory/fallacy, the Fixed Quantity of Education fallacy. Toby Young takes aim at it here. He and some friends of his are setting up a "free school". Their critics in the state education sector object, because this new school will suck educational excellence out of their schools and make it available only to a privileged few.

In particular, it is said that this new school will draw middle class children away from state schools, to the educational detriment of these schools. State educators who talk like this sometimes make it sound as if most of the good teaching that goes on in their schools is done by middle class children rather than by educationally expert adults. Perhaps they have a point.

But the amount of satisfactory educating going on is very variable, depending on how relaxed or restrictive are the rules about how it may be done and who may do it. (For instance, if it were forbidden for parents to educate their children at home, that would, I believe, sharply diminish the supply of good education.) Toby Young says that the real reason the detractors of the educational venture he favours are so vocal is that they fear being shown up as bad educators, by a new school that creates a vast new surge of educational excellence, thereby proving that they could be doing this too. No upper limit on the total amount of available education is stopping them, only their own stupid educational ideas and habits. I am sure that he has a point.

The dependably dismal Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who thinks his god favours a massive force backed regulatory state which takes one person's wealth implicitly at gunpoint and gives it to someone else, get a well phrased hammering by Graeme Archer:

It is obscene, Dr Williams, that some people choose not to work, and are better off as a consequence than those who do not make such a choice. Such people are less deserving than others. If there are no jobs available, what are all these Polish men doing on this bus, at 6.30am? They deserve more than to be viewed as taxable cart-horses.

And you? On an average salary? Trying to raise a child and thinking about having another? Coming to the conclusion that you might be able to balance commuting against mortgage costs, if you moved to an unpopular area farther out than you’d like? It must be hard for multiple houseowners such as Mr Cruddas, or the Archbishop in his palace, to understand: this is life, for most of us. And we’re not fascists because we make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving when we see where our tax is spent.

Read the whole thing. My only regret is Archer does not follow the moral argument to its logical conclusion.

I tend to have a "half empty" view of the world - but even I do not believe that the British population contains no pro freedom people. Indeed I believe that there are millions of pro freedom people in Britain - and basically the British book trade was telling us all to bugger off, that we were not welcome in the book shops.

Well we got the message - it is not all "the internet" that is the reason for the decline of the British book trade, basically they were telling non-socialists that our custom was not wanted.

- Paul Marks

As a BBC news announcer gave out the round of story headlines this morning on the television, I heard this particular classic of its type connected to this story about extremism and universities:

"Government money is no longer going to be given to Islamic extremists".

First of all, there is, as readers of this blog know, no such thing as "government money". All money spent by government is, despite what some might believe, owned by you, the taxpayer, or lent to it, by other people. Second, it is not just appalling that money levied on pain of imprisonment (taxes) is then transferred to people who want to impose a particular worldview on their fellows; it would be just as bad if the money were to be given to the forces of sweetness and light. No such groups, whether it be Islamic Jihad, The Women's Institute or the Worshipful Company of Bald People, should receive a penny from the taxpayer. End of subject.

The ineffectiveness of modern government is a great blessing. It means that proposals like this - "Cameron-backed report to protect children from commercialisation" - will almost certainly come to very little.

For the record, like Tim Worstall, I think T-shirts for five year olds that read 'Sexy Tart' are not the most tasteful of fashion statements. My opinions are rather more hostile than that, as it happens. But my hostility to chav parents is mild compared to my hostility to the governing classes, who first bred the problem (by ensuring that two generations have grown up who had no need to be respectable), and now step forward to "solve" it by giving themselves more power.

Mercifully, the modern Big State is made of fat, not muscle. Listed below are the key proposals of this report, and next to each what will actually happen.

• Retailers to ensure magazines with sexualised images have modesty sleeves. Measurable, enforceable, provides work for council busybodies. Might happen.

• The Advertising Standards Authority to discourage placement of billboards near schools and nurseries. Discouraging noises will be made.

• Music videos to be sold with age ratings. Measurable, enforceable, work for busybodies. Will be about as effective as the age ratings for computer games and films. (I have nothing against manufacturers giving an age rating for a product voluntarily, by the way - but see the final sentence of this post about "voluntary" self-regulation.)

• Procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult and age restricted material on internet. Could be dangerous, since procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult material on the internet are necessarily also procedures to make it easier for governments to block any material on the internet - but fear not, they can't afford the people who can write the program.

• Code of practice to be issued on child retailing. OMG, a code of practice!

• Define a child as 16 in all types of advertising regulation. Presumably they mean "under 16". If the current regulation allows scope to define a child as "under 13" this might make a difference. Or it might not. Probably all concerned will work very hard to find all the clauses and sub-clauses in fifteen different laws that refer to this, harmonise them all, then sit back and contemplate the beautiful consistency of the result. No one else will notice.

• Advertising Standards Authority to do more to gauge parent's views on advertising. Colourful website to be set up. Two comments will be left a week, in Chinese.

• Create a single website for parents to complain to regulators. Colourful website to be set up. 45,000 comments will be left a week, often in something resembling English. Government will promise to clear backlog by 2021.

• Change rules on nine o'clock television watershed to give priority to views of parents. Will be acclaimed by all until someone who is not a parent threatens to sue.

• Government to regulate after 18 months if progress insufficient. Although I do think it most unlikely that the government ever really will send out inspectors to measure the amount of black lace on pre-teen bras, I still find this type of sickly-sweet concealed threat, so common nowadays, nauseating. "Voluntary change is so much nicer, don't you think? So much more meaningful. But, of course, if you don't change voluntarily..." It always reminds me of Dolores Umbridge early in her career.

Never mind he is debasing the currency and starting us on the road to runaway inflation, is functionally indistinguishable from Tony Blair and his 'savage cuts' are a fiction simply parroted by a mainstream media seeming unable to do simple math... he has 'Ease and authority'

Well, phew, good to know! I guess we'll be ok then!

- Perry de Havilland commenting on a Telegraph blog article claiming that "Ease and authority make David Cameron hard to beat"

... no, I am not talking about his, er, other talents but rather the clarity of his economic analysis...

Ladies and gentlemen, Guido presents the Great Inflation Swindle, we have just seen the second-biggest one-month increase on record and a record high in core CPI yet the Governor of the Bank of England has told us for 3 years inflation was a blip and that the real danger was deflation. It was a deliberate lie to excuse the most reckless monetary loosening since… well actually monetary policy has been too loose globally since back to 1998 when Greenspan “saved the world” after Long Term Capital’s financial theory geeks had a close encounter of the reality kind. The loosening up of monetary policy to smooth the aftermath of that hedge fund collapse told financial risk takers to rack up the risk because central banks would step in if you got in to trouble. Everyone was “too big to fail”. Central bankers turned capitalism from a system of profit and loss into a system of private profits and socialised losses. Taxpayers had their chips put on the gambling table without even being asked.

Read the whole thing.

The Business Secretary, and member of the Liberal Democrat Party, Vincent Cable, likes to let us know he supposedly predicted the recent credit crunch (I am not sure he did, actually), and still manages to be presented as a sage voice on current affairs. Never mind that many of his views are nonsense.

Anyway, the Daily Mash satirical website has nailed him.

To argue for controls over the internet may not be cool, but it's right

Investigating Chris Huhne is disproportionate

Here is one of those quotes where you add "read the whole thing":

But next time you are told that Osborne is imposing savage, reckless cuts on the UK, remember that the figures tell a different story. So far, spending is still going up. The plan is for total spending to go up in cash terms overall this financial year and to fall by 0.6 per cent in real terms (the measure that really matters). This will hurt, especially given that debt interest payments are soaring, reducing the funds available for public services by a lot more than the 0.6 per cent overall cut. But this should also be put into context. Barack Obama, who was in London yesterday, wants to cut public spending by 3.8 per cent next year, more than the 3.7 per cent pencilled in over four years by Osborne. In other words, Obama’s cuts – which many in the US want to make even larger – are four times larger than the average annual cuts proposed by slowcoach Osborne.

So it is no wonder really that the UK’s credit rating was downgraded yesterday by (wait for it) Chinese rating agency Dagong, which cut the UK by one notch to A+, from AA-, and placed it on a negative outlook. You may snigger – but unless the UK is able to deliver on its fiscal austerity not just this year but for the next four, our creditors will soon start panicking again, with good reason.

That's Allister Heath, writing in the London giveaway newspaper, City A.M., which he edits. His point being that the journey in question has only just begun.

Read the whole thing. The above quote comes at the end. Before that come a few of the facts and the figures.

I suppose the optimistic take on all this is that you can't wrench a graph that is going up onto a downward path, just like that. But how much wrenching is actually going on?

So, Ken Clarke hamfistedly but correctly says there are degrees of seriousness in rape and the law reflects this - and causes great outrage. Not just from the avowedly feminist Guardian either. The Sun says he's a danger to women, no less.

Interestingly, both the the Guardian's and the Sun's commenters seem to take a more nuanced view than their respective papers. As they should. Clarke was attempting to make a valid distinction. Sure, he messed it up, particularly when he appeared to confuse date rape and statutory rape, but of course there are degrees of seriousness in rape as in any other crime. To say that is not to say that any form of rape is trivial. Whoopi Goldberg's much derided comment that Roman Polanksi was not guilty of "rape rape" was not outrageous because she attempted to distinguish between statutory and actual rape, but because Polanski had committed rape rape.

It distresses me that so many of those who seek to help to rape victims seem to act all the time as if they were a politician on the radio. By this I mean that they have always ready in their heads one idea, one sound bite, that they must express. Nothing must detract from that message; no ifs, no buts, no side issues. I agree entirely with the One Idea in this case: all rape is serious. But when one sees what trouble a real politician on the radio got into for merely touching upon the reasons for a sliding scale of sentences one also sees why most politicians try so hard to stick with the pre-prepared One Idea. Meanwhile Lara Williams in the Guardian (linked to above), a woman whose real-life experience of helping rape victims would lead one to hope that her views were rooted in observation, comes out with the sort of mindlessly simplified slogans that have given politicians a bad name:

Through distinguishing "serious" and "less serious" rape, Clarke assumed a perverse gradient of suffering, a warped taxonomy of perceived victimisation.

No one actually believes that. If called upon in court to state what impact a particular rape had had on a particular victim, I have no doubt that this writer would recoil in horror from saying, "Oh, the usual. All rapes have the same impact. All rapes are equally bad." Yet that is the logical implication of what she has written. She is not the only such commenter. It is sad to see obviously intelligent and compassionate people with so little faith in the public that they make themselves believe that the only way to put forward a true idea - all rape is bad - is to coarsen it into falsehood.

We seem to be having quite a lot of referendums at the moment in the UK and Europe. As we might note with a sort of grim amusement, the largest recent ones - on the EU Constitution - were airily ignored with customary insouciance by the EU political elites, and therefore fill many people will understandable cynicism. Over at the EU Referendum blog there is a long item about protest movements, violence, referendums and political change. I may have more to say when I have the time to study it. It looks a good piece, and I recommend it.

Talking of protests, here is a nice collection of photos of recent "rally against debt" held in central London a few days ago, as taken by our own Brian Micklethwait.

Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:

The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.

I do hope so.

The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with "urgency and resolve" if it is to follow its vow to be the "greenest government ever".

The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.

Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.

A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.

I love the phrase "a top priority", in particular the "a". And when a government says that it "stands by its record", that often means that it realises that it's a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.

David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a "vow", but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.

Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.

The Daily Mash satire site has this beauty of an item on Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He is the gift that keeps on giving, as Perry de Havilland of this parish noticed a while ago.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard

- H. L. Mencken

I read this article by Matthew d’Ancona and had to laugh out loud.

David Cameron would be wrong to jettison his co-pilot. Nick Clegg’s only chance of recovery is to ignore the turbulence and carry on regardless [...] Instead, Clegg has led his party in another direction: into office with an ideological rival, and the cockpit of compromise, U-turns, and grinding policy formation. To say it has not been easy is a laughable understatement, and the price – so far – has been immense. But it was the right call.

Hahahaha... political rivals, sure... but 'ideological' rivals? Oh give me a break. Tories, LibDems, Labour, oh and SNP... ie. all of Britain's main parties are utterly committed to the regulatory welfare state and their 'idealogical rivalry' amounts to arguing over the length of their minister's ties. The 'co-pilot' is staring straight ahead as the aircraft in on 'finals' for a CFIT.

I particularly loved this...

“The best help we can give the Lib Dems is not a shopping list of policies,” says one senior Cameroon, “but to help them through their adolescence as a party of government – to help them navigate this crisis.”

It is not that the LibDems are 'adolescent' but rather that the entire political establishment appear to be intellectually 'senile' as the disconnect between objective reality and acceptable political reality grows apace (and largely unremarked by that essential priesthood of media truthsayers).

It hardly matters which of these lumps are in office. All the policies being bandied about are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and not only does *no* major political party have the will to implement a radical reduction in state expenditure and a massive reduction in the red tape that limit the scope for new market entrants in industry after industry, they all lack the will to even seriously discuss such notions.

When someone suggests a budget that has the state appropriating 20% less of the national wealth overall next financial year and the same the year after that, and allowing banks to simply go bust if they screw the pooch on an epic scale, well then and only then are they are getting serious... but until that happens, let the various party loyalists blather on about Dave and Nick as if it actually matters.

The Ponzi scheme has reached the 'end game' phase and the antics of the clowns in Westminster and their supporters are as important as a tinker's damn. Britain and much of the western world have got the leaders they voted for and the ones they deserve. Drink wine, watch films, play games, meet friends, but only pay attention to politics for the entertainment value. It is not like politics is actually going to have much impact on where the economy is heading.

I loved the hats.

And the grumpy-looking little bridesmaid on the balcony at the exact moment of one of The Kisses (surely a future Violet Elizabeth Bott).

And the foxy chief bridesmaid.

And hearing again the words of the Anglican wedding service (even though it prompted, again, wistful laments from my wife about our own godless civil ceremony).

But mostly the hats.

I am sitting next to the beach at Lyme Regis, south Dorset. The sun is out, the Brits have a public holiday due to the Royal Wedding, and I have deliberately fled central London to be down here. A good choice, as it turns out. This has to be one of the nicest parts of the UK.

The Daily Telegraph has one of those gushing, pro-Royal editorials written, I sometimes think, with the deliberate desire to wind up the malcontents out there. It seems to have succeeded most admirably, judging by this fellow in the comment threads by the name of "tyburntree":

"....a nation with much to celebrate..." Er, like what exactly? Treason committed at the highest levels. Illegal wars. Thoughroughly undemocratic parliamentary system. Deliberate population replacement and destruction of indigenous identity and culture ( contary to international law). Islamic extremism. Children killing children. Strutting Peacocks and thieves in our House of Shame. A three party dictatorship. Useless police. Useless courts. Useless schools. The refusal of our political class and courts to deport foreign criminals. Holiday camp prisons. Mulitculturalism. And last but not least a series of broken coronation oaths that have left this country at the mercy of an EU dictatorship. Independent English Republic now!"

This is what might count as a sort of grumpy, right-wing kind of anti-royalist. I suspect that Samizdata regulars might agree with some of the sentiments expressed here - although the stuff about "deliberate population replacement" sounds a bit hysterical to me - plus the line about "illegal" wars (what, so it is okay so long as we get UN approval for them?). And for a person who seems to be concerned about the loss of "indigenous" identity and culture, why does this man want a republic? Like it or not, a constitutional monarchy is part of that "indigenous culture" of the UK, and has been for a long time. To be a republican, as this guy must surely know, is to make a pretty big break with tradition.

I am an agnostic about republics and monarchies - I think the system we have now is no worse than any likely alternatives. Republics have not, by and large, been noticeably less prone to the follies of socialism and big government than constitutional monarchies. Arguably, the reverse.

Anyway, I'll unashamedly be raising a glass to the happy couple today. We can resume normal service tomorrow, whatever that means.

Well, call Ghost Busters if you like but for heaven's sake do not call the Plod.

When a gang of travellers trespassed on her land and allegedly threatened to cut her throat with a chainsaw, Tracy St Clair Pearce dialled 999, expecting protection and reassurance from the police.

But while they took a statement and visited the nearby traveller camp, officers came back and confiscated her shotgun, saying it was a “sensible precaution”.

Well Tracy got quite a life lesson, eh? Where on earth did she get notion the State gives a damn about her right to self defence from some predatory 'Traveller' thugs?

The rule is simple... are you a home owner? Never. Ever. Call. The. Police.

They are not there to protect you. Just file this under 'the State is not your friend'...

Recently, I've been exploring the area around the Royal Victoria Dock, which now has lots of houses on its south side, between it and the River Thames, and the ExCeL (apologies for the correct spelling there) Centre on its north side, where they hold big exhibitions like, most recently, this.

The area abounds with photo-opportunities of the sort that I like. To the West, there is the Dome and the Docklands Towers. Beyond them, other more distant towers nearer to London's centre can be spotted, by me anyway. To the East, interestingly obscure airplanes land and take off from the City Airport, often flying the length of the Dock in the process, near enough for me to actually see some detail in my snaps of them. All around the Dock, large but idle cranes stand, reminders of more muscular and industrial times for this stretch of water, which now advertises itself on the outsides of nearby building sites as being a venue for sporty little sailing boats.

Best of all, there is a big footbridge, half way along the Dock, north to south, with a span high into the sky which is reached by lifts at each end. The views from this bridge, especially those looking West into central London, are very fine.

And all around the Royal Victoria Dock, as everywhere else in Britain that I have visited lately, there are official signs of all sorts (a more recent photographic enthusiasm of mine), urging this, forbidding that, threatening and warning and nagging and cajoling.

Are you a building worker? Be careful in there:

Building workers seem often to get bombarded with the visual equivalent of a Fidel Castro speech, in the form of huge clumps of warnings about every imaginable infringement of safety they might choose to indulge in.

The rest of us are of course nagged on a similar scale, but each nag tends to have its own separate notice.

So, at the Royal Victoria Docks, we observe, if we choose to, dozens of nags and official imprecations of all kinds...

Are you the kind of person who thinks that jet airplanes in the vicinity of airports are always silent? They are not:

Were you thinking of doing some fishing? Think again:

And be warned that "but I was doing it at night" will not wash as a defence:

This being a big stretch of water, there are signs upon signs, too numerous to count, all saying:

All of the above drops in the ocean of signage in and around the Royal Victoria Dock are signs that I made a point of noticing, but which others would not. But, in among all these very ignorable signs, I came across this next sign. It also concerns swimming, but I think that this is a no swimming sign with a difference:

That is a sign which I think I would have noticed even if I had not been noticing signs generally at all.

It's as if its creator was, while creating it, thinking and feeling something rather unusual. He actually cared about people reading his sign and about people doing what he said. He really wanted to communicate something.

He thought about it. How can I word it, he said to himself, to make sure that people pay attention, refrain from swimming in these truly dangerous waters, in which, I know for a fact, in 1995, no fewer than seven - seven - people were drowned? How can I get that across? Lives are at stake here. Before I die, I want to make the world a slightly better place. This is my chance.

You can see the scene in his office, in 1999 or whenever it was. "I'm stuck," said he. Stuck? Relax, said his less committed colleagues. It's only a sign. Nobody reads signs. They're only there to avoid legal liability when some idiot does whatever it is. "But I really want people to read it! What can I put?"

I like to think that at this point, a wise and experienced sign writer said: "Put your pen down, and tell me what you are trying to say? Say it it out loud."

"Say it out loud?"

"Yes."

"Well, what I want to say is that during 1995 there were seven deaths in docklands waters due to people ignoring these signs! These waters are dangerous! No swimming!"

"Well, why don't you put that?"

"Eh?"

"Put what you just said. That'll get their attention. Your sincerity will shine through."

Seriously, there is a real problem with all these signs, not unlike the problem of too many laws. People just switch off. They screen them out. Call it: sign inflation. So many warnings add up to ... no warning at all.

This, come to think of it, is one of the reasons I have taken to snapping these signs and sticking them up on this (or my own) blog. I'm saying: do what you never do normally, and actually read some of this crap. Isn't it weird? What's the world coming to? (There are some very pertinent answers to that question here.) The signs say something in a blog posting, because these signs are typically ignored. If they worked, and everyone read them, there'd be no point in me reproducing them. As it is, it's quite a laugh, albeit rather a troubling one.

Which means that when there actually is a real problem of some kind (and not just the fear of law suits or a quota for how many signs your department has erected this year or a "compliance officer" with no-one else to torment snapping at your heals and threatening to ruin you), when quite a few people actually have died due to not being scared enough about doing this or that, a sign that merely says don't do it will not suffice.

Most public officials, presumably, just say to hell with it. I did my bit. I organised a hundred signs saying: no swimming. If people ignore all that, how can I be blamed?

But the question my sign-composing hero put to himself was not: How can I evade responsibility when people die? His question was: How can I actually save people from dying?

That's what I like about this particular sign. It cut through the background noise of the usual health and safety signage, and actually spoke to me. It actually convinced me that swimming in the Royal Victoria Docks would be truly unwise, as opposed to merely being troublesome to plan for and officiate over. It got me thinking about tidal currents in that part of London, and the cost of a big rescue operation when someone who fears he or she is about to drown cries out to someone on land to fetch help, a lot of it, quick. I started imagining the early evening news reports, with photographs and little clutches of flowers where the body was washed ashore.

I quite realise, before anyone says, that in a libertarian world, such things might be handled very differently. The right to take risks might, at any rate in some parts of town, be taken a whole lot more seriously than it is now, along with the obligation to live or die with the consequences of taking risks. Not my point here. Sometimes the public sector does something I admire. That's what this posting has been about.

There is also the suggestion of an acknowledgement - is there not? - both in the wording of this sign and in the fact that as the years have gone by it has not been updated with news of more recent safety insubordinations, that ignoring no swimming signs in 1995 was a truly culpable act. Whereas now, in 2011, only a fool - or a weirdo photo-blogger - would pay any attention to all the relentlessly ubiquitous official nagging of this sort.

Unless, that is, it got through to you, and truly convinced you of the wisdom of heeding its advice.

There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who's-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough...

...but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago.

David Deutsch, quantum theorist, libertarian and a man with a brain exceptionally huge even for a libertarian, has posted a video on youTube of himself discoursing against AV (thanks to Sarah Fitz-Claridge for passing news of it on to me).

It is a beautifully clear 15 minutes of listening. He argues that AV, by making proportions of MPs more closely reflect the proportions of electors supporting the parties, doesn't succeed in its purported aim of making the electoral system fairer. Rather, by making coalitions almost inevitable, it gives king-making power to the third party. Not only does that have nothing to do with numerical 'fairness', it makes it virtually impossible for electors to influence the third party and hence for it to learn from experience - Popperphiles will love his introduction of the great Karl into the argument near the end. First-past-the-post is less bad in this respect. The implication is that any proportional-representation system will have the same weakness.

I always participate in elections. I almost invariably spoil the ballot paper with a libertarian slogan. I try unsuccessfully to make my kinfolk and friends understand that this symbolic act is no more ineffective than the votes that they cast and is just as morally responsible. One of the rare votes I did cast was for a UKIP local councillor. I could actually detect a difference between UKIP and the other parties, and I approved of it.

Now I think David Deutsch might have persuaded me to cast a vote again - against AV.

Yesterday I received a spam-email, with a link to this, which begins thus:

The public sector has a key part to play in the fight against climate change, as well as ensuring the security of the country's energy supply. The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the UK's 'unacceptably slow' progress towards meeting its renewable energy targets. Understanding the scale of change required, and the public sector's role in leading the way, is vitally important.

And the Gadarene Swine are moving towards the cliff edge with abysmally insufficient urgency.

Later:

Greening the heat supply is extremely important – heating accounts for roughly half of Britain's carbon dioxide emissions. The Department for Energy and Climate Change recently announced the launch of the world's first Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which aims to increase renewable heat generation from 1% to 12% by 2020. The £860m scheme aims to encourage the installation of equipment such as renewable heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar thermal panels to reduce emissions and support the existing 150,000 jobs in the heating industry.

Once again, we observe that Law about how, when you name a government department after some problem, this guarantees that the problem will only get worse.

All of which just goes to show the power of momentum. The mere arguments in favour of such policies have taken a hammering during the last year or two, and I daresay that the event that this piece of spam was alerting me to won't have quite the buzz that its organisers had been wanting when they first set it up. Doubts - in the form of puzzled and angry questions about what to do about the rising tide of climate denialism, but doubts nevertheless - may be heard during it. And that matters, because unless there is global unanimity on this issue, curbing some of the CO2 emissions of little old Britain will be so extremely pointless as actually to seem somewhat pointless to some of those who favour such a policy. But, too many bets have been placed, too much Green Money is now swilling around, for this foolishness to end at all soon.

In the recent Local Growth White Paper, the government emphasised its commitment to delivering a huge expansion of renewable energy over the next 10 years. Recognising that community renewable energy projects play a vital role in meeting the national need for secure and clean energy, they will now be allowed keep any business rates generated. Moreover, the planning system has caused hold-ups in the past, but imminent changes to planning powers will make it simpler to take advantage of such opportunities.

In other words, this Good Cause is now deep into the racket phase. Which means that the end is in sight, but not before a lot more money has been given to some very undeserving people.

Earlier in the week I was visiting family in the old family home, the nearest railway station to which is Egham. And just outside Egham Station, I spotted this rather remarkable sign, erected (I presume) by the local council, Runnymede.

It seems that Lucinda Campbell Jackson of St Cuthbert's School (see the verbiage top right) did a really quite witty piece of art, on the theme of CCTV surveillance. But the odd bit is Runnymede Council (see the verbiage top left) - and yes that is Runnymede of Magna Carta fame - thinking that using this bit of school art on an official sign is a good way to publicise the fact that everything you do in public in Egham is being recorded on video.

For me, what this illustrates is that all those who still oppose public video surveillance in all public places in Britain (personally I am still rather undecided) have comprehensively lost this argument, insofar as it ever was an argument in the first place. These local councillors know their business. They know that, if there was any serious public opposition to ubiquitous CCTV surveillance, it would not be in their interests to make public jokes about it. As it is, they are extremely keen to advertise their enthusiasm for CCTV surveillance with a bit of humour, knowing that many will laugh, but that very few will grumble, still less complain out loud.

I mean, if you have nothing to hide, you obviously have nothing to fear. Right? Except looking badly dressed.

First off, they really are. Running around like headless chickens in Whitehall, I mean. I have photographic evidence! Click on this link to the 10 Downing Street website and it shows a headless person running, or at least walking fairly fast, down Whitehall.

At least we now know the person who thought up this proposal. Not that I want to mock the Headless Apparation's disability, but this is not a conception that can have originated in an actual brain. This one came out of the sacral ganglia in the spinal column, in the manner of the stegosaurus.

PM welcomes scheme to help graduates start businesses.
Entrepreneur First, a new programme to encourage entrepreneurship has been launched today, with recruitment of the first intake due to start this year.

Launched on the same day as a series of measures to help enterpreneurs, Entrepreneur First will be a two-year programme, through which graduates with the most promising business ideas will get the opportunity to start their business, with the support of corporate mentoring, business training and networking.

After the two years, participants will have the option to continue building their own business or apply to graduate recruitment schemes in some of the sponsoring companies.

OK. There are worse things to spend government money on. For instance... on second thoughts, I will postpone that rant until I have a spare decade. There are many worse things, but let me count the ways in which this one is misguided.

One, it is only for graduates. Because having uncredentialled people starting their own businesses never works.

Two, it is a two year programme of intensive, expensive help ("corporate mentoring" does not come cheap) to a select few already-privileged individuals - when the length and breadth of Britain the shabby little shops and grotty corrugated-roofed offices on industrial estates that actually provide the jobs are closing. It's behind a paywall, but today's Times magazine has an article by Sathnam Sanghera who spent a shift or two working in a corner shop he had passed hundreds of times. The featured quote was "By 8.30am the takings amount to £45, which means the three of us were up at 4am for the sake of making some £9." Sure, declining sales of newspapers are not the government's fault - but the hours of official paperwork that shopowners have to do in their so-called spare time is.

Three, that get-out clause after two years. Even I, possessed of the entrepreneurial spirit of a sessile mollusc, can tell that having the option after two years to apply for graduate recruitment in the sponsoring companies is not the spirit that makes a business great. Possibly it is great for the sponsoring companies, though.

I used to hold fairly high hopes about Nick Cohen, who had the courage to tell his leftist friends a few home truths about the sheer madness of their consorting - in the case of the hard left - with radical Islamists. He does not adopt the default "Blame America First" line on issues such as, say, Iraq, or for that matter, events in the Balkans. In the very big scheme of things, he's one of the good guys, in my opinion. The trouble is that he is still a big government leftie; for him, the reductions in spending by this government, which are not that much more than envisaged by former UK (Labour) Chancellor Alisdair Darling, are wicked. Oh well.

He attended the protests against the UK government's supposed "cuts" on Saturday (the sneer quotes are there because it is not clear that government spending as a share of GDP will actually shrink). Before I return to his comments against the "cuts", here is what he said about the kind of folk causing a tear-up in the West End:

The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics. As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.

Quite so. All we have to do now is get Mr Cohen to give up on the nonsense of this Keynesian idea that cutting public spending - and hence debt - somehow reduces "demand" in the economy. Given that a large chunk of tax revenues are gobbled up on debt interest payments alone, it seems fairly good public finance to make an adjustment. Cohen and others would do well to realise that Britain's public finances were on their way to ruin long before anyone had heard of sub-prime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations, or for that matter, Ben Bernanke.

As an aside, I was in Piccadilly on my way to a meeting yesterday, and could see some fairly extensive damage to shops, banks, etc. Well done guys.

Mark Steyn has been in London, and although his visit has coincided with truly wonderful weather - I have spent a great afternoon with my wife and friends eating good food on the side of the Thames in Richmond - it has also been a time of protest:

"In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists. Judging from the many marchers partial to robotic, pseudo-ethnic West African drumming, the British left’s plan is presumably for the entire country to relaunch itself as the world’s least rhythmic percussion ensemble."

This denial of reality is everywhere. Consider this YouTube spot featuring Mark Littlewood, head honcho of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a friend of mine) alongside some hard-leftist type who regards the mass protests yesterday as an example of the Labour movement "striking back". As far as this guy is concerned, our national debt is relatively low (seriously), we can, somehow or other, grow our way out of any problems that might exist, etc. In fairness to the BBC interviewer, she did not let this guy make these points without challenge and I thought Mark acquitted himself well. A good, perhaps "soft" point to make here, as Mark did, is the "think of the children" angle. The protesters who want to protect final-salary public pensions, vast numbers of state jobs, etc, are choosing to do so regardless of the debt being loaded on the shoulders of future generations. And in their adolescent fantasies, they imagine that all the mess can be somehow put right by taxing the evil rich bankers. There is, in this worldview, a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, usually located in a tax haven. But what these folk don't seen to understand, or perhaps, don't want to understand, is that taxing banks even more means lower savings rates, higher borrowing charges, worse service, lower investments. If we drive sources of capital away, as happened in the 1970s, then does this young activist really believe that will benefit the more vulnerable people in this country in the medium-term? I suspect he either does not care or imagines that somehow, something will turn up.

This mindset does not come out of thin air. The activist was trotting out the standard, dreary line about how all the things he imagines are good (and I regard as thoroughly bad), such as comprehensive state schooling, socialised medicine and Big Government, arose even when Britain was broke after WW2. Arguably, these developments ensured we stayed thoroughly broke, right up until the 1970s when the UK was, humiliatingly, bailed out by the IMF. As Mrs Thatcher said, in the end, socialists always run out of other people's money.

A difficulty for any government is that once the drug of state dependency has been created, it is a long, hard road back to sanity. I don't like this government, which is hardly close to my own classical liberal worldview, but some measure of credit is due here. A larger chunk of voters than is perhaps realised have no conception of self reliance, independence, or a desire for said.

Many voters have been clients of the state all their lives; changing that will be enormously difficult. Whole cities, such as in the north of the UK and pockets elsewhere, derive the bulk of their incomes from taxpayers in the more prosperous parts of the UK. Londoners are a fairly stoical lot, but we are getting a bit tired of folk coming to the capital, trashing it, and demanding that this evil den of capitalism should go on providing them with the lifestyle to which they think they are entitled. Maybe London should declare itself an independent state and we'll see how well the rest of the UK can cope without this high finance. The Atlas Shrugged narrative continues.

Independence for London. Hmm, there have been worse slogans.

Big demo against the cuts in London today! Takes me back, that does. Maggie, maggie, maggie, OUT OUT OUT!

Simon Jenkins says British demonstrations scarcely ever achieve their aims. I think they often do. Not always quickly, not always directly, and the aims achieved are not always good, but the clue to the effectiveness of demonstrations is in the name. The demonstration demonstrates that there are enough people who care enough about some issue to fill up in Trafalgar Square. They vote, thinks the politician. Not that he panics; he knows that there are other voters shouting or yawning at their televisions as they show pictures of the Trafalgar Square lot, but the highly visible existence of this big shouty bundle of single-issue votiness seeps into his mind and affects his decisions, irrespective of whether he likes them or loathes them.

On the other hand, sometimes the demonstration demonstrates that there are not enough people who care about your issue to fill up Trafalgar Square. (There will be today; I speak in general terms.) If the mainstream media like your cause they will do their very best to help by means of what I think of as the squat shot. That's when the cameraman squats on the ground and points the camera upwards so that the shot shows only bodies and not the tell-tale large areas of empty pavement between and around the marching feet. (Added later: however eventually, the use of this low-angle crowd-shot becomes a signal to alert observers that attendance was low, and the subject of ridicule. The BBC have wised up and reined back on its use in the last few years.)

And sometimes - in fact ofttimes - the demonstration demonstrates that quite a lot of your supporters are not very nice. The blogger Zombietime went to many anti-war demonstrations in the US while G W Bush was president and quietly snapped away. One of the results was this record of the signs calling for Bush to be assassinated. Here in Britain the student demonstrators against tuition fees did not endear themselves to the public by the fact that one or two of their number were photographed hurling fire extinguishers from the top of buildings or hanging from the flag commemorating the war dead at the Cenotaph. I sympathise with the demonstration organisers in these cases: they did not condone these actions - but like the scorpion in the fable who could not help but sting even at the cost of his own life, demonstrations cannot help but demonstrate something. You asked the public to watch and judge your cause by the people you assembled, and they will.

As will your own people. The demonstrations I went to in the 70s and 80s have merged in memory. Was it at the CND one, or the anti-NF one, or one against changes to the immigration laws where I saw the collection bucket being passed round for the IRA? The bucket filled up slowly, I'll say that much for my fellow demonstrators, but it was not empty. At all of them I picked up piles of mimeographed leaflets that I now wish I had kept. They were revealing. They were insane. I realised that Searchlight, for instance, who I had thought of as just an anti-fascist group were very left wing indeed. Most of all I remember the posters. Three quarters of the posters, and almost all of the printed ones, were produced by the Socialist Workers Party. Busy little bees, they were. They still are: it is an astonishing fact that this tiny and fissiparous Trotskyist sect has twice dominated massive popular protest movements in my lifetime; the Anti-Nazi League / Rock against Racism movement of the 80s and the Stop The War Coalition of 2001-2008. Sorry, 2001-present, only they stop wars much more quietly now that Mr Obama is president. They were also big in CND.

Most demonstrators back then avoided carrying SWP posters. But it was difficult to refuse if someone asked nicely, so ordinary non-SWP people did end up walking for miles with an embarrassing commie placard thinking, how the hell did I end up doing this and I'm not doing it again. I suspect this will happen today as it did in the 80s.

The problem with demonstrators being turned off by weird extremist literature and weird extremist fellow attendees is not confined to causes that I dislike - even if part of the reason I now dislike them is that I was turned off by the weird literature and people. I sympathised with, although I did not attend, the big demonstration in 2002 against the hunting ban. My husband picked up a BNP leaflet for me while he was there because he had heard earlier verbal versions of the reminiscences about extremists at demonstrations that form much of this post. It depressed me that the originators of the leaflet were probably right in seeing that demonstration as a good opportunity to shift their stuff. One good thing, the leaflet had a picture of a squirrel on it. The good here is not the squirrel per se, fond as I am of the tree-rats, but at least they felt the need to hide behind cuddly things.

Oh yeah, another thing to avoid is having the same demo at regular intervals. Lie all you like about numbers, the media will help you if you are left wing, but when like for like comparisons can be made, decline will out. A left wing writer said in 2003:

The SWP's main priority is recruitment. Why else did it continually call demonstrations week after week during the Iraq conflict? This was a big tactical error for the anti-war movement. When the bombing started, many people felt dispirited and tired, but were organising and carrying out further actions and protests. More importantly, the SWP had not realised that many people on the enormous demonstration in February were there because they felt they had been denied a democratic voice. These demonstrations were bound to result in diminishing numbers - and many were bound to judge that as the collapse of the anti-war movement.

Innovative forms of demonstration like Earth Hour (today, apparently) replace the crowd in Trafalgar square with the crowd at home doing something that shows up somehow. This avoids the "embarrassing supporter" problem and the "clashes with the other big demo" problem. However having a metric for your demonstration that is easier to count than crowd size, and having it as a regular event, makes this type of demonstration particularly vulnerable to the cold wind of comparison to last year. The better they do one year, and the more their success is hyped up, the tougher the target for next year.

"Liberal democracy is not about "paying a fair share" based on the exigencies of the moment and the vagaries of public opinion. If it were, Parliament would be little more than a trading floor where the freedoms of minorities were bartered away for temporary fixes and periodic bond repayments. True liberal democracy was and still should be about protecting and preserving freedom, equality in liberty and equality before the law – even when it is not, financially or politically, in our best interests to do so."

PJ Byrne, over at the Adam Smith Institute blog. Alas, "true liberal democracy" is hard to achieve, given the strong urge by politicians to persuade one group of electors to rob another group, or indeed, even to rob themselves.

I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron - I think he is both.

- A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around.

It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn't follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts.

LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent.