(17)

Assiduous readers will have noted from my (sparse, of late) posts that I do not agree with some other Samizdatistas about UK elections. I do not think political disaster will save us or that small government might arise from the wreck of huge government. Mine is a mitigation strategy.

Just as we have to eat, even when the choices are unappetising, we have no choice but to be governed. Therefore I vote, and am active within the existing political system, in order to to try get the least worst result I can.

Sometimes the least worst is not very good. Politicans in a democracy have an amazing ability to back themselves into impossible corners, even when they don't have to.

The Conservative party's promises to "protect" the budgets for the National Health Service and overseas aid may be mad as government, but they do have an electoral logic. They are explicable as strategic decisions to change the image of the party, and appear to have worked as such. Overseas aid is largely symbolic, peanuts compared with the welfare bills. (And few will really care if that promise ends up broken.) Whereas keeping up spending plans on a bloated NHS which absorbs approaching a fifth of the budget and a tenth of the nation's wealth, supports huge lobby groups and unions, and has been force-fed taxpayers' money like a Strasbourg goose by the incumbent regime, is a serious commitment it will be hard to row back from. Still, maybe they had to do this to themselves, as the price of power: middle Britain worships the NHS; it is more important than IHS, more established than the Church of England. The Tories were not trusted to keep that faith, and had as a result no more chance of governing than a secular party in Iran. Now they are accepted as orthodox.

But why would you make a promise no-one expects, but that similarly constrains your scope for radical action? No party has promised not to raise VAT rates, despite pressure. No party has directly promised not to make cuts to state wagerolls. And Cameron did just promise a pay cut in the public sector. Sounds good? Oh dear, no. He did so in a way that disastrously locks him in and creates a political bar to the cuts that are really needed.

A 5% cut in ministerial pay, and freezing it for the life of a parliament, is easy populism. "Slashing" the BBC calls it. However, in practice it is trivial; and, much worse, it puts a ceiling on what can be done to tackle the deficit. Ireland has already cut all public sector salaries—by an average of 13.5%. Had he said ministers will be paid a third less, and hinted at serious cuts in other public sector salaries over £60,000 (representing impossible wealth to most voters), then he could have been populist with room for manoeuvre. But now Cameron will be very hard put to do as much as freeze the wage bills of the bureaucracy. Even though ministers are arguably underpaid, getting much less in real terms than their Victorian forebears, it will be impossible now to cut the salary of any signficant public sector interest group by more than 5%. Protecting the NHS forces greater cuts from every other department just to stand still.

A promise to cut just made cutting nearly impossible. That is a terrible mistake.

(58)

Instapundit compares President Obama to Apple, saying, in connection with recent rather belligerent rhetoric from Obama, and similarly belligerent conduct by Apple regarding the alleged stealing of their latest iPhone before they had themselves unveiled it, this:

Like Apple, Obama’s strength is mostly in the image department ...

That may be right on the money about Obama. Don't know for sure. Don't live there. But I definitely think it's wrong about Apple. For me, Apple's stellar "image" is based on an underlying reality of product quality, not on how nicely Apple supposedly behaves, or did behave until this recent atrocity.

A lady friend of mine has the earlier version of the iPhone, which she adores. Talks about it like it's her perfect boyfriend, and looks at it like its a new and really good baby she just had. When she first got it, she could hardly stop gazing at it, and kept not listening to anything I was saying, instead wanting to demonstrate how fabulously it worked and how great it was for tracking emails and recognising pop songs and taking snaps and the rest of it, like she was a fat old geek with no life. Shame about the battery life, she says. But of course they are fixing that in the new version.

And then there's my beautiful Apple keyboard, which a few months ago I purchased and attached to my clunky old PC because every PC keyboard I have ever owned or seen or heard of is total shite, either about a mile across with a completely useless accountancy section adding even more mileage to its width or, if a sane size, doomed to instant disintegration and requiring baby fingers to use even half accurately and so flimsy that if you type like an adult with your adult fingers it slides across your desk like a big insect. Also, on all the PC keyboards I have ever owned a few of the damn letters soon became invisible, and I had to buy new stick-on letters from Rymans. Contemptible.

My new Apple keyboard is the total opposite of all such shiteness. It is the keyboard I am happily typing on right this minute, and it is well on the way to convincing me that my next entire computer should be Apple as well.

Quality like this is not "image", of the sort based on merely incidental nice behaviour. I suppose you could argue that what happens on the front of an iPhone is "image", in the sense of legible lettering, clever pointiness and so forth. But that's image of the kind that is central to the quality of the product. And my keyboard is solid, beautiful reality, at its most solid and most beautiful. (Make of that what you will.)

Meanwhile, I also think of Apple, not as serenely nice people, but more like neurotic and borderline psychotic artists. The kind of artists who regard the transcendent excellence of their creations as a excuse to be mad bastards. I pretty much agree with them. It comes down to my understanding of the character of Steve Jobs. Genius. Mad bastard. Hell to work for, apart from that little thing that you get to make supremely great stuff and everyone thinks you are great too, which you are. "Insanely great", you might say. So, for me, Apple getting the government to smash down the door of some defenceless little tech-bloggers is no deviation for them. That's regular Apple behaviour. That's Jobs throwing a mad tantrum and stamping his never-grown-up feet, insisting that just as his products must be perfect, so must the launching of them be perfect, or not enough people will buy them quickly enough and the network effect won't cut in soon enough, and can't you pathetic fuckheads see that!!!! And if the new iPhone that Apple's psycho lawyers are saying was stolen turns out to be as good as all the other Apple gizmos have been, then Apple will continue to rack up insanely great profit margins.

The day may come when Apple products start to be only average, but the incidental madness continues. This is what I foresee if Steve Jobs ever departs, because of death or some such catastrophe, or because they fire him, again, on account of wanting quiet lives, again. Then nemesis will follow, and the revenge of all the other nerds will be something to see. But that's not the story now.

In a related way, and to fly off at a bit of a final tangent, if the current British Prime Minister, also a mad bastard, whom I do know quite a bit about because I live here in Britain, was imposing sensible government policies on everyone with his mad bastardry, then we here would idolise him, certainly enough of us would for him to stay in his present job. Those mobile phones (does that include iPhones I wonder?) would hurtle towards the heads of his underlings, and they'd moan to journalists, and the journos would say: "Ooh that Gordon, what a character! He blames everyone but himself whenever he does anything wrong, like he's a mad kid or something! He's a laugh a minute, isn't he? Now, about that wondrously falling government deficit ..." And they'd be right. But alas, the Gordon Brown product is not insanely great, just insanely insane, and he and all the other mad bastards who foisted him on us are all about to be hurled over an electoral cliff and good riddance.

(33)

The economy in Britain and much of the world is in dire straits and it would not be an exaggeration to say we have entered a period of history that far from being a 'crisis of capitalism', historians looking back may well call it the 'crisis of regulatory statism'.

And that is what makes the current UK elections... and indeed the recent US election... so utterly uninteresting.

Political parties on both sides of the imaginary left/right divide are in near total agreement that question at hand is not "how do we change the state of affairs that got us into our current predicament" but rather "how do we manage this crisis best in order to preserve the status quo". The one thing that everyone in politics agrees on is Britain's vast regulatory welfare state is an immovable given. This is literally beyond debate and exists at the meta-contextual level ...all that is actually up for discussion is how best to preserve it.

Commentary in the mainstream media accepts as axiomatic that the parties represent the struggle between laissez faire and regulation, between capital and labour, between right (whatever that means) and left (whatever that means).

Indeed the parties themselves employ the same rhetorical markers to differentiate their products as they have always done: the so-called 'conservatives' speak of "prudence" and "responsibility" and "living within our means"... Labour and the LibDems speak in terms of "fairness" and "equality"... and these terms are simply accepted at face value and repeated by most of the media as if the choices on offer were between chalk and cheese, and as all the parties benefit from this differentiation, this linguistic legerdemain is unchallenged and uncontroversial.

Yet the choices on offer are in truth more akin to that between Coke or Pepsi... the 'sacred rite of democratic empowerment' actually comes down to being given the option of selecting rapist A, B or C and then being told not to complain when you get raped because, after all, you got to vote.

And so we see the media portraying David Cameron as Thatcher the Milk Snatcher reborn... a dangerous welfare wrecker when he states that he intends to, and I quote from a Daily Telegraph article last year:

Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year - rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers. He warned voters not to expect an incoming Tory administration to slash public spending and cut taxes, saying: "That's not what they should be thinking. They should be thinking this would be a responsible government that would make government live within its means, that would relieve some of the debt burden being piled up on our children."

So the Tory party, those slash-and-burn laissez faire wildmen, wanted to take £25 billion more out of the productive economy in taxes so that the state can spend it... at a time when the economy is actually contracting... and somehow that will relieve rather than increase the burden on "our children". Yup, clearly an ardent capitalist is our Old Dave... it must be so because the media reports him saying he is all for markets largely without comment.

But the core truth here is that if by some dark miracle Brown's Labour wins, we will have a vast regulatory welfare state. If the even more spendthrift LibDems win, we will have a vast regulatory welfare state. However if Cameron's Tories win, we will have... a vast regulatory welfare state... oh, and fox hunting will be permitted again.

And yet the idea that there are meaningful differences between any of these gits is a given even though all they are really discussing is how their different approaches to rearranging the same elements can preserve the very state that got us where we are now. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.

Nigel Farage of UKIP at least talks of sacking two million public sector workers and having a bonfire of the QUANGOs... making him the only half way visible politician making any truly radical statements at all. Sadly Farage also seems to think "quantitative easing"... i.e. just running the printing presses in order to re-inflate the very credit bubble that has been the trigger for much of the current woes, is just fine and dandy, so I do question his grasp of economics, not to mention causality... but by the standards of current discourse he is Ludwig Von Mises reborn and perhaps in time Pearson can smack some sense into him on that score.

But UKIP will not be running the next parliament and so it does not matter which of the three plonkers you vote for because in effect the same person will still be in 10 Downing Street: and that would be the ring-wraith-like presence of Tony Blair of course... or Tory Blair if you like... the name and party hardly matters because that grin remains like some demonic Cheshire Cat in the sky over Westminster.

What did you say your name was again?

(33)

It is impressive just how much I would like to see this lot annihilated and humiliated in the election, all considered.

(7)

Gordon is cyanide on the doorstep.

- Rachel Sylvester gets lucky quoting a Labour candidate in what used to be a safe Labour seat, just before Gordon Brown calls a core Labour voter a bigot. I reckon he's cyanide everywhere.

(13)

Ian Dale writes that the internet and all that is having very little effect on this general election. I'm sure we can all see what he means. The politicians strut about emitting their parallel universe proclamations, while the rest of us stolidly refuse to be impressed as we sit about wondering just which big party and big party leader we loathe and despise the least, so that we can humiliate most of them, instead of what we would really like to do.

But in another sense, a negative sense, I think that the internet is already having a very profound effect on this campaign. Put it like this. The good thing about blogs and facebook and twitter and all that is that we can speak our minds. We tell it not necessarily like it is exactly, but how we truly reckon it is at the time or writing. The big cheese politicians? Like I say: parallel universe of staged dishonesty.

Trying to combine doing regular politics with joining in the New Media hubbub means either being ignored as a useless bore, or getting into trouble, for saying something honest and eloquent but verboten. The two just don't mix. Remember that scene in that great regular politics movie The Candidate, starring Robert Redford, where the Redford character tries telling the truth (as he happens to see it) at a campaign event. His handler just tells him to do up his trouser buttons, grow up, and campaign properly, i.e. go back to emitting the correct barrages of staged dishonesty. As far as the old pro regular politician is concerned, telling it like it is, like you are blogging or twittering or something, is just waving your willy about like a stupid little kid. Honesty didn't work then for regular politicians, and it doesn't work now.

But the difference is that the rest of us can now do honesty, and consume honesty. We now have honesty. For several years now we've been waving our willies about and having a ball. It's just that the regular politicians can't join in without making asses of themselves.

So, one: rise of the New Media. And, two: a general election in which almost nobody looks like they're going to be happy. None of the politicians, with the possible exception of The Clegg, and none of the voters. Nobody is going to "seal the deal". It used to be that someone did. Now, we seem to hate them all.

No effect? I think not. I know exactly what Iain Dale means. The New Media aren't contributing anything positive to regular politics. The New Media aren't helping regular politicians to canvass, get out the vote, assemble people to mass meetings and get them all excited about their preferred version of regular politics. The New Media aren't helping to spread barrages of lies, and then cheering like lunatics. They (we) are merely standing at the back muttering to each other that it's all lies. But just because the New Media are doing nothing positive for regular politics doesn't mean they're having no effect on regular politics.

Iain Dale is nearly there when he describes the internet this time around as "the dog that didn't bark". But the fact that the dog isn't barking is highly significant, as Sherlock Holmes himself pointed out in the original story. The New Media dog, from where Iain Dale stands, is doing nothing, and that is what is so interesting.

(7)

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has surged up the popularity charts in recent days after his supposedly slick performance in the recent TV political debates opposite David Cameron and Gordon Brown, made a remark - which I caught on the TV summaries this morning - that proves that behind all the supposedly "nice", decent image he wants to present, that he is a man incapable of handling serious disagreement with the conventional wisdom. In his attack on Cameron's decision to ally Tory MEPs with a certain grouping of right-of-centre European political parties, Clegg damned this grouping for being full of anti-semites and, wait for it, "climate change deniers". So, let me get this right, as far as Clegg is concerned, someone who is unconvinced, or at least not fully convinced, of the AGW theory, is on a par with someone who hates Jews and wishes them ill. Riiiight.

There are two notable things about Clegg's remark: that he made it and thought this would play with the audience, and that Cameron, trying still to be so much the "I am above all this grubby stuff" schtick, did not kneecap this insufferable toad for so doing. But then again, as David Cameron has bought into the AGW theory wholesale, he did not have it within him to call out Clegg for such a remark.

As has been noted already, this is a prime example of when political parties embrace the same, suffocating meta-context (as Samizdata's own editorial El Supremo, Perry, would put it). It means that interesting, even deadly, debating points don't enter the heads of those who could profit from actually using them. And yet I am sure that many Britons, who are not totally convinced of AGW, would have applauded Cameron had he had the sense to hammer Clegg for his oafish remark.

(12)

"The trouble is that what the markets demand – a credible plan for getting debt back to sustainable levels – is the opposite of what the voters want to hear. Perhaps regrettably, when markets and politics collide, it is always the markets that end up winning. Today’s fantasy world of still-growing public expenditure can last only as long as markets are willing to lend on reasonable terms. Governments are perfectly happy to rely on bond markets to support their grandiose social ambitions when times are good, but when the going gets tough, they become a growing source of frustration and complaint. George Brown memorably blamed the gnomes of Zurich for the sterling crisis of 1964, never mind that it might have been solidly grounded in economic fundamentals. President Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville, became so angry about the pressures for deficit reduction that he snapped that if there were such a thing as reincarnation, he would want to come back as the bond market, because it was more important than the Pope."

- Jeremy Warner.

He seems to be taking the line that ultimately, "we get the governments we deserve". Well maybe, maybe not. The problem with this sort of argument is it begs the question of what "we" is being discussed. It is a disheartening experience to watch as so many of my fellows seem willing to vote for a bunch of statist buffoons. I feel no sense of kinship, no sense of "duty", to a country inhabited by those who seem to have given up on basic facts of reality. And so I repeat the point I made a few weeks ago here: for a genuine patriot, an obvious option is to get out of this country. My plan B is still very much on the cards.

(13)

"A hung parliament risks economic disaster" says Dave Cameron... and El Gordo agrees.

Well count me as in agreement too! A hung parliament does indeed risk economic disaster.

If I was a betting man I would say "80% risk of economic disaster if we get a hung parliament and a 20% chance that political paralysis prevent further 'helpful' government action and thereby allows the battered economy some respite, enabling at least a partial recovery... as opposed to a 100% certainty of economic disaster if Labour or LibDems or Tories get a working majority".

So there you have it: Tory Party, Labour Party and Samizdata in agreement. I fully expect water to start running up hill next.

(8)

I'm watching the news, in particular the news that the airplanes will be allowed to fly again over Britain. Thank goodness.

Inevitably, a professorial head popped up – Professor Hayward was the name, I think – to argue that what had been revealed was that there were problems with who was in charge. Yes, it must have been the same Professor Hayward as the one quoted in this story. He described the muddle of different jurisdictions – with one Euro-quango governing this, and another that, and France and the UK actually, to quite a large extent – sniff – controlling their own airspace. I don't know what the Professor really thinks about this, but he or the TV editors made it sound like he thought there ought to be one Euro-authority in charge of everything. There should be, that is to say, a Single European Sky. Recent events, he said, highlighted the fact that there is a muddle of different jurisdictions, when it comes to whether airplanes can fly or not.

And a good thing too. Thanks to that muddle of different European jurisdictions, some planes have been flying over Europe, including one KLM plane which this afternoon flew over London. And the ban is melting away, for all the world as if Europe was still governed by a gaggle of sovereign states, each in charge of its own affairs. No planes have so far dropped out the sky. They didn't put it like that, but if a plane has fallen out of the sky, they would definitely have said. As more planes have taken to the air, the claim that flying in them is a death sentence becomes harder and harder to accept.

Had European airspace been commanded by a single despot, as will surely be argued by many others besides that Professor in the next few days and weeks, this disaster might have lingered on indefinitely, at a cost (and never let it be forgotten that economic disruption on this scale is, for quite a large number of severely stressed and severely impoverished, severely financially ruined people, a matter of life and death) which would have defied calculation.

Now Paxman is talking about pressure from "vested interests". Airlines wanting to stay in business, in other words, airlines who have become convinced that this scare has been massively overdone. Airlines who prefer to pay attention to evidence of what is actually happening in the sky, rather than trusting mere computer models. Computer models are getting a rather bad name these day, aren't they?

If, now that the ban is being lifted, planes do start crashing for mysterious reasons, or if the aircraft maintenance people start to detect the damage that they now say is non-existent in the planes that have already flown, then fine. Ground the planes again. But I'd be amazed if that happened. Airlines know better than anyone that plane crashes must be avoided at almost any cost. It is clear that they think that the risk of crashes now is negligible, for the reasons alluded to in this earlier posting here.

I hope that Simon Jenkins's phrase, health and safety Armageddon, catches on. My thanks to EU Referendum for the link to that piece, and in general for being all over this story.

But, note that North is today defending the Met Office. North implies that the problem is that muddle of jurisdictions, which has enabled the European commission to evade its responsibility for this mess and heep all the blame on the Met Office. I see what he means, of course I do. But which would you prefer? A muddle of jurisdictions, with all the inevitable buck passing and mutual recrimination, plus pressure from vested interests, and from politicians trying to get re-elected, and derision from bloggers, and by and by from the mainstream media, in short the semblance of a still-free society? Or a pristine tyranny, willing and able to be totally wrong, indefinitely, rather than admit to the embarrassment of being wrong? Widespread panic for a few days? Or, total panic for weeks or months on end, that refuses even to admit that this was what it was? I know which I prefer.

(25)

And so Dave Cameron stands up and says "Only conservatives offer real change" and the media report this more or less at face value.

We have a vast regulatory welfare state under Labour. We will still have a vast regulatory welfare state under Cameron... no? Well how many million state employees will Cameron fire in his first term in office? What number did he put on it? Anyone? Has he said he will have a massacre of the QUANGOs? He has loudly promised more green regulation and sticking it to the financial sector but where exactly will he de-regulate? Yet the media just repeats Cameron's claim to represent anything other than more of the same as if it is a self evident truth. Yet "Big Society" looks a lot awful like the same old "Big State" we have right now.

Are you unable to resist the urge to vote? Well someone is actually calling for two million less state employees over five years. Dave "I represent change" Cameron? Don't make me laugh.

(32)

According to the Telegraph...

The Conservative leader presented a bold vision of Britain in which communities – rather than government – worked together to solve shared problems. In calling for the role of the state to be scaled back, Mr Cameron sought to establish a philosophical divide with the Government after 13 years of public sector expansion under Labour.

According to Samizdata...

The Conservative leader presented a bold vision of Britain in which when communities work together, which happens in something we call 'markets', nice caring Dave will regulate them and give us MORE state, which the media will call LESS state... and magically it will cost less money... somehow... and yes any claims he is going to scale back the state in any meaningful way is pure and utter bollocks, but it suits the needs of both main parties to pretend otherwise because in fact there is no philosophical divide. Confused? Just shut up and vote and then go back to your reality TV.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

(31)

The Prime Minister has announced the date of the UK general election between the Party of Big Government Regulatory Statism and, er, the Other Party of Big Government Regulatory Statism.

Of course the media and quite a few bloggers will spend the time between now and then obsessing over the 3% margin in the purview of the state which differentiates them as if they were comparing chalk and cheese, whereas in fact they are arguing which is preferable for the terminally ill patient: pneumonic plague or bubonic plague.

But nevertheless we will see an endless stream of Tories harrumphing that Dave Cameron's brand of regulatory statism is in fact both the Small Government Society Friendly Ideal, The Saviour of the National Health Service, Market Friendly, Eco-Regulation Friendly and indeed all things to all people.

And as a result, I urge people who feel the overwhelming urge to vote for anyone to put their X down for Britain's only conservative party... and of course that means do not even consider voting Tory, unless a more inept version of Tony Blair (i.e. Tory Blair) is actually what you want.

But please be clear on one thing: if you fear not voting Tory will give Labour more time to wreck the country, that is simply not the choice on offer...nothing meaningful will change in Britain as long as the two main parties are essentially as one on the size and scope of the state, which at the moment they most certainly are...

...and if you vote to endorse that fact just because you (quite rightly) loath Gordon Brown, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

(29)

Waitrose sells Horse and Hound magazine.

Huh?

Didn't they ban hunting, like, years ago? Yes. Yet Horse and Hound is still there on the hotly contested shelves of the Waitrose magazine rack, and in the posh aspirational section right next to Country Homes & Interiors to boot. I suppose some of the reason for H&H's survival must be down to upping the quotient of writing about Princess Zara and her horse Toytown and downing the quotient about hunting. Even so, it must be galling for the anti-hunting activist community. Not what they imagined back in the heady days of 2004 when they were offering to help the government and police enforce a hunting ban.

At this point I could either launch into a detailed, link-filled account of whatever it is hunts actually do these days or I could just vaguely mutter some half-remembered stuff about how there is some get-out clause that allows them to chase the foxes with as long as they don't actually kill them, or if they do it's collateral damage or done for research or something. I shall do the latter and make a virtue of it, because vague half-remembered perceptions and their political consequences are what this post is actually about.

It didn't stick. Thirty years plus of campaigning, thousands of letters to the editor, millions of Ban Hunting Now badges, at least three private members' bills, Royal Commissions galore, keeping the faith in the dark days of Thatcher, then the dawning hope that this Bill might be the real deal, First Reading, Second Reading, Committee, Third Reading... then that last minute farrago with the Parliament Act when the Lords cut up rough, then finally Royal Asssent (through gritted Royal teeth, yeah)... all that and it still didn't bloody stick. The hunts are still there, shooting foxes by firing squad or whatever they do, and the sabs are still there cutting off peoples' heads with gyrocopter blades or whatever they do, and when the Tories get in, as they almost certainly will in three months time, they will repeal the ban.

I will rejoice. I have never seen the appeal of hunting, still less hunt-following, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow-citizens seem to like these pastimes, as their ancestors did, and a large proportion of the human race still do. The anti-hunt argument that does have some power to move me is the one about preventing suffering of a creature who can suffer. I myself prefer not to think too deeply about Mr Fox getting killed by dogs - but I do not see that it differs much from what Mr Fox does to rabbits. It's a predator thing. As for the argument about humans, get lost. On those grounds the new puritans had about the same moral right to stop their fellow humans hunting foxes as they would have to stop their fellow mammals, the foxes, hunting rabbits. Another thing, it bugged me to hear people who, if they were to learn that Amazonian tribesmen, having been forced to give up their ancient traditions of the hunt, had taken to soccer and Playstations instead, would be heard from here to the Amazon squealing about Western cultural oppression - it bugged me to hear these same people cheering on the Western cultural oppression of their own tribesmen.

As well as rejoicing to see these puritans discomfited, I will rejoice because the repeal of the ban is a retrograde step. When one has gone in a wrong direction a backwards step is a good thing. Every generation or so the progressives have the presumption buried in their name for themselves knocked out of them and the whooshing noise is pleasing. Yet for most of the my lifetime their presumption has been justified. The progressive ratchet slips a little but mostly it moves on. What a liberation it would be to see the clock turn back, just to show it could! What strange new vistas it might open if one bad law were repealed. We could repeal some more. The smoking ban... the European Communities Act 1972... it might even have an effect overseas; at present most people seem to assume that President Obama's historic achievement in passing the US healthcare bill is just that, historic. A historic change is a change that stays changed. But history turns round sometimes, as the original puritans found out to their cost in 1660.

So the repeal of the hunting ban will be a fine thing, and on that morning even I shall hear something of the

..long-drawn chorus
Of a running pack before us
From the find to the kill.

But the end of a bad law and the good example its end sets will not be the only reasons to rejoice. Sure, repeal will annoy the progressives but - as the fox understands the huntsmen - a law going against them for once in a while leaves their worldview intact. What I really will value in the repeal is that it will be symbolic completion of a process that has already happened. The Royal Assent on this one may be good fun for her Maj, and me, but the really subversive thing is that people will say, "Oh, they've got rid of that law... didn't know it was still on the books, actually. I'm sure I saw Horse and Hound on sale on Waitrose."

(43)

It is a melancholy fact to face that while most of us, most of the time, like to imagine that we live our lives by some sort of moral code, and respect our fellows as beings deserving of respect if they do not threaten our lives or property, some people do not live by such a code, nor care. One particular species of maggot in our world is the person who likes to verbally and physically abuse disabled persons.

The issue of care and protection of the mentally and physically handicapped, raising as it does issues of personal autonomy, concerns about abuse of state power and medicine, etc, is too big an issue to push into a blog post. No, the point I want to address is the narrower one of whether it makes any sense at all to create another "hate crime": the crime, as it were, of hating disabled people. In brief, I think creating such a "hate crime" is foolish, albeit an understandable move driven by those with honorable motives to protect the weak.

Let's be clear from the get-go that I regard those who hate, and who act on that hate, of disabled people to be scum of the earth. It does bother me, though, that a crime of say, assault on a person and his property should be treated as being far more serious because the state has tried to measure, or establish, the hate that exists in the mind of the attacker. A crime is a crime, surely. If an able-bodied man is mugged in the street, does it make any specific difference in terms of sentencing the criminal, assuming the criminal is caught? The area where physical or mental disability comes into play in sentencing a criminal is where, say, the disability clearly meant that the disabled victim could not defend himself. That is why assaults on the aged and infirm, and on children, are treated - at least supposedly - more severely than assaults on say, the holder of a karate black belt. Of course, in investigating a crime, the fact that a suspect has a motive such as hate of group X or Y might be useful in helping to narrow down a list of suspects. However, as a factor in sentencing, the idea of "hate crime" strikes me as nonsense.

What next - political hate crimes where a person is sentenced for the crime of "hating" those in public office or who are members of certain ideological/political groupings?

(17)

Policy Exchange has just published a "research note" purporting to show that the tax on cigarettes in the UK should be increased, and that "that every single cigarette smoked costs the country money - 6.5 pence each time someone lights up."

If you read the paper [pdf], you will find it is an astonishingly dodgy dossier. Here is how the figure is made up:

Taxation of tobacco contributes £10 billion to HM Treasury annually; however, we calculate that the costs to society from smoking are much greater at £13.74 billion. Every cigarette smoked is costing us money. These societal costs comprise not only the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion) but also the loss in productivity from smoking breaks (£2.9 billion) and increased absenteeism (£2.5 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of smoking related house fires (£507 million), and also the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers (£4.1 billion) and passive smokers (£713 million).

The notion of "cost to society" is a pretty weird one.

Leave that aside for a moment. Add up costs and revenues to the state, which might be one semi-logical way of determining whether the smoking in some sense "runs a deficit", and using Policy Exchange's own figures you get a big surplus for the Treasury. Even if you assume all house fire costs are borne by the state and not partially by insurers and householders, and there are no errors in the headline figures, then you can only get to £3,549 million. (Have you noticed how public policy research generally involves implausible numbers of significant digits, and at the same time utter absence of error estimates?) On that basis smokers are contributing roughly £6Bn annually towards public spending.

But what are we to make of the suggestion that counting "lost output" is meaningful? To my mind the idea that an economic aggregate represents a collective wealth that may be politically attributed and redistributed is repulsive even if it is coherent (which I doubt). The state's royal We, which Policy Echange is channelling here, may in turn choose to impersonate you and me and everyone else, but it only controls the taxed margin of other's outputs. Output and taxation are apples and oranges. It is meaningless to add them together. Unless you want (or deserve) a punch.

And even were it not meaningless, there's an accounting fraud here. If you count output putatively lost to smoking, then you must also count the gains. There is the output of the tobacco industry, distribution and retailing in the UK to consider. Imperial Tobacco alone had a gross profit for the year ending September 2009 of approximately £5.3 billion. The CTC industry consists of tens of thousands of small shops. Honest research, however dubious its theoretical basis, would attempt to estimate the value-added, too. It would also be clear - without referring to a paper cited in the footnotes we cannot tell whether the cost-of-illness measure used in determining those "lost outputs" also includes the gains to third parties in pensions unpaid and public services unused by people dying early. If you are going to add apples and oranges, you should also tell us explicitly whether you have subtracted pears.

But what set me off on this chase was actually just one of those headline figures. Most of the margin of costs over gains in this strange sum is covered by the £2.9 billion allocated to the "output lost to cigarette breaks". How do they know? "[A] number of studies have investigated workers taking breaks in order to smoke, and have tried to quantify this time at between £915 million and £3.2 billion per annum." Hm.

Read through to p13, and you discover that the number of studies was... two. Er, no. It was one... Or some sort of strange interpolative hybrid... I cannot decide. Make your own mind up:

McGuire et al. estimated that £915 million annually is lost on the basis that average smokers spend tenminutes a day smoking, while light smokers and part-time workers would use approximately half of this time. The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) used similar initial assumptions on average smoking time to calculate that some £2.6 billion would be saved through the introduction of smoke-free legislation. Using McGuire’s estimates of 5.2 million working smokers, with the RCP’s estimates of ten minutes a day smoking reveals an intermediary figure of £2.9 billion.

I think that is 'intermediary' in the sense that a magician is an intermediary between a rabbit and a hat.

However they get there, if someone thinks that cigarette breaks ought to be a determining factor in public policy, rather than a matter for negotiation between employer and employee, then I suggest that it would be a good idea if they are kept as far as possible from the levers of power. This lot are said to be influential on the presumptively incoming Cameron team. Oh dear.

(11)

The sheer venality of the current political class, while not necessarily a radical departure from what has been the case in the past, still has the capacity to make me rub my eyes in amazement. Get a load of this:.

Tony Blair waged an extraordinary two-year battle to keep secret a lucrative deal with a multinational oil giant which has extensive interests in Iraq.

The former Prime Minister tried to keep the public in the dark over his dealings with South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corporation. Mr Blair - who has made at least £20million since leaving Downing Street in June 2007 - also went to great efforts to keep hidden a £1million deal advising the ruling royal family in Iraq's neighbour Kuwait.

In an unprecedented move, he persuaded the committee which vets the jobs of former ministers to keep details of both deals from the public for 20 months, claiming it was commercially sensitive. The deals emerged yesterday when the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments finally lost patience with Mr Blair and decided to ignore his objections and publish the details.

Of course, the fact that Mr Blair makes a lot of money is hardly a reason for criticism per se, and given that the story is in the Daily Mail, a noisy mixture of rightwing populism on social issues, economic nationalism and Blimpish anti-Americanism, I tread a little carefully. But even so, it is pretty galling that a man like Blair who has largely risen to where he is on the back of artifice and bullshittery of heroic proportions should be making so much money. Also, considering that one of his most contentious decisions to support the war to topple Saddam was always going to be attacked by the usual types as being "all about oil", it does seem incredibly crass for this man to validate the usual Blair/BushHitler/Halliburton/Blackwater/blah blah conspiracy theory tropes of the Michael Moore left and Raimondoesque right.

Oh well, at least he can keep Cherie Blair in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. I would not be at all surprised if Blair ends up becoming a tax fugitive from the UK.

Mr Blair is, of course, a classic example of the political class so ably described by Peter Oborne, the British journalist. No doubt Messrs Obama and Sarkozy are taking notes.

In some ways UK politics has reverted to the 18th Century model, as described by the likes of Lewis Namier, when different gangs of folk with remarkably similar views scrapped for the spoils of office. And as Mr Blair now shows, those spoils are remarkably lucrative indeed.

(12)

Dr Butler's work is a follow up to his book "The Rotten State of Britain" - itself a fine book explaining many of the problems this country faces.

In "The Alternative Manifesto" Dr Butler concentrates on the terrible economic position that Britain finds itself in, what really caused this position and what should be done about it.

Unlike the United States there is little challenge in Britain to the establishment view that all our problems are caused by "greedy bankers" and "lack of regulations". The "lack of regulations" point is utterly absurd as there are endless national and indeed international regulations (for example the "mark to market" rule was part of the international financial regulations agreed, years ago, in Basel, Switzerland).

And, as for "greedy bankers", they are indeed greedy, but to blame their greed for the crises is like blaming the speculators of "charge alley" for the problems of Britain in the 18th century - many great figures of English literature did this (as to attack the wicked speculators diverted attention from the politicians who were paying many of the great figures in English literature), but that does not alter the fact that it was the "public credit" itself, the endless government borrowing, that was at the root of the economic problems and the political corruption - not the speculators in the debt, however wicked they may have been.

Even today with our fiat money and fractional reserve banking taking beyond any level of sanity - even the most crazy banker can only build a pyramid of debt on new money that the governments themselves have created, and indeed it is these governments who are normally the loudest voices demanding that banks "expand credit" - lend more money.

However, presently Dr Butler's works are the only books dissenting from the establishment view (the view that the root of the problem is the greed of bankers and the solution is yet more taxes and regulations) that one can find in (for example) high street book stores.

This may be difficult for an American reader to understand, so I will explain a bit further. In a British book shop or supermarket book section you may find works by people who are regarded (and indeed regard themselves) as foes of the "liberal" left establishment - but they will not cover the basic economic crises that faces us. Britain has its Richard Littlejohn and J. Clarkson, but they are not really like America's Glenn Beck.

Mr Littlejohn will attack "politically correct" (i.e. "identity politics" stuff whose origins lie in the Marxist Frankfurt school) regulations and thought police attitudes, and Mr Clarkson may broadcast a similar point of view on the BBC itself (which he is allowed to do because he also broadcasts nasty and dishonest attacks on the United States - American soldiers were cowards facing the Communists in Vietnam, the United States looted Britain during World War II, America was not on Britain's side during the Falklands war..... and on and on), but neither man will explain the rise in the money supply or how this credit money bubble led to the economic crash, and how government bailouts will make things worse..... (although, of course, bailouts only make things worse over a period of years - in the short term bailouts put off a great slump, the liquidation of the vast black hole of debt Malinvestments, and may even produce a phony boomlet, and the short term is all that politicians tend to care about).

On the great crises of our age the "everyman" part of the British "right" (for want of a better term) has nothing to say. Nor is there (yet) any message from dissenting free market scholars - nothing like Thomas Woods' (Austrian School) "Meltdown" or Thomas Sowell's (more Chicago School) "The Housing Boom and Bust" - explaining how the government (and it did this in Britain as much as the United States) created a vast credit money bubble via the Central Bank and how regulations and government policy pushed this money into the real estate market in the United States (which was then passed on, in the form of securities, to Britain and many other nations).

Partly this may be because there are simply fewer pro free market scholars in Britain - but it also may be due to certain features of the British publishing and book selling trade. And, of course, the utter lack of any even vaguely pro freedom television or radio stations in this country - for those American conservatives and libertarians who complain about the various imperfections of Fox News my reply would be "you would soon miss it if you lived in a country without one".

All these obstacles Dr Butler has managed to overcome - his works are available. Not just on the internet, but also in the ordinary shops and that is still important. One can find his "The Alternative Manifesto" not only in good London book shops such as Foyles, but also in the standard (and normally quite horrible) "Waterstones" that exists in the average British town although not yet in the (even worse) "W.H. Smith" book shops. It is up to us to buy Dr Butler's work in order to show that the British people are not just interested in Barack Obama's "Dreams from my Father" (I wonder how many people who have bought this work have actually read it - for example the anti British rant on the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, in reality a revolt that was based on a weird mixture of disgusting tribal practices and Marxism) and other "celebrity" works.

Are we really just concerned with Barack Obama's flat tummy (eat less, smoke more would seem to be the message if we are) and various female celebs’ plastic breasts? Do we not care at all about what problems we face - what caused them, and how to dig ourselves out of this mess?

Dr Butler does a good job explaining not only the absurd monetary policies that have brought us down, but also the fiscal policies (the wild taxation, and far wilder government spending) that would have undermined our economic prospects even if monetary policy had been sane.

We simply can not go on wildly try to reinflate the credit bubble - and trying to use government spending to try and buy prosperity (presumably under the delusion that some Galactic Federation exists that will bail us all out when the whole farce finally collapses) - and we can not go on ignoring the ever growing economic and social harm done by an out of control and "unsustainable" Welfare State (what the Economist and Financial Times would call "public goods" - on which the "essential spending" just happens to have to go up by a vast amount every year for ever, and which in no way shape or form ever lead to a broken country).

However, there are less favourable things that need to be said about Dr Butler's latest book:

Firstly he has a tendency to go off at tangents - so do I (so I have sympathy with this), but some of the tangents are unfortunate. For example the causal light-hearted mention of human trafficking - it is not that Dr Butler really things that women being raped, brutalized, threatened with death, forcibly addicted to drugs and then basically used as human toilets for the most debased and vicious lusts of men, is a just a bit of fun. On the contrary, Dr Butler thinks such things are terrible - but they do not happen very often and the government is wildly overestimating how common they are in order to have an excuse for yet more power.

However, the left establishment are not very fair in their reviews (ask Glenn Beck or indeed any author or broadcaster outside the left) so Dr Butler should expect to get attacked for what he says (or rather what the left will pretend he says) about human trafficking. This part of the book needed either far more of a passionate attack on the terrible things that are done to some women - or just the use of the blue pencil on the whole section.

On the bad effects of government regulations on general life Dr Butler gives many good examples. The sort of thing that will be familiar to those who have read the writings of Christopher Booker (mostly in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper) and his friend Dr Richard North. And Dr Butler tries to get at the philosophy behind the various demented "health and safety" (and so on) regulations - although perhaps not as well as F.A. Hayek did (in his works on the decline of the traditional view of the role of law - see his "Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" which themselves party draw on the works of British writers such as A.V. Dicey and, rather more, Chief Justice Hewart's "The New Despotism" 1929).

For an examination of the ideas that have made things worse in recent years the writings of Peter Hitchens are perhaps better than those of Dr Butler - but the articles and books of Peter Hitchens can seem "paranoid" to those who cling to the false hope that the political class has not been corrupted by collectivist ideas taught to them as students (indeed sometimes even as school children).

However, Dr Butler offers no real solutions to the problem of endless government regulations. He does not even suggest (as Booker, North, Hitchens and so many others do) that Britain leave the European Union, which would at least get rid of the tide of EU inspired regulations.

In fact Dr Butler simply seems to suggest that politicians, administrators and other members of the political class just become better people - "go thou and sin no more" may be fine theology, but it is not a political "manifesto", particularly as the ideas of the political class have been taught teach them that they are not "sinning" at all. Indeed that it is their role to "nudge" (or shove, or.....) people to obey them in every aspect of life.

More broadly Dr Butler is far better on the causes of the present crises than he is on the solutions to it:

This is not to say that Dr Butler does not argue for policies. On the contrary, he produces excellent and well argued policies on such things as the flat tax (rather than the endlessly complex "progressive" income tax), the need to reduce taxation on investment (if Warren Buffet's advice on the taxing of capital gains were followed there would not only be no more Warren Buffets it would also mean the destruction of what is left of investment in the Western world), and the need for real choice (not de facto state monopoly) in education and healthcare with the money being under the direct control of the individual not other people buying services in their name.

But, as Dr Butler would be the first to admit, most of these policies can be found in Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" (1980) or even in his "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962) - there is little specifically on the current crises, and little sign of understanding about how new evidence has complicated matters. For example, evidence (from the work of Charles Murray and others) that handing people money to spend on health and education (or food or whatever) is a wildly different thing from them earning money themselves and then choosing to spend it on these goods and services.

Even the flat tax proposal feels dated - as it ignores the work done on the perverse effects of one aspect of the "flat tax" proposal as it is normally presented. Namely the idea that people below a certain (reasonably high actually - although, to be fair, the figure that Dr Butler gives is a lot lower than some I have seen) level of income should not pay the tax at all (I know that government subsidizes many rich people to a disgusting level - I will deal with that further on).

This "let us get people out of the tax net" doctrine may be nice for people like me (I do not earn much - I never have and I never will). But for half of the American population to pay almost nothing of the main source of revenue for the Federal government (the income tax) is surely perverse in an age of one person one vote (it reminds me of Rome during the late Republic - where the mob paid no real taxes but got to vote for endless "bread and games"), and most flat tax proposals would take even more people out of the tax net.

It is surely no accident that most low government spending States in the United States either have no broad based income tax (Alaska, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas - Washington State also has no State income tax but is not a low government spending State) or have a income tax that hits most voters (not just the rich and the middle class) - Alabama being the classic example of this.

The old way of financing American Federal government spending (in the days when it was about 3% of the economy, rather than about 30% of the economy) was via a tax on imports, which whilst terrible was better than taxing some people very highly and not (apart from with the Social Security tax of course) taxing the other half of the voters. It is a terrible mistake for America and Britain to build a "welfare underclass" as they have both done and (by phony "tax credits" and so on) are continuing to do.

A tax structure where everyone can vote - but only just about half of the voters pay much, will not work. Either at local or national level. Certainly the "rich should pay more than the poor" - but that should be in money, not as a proportion of their income. If it is as a proportion of their income also (due to "basic income" not being taxed at all) - then the point of the "flat tax" is lost, as lots of people will be able to vote for government spending that they do not think they will be paying for.

Of course they will indirectly pay for this spending (pay for it by general economic decline), but that is an effect that the disinformation machine of the left (of academia, the "mainstream" media and so on) will strongly dispute - it will lead to a California type situation where (contrary to the Economist magazine) the problem is not referendums keeping taxes down, but wildly high government spending (fully supported by the politicians in the State legislature and the academic, judicial and media parts of the establishment) with many voters (especially the recent arrivals from Latin America) told that only "the rich" need pay most of the tax burden - an impossible burden of government spending for any tax system to support in any case.

This is not to say that the policies that Dr Butler suggests would not be an improvement on we have now, but one must be careful to no longer hope for vast improvement from these policies in the provision of "public services" - and of course it does not really deal with the central problem of our time we can not afford this vast burden of government spending any more. Although at least Dr Butler knows this - whereas the establishment call every good or service a "right" that must be provided at the expense of the taxpayer. In the latest absurdity both the British and American academic, media and political establishments have declared that "broadband internet access" is such a "right". No doubt the old promise of V.I. "Lenin" of gold plated public toilets will be introduced next week.

On how one should at first respond to the crises Dr Butler does not really dissent from the establishment - he supports both bailing out the banks and then increasing the money supply to try and restore demand.

Have no fear I am not about to launch into a massive Austrian School attack on Chicago School Monetarism. I am just going to make a political point.

One can not (with hope of success) support bailing out the banks (let alone subsidies for favoured corporations - which is what increasing the money supply really means) and then turn round and say "now we have got to get Welfare State Entitlement spending under control".

As Bastiat noted a century and a half ago - one can not, politically, support subsidizing the rich and oppose subsidizing the poor. It will not work - so even if I accepted the economics of "bailoutism" (which, of course, I do not - no matter how terrible the liquidation of the vast black hole of debt malinvestments would be, putting it off does not make it less terrible, in fact it will make it even more terrible) the politics of it are absurd and self defeating. In the end there is a moral side to politics, one must have a code of honour (the Cameron crowd are laughing at this point - but you will find out that your "cleverness" can not help you in the long term). For if one has no honour one will be exposed as dishonourable - and one loses all moral credibility to do the hard things that must be done.

Or to put it in blunt language - one can not take the free bread out of the mouths of the poor (as the Welfare State, the "essential public goods", has reached such a level of spending that will not be “sustainable" over the next few years - especially when the bubble economy finally does collapse) whilst one slips money into the pockets of one's rich friends.

Perhaps Dr Butler feels some of this himself - for his "Alternative Manifesto" is rather light on specific ways to save money.

No doubt Dr Butler would support such things as abolishing "Regional Government" (indeed I strongly suspect that he is one of the people in the "think tank world" who has been arguing strongly for getting rid of "regional development agencies" "development companies" and other QUANGOs ) and hopefully Dr Butler would strongly support Britain leaving the European Union (although I can not find the place in this book where this is specifically argued for - which is odd as leaving the E.U. is also an essential precondition for any serious roll back of regulations). But such moves will hardly be enough.

And, whatever may have been the case in Canada, I can not really put much faith the chances of a new "Public Service Ministry" (a "Ministry of Administrative Affairs"? led by Jim Hacker?) to achieve anything. If I were to draw a lesson from Canada that might be applied to Britain, it would be that of former Premier Harris of Ontario - honestly argue for the real reductions in government spending (and do not pretend that this will lead to "better public services" or other such B.S.) and voters may rally to your cause.

Even some people who were openly told they were going to have their benefits cut or even abolished voted for Harris - they voted for him because they saw an honest man who was going to what was needed to save society (i.e. that network of civil interactions that make up a real society - for there is no such "thing" or entity called "society" that has resources to do things of its own, only real individuals and their work).

I am poor and I can tell anyone prepared to listen that many poor people are not rats or insects - we are men, and are prepared to respond as men if we are talked with honestly by people who do not hide the fact that we are to suffer. Rather than presented with pathetic attempts to deceive us by shifty Captain Hook style Old Etonians (there are good Etonians and bad - sadly the bad, the dishonest and dishonourable, are in the key positions presently).

In recent times public attention has been, quite rightly, drawn to the obscene costs of the bank (and other such) bailouts. Indeed this cost is even higher than is generally believed as the published numbers (for bailouts) do not contain the hidden subsidies. For example the old trick of sweetheart (low interest rate) loans for connected banks and other corporations - via the Bank of England (the "discount window" and other scams), or the 200 billion Pounds in "quantitative easing" new money.

In both Britain and the United States the practice is for government (via the central bank) to produce money, then "lend" it out (at near zero interest rates) to politically connected banks and other corporations, who then (in turn) lend it back to the government (via the Treasury) at a higher rate of interest.

This is such a disgusting (and dishonest) subsidy of the rich that it is difficult for me to find (non "Anglo Saxon") words to describe it. And, of course, it means that the profits of banks and stock markets recently announced are one big fraud. Of course there are people who say that governments should just print "debt free money" and spend it - however such an open fraud could not last (the reason that Lord Keynes supported using the banking system to hide the monetary expansion fraud is because it can be made so complex that the public does not know what is going on).

Dr Butler main complaint about "quantitative easing" is that it was not larger - that it did not contain money for companies to play with (engage in malinvestments with) rather than just lend to the government to fund yet more wild government spending. This was the one point in reading Dr Butler's work when the book left my hand and made contact with the far wall. I am no enemy of the rich (I hope what I have already written proves that), but to subsidize them on an even greater scale is utterly unacceptable (on economic, political and yes moral grounds) - indeed to carry on subsidizing them at present levels is also utterly unacceptable.

"But it is not just the rich who will be hurt by allowing the credit bubble economy to collapse Mr Marks".

Quite so - and I personally may very well not survive such a collapse (if things do turn out badly for me I hope that I can at least find the courage to face my end with some scrap of dignity - but I may fail even in this). However, such a collapse will happen and every time the collapse is put off (by yet another bailout orgy of money supply expansion and government spending) the eventual collapse is made worse (and poor people like me are put into a position from which we are even less likely to survive). It is "later than you think" and the end of this credit bubble economy can not be long delayed - no matter how much effort is put into trying to create one last "crack up boom".

That is the seriousness of the situation we face, a situation where people must come together in voluntary effort (civil interaction - the true meaning of "the market", both "for profit" and in terms of mutual aid) in order to save what can be saved and to build new things after the tidal wave of liquidation has passed by. Any government interventionism (especially in the labour market) will just make mass unemployment (and the terrible poverty that will go with it) worse and last longer. It will prevent people helping themselves, and helping each other, in the terrible times we will soon face.

For all its other merits, I do not believe that Dr Butler's work fully grasps the seriousness of the situation we will face in the coming years.

(14)

I really, really hope that Nick Clegg, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, does not hold the balance of power at the next General Election, if this Spectator article, "Can Nick Clegg Sing the Blues?", is a guide (the article is behind the Speccie's subscription firewall).

Mr Clegg, the article says, is trying to reach out to supposed Conservative voters by arguing for tax cuts. But as is clear, the cuts are only for low-earners and not for anyone else (I certainly do support tax cuts for the poor, in case anyone brings this up). He wants, for example, to impose a so-called "mansion tax" on properties worth £2 million or more and wants to raise the level of capital gains tax from its current 18 per cent to 50 per cent - a huge jump - on those whose annual income is £150,000 or more. In other words, CGT will skyrocket for the sort of entrepreneur who can, or hope, to make a decent capital gain on a business that has been launched. As the supply-side school of economists likes to point out, once depreciation for wear and tear and inflation is taken into account, a 50 per cent CGT rate can in fact be more like 70 per cent, largely nullifying the gain and likely to hammer entrepreneurial activity. Given that top earners are already due soon to be paying 50 per cent income tax, not to mention other tax hikes, the process will drive yet more folk abroad and deter wealth creators from coming into the UK. The likely upshot of this will be a less active stock market - which will hit pension fund investments - hardly a great idea from the LibDems' point of view - and likely as not, erode, rather than acquire, more revenues.

There is also a quote, on page 14 of the magazine, that also proves to me that Mr Clegg is a numbskull: "The Tory inheritance tax cut, he said, would help people who don't actually spend their money, they just squirrel it away'". In other words, if you have wealth, either from your own efforts or from inheritance, and save it - you are a parasite, a dead weight. Mr Clegg clearly thinks that saving is bad, that "hoarding" of money in a bank account, or whatever, is a terrible thing, and that we should all be spending our money like mad down the High Street. Maybe he thinks it would be better if trustafarians were all down the dog track or the casino rather than sitting on a portfolio.

It is almost hard to summon breath to point out that it is precisely the high level of consumer spending, funded by debt rather than by real savings, that in part explains much of the current economic mess. We need to encourage, not discourage, savings. And given that as folk get richer, they typically invest and "hoard" a relatively high percentage of wealth, it is folly to hit them since they are a key source of capital for future investment. Folk on low incomes, by contrast, have low savings for the rather obvious reason, of course, that they struggle to make ends meet with what little income they have.

In fact, if the Tories have any sense - not much unfortunately - they should boldly confront the insane, Keynesianism-on-drugs mindset that says that spending is always a good thing and that savers are all rich, selfish bastards who should be taxed. Many years ago, FA Hayek likened this form of economic thinking to quackery. As usual, the great Austrian economist was being far too polite.

(25)

This is splendid almost beyond words.

Now go make your own!

Hat tip to John Farrier

(20)

Oh Jesus wept, just put the leadership of the Tory party out of our misery and get it over with. The 'secret weapon' of the Tory Party is a pro-Euro corporatist whose ability to alienate actual conservatives has been proven every time the bastard has rolled out over the last couple decades.

The Tory party is facing a widely detested and demonstrably failed government and the fact they are not forty points ahead in the polls shows just how far they have their heads up their own collective backsides... and now, just to dispel any lingering doubt, they dust off Ken Bleedin' Clarke. Unbelievable.

(47)

Of course, when I say that that is what Strathclyde Fire and Rescue ("making our communities safe places to live work and visit") preferred, I do acknowledge it cannot have been pleasant to sit around listening to her desperate cries for the last six hours of her life while rescue equipment that could have brought her out from the mine shaft into which she had fallen stood inactive. But it was that or disregard a memo.

According to the Times,

An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.

A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public. A memo had been circulated in Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations months previously stating that it was for use by firefighters only.

I am a little confused by the fact that the this rope equipment was specified for use by firefighters only. I suppose this restriction is to avoid untrained people being rescued.

(78)

NickM, Samizdata comment thread regular who gigs over at CountingCats, pretty much sums up my own views about the Tories and David Cameron at the moment. Which got me thinking: what would happen if, heaven forbid, we got another few years of Gordon Brown in Number 10?

This is all getting very ugly indeed. For a start, sterling is falling fast in the exchanges. There is, I think, more than an outside chance that if long-term government bond yields start to rise faster to attract lenders to lend, it will push the UK back into the recession from which it only recently - if you believe the data - recovered. I also think this government is quite capable of reiimposing exchange controls, which means that tourists, for example, would not be allowed to take more than a piddling amount of cash out of the UK. Of course, such a policy would not be announced in advance but imposed as an immediate measure. But it is a prospect to bear in mind. It is a bit academic in my case, but it is worth moving any spare cash you might have offshore, assuming you can do this without incurring a heavy charge. With what investments I do have, I tend to make sure that a fairly high proportion are in economies that are not heavily exposed to sterling. I am also a bit of a long-term dollar bear, given that the US also suffers from massive debt problems and that the dollar is also losing its reserve currency status, albeit slowly. I also favour commodity-backed currencies (the Australian dollar, for instance.)

Next year, I can qualify to get a Maltese passport, which, among other things, makes it easier for me to live in places such as Canada, apparently. I am going to look into this seriously. In the current environment, it pays to have a Plan B. I am lucky: as we don't - yet - have kids, me and the missus will not have too great a trouble getting out, although I would contemplate it perhaps even more so if I did have children. I have worked abroad from time to time, so some of the logistics would not be a mystery to me. My only major reservation at the moment is that if I did move, I would not want to be too far from my parents, who haven't been in the best of health lately and are not getting any younger.

UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback (well, most of it, anyway). First of all, my support for the freedom to migrate - as in the above instance - does not mean that I can expect to go where I like, or change the culture of the country to which I choose to live, or impose my values on such places. Which means that I do not dismiss the worries of those who have been concerned about, say, the influx of folk from very different cultures into the UK (ie, from the Muslim world). There is also the injustice, of course, of migrants taking up welfare benefits in the countries to which they enter - that clearly should stop. But such important caveats aside, as I have said, the freedom of exit is, if you think about it, the ultimate freedom as it protects other freedoms. If the situation becomes intolerable, it is glib for someone to argue that I am somehow "harming" my fellows who stay behind by leaving. If a state can ban or seriously hamper any individual from leaving a country of his birth, tht person is a serf.

One commenter by the name of Tim thinks my argument for leaving is somehow unprincipled as I will be causing, albeit in a tiny way, the very sort of problems (a falling pound, etc) that is bothering me in the first place. That argument does not convince. One might as well object to my refusing to use the services of a firm any longer because the firm will lose sales. Yet the firm, if it is run by intelligent people (big if) will react to the loss by trying to make itself more attractive. If a country is losing people and their departure is a "harm", then surely that very fact is an incentive for countries to change course, to encourage people to enter that country rather than leave. Or take another analogy: socialists get upset by the idea of school choice because a school will be "harmed" if dissatisfied parents pull their kids out and send them somewhere else.

(7)

Every time Labour show a whiff of recovery the pound crashes.

- Guido Fawkes comments on his graph showing that The Market Hates Labour.

(5)

One of my current top bloggers Richard North points to a new blog, Political Facts, where posting number one is about the Convenient Criminal. And since Richard North is now one of a lot of other people's top bloggers also, that means that news of this new blog will spread fast, perhaps faster than its writer might have preferred.

The story its first posting tells if of how the British police, animated by the desire to meet targets rather than to mete out justice, have resorted to arresting the easiest persons to arrest, rather than the guiltiest. The guilty ones flee before the police arrive but the victims of the villainy stay, waiting for help and support, unpractised in the arts of obstructing the police. So they, or their angry sympathisers, get arrested, basically for being a bit angry about having been set upon by actual criminals.

Police arrive. One police officer tells the violent drunk, now a few yards away, to leave the area. The bleeding victim is helped to his feet and tries to point our his attacker but by now he has already left the scene as instructed by a police officer. Not good for the police who have attended an assault but now have no boxes to tick.

One girl tells the police they are useless and is arrested for a Section 5 Public Order Offence for screaming and swearing at the violent drunk as he assaulted the young man. A female bouncer from the nightclub who has witnessed this rushes across the street and tries to tell the police they have the wrong person. (Captured on CCTV) Police tell her to go away and proceed to issue a Fixed Penalty notice. Another Convenient Criminal without police having to take the time and effort of now trying to find and arrest the violent drunk. Effortlessly ticks all the boxes the officers need ticked for their performance targets while justice is thrown away.

But are that event and another similar one outside a pub real events, or were they merely, as they say in the movies, "based on fact"? Are these actual people, or merely composites. This first posting is strong on principle, not so strong on chapter and verse. A widespread set of prejudices about how the police now operate is eloquently laid out. But where are the actual reports of actual events, in local papers or in other blogs? At first glance, the posting looks to be full of links, but all that bold-and-in-colour stuff turns out merely to be bold-and-in-colour. It doesn't lead anywhere.

But, as I say, it's early days for this blog and with luck it soon will start to lead somewhere. More to the point those facts alluded to in the blog's title may start gravitating towards it. After all, the blog's readers now at least know the kind of facts being sought. The man can obviously write, and with luck, he will turn out to be well placed enough, near enough to the kind of dramas he now describes in a generalised way, soon to be deploying some serious facts and making some serious waves.

(66)

"The declaration of neutrality on the issue of the sovereignty of the Falklands issued by the US State Department is clear proof of the uselessness of the Obama administration."

James Corum, military expert, ex-US soldier and writer in the Daily Telegraph. I would point out, in fairness, that in the early phases of the Falklands conflict in 1982, some members of the Reagan administration initially were sympathetic to Argentina, or at least tried to prevent a UK military recovery of the islands. But the Obama administration clearly has little love for the UK. Fair enough: let the UK follow its national interest and f**k the White House.

(6)

Over at Devil's Kitchen, the blogger uses justifiably salty prose to describe what he thinks of Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, after Mr Clegg gave various proposals for taxing City bankers and the like, including such brilliant ideas as raising the rate of capital gains tax to 50 per cent on top earners, in line with the new, 50 per cent income tax rate due to kick in at the start of April. Clegg gave an interview to the daily freesheet, CityAm.

Clegg, let us not forget, could be in a position to be an important power-broker if the outcome of the next UK general election produces a hung parliament in which no one single party has an overall majority. Given that both the Tories and of course Labour have shown no reluctance to pander shamelessly to anti-banker, anti-capitalist sentiment, it is likely that if any of these parties gets into bed with the LibDems (a truly gruesome thought, Ed), that such "bash-the rich" crapola will get worse. So we can expect the exodus of wealthy people from this country to continue if this sort of zero-sum economics nonsense holds sway.

Under trade descriptions legislation, the LibDems' own brandname would be declared as false advertising. Liberal they are certainly not.

(24)

"What’s really going on, I think, is that the nature of class war has changed. The old virus has mutated. The old social and political divisions have given way to two new classes — rather as on the trains. Those in economy are most of us, paying for the comforts of those in first class. And those in first class are the new political class — all those who owe their advancement and their security and their pensions and their privileges not to their backgrounds or their talents, or even necessarily their political parties, but to the state and our taxes."

- Minette Marrin

(16)

Incoming from Rob Fisher, to whom thanks (and oh look, I get a mention in Rob's latest posting), alerting me to this.

This is worth a look. The chap handles himself very well.

Indeed. His name is Bob Patefield. It comes across rather strongly that his real crime is not "being anti-social", but telling the first semi-police-officer, a "Police Community Support Officer", very politely, that he wasn't prepared to give his personal details, because he didn't believe that the semi-police-officer had the right to demand such details. That semi-police-officer then told a real police officer about this act of defiance, and the real police officer then moved in, inventing the claim that the photographer was taking pictures in an anti-social manner.

He was held in custody for eight hours, and then released without charge.

What a difference an internet makes. Not just in spreading the news of such harassment, but in rewarding those who resist it with a bit of glamour and attention and praise, from the likes of us. And punishing the police for such behaviour in an equal and opposite way.

The bottom line of all this, I believe, is that none of us actually believes that the way to stop terrorists, any terrorists, is to stop people taking photos of buildings. There are just too many people who take such pictures for entirely innocent reasons for such harassment to make any sense. Contrariwise, have terrorists ever crept about the scene of their subsequent crime, taking snaps? If so, I sure we would now be being told about it relentlessly. I like to take pictures of tourists taking pictures in the centre of London, and they constantly take pictures of buildings that are surely a lot more likely to be attacked by terrorists than is Accrington town centre. Like: the Houses of Parliament. The police never seem to bother them.

Maybe the police want to establish a track record having harassed lots of people who they have no reason to suspect of being terrorists, so that when they really do suspect someone of being a terrorist, who is also taking photos, and they ask him who he is, they can avoid accusations of racism, Islamophobia, etc. But if they have reasons for such suspicions, why all this kerfuffle when they haven't? These PCSO people in Accrington should perhaps be told about this.

Maybe the truth of this is that these PCSOs are simply picking fights with people, in order to prove that they are doing something other than just wandering about rather aimlessly and not really earning whatever they are paid. Maybe it's that simple.

(8)

Political bloggers of the Guido Fawkes/Iain Dale variety have found themselves, I suspect, and as I suspect that the traffic numbers may now be proving, being ever so slightly sidelined during the last month or two. Who cares about the petty pilferings of MPs when there is a world of lies and plunderings out there, under the general rubric of "Climategate"? It's not that the blog-as-gossip mongers been ignoring this story, more that they have faced a problem of how to respond to it. Should they hurl themselves into the science of it all? Probably better to leave that to specialists. Should they switch from contemplating the merely local government of Britain, to contemplating the government of the world, no less? Probably not.

One way for these bloggers to turn Climategate into their kind of story is to follow the money, especially if it is flowing through Westminster. Iain Dale, a political blogger very much inside the Westminster Bubble, yesterday featured an expensively produced climate change propaganda guidance leaflet entitled the rules of the game. Characteristic quote:

Those who deny climate change science are irritating but not important. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate change, but how we should deal with climate change.

Which just goes to show how much difference Climategate had made and continues to make. Without Climategate, the wider public was just left having to trust the scientists and acquiesce to this kind of stuff. Now "those who deny climate change science" are a whole lot more than irritating, important even, and the question very much is about if we should deal with climate change by any means other than simply adapting to it, as and when it really does occur.

Besides which, the second part of the quoted claim is also false. The argument being put by these climate propagandists is that we all should "deal with climate change" in the particular manner that they demand. Us saying that we have different opinions about how to adapt to climate change is also to be ignored, just as is the claim from any of us that "climate change", i.e. climate change of the man-made and catastrophic variety, may not even be happening.

The whole thing is disgusting, of course, and kudos to Iain Dale for featuring it. But the point I want to make here and now is that this disgustingness is only now clear. For as long as "climate science" was widely trusted, or at least not widely contested, this leaflet was just a leaflet, not a story. Publishing it before Climategate would merely have resulted in counter-comments from those who agree with it to the effect that they agree with it.

I recall being told by some pessimistic commenters on this early Climategate posting of mine here (done during the time before that word had even been decided upon as the name for all this), and reading elsewhere, that this story would, contrary to what I was already then enthusiastically asserting, soon go away. It would, that is to say, be made to go away. This Iain Dale posting is just one small example of very how untrue that notion is proving to be.

(15)

Back into the Westminster Village. Readers may have already seen the news reports alleging that Gordon Brown bullied members of his own staff in Downing Street (his office, it should be said, denies such claims). Apparently, a charity that runs a sort of hotline service took a call or calls from folk at Number 10 pleading for help. The issue threatens to turn into a major political storm. On the BBC Breakfast News this morning, one of the presenters was trying quite hard to put the charity on the defensive but the charity adamantly backed up the claim that complaints of bullying had been received. It did not, it should be noted, state that it believed Brown was in the wrong.

Some may say that harping on such matters misses the "Big picture": should it matter whether a prime minister is a decent person to work for or is a total jerk? I think it does matter, just as it matters when it turns out that so-called climate scientists fabricate evidence and then try and lie about it, or bully or generally try to intimidate anyone who disagrees. It matters, in other words, that some of the people that we might disagree with in our ideological battles are shits and liars. For one of the emotional tactics that collectivists of various hues have used over the ages is that "We are good people." To be an AGW skeptic, for instance, is not just to be wrong, it is a sign that you are a Bad Person. To have disagreed with socialism was, for a long period of time, also a sign that you were "bad" in some way, or that you failed in terms of compassion, etc. Mr Brown is a man who goes on a lot about "values": indeed, he waves his morally excellent beliefs around like a badge. So to find out that he allegedly bullied junior staff who might be reluctant to answer back is a useful fact to know about.

This point should not be pressed too far. After all, people whom I regard as being broadly on the side of the angels can sometimes be hard work and be rude. But it is interesting, I think, that a person known to be tough as a debater and sometimes rude to cabinet colleagues, as was the case with Mrs Thatcher, was well known for treating her staff in Downing Street with great kindness and consideration, according to various accounts that I have read. In the end, I think it matters in how a powerful person treats those who are not powerful. On that basis, the stories coming out about Brown are very damaging indeed.

This could be an interesting week in UK politics.

Update: I see that Rod Liddle has suggested that the alleged victims of workplace bullying grow a bit of backbone. I guess he has a bit of point, but Mr Liddle would presumably draw the line when an employer starts throwing physical objects at staff, causing potential injury. Many years ago, I used to hear stories about a news editor for a regional publication who would hurl typewriters at staff, lose his temper uncontrollably, etc. In that case I think an employee should not only sue, but if necessary, hit the employer in self defence.

(16)

Like James Delingpole, I'm finding it hard to keep up with Climategate, the latest posting by this Climategating journo-blogger, after another tumultuous weekend of Climategatery, being a piece he put up on Saturday about the Beano. Read EU Referendum, read the Bishop, Climate Audit, WUWT, and the rest of them. In particular, the sheer quantity of good stuff that EU Referendum puts up every day amazes me.

In one of his more recent postings, EU Referendum's Richard North says this:

... there is a long way to go before the institutional inertia supporting the global warming industry can be overturned, and the lack of political engagement by the Conservatives is a major handicap. Until and unless this issue goes political, there is little to sustain it in the long run. Without that political traction, skeptics will find it hard to keep up the momentum, feeding fresh stories to the media. The campaign could falter.

I don't believe the campaign will falter for a moment, any more than that old habit we used to have of complaining about the uselessness of Communism ever stopped, just because the newspapers had been ignoring that fact for a week or two. But, I get the point. Yes, the "campaign", in the sense of daily old and new media Warmist catastrophes and surrenders and humiliations and measured retreats that turn into routs, might soon slacken off bit. And a few words of doubt about Warmism from David Cameron would indeed keep the media pot boiling that little bit longer. But how to contrive this?

Cameron's plan for the next general election is to present himself as Mister In-Between, neither Left nor Right, but Nice and Good and Wise, and thereby to make a nonsense of all Leftist protestations to the effect that he is a nasty Rightist. The more the Right complains about him, the more it suits Cameron's plan. His plan may be unprincipled hogwash, but that's another whole argument. Meanwhile, that is his plan.

It thus follows that the way to get an anti-Warmist response out of the Cameron is not for the Conservative Party's entire activist base to bombard him with anti-Warmist complaints. Cameron believes he has all his faithful votes in the bag. He frets now only about the unfaithful ones. He will merely use his refusal to notice complaints from his own angry supporters to burnish his image as Mr Not-Right. No, the trick is somehow to get the Left to say anti-Warmist things. If that happens, Cameron will be echoing it within the hour.

And the good news is, the Left is starting to do this. The newspapers of the Right are now all over Global Warming, printing their usual newspaper mixture of important truths, sloppy lies, stupid irrelevancies, and generally echoing the anti-Warmist blogosphere of about a month ago or more. But, quite often, they are even acknowledging that bloggers got there first. And now they are catching up. The Guardian is starting seriously to shift. Even the BBC is starting to ask some of the questions that matter.

The reason this is happening is that when the regular non-Left newspapers publish stories about Warmism and about the dishonesties of the Warmists, people read them. Public opinion is inexorably shifting on this. Why wouldn't it? Had it been uncontested, Warmism would have spread - still might spread - ruin all over the planet, and at a time when ruin of other kinds has just been spread all over the planet on the basis of other excuses. What's not to hate? The arguments are extremely complicated, but the basic message now being learned from them is cruelly simple. It's bollocks. This is a meme that can spread from one head to another head in under a second. The opinions polls can only go on going one way on this. By and by, the Left that hasn't noticed this already will notice. Even if their only complaint is that Warmism isn't working any more, and is instead hated, well, that's a good reason for them to hate it too. Perhaps Warmism's ultimate crime in their eyes will be that it is now making them look like fools.

And guess what they will then say? My guess is, they will say (see above) that Warmism is a capitalist plot. As opposed to global warming, I mean. This is how the Left always ends up accepting that something that their enemies have denounced for years as bad actually is bad. They say, it's bad because capitalism did it. That they actually started it themselves, well, they forget that bit. But, in a way, they're correct about this. Leftist causes do have a habit of degenerating into capitalist rackets. Certainly Warmism has become a capitalist racket, big time.

"Capitalism", in an argumentative context such as this, is a word that blurs the distinction between (a) good and just and freedom-enhancing rules that result in, among many other splendid things, capitalists doing very well, and (b) capitalists who have done very well buying up the government and bending it to their will. We here unswervingly support (a), while remaining suspicious of (b), for all that, as we constantly also point out, (b) is at least better than (c) utter ruin, caused by people who hate both (a) and (b). For most Lefties, the dubiousness of (b) is iused as an excuse to destroy (a), which is stupid, but there you go. If that's what it will take to make them enjoy performing the intellectual about-turn that I am suggesting for them, away from their idiotic and hitherto wholly uncritical fixation with Warmism, well, so be it. It would also help if by then the Left had found some plausible but quite different excuses for ruining up the world in their preferred manner. Again, different argument.

If anybody else in the world is doing more than Richard North to offer the Left the sort facts it needs to change its tune in the manner I describe, then I have not noticed such a person, although the Left won't thank him for this. It will suddenly pluck such facts out of thin air, as if nobody had ever thought of them before, and denounce Right wingers for none of them having realised any of this. They will. Just you wait.

Which is when Cameron may finally have something to say about the imperfections of Warmist scientists.

It goes like this: specialist skeptic blogs, unspecialist but skeptic blogs, the Conservative Party's usual supporters, public, non-lefty old media, more public, lefty old media, more public, and finally, last of all, David Cameron. This undignified process is presumably what David Cameron thinks of as leadership. It may end up being branded by the rest of us something seriously other than leadership, but, like I say, different argument. My point is, given Richard North's question, that has been my answer.

(6)

"Had McQueen's life been recorded in a measured and appropriate way, it would have retained some dignity. As it is, we've had to consider the silhouette of trousers as though it ranks with the irrigation of Sudan or a cure for cancer. And that just makes him look a complete prat."

George Pitcher, writing about the fashion industry in the light of the death of 40-year-old designer Alexander McQueen. Much of what Mr Pitcher writes in this piece also applies, in my view, to parts of the architecture and "modern" art establishment. However, at least the fashion industry operates mostly in a free(ish) market. If we don't like its products, then we don't have to buy them. When a tax-funded body pays for some freakish statue, for example, it is not quite the same thing.

(4)

"In short, sterling is in the toilet, our pensions have been slaughtered, cash savings yield almost nothing, the country is up to its neck in unprecedented debt, the banking system is awash with funny money, our gold reserves were sold off at rock-bottom prices, and Britain’s dole queue is considerably longer than before Crash Gordon began cooking the books. Apart from that, it’s not too bad."

Jeff Randall.

Even now, after thinking through all the various words written about the plodding disaster of a man that Brown is, it is shocking to contemplate the damage he has done and continues to do, as he heads towards oblivion.

(8)

Scanning the news headlines at lunchtime today, I read through the Wall Street Journal and saw this item, in relation to the expenses scandal of British Members of Parliament:

I thought the headline was interesting, in that the WSJ - still an overwhelmingly US-centred publication, covering world affairs through the prism of certain American assumptions, likes to refer to MPs as "lawmakers". To be pedantic, it is true that they do continue to make some laws and pass many others, but given that their legislative functions have been largely subsumed within the structure of a EU superstate, maybe the term "lawmaker" somewhat flatters the true status of these characters, who are more akin to members of a local council.

Just a thought.

(13)

The British Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown, is going to promise nursing at home for all cancer patients who desire this. Such nursing is already provided by the Macmillan charity (hence "Macmillan cancer nurses"), but people will soon forget that. If the plan goes ahead and (a rather wild assumption) the British government manages to stagger on for a few more years without bankruptcy from its endless schemes, people will soon be saying "if it was not for the government people with cancer who wanted to stay at home could not do so - unless they were RICH" (the word "rich" being said with hatred).

This is how the expansion of government happens. The government takes over something (and civil society retreats) and soon people do not even know that it was ever done voluntarily. And, too often, the people who used to undertake the activity welcome the advance of government - "now we will not have to go begging for money" they tell themselves, not understanding that where there is government finance there is also government control.

It may even be that, a few years down the track, some future government decides to abolish home nursing of cancer sufferers ("it would be more efficient to do this in hospital"). Take over and then some time later close (or mutilate) has been a common thing in such things as health... for example the cottage hospitals that local communities had financed for centuries... or education (no more need to go "begging" for funds to finance talented poor children going to the local grammar school, for the government would fund the grammar schools - accept that the government closed them after a couple of decades).

The education "system" (the schools and the universities - with the exception of the University of Buckingham) teaches none of the above - one would not expect it to, after all even the private schools are dominated by such things as they need to pass examinations set by government approved people. However, even the privately owned media is useless - at least in Britain.

For example, today "Classic FM" (one of the largest non-government radio stations in the United Kingdom) just covered the matter in its news broadcasts by saying how Mr Brown was making this nice offer - and had a person on saying how the whole scheme might even pay for itself by helping people back into work and... basically flying pigs nonsense.

As for the Conservative party - there was no opposition in principle (no defence of civil society), just a question of what was going to be cut to pay for the noble scheme.

Lastly where Mr Brown is going to make his promise is worthy of note - he is going to make a speech at the "King's Fund". This was once a charity set up to give poor people health care and it was given vast sums of money (by rich people - but also by a lot of people who were not rich at all) which was invested to provide an income. Then the organization changed its function (to offering advice conducting, non medical, "research" and so on) - but it never gave any of the money back... It is controlled by ex BBC people, and other such, these days. Actually the King's Fund is, therefore, a perfect venue for a speech that will (in reality) announce the death of another piece of civil society - but I doubt that anyone present for the speech will understand this.

(7)

Mental hospitals in this case.

I sometimes get stick on Samizdata for pointing out that the demands of practical politics in a media democracy mean that it is pointless to try the public statements of politiicans against an ideological touchstone, and unreasonable to believe that they believe everything they say from day to day. But I do greatly resent two consequences of populist pandering: first, the willingness to distort the facts to flatter or inflame public delusions and foster moral panics; second, the blithe adoption of policy that is logically or strategically utterly incoherent, suggesting they have no understanding whatsoever of what they are doing. Today brings an example of the latter:

The Conservatives' planning system would remove potential obstacles to the development of new schools by curtailing the power of local authorities in this area, according to the document.

The leaked planning policy says "for the [education] policy to be successful it is essential that unnecessary bureaucracy is not permitted to stifle the creation of new community schools".

Fine. Perfectly sensible. Get the monopoly producer interest out of the way. That is entirely consistent with an implicit aim of Tory education policy (definitely not publicly advertised as such) of permitting competition between schools. But..

Under the policy, as well as planning decisions on new schools being taken by the secretary of state for children, schools and families, anyone would be able to turn an existing building into a school without the need for planning permission.

Which might be good, but the madness is starting to creep in. If any building can be converted into a school ad lib (excellent), then what "planning decisions" could there be for the Secretary of State to take? And how does that accord with a general claim to be in favour of decentralisation?

And when an existing school closed, that land would not be allowed to be used for any other purpose without the agreement of the schools secretary.

Straightjacket for Mr Neill, please. That is just crazy.

"Let us establish a ratchet/racket whereby the proportion of land and other property occupied by schools is calculated to increase, regardless of demand. Let us destroy much of the advantage of the freeing up of planning, by making it clear to investors that they may be stuck with the change of use. Let us put future Secretaries of State in the position where they are directly politically responsible for the closure of any school, and therefore likely to be under pressure to resist it from concentrated interest groups, and constantly preoccupied with campaigns over particular cases. Cottage Hospitals, you say? What are they?"

(12)

The fascinating thing about this response is that it demonstrates that Cameron, whose only claim to fame is that he is a politician, isn't even very good at politics.

- Richard North describes Conservative Party leader David Cameron's stonewalling response to suggestions that he might want to rethink his attitude towards the climate change debate

(26)

Well, continuing in my theme of talking about folk heading off to mountainous nations with more sensible tax laws than in the UK, I see that Sir Simon Jenkins thinks that Britain would be well rid of the thousands of financiers and other folk who are threatening to leave the UK because of high taxes. Jenkins is a rum fish: he is often quite astute in pointing out, for example, the damaging impact of regulations on certain industries and in some ways his instincts are quite liberal in the old, proper use of that word. But he also thinks that tax rates don't really matter. To hell with 'em, he says: these bankers are just bluffing:

"There may be someone out there outraged at paying 10 per cent more in tax from an enormous income, and equally outraged at his firm being taxed on his enormous bonus. Of these a few may be so outraged as to uproot their families, desert their friends and go into exile — before they find that a £2 million London house costs £9 million in Geneva. If they can do their business entirely online, why be in London at all? But I doubt if there really are 9,000 such sad, migratory souls."

Jenkins needs to get out more. There are indeed thousands of people who are not amused at the prospect of having their wallets so comprehensively lifted. In my travels and through work in the media and wealth management sector, I can tell Sir Simon that the exodus of folk is not a mirage. It is happening. Note the lazy assumption that because these evil bankers are paid so much, it will not make any difference if the state seizes another 10 per cent of their annual income. In fact, once changes to pension allowances, thresholds and National Insurance are taken into account, the top rate of income tax in the UK will be more than 60 per cent in marginal terms for anyone earning more than £150,000 a year. That tax bite is higher than will be the case on top earners in France, if my memory serves. Way to go, Mr Brown! But what is objectionable about Jenkins' reasoning - if we can dignify his comment by such a word - is the idea that such folk have no right to be outraged at having almost two-thirds of their income above a certain level seized, at source. The assumption is that no-one really "needs" all that filthy lucre and should be jolly grateful that they do not have to surrender even more. The unconscious collectivism is all too evident.

The consider this classic:

"We used to get the same tax-dread from the British film industry, howling at being taxed like ordinary mortals. Yet the last time Britain made really good films, in the Sixties and Seventies, marginal income tax was 80 per cent. In 1986 the Big Bang transformed the City of London, leading to German, Swiss and American banks pouring into London. It ensured that the City, then languishing under competition from abroad, would flourish. At the time, marginal income tax was not 40 per cent or 50 per cent but 60 per cent."

That is a silly argument. No-one is claiming that if taxes rise, that the economy collapses overnight - the damaging effect can take quite a while to have its effect. But have its effect it did. Many of the stars of 1970s films, such as Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Roger Moore, did not live in the UK for part of the period that coincided with confiscatory tax rates. Sellers, for example, ended his days in Switzerland.

"It was not until two years later, in 1988, that the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, cut the tax to 40 per cent. By then Margaret Thatcher was so fearful of over-heating the economy that she pleaded with him that 50 per cent was enough. It was not Thatcher who cut the tax, as Johnson keeps saying, but Lawson. It led to inflation, boom and bust."

Well, if Mrs Thatcher really did think that 50 per cent was "enough", then all I can say is that I am glad Mr, now Lord, Lawson, prevailed. If the state takes a smaller chunk of a person's income at source, that does not necessarily fuel inflation - since before the tax was cut, presumably the money being seized from such taxpayers was being spent on something else. In fact, I would add that one of Mrs Thatcher's faults was her support for mortgage interest tax relief, which encouraged people to over-extend their borrowing on property and helped fuel the housing boom of the late 1980s (UK regulations restricting house building did not help either, but that is another story).

Finally, there is this:

Bankers can drift around the tax havens of the world while we are stuck in London but I don't see why I should pay off their gambling debts with my taxes when they will not pay them too. If they storm off in a huff, good riddance. I don't want such people investing my money.

Here he is confusing good arguments - no bailouts for failed bankers - with a sort of vengeful "fuck-you!" spite against bankers in general. If Sir Simon wants to make the case against "too big to fail" bailouts of bankers, argue for a genuine free market in banking rather than the statist, moral-hazard disaster we have now, and insist that the Keynesian madness now in vogue be challenged, I will be cheering him on. I suspect I might have to wait a while.

(45)

The Royal Society for Public Health no doubt sees itself as a worthy collection of people who are axiomatically on the side of the angels. I mean, who could be against public health?

In truth they are a terrifying and truly totalitarian outfit who operate with a presumption that the state has super-ownership of the physical bodies of everyone in Britain. Now I am of the view that defence against infectious plagues is a legitimate role of the state because it is a collective threat... a plague, like a fire or an invading army, does not respect property lines and so this is the whole reason to have a 'nightwatchman state'.

But that is not the view of people like the Royal Society for Public Health. No, they take the view that 'public health' follows on naturally from state run medical care and gives the state the right to decide pretty much anything that can impact on an person's health, regardless of that individual's preferred choices, even if those choices are personal ones that do not place other people at risk.

They have issues a manifesto for nothing less than the nationalisation of your body and the intrusion of the state, on grounds of protecting your health from yourself and others who agree to be around you.

1. A minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol sold
2. No junk food advertising in pre-watershed television
3. Ban smoking in cars with children
4. Chlamydia screening for university and college freshers
5. 20 mph limit in built up areas
6. A dedicated school nurse for every secondary school
7. 25% increase in cycle lanes and cycle racks by 2015
8. Compulsory and standardised front-of-pack labelling for all pre-packaged food
9. Olympic legacy to include commitment to expand and upgrade school sports facilities and playing fields across the UK
10. Introduce presumed consent for organ donation
11. Free school meals for all children under 16
12. Stop the use of transfats

Of all these statist policies, number 1 is particularly invidious, with our technocratic masters seeking a sumptuary law on alcohol (i,.e. a tax to stop poor people drinking), number 12 seeks to regulate our choice of what we eat.

But by far the worst of all is number 10, this is the one which tells you everything you need to know about these people and the profoundly, unabashedly thugish nature of their world view... the state can help itself to your body parts by default. Post mortem conscription. Frankly I am all for organ donation, but at the moment, I carry a card expressly forbidding my organs to be harvested post mortem as the very notion these people are presumptive owners of any of my mortal remains is simply intolerable.

But then as they demand the right to regulate everything about your physical existence prior to death, I suppose it is no surprise they think nothing of helping themselves to your carcass after you die.

These people are the very worst kind of self-righteous technocratic curtain twitchers, the true spiritual heirs to the folks who in the first half of the twentieth century had people with birth defects sterilised or has troublesome people lobotomised, on 'scientific grounds' of course 'for the public good'. Naturally such Guardian reading caring sharing folks would see drawing such analogues as a grotesque calumny, but in truth they exhibit the same intrusiveness and obsession with controlling the lives of others, it really is the same psychopathology, just repackaged for the 21st century with the current notions of 'best practice'.

These people must be opposed... but not just politically, they need to be seen socially for what they are and abominated for their desires to regulate the lives of everyone around them. They presume to occupy the moral high ground but they do not and the more people who openly and publicly reject their axiomatic presumption of state controls over the very bodies of people, the sooner we can start to reclaim the culture of people who belong on a psychiatrist's couch to help them deal with their abhorrent desires to use force against those who wish to live their lives without interference and according to their own judgements, with the positive and negative consequences of that accruing to themselves alone, like real adults.

The people behind this manifesto are detestable and they need to be told that to their faces.

(4)

"It says something about our prospective future prime minister that when he decided to respond to accusations of being a lightweight, he did so by granting privileged access to the “most fashionable man in Britain”, and that the subsequent book that was produced (for which he was paid £20,000) and the subsequent articles that continue to be produced (Jones recently wrote a 3,288 word piece on Cameron for The Mail on Sunday), have resulted in revelations such as the fact that Cameron doesn’t really like Pot Noodle, that he needs six or seven hours’ sleep a night, that he has “small flecks of grey in his thatch” and that his karaoke song of choice is A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles, because “even I couldn’t muck up a song like that”.

- Sathnam Sanghera

(28)

Free association is one of the bedrocks of civil society, so when 'faith based' schools start complaining about the secular state interfering with who they can and cannot admit, my first response is to urge these folks to inform the state that it is none of their god-damn business.

It is surely a matter for religious group themselves to define their own congregation. In short, if they actually have any deeply held principles, and if they do not, why call themselves 'faith based' at all, they should simply refuse to comply with the state's demands. Just point blank refuse.

To their credit some Catholic adoption agencies shut down last year due to the state demanding they operate in contravention of Catholic principles (by placing children with homosexual couples), but it remains to be seen if any schools will do likewise and shut down rather than comply, or better yet, simply ignore the regulations on who they admit.

But that said, at the same time that these schools should refuse to obey secular direction of their religious based institutions, they must also refuse to take a single penny of state money. Why? Because if they take the taxpayer's coin... coin which has been extracted from believers and non-believers via the political system... they cannot then complain if that money comes with politically imposed conditions.

(96)

In Britain, a woman alone in her own home cannot even brandish a knife to defend herself, let alone actually use one.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.

The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive.

If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as you can, no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect).

And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives.

Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards.

Myleene, you had the right instincts and you have my respect... your only mistake, and it is a big one, is to assume the cops in the UK are on your side and a young mum home alone with her child was legally entitled to defend herself. They ain't and you are not. You have the moral right to do whatever it takes to defend yourself from intruders, but the police have no interest in such niceties.

The state is not your friend.

(7)

Helen Evans, who runs Nurses for Reform, a campaigning organisation dedicated to free-market options for healthcare in the UK, got to meet Conservative Party leader David Cameron a couple of weeks ago. The Daily Mirror [here, here and here] and the Daily Telegraph found out about the meeting and offered their own take on it.

Broadly, I agree that the proposals are in the right direction, although I have concerns about some of the tactics suggested and their formulation, which I deal with later. The bit that was not previously familiar to me was the idea that a barrier to entry should be at least lowered, by amending local planning rules to make it easier to open a new healthcare facility. I'm told the Conservative Party already favours this for schools, so the extension to clinics should not be difficult.

Having read the briefing document presented to the Leader of the Opposition, I disagree with one element of the strategy being proposed, specifically this passage: "the [National Health Service] NHS should be renamed the National Health SYSTEM and that under its auspices patients should benefit from a universal right to independent hospital care and treatment."

A "universal right" is something that a government could be justified in declaring war to defend, like "freedom from slavery" or freedom from the use of confessions extracted under torture in criminal trials. It could certainly be a pretext for new taxes, a new bureaucracy, more regulations, and the restriction of other "non-universal" rights. Sadly, this call for declaring that privately-provided healthcare is a right could become the very instrument for imposing regulations (such as US Medicare-style price controls, or French-style government control on where doctors can practise [link in French]) that violate patient and physician freedom. To give a specific example: could a private clinic be fined for not providing 24-hour accident and emergency access? I would expect a government agency to do just that. Meanwhile, of course, government facilities which operate "in the public interest" would be excused.

A second concern comes in a later paragraph: "health censorship must be outlawed and patients must be empowered with greater access to information." Outlawed? Must be empowered? By what agency, regulation, funded by what taxes or levies, with what powers of inspection and control?

These may seem like quibbles, but the law of intended consequences suggests that the wording of reforms can be as important as their spirit. Consider the US Constitution's First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Does it say that Congress cannot give money to the Food and Drug Administration to hunt down anyone making claims about the alleged benefits to cancer patients of drinking grapefruit juice? No it does not. It means it, I think, but can I prove it to the US Supreme Court? Probably not.

It might be more boring to do, but the best way to remove censorship would be to revoke the clauses of those laws and regulations that allow it. As for "empowerment," if this comes from the government it will mean a Department of Truth in Advertising demand for a quarterly report from all private providers as to how they inform the public, with fines for not reaching a wide enough audience.

On the positive side, Nurses for Reform finds that the ownership by a government department of most of the UK's hospitals is a potential conflict of interest. There is the temptation to hide problems, to restrict information about alternative (often newer) treatments, the cozy relationship between the government employees in the NHS and those of the Department of Health who are supposed to watch them.

Dr Evans is therefore absolutely right to suggest the immediate transfer of ownership of NHS hospitals out of "public ownership," and she is also correct that the "Secretary of State for Health must no longer have any say over when or where hospitals are built, opened or closed."

On the issue of advertising, or freedom to communicate with the public in general, the major benefit would be that people could get an idea of which were the better brands (either cheapest, or best quality, or best balance between the two). If we think of how Aldi and Lidl can co-exist with ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and independent grocers, we can see how variety of branding can lead to beneficial competition: new treatments, more options and probably less queues.

Personally, I see no point whatsoever in delaying the reform of NHS funding: it merely prolongs unnecessary suffering and provides more opportunities for opponents of change to mobilise, like Gorbachev's "perestroika" versus the liquidation of the soviet system. Having little expectation of any progress under a new Conservative Party government this coming year, it would be a pleasant surprise if Dr Evans' proposals came to fruition. But at least no one can now claim that the case was not made.

[UPDATE: corrected link for Daily Telegraph article]

(5)

Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple:

Join us.

Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie.

Mr Devil's Kitchen didn't mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply.

I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all.

I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us?

(27)

Anatole Kaletsky still inhabits the mental world where debt-driven crises are cured by more debt, where the damage inflicted by madly cheap money can be cured by, er, even cheaper money. And in the process, he dismisses anyone who might demur from this fantastical notion as mad ideologues or right-wing troublemakers:

"These unabashedly Keynesian policies, which Mr Brown did not just implement in Britain but proselytised around the world, are now almost universally acknowledged to have contributed to economic recovery, not just in Britain, but also in the US, Europe, Japan and China. It might well be argued, therefore, that the Tories discredited themselves as potential economic managers by choosing the wrong side of the debate over fiscal stimulus, aligning themselves with right-wing Republicans, German neo-Marxists and anti-Keynesian academic ideologues, all of whom insisted that you cannot cure debt with more debt and that government stimulus plans would prove counter-productive."

So perhaps Mr Kaletsky can explain why, if Brown was such a great man, he presided over a situation as finance minister when the UK ran a budget deficit even when the economy was - according to official statistics - growing reasonably strongly before the crisis. And maybe he can explain why, in previous historical episodes, such as in Britain during the early 80s or in the early 1920s in the US, the economy recovered from recession without massive government spending and oodles of cheap central bank money.

Of course, Kaletsky is right to point out that this massive pile of public debt that has now been built up will have to be reduced, and probably far more severely, than the UK's opposition Conservatives have been willing to let on. But then such a process is bound, by the logic of Mr Kaletsky's own neo-Keynesian macro-economics, to drag on any future recovery, since such a debt reduction programme is bound to involve tax rises as well as public spending cuts.

By "anti-Keynesian academic ideologues" - as opposed to sober-minded sages such as himself - Mr Kaletsky is presumably referring to what can be loosely described as the Austrian school of economics, a school that regards money not as a metaphysical abstraction to be manipulated at will by a handful of central bankers and their political overlords, but as a claim on real resources, which cannot be simultaneously used by different people at the same time. Instead of sneering at such views, it would be more edifying if Mr Kaletsky, and those who share his views, could address them cogently.

Here is a decent article on a related theme.

(28)

I get the feeling that the next general election in Britain could be the first one to be seriously altered in its overall result by the internet. I definitely hope so. My ideal result would be for Gordon Brown and David Cameron and that LibDem guy all to emerge from the election feeling equally humiliated, and all sounding like they are on the same side, that of Big Politics, while all the conviction parties, the silly parties, including silly conviction parties whose silly convictions are the absolute opposite of my own convictions, do far better than they were supposed to and compared to the amount of and nature of the mainstream media coverage that they got.

In particular, I hope that UKIP does really well. I've heard the complaints about this party, most of which boil down to the claim that they are all just too weird. But scratch any active participant in any political party and pretty soon the weirdness spills out.

My feeling-stroke-wishful-thinking along these lines is based on seeing things like this:

I came across that here, a few days ago. It's basically a greatest hits compilation of UKIP snippets taken from the European Parliament, mostly about Climategate, with a few bits from some internet TV show in the USA spliced in. I particularly like the Liverpudlian guy.

That EU Parliament is an odd place. People make these little speeches in it, which almost none of the people present pay any great attention to, but which, on YouTube, can sometimes escape into the wild, to the point where mainstream media non-coverage becomes impossible to sustain.

More fundamentally, even if such non-coverage persists, as I expect it to persist at least until the forthcoming general election, so what? More and more people can now receive such messages as these anyway.

Enough to embarrass Brown, Cameron and Whatsisname? Maybe. As I say, I do hope so.

(69)

An Islamic group called islam4uk, who are a front organisation for the islamo-fascist group al-Muhajiroun, want to march through Wootton Bassett carrying "symbolic coffins" as a protest against the ongoing British participation in the Afghan civil war against the Taliban.

My suggestion is that the good people of Wootton Bassett reply by throwing "symbolic bricks" at the Islamo-fascist protesters, should they actually ever march down that town's streets. Just symbolic bricks of course, made of sponge cake... or maybe bricks of good English bacon or Danish butter as I am sure the cheerful chaps of al-Muhajiroun will get the joke... not real bricks, because we do not want any Islamo-fascists to get their brains bashed out by our jolly japes... well, not whilst they are in Britain at least.

But what I would really like to see is for Islam4uk carry out a march carrying symbolic coffins through a street in beautiful downtown Bazarak in Panjshir Province in Afghanistan. Just about everyone there is a muslim, so what could possibly go wrong, eh? Go on, guys, give it a try.

(12)

As Michael Jennings has already reminded us, it is now that time of year, when we look back at the rest of the year. I too will now look back at 2009. Whereas Michael trots the globe, my preferred outdoor activity is walking around London, taking photos, an activity which, as of now, remains more or less legal.

And one of the things I especially like to photo is Evening Standard headlines. Not the headlines in the actual newspaper itself, but the ones on the outside of the contraptions behind which the sellers of the Evening Standard sit. I don't do this as obsessively as this guy, but I do it every few days or so, whenever a particularly intriguing or doom-laden headline hoves into view.

Click on all these headlines to get the original picture that I took, often a bit prosaic, as in: just the headline and its immediate surroundings; but sometimes with further fun and games, in particular further headlines next to the one I've featured in the little squares below. So, for instance, to consider just the first two snaps, on Jan 5, besides the amazing news that it was quite cold in January 2009 (just as it is quite cold now - see Dec 22(a)) you can also see talk of "TORY TAX CUTS". We wish. Still in January, you can ponder the ever widening gap that separates the ever more bogus hero Barack Obama from the real deal: "CAPTAIN COOL IN RIVER JET CRASH".

The most regular themes are: economic woe, politicians cheating on their expenses, the consequent relentless criticism of and plotting against the Prime Minister, and the equally relentless way the Prime Minister just bashes on with his ruinous activities, seemingly impervious to all complaints.

See especially June 5, which is worth clicking on for, I humbly submit, artistic reasons This is certainly my favourite photo of all these, in terms of the atmosphere it evokes and the memories it will stir in me in future years, one of the main reasons I take photos being just remind myself of what I was interested in, whenever it was. I love that digital cameras automatically attach dates to everything. So, here we go.

There are three for July, because none of the three headlines you see seemed to me to deserve exclusion.

Well, I hope you liked all that, even if without a lot of clicking.

You may now be saying to yourself that November and December have become pretty anti-climactic, and you would be right. For there is another story here, besides all the stories alluded to in the headlines. These photos serve not just as a random walk through the year 2009, but as a probable elegy for the Evening Standard itself, and certainly for the long London era of Evening Standard headlines in the streets.

Click on October 20 for the first clue. That's right. Some time around then, the Evening Standard stopped costing any money, and started being handed out free. At first the guys giving it away carried on with the billboards, but I knew that this practice would soon fade away. If no money is being made in the street from these newspapers, why go to all the bother of advertising them in the street. So it is that if you click on the last picture of all, you see that where there used to be informatively alarming stories about doom and disaster, now there are only forlorn signs saying that the ES now costs nothing.

This switch to the ES being a giveaway came only a few months after its takeover by a Russian Oligarch. How soon before the ES vanishes altogether, becoming itself the subject of a few more doom-laden headlines in other organs, before it sinks from the memory of Londoners?

(14)

If religious leaders get the urge to spout off on religious topics to the religiously inclined, well I suppose that is what they are for. But why oh why does the Church of England think it is appropriate for them to have any corporate opinion at all on purely secular matters like advertising?

Why should a bunch of clerics think they have any business demanding the state regulate the media? Exactly what biblical basis do they have for supporting the imposition of restrictions on what people do on TV? I must have missed the passage in the New Testament where it says "The Lord says tell Caesar to threaten those who sayth things you don't approve of".

I have zero tolerance for a state privileged organization who claim to speak from a position of moral superiority advocating force backed restrictions on secular life. The sooner the Church of England is disestablished the better.

(23)

Abdelhaset Al-Megrahi is a millionaire, released under mysterious conditions of mortality, to the lasting shame of the Scottish Parliament. It now appears that he is no longer in hospital, a puzzle given his mortal prognosis. He has now survived longer than the diagnosed two months, imploding the claims of clemency and mercy.

Yet, Gary McKinnon will be deported to the United States despite his mental condition and the prognosis that he is a suicide risk, under a despised extradition treaty.

What justice could my country invoke if Al-Megrahi lived in Libyan luxury and David McKinnon took his own life far away from kith and kin?

(29)

It is no secret that I think Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, is a twit and indeed possessed of some very destructive and morally inexcusable views (why mess around with fiddly things like moral culpability or moral choice leading to charity when you have state power to simply take and redistribute, eh?).

Well I suppose his latest utterances should come as no surprise then...

Children are being forced to grow up too quickly in a culture which refuses to recognise that human beings are naturally dependent on one another, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned today.

Dr Rowan Williams condemned the pressure on children to become "active little consumers and performers" at the earliest opportunity.

Never mind the fact our culture works hard to infantalise adults and the notion of a profound differentiation between childhood and adulthood is a very modern and rather weird idea. But as he is an unabashed statist leftie. I can see how fostering a sense of dependence would appeal to such a person and it is to be expected he would deprecate the fact many people hold up independence from others as a virtue.

(46)

This headline and lead paragraph in the Times (of London) deserves a sort of award:

Thrifty families accused of prolonging the recession -

Anxious families are repaying debts instead of spending in the shops, amid concern over the uncertain economic outlook. The share of income saved in banks and building societies has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, heightening fears that faltering consumer demand could prolong the recession.

This is a sort of reflexive crude Keynesian message at work; the laziness of the assumption that recessions are ended by people spending more - never mind where the money comes from - continues to hold a grip on the MSM. In fairness, maybe what the writer is trying to say is that saving is a good thing but if everyone saves "too much" (however one can define that), then in the aggregate, it drags everything down. But that does rather ignore the situation that has built up over the years, and the disruption to the economic system caused by excessively cheap credit. People who try to reduce their debt, save more and decide to forgo spending money they haven't got are not "prolonging the recession" beyond some point that can be marked down on a graph. The current economic Snafu was caused - as the author of this newspaper item must be dimly aware - by a country hooked on the drug of cheap credit, beguiled by the idiotic notion that whenever the drug wore off and the hangover kicked in, that that nice Dr Greenspan and friends would administer yet more of the drug, to get yet another high. That way lies the equivalent of liver poisoning.

It may seem a Scrooge-like message for this time of year to point out that you cannot spend money that you don't have; businesses cannot invest money that has not been already saved, and that interest rates must reflect the balance of supply and demand for savings. The "Austrian" economic insight that money is a claim on resources, and that two people cannot hold the same claim on a resource at the same time, needs to be relentlessly rammed home.

The best way to end a recession is to unravel the massive misallocation of resources caused by printing money as soon as possible, to let labour markets clear, to cut public spending and cut taxes, and where necessary, recapitalise banks speedily. (Check out this paper for a good course to steer). Such a process is inevitably painful. In the short run, the pain is worse than the sort of dragged out situation we have now. But ask yourself this question, dear reader: what is the more compassionate policy - a short, sharp recession and closure of failed banks, followed by a rapid 1921-like recovery, or a Japanese-style multi-decade of stagnation?

On that note, this makes a good Christmas present for those interested in economic affairs, if you still have the time to get it shipped.

(40)

When you read this passionate denunciation of the sheer intellectual cowardice of the Conservative Party over the issues of tax, public spending and the banking sector, ask yourself again: who gives a brass farthing as to whether David Cameron and friends win power next year? Who?

(5)

"There is no reason to doubt that Mr Brown's statement that he went into politics because of his horror at the effects of unemployment. Unfortunately, he forgot one of the few laws of political economy: that the road to unemployment is paved with work creation schemes. He is likely, therefore, to go down as something like the patron saint of unemployment."

- Theodore Dalrymple, from "Not With A Bang But A Whimper", essays on current affairs, page 79. The whole chapter from which this paragraph is taken is a brilliant summary of everthing that is wrong about the current prime minister.

(30)

Yet another intellectual gem from a senior member of the Church of England:

The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the Islamic fundamentalists. The Church of England's Bishop to the Forces said it would be harder to reach a peaceful solution to the war if the insurgents were portrayed too negatively. [...] "We've been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban," said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the West could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other."

Could not the same have been said about the formidable soldiers of the Waffen SS? But how is 'conviction' and 'loyalty' in the service of evil somehow admirable? And how is noting this quality in an enemy going to "help the situation"? And what if the nature of the enemy simply precludes any possibility of a "peaceful solution"? This is the Taliban we are talking about.

Well in a way he is right I suppose... we should note that they are loyal to their faith and to each other, and understanding this, it should be understood that no accommodation can possibly be reached with fundamentalists, be they Nazi ones or Islamofascist ones. They need to be confronted, culturally, politically and when needed, militarily when they wander "off the reservation"... precisely because of their "conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other".

Getting that set in people's minds would indeed "help the situation".

(21)

This evening I am doing a recorded conversation with Bishop Hill, and by way of preparation have been rootling around in his archives. And I just came across this, which the Bishop posted on November 19th 2006:

In this connexion the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against "the liberty of the subject" they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.

Excellent, apart from the odd spelling of "connection".

That's not by Bishop Hill himself. It was recycled from somewhere called "Outside Story", the link to which no longer works. But there's no reason to doubt theis particular story, which should now inspire us all. For too long we have been ruled by politicians who measured their success by how many laws they could pass. Because of these fools, we now need politicians who measure their success by how many laws they can unpass.

Bishop Hill's latest posting, as I write this, is to this. Well worth reading. Climategate is not nearly over. It is just getting into its stride. At Copenhagen, lots of laws, seemingly unshiftable from then on, will be made, maybe not as many as would have happened without Climategate, but still, most of us here surely fear, a lot. But the point is: laws can be unmade. There can be, and there must soon be, another great purgation.

(11)

George Monbiot, who the other day voiced anger at the misbehaviour of so-called scientists at the University of East Anglia's climate resarch unit, has reverted to his original mode of George Moonbat by attacking AGW skeptics as deniers who want to dupe the public in the service of Big Oil. It does not occur to this man that he, and others like him, also have made a very nice living out the AGW story. After all, research grants and academic careers have been built on it. Where's there is muck, there is brass, as they say.

There is a whiff of desperation in the air from these guys, who resemble nothing so much as a bully confronted by those whom he or she has tormented. Opinion polls like this one show high levels of skepticism among the public about the claims made by alarmists, and the fact that the climate has not, on average, warmed up at all since 1998, is not quite helping their cause.

Monbiot and others like him need to drop the hysteria, the smugness, the bullying and the rest of it. They need to grasp the fact that their predictions are debatable and that the CRU leaks are intensely damaging to their agenda.

Even a BBC Breakfast TV presenter, who normally has all the interviewing manner of a soft cuddly toy, asked a guy on the show yesterday about "whether the UEA leaks are undermining the Copenhagen process". This story is not going away.

(7)

Bishop Hill, who has been working overtime to keep apace with the whole University of East Anglia climate change kerfuffle, has this remarkable example of how some journalists have been threatened by AGW alarmists. How lovely.

By the way, as a native of East Anglia, I feel ashamed of how my region has been tainted by these arseholes. When the UEA was originally built back in the 1960s, it was constructed, much to my father's chagrin, on a golf course. Given the collapse in that institution's reputation as a result of the emails, perhaps it should revert to golf and do less harm to what remains of the UK's intellectual life.

(2)

The UK state sector is two large banks with a medium sized government attached.

- John Redwood. Funny, but the UK government is not really medium-sized at all. This is still a big country on most measures. And the government's share of GDP, our overbearing officialdom, and state colonization of civil society, are each now uncomfortably upper-quartile among democratic states and heading rapidly upwards. We are arguably now more governed than France, the home of dirigisme.

(21)

This lead item in the Guardian newspaper today, which I read with a sort of grim satisfaction, explains how he has bought into the whole idea that climage change skeptics are not just wrong, they are baaaaaaaad. The reaction to the scandal of the University of East Anglia CRU emails shows that part of the "Green Establishment", with odd decent exception, to be in deep denial.

Keep it up, Gordon. The more this plodding, revolting disaster of a politician and his friends continues to take this line, the more it justifies what Lord Lawson, former UK Chancellor, is trying to do in re-framing the debate over the policy of how to address real or alleged AGW. Gordon Brown: he's the gift that keeps on giving.

Update: fresh developments at the UK's Met Office. (H/T: Counting Cats).

(15)

Are nation states more trustworthy now than in previous times? I am of course asking a rhetorical question. No, they are not more, or less, trustworthy. People, in particular the sort of people who seek political power or to in some way wield the authority of the state, are essentially the same sort of people who have always sought such things.

And so, when the Scottish state tells us that the venerable prohibitions against double jeopardy, being put on trial more than once for the same crime, must be abolished due to improvements in methods of forensic science, they are actually saying "we, the state, can be trusted with the power to just shuffle the deck and try again if we do not like the outcome of a criminal trial because of course our motives could never be anything less than a relentless search for truth and justice, right?"...

That is in actually what they are saying, because DNA cannot possibly be planted or falsified and our priestly class, sorry, I mean scientific experts are always simply concerned with the dispassionate facts (like say, the good folks at the CRU).

What could possibly go wrong with being able to keep retrying people until the "right" result is gained, eh?

(32)

So Baron Pearson of Rannoch has become the new leader of UKIP. I can only hope that he has a better grasp of real economics than Nigel Farage, who although he was very sound on a great many issues, was clueless in that respect in that he basically was offering more of the same deranged Keynesian bollocks being proffered by both the main parties. Well we shall see I suppose.

I once heard a very good pro free-trade diatribe by Pearson some years back which is an encouraging sign and his support of Geert Wilders on the Fitna issue was glorious and suggests he may well be dependable on civil liberties.

(28)

Alice Thompson is a bit of an economic dunce, isn't she?

"Their private polling shows that the public loathe bankers more than politicians, so the Conservatives are desperate to disassociate themselves from the City. Voters are furious that the gap between the yachts and have-nots has grown rather than diminished in the past few months. While City high-flyers are once again buying £10,000 stocking fillers, eBay crashed last weekend under the weight of people trying to sell goods to get extra cash for Christmas. The more distance the Tories can put between themselves and the City the better. Even Boris Johnson, always a reliable guide to the prevailing political wind, has dumped his “monstrous” pinstriped friends. Instead, the Tories are courting the CBI and business, emphasising tax cuts for companies and promising to be “unashamedly pro-enterprise”. The message is clear: real businesses matter; the City doesn’t."

Let's unpack this. I read the entire, dreadful piece and it occured to me that Ms Thompson is wedded to the notion that if an activity - such as hedge fund arbitrage - cannot be immediately explained in terms of some physical good or easily understood service - like laundry - then it must be suspect in some way. She does not necessarily endorse all of the anti-market sentiment expressed by others she quotes in her article, but the overall tone is unmistakable. It is also a reminder that there is much hostility to banking, finance and the market on parts of what I might call the Right as among the Left, crude though such terms are in terms of political mapping.

Of course, it is true that the size of the financial services industry has been arguably swelled beyond what is healthy by decades of ultra-low interest rates, which have caused an increasingly manic hunt for yield, leading to the whole alphabet soup of acronym products associated with the credit crunch. But that is not the point that Ms Thompson is making. She seems to be saying that banking per se, when set against other kinds of economic activity, is wrong or morally dubious, and that we'd be better off without it. But whether "we" (who?) would be "better off" with a different mix of economic activities is something of a subjective judgement, not something that can be modelled according to some sort of utilitarian calculus. For instance, should banking make up 5%, 10%, or 20% of an economy's gross domestic product? How much is too big or too small? Surely, in a proper market without artificial barriers to entry and without the distortions of central bank rates, regulations and the like, the size of banking as a sector will vary depending on the shifting sands of consumer preferences. That is all.

I am not suggesting that Ms Thompson take in all these points in a brief column for a newspaper, even if she had a clue about economics. But frankly, when I read yet another version of the centuries-old slur against speculators and "middlemen", even if dressed up in the slightly "gosh how awful" tones of a rightwing female columnist, I think it is necessary to kick the offending author in a sensitive part of the anatomy. If Britain loses its edge in financial services due to a rash of bad legislation, heavy taxes and the rest, this nation is in trouble. The exodus is already well under way.

(11)

After the exposure and the lies, the excuses and the 'business as usual' attitude, we are told that only four broke the law. Only four were stupid enough to actually get caught. The rest get slapped wrists or a golden handshake, happy wanking their golden pay-off from the backs of the taxpayer, now viewed as a bottomless treasury for Labour's ballot fund.

This Parliament is a sump, a slough, a slurry pit which does not even have the decency to develop an upper crust to disguise its foulness. You cannot drain this away as the swine have developed a taste for speculation, peculation and entitlement. And worse than the poor suckers of dole who know no better, their entitlement is a result of greed, not Special Brew.

How can an electorate inoculate ourselves from those who would wield power? In days past, this was the result of a tie: the contractual ties between governed and governor enriched by the fear of riot, the joy of bribery and an indecent sense of superiority over the occasional war: such are the advantages of a rising power. Even thirty years ago, our greatest traitor, Heath, was tested and sent packing when he had the temerity to ask “Who governs Britain?”

That crisis of governance may be more important than we know. Fifteen years of turbulence may have taught some that it is better to dilute the power of the demos, and transmute rage to apathy, gold to lead. And what better vehicle for this inoculation arose than the European Union: a new structure that observed the norms and the forms, but rendered each voter more impotent than a castrati in a Nevada brothel.

So when I say “only four?” I know that their fellow politicians will look on them as sacrificial lambs, thrown to wolves now and rescued later through sympathetic parole boards and glowing character references from fellow peers.

(8)

I first wondered whether this story was a spoof, but it appears not to be so.

(19)

I wonder what Patri Friedman, moving light in the Seasteading Institute and an advocate of the idea of creating new nations, makes of this story.

Sealand is one of the longest-running attempts to create a micro-state. It is off the Suffolk coast, based on an old anti-aircraft tower. The article, by the local newspaper in the East Anglian region, contains a nice photo of the place.

I suspect that if Sealand ever provided services - such as totally encrypted financial service facilities - then a tax-hungry UK would not demur at sending over a frigate to shut the place down. But the guy who set up this place has been known to defend his territory vigorously. For a supposed old eccentric, he's held out remarkably well.

(11)

Yet another example of the vileness of the culture which pervades the management of the public sector...

Paramedics fighting to save a nine-year-old road accident victim were told rigid rest-break regulations meant the closest crew could not be called upon for back-up. Lifesavers at a crash scene in Upton were told they would have to wait for a crew nearly 20 minutes away because paramedics in Poole still had a few minutes left on their break.

Ambulance staff treating little Bethany Dibbs then called Poole ambulance station directly. A second crew abandoned their break and raced to Sandy Lane, arriving just five minutes after their colleagues [...] But the South Western Ambulance Service Trust is standing by its decision. A spokesperson said the trust took its statutory health and safety duties for all staff very seriously.

But this is also an example of the fact civil society still has at least some life left in it, because the paramedics on the scene said "screw it" and just called the people they needed directly themselves... and of course those lads came immediately, teacup in hand no doubt, regardless of the rules and regulations that the South Western Ambulance Service Trust and the union think are so damn important.

[via Reason]

(30)

Via the Cobden Centre, a relatively new think tank that focuses on banking and money from the "Austrian" point of view, here is a nice article by James Tyler. He sets out how to avoid past problems and what to do about banking and money.

I still think that fractional reserve banking, so long as it is openly stated and so long as legal tender laws are scrapped, is not necessarily an evil. If a person deposits money in an FRB that advertises itself as such and if he takes out commercial insurance to cover a potential disaster, then in a free market based on consent, I am not sure that FRB should be made illegal. For sure, a bank that claimed to be a 100% reserve bank that was in fact, not fully covered, should be prosecuted for running a fraudulent business. But that is simply a case of obtaining money by deception, an offence covered in existing law.

As is so often the case, I think that some of our current woes could be ameliorated, if not solved, if we enforced the basic Common Law of this realm rather than endlessly creating new rules instead. But then I guess that would give politicians nothing much to do, would it?

(105)

The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be of the view that somewhere in the Bible, it says "take the wealth of others by force and give it to people best able to work the political system". Just another statist thug, but then we already knew that.

(12)

And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?

John Osimek reports for The Register:

The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

The questionnaire – or "School Entry Wellbeing Review" – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a "Health Record" on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.

The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child "often lies or cheats": whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. [...]

(10)

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and media columnist, has this to say about the new top income tax rate of 50 per cent, due to take effect from next April. He is pretty blunt:

So it is utterly tragic, at the end of the first decade of this century, that we are back in the hands of a government whose mindset seems frozen in the wastes of the 1970s. If Gordon Brown remains in power – and perhaps even if he does not – Britain's top rate of tax will soar far above that of our most important global competitors. China, Germany and Australia are on 45 per cent maximum; Italy is on 43 per cent; Ireland on 41 per cent; France on 40 per cent; and America is on 35 per cent.

I would not mind so much if I thought this expedient was temporary, or that it would work. If the 50p tax was going to plug the hole in the nation's finances, then it might be a good thing, and it would be right that the rich should pay a larger share. But even on the Government's figures it is only due to raise £2.5 billion of the £700 billion required – and those estimates may be wildly optimistic. This tax is predicted to drive away at least 25,000 people; it may simply encourage more avoidance; it may actually cost money, not bring it in.

As he says, many of those whose lives are shaped by the shrivelled, dog-in-the-manger philosophy of collectivism will not give a damn. So what, they will say? And in the Daily Telegraph article that Boris Johnson writes, you can read a goodly number of such dismissive comments, from the sort of cretins - I use the word without apology - who seem driven more by hatred of the rich than by a serious desire to improve conditions generally.

But what interests me in the politics of this is how emphatic Mr Johnson is in saying what a disaster the top rate will be. He's absolutely right, of course, and it is heartening that a senior figure from the opposition Conservatives should say so. I have my problems with Mr Johnson - he's certainly no consistent advocate of small government - but by goodness, it is good that he is making this point and in this emphatic way. No doubt Mr Johnson will be told by the various unlovely allies of David Cameron to shut up, to not be "difficult". (The same thing happened when he mentioned the Tory promise to hold a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty). Well, to hell with that.

It appears that an incoming Tory - or BlueLabour - government will not reverse this new, top rate in the first budget after any election. That would be a gross mistake. I hope Mr Johnson does not shut up on this issue. Of course, he also has to practice what he preaches in his own job.

(51)

One of the morals that can be drawn from the analysis of totalitarian madness is that any reasoning system that is uncritical of itself turns into utter madness. Cold-eyed self-perception is the most important thing, especially when it comes to criticism.

- Sergei Averintsev

Anyone who doubts Britain is spiralling ever faster into totalitarian madness should consider this case:

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested.

"I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets."

This is not a case about whether law-abiding people should be allowed to have weapons (or even, in accordance with the 1689 Bill of Rights, whether Protestant people should be allowed to). It is closer in smallness of spirit to the sort of vindictive prosecution that occurs in petty dictatorships when you have failed to bribe the right people. But here the motive is the much more dangerous one of nominally altruistic bullying. A case where the populist fad of arbitrary fixed sentences for strict liability offences has met its reductio ad absurdum

Lest you think you are safe, recall that politicians are still involved in auctions of severity in relation to drugs, immigration, alcohol, offensive speech and writing and pictures - and knives. The sentence for possession of a knife in a public place without an excuse acceptable to the authorities can be 4 years in prison in England. In Scotland, the Labour Party is attempting to make imprisonment mandatory, deeming a severe new Scottish Bill insufficiently savage. Criticism is effectively not permitted. No voices in either parliament are raised for sanity. The moral busybodies are indeed omnipotent.

A 'knife' for this purpose is any sharp or bladed instrument, except a folded pocket knife with a blade less than 7.62cm (3 inches) long. So most tools are covered.

If you spot a potato peeler, chisel, or pair of scissors lying on the pavement, do not pick it up. That would be a crime. And you could be disturbing evidence of crime. Call the police. You cannot be too careful.

(13)

From time to time I get into a lot of trouble with my allies because I express skepticism of the value of prescriptive rights, regulation or transparency. In fact am inclined to think (though there may be tactical advantage in their reception in law) human rights are an ornamental distraction from the pursuit of liberty, Gucci belts for those who think buying trousers is disgusting.

One of the reasons we are in such a terrible mess in the UK is that those on the left who used to care about personal liberty became utterly infatuated with the legalism, having been given the Human Rights Act as a pretty distraction, and now spend all their time defending its importance.

- Guy Herbert

(5)

John Bercow is the sort of politician I love: so dependably grasping and filled with a sense of entitlement that, whilst others have the wit to keep their heads down as MP expenses are under increased public scrutiny, good ol' John just cannot stop himself from noisily grunting and ramming his snout deeper into the taxpayer's trough.

As I mentioned before, the longer this goes on and the more disrepute it brings upon the entire political class, the happier I am. They just cannot help themselves... I mean what is the point of all the power if you cannot trouser a few poxy quid, eh?

(10)

Richard Reeves writes an article in the Telegraph called It's not about the size of the state – it's what David Cameron does with it that not only falls at the first fence (the title pretty much alerted me to the fact this was going to be filled 'advice from the enemy'), it is overflowing with analysis that encapsulates the intellectual failing that underpin BlueLabour. Let me do a fisk-lette:

This week Cameron strayed further still, using the Hugo Young memorial lecture to attack Labour's record on poverty and inequality. He said that a "re-imagination in the role, as well as size" of the state was needed to build what he called "The Big Society". It is audacious stuff. Cameron has adopted Labour's goals of narrowing the gap between rich and poor, reducing child poverty and promoting social mobility, and then damns Labour for failing to achieve them.

What is audacious about conceding the choice of battleground entirely to the nominal enemy? I say 'nominal' because in truth the philosophical/ideological differences between New Labour and the Tory Party (BlueLabour) are not that significant.

It is a bit like the 'audacious' plans by the allies in World War II to area bomb German cities to break morale by slaughtering enemy workers even though earlier German attempts to do that to Britain had been an abject failure. If "London can take it", it did not seem to occur to the 'audacious' RAF and USAAF that, chances are, Hamburg and Berlin probably can "take it" too.

And so Cameron's audacious stuff is to try and do what Labour tried, just 'do it better'. Far from being audacious, this is just more of the same heard-it-all-before by-the-numbers political droning, tailored slightly to appeal to whoever he is talking to at the moment and which way the weathervane is pointing today. Audacious would require an actual meta-contextual shift and Cameron has made it clear he represents continuity, not radical change.

Labour's response has been to accuse Cameron of advocating "Thatcherism or 19th-century liberalism". Wrong on both counts. Mrs Thatcher was more likely to join the National Union of Mineworkers than to say, as Cameron did, that "strong and concerted government action" was needed to "remake society.

So if government action (i.e. the welfare state) has hollowed out civil society, it seems remarkable that the notion that more government action might far from "remake society" but rather just continue its unravelling. The brutal truth is that David Cameron (and I suspect Richard Reeves) do not really understand that society may be something governments can weaken and destroy but they is not something that states can "remake" because societies are not "things" in the same way states are, they are emergent collective properties produced by countless several interactions.

But for much of the 20th century, politics was defined by attitudes to the state: the Right against, the Left in favour. And in one area Cameron remains instinctively opposed to state action, which is financial redistribution to reduce poverty. Cameron claims that inequality has worsened under Labour. Actually, the picture is complex: on some measures the gap has narrowed. The fairest assessment is that income inequality today is roughly the same as it was in 1997.

The 'right' (a sloppy term really) is against the state? Like Ted Heath maybe? And just how many 'right' leaders in the 20th century actually shrunk back the size of the state, as opposed to just growing it a bit more gradually? Never mind that 'inequality' per se should not even be an issue (someone else getting richer does not make me poorer), the size of the state is the issue. The larger the state, the more civil society is circumscribed. The larger the state, the more wealth and opportunity is sucked out of productive sectors by confiscation and regulation.

The only think we need more of from government is inaction... we need less across the board, not more... Richard Reeves cannot see that because he is a regulatory statist who sees government in terms of the parties being competing 'management teams' rather like Soviet design bureaus... offering creative options within essentially the same ideological system and meta-contextual framework. But in truth we do not need 'better' government action, we need 'less' government action... dramatically less. We also need actual intellectual opposition, not a difference of management theories. In short we need a far less powerful and intrusive state vis a vis civil society.

It is very much about the size of the state.

(7)

The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.

You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying... by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means... and that's it. There's a running competition for the best pics.

It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public's attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too.

Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night.

I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit?

(20)

This comes as no surprise whatsoever...

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting.

Despite widespread opposition over Britain's growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. [...] John Yates, Britain's head of anti-terrorism, has argued that the legislation is vital for his investigators.

The Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner said: "The availability of Communications Data to investigators is absolutely crucial. Its importance to investigating the threat of terrorism and serious crime cannot be overstated".

It is just a bit ironic that is comes on the day celebrating the Berlin Wall coming down. It is not enough to just defeat this legislation, the likes of John Yates and all his ilk need to be driven from positions of power because these are the Orwellian people who are the true clear and present danger to our very civilisation. The threat from terrorism is real, but the threat from our own insatiable security state is even greater.

(18)

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers' Alliance, writes, at Devil's Kitchen, thus:

Part of the problem for eurosceptics has been that we have too often only engaged in one half of the argument. To be fair, we've all made a pretty good case that the EU is a costly, harmful, antidemocratic monstrosity - so much so that the public are in great majority convinced of that.

It is the second half of the argument which has been somewhat lacking - what is the positive alternative? Convincing people there is a problem with the current situation is not enough; we need to lay out what life would be like without the EU, how things could be better and, crucially, how it is perfectly feasible to get there.

To that end, the TaxPayers' Alliance is publishing a new book, Ten Years On: Britain without the European Union which lays out a vision of what Britain could be like in 2020, governing ourselves and with the freedom to cooperate and trade with whomsoever we like.

Even better, it is available free to pre-order through this link!

I think this is spot on, not necessarily in the sense that Britain would be better off out of the EU, but in the sense that this is the bit of the argument that has been neglected. After all, the same lying politicians, stubborn bureaucrats, town hall little Hitlers and idiot voters that got us into this mess would still be around to screw up the alternative. So how would being out of the EU necessarily make their position weaker? Might the alternative actually be worse? I believe - partly because I want to believe (see paragraph one of the quote above) - that it would an improvement, but I would like to hear this argument made.

Also, would we, Norway style, still have to endure EUrocrats making our rules for us, for the privilege of trading with the EU? Seems unlikely, but again, I'd like to hear the argument.

So, as Instapundit would say, it's in the post. The ordering seemed to work very smoothly. Nothing like free of charge to simplify things.

(7)

Inexplicably many seem to have been surprised by Dave Cameron's predictable backtrack on confronting the EU's constant slow motion power grab... however even those credulous enough to have not sussed Cameron's weathervane nature ages ago are now getting the message loud and clear.

After abandoning plans to hold a referendum on Europe, following last week’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, Mr Hague said the Tories accepted that constitutional reform would not be on the EU agenda for some years.

The solutions are actually quite obvious and straightforward:

1. simply do not vote for a Cameron-lead Tory party as a vote for them is a vote for more of the same. Vote UKIP instead. This could mean Cameron will win anyway (which means we get more of the ways things are now but at least does not reward the Tories for being BlueLabour) or Labour wins again (which means we get more of the way things are now). Either way it makes sense to vote UKIP.

2. get rid of the disastrous Cameron, who is in effect the UK version of the disastrous George Bush (i.e. a nominal 'conservative' who will continue to expand the state) and get a Tory leader who has some balls and at least a modicum of principle.

This is not rocket science, it is just stating th bloody obvious. Hague's Cameron mouthpiece statement is already setting up the Tory party for a lengthy period of doing nothing meaningful on the issue of the EU. Anyone who thinks "constitutional reform would not be on the EU agenda for some years" does not mean "constitutional reform will not be on the EU agenda ever" is a jackass and I have no interest in even debating with them.

Either... clean house within the Tory Party and get rid of Cameron... or vote UKIP. Voting for a party under a jackanapes like Cameron makes no sense at all, unless the current state of affairs is actually what you want.

(29)

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

(28)

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

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

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

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

(31)

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

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

(6)

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

- David Cameron in 2007.

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

(7)

Bishop Hill:

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

Indeed.

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

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

(11)

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

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

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

(13)

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

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

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

(13)

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

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

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

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

(22)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(6)

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

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

- The hilariously pseudonymous commenter 'Mustapha Jihad'

(20)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

(3)

... and another for 'outsiders'.

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

Curious, no?

(34)

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

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

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

(11)

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

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

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

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

(5)

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

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

(15)

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

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

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

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

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

(35)

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

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

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

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

(23)

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

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

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

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

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

(15)

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

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

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

(17)

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

Well just look what you have to look forward to.

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

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

(24)

The destruction of British civil society continues apace...

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

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

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

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

(3)

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

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

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

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

(10)

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

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

(9)

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

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

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

(18)

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

Boris has a point: Blair is still heartily detested in France for arguably the one act that makes me think quite well of Blair - his determination to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, even if one would choose different justifications from him in that course (an argument that continues to divide libertarians, by the way). Nevertheless, Boris's underlying logic is strong: