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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away
-Phillip K. Dick

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Paul Marks takes a radical view of Britain's transport system

No one has yet explained to me why the railways could not have been sold as a single unit.

If it had been more efficient to brake up British Rail into regional companies then the new owners would have done just that. Just as if it had been more efficient for the rail to be owned by one company, and have the trains run by other companies this is what would have evolved via the choices of people buying and selling shares ("market forces" are, of course, simply the choices of people engaged in trading). There was certainly no need for the government to engage in complicated schemes - just sell the thing and stand back.

People often talk for the need for subsidies for the railways to compete with the roads (and, to a lesser extent, the airlines) - but whilst I am pleased to accept the fact that the railways and roads do compete for custom (which rather undermines the idea that the railways must be compulsorily broken up to ensure "competition") I think the whole idea that the railways must fall apart without subsidies is false.

Firstly the roads should not be provided "free" (i.e. free at the point of use) by the state. The problem is not that the government builds motorways late - the problem is that it builds them at all. If people want motorways let them build them and charge people to use them (such things as "road tax" should, of course, be abolished). If people really want to build free motorways let them do so - but I doubt charitable people will put up enough money for this idea.

As for the railways - subsidies should be abolished, but so should regulations. The railways have been attacked by regulations as far back as the 19th century (there were such things as profit controls even then), but in 1906 the government basically declared war on the private railways. Putting trade unions above the law of contract (i.e. outside civil interaction) hit British industry badly - but the railways companies were a specific target of the 1906 Act (the Act was, after all, a direct reaction to the "Taff Vale Judgement" in which the courts declared that a railways company had the right to sue a trade union for organised contract breaking). The "Liberal" government of the day also launched a tidal wave of regulations at the railway companies in the period 1906 to 1914. And then (during the First World War) the railways were taken over by the government, maintenance neglected and the system undermined. We should be very wary of making claims such as the idea that the British railway system was the best in the world in 1919 - such claims are not only rather easy for statists to refute, but (more importantly) undermine the libertarian case that regulations and state control have undermined the railways.

Why the history lesson? Simple - after the returning of the railways to a sort of private ownership history repeated itself. First history repeated itself as farce - in that the government of Mr Major did not intend to harm private railway companies with regulations (but did anyway). And then history repeated itself in a straightforward way with the Labour government's transport boss (Mr Prescott) setting out to undermine the railway companies as much as he could. A policy continued by his supposedly arch "New Labour" successor as transport boss.

Without the regulations the railways might well be able to compete quite well with the roads without any subsidies at all - even if the roads remained free.

And (of course) a railway system without regulations would be a much safer railway system - as it would be clear who was in charge and who was responsible.

Paul Marks

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It will come as no surprise to anyone who habitually reads British newspapers that the state likes the idea of being able to intercept any and all of your communications on the Internet. Well it just so happens that some people are not going to roll over for the government and play ball. Just as the state comes up with new technological ways to spy on its subjects (i.e you), those same subjects are finding ways to prevent them from doing so.

Mathematician Peter Fairbrother simply refuses to just accept the Draconian powers that the state has taken upon itself via the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and is developing M-O-O-T, an integrated privacy system that you just pop in your PC or Mac at startup. As it uses off-shore key storage, the user can rest safe knowing that the British state cannot get access to your sensitive data at a whim. Bravo!

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Lowell Ponte over on Front Page has written a superb retort to Frances Fukuyama's latest collectivist cri de coeur 'Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution'. Although critiquing Fukuyama is sometimes a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (Instapundit frequently makes sport of him on slow news days), Ponte does a very good job at pointing out the horrendous implications of Fukuyama's line of thought

Who owns your body? In Fukuyama's implicit view, the government does because "you" are merely a cog transmitting your DNA on to the collective of future generations whose rights are superior to yours. You should have no right to tamper with your own mind or body via drugs or with your heredity by cloning yourself or altering your own DNA.
[...]
Fukuyama likes big government, especially when it grabs people by the short-and-curlies and prohibits them from using science to alter reproductive DNA. "Libertarian advocates of genetic choice want the freedom to improve their children," wrote Fukuyama, "But do we really know what it means to improve a child?" ("I am guessing," riposted Libertarian David Dieteman, "that Johns Hopkins, where Fukuyama is a professor, does not include this query with its tuition bills to parents.")

This is terrific stuff and I strongly commend the whole article to anyone who holds to quaint notions of self-ownership as I do. Fukuyama and his ilk are not just misguided, they are the intellectual cheerleaders for a totalitarianism of the most profound kind... they would have the state lay claim to the very molecular structure of your body.

As John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859, "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign". Well not if Frances Fukuyama has his way.

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• Prams versus pushchairs. I know I was meant to dispense my maternal wisdom earlier, Brian, but I was caught up in dispensing a few maternal whacks round the head. (Only joking M'lud.) There is a fixed quantity of attention available to children or indeed adults. 1,440 minutes per day, less sleep time. That's why someone-or-other called attention the final currency. It's like land. They aren't making any more. That said, we are all using so little of the potentially available attention supply that depriving a kiddie of seeing mama's face for the time spent in the pushchair is insignificant, and may as you say be outweighed by the benefits of seeing the world. Pity one has to strap them in though. Gets 'em entirely too accepting of safety belts.

  This goes the same way as arguments about population and productivity. The Club of Rome deserve our mockery for saying that space / food / oil whatever will run out by 1980. Of course there's loads more good stuff being created by busy capitalist hands all the time. Eventually, however, the limits to growth doomsayers have a point. And relying on the invention of interstellar travel sometime in the late 2200s does not fully satisfy me as an insurance policy.

• UK Transport. With this Illuminated blog, it's not how many readers, it's who reads. Real journalists will go there to research stories, if they are wise.

• A plug if I may, for my own take on His Majesty King Brendan over at my blog.

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It was bound to happen. Writers in Europe have woken up to the fact that Americans do not regard the European chattering classes with particular fondness and respect. Paul Gottfried in a singularly bad-tempered article in this week's edition of The Spectator magazine, broadly tries to argue that there is a right-wing smear campaign in American intellectual and political circles to discredit Europe and to portray Europeans as anti-Semitic, cowardly, cynical, socialistic idiots.

Well, Gottfried makes a few decent points, and it is undoubtedly true that there has been a strain of hostility towards Europe in some of the commentary emanating from Jefferson's Republic (den Beste at USS Clueless and some of the Weekly Standard writers are particular offenders). But Gottfried does not pause to consider why this hostility has arisen. It is not because Americans are jealous of Europe, why should they be? It is not fear of us...that'd be the day! It is a lack of patience with the sneering, dishonest rubbish coming out of the lips of the likes of Chris Patten and the rest. From what I read, I get the impression that all but the most bigoted paleo-conservative commentators appreciate that most European folk like and are sympathetic to the U.S., want it to beat terror, and will help in that cause.

God Save the Queen and God Bless America.

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The Council of the European Union is pushing to introduce measures that would force internet service providers and phone companies to keep records of all communications for many years. The Internet bill is supposed to aim at protecting the confidentiality of electronic communication to boost confidence in e-commerce. But it also contains provisions to allow police access to phone, fax and email records, something that governments view as a useful tool to fight crime and terrorism in the wake of the 11 September attacks in the United States.The information recorded and archived would consists of URLs of web pages visited, news groups and numbers dialled. It would then be made available for the police and other security agencies in gathering criminal intelligence.

Despite strong opposition from civil liberty groups and the industry, the bill is likely to include the data retention rules because of support from the European Socialist Party and the European People's Party, the assembly's main political groups. Also, documents leaked to civil liberties groups, reveal that powerful lobbying is taking place on behalf of power-grabbing thugs law enforcement agencies to try to destroy existing data protection and privacy laws in member states.

"These proposals would allow fishing expeditions into the only activity, browsing habits, and internet associations of every citizen in the EU for up to seven years. They could do this without any warrant or court order."

Civil liberties groups such as Statewatch and the Foundation for Information Policy Research warn that this would give police and other security forces the powers normally expected of an oppressive regime:

"Authoritarian and totalitarian states would be condemned for violating human rights and civil liberties if they initiated such practices. The fact that it is being proposed in the 'democratic' EU does not make it any less authoritarian."

This is all rather standard and predictable given what we know about the EU and its practices. However, there is a rather worrying twist to the story. Instead of the usual heavy-handed, freedom-quashing bill drafting by the EU, the latest version of the bill has been made more oppressive at the request of none other than the good HM Government! Originally, the EU Parliament had drafted the law to limit access to electronic data by public authorities to the strict minimum. But this move was criticised by member states, notably Britain, which wanted greater power to monitor the Internet. US officials also criticised the bill, fearing that the request to erase data would hinder prosecution of criminals. Fearing that this legislative clash would ultimately kill the bill, the two biggest parliamentary groups have now aligned themselves with the member states.

What is going on here?!

Well, nothing much, actually, just the usual state stuff. The fact that the system of government in the member states is democratic does nothing to stop them from abusing an undemocratic institution such as the EU. In fact, they are being democratic, using the powers of the EU to reduce the liberties of their citizens, just like the majority of their citizens use domestic institutions to do the same to individuals.

So predictably, for me, democracy - the rule of the majority - has negative connotations as it has for Perry de Havilland. Democracy is far from the political and social panacea it is made out to be. It does not bring about the kind of fluffy bunny utopia socialists would like us believe in. Although the un-democratic EU together with its democratic member states are doing their best to have the bunnies stuffed... And just like Mr Franklin, I do want to see the bunny (or the lamb) well armed.

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As everyone knows by now, US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and U2 frontman Paul "Bono" Hewson just completed a week-long tour of Africa. While the unlikely pair seem to play off each each other well on stage, and seem to be getting along well offstage, it is not entirely clear how Mr. Bono has suddenly emerged as a power-broker. Several news sources attributed this quote to the man with the wraparound shades:

"[O'Neill] is the man in charge of America's wallet ... and it's true, I want to open that wallet."

None of the news sources I saw chose to elaborate on this comment's obvious falseness. The treasury cannot release any funds until the proper appropriation and authorization bills have made their way through Congress. (I will cut Mr. Hewson some slack because he is not an American; but if certain members of the press need a refresher course in this area, I would recommend that they review their Schoolhouse Rock.) At any rate, it makes you wonder why we should take anything else the guy says seriously.

Bono's cause is third-world debt relief. He argues that the heavy external debts of foreign governments are the principal obstacle to their emergence from poverty. We shall examine those claims briefly. How effective are official debt-relief programs in improving economic performance? Well, we can let history be the judge, since we have tried this before. In the late 1980s, the US treasury department began a debt-relief program called the Brady Plan, in which creditor banks were encouraged (through the stick / carrot of the federal tax code) to refinance debt at subsidized rates and reduce principal levels by allowing banks to replace severely discounted loans with new debt at levels closer to par value.

Was the Brady Plan a success? It depends on how you define success. If the objective was debt reduction as an end in itself, then the Brady Plan looked good -- more than $60 billion in foreign debt was forgiven, by one estimate. But did the Brady Plan succeed on a larger scale, i.e. did it promote economic growth and encourage more responsible borrowing by third world governments? Sorry, Bono, but the track record there is not so good.

In his book International Debt Reexamined (unfortunately no longer in print, though I have a copy from my grad-school days), economist William R. Cline demonstrates that the economies of Brady Plan participants did not outperform those of nonparticipants with similar debt levels in the 1990s. So much for the argument that debt relief is a sine qua non of future economic growth.

Moreover, there is evidence that the Brady Plan (and other official debt relief programs) merely crowded out private debt relief efforts such as debt-for-equity and debt-for-nature swaps, which had commendably been on the rise throughout the mid to late 1980s. The announcement of the Plan itself had the effect of encouraging further profligacy -- if your mortgage banker announced that it might be forgiving or substantially reducing your mortgage debt in the near future, wouldn't you think twice before mailing in your next payment?

Bono's line of reasoning on third-world debt would have found a favorable audience with economists a generation ago, but has long since fallen out of respectability. The new generation of development economists, spearheaded by the Peruvian economist and think-tank chairman Hernando de Soto, argues that the people of the third world already hold the solution to their poverty. This makes things difficult for would-be celebrity messiahs like Bono. Sorry, pal, but the world is ready to move on, with or without you.

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Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1759

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Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is a happy puppy. The new Miss Universe is Oxana Fedorova, a policewoman from St.Petersburg in Russia... now I am off to that historic city to see if I can get arrested.

 

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I must admit that the terms 'Libertarian' and 'Monarchist' are not one that are effortlessly congruent but neither are they mutually exclusive. So it is without any hesitation that I declare myself to be, in my own quiet and understated way, a Monarchist, at least as far as Britain is concerned.

This being the case, I am only too happy to rise to the challenge of Brendan O'Neill

"..in fact, worst of all is a monarchist who dare not speak his name, who won't come out in full defence of the royals. So come on then - defend the monarchy."

I do dare to speak my name, Mr.O'Neill, and defending the monarchy is not just my burden but, I'll have you know, my pleasure.

If one is to live within the institution called 'nation' then it is entirely reasonable (and maybe even essential) to have something or someone to symbolise that nation. Our monarch fulfils that role not just satisfactorily but admirably. It is an institution which is the product of our heritage, culture and history and a reminder that our constitution and civil society was painstakingly built by the craft and toil of ages and has now been largely squandered by the kind of elected representatives you seem to admire so much.

The monarch is a continuum; it is an anchor for the commonwealth of the people and stands not above politics but apart from politics. The monarch has served and continues to serve as a totem for both British sense of community and nationhood; a stubborn reminder that British civil society is not within the gift of Tony Blair or Romano Prodi and will be here long after both of them have turned to dust. Our Queen really does serve, our politicians merely feed at the table.

I might remind you, Mr.O'Neill that it is not the Queen that is bleeding us white with taxes, it is elected politicians. It is not the Queen that is suffocating us with pettyfogging regulations and laws, it is elected politicians. It is not the Queen who has traduced our civil liberties, it is elected politicians. It is not the Queen that has delivered us, bound hand and foot, to the fat Cardinals in Brussels, it is elected politicians. Given the choice between Queen Elizabeth and the gaggle of mendacious, thieving sluts that people like you have in mind to replace her, I know for sure which one I would take up arms for.

So there you have it, Mr.O'Neill. A defence of monarchy. And since I have been bold enough to defend my position, perhaps you will allow me the indulgence of a challenge of my own? It is a challenge for you and all others who believe in 'democratic' virtues. Did you take a holiday last year? If so, did you canvass everybody in your constituency beforehand on their opinion as to a) whether you were entitled to a holiday and b) where you should spend it? If not, why not?

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Brendan O'Neill has posted a reply to the various people who have commented on his anti-monarchist remarks posted earlier on his own blog. In the following paragraph he addresses my article posted yesterday called A toast to the 'anti-democratic' and pleasingly powerless Monarchy

Perry at Libertarian Samizdata challenges my definition of democracy, and claims that 'the Queen steals a great deal less of my money and poses a far lesser threat to my liberty than the democratically elected thugs in Downing Street'. This is a popular argument in favour of the monarchy - that it is at least better than the politicians we end up with. But this is an inherently anti-democratic view. At least we can get rid of politicians if we don't like what they do - there is no option to 'unelect' Prince Charles for talking utter nonsense about the environment, or Prince Andrew for being a useless, parasitic playboy, or Princess Margaret for being obnoxious and arrogant. We're stuck with them, whether we like it or not.

Of course what I said was anti-democratic, what I wrote was an overt anti-democratic polemical article! It seems Brendan has completely missed my point. I don't care what Prince Charles says about the environment because he, unlike Tony Blair, has no ability to take my money to put his views into practice. I am free to ignore him, which I do. I don't give a damn how obnoxious Prince Andrew is... supporting his playboy lifestyle is chump change compared to what the socialist British state takes from me by force to support the ghastly National Health Service or any other of the host of other theft based 'social' (meaning state) programmes. I regard the monarchy as a quaint oddity and the Jubilee as a fine excuse for a party because it has no real political power and thus does not actually need to be 'un-elected'. The Queen and that idiot Prince Charles does not decide how much of my money the British state will steal tax, the democratically sanctified state does, aided and abetted by everyone who adds bogus legitimacy to that appropriation by voting for the thieves MPs in Parliament who act as their proxies confiscating other people's property.

To say an aspect of life is amenable to democratic politics, which is to say, to politicise it by allowing parties other than the people directly involved to decide what form some interaction must take, is to take that aspect of life out of the realm of voluntary association/dis-association and to give it a violence based mandatory nature... and to morally de-legitimise it.

I am not pro-monarchy, I am anti-political... and that includes democratic politics as well. Thus the reason I will toast the monarchy is that it is essentially a non-political figurehead with no real power over me, unlike Tony Blair or Iain Duncan Smith or Chaz Kennedy. I do not care how it is determined who gets to pull the political levers of power... I want those levers to have no one's hands on them and the hands (and, yes, maybe heads) of anyone reaching for them cut off with an axe. I do not want the power over my life wielded by the democratic state transferred to the monarchy, I want it removed all together. Brendan, I think the 'libertarian' bit before Samizdata might have given you a hint where I was coming from. What matters is not democracy or monarchy, but several liberty.

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Perry: "Have you read Orwell's 1984?"
Adriana: "No, I don't need to, I used to live in it."

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I just noticed that UK Transport now has a hit counter, and I pushed the little cross, expecting just a number. But as most readers of this probably know far better than I, what you actually get is a whole new page of numbers. And the news is that the UKT cup is either almost completely empty, or else starting to get definitely, detectably damp at the bottom, depending on how you look at it. VISITS: Total: 869, Average Per Day: 29, Average Visit Length: 1.10, Last Hour: 5, Today: 24, This Week: 240.

You can see how a regular journalist, looking at numbers like those, would say, forget about that. I, and I hope Patrick, with our backgrounds in unofficial paper pamphlets stuffed into envelopes and the like, are more easily impressed. I definitely am. Compare Total with This Week, or Average with Today (that was at 11.30 am today), and maybe you'd agree. Patrick seems to be excited, because (as Natalie Solent also noted) he was up at 6.43 am this morning. This is about when I go to bed.

There's a mass of recent UKT stuff to look at, and Patrick does write beautifully, with a decent sprinkling of human being outbursts and idioms to enliven what from other keyboards would be uninterrupted number and date crunching. What I like about Patrick is: he's honest. You always feel that he's saying it like he's seeing it. If he's confused, he says so. If he deviates in his head from the libertarian orthodoxy (e.g. on Compulsory Purchase Orders being necessary to build railways) he deviates right there on UKT. Which means that when he does express a strong judgement that counts for something.

Nevertheless, of all the recent stuff on UKT, the thing that most impressed me was an email from Tim Hall, whoever he is. It's full of insider knowledge about the sad fate of brand-new but never used railway carriages, or something, and what it means is that UKT looks like continuing its slow but steady rise to significance. Patrick doesn't have to write the entire thing himself. He may not know as much about roads and planes and ships as he does about trains, but there are surely others out there ready to fill in, as soon as they hear of UKT's existence. In a year or two, he could have himself an entire ideologically simpatico circus of regulars. Patrick is a one-step-at-a-time sort of person, and he'll probably say something like: you're very kind Brian, let's hope you're not too kind, wait and see, etc, etc. Which is all part of why I'm starting to get seriously optimistic about UK Transport.

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Yes, just as Perry said at the end of my earlier post, I now have this quote nailed, although I have to say it wasn't just the blogosphere - more like the Internet as a whole. And it happened in less than an hour, or so it seemed. It's like having your own personal global Tannoy system. But it also needs the good-will of humans, not just technology..

John Daragon emailed thus, with admirable terseness:

Book 3, Chapter 5, pg. 127.

Steven Galaher e-mailed that while he couldn't give me the chapter and page number, he could give me an expanded version of the quote:

"The Enemy, of course, has long known that the Ring is abroad, and that it is borne by a hobbit. He knows now the number of our Company that set out from Rivendell, and the kind of each of us. But he does not yet perceive our purpose clearly. He supposed that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he would himself have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream."

Neither email on its own would have been enough, but put the two together (the speciality of the Internet, after all) and it wouldn't have taken me much longer. However, the man whose email I am publishing in the first place (and whom I had also personally e-mailed), Michael Drout of Wheaton College, Massachusetts, as well as giving almost all of the same expanded quote that Steven Galaher supplied, also settled the whole thing for me thus, and I'm going to "publish" all of this too (i.e. elsewhere and not just here) because it is informative:

Citing the Lord of the Rings is tricky because there are so many textual variants (due to multiple printings and re-printings and Tolkien's tendency to revise each set of galleys sent to him). A "clean" text was only finally developed in the late 1980's, so most people just cite by Volume, Book, and Chapter number. Thus the above would be: TT, Bk III, ch v. But if you want a more traditional cite, it is page 100 in the Hougton Mifflin hardback edition, the closest thing we have to a "standard" edition in Tolkien scholarship.

Hope this was helpful.

Indeed it was. Thanks also to Antoine Clarke for showing willing, and to anyone else who was half way to the answer when Perry told everyone to stop.

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I don't know if this is a good way to find out about Formula One racing car racing, but this is blogland so there's a link for you.

I'm now watching the TV re-run of the Monaco Grand Prix, which was held last Sunday and which David Coulthard won, I believe. And this has reminded me of something I've been wanting to say to the world for some time. Why can't they have more racing car races in places like Monaco, which is an actual place, with hotels and houses and a sea-front with super-luxury yachts parked in it, and fewer racing car races in places like all the other places where they have racing car races, i.e. the racing car racing equivalent of out-of-town shopping centres?

I thought this was not going to be political, but as I blog the question I realised what the answer is, and it's deeply political. In Monaco you are allowed to take your own risks. You are allowed to race a racing car at 200 mph within two yards of a concrete wall, if you're good enough and if some insane millionaire or cigarette salesman will pay you. And you are allowed to stand just above the concrete wall in the direct line of fire of any bad driving that might occur and watch all this insanity. At most grand prix circuits you need a pair of binoculars to see what the hell's happening, because before a racing car driver can stage a decent crash for you he has negotiate about a third of a mile of gravel and a giant wall of rubber tires.

It is no coincidence whatever that in Monaco they also allow you to keep most of your money. In most parts of the world they run your life, and tax you half to death to pay their wages. In Monaco you run your own life, almost entirely.

Two different things: low taxes and a fun racing car race track. Same underlying philosophy.

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With less than 48 hours to go until the commencement of the Football (Soccer) World Cup, one could rightly expect the outbreak of a 'footbal fever' in England. And, indeed, there is a tingle of breathless anticipation in the air and a sweating of the palms at the prospect of our opening game against Sweden on Sunday.

We all recognise this. We've all been here before. But never, ever can I recall quite the level of overt patriotism that is clearly on display all over London. Driving to work this morning, I was waiting at a set of traffic lights behind a dozen or so other vehicles all of which were displaying either the Cross of St.George or the Union Jack boldy from their aeriels or emblazoned in their rear windows. Houses, shops, offices and restaurants are festooned with bunting and flags. Everywhere I look, there's a flag.

I get the feeling that this is about more than football.

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"If you aren't a part of the solution, you're part of Europe"

(Courtesy of Eristic)

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People occasionally ask me why I work as a journalist. Is it the thrill of interviewing British Chancellor Gordon Brown, covering aspects of the Enron disaster or implications of September 11^th?

Well I guess the answer would be yes to all of the above. But, gentle readers, it is stories like this one that really make working for Reuters so rewarding. It is libertarian, in a not terribly intellectual kind of way. Enjoy.

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democratic adj. 1 of, like, practicing, advocating, or constituting democracy or a democracy. 2 favouring social equality.

Brendan O'Neill is a republican in the British sense of the word, which is to say he wants to abolish Britain's figurehead monarchy. He wants to do this because it is 'anti-democratic'. Of course when a Marxist says 'democratic' it is useful to actually ponder the meaning of the word and how it is being used. After all, communist East Germany was the 'People's German Democratic Republic'... and Brendan is both a self described republican and in favour of democracy, so clearly one must not just assume that when the D word gets bandied about we all mean the same thing.

Or do we?

When I use the term democratic, it is generally in a negative pejorative sense. To me it means my neighbours voting themselves some of my money, in effect mugging me by proxy when the state taxes me for their perceived benefit. To me 'democratic' means allowing my neighbour a say in how I build my house and how I raise my children and what chemicals get put in my food and water regardless of what I want. Democracy is at its core about denying the concept of ownership, even of your own body, because other people get to use the violence of the state via their ballots to reduce my actual ownership. When the state intermediates itself, it negates society, because state and society are two completely different things. The morality of several ownership, even of yourself, gets superceded by the force based political state.

So when I hear people like Brendan say something is 'anti-democratic' I usually assume that whatever they are referring to is actually a good thing. The US Constitution for example is quite anti-democratic because it severely constrains (in theory at least) the ability of people to vote for laws that would abridge liberties (such as freedom of speech or the right to own the means to defend yourself)... so things that act as a check on that violence backed tyranny of the majority called 'democracy' are generally a splendid idea. For me, voluntary social interaction is the source of legitimacy, not the sanctification of the ballot box and the violent intermediation that springs from it.

Yes, I suspect Brendan and I do indeed mean the same thing when we use the term 'democratic', I just happen to regard it as the means by which a vast engine of criminality powers itself whereas Brendan sees it as the key to an egalitatian Utopia at gunpoint.

So whilst I must confess to being infused with the widespread indifference to the monarchy Brendan mentions, the fact is the Queen steals a great deal less of my money and poses a far lesser threat to my liberty than the democratically elected thugs in Downing Street, so I for one am happy to use the Jubilee as an excuse to hoist a few drinks to toast the health of 'Her Majesty', who reigns without ruling, something I am unlikely to ever do to the Capo di tutti Capi, the Prime Minister, who rules without reigning.

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I can assure Tony Millard (see below) that mine shines through pure and strong throughout the ages having started its life on the wrong side of a Habsburg bed...

As to being led by one's ancestral star, I see the task more like building my own constellation...

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Tony Millard cogitates about ancestry and its influence on the modern man...sort of

Another major busy farmer day yesterday – among other events there was a return of the well excavator, which has been away for a month, in pasta-sphere time, for some minor surgery. I thus had some quality "digger time" yesterday afternoon which is as good a substitute as can be found for the 7.05am Haslemere-Waterloo express, upon which I used to do most of my cogitation (45 mins each way per day) before moving to easier-on-the-eyes Northern Tuscany.

It struck me as to the appositeness (or otherwise) of our antecedents. For instance, many moons ago I used to be a broker at Lloyd's - a job something akin to a pirate on the Spanish Main. Well blow me over with a wafting feather, if I didn't discover after a while that a couple of my fellow-travellers around the floor of Lloyd's sported the names Kidd and Morgan, and yes, they were both direct descendants of the eponymous pirates. Genetic programming or pure coincidence? Or just a couple of boys having some fun at the expense of their ancestors? Who knows... Perhaps we should ask Adriana Cronin or Perry de Havilland, if they are led by the ancestral star. Me, well, I've been traced back to a family of itinerant and impoverished flour millers of 17th century Britain. QED. Anyone else sporting an interesting past?

Tony Millard, Tuscany, Italy

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In my capacity as the Supreme Pamphleteer of the Libertarian Alliance I am assembling the next Stuffed Envelope operation, consisting of, you know, publications. Arising out of this exercise in twentieth century nostalgia, and for reasons I can't be bothered to explain, I find myself searching, at present in vain, for the exact chapter and page number of the following quote, probably from The Fellowship of the Ring, and probably from Chapter 2 ("The Council of Elrond"), said, I'm told, by Gandalf (good) about Sauron (bad):

"That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind."

A magnum of warm virtuous feelings for the first person to tell me the answer and put me out of my editorial misery.

Update: [Editor: Ah, the power of the blogosphere...Thanks for the help, the information is now safely lodged in Brian's head]

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I don't know why I still bother noting the various examples of the fact that governments are inherently inefficient. I suppose because this one, as government cock-ups (and accounting errors) go, is a whopper. The US Treasury has admitted that is has 'lost' $17.3 billion (£11.7 billion) because of shoddy book-keeping - enough to buy a fleet of eight B-2 stealth bombers and still have change for jet fuel, as Chris Ayres of The Times calculates in his article.

The misplaced cash is nearly 30 times greater than the $600 million error in Enron’s reported profits that led to its spectacular bankruptcy last December. The admission, contained in the 2001 Financial Report of the United States Government, is likely to infuriate firms that have been targeted by the Bush Administration for sloppy accounting. I wonder if the anti-capitalist activists screaming about Enron's malfeasance will be sceaming 30 times louder about this?

To top it up, Paul O'Neill, the US Treasury Secretary, writes in the introduction to the Financial Report:

“I believe that the American people deserve the highest standards of accountability and professionalism from their Government and I will not rest until we achieve them.”

However, on page 110 of the Financial Report is a note that explains that the Treasury’s books did not balance because of a missing $17.3 billion. So no holidays for you then...? Oh, well, it's not like it's your money, is it?

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Well, it seems hapless former UK transport minister and all-round-twit Stephen Byers learned the hard way of why the once-magnificent British railway system was to prove his downfall. As they say, it could not have happened to a nicer guy.

Meanwhile, Patrick Crozier, at his excellent UK Transport blog, confesses to being totally surprised at the resignation of Byers. I confess to feeling the same way. But of course I am not kidding myself that anything will change in the quality of our transport network as a result of Byers' departure. The trains will still be late and dirty, the Tube (underground subway) will still be noisy, late and hot; our roads will be jammed, and the cost of motoring will still be extortionate.

Britain is a member of the Group of Seven industrial nations and yet we have an increasingly third world transportation system.

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No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself.
-King Lear (King Lear - Act IV Scene 6)

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Freedom works. You know that from your own life. Give it a chance to work for everyone else as well.
-Charles Murray in What It Means To Be A Libertarian

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So he's gone. Stephen Byers, formerly Secretary of State for the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions has resigned. And just when I thought he'd never go. You just can't tell.

Now, all the speculation is about who should replace him. Should it be invisible Charles Clarke? Or should it be Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon? Neither is about to set the world alight. Of the two, Hoon, would seem to have the best credentials to step into Byers's shoes: not only can't he manage the news, but I understand he's rapidly buggering up the armed forces.

But I have got a much better and simpler idea. One that will almost certainly solve our transport problems. 

Abolish the Department.

It only goes back to 1919. Before then we had the best railway in the world. We had already built most of the tube. Electric trams, taximeter cabs and motorised buses plied the streets of the capital looking for trade. 

And then Transport got a Ministry and a Minister: Eric Geddes. It got off to a bad start - forcibly re-organising the railways and hamstringing their profits. So started their steady decline. And after the bad start things just got worse. London Transport was nationalised halting development in its tracks. Not satisfied with that they then decided to nationalise the whole railway. The decline just gathered pace. And so on and so forth. 

Luckily the Ministry's incompetence was masked by the growth of road transport. But even there motorways were built too late and in insufficient numbers. 

Almost every move the Department has ever made has made things worse: expanding the railway, then cutting it; expanding the road network then slamming on the brakes. They couldn't get nationalisation right. They couldn't even get privatisation right.

Politicians are not part of the solution: they are part of the problem.

Patrick Crozier

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Despite Perry's recent preoccupations, Samizdata seems to be bowling along nicely, doesn't it? The pattern is, there's an eight hour silence, Perry is out on the town trying to sign up more Samizdatans and getting somewhat "tired", I decide it's up to me, I post a page-and-a-half of waffle about whatever comes into my head and other Samizdatans read it and say to themselves we can't have all those Americans thinking all this is is Brian waffling we'd better do something. So they do. And I now have some rambling to do in reply.

I liked Paul Staines' bit about Britain's growth rate having sunk like a stone. What this confirms is that British government income is now as high as it can be. Increasing the percentage rate of taxation doesn't increase government tax income, it merely slows the economy down and causes government income to remain static. Similarly, if the government were to reduce the percentage rate of tax, government income wouldn't decrease. This would merely cause the economy to surge forward, and the smaller slice of a bigger cake would end up being the same size as the bigger slices of smaller cakes. Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Isn't that exciting? In plain English, the bastards are taking us for the absolute maximum amount they can, and if they get any greedier we stop coming through their bit of the forest.

If they truly want to spend more on the British National Health Service they are going to have to spend less on other things.

Aaron Armitage liked my ramble about gun-control, but wants to add that: "… people who are more likely to be shot are more likely to buy guns for self-defense. In other words, the risk of getting shot causes the gun ownership, not the other way around." Quite right. Capitalise the P, take away "in other words", and we have another anti-gun-control aphorism for the collection.

I didn't pay much attention to that David Caruso movie, but by the end Marg Helgenberg was making excellent use of a gun to kill a bad person. David Caruso, if I understood matters correctly, continued to disapprove and instead of remaining with Marg like a Real Man and having some more sex with her in her swimming pool instead buggered off to Rio de Janeiro. Good riddance. Whatever happened to David Caruso? (E-mailers: I do not care what happened to David Caruso.)

I was delighted that Alice Bachini responded to my bit about pram design. I feared that this pram posting had disappeared into the oblivion bucket labelled Things That Belligerent Men Of A Certain Age In T-Shirts With Jobs In IT Don't Care About. "Prams? Prams?!?!?!?! We want threats to H-Bomb the Middle East, girls in black leather on motor bikes, GNP statistics, guns, jet planes, pictures of Kylie Minogue in see-through clothing …" [stay tuned gentlemen]. "We may not be Real Men, but at least when we're sitting at our computers allow us to pretend that we are." Etc.)

Anyway Alice, thanks. You caught me committing an error I'm fond of denouncing others for, which is another Fixed-Quantity-Of fallacy, in this case the Fixed Quantity of Infant Attention fallacy. Your point being: outside stimulation increases the total capacity of infants to pay attention to things in general, such as and including Mum. They don't either attend to the outside world or to Mum. They pay more attention to both. Makes sense.

That's enough rambling for now. I'll get to Antoine later. As usual, most of what he's saying I agree with.

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Well, it seems the Communist state of North Korea is not letting its downtrodden citizens get so much of a sniff of the World Cup tournament, which kicks off this weekend. Anti-football snobs may claim this is a rare example of the benefits of Communism, but as an (admittedly currently depressed) Ipswich Town and England fan, this story surely demonstrates the evils of what Marx has spawned,

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Dodgeblog is doing a multi-part series on sex, drugs, and rock & roll... well as Andrew is a rock critic, these are subjects about which I would venture he is more than passingly familiar

Update: Part II and Part III are also up.

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Alice Bachini has some views about Brian Micklethwait's article Which way did your pram face?

It's not just outward-facing prams that are new; what about all those carriers and backpacks that allow babies to view the world from a user-friendly height? I think a social change is very definitely afoot, and a libertarian change for the better as well. But I don't think all this is just the result of parents consciously trying to encourage more outgoing interactions for their offspring. Nor do I think that it contradicts with the kind of intimate mother/baby relationship Brian associates with the National Childbirth Trust. I think parents are just being more sensitive about what kids actually enjoy doing, and the result of this is inevitably good.

It's much more fun to watch the world from Dad's shoulders than to be stuck in a pram with only a row of plastic bunnies for company. Although even if you do have plastic bunnies nowadays, they are likely to be all-singing, all-dancing electro-bunnies which recite the alphabet in fifteen languages at the press of a button, the real world is still very often more fun than the gimmicky or "educational" toys that adults seem to think babies will enjoy.

Kids, including babies, want more, more, more, and capitalism with all its mind-blowing array of baby entertainments and transport machines, meets more and more of their wants. And parents know this is good for their development, because they can see how happy they are and how much they are learning from all that interesting stuff. Whereas in the 1950s little Billy would have spent all day in his pram, his cot or his playpen, nowadays he gets to go to exciting places and meet interesting people with fun toys. So things are getting better, in a pro-human beings, libertarian direction.

But mostly, we just aren't inclined to leave them screaming in boredom if putting them somewhere more stimulating cheers them up. As this represents good parenting, it doesn't detract from the mother/child stuff so much as adds to it. Happy people tend to get on better with each other, and you're not walking round town all day; sometimes you are sitting together at home on the sofa, watching the "Super Duper Sumos" and drinking "Sunny Delight".

Alice Bachini

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Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don't have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that...

I'm a fan of Charles Murray's writings on the "underclass" which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian's neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.

Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily "cared for" places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to "help" immigrant communities.

As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I've often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven't been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they're fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they're mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.

When there's a riot in a town "by Moslems" it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew "finds"), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.

I'm guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of "Rebel Without A Cause", except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?

None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren't Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).

The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to "blow it all away" and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can't remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.

The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don't understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won't be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.

The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don't believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.

So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.

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The accumulation of medical information by the state is a bad idea for too many reasons to list here. The reason its being done is part of the desperate attempt to make the National Health Service work at any cost. For my part I look forward to the News of the World (a very downmarket British tabloid) informing us which cabinet minister's wife has head lice, which one takes Prozac, who's receiving treatment for haemorroids and which cabinet minister's children won't have the autism jab.

Of course it is rather difficult arguing against breach of doctor-patient confidentiality on pragmatic grounds: first national databases could be handy in a bio-warfare emergency, it would be handy for the state to know where the greatest threat of smallpox epidemics are. Second, lawyers caved in on this issue of client confidentiality, banks on financial records, now doctors. Oddly enough the most principled professionals are the media. Perhaps it makes a difference that journalists, unlike doctors or lawyers, aren't working in a licensed sector: a journalist who rats on sources is competing with others who will protect theirs.

The existence of the blogsphere and web media provides a "back street" media which is what the medical profession needs right now. If we had a flourishing industry of back-street abortionists, state centralized records would be meaningless. I confess that's the most unlikely argument I've ever put forward for banning abortions.

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Perry's internet connection has been on the blink all day, on account of it being cable-based. That little power cut (see my previous post below, end of) apparently deranged his cable company. (His cable TV was out also. I hate that. Always keep business and pleasure on separate kit, I say. That way, when one fails you can still do the other.) Anyway the upshot is I promised Perry I'd shove something onto Samizdata tonight. Which is now.

Well the blog fairy has spoken, and I have my topic. It's one of those mildly entertaining American movies (I'm combining blog pleasure with the pleasure of late night junk TV) about decorative but badly behaved people with nicer houses and swimming pools and weather than they deserve. It stars David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger and is called Elmore Leonard's Gold Coast. And the David Caruso character has just said something calculated to annoy Samizdata and just about all its friends and readers everywhere:

"People who don't own guns don't get shot as often as people who do."

That sounds like one of the big pro-gun-control mantras to me. Now most anti-anti-gun-controllers are no doubt familiar with all the wrongnesses of this mantra, but indulge me. It's a somewhat new claim to me, and I want to explain (basically to myself) what's wrong with it.

Error One - that the only bad thing a person with a gun can ever do to you is shoot you. But of course there's something else, in fact a lot else. He can threaten to shoot you, and then without actually shooting you he can do lots of other bad things to you, or that you would otherwise have stopped him doing. So even if owning a gun yourself might have got you into a gun fight, the risks of such a fight might easily have been preferable to what happens as a result of you not being able to even threaten such a fight. Not getting shot is not a guarantee of happiness. You may not get shot, but you may be raped, or robbed, or powerless while your family ditto. There are worse things than getting shot, even than being shot dead.

Error Two – most of the above applies also to when you are attacked by someone physically stronger than you, but when neither you nor he has a gun. It all applies if, for example you are an averagely strong male who is not good at hand-to-hand combat, while he's an above averagely strong male who is. In those circumstances you brandishing a gun makes all the difference (provided you're willing to use it), even if you do take the risk that the physically stronger attacker does have a gun after all and waves it back at you in "self defence".

Error Three, and I think this is my biggest objection – the benefits of widespread gun ownership among non-criminals for the purpose of self-defence are dispersed throughout society. Even if it were true that "people who own guns don't get shot as often as people who do", and even if getting shot was the worst thing that could happen to you, and the risk of getting shot was the worst risk you could take, that still wouldn't mean that non-criminals being forbidden to own guns (the real world effect of gun control laws) is a good public policy. The widespread existence of non-criminals willing to take the risks alluded to by the David Caruso character may not make life safer for each non-criminal gun-owner, but between them these people sure as hell make for a better world. And if enough non-criminals can be persuaded to accept these burdens, the criminals pretty much give up, and the guns need never be fired, just owned. Think of the non-criminal gun-owners as soldiers in the war against crime, a war which they and only they can win. And think of David Caruso as the guy who says, don't be a soldier, you'll only get yourself shot at. That may make sense, even if the "only" is overstating things. But pacifism as a public policy absolutely does not make sense merely for that reason.

As for the claim that it's the job of "experts" – like the good police – to do all the good gun-fighting against the bad criminals, and not the good civilians, well that seems to me like saying that you can win a land battle with the massed ranks of your own infantry stripped of all their weapons, but backed up by "expert" air power. Tell that to the Marines.

That last little metaphor might actually have contributed something useful to the argument, in the form of an aphorism worth copying and pasting to other places. Keep writing for long enough, and eventually you find yourself being brief, and to the point.

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My speaker at my fast approaching last-Friday-of-the-month discussion evening for this May (the 31st) will be Gerald Hartup (who has just started something called Liberty and Law - no website as yet - which sounds interesting). The subject, a tricky one, will be "How to Talk About Race, Culture, Immigration, Asylum, etc.". I don't want the evening to degenerate into a nitpick about the current British government's current asylum policies, from the point of the view of the current British government, and with the assumptions that underpin the current British debate about these matters. What I want us to think about is: What should those assumptions be? I want us to think about meta-context, to coin a phrase. We've had plenty of discussion along such lines here, as you may have noticed.

I think I already know one of the rules for such discussion, which is that you should always talk about these matters with the mind-fix in place that maybe there's an actual, honest-to-God asylum seeker listening to what you're saying. This is one of the big facts behind Political Correctness. "Now we have to worry about the feelings of Afghans and Somalis and Slovaks." Damn right we do, and a good thing too. Part of the `right wing' thing is that you don't have to do this and shouldn't have to do this. But you do now. One of the things I most like about writing for something like Samizdata is that, what with all these hundreds of hits we have every day, this mind-fix isn't entirely artificial. Such people really might be reading in, such is the potential reach of the blogosphere. And someone might definitely be reading in on this who falls into the category of those who can say in all honesty: "Some of my best friends are asylum seekers." I really like that.

Example. Another speaker I've already fixed is the estimable David Carr, who'll be doing September of this year (the 27th), giving us an update on what's happening in the Middle East. One of the reasons I fixed this event with such enthusiasm was that David's talk last year on the same subject was good in particular in the exact way I've just referred to.

David's sympathy – his "bias" you could say - is with the Israelis, but there is bias and there is bias. There's the kind which causes you to be blind to facts or to conceal facts or even to just make up non-facts, and to be blind to the feelings of anyone except your own folks. And then there's the kind of bias which consists of admitting that yes, this is where your "bias" is, but nevertheless managing to describe things accurately and fairly. I recall with particular pleasure that present at that meeting which David addressed was another British guy who had spent quite some time in the West Bank, among the Arabs there. His "bias" was a very different thing to David's. Yet when it came to the facts of the matter - who did what when, what all the biases of the various actors in the drama were, and so on – this Arab-friendly man and David were in complete accord. I can't say we managed to actually solve anything Middle-East-wise that night, but that particular degree of agreement I found very pleasing.

If this coming Friday is as good, I'll have no complaints. Email us if you are interested in learning more about these meetings. The London SWPosh area has just had a mysterious power cut lasting a quarter of a second (a phenomenon I've never experienced before). I'm all okay, but Perry's phone connection has temporarily collapsed, so send emails to me at if you want to be sure of getting through.

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Yesterday at Instapundit, just in case there are any Samizdata readers who read this but not that, there was a link to a story in the Boston Globe about the failure of anti-gun laws to control crime, in Britain. Depressing. The story. And the fact that the story seems only to be being told in America.

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Three cheers and bloody hurrah for Iain Duncan Smith for having some backbone and standing up to both our government and Spain's over the latters petulant and childish demands on Gibraltar

It's been an awful long time since any mainstream politician of any stripe stood up to the demands of Europeans over anything but such feathers has he ruffled that:

"Iain Duncan Smith suffered a diplomatic rebuff prior to his three-day European tour, starting today, when Spain's prime minister cancelled plans to meet him.

And it looks like IDS is not going to back down. Good. Now if he can stand the carpetting he is assuredly going to get in the press ("xenophobe, anti-Europe, intransigent, extreme right-winger...yadda...yadda...yadda") then we'll know that whether he's actually got a brass set or not.

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Believers, show discernment when you go to fight for the cause of Allah, and do not say to those that offer you peace: "You are not believers," – seeking the chance booty of this world; for in the world to come there are abundant gains. Such was your custom in days gone by, but now Allah has bestowed on you His grace.
-The Koran 4:93

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Don't know how to tie your own shoelaces? Just what is the proper way to make a cup of coffee? Should a person sleep standing up or lying down? Having difficulty finding your own arse even though you're using both hands a map? Don't know how to barbecue sausages? Well, fret no longer because HM Government is here to help you.

"The Agency's food hygiene campaign is going alfresco during summer 2002 with a 30-second TV ad spelling out the risks of not cooking barbecue food properly.

This should come as a blessed relief to anyone planning a barbecue this summer. After all, in a country where the mere act of lighting a charcoal briquette is enough to bring on a monsoon, only the hopelessly naive and terminally idiotic can possibly be planning a barbecue in the first place.

'The Agency'. It sounds so sinister, doesn't it? That's because it is. The Food Standards Agency was established in the wake of the BSE crisis to reassure a jittery and highly risk-averse British public that the government was doing its bit to protect them from the evil bugs lurking in their own fridges. Which means, of course, that they do less of their own bit and, thanks to greater dependency and bureaucratic empire-building, today's patronising message will become tomorrow's law. I see Sausage Inspectors in our future.

It's just another brick in the Napoleonic Wall behind which our collective goose is slowly being cooked.

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During this past week, I managed to catch a late-night documentary programme on Channel 4 about a young British woman's interest in reincarnation and her search for her past lives. Unfortunately, it was late, I was tired and feel asleep before the end of the show so I never discovered whether or not she was successful in her quest.

However, I was conscious to witness much of her journey during which she encountered like spirits who were searching for their past incarnations and, in many cases, claimed to have found them. Well, 'found' may not be exactly the right word; 'adopted' may be more accurate because a startlingly high number of these perfectly ordinary every-day folk were convinced that they were once Cleopatra or King Louis XIV or Horatio Nelson. One middle-aged chap from Leeds claimed to be a reincarnation of the Egyptian God Horus. Not for any of them was the grey, ignominious life of a peasant labourer from the Russian Steppes who died boringly of old-age or an anonymous factory-worker from Manchester who gave up his ghost in the First War. Far too prosaic.

I realise that reincarnation is a central doctrine for both Hindus and Buddhists and may well be true for all I know, but I can't help getting the feeling that, in the hands of vulnerable Westerners, it is a matter not so much of faith but therapy. Watching these people gave me the impression that they were victims of an inverted 'Cult of Celebrity'. Those unlikely to be touched by fame and fortune in this life can comfort themselves by arrogating some from a 'previous life'. If you can't ask the question 'Don't you know who I am?', you can at least ask 'Don't you know who I was?'.

The impression I got from most of the participants was of mildly unhappy or unfulfilled people and whilst I'm all for the pursuit of happiness I am not sure that seeking past lives is the way to do it. There is something very negative about the whole exercise of seeking yesterday's glory rather than tomorrow's promise and I am sure that finding out I was Hernan Cortez in a past incarnation would only throw the relative mundanity of this life into sharp relief. Better, in my view, to devote one's efforts to finding fulfillment among the living rather then searching for dubious glamour among the ranks of the dead.

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This is typical, absolutely typical … of the kind of ARSE I have to put up with from you people. You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, well I'm trying to run a hotel here. Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not, you're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking around for things to complain about, aren't you. Well, let me tell you something – this is exactly how Nazi Germany started, you know. A lot of layabouts with nothing better to do that cause trouble. Well I've had fifteen years of pandering to please the likes of you and I've had enough. I've had it. Come on, pack your bags and get out!
-Basil Fawlty, to a group of Fawlty Towers guests.

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The Sunday Telegraph has commented on the latest and most worrying example of the Labour Goverment's accumulation of power by controlling information. The good Dr Liam Fox, also the Shadow Health Secretary, alerts us to the fact that last week the Government effectively dismantled the UK system of medical confidentiality. Under new regulations, slipped in using procedural devices to prevent debate in the House of Commons, the Secretary of State will be able to demand that doctors hand over medical records - and fine them if, in order to protect your confidentiality, they refuse to do so. The language of 'the public interest' is used to assert the right to demand, and receive, confidential medical information. Boringly, the 'public interest' is defined as whatever the Secretary of State says it is....

Having worked as a doctor myself, it horrifies me that doctors will now have to choose between breaching their ethics and breaking the law. To make matters worse, the new law is not restricted to doctors: the behaviour of every health care professional to his or her patients will now be subject to the direct control of politicians. The new law places the administrative convenience of the NHS not only above the bond of trust between doctor and patient, but above the dignity and privacy of patients....the change marks the death of the principle of the patient's right to give consent before identifiable personal data about them is shared. It is yet another restriction of our liberty - and one we have surrendered to with barely a whimper of protest.

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Once more our crappy domain name host is down. Please use our emergency contact address if you wish to e-mail us.

Update: Our regular e-mail seems to be working again.