Samizdata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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