In fact, Oxford has a disproportionately high number of black students, although you wouldnât know this from the comments made by Lammy and others last week. He quoted the seemingly shocking statistic that, between 2015 and 2017, several Oxford colleges had failed to admit more than one or two black British students. This set the tone of the news agenda, prompting Oxford graduates to tweet their scorn at their old university. But, as ever, statistics are the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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At the end of a week in which the House of Commons defeated Labourâs draconian plans to regulate the press, the Tories revealed their own draconian plans to regulate the internet. The culture secretary, Matt Hancock, has pledged to make Britain âthe safest place in the worldâ to be online. But when the worldâs âsafestâ internet is currently found in China, where access is heavily restricted and censored by the state, it becomes clear how terrifying the governmentâs safety agenda really could be. May 27th, 2018 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The cliche is that itâs personal ambition that propels most politicians. Unfortunately, I think itâs true, at least for the biggest of them. What really drives most of them round the twist is not failing to get their policies enacted, but their ascent up the greasy pole being blocked. May 26th, 2018 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 23rd, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
It occurs to me that thereâs perhaps a bit of guilt on show here. You see those pregnant 11 year olds in Telford got in that state because the local authorities, in fear of being branded racist and/or islamophobic, allowed gangs of muslim men to groom and abuse white girls for decades and ignored complaints/reports etc. that this was occurring. One suspects that the distaste for this joke is more because it reminds readers of the failures of the Briitsh Nanny state than actual concern for the feelings of 11 year old sex abuse victims. If the writer actually cared about the victims and subsequent potential victims heâd be campaigning to have the perpetrators and their facilitators in the police/social services punished appropriately (personally I think being nailed to a fence by their genitals would be reasonable, but I can see that people might differ on the details. Would a bit of rebar up the bum be better? both? or how about the traditional English hanging, drawing and quartering?) so as to make clear that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable in the UK. May 21st, 2018 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
I give you Kaitlin Bennett from Ohio, as reported by BBC News:
May 18th, 2018 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
As any big city mobster will tell you, shaking down small businesses for protection money is a profitable line of work. The government gets into the same lines as the mob and every branch of government wants a piece of the action until the number of permits gets to the point that no one can afford the protection. Mobsters understand this, which is why they have a capo who decides which local thugs get to shake down which neighbourhoods. Sometimes the Capo is referred to as âMr. Mayorâ. May 16th, 2018 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Aunt Agatha seeks to give advice to another troubled public figure in Britain… I wonder who it could be? May 16th, 2018 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m not making up my mind on Gaza until I’ve heard what Gary Lineker and Lily Allen think – Jeremy Briar offers sage words of advice đ May 15th, 2018 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
For [Adam] Smith, the dangers that natural liberty faces are not a result of the system of free markets itself, but of mankindâs flawed human nature, particularly the desire of those he called âmerchants and manufacturersâ (among others) to ârig the system.â The natural desire to âbetter our conditionâ motivates us to strive for a better life. This is the motivation that underlies the success of natural liberty. Yet this same natural desire also leads to cronyism and corruption when businesses and others use the power of government to procure for themselves âsystems either of preference or of restraint.â In so doing, Smith said, they impose an âabsurd tax on the rest of their fellow citizens,â retard growth, and increase inequality. As a result, free markets are neither self-establishing, nor self-sustaining. If we are to continue to reap the very real benefits of natural liberty, we must be prepared to defend against cronyism. May 10th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Political and economic theories are never implemented in pure form, and their adherents are rarely impressed by politicians who claim to be inspired by them. Thatâs just par for the course. Marxists, however, are pretty much the only thinkers who accept no responsibility whatsoever for real-world approximations of their ideas. Third-Way advocates may have despaired over Blair, Hayekians can â and do â rant all day about Thatcherâs shortcomings, and ordoliberals have written scathing condemnations of Konrad Adenauer. But ask them whether they think those respective governments did more good than harm on balance; ask them whether they think those governments were preferable to the next likely alternatives â and you will get an unambiguous and unqualified âYes!â as an answer. In contrast, hardly any contemporary Marxist would accept that whatever ârealâ socialism is â surely, East Germany was at least closer to it than West Germany, North Korea is at least closer to it than South Korea, Venezuela is at least closer to it than Peru, Maoist China was at least closer to it than Taiwan, etc. And why would they? It works for them. Every other idea is judged by its necessarily crude, incomplete and imperfect real-world approximations, warts and all. Only Marxism has the luxury of being judged purely as a set of ideas, which something as mundane as real-world experience could never blemish. May 5th, 2018 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
If weâve got to apply the full nelson to get the governmental apparatus to do something obviously both morally and pragmatically correct then why in buggery would we give them more power over our lives? This is something that could and should have been settled before even the decision to go in. That it wasnât is evidence that government ainât very good at doing things, isnât it? May 4th, 2018 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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