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My comment below on youth crime prompted a lot of good comments. My thanks for Civitas, the think tank, for commenting about this admirable venture to encourage youngsters to learn discipline, pride and have a lot of fun at the same time. It is not all bad news out there, thank goodness. March 31st, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Blogger Clive Davis, who is well known to us at Samizdata, has this distressing report about an attack by youths on his teenage son. He’s not been impressed by the response by the police. It will not ease Clive’s anger one jot to hear that I had exactly the same experience when I was mugged in Clapham nine years ago. The police jotted down some comments, took a statement from me, including a description of the attackers (I managed to hit one of the bastards quite hard, I am glad to say). About a week or so later I was contacted by Victim Support, offering counselling, which I politely refused, although I was grateful for at least some followup. I had bad headaches for about a week and had to take several days off work. It is, as Clive and the rest of us Londoners know only too well, a regular occurence. What to do about it? That is the big question, perhaps one of the biggest questions of public policy in Britain. Sure, the economic worries arguably are taking a greater share of the chattering classes’ time right now, but the long-running issue in Britain, at least since I have been interested in public affairs, is the continued uptrend of yobbery and violence in British society. It has been blamed on many things, with varying levels of plausibility: the lack of authority figures that can inspire and instill respect in youngsters, mostly boys; the breakdown of the family and the rising levels of single-parenthood, which in turn is encouraged by perverse incentives, such as the Welfare State. Throw in a culture that celebrates, or at least does not condemn, yobbery and violence plus the decline of manual labour and lack of outlets for youngsters who are not academically gifted, and you have quite a toxic mix. As for the last point – the decline of manual labour – I certainly do not think that could or should be reversed, given all the gains we have enjoyed from the move to a more service-based economy. But it is a problem that has to be thought about. I personally think one step would be to cut the school-leaving age and hack away labour market restrictions so that apprenticeships can be viable. What so many kids lack is a chance to learn a skill and quickly experience the pride of earning a proper wage. It would be a start. Time magazine has already caused a stir with this front cover. Good. Sometimes it takes a foreign news publication to tell it like it is about what is happening. Not very “Cool Britannia”, is it? Anyway, my best wishes to Clive and his family. March 31st, 2008 | 77 comments - (Comments are closed)
Heathrow’s Terminal Five, the one which is fingerprinting passengers even if they take domestic flights, has got off to a glorious start. The British Airports Authority, now owned by Spain’s Ferrovial, is a joke. In an ideal universe, it would be broken up – as it should never have been privatised as a monopoly in the first place. If the wannabe Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wants a campaign issue, this is it. Update: I should of course stress that BA, which operates out of the terminal, bears a heavy lump of the responsibility for this. Its share price is down today by more than 3%. At least BA feels the economic chill of this sort of mess, BAA does not. One commenter points out that hitches often happen at the start of a new venture, but that does really wash since one assumes – right? – that the baggage and check-in facilities at a new airport were beta-tested to make sure they work properly. One would like to think that this is standard procedure in any new operation. March 28th, 2008 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Raising issues like non-intervenionist foreign policy on a site like this is a bit like poking a bear with a stick: potentially hazardous. In my recent item on WW2, the issue surfaced again of whether a viable foreign policy for a nation is the “Swiss model” (no, not that kind). I personally doubt it works for all nations, certainly not the largest ones with long, porous borders. But as I have praised tax havens recently, I am reminded of how the Swiss seem to cope very well thankyou outside a surpranational organisation like the EU or a military alliance like NATO. But is that country what economists call a “free rider” – taking advantage of the fact that other, bigger nations have done the heavy lifting in standing up to tyrants, etc? March 27th, 2008 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
This priceless comment adorns the Financial Times comment pages this morning:
Wow, alert the media! This remark is contained in a remarkably wrong-headed piece of analysis as to the implications of a recent decision by 3i, the large UK investment firm, to pull out of financing early-stage companies, or what it is generically known as venture capital. Compared to other news events, this might seem like arcane stuff, but in its own way, tells us a lot about the rough environment that entrepreneurs face not just in Britain but in the continent. Venture capitalists typically will back dozens of fledgling businesses, hoping that a minority of them become Google-type successes to compensate for the inevitable failures and just-about-break-evens. VC is very much a long-term game: it can take up to 10 years or more for a portfolio of these investments to bear fruit. The epicentre of VC investing is in northern California; investment outfits like Sequoia Capital have helped to fuel the Silicon Valley startups that are now part of business folklore. Yet the writer of the FT piece lamely argues that public – taxpayer’s – money be used to encourage such businesses. Groan. It is vain to point out to this person that politicians should have rather more urgent things to do than risk public funds on highly speculative investments. Far better to get to the roots of why 3i and similar outfits have turned their backs on venture capital: a stifling tax and regulatory climate in Britain and elsewhere. If the rewards to success are not taxed at high marginal rates, then the money will flow in eventually, just as it has in the US. March 26th, 2008 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
In my neighbourhood of Pimlico stands one of the ugliest public buildings in the known universe: Pimlico School. Unbearably hot in the summer (all that glass), miserable in the winter, with the sort of cavernous, Stygian style unlikely to suit enquiring young pupils, the place is being demolished for hopefully something rather more attractive. I cannot help but wonder, though, at the resemblance between the school and the main spacecraft in Battlestar Galactica. Mind you, I have not seen any Raptors flying out of the end of it. Some people actually like Brutalist architecture. March 24th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A nice article in the Daily Telegraph on how to make flying a bit more fun, which admittedly is a tough proposition as the enthusiasm for “security theatre”, as some call it, makes for longer queues at airports. The term means security measures designed to give the impression of making us safer rather than actually doing so. I rather liked the article’s almost heartbreakingly simple suggestion: pack a set of ear mufflers. They don’t have to be big, but they can cut out the racket, such as the noise of a fractious baby child. I am going to get some. For years, I always dreaded the prospect of having to share part of the cabin with a set of screaming kids or for that matter, a chatty adult who did not get the hint that I’d rather read one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers than hear my neighbour’s personal problems. Problem solved! March 22nd, 2008 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The late Arthur C. Clarke would have been impressed by this discovery, I reckon:
March 20th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across this temperately argued but brutal demolition of one of those books purporting to claim that we’d all be a jolly sight better off by letting that misunderstood Adolf H. chap do what he wanted in Europe and Russia and that Britain and those other warmongering Anglos should have minded their own business. The book in question is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and written by Nicholson Baker. The reviewer is Andy Ross. Excerpt from the review:
And:
Now, there are good books worth reading that debunk some of the myths of the war, such as that Churchill was a great strategist (he was not and made loads of mistakes), or that Roosevelt was the same (he was not, and unbelievably naive about Stalin), or that things should and could have been handled far better. There might even be a case for selling the “appeasement” line that we should have kept out of the war, at least early on, or bided our time. The trouble is, that most books I have come across selling the isolationist case, such as by John Charmley, for instance, fall down because they fail really to address how America and Britain could have realistically coped with a massive Russo-German fascist empire stretching from Vladivostok to Brest, murdering millions of non-Aryans, dominating international supply routes, and so on. Now of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. Churchill may not have known that Hitler was embarking on mass murder of European Jewry, although he was more alive to this threat than most politicians at the time. But Churchill had a pretty good idea that very ugly developments would accompany a Nazi empire, and of course had no illusions whatever about what would happen to Europe if Stalin’s Russia conquered all of it. It is just about possible, I suppose, that Britain could have struggled on a bit as an independent nation next to such a monstrous empire – assuming we could have lived with an ounce of self-respect by leaving France and the rest in the lurch. As for America, it could, I suppose, have traded on with its southern neighbours, bits of Africa, Australasia and those scattered nations not under communist/fascist rule, but huge parts of the globe would be hostile, poor, nightmarish places. And I very much doubt that we would now be enjoying those fruits of a globalised trading environment that we unashamedly champion today on this blog. March 20th, 2008 | 102 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of this Government’s proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq – where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote. March 20th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break. Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals. For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently. March 19th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years. This quote is great:
Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter. March 18th, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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