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One of the contenders for the leadership of Britain’s Liberal Democrats is Scot, Menzies Campbell, known as “Ming”. I am not sure how he got this moniker. Was it because his friends thought he resembled the villain of the Flash Gordon series, Ming the Merciless? I feel sorry for his supporters. They are destined to be known as a lot of mingers. (That’s enough adolescent humour, Ed). January 20th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk? The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science. January 19th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (page 416), hitting some practitioners of Modern Art between the eyeballs. January 17th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Crime in Britain is a serious problem even though people will contest the figures and trends. The present government, no doubt aware that the issue remains a hot-button matter for voters, is determined to be seen to be doing something about it, however ineffectual. In the process, rather than push for tougher sentencing and allowing people to defend themselves, the administration’s approach is to overturn centuries of checks and balances in the criminal law. This is the latest:
The article goes on to say that the government aims to save money from this bracing and exciting new approach to law enforcement. Up to £350 million a year is spent on Legal Aid to court defendants appearing before magistrates. 350 million pounds is a large dollop of money although chickenfeed compared with what the government may end up spending – and we paying for – on ID cards. ID cards are likely, I confidently predict, to be largely useless in reducing crime, and I very much doubt that cutting public spending is a great priority of this government. January 16th, 2006 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
A comment I heard yesterday on a BBC travel programme about the supersonic plane Concorde. January 15th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
There seems to be a lot of it about at the moment, as the late British comic writer and broadcaster Spike Milligan might have put it. “It” being atheism. The biologist Richard Dawkins, known in some quarters as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, takes aim at religion in a current television series on Britain’s Channel 4 station. And only a few weeks ago I watched a programme on BBC 2 with Jonathan Miller, praising the tradition of skepticsm and outright atheism. What is going on? We live at a time when our post-Enlightenment civilisation is threatened by religious fundamentalism in the guise of radical Islam. It seemed for a while after 9/11 to be bad form to make harsh attacks on religion per se but now it appears some restraints are coming off. Of course this may only apply to Britain. In the United States, notwithstanding the theoretical separation of religion and state, it is, as Salman Rushdie has said, all but impossible for any declared atheist to hold down a public office more senior than that of a dog-catcher. This may of course change in time. Such things sometimes move in cycles. January 14th, 2006 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across this “Oddly Enough” item over at Reuters this afternoon. It seems that the straight-laced culture of Norway is alive and kicking:
But the priest was not judging the moral worth of women, he was judging just how physically attractive they are, which is not the same thing at all. Dearie me, standards of logic in the churches these days seem to be on the skids. Not that I am remotely interested in such shallow contests, you understand. January 13th, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
We have recently had a run of posts about the new Conservative Party leader David Cameron. I think it is an understatement of the year to say that we contributors are underwhelmed by the gentleman thus far. The articles triggered off a good deal of commentary, not least from some belligerent self-styled New Labour supporters who openly admitted that Cameron is the most likely heir of the Blairite political tradtion, unlike Chancellor Gordon Brown. In as much as I understand it aright, Blairism involves a number of elements: competent economic management at the macro level (no repeat of the disasters of yore under Wilson, Callaghan, etc); enthusiasm for blurring the boundaries of business and government; desire to micro-manage personal behaviours (training bad parents to be good parents); an obsession with modernity for its own sake; distrust, and in some cases, open dislike of British history and its tradtions; enthusiasm for transnational progressivism and its institutions such as the European Union and United Nations. Now like all such things my view simplifies things a bit. But that is pretty much what we have got. We have a fairly reasonable economy – albeit one that has performed sluggishly of late – a fast-rising number of public sector workers; a raft of regulations governing the most minute aspects of personal behaviours, and so forth. January 12th, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The blessed UK government wants to pass a bill to reduce the amount of bureaucracy. This falls into the category of “government pledges to make water flow uphill” bracket, methinks. There have been dozens of widely touted events by governments (of both parties) to cut red tape and yet the amount of regulations that businesses and individuals have to cope with just grows like ivy up the side of a tree. The solution is not to pass another bill but to reverse the laws we have on the books already. Simple. The actor Clint Eastwood once said that the problem with so many people in politics is that they tended to be folk like schoolteachers rather than people who have had to run a business and meet a payroll. I know what he means. January 12th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam’s Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam. I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all. January 11th, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nice and fair piece on the late Arthur Seldon, for years the editorial powerhouse at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The writer, Simon Heffer, is not always to my taste, given some of his Blimpishness, but he hits the mark here. One thing that stands out for me about Arthur is that he was not remotely interested in pandering to the short-term vagaries of opinion or attracting the plaudits of the rich and famous. He was also a representative of a style of liberalism going back to Gladstone, one which Britain is sorely in need of. January 11th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Britain’s Tony Blair has taken a further step in his self-declared role of father, and quite possibly mother, of the nation. He wants to introduce new laws to regulate anti-social, yobbish behaviour and introduce training (this is not a joke) for particularly wayward parents. Given the recent Orwellian remarks of Lord Gould, this all makes perfect sense. Blair and his ilk have no conception of civil society as a network of individuals, mediated via institutions, evolving slowly across time. He has no idea of how in such a society, values of self-restraint, civility towards others, concern for the weak, can be internalised rather than be handed down by dictat. This is not to say that yobbery, uncouthness, family breakdown and other pathologies are not serious problems. Of course they are. Ask anyone who has walked through a major UK city centre on a Friday evening. There is now a large and impressive body of work pointing to both the problems and some possible solutions in this regard. (Go and read Theodore Dalrymple or James Bartholomew, for instance). What these books and other studies have in common is an understanding that the top-down model of social reform, with its legions of officials, laws, agencies and so forth, has manifestly failed. There is little prospect of further efforts in this mould working either. Yet for Blair and so many others – including Tory leader David Cameron no doubt – problems of yobbery or mass drunkeness call for an “top-down” set of “solutions”. All the while the behaviours that are crimes, such as murder, burglary and violence, are frequently met with police indifference or punished only haphazardly by the courts. The law turns topsy-turvy. It may amaze some readers to think that Blair was once thought of as a highly intelligent politician back in the mid-1990s, and there is no doubt that to this day, he remains – on tactics at least – one of the most astute political figures of modern times. In terms of his grasp of human nature, however, he presents a pitiable sight as he grasps for that “eye-catching” gesture. January 10th, 2006 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
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