Lady Thatcher’s observation encapsulates the main change in public discourse that I noticed when I returned to these islands in 2011, after nearly twenty years away. The English pride in rationality and the traditional “stiff upper lip” approach to emotion has vanished to the extent that I experience living here now as akin to being on some dreadful afternoon TV show. All media presenters are more or less Jeremy Kyle or, at best, Ellen Degeneres. Whereas as a young law student I was trained that “hard cases make bad law” and that legislation should be made in a detached spirit, not driven by the passions of those close to the problem, I now hear every day the ludicrous assertion that only victims can truly hope to understand issues and that it’s ridiculous to believe that a calm, rational analysis by a detached person, “privileged” by not being in a given group of victims could lead to the right outcome.
|
|||||
|
April 4th, 2018 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Despite the fact that I foresaw all this years ago. So did you. So did anyone with the slightest knowledge of the principles of law. So did anyone who had ever read a fricking detective novel. The Times reports,
That is progress. But I note that she is still saying “victims” instead of “those who claim to be victims”. April 2nd, 2018 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today marks the centenary of the Royal Air Force, established for bureaucratic convenience at the start of a financial year in 1918, beaten in the age stakes by the Finnish Air Force, formed on the preceding 6th March, a Force which has higher scoring aces, with implausible names like Hans Wind, but I digress. Whilst I am not one to celebrate bureaucracies (and the RAF is a bureaucracy), it has the merit of having done much to banish tyranny from the world, and has many tales of heroism in its relatively short history, even if for one-fifth of that, it has been part of the Blairmacht. Today I would like to note one incident in the RAF’s history, which came at the ‘half-way’ mark, when in 1968, (actually on 5th April) after Harold Wilson’s Labour government decided not to commemorate the RAF’s 50th anniversary with a fly-past, and this did not go down well at all. In fact, it went down so badly that one RAF pilot, the heroic Flight Lieutenant Alan Pollock, threw away his career and very nearly his freedom in the ‘Tower Bridge incident‘, when, in protest at the lack of a commemoration, in his Hawker Hunter jet, he ‘buzzed’ the Houses of Parliament. Then on the spur of the moment, going down the Thames towards the sea, he flew under the top span of Tower Bridge at around 400 mph, and also ‘beat up’ a few airfields inverted, before landing, getting arrested but avoiding a court martial after being demobilised on health grounds by superiors eager to avoid the publicity of a trial, which is a weird echo of a similar ruse used in Viktor Suvorov’s ‘The Liberators’ when a Soviet Army soldier’s conduct presented a bureaucratic embarrassment that could not be concealed from higher authority. The jet only just missed hitting the top span of Tower Bridge with its tail, so no harm was done, however, it was close, there was a double-decker bus on the bridge at the time, and a cyclist on the bridge ripped his trousers dismounting in haste. Flt-Lt Pollock gallantly offered to pay for the trousers, but the cyclist declined. It is a tribute to the political culture of the UK that discontent manifested itself in this way, rather than in something like a tanquetazo . The World would also be a better place if more people, like Flt-Lt Pollock, placed acting out of good principles over doing what is needed to maintain one’s position or career, when one is led by disgusting ones. UPDATE: The Daily Mail have done a full interview with Alan Pollock, here it is. April 1st, 2018 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
March 31st, 2018 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 23 2018:
I posted about it here. March 28 2018:
And I’m posting about it here. March 29th, 2018 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you’re a Labour MP, if you take Corbyn’s whip, if you sit behind him in the House of Commons, then you can roll your eyes when he speaks or tell us how distraught you are on Twitter all you like; it counts for nothing. Your arithmetical function is to combine with other Labour MPs in order to give Jeremy Corbyn a majority in Parliament. No amount of election leaflet drivel or chuntering on about “fighting Tory cuts to save my community/the NHS/insert name of local school here” can wash away the permanent stain of your complicity with wickedness. How such people sleep at night or meet their reflection’s eye is their own affair and not my problem, thank God. But as the repellent psychodrama of their monstrous party staggers on to its terrifying conclusion, I’d ask them, in the meantime, to shut up about how good they are, how nasty the Conservatives are, how kindness entails a vote for Labour. Tories don’t succour anti-Semitism, comrade. In my book, that makes them better than you. March 26th, 2018 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Britain, the EU is often thought about as a single entity — and one that in the end will do whatever Germany says. But Angela Merkel is struggling to exert control over her own government, let alone the continent. Juncker and Barnier see an EU that does not take its orders from member states, but draws (or claims to draw) its own democratic legitimacy from the European Parliament. The EU member states have an interest in a good deal with Britain. But the European Commission — the apparatus in Brussels — has an interest in Britain being seen to be worse off after leaving the EU. The Commission would also receive 80 per cent of the tariff revenue from UK exports to the EU, making ‘no deal’ more appealing to Brussels than to member states. – Editorial in the UK’s Spectator magazine (£). March 23rd, 2018 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
When Corbynites say how their leader’s apparent chumminess with Hezbollah and Hamas or the IRA only arose because to make peace one must talk to those one does not like, I have long been in the habit of asking, “So why did he never meet with the equivalents on the side the left wingers don’t like? When did he arrange to meet with ‘price tag’ Israeli terrorists, or with Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland? Why did he never have similar dialogue with fascists and racists?” I must eat my words. He did. Via a post on the “UK politics” subreddit by “Tophattingson”, I learned that in March 2015, Corbyn spoke for a conference organized by the fascist cult “LaRouche Movement”. March 22nd, 2018 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
An unnamed West Yorkshire police officer has managed to attempt to pervert the course of justice by getting himself summonsed for driving an untaxed vehicle, when he accidentally put his own details on a form instead of those of the alleged miscreant, reports the Daily Mail.
I’m pretty sure that a humourless American prosecutor would seize on this as obstruction of justice by wrongly reporting yourself as the ‘perp’, and to be fair, it does seem to have all the necessary elements of causing wasteful employment of police time in UK law. Our wonderful mini plea-bargain system of fixed penalty notices in the UK allows you to buy off a prosecution, or go to Court and challenge the basis of the ticket and risk conviction. Whilst the UK may seem more and more like East Germany as time goes by, witness recent police action on free speech, it is heartening that the police are managing to boost their summons rates in a way that cuts out the unfortunate middleman, like the Armenian Orthodox Priest in Soviet Russia who, having a conspiracy beaten out of him by Stalin’s NKVD, managed to name as his co-conspirators every member of his congregation that he had buried in the past 3 years, thus enabling his tormentors to fill their quota with ‘real’ people. At least for now, this is a laughing matter. Should Comrade Yezhov‘s admirers take power, it might not be so nice. March 21st, 2018 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Meechan a.k.a. “Count Dankula”, the man who imperilled us all by making a funny video of a little dog lifting its paw like a Nazi salute, has been found guilty of a crime under the Communications Act 2003 at Airdrie Sheriff Court. If we are handing out punishments to obvious non-Nazis for doing stuff that reminds people of Nazis I don’t see why that Seig-Heiling pug should get away scot-free. March 20th, 2018 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
