Guy Herbert: Theresa May proven worse than cancer. It is a fine slogan
Perry de Havilland: Guy’s remark needs to be SQOTD
Guy Herbert: Along with my NHS slogan I hope: “Better than Greece”
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June 9th, 2017 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Like most of my fellow Samizdata contributors, I imagine, I am watching the election results in the UK and the projections from exit polls suggesting that the Tories may not even have a working majority. And about 10 days or so before the full, formal negotiation process is due to start over the UK departure from the European Union. It is a non-trivial possibility that Brexit may either not happen or at all, or take a form on such a humiliating basis that it is not really a departure from the EU at all. As already noted, the idea that it was smart strategy for the Tories to pursue a centrist, pre-Thatcherite, interventionist agenda, was always dumb. Not least because to make a positive case, it was necessary to stress the pro-enterprise case for leaving the EU, rather than simply promising to introduce the very kind of dirigiste policies that the UK was supposed to be freeing itself from by leaving. Mrs May, does not have it in her to make a positive case. It has come to this: a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, Marxist, hater of Israel, cheerleader for the IRA, Hamas, and a foe of open markets and the West in general could be close to holding power in a few days’ time. I seriously hope I am wrong. But whatever happens, I think it is highly probable that May may not be in Downing Street for very long. June 8th, 2017 | 103 comments - (Comments are closed)
The main political insight of Thatcher and Reagan was that parties of the center-right must be parties of economic growth. Having wavered since, those parties now risk losing their way entirely. Some centrists will argue, quirks of this campaign notwithstanding, that Mrs. May shows how to win an election. The important question for conservatives to ask is: To what end? – Joseph C. Sternberg, Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) June 7th, 2017 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
We happily say ‘Christian fundamentalist’ about people who are Christian and fundamentalist. We use ‘Buddhist extremists’ to describe violent Buddhist groups in Myanmar. And yet Islam is ringfenced from tough discussion; phrases which at some level include the word ‘Islam’ are tightly policed; criticism of Islam is deemed a mental illness: Islamophobia. This is incredibly dangerous. This censorious flattery of Islam is, in my view, a key contributor to the violence we have seen in recent years. Because when you constantly tell people that any mockery of their religion is tantamount to a crime, is vile and racist and unacceptable, you actively invite them, encourage them in fact, to become intolerant. You license their intolerance. You inflame their violent contempt for anyone who questions their dogmas. You provide a moral justification for their desire to punish those who insult their religion. June 6th, 2017 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
One probable outcome of the emergence of knife wielding jihadis on British streets will be an increase in British people arming themselves as well. Of course, this will be treated as a bigger threat than the jihadis by the state, but one might speculate how many unarmed people would have been killed and wounded if the jihadis had not chosen to attack in well protected central London but rather some part of the country where armed policeman are few and far between. June 4th, 2017 | 160 comments - (Comments are closed)
For many people, 9/11 remade their political world. Excluding 9/11 itself, has continuing Islamist terrorism in the years since 2001, such as last night’s attack at London Bridge, changed your beliefs? June 4th, 2017 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Taxing wealth reverses the relationship between citizen and state: rather than it being in charge of protecting our life, liberty, and property, we now work for it. There are no more proud freeholders; citizens become meek leaseholders with the government in charge. Our property becomes a temporary privilege, to be used until accumulated taxes return to the ultimate owner, the state.” – Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 1 June. (Behind a paywall.) June 2nd, 2017 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
Let us put to bed the idea that Labour voters are well meaning people who just happen to have different ideas about economic policy, or are voting Labour out of habit (“my father voted Labour – so I am voting Labour”). People who vote Labour THIS TIME are voting for someone, Jeremy Corbyn, to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – and they are doing so in the full knowledge that he is an enemy of Britain (and the West in general) and an ally of the terrorists – both Marxist and Islamist terrorists. May 30th, 2017 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Historically, it seems to me that Mr Corbyn has been more comfortable in the company of people who make private bombs than those who sell private bonds – Mr. Ed of this parish, who may or may nor be a talking horse but make sense regardless. May 28th, 2017 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Post-Brexit Britain will no longer be bound by an EU Code of Conduct that seeks to police the online speech of over 500 million citizens and ban ‘illegal online hate speech’. Or an EU law that encourages the criminalisation of ‘insult’. Or a proposed EU law that undermines fundamental freedoms by purging Europe of every last shred of supposed ‘discrimination’ […] There is just one, small problem: when it comes to censorship and the quashing of civil liberties, the UK doesn’t need any encouragement from the EU, or anybody else. May 28th, 2017 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday the BBC’s Andrew Neil interviewed Jeremy Corbyn. A link to the interview is here. Starting at 21:52 the discussion goes as follows: -*- Neil: And as part of the investing in the future you plan to borrow a lot to do that. How much will you borrow? Corbyn: What we will do, is for the public ownership elements there’ll be an exchange for, erm, bonds for shares in it. Neil: But what is a bond? Corbyn: A government – a government bond. Neil: Yes, it’s a debt instrument. It’s borrowing. Corbyn: Well, it’s a bond – it’s a government bond which would be serviced by the income from that service, but in addition we would have control of it. Take – Neil: But you would still have to borrow. Bonds are borrowing. You would borrow. Corbyn: Take the water industry, for example, which has been a method of siphoning off profits out of this country to offshore companies that made a lot of money at the same time leaving us with expensive water and in some cases very bad levels of pollution. Neil: You would need to borrow – I understand the case but you would need to borrow to buy the utilities. Corbyn: No, it’s not a – it’s a swap of the shares for a government bond. Neil: But if you’re issuing bonds, Mr Corbyn, you’re issuing government debt. You are borrowing. Corbyn: Issuing bonds that we own which would be paid for by the profits from the industries, so instead of the profits – Neil: But you’ve said you would cut the water utilities’ profits. That means you wouldn’t have the money to pay for the bonds. Corbyn: Andrew, instead of the profits being siphoned off they would remain here. That’s an advantage, surely? Neil: National debt is already an incredible 1.7 trillion. If you borrow to invest on top of the 50 we do, another 25 you say, you need to borrow to nationalise, you may have to borrow – if the IFS is right – for day to day spending. Corbyn: No, we’re absolutely clear we will not borrow for day to day spending. Neil: But you might have to, if the IFS is right. Our national debt, which has already soared under the current government would soar even more under Labour, wouldn’t it? Corbyn: No, because the – we have the rule that we would only borrow to invest for the future. We would not borrow for revenue expenditure. I mean that’s sort of a sensible rule which has not always been followed. Neil: A technical rise. Corbyn: And what we’d get in return is investment in better services. That in turn would encourage economic growth. Listen, we have a huge imbalance of investment. Far too much goes to London and the south east in transport infrastructure. Far too little goes to the north east, north west and Yorkshire. Those issues have to be addressed. Hence the National Investment Bank, which will be regionally based all across the UK. -*- According to the polls it is looking more likely, though still unlikely, that Mr Corbyn will be our next prime minister. So I would like to know what he means by the above. My base assumption is that he has very little idea what he is talking about. But I must confess that if Andrew Neil were to ask me what a bond is, my answer would be scarcely less waffly than Mr Corbyn’s. Can Samizdata readers explain it all for me and readers like me? What exactly is wrong with his proposals, if anything? May 27th, 2017 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
The post-terror cultivation of passivity speaks to a profound crisis of – and fear of – the active citizen. It diminishes us as citizens to reduce us to hashtaggers and candle-holders in the wake of serious, disorientating acts of violence against our society. It decommissions the hard thinking and deep feeling citizens ought to pursue after terror attacks. Indeed, in some ways this official post-terror narrative is the unwitting cousin of the terror attack itself. Where terrorism pursues a war of attrition against our social fabric, seeking to rip away bit by bit our confidence and openness and sense of ourselves as free citizens, officialdom and the media diminish our individuality and our social role, through instructing us on what we may feel and think and say about national atrocities and discouraging us from taking responsibility for confronting these atrocities and the ideological and violent rot behind them. The terrorist seeks to weaken our resolve, the powers-that-be want to sedate our emotions, retire our anger, reduce us to wet-eyed performers in their post-terror play. It’s a dual assault on the individual and society. May 24th, 2017 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
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