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From the Daily Mail: Polish prince challenges Nigel Farage to a DUEL with swords over Ukip slurs on immigrants And why not? Resort to the field of honour would be in accordance with prime ministerial precedent. Those were the days. The Sussex Advertiser of 23rd March 1829 blandly recorded, “His Grace was seen riding through the Horse-Guards at six o’clock on Saturday morning, and returned to Downing-street at eight.” April 13th, 2015 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 On the NHS, that has gone far beyond a joke. It is not enough to value the idea of universal healthcare free at the point of use as a concept – one must “love the NHS”. Doctors and nurses are not doing their job in difficult circumstances – they’re fighting on the front line. Nobody wants to reform the NHS – Labour leader Ed Miliband wants to “rescue” it. The debate is uncritical, nostalgic, what The Economist called “ideological, ahistorical bunkum” – and nothing short of cowardly. Andy Burnham, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, has warned that there are “24 hours to save the NHS” so often over the past five years that people are beginning to doubt his grasp of Babylonian concepts of time. April 11th, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
A overtly Marxist Guardianista wants to replace Jeremy Clarkson. The Horror. The Horror! You would think someone with a Russian name would know how well Marxism turned out the last time… April 10th, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the late 1970s, the top rate of income tax in the UK was over 80 per cent and the top one per cent of income tax payers paid just 11 per cent of the total. Rates are dramatically lower today, and the one per cent paid 27.7 per cent of the 2011/12 total. The idea you get more money out of the rich by putting the screws on runs counter to the facts. April 10th, 2015 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet again the utterly dismal David Cameron is being generous with other people’s money:
Is Labour even worse that this dismal shower? Yes, without a doubt, but the only difference is how fast the state marches, not the direction in which it marches. I am old enough to remember when the Tories under Edward Health nationalised companies, so even historically it is hardly like comparing chalk and cheese. No wonder there is talk of making voting compulsory, given there is hardly any difference between the main parties. April 10th, 2015 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Labour Party has stirred up the usually rather complacent wealth management sector in the UK by vowing to end the so-called “non-dom” system under which a foreigner who wants to spend some time in the country can avoid paying tax on all his/her worldwide income and capitals gains so long as this money is kept outside the UK. If such a non-dom has lived in the country for seven years, they must pay an annual levy and depending on the duration, that annual levy is as high as £90,000. A study by University College, London, published in 2013, concluded that the system brought in more revenue for the UK than was being lost by the absence of such a system. At face value, the non-dom system might look like a great deal for a person who is worth tens of billions of pounds, dollars or whatever and who “only” pays several thousands per year to live in the UK. But if such a person’s wealth has been largely generated outside the country and is kept outside it, what is unfair about this position? If Mr Stinking Rich brought those billions to the UK, he would have to pay a thudding great tax bill. Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, must know that, or if he doesn’t, he is being reckless. The whole idea that a person should pay tax to the country of his/her birth regardless of having not lived there for a period – as is the case with the odious worldwide US tax regime – cuts against the idea that one should pay taxes that focus on where you actually live. Matthew Sinclair has a good piece here on the issue. From a point of narrow party politics, I suppose Ed Miliband and his colleagues think they are being clever at playing the class war card and hope to trap opponents by having to defend the non-dom system. I notice that whenever a weapons-grade knob such as Miliband makes such a crowd-pleasing proposal, it is seen as a “trap” and that therefore the other side are told that it isn’t wise to oppose it. But this sort of cowardice-as-a-tactic approach merely favours the bully. A braver, and ultimately better, argument is to state that it is in the UK’s interest to encourage internationally-minded investors and entrepreneurs (so long as they are not criminals and jihadi nutcases) to come to the UK and enrich themselves and everyone else. To pander to the zero-sum, dog-in-the-manger mindset of Miliband and others is also foolish. There is also a broader point to be made here: such attacks represent, at the margins, part of a rollback of globalisation, of the free movement of capital and people, a process from which London, as a global financial centre, has been a mighty beneficiary. Far too many people in the banking and financial markets more broadly have fought shy of voicing their concerns about the demented nature of so much “banker-bashing” and attacks on inequality recently. Consider the respect granted to Thomas Piketty’s fatally flawed claims about inequality and his call for draconian taxes on capital. It is sometimes stated – I heard such a statement recently at a gathering – that “neo-liberals” (ie, classical liberals) have “won” the argument and that we now need to move on. How complacent that is. The arguments for freedom and capitalism are being lost in the UK, or at the very least, they aren’t being made very effectively. April 8th, 2015 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
In brief, the SNP’s dislike of the UK is more that the UK might be a brake on their statism than anything else. Hatred of the English is actually hatred of the (vestigial) freedom that England represents. – Commenter Mr. Ed April 8th, 2015 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Due to come into force in August 2016, the Named Person initiative is truly dystopian. Once, it was only abandoned or orphaned children who became charges of the state; now, all Scottish children will effectively be wards of the state under a new, vast system of, in essence, shadow parenting. In an expression of alarming distrust in parents, and utter contempt for the idea of familial sovereignty and privacy, the state in Scotland wants to attach an official to every kid and to keep tabs on said kid’s physical and moral wellbeing. There’ll be a state spy in every family. In Scotland, Big Brother is not only watching you (it was recently revealed that Scotland has 4,114 public-space CCTV cameras and “camera vans,” which drive through towns filming the allegedly suspect populace); he’s also watching your kids. April 7th, 2015 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
The dismal forces are indeed massing as I predicted. That well documented fountain of fraudulent claims the NSPCC and all the usual dismal censors, from assorted statists of the nominal right like Sajid Javid, to the usual leftists are indeed starting to metastasise into another effort to control the internet. For the children of course. We need products than make proxy servers and geolocation spoofing default-easy for the 95 IQ user, something people just use because it is cheap and largely invisible… with end to end encryption and all those other things that states hate integrated in at the lowest level possible. April 4th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Back in the 1986, we actually had that bastion of idiotarianism, Channel Four, run a program called “The New Enlightenment: the rebirth of liberalism”, about Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman et al. But I would have never guessed that in 2015 we would be experiencing a New Endarkenment. Fuck you. No seriously, fuck every last one of you who turned off those lights and made parts of glorious London look like North Korea. Well my house was a gleaming beacon I can assure you, with every single light turned on. Maybe I will purchased some searchlights for next year’s endarkenment. Yeah, this is my ‘hang over’ from ‘Earth Hour’ rather than this incident per se. April 2nd, 2015 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Metropolitan Police have today dug up the remains of Richard III, a week after he was re-interred in Leicester after resting under what became a car park after 500 years, in an exercise reportedly designed to show their commitment to tackling historic child abuse. Executing a warrant under Schedule 5 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 permitting them to exhume the bones, they claim to be looking for any DNA evidence linking Richard III to the deaths of the Princes in the Tower. A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: ‘The Princes were held in the Tower of London, which is now within the Metropolitan Police District. As a service, we are committed to tackling all historic allegations of child abuse, even this instance of child abduction and a possible double murder. Whilst there is obviously no possibility of charges arising from this investigation, it will serve as a signal to those who may feel reluctant about coming forward to report abuse that there is no one who is above the law and the highest in the land will be investigated’. The spokeswoman also said that the timing of the exhumation was not an accident, they did not wish to prejudice any investigation by incurring publicity before Richard III’s burial, and to maintain operational secrecy they waited until after burial, as to have examined the bones beforehand would have meant applying to the Ministry of Justice for a variation on the licence granted to allow the bones to be tested, which might have led to political interference. The spokeswoman further justified the investigation by saying that it would provide a valuable exercise in testing the boundaries of forensic techniques, and may enable more recent ‘cold cases’ to be re-opened by stretching the boundaries of forensic science. The investigation follows a number of raids on the homes of VIPs by police investigating allegations of historic child abuse, and the news that late Sir Cyril Smith, a former Liberal Democrat heavyweight MP, was arrested at a children’s home and then promptly released following intervention from senior officers despite being found with two boys. Cynics might wonder if the raid had been timed to occur after the Dissolution of Parliament on Monday and as the General Election starts, to avoid the matter being raised in Parliament by sceptical MPs concerned about police wasting resources by stunts. April 1st, 2015 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I assume this risible claim by NSPCC (the quango responsible for the discredited family destroying ‘satanic‘ moral panic of the 1980’s/90’s), is priming the pump for the next assault on civil liberties to justify its existence, yes?
…”researchers found” is a phase that is pure gold, it is not? Perhaps children have fundamentally changed since I was one, but when I was in my early teens, if I saw a ‘helpline’ being advertised that could assist me regarding porn, I would have called it on the assumption they were going to help me find the ‘good stuff’ rather than those hairy porkers in Mayfair or Men Only 😉 March 31st, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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