The worthy IEA are hosting a panel discussion tonight called: The future of the BBC.
Guess what I would like to see for the BBC…
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… but then they discover that the UK has made it illegal to fly there! Rats foiled again! Yeah that should work, hahaha 😀 And on a related note, the three formerly British girls who ran off to Syria to become ‘Jihadi Brides’ have been located at a specific address in Raqqa. My only question was, does the RAF know? March 8th, 2015 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Nick Cohen laments the ‘the sinister treatment of dissent at the BBC‘, as if the state owned tax funded media operation had ever been some haven of even handed rectitude and objectivity.
Why would the top people at the BBC be all that different to any other part of the British state? When being a state body means you cannot go bust as long as there are taxpayers to be farmed, the people suckling from the public teat serve up such wonders as the police and social services did in Rotherham, or the NHS in Staffordshire Hospital. Had the Staffs scandal happened privately, I are quite certain there would be howls in the Guardian for all private hospitals to be nationalised and new ones made illegal, yet I am told the NHS is still the ‘envy of the world‘. It takes a double shot of navy proof state issued rum to not expect the worst from any aspect of the tax funded Leviathan. And the BBC is a tax funded arm of the state. March 8th, 2015 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thus reports the BBC:
If David Davis is the nice fellow that I think he is, he should send Rifkind a friendly ‘thank you’ note for making such a kind remark 😉 Sometimes I think David Davis is the best Prime Minister we never had, the British Barry Goldwater. But instead we got that twerp David Cameron. February 27th, 2015 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Play the audio in this story and see if you can suppress an involuntary wince of sympathy: Incredibly Awkward Interview With Natalie Bennett. (Ms Bennett – a Samizdata commenter – is currently leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.) Kudos to Nick Ferrari who can evidently do what so many media folk cannot: order-of-magnitude mental arithmetic. Life is unfair. If The Boris had been on the hot seat he’d have said, “Oh cripes, you’ve ker-splonked me there!” and everyone would have loved him all the more. February 24th, 2015 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
So argues Mary Dejevsky in the Guardian. Her piece could have done with a clearer separation of the several different issues involved; freedom of speech, freedom of movement, state surveillance of all travellers, targeted spying on individuals, and above all the question of what difference it makes when the potential recruits to ISIS are minors. Nonetheless I broadly agree – the British state should not seek to prevent adult citizens leaving the UK merely because it suspects they wish to become members of ISIS – or to kill members of ISIS. Whether state assistance in the form of weapons or subsidy should be available to the latter admirable group, or whether any of the former group seeking to return should be allowed to do so in exchange for cooperation with MI6, are questions that even the purest of libertarians might find worthy of debate. The crimes of ISIS have been so flagrant and atrocious that the world is entitled to see any adult, male or female, volunteering to live under its standard (let alone bearing arms) as hostis humani generis and to exterminate them without any fuss about human rights – but wait till they get there. It is the burnings, beheadings and rapes that are the crimes, not getting on a plane to Turkey. February 23rd, 2015 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Another Angry Voice seems to be a bog-standard lefty-green blog bashing out mostly boring and predictable articles about how all the political parties are too right wing and if only proper lefties could get in power we could have an even bigger state and poor people would stop being wage slaves and… yawn. What bores me most is the obsession with rich vs. poor, when the real battle is state vs. individual, so it all misses the point and does not seem worth engaging with. But some of his UKIP-bashing is doing the rounds on Facebook. And it is making me want to vote for UKIP even more. According to AAV, UKIP are Thatcherite ex-tories, which just makes them sound like the proper Tories that the current lot are not, which is, if not ideal, an improvement. In another article in which AAV is confused about the meaning of “tax avoidance” and “tax evasion”, he points out that “Farage declared that ‘straightforward’ tax avoidance isn’t ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ and that most tax-dodgers are only good-hearted people trying to rip off the rest of the taxpaying public for the good of their children!” Translation: Farage understands that of course people should not voluntarily hand over more tax than they are required to pay. I like Farage even more. We also learn that UKIP MEP members do not bother to turn up to the European Parliament (why encourage them?), that Farage did not bother to engage with the EU on fish policies (let’s just ignore them and leave the EU), that they voted against clamping down on ivory trade (it makes more sense to legalise it) and that they have not voted in favour of taxing foreigners for some imagined benefits to the UK. Finally, we learn that the Green Party is the only other route out of the EU, but unlike UKIP, they will not give us any “neoliberal orthodoxy of privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts”. That seals the deal, then. Addendum: In unrelated news, my current favourite computer game has been labelled Thatcherite by an idiot. I should read these kinds of bloggers more to discover more good things that they hate. February 17th, 2015 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
This obsession with tax avoidance is not the mark of a morally enlightened society. It is the mark of a society that is refusing to face up to the real problems in its midst. There is no moral clarity to be gained from gawping at individuals’ tax returns, only moral scapegoating. February 16th, 2015 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are now living in a corporate economy. We are living in an economy where capitalism, free markets, enterprise and ambition have been replaced and are often crushed by a modern form of corporatism, which is supported by all three political parties and the trade union movement. I by no means agree with Farage on everything (to put it mildly) but I cannot argue at all with that remark. February 13th, 2015 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
HMRC seems to be a law unto itself. Another inept quango making arbitrary decisions as it goes along February 11th, 2015 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Obey and you have nothing to fear.
Many people in the UK clearly think the book 1984 was an interesting suggestion rather than a warning. I know what that reminds me of. February 10th, 2015 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is fascinating to see Members of Parliament and Rabbis joining forces to ban free speech. Indeed it is even more fascinating to see Rabbis and Imams (and indeed the Pope) all steadily uniting to undermine one of the primary pillars upon which modern liberal western civilisation rests, which is to say freedom of expression. And of course I mean liberal not in the nonsensical debased American sense of the word (by which they mean something that is illiberal). February 9th, 2015 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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