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— Detlev Schlichter, 8th November 2012
— The Bank of England, 14th November 2012 November 14th, 2012 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Despite its obvious potential for oppression, for the first twenty years or so of its existence the Malicious Communications Act 1988 did not seem to do much harm. At least, if it did, I did not read about it. If I am wrong on this, tell me, but on the few occasions that I heard about prosecutions under the Act they seemed to be cases like this one where a man sent out emails purporting to be from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the aftermath of the 2005 tsunami falsely telling people that their relatives had been killed. That is certainly fraud, and something like assault, and I would argue that it is not a freedom of speech issue. “Malicious communication” seems a fair description. You are not safe just because a monster sleeps. Circa 2006 the government rediscovered the Act and decided to give it some exercise. In the period 2006-2010 the number of people against whom proceedings were launched followed this pattern: 182, 251, 329, 507, 694. The latest? Here is a story from the BBC: ‘Canterbury man arrested over burning poppy image’. He is not a Muslim apparently, and it is another reflection of the decline of free speech that my assumption that the BBC’s unnamed “Canterbury man” was left unnamed to conceal him being a Muslim was a perfectly reasonable one. In fact Linford House, 19, is a non-Muslim, white rugger bugger. There is a good article by Ally Fogg in the Guardian: Arrested for poppy burning? Beware the tyranny of decency. November 12th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Writes Fraser Nelson, Spectator editor. Given the current state of near-hysteria over the child sex abuse case surrounding the late Jimmy Savile and others, the recent MP expense excuse scandal and the case of newspapers having broken existing laws to hack phones, etc, we are now in a very dangerous situatiion where MPs from all parties have an incentive to try and licence the press and wider media, and secondly, that a large chunk of well-meaning but deluded members of the public apparently feel okay with such regulation, no matter how counterproductive or oppressive this might be. These are depressing times to be a friend of liberty, but we need to try and take whatever wins we can on the way. November 9th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This quote about the absurd Tory MP, Nadine Dorries, caught my eye: “Ladies, if you really want to be Gladstone and Disraeli, it’s best not to act like Thelma and Louise.” Of course, Dorries might secretly want to promote the idea in the public’s mind that MPs have now become so powerless and overshadowed by the doings of Brussels and so on that they don’t really have much point any more, so what is wrong with appearing on some moronic “reality TV” show? However, as a taxpayer, I resent paying this woman’s salary and providing her with an opportunity to make a prize twerp of herself. If she wants to make it in entertainment, she should do what thousands of other young actors, actresses and showbiz types have done. Oh well, at least it means we don’t have to talk about four more years of Obama just yet. My prediction that he would lose turned out to be a dud. Of course, for sheer entertainment value, we have Francois Hollande, the president of France, now that Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to four years in the slammer. Maybe the old “bunga-bunga” politician should be put on the show with Ms Dorries. November 8th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last week, on Wednesday October 31st, unaware that this was “Halloween Night”, and entirely for my own personal reasons, I happened to find myself at Piccadilly Circus, in the middle of London. Lots of people were dressed in funny costumes, with a definite bias towards monster masks and make-up that suggested extras in horror movies. I had my camera with me and snapped away. It was dark, but the big adverts flickering away above and beyond the scene ensured that it was quite well lit. Some at least of my snaps came out okay.  Halloween has been on the up and up in Britain for quite a while. But when I was a kid half a century ago and more, the big deal at this time of year was Guy Fawkes Night aka Bonfire Night aka Fireworks Night. Halloween was, then, even a distant American rumour. Guy Fawkes Night is supposedly tonight. Remember remember the fifth of November, etc. I can’t remember the rest of the words of that nursery rhyme or poem or whatever it is, but the date is imprinted on my brain. But Guy Fawkes Night seems to be fading in popularity even as Halloween has risen up to challenge it. It is now, as I finish this posting before its November 5th deadline expires, nearly midnight, and had I not, in my central London home, been listening out for explosions, I would have heard hardly any. Even with maximum alertness, I heard only a tiny few. I am told that many pet dogs are driven nearly mad with fear by these bangings. If only for the sake of these suffering dogs, I now wish that the Guy Fawkes habit would cease entirely. So, why is Halloween on the rise, and Guy Fawkes Night in decline? It can’t only be that people want to make life better for dogs. Let me now try to guess some of the ways. Let me start with the simple impracticality of arranging a bonfire these days. As life gets ever more urban, random clutches of combustible material just don’t get accumulated, the way such stuff did in the big suburban garden of my childhood, or out in the public places of Englefield Green, the outer London suburb we lived in, which really did have and still does have a big “green” bit. Simply for that reason, I should guess that Bonfire Night retains more of its old popularity in places like Englefield Green – even more so in the proper countryside – than it now does in central London. In Englefield Green, there is somewhere sensible to do it on a proper scale. But even that may not be enough for Englefield Green to continue Bonfire Nighting in a big way. The organising classes, the people who once would have organised public space Bonfire Night gatherings complete with a big bonfire and lots of fireworks, are now obsessed with health-and-safety, either because they really believe in it or because so many others do believe in it that the law now hovers over the slightest suggestion of un-safety. Bonfires? Fireworks? Worst than that, fireworks that children hold? Children being children, following Bonfire Nights in the olden times there were always a few stories of children burnt or even blinded by, e.g. mistaking a proper firework for a mere sparkly thing that you were supposed to hang on to. Then, the moral was: well, kids are kids, and those ones should have been more careful and have been better looked after. And: bad luck, how sad. Now, such incidents provoke nationally broadcast sermons about how We Need Tighter Regulation, and lawsuits that go on for ever. The Organising Classes would probably now like Bonfire Night to be made illegal, to the point where, if it survives, it will do so as an act not of harmless self entertainment, but of popular defiance against officialdom. But in truth, Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Night, is not a satisfactory vehicle for such defiance. After all, what Guy Fawkes Night (to choose that particularly pertinent title) celebrates, is the public execution, by the government, of a Catholic terrorist who tried to blow up Parliament. Guy Fawkes night is an officially sponsored celebration of a government victory over anti-government disruption. If we want to defy the government with a Guy Fawkes themed event, we would do better to fake up a Parliamentary explosion and dance around it in Guy Fawkes masks, like the ones worn in Vendetta, and now at every other political demo anyone tries to arrange in London. The thing that gets burned should be Parliament, not a “Guy”. Having already written the previous couple of sentences I watched this clip from Vendetta, that Guido Fawkes has up today, by way of celebrating November 5th and all that. And in that clip they do blow up Parliament, and a huge crowd all wear Guy Fawkes masks. But this doesn’t mean that Guy Fawkes Night is destined to continue as it was, more that the imagery of Guy Fawkes Night is, so to speak, being asset stripped and applied to other activities, activities which are not confined to just the one day in the year. As for the fireworks side of things, fireworks work best when resources are pooled, and when a precise time is agreed upon as the moment of celebration. I vividly recall visiting West Germany in the 1980s, over the New Year, and witnessing the night sky of Germany being lit up with ferociously Teutonic unanimity at precisely midnight, at the exact end of the old year and the exact beginning of the new. (I wish digital cameras had existed then.) And I recall thinking how much better this was as way to do fireworks than our British week of tiny little bangs and sputters and sparkles. The point was not that all these German fireworks were paid for by the government. Lots of them were impeccably freelance in their financing, as well as in their manufacture of course. The point was that everyone agreed about exactly when the fireworks would all be detonated, so that all could share the fun, and then go back indoors and carry on with their lives. Then the same thing happened on Millenium Night in London itself, just as it did everywhere else on the planet. This was far more impressive than any “Fireworks Night” display. Meanwhile, what of Halloween? What’s the appeal of that? Let me try to count at least some of the many reasons why Halloween, unlike Bonfire Night, is now on the rise. → Continue reading: Is Halloween supplanting Guy Fawkes Night in Britain? November 5th, 2012 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story has suddenly hit the attention of the Big Media – there were several reports about in the weekend – and it is true that the outbreak of a disease that kills ash trees is alarming. As a reminder of how virulent such diseases are, the UK was once full of elm trees and then the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak wiped them out, although some species of elm can, it is hoped, be bred to resist it. (Elm is a wood once used in things such as rudders and keels of boats). Ash has considerable uses in the furniture trades; the prospect of thousands of trees being wiped out is alarming enough. Charles Moore, writing in one of his regular berths, the Spectator, makes a point about what he sees as the ineffectual performance of Britain’s state-owned Forestry Commission. (The UK government tried to privatise it, but caved in when the FC and its supporters claimed this would bring the End of Civilisation as We Know It a bit nearer.) He has a point, and this quote caught my eye: “A friend of mine who owns an extremely rare ash forest in Scotland (a fraction of one which the Forestry Commission destroyed in the 1950s) tells he has received no alert at all from the Commission before or during the present crisis.” Moore says his own efforts to research the ash issue on the FC website has carried very little useful data on it. When I click on it, there is an item on the disease. By coincidence, the Forestry Commission’s performance comes under separate attack, in the same edition of the Spectator, by Matt Ridley. He blames it for spending more time on AGW alarmism than in dealing with the issue of imported bugs and diseases. This leads me to a broader point. These last few weeks have provided plenty of evidence that state-run organisations tend to be jealous of their own privileges to the detriment of the public interest they are supposed to serve. The BBC, allegedly, has employed a sexual predator against young children (Jimmy Savile) for decades, and when this was pointed out after the man died, the BBC pulled a documentary about this fact and chose to air some crummy “tribute” to the old creep instead. Then there is the National Health Service, that symbol of 1940s infatuation with central planning and anti-market prejudice. It allowed Savile to roam around at least one hospital, for many years. By a strange twist, it appears one reason why the whole issue was tamely covered were fears, so it is said, by journalists that their industry could be regulated if the UK government accepts recommendations by Lord Leveson, who has carried out an enormous and expensive enquiry into the phone hacking scandal. And in the same edition of the Spectator, the actor Hugh Grant comes out with this piece of statist-leaning rubbish:
It won’t end it, but it will be a step in the wrong direction. The fact that 77 per cent of the UK population want X is no more proof of the wisdom of state regulation than it would have been proof of the existence of witches or intelligent life on Mars.
Oh great. Just what we need. So how does Mr Grant imagine that, say, an internet-based blogger, or chatshow host, or whatever, is going to be regulated? If only qualified journalists (qualified where, and in what ways, and by whom?) are allowed, then a lot of people who have jobs in the media are going to either retrain, at cost and inconvenience, or leave. And does Mr Grant not imagine that the whole world of non-mainstream media is going to be affected by this? (Also, it is nonsense to suggest that broadcasters are not feeling constrained: the people who made the abandoned Savile documentary certainly were, and I believe, were constrained to an extent by what the BBC is.) Anyway, the reason why I don’t want the media to be regulated in the way that Grant wants is to avoid yet more parts of this country’s affairs succumbing to the same smug, inward-looking mentality that we see at the BBC, the NHS, a state forestry organisation, or whatever. The sins of the British media, such as the newspapers, are well known. What Grant does not seem to mention is that the UK also operates some of the most ferocious libel laws; this country does not have anything like the US First Amendment; and if there are serious wrongs (and hacking phones is wrong), there are already plenty of laws to prevent that from happening, or punishing those when caught. From dead ash trees to a British actor. We cover a lot of ground on this blog. November 5th, 2012 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
You tax businesses, then give them the money back and call it a growth fund? – Eamonn Butler is not impressed by Lord Heseltine’s plans to stimulate the British economy. October 31st, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
A recent blog post by Tim Worstall describes the lack of understanding that surrounds this embarrassing condition. He recalls his experiences as a chronic sufferer since childhood:
A SORAS survivor among his commenters, ‘Chris’, had an even more overwhelming attack,
Another commenter, ‘Richard’ was a witness as the syndrome struck down a friend.
Be aware that initial symptoms can seem trivial – hearing a person who has lived in England for half his life say, “put it down by there” within seconds of setting foot of the platform at Swansea station may not, at first, seem cause for concern. However without treatment “by there” can become interjections of “mun” or even “Ych y fi” with terrifying speed. Although the disease is most common in its homolocutic form, in which people suddenly revert to an accent they thought they had abandoned years ago but did actually have at one time, it also has a heterolocutic variant. At the London SORAS support group, I recently met Berenice (28) who blames the loss of her job at an advertising agency specialising in political campaigns on the heterolocutic form of the disease. At a creative meeting, she prefaced her query as to whether an advert suggesting that first time female voters might like to grant Ed Miliband the traditional jus primae noctis would really resonate with the youth demographic with the words “Not being funny or nuffink”, and was fired on the spot. Berenice was infected after discussing the weather with a work experience girl. Some sufferers choose to carry an information card or medical alert bracelet in order to assist first responders when the victim himself can no longer communicate verbally in a way normal people can understand. ‘Quentin’ (not his real name), a plumber’s mate struck down with the disease after installing a combi boiler in this right posh house up on Primrose Hill, is very grateful he did. While just about still able to speak comprehensibly he called an ambulance to say he had “the most frightful case of SORAS” before lapsing into a kind of idiodialect in which the only words medical staff could understand were “yah” and “darling.” It was only his desperate gesticulation towards the bracelet while strapped to a medical trolley that stopped him being wheeled into the genito-urinary ward. Related conditions such as TIGFAF – Talking In a Generic Foreign Accent to Foreigners – can be even more distressing. October 30th, 2012 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
Britain’s charities and quangos are now stuffed to the gunwales with Labour placemen, writes Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph. Not news to you, perhaps, but news to many. What can be done? Dante placed the simonists in the Eighth Circle, turned upside down in large baptismal fonts cut into rock, with their feet set ablaze, but I’m thinking in the shorter term. October 25th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
You have to hand it to Peter Oborne, the newspaper columnist, for his ability to think several contradictory thoughts at the same time when writing for the need for the head of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten (a former Tory party chairman and Hong Kong governor), to resign over the Savile sex abuse scandal:
Well, if Oborne thinks that the BBC, an organisation that has the privilege of taking revenue in the form of a tax (the licence fee) levied on anyone who owns a television, regardless of their viewing habits, is a “great national institution”, and “not controlled by the state”, which is laughable, then how does he go on to say this:
But if the BBC is a “great institution” – which I contest – then the fact that it has been “colonised and captured” by such terrible people must surely point to the problem that any state-privileged institution with certain monopoly powers, such as the BBC, can be captured by such people. The point is not to create such bodies with such privileges in the first place, since they almost always end up being captured or politically manipulated; or, to establish such powerful checks and balances that bad behaviour is rapidly dealt with. (In the case of the army and the legal profession, even they are not free of problems.) The foolishness of Oborne is in his naïve belief that all that is necessary is for good and honest people to be put in charge of X or Y, and all will be well. The problem is not the people, but the monopolistic system in place. In all state bodies where an element of state privilege is involved, and where the competitive force of the market does not apply, the way to the top is often through political scheming rather than simple merit, although no doubt there are elements of meritocracy involved, at least in the early years of an institution when there is plenty of idealism in the air. And the reference to the Murdoch media empire is typically misleading and gratuitous, since Murdoch has, in the face of the outrage about the behaviour of some of his journalists, shut down a newspaper (the News of the World), suffered major shareholder damage, and seen the potential breakup of his empire. Ask yourself this: in a year’s time, does anyone expect anything similar to happen to the organisation known, hilariously, as “Auntie”? Needless to say, I should add that some of the same problems apply to the National Health Service, the UK’s socialised medical system which, despite some tweaks, still runs on the same quasi-Soviet basis as when it was created in the late 1940s. Savile was able, so it is alleged, to abuse young patients in at least one of its hospitals (Stoke Mandeville), and it is appalling that his activities were not stopped. I am not saying that a completely private medical system would be free of such monsters, but one has to ask whether the public’s almost religious view of the NHS, despite everything, is a hindrance to clear thinking about such matters. October 25th, 2012 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Any organisation that is not dependent upon its customers, whether a state or private monopoly, will eventually become self-serving. During my career I was party to many conversations about how to maximise profit for the owners of our businesses and provide attractive employment terms for our staff, but they all turned in the end to what our customers would want, or at least accept. We spent much more time worrying how to please customers than please ourselves. Satisfied customers who choose to come back are the only guarantee for owners, managers and workers in the private sector that they can achieve their personal goals. As will all state enterprises funded by taxation, the BBC has become, in effect, a worker’s co-operative. The “customers” have to pay regardless, so they become irrelevant and the focus turns to the interests of its own people. No private business would survive the shit storm that is heading the BBC’s way. The share price would now be collapsing as investors tried to get out before the lawsuits begin. I confidently and sadly predict however that the BBC will survive. It has the coercive power of the state behind it and will simply take your money to settle the cases. It is the left establishment’s propaganda arm and they will rally to restore its reputation. We are about to have an instructive, but depressing, demonstration of the realities of modern Britain. We will be able to compare and contrast the BBC news and current affairs teams’ handling of this story with their campaign against News International. Just imagine if the phone-hackers had worked for Newsnight and Savile had worked for Sky News! – Tom Paine comments on the Saville scandal at The Last Ditch. Follow the first link there and read the entire posting. Better yet, if you have the time or can make it, follow the last link and read the entire blog. The latest posting there is entitled QC appointed to advise the BBC over Savile case. Says Tom Paine: “The expenditure of your money on the BBC’s defence begins.” October 23rd, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andrew Mitchell, the government enforcer, allegedly calls a policeman a “*u**i** pleb”. George Osborne, the finance minister, boards a train with a second class ticket and proceeds to sit in first class. MPs, of all parties, are found to be scamming the taxpayer by owning one house and living in another – no, I don’t understand how the scam works either. So, why are we getting so many scandals now? Is it because this is a particularly bad time for it? I don’t think so. My guess is that the amount of obnoxious behaviour by politicians is more or less constant over time. The variable is the press. Older readers, and those with a fascination for history, will remember the spectacular collapse of the Conservative government in the mid-1990s. Originally elected in 1979, for over 10 years there was an almost complete absence of sleaze stories. About the only one I can think off the top of my head was Dennis Thatcher’s use of No.10-headed notepaper. And then, all of a sudden, in about 1992 they all started coming out: cash for questions, three in a bed, secret love children, more cash for questions, affairs with actresses. Every day a new scandal. As I said, it seems improbable that Tory MPs were for 10 years purer than the driven snow and then, all of a sudden, dropped all principle like it was a form of radioactive waste. No, what happened was they had always been acting like this; it was just that now the press started reporting it. And why now (or, is it then?)? Because of Black Wednesday. Black Wednesday – Britain’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in September 1992 – had demonstrated in the clearest possible terms that the government didn’t know what it was doing when it came to the economy. At that moment the press got angry. So long as they believed that these people knew how to ensure prosperity they were prepared to turn a blind eye to the odd peccadillo. But now they realised that they had been hood-winked. After that any Conservative was fair game. Now, Cameron’s government has not had an ERM moment as such. But then again, it has never demonstrated any great degree of competence. Faced with the greatest economic calamity in living memory (or the Second Great Depression as Brian likes to call it) it has drifted and the press has started to notice. The feeling of hoodwinkedness and corresponding anger is now fully fledged. I unconfidently predict a stream of scandals until Cameron leaves office. October 20th, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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