The election has dealt a major blow to the political class, though it hasn’t been a catharsis; we still hate them.
– Raedwald
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It is amusing to be honest. The Tory party faces a PM with no actual mandate, who is as charismatic as a bowl of cold Scottish porridge and who has presided over economically calamitous times… and the best the Tory Party can do is… 36.1 percent. I now look forward to some bracing political paralysis and hopefully the unedifying mess of a hanged… I mean hung parliament… hanged would be most edifying indeed. With a little luck the inevitable steaming pile of discordant political prima donnas will further discredit the whole establishment with their antics. I can only hope that in the coming months this period will do lasting damage to the Tory party in order to provide a wedge of daylight for the likes of Libertarians and UKIP to exploit. The ‘Middle of the Road’ is where you generally find road kill. May 7th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Well, it was Samizdata wot won it. Perry de Havilland said a plague on all their houses last week. Chris Cooper said last night that he’d voted for none of the above. And the result? None of the above. A plague on all their houses. Who says blogs don’t have any influence? Here are the various plagues: Conservatives: A horror story. No absolute majority. Will Cameron manage to contrive an absolute majority after another general election? (Think 1974.) Will he be able to contrive any kind of government in the meantime? Maybe and maybe, but there’s a world out there, and what Cameron has to do about that may make him even less electorally appealing than he is now. Cameron has been all at sea ever since the boom went bust. As have … Labour: A horror story. In terms of percentage of the vote, Michael Foot did a tiny bit worse in 1983 than Brown. That’s Brown’s only comfort. But now, do they try to cling on or do they walk away? Neither choice makes them look good. Unelectedness versus “we made the mess but the rest of you must sort it out”. LibDems: A horror story. Cleggmania fizzled out ignominiously. Yet they can still decide everything, in the short run. So which of two profoundly unappealing big parties do the LibDems pick? Neither choice makes them look good. Plus: do they plunge the political system into a huge row about proportional representation? But the problem is not how they’re picked; it’s what the hell they now do about that world out there. And what the hell kind of “mandate” do the LibDems now have to demand anything at all? Yet if Clegg comes away from all this with nothing, what will his party think? Others: BNP, UKIP, Greens, etc. My impression is UKIP did not too shabbily, but not too shabbily doesn’t really count. At least the Greenies got a stuffing. SNP hardly laid a glove on Labour in Scotland. Just heard a politician talking on the telly – I think somebody called Tony McNulty:
Boris Johnson agrees. Now I’m watching him say that the voters hate all the politicians, and have found a way to make all of them suffer. All those us who wanted the whole damn lot of them squirming as a result of this election have now got our wish. Now Brown is making a speech. He’s trying to cling on. May 7th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Written by a character called Paul B, over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog. I happen increasingly to agree. While I yield to no-one in my admiration for much of what Scotland has brought to Britain and to the wider world – this book is a wonderful description – the brutal fact is that Scotland is now exerting an outrageously one-sided, and disproportionate, influence on British affairs. Its politicians have carefully natured a client state in the big cities such as Glasgow, where a huge proportion of the locals subsist on state benefits. If, as the Coffee House commenter suggests, we were to make it possible for Scotland to operate as an independent nation, then the Scottish Labour Party machine, a profoundly corrupt one and similar to the Chicago Democrat machine that gave the US Barack Obama would no longer exert its malign influence on England’s affairs. It is time to cut Scotland loose, both for its interest, and more to the point, for those who want to see the back of the Scottish Labour Party and its arm-lock on UK affairs for the past decade and a half. In the meantime, I suspect that the international bond market is going to have the casting vote on what happens next after this inconclusive election. May 7th, 2010 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
An hour after the polls closed, and the BBC has tortured its exit poll to death. They keep on talking it down, because they can’t believe that the LIb Dems can really have lost seats, as the exit poll says. A single election result is in. A rock-solid Labour majority has been slightly dented by the Conservative swing. Vernon Bogdanor extrapolates it to say that the Conservatives will get an overall majority. The limited pleasure of the election broadcast will fade soon. I enjoyed the first few minutes as the BBC’s ludicrously garish setup battled with good old-fashioned gremlins. One panel of a giant bar graph of the projected seats vanished for several minutes. Michael Gove’s artificially rejuvenated mug loomed at us while his mike failed utterly. Jeremy Paxman bellowed at an interviewee as if he could make him respond faster that way, for all the world as if he’d never encountered satellite delay before. Mariella Frostrup thinks it’s terrible that we’re all in (strangely pronounced) thrall to the markets, and what a pity we haven’t invented a better and more humane way to manage our finances. Watching her say that makes me want to go to bed, and not in a good way. Oh bloody hell. Jeremy Vine is knocking down huge trains of CGI dominoes for some reason. Generations yet unborn will injure themselves laughing at the Beeb’s presentation tonight. May 6th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s conceivable, although I promise nothing, that I may do some of this “live blogging” thing, come the early hours of tomorrow morning. It depends on my mood at the time, and on such things as computer availability, dongle workability and so forth and so on. Somehow I doubt that Perry de Havilland will be hanging on every result. And oh look, he just said it again, see immediately below! So, if none of us here manage it, but if you nevertheless hunger for this kind of thing, how about paying attention this this guy?
Well, if it’s your kind of thing, he says he’s going to start around 10 pm. Maybe Perry might even want to give it a glance. He and Simon Clark of Taking Liberties, who wrote the words quoted above and to whom thanks for the email alerting me to this, do seem to be on the same wavelength. May 6th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Benedict Brogan wrote a Telegraph article called “Election 2010: a bracing reminder of the price we pay for political freedom“, in which he notes the cost to Britain’s young soldiers in Afghanistan in juxtaposition with the scenes of election tumult. Well I can think of several arguably good reasons for western troops to be fighting in Afghanistan but I sure hate to think of anyone dying for political freedom… freedom, sure… but that qualifying word in front does rather change things. Politics is what we call the struggle to control the means of collective coercion. It may be a process we cannot avoid but it is, at best, a necessary evil… and most of the time it is just evil without the necessary. Freedom is essential and worth fighting for… but anyone who died to defend political anything died for all the wrong reasons. What does ‘political freedom’ even mean in Britain? The right to vote who gets to rape you? Britain’s political system is not something to get all misty eyed about because most politics has nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom” but rather forcing people to do things they would rather not do. It is for the most part about people using the proxy violence of the state to take things they want and punish people they do not like far more often than it is about dealing with the genuine collective threats of plague, disorder and war. And as for this being an ‘extraordinary’ election, as the linked article claims, I cannot recall one where it mattered less which of the largely interchangeable plonkers on offer gets into Number 10. All that will change is which of set of rapacious thugs says who gets snout space at Westminster’s trough filled with other people’s money. But of course many will vote Tory on the ‘lesser evil’ principle and no doubt act surprised when Cameron more or less does all the things he has said he will do to prop up the intrusive regulatory welfare state. People voting for an ever so slightly lesser evil (and quite possibly not even that) will get exactly what they vote for… another evil government. Nice one, guys. Today is the day that nothing important really changes. May 6th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I seldom read the Independent, but today the blogosphere lead me to this story, about an Indy journalist, Jerome Taylor, who got beaten up for the crime of investigating electoral fraud in East London.  I also learned something that I did not know, about the art of being beaten up:
I never knew that, but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Punched in the face is not good, but you really don’t want to be kicked in the kidneys. Presumably Taylor managed to remain standing. It reminds me of an old Elton John song that I have always quite liked. Luckily for Taylor, he was saved from further punishment by a nearby onlooker who intervened, which was enough for the beaters-up to go away, two of them “into the candidate’s house”. Good bit of journalism, that last bit. Your face is a mess, but you still clock the vital fact about your attackers. I hope (a) that Jerome Taylor’s career prospects improve as a result of his ordeal, and (b) that both the barbarians who did this and the barbaric puppeteers they were doing it for live more miserable and complicated and dysfunctional lives from now on. Raedwald, the blogger who lead me to this story, says that it was “naivety or foolishness ” that got Taylor into this fracas. Maybe so, but that strikes me as a bit harsh under the circumstances. Isn’t trying to learn the truth about things, sometimes naively and foolishly, going where people who already know it all are too wise to venture, what journalism is all about? Also, was that Good Samaritan onlooker who chased away the villains also perhaps being rather naïve and rather foolish? Again, maybe yes, but it’s a good thing he did what he did. May 4th, 2010 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well then what a pity that none of the main parties are actually offering a ‘conservative’ option to vote for.
And this, gentle reader, is why the current editorial of the Sunday Telegraph is fit for nothing more than lining the bottom of a bird cage. Cameron has made it abundantly clear over the last few years that he, just like Labour and the Lib Dems, sees the state as the centre around which civil society must rotate, regardless of selective rhetoric to the contrary. Ignore the dissembling phraseology and just stay focused on the numbers. And what do the numbers say? They say that risible balderdash like “the invigorating power of citizens and communities” is just code for Tory directed statism, which differs in verbiage and style, but not substance, from Labour directed statism. The litmus test to see if there is truly any difference is very simple to administer: Will the state’s net take of the nation’s wealth be smaller or larger at the end of David Cameron’s first (and hopefully last) term in office? Will it be less by even so much as a single penny? Well lets see what Dave has to say on that subject…
Oh I just never tire of linking to that article, filled as it is with radiant doublespeak but oh so revealing numbers, the empty Tory verbiage of classical liberalism varnished over the numbers of Keynesian statism: that truly epic insincerity that has become Cameron’s trade mark and which the mainstream media simply accept uncritically. Strange how much “the invigorating power of citizens and communities” of “Big Society” looks like costing even more that the “Big State” we have today, eh? May 3rd, 2010 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Regular Times columist Matthew Parris writes eloquently, if with somewhat sweeping generalisation, about how “we” do not want to hear the truth. “We” do not want change. “We” want things to carry on as they are. “We” want to stay as well off as “we” are, and will snarl and rage at any politician who dares to even hint otherwise. He has a point. Whichever combination of politicians turn out to have lumbered themselves with the grim task of running the next British government will have to cut, cut and cut. So, what should they cut? Let me prove that Matthew Parris’s generalisations don’t entirely apply to me by suggesting a reduction in some at least of the fluid that I personally now suck from the governmental tit. How about abolishing these? 
That thing gives me, at no charge whatever, the run of the entire London Underground network, plus all buses in the same approximate area, plus, if I understand things correctly, free travel on local buses throughout the UK. I wouldn’t like losing all that, not one bit. But I acknowledge that cuts like this will have to happen, if only to soften the blows a little for others who are being told that they must suffer far worse. Like losing their entire jobs for instance. Can you, esteemed commenter, suggest other cuts, that you personally would be quite badly hurt by, but which you nevertheless think would be a good thing to do? Or, at least, a cut or cuts that would wound you personally, maybe far worse that losing my “Freedom Pass” would wound me, but which you would find it very hard to argue against? Maybe you have an entire job that you can’t defend and are now ready to admit that you wouldn’t have in a better governed country. I wonder how Matthew Parris would answer this question. Or Guy Herbert, whose posting immediately below I had not read when I posted this. May 1st, 2010 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
Assiduous readers will have noted from my (sparse, of late) posts that I do not agree with some other Samizdatistas about UK elections. I do not think political disaster will save us or that small government might arise from the wreck of huge government. Mine is a mitigation strategy. Just as we have to eat, even when the choices are unappetising, we have no choice but to be governed. Therefore I vote, and am active within the existing political system, in order to to try get the least worst result I can. Sometimes the least worst is not very good. Politicans in a democracy have an amazing ability to back themselves into impossible corners, even when they don’t have to. The Conservative party’s promises to “protect” the budgets for the National Health Service and overseas aid may be mad as government, but they do have an electoral logic. They are explicable as strategic decisions to change the image of the party, and appear to have worked as such. Overseas aid is largely symbolic, peanuts compared with the welfare bills. (And few will really care if that promise ends up broken.) Whereas keeping up spending plans on a bloated NHS which absorbs approaching a fifth of the budget and a tenth of the nation’s wealth, supports huge lobby groups and unions, and has been force-fed taxpayers’ money like a Strasbourg goose by the incumbent regime, is a serious commitment it will be hard to row back from. Still, maybe they had to do this to themselves, as the price of power: middle Britain worships the NHS; it is more important than IHS, more established than the Church of England. The Tories were not trusted to keep that faith, and had as a result no more chance of governing than a secular party in Iran. Now they are accepted as orthodox. But why would you make a promise no-one expects, but that similarly constrains your scope for radical action? No party has promised not to raise VAT rates, despite pressure. No party has directly promised not to make cuts to state wagerolls. And Cameron did just promise a pay cut in the public sector. Sounds good? Oh dear, no. He did so in a way that disastrously locks him in and creates a political bar to the cuts that are really needed. A 5% cut in ministerial pay, and freezing it for the life of a parliament, is easy populism. “Slashing” the BBC calls it. However, in practice it is trivial; and, much worse, it puts a ceiling on what can be done to tackle the deficit. Ireland has already cut all public sector salaries—by an average of 13.5%. Had he said ministers will be paid a third less, and hinted at serious cuts in other public sector salaries over £60,000 (representing impossible wealth to most voters), then he could have been populist with room for manoeuvre. But now Cameron will be very hard put to do as much as freeze the wage bills of the bureaucracy. Even though ministers are arguably underpaid, getting much less in real terms than their Victorian forebears, it will be impossible now to cut the salary of any signficant public sector interest group by more than 5%. Protecting the NHS forces greater cuts from every other department just to stand still. A promise to cut just made cutting nearly impossible. That is a terrible mistake. May 1st, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit compares President Obama to Apple, saying, in connection with recent rather belligerent rhetoric from Obama, and similarly belligerent conduct by Apple regarding the alleged stealing of their latest iPhone before they had themselves unveiled it, this:
That may be right on the money about Obama. Don’t know for sure. Don’t live there. But I definitely think it’s wrong about Apple. For me, Apple’s stellar “image” is based on an underlying reality of product quality, not on how nicely Apple supposedly behaves, or did behave until this recent atrocity. A lady friend of mine has the earlier version of the iPhone, which she adores. Talks about it like it’s her perfect boyfriend, and looks at it like its a new and really good baby she just had. When she first got it, she could hardly stop gazing at it, and kept not listening to anything I was saying, instead wanting to demonstrate how fabulously it worked and how great it was for tracking emails and recognising pop songs and taking snaps and the rest of it, like she was a fat old geek with no life. Shame about the battery life, she says. But of course they are fixing that in the new version. And then there’s my beautiful Apple keyboard, which a few months ago I purchased and attached to my clunky old PC because every PC keyboard I have ever owned or seen or heard of is total shite, either about a mile across with a completely useless accountancy section adding even more mileage to its width or, if a sane size, doomed to instant disintegration and requiring baby fingers to use even half accurately and so flimsy that if you type like an adult with your adult fingers it slides across your desk like a big insect. Also, on all the PC keyboards I have ever owned a few of the damn letters soon became invisible, and I had to buy new stick-on letters from Rymans. Contemptible. My new Apple keyboard is the total opposite of all such shiteness. It is the keyboard I am happily typing on right this minute, and it is well on the way to convincing me that my next entire computer should be Apple as well. Quality like this is not “image”, of the sort based on merely incidental nice behaviour. I suppose you could argue that what happens on the front of an iPhone is “image”, in the sense of legible lettering, clever pointiness and so forth. But that’s image of the kind that is central to the quality of the product. And my keyboard is solid, beautiful reality, at its most solid and most beautiful. (Make of that what you will.) → Continue reading: Apple’s strength is that it now makes great products – not that it behaves nicely April 30th, 2010 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
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