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Recently, I’ve been exploring the area around the Royal Victoria Dock, which now has lots of houses on its south side, between it and the River Thames, and the ExCeL (apologies for the correct spelling there) Centre on its north side, where they hold big exhibitions like, most recently, this.
The area abounds with photo-opportunities of the sort that I like. To the West, there is the Dome and the Docklands Towers. Beyond them, other more distant towers nearer to London’s centre can be spotted, by me anyway. To the East, interestingly obscure airplanes land and take off from the City Airport, often flying the length of the Dock in the process, near enough for me to actually see some detail in my snaps of them. All around the Dock, large but idle cranes stand, reminders of more muscular and industrial times for this stretch of water, which now advertises itself on the outsides of nearby building sites as being a venue for sporty little sailing boats.
Best of all, there is a big footbridge, half way along the Dock, north to south, with a span high into the sky which is reached by lifts at each end. The views from this bridge, especially those looking West into central London, are very fine.
And all around the Royal Victoria Dock, as everywhere else in Britain that I have visited lately, there are official signs of all sorts (a more recent photographic enthusiasm of mine), urging this, forbidding that, threatening and warning and nagging and cajoling.
Are you a building worker? Be careful in there:
Building workers seem often to get bombarded with the visual equivalent of a Fidel Castro speech, in the form of huge clumps of warnings about every imaginable infringement of safety they might choose to indulge in.
The rest of us are of course nagged on a similar scale, but each nag tends to have its own separate notice.
So, at the Royal Victoria Docks, we observe, if we choose to, dozens of nags and official imprecations of all kinds… → Continue reading: Swimming in the Royal Victoria Dock really is dangerous!
There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who’s-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough…
…but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago.
David Deutsch, quantum theorist, libertarian and a man with a brain exceptionally huge even for a libertarian, has posted a video on youTube of himself discoursing against AV (thanks to Sarah Fitz-Claridge for passing news of it on to me).
It is a beautifully clear 15 minutes of listening. He argues that AV, by making proportions of MPs more closely reflect the proportions of electors supporting the parties, doesn’t succeed in its purported aim of making the electoral system fairer. Rather, by making coalitions almost inevitable, it gives king-making power to the third party. Not only does that have nothing to do with numerical ‘fairness’, it makes it virtually impossible for electors to influence the third party and hence for it to learn from experience – Popperphiles will love his introduction of the great Karl into the argument near the end. First-past-the-post is less bad in this respect. The implication is that any proportional-representation system will have the same weakness.
I always participate in elections. I almost invariably spoil the ballot paper with a libertarian slogan. I try unsuccessfully to make my kinfolk and friends understand that this symbolic act is no more ineffective than the votes that they cast and is just as morally responsible. One of the rare votes I did cast was for a UKIP local councillor. I could actually detect a difference between UKIP and the other parties, and I approved of it.
Now I think David Deutsch might have persuaded me to cast a vote again – against AV.
Yesterday I received a spam-email, with a link to this, which begins thus:
The public sector has a key part to play in the fight against climate change, as well as ensuring the security of the country’s energy supply. The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the UK’s ‘unacceptably slow’ progress towards meeting its renewable energy targets. Understanding the scale of change required, and the public sector’s role in leading the way, is vitally important.
And the Gadarene Swine are moving towards the cliff edge with abysmally insufficient urgency.
Later:
Greening the heat supply is extremely important – heating accounts for roughly half of Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions. The Department for Energy and Climate Change recently announced the launch of the world’s first Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which aims to increase renewable heat generation from 1% to 12% by 2020. The £860m scheme aims to encourage the installation of equipment such as renewable heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar thermal panels to reduce emissions and support the existing 150,000 jobs in the heating industry.
Once again, we observe that Law about how, when you name a government department after some problem, this guarantees that the problem will only get worse.
All of which just goes to show the power of momentum. The mere arguments in favour of such policies have taken a hammering during the last year or two, and I daresay that the event that this piece of spam was alerting me to won’t have quite the buzz that its organisers had been wanting when they first set it up. Doubts – in the form of puzzled and angry questions about what to do about the rising tide of climate denialism, but doubts nevertheless – may be heard during it. And that matters, because unless there is global unanimity on this issue, curbing some of the CO2 emissions of little old Britain will be so extremely pointless as actually to seem somewhat pointless to some of those who favour such a policy. But, too many bets have been placed, too much Green Money is now swilling around, for this foolishness to end at all soon.
In the recent Local Growth White Paper, the government emphasised its commitment to delivering a huge expansion of renewable energy over the next 10 years. Recognising that community renewable energy projects play a vital role in meeting the national need for secure and clean energy, they will now be allowed keep any business rates generated. Moreover, the planning system has caused hold-ups in the past, but imminent changes to planning powers will make it simpler to take advantage of such opportunities.
In other words, this Good Cause is now deep into the racket phase. Which means that the end is in sight, but not before a lot more money has been given to some very undeserving people.
Earlier in the week I was visiting family in the old family home, the nearest railway station to which is Egham. And just outside Egham Station, I spotted this rather remarkable sign, erected (I presume) by the local council, Runnymede.
It seems that Lucinda Campbell Jackson of St Cuthbert’s School (see the verbiage top right) did a really quite witty piece of art, on the theme of CCTV surveillance. But the odd bit is Runnymede Council (see the verbiage top left) – and yes that is Runnymede of Magna Carta fame – thinking that using this bit of school art on an official sign is a good way to publicise the fact that everything you do in public in Egham is being recorded on video.
For me, what this illustrates is that all those who still oppose public video surveillance in all public places in Britain (personally I am still rather undecided) have comprehensively lost this argument, insofar as it ever was an argument in the first place. These local councillors know their business. They know that, if there was any serious public opposition to ubiquitous CCTV surveillance, it would not be in their interests to make public jokes about it. As it is, they are extremely keen to advertise their enthusiasm for CCTV surveillance with a bit of humour, knowing that many will laugh, but that very few will grumble, still less complain out loud.
I mean, if you have nothing to hide, you obviously have nothing to fear. Right? Except looking badly dressed.
First off, they really are. Running around like headless chickens in Whitehall, I mean. I have photographic evidence! Click on this link to the 10 Downing Street website and it shows a headless person running, or at least walking fairly fast, down Whitehall.
At least we now know the person who thought up this proposal. Not that I want to mock the Headless Apparation’s disability, but this is not a conception that can have originated in an actual brain. This one came out of the sacral ganglia in the spinal column, in the manner of the stegosaurus.
PM welcomes scheme to help graduates start businesses.
Entrepreneur First, a new programme to encourage entrepreneurship has been launched today, with recruitment of the first intake due to start this year.
Launched on the same day as a series of measures to help enterpreneurs, Entrepreneur First will be a two-year programme, through which graduates with the most promising business ideas will get the opportunity to start their business, with the support of corporate mentoring, business training and networking.
After the two years, participants will have the option to continue building their own business or apply to graduate recruitment schemes in some of the sponsoring companies.
OK. There are worse things to spend government money on. For instance… on second thoughts, I will postpone that rant until I have a spare decade. There are many worse things, but let me count the ways in which this one is misguided.
One, it is only for graduates. Because having uncredentialled people starting their own businesses never works.
Two, it is a two year programme of intensive, expensive help (“corporate mentoring” does not come cheap) to a select few already-privileged individuals – when the length and breadth of Britain the shabby little shops and grotty corrugated-roofed offices on industrial estates that actually provide the jobs are closing. It’s behind a paywall, but today’s Times magazine has an article by Sathnam Sanghera who spent a shift or two working in a corner shop he had passed hundreds of times. The featured quote was “By 8.30am the takings amount to £45, which means the three of us were up at 4am for the sake of making some £9.” Sure, declining sales of newspapers are not the government’s fault – but the hours of official paperwork that shopowners have to do in their so-called spare time is.
Three, that get-out clause after two years. Even I, possessed of the entrepreneurial spirit of a sessile mollusc, can tell that having the option after two years to apply for graduate recruitment in the sponsoring companies is not the spirit that makes a business great. Possibly it is great for the sponsoring companies, though.
I used to hold fairly high hopes about Nick Cohen, who had the courage to tell his leftist friends a few home truths about the sheer madness of their consorting – in the case of the hard left – with radical Islamists. He does not adopt the default “Blame America First” line on issues such as, say, Iraq, or for that matter, events in the Balkans. In the very big scheme of things, he’s one of the good guys, in my opinion. The trouble is that he is still a big government leftie; for him, the reductions in spending by this government, which are not that much more than envisaged by former UK (Labour) Chancellor Alisdair Darling, are wicked. Oh well.
He attended the protests against the UK government’s supposed “cuts” on Saturday (the sneer quotes are there because it is not clear that government spending as a share of GDP will actually shrink). Before I return to his comments against the “cuts”, here is what he said about the kind of folk causing a tear-up in the West End:
The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics. As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.
Quite so. All we have to do now is get Mr Cohen to give up on the nonsense of this Keynesian idea that cutting public spending – and hence debt – somehow reduces “demand” in the economy. Given that a large chunk of tax revenues are gobbled up on debt interest payments alone, it seems fairly good public finance to make an adjustment. Cohen and others would do well to realise that Britain’s public finances were on their way to ruin long before anyone had heard of sub-prime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations, or for that matter, Ben Bernanke.
As an aside, I was in Piccadilly on my way to a meeting yesterday, and could see some fairly extensive damage to shops, banks, etc. Well done guys.
Mark Steyn has been in London, and although his visit has coincided with truly wonderful weather – I have spent a great afternoon with my wife and friends eating good food on the side of the Thames in Richmond – it has also been a time of protest:
“In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists. Judging from the many marchers partial to robotic, pseudo-ethnic West African drumming, the British left’s plan is presumably for the entire country to relaunch itself as the world’s least rhythmic percussion ensemble.”
This denial of reality is everywhere. Consider this YouTube spot featuring Mark Littlewood, head honcho of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a friend of mine) alongside some hard-leftist type who regards the mass protests yesterday as an example of the Labour movement “striking back”. As far as this guy is concerned, our national debt is relatively low (seriously), we can, somehow or other, grow our way out of any problems that might exist, etc. In fairness to the BBC interviewer, she did not let this guy make these points without challenge and I thought Mark acquitted himself well. A good, perhaps “soft” point to make here, as Mark did, is the “think of the children” angle. The protesters who want to protect final-salary public pensions, vast numbers of state jobs, etc, are choosing to do so regardless of the debt being loaded on the shoulders of future generations. And in their adolescent fantasies, they imagine that all the mess can be somehow put right by taxing the evil rich bankers. There is, in this worldview, a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, usually located in a tax haven. But what these folk don’t seen to understand, or perhaps, don’t want to understand, is that taxing banks even more means lower savings rates, higher borrowing charges, worse service, lower investments. If we drive sources of capital away, as happened in the 1970s, then does this young activist really believe that will benefit the more vulnerable people in this country in the medium-term? I suspect he either does not care or imagines that somehow, something will turn up.
This mindset does not come out of thin air. The activist was trotting out the standard, dreary line about how all the things he imagines are good (and I regard as thoroughly bad), such as comprehensive state schooling, socialised medicine and Big Government, arose even when Britain was broke after WW2. Arguably, these developments ensured we stayed thoroughly broke, right up until the 1970s when the UK was, humiliatingly, bailed out by the IMF. As Mrs Thatcher said, in the end, socialists always run out of other people’s money.
A difficulty for any government is that once the drug of state dependency has been created, it is a long, hard road back to sanity. I don’t like this government, which is hardly close to my own classical liberal worldview, but some measure of credit is due here. A larger chunk of voters than is perhaps realised have no conception of self reliance, independence, or a desire for said.
Many voters have been clients of the state all their lives; changing that will be enormously difficult. Whole cities, such as in the north of the UK and pockets elsewhere, derive the bulk of their incomes from taxpayers in the more prosperous parts of the UK. Londoners are a fairly stoical lot, but we are getting a bit tired of folk coming to the capital, trashing it, and demanding that this evil den of capitalism should go on providing them with the lifestyle to which they think they are entitled. Maybe London should declare itself an independent state and we’ll see how well the rest of the UK can cope without this high finance. The Atlas Shrugged narrative continues.
Independence for London. Hmm, there have been worse slogans.
Big demo against the cuts in London today! Takes me back, that does. Maggie, maggie, maggie, OUT OUT OUT!
Simon Jenkins says British demonstrations scarcely ever achieve their aims. I think they often do. Not always quickly, not always directly, and the aims achieved are not always good, but the clue to the effectiveness of demonstrations is in the name. The demonstration demonstrates that there are enough people who care enough about some issue to fill up in Trafalgar Square. They vote, thinks the politician. Not that he panics; he knows that there are other voters shouting or yawning at their televisions as they show pictures of the Trafalgar Square lot, but the highly visible existence of this big shouty bundle of single-issue votiness seeps into his mind and affects his decisions, irrespective of whether he likes them or loathes them.
On the other hand, sometimes the demonstration demonstrates that there are not enough people who care about your issue to fill up Trafalgar Square. (There will be today; I speak in general terms.) If the mainstream media like your cause they will do their very best to help by means of what I think of as the squat shot. That’s when the cameraman squats on the ground and points the camera upwards so that the shot shows only bodies and not the tell-tale large areas of empty pavement between and around the marching feet. (Added later: however eventually, the use of this low-angle crowd-shot becomes a signal to alert observers that attendance was low, and the subject of ridicule. The BBC have wised up and reined back on its use in the last few years.)
And sometimes – in fact ofttimes – the demonstration demonstrates that quite a lot of your supporters are not very nice. The blogger Zombietime went to many anti-war demonstrations in the US while G W Bush was president and quietly snapped away. One of the results was this record of the signs calling for Bush to be assassinated. Here in Britain the student demonstrators against tuition fees did not endear themselves to the public by the fact that one or two of their number were photographed hurling fire extinguishers from the top of buildings or hanging from the flag commemorating the war dead at the Cenotaph. I sympathise with the demonstration organisers in these cases: they did not condone these actions – but like the scorpion in the fable who could not help but sting even at the cost of his own life, demonstrations cannot help but demonstrate something. You asked the public to watch and judge your cause by the people you assembled, and they will.
As will your own people. The demonstrations I went to in the 70s and 80s have merged in memory. Was it at the CND one, or the anti-NF one, or one against changes to the immigration laws where I saw the collection bucket being passed round for the IRA? The bucket filled up slowly, I’ll say that much for my fellow demonstrators, but it was not empty. At all of them I picked up piles of mimeographed leaflets that I now wish I had kept. They were revealing. They were insane. I realised that Searchlight, for instance, who I had thought of as just an anti-fascist group were very left wing indeed. Most of all I remember the posters. Three quarters of the posters, and almost all of the printed ones, were produced by the Socialist Workers Party. Busy little bees, they were. They still are: it is an astonishing fact that this tiny and fissiparous Trotskyist sect has twice dominated massive popular protest movements in my lifetime; the Anti-Nazi League / Rock against Racism movement of the 80s and the Stop The War Coalition of 2001-2008. Sorry, 2001-present, only they stop wars much more quietly now that Mr Obama is president. They were also big in CND.
Most demonstrators back then avoided carrying SWP posters. But it was difficult to refuse if someone asked nicely, so ordinary non-SWP people did end up walking for miles with an embarrassing commie placard thinking, how the hell did I end up doing this and I’m not doing it again. I suspect this will happen today as it did in the 80s.
The problem with demonstrators being turned off by weird extremist literature and weird extremist fellow attendees is not confined to causes that I dislike – even if part of the reason I now dislike them is that I was turned off by the weird literature and people. I sympathised with, although I did not attend, the big demonstration in 2002 against the hunting ban. My husband picked up a BNP leaflet for me while he was there because he had heard earlier verbal versions of the reminiscences about extremists at demonstrations that form much of this post. It depressed me that the originators of the leaflet were probably right in seeing that demonstration as a good opportunity to shift their stuff. One good thing, the leaflet had a picture of a squirrel on it. The good here is not the squirrel per se, fond as I am of the tree-rats, but at least they felt the need to hide behind cuddly things.
Oh yeah, another thing to avoid is having the same demo at regular intervals. Lie all you like about numbers, the media will help you if you are left wing, but when like for like comparisons can be made, decline will out. A left wing writer said in 2003:
The SWP’s main priority is recruitment. Why else did it continually call demonstrations week after week during the Iraq conflict? This was a big tactical error for the anti-war movement. When the bombing started, many people felt dispirited and tired, but were organising and carrying out further actions and protests. More importantly, the SWP had not realised that many people on the enormous demonstration in February were there because they felt they had been denied a democratic voice. These demonstrations were bound to result in diminishing numbers – and many were bound to judge that as the collapse of the anti-war movement.
Innovative forms of demonstration like Earth Hour (today, apparently) replace the crowd in Trafalgar square with the crowd at home doing something that shows up somehow. This avoids the “embarrassing supporter” problem and the “clashes with the other big demo” problem. However having a metric for your demonstration that is easier to count than crowd size, and having it as a regular event, makes this type of demonstration particularly vulnerable to the cold wind of comparison to last year. The better they do one year, and the more their success is hyped up, the tougher the target for next year.
“Liberal democracy is not about “paying a fair share” based on the exigencies of the moment and the vagaries of public opinion. If it were, Parliament would be little more than a trading floor where the freedoms of minorities were bartered away for temporary fixes and periodic bond repayments. True liberal democracy was and still should be about protecting and preserving freedom, equality in liberty and equality before the law – even when it is not, financially or politically, in our best interests to do so.”
PJ Byrne, over at the Adam Smith Institute blog. Alas, “true liberal democracy” is hard to achieve, given the strong urge by politicians to persuade one group of electors to rob another group, or indeed, even to rob themselves.
I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron – I think he is both.
– A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around.
It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn’t follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts.
LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent.
Caroline Lucas MP, Britain’s only, (or “first” as the Guardian puts it) Green Party MP, writes “Scrapping the fuel duty rise will hurt Britain economically”. In the article she says,
Some of the loudest voices are calling on the chancellor to scrap the planned fuel duty increase, due in April. But that essentially means using tax-payers’ money to fix a problem that we cannot control – the long-term upward trend in oil prices.
A commenter called Fomalhaut88 pointed out one strange aspect of her article at 12.53AM. He or she wrote,
Only in the mind of Ms Lucas could not raising a tax further be defined as “using taxpayers money”.
Some words from Ms Lucas that occur a line or two down are even more bizarre:
“A report commissioned from the Policy Studies Institute for the Green Alliance calculates that using a fuel duty cut to bring pump prices back to December 2009 levels would cost the taxpayer almost £6bn in the first year alone.”
Spot the error in this sentence. I have put the relevant bit in bold to make it easier for you. I don’t really think you need that help in spotting such an absurdity, of course. But by Gaia, some people do.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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