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The fascinating thing about this response is that it demonstrates that Cameron, whose only claim to fame is that he is a politician, isn’t even very good at politics. – Richard North describes Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s stonewalling response to suggestions that he might want to rethink his attitude towards the climate change debate January 27th, 2010 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Well, continuing in my theme of talking about folk heading off to mountainous nations with more sensible tax laws than in the UK, I see that Sir Simon Jenkins thinks that Britain would be well rid of the thousands of financiers and other folk who are threatening to leave the UK because of high taxes. Jenkins is a rum fish: he is often quite astute in pointing out, for example, the damaging impact of regulations on certain industries and in some ways his instincts are quite liberal in the old, proper use of that word. But he also thinks that tax rates don’t really matter. To hell with ’em, he says: these bankers are just bluffing:
Jenkins needs to get out more. There are indeed thousands of people who are not amused at the prospect of having their wallets so comprehensively lifted. In my travels and through work in the media and wealth management sector, I can tell Sir Simon that the exodus of folk is not a mirage. It is happening. Note the lazy assumption that because these evil bankers are paid so much, it will not make any difference if the state seizes another 10 per cent of their annual income. In fact, once changes to pension allowances, thresholds and National Insurance are taken into account, the top rate of income tax in the UK will be more than 60 per cent in marginal terms for anyone earning more than £150,000 a year. That tax bite is higher than will be the case on top earners in France, if my memory serves. Way to go, Mr Brown! But what is objectionable about Jenkins’ reasoning – if we can dignify his comment by such a word – is the idea that such folk have no right to be outraged at having almost two-thirds of their income above a certain level seized, at source. The assumption is that no-one really “needs” all that filthy lucre and should be jolly grateful that they do not have to surrender even more. The unconscious collectivism is all too evident. The consider this classic:
That is a silly argument. No-one is claiming that if taxes rise, that the economy collapses overnight – the damaging effect can take quite a while to have its effect. But have its effect it did. Many of the stars of 1970s films, such as Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Roger Moore, did not live in the UK for part of the period that coincided with confiscatory tax rates. Sellers, for example, ended his days in Switzerland.
Well, if Mrs Thatcher really did think that 50 per cent was “enough”, then all I can say is that I am glad Mr, now Lord, Lawson, prevailed. If the state takes a smaller chunk of a person’s income at source, that does not necessarily fuel inflation – since before the tax was cut, presumably the money being seized from such taxpayers was being spent on something else. In fact, I would add that one of Mrs Thatcher’s faults was her support for mortgage interest tax relief, which encouraged people to over-extend their borrowing on property and helped fuel the housing boom of the late 1980s (UK regulations restricting house building did not help either, but that is another story). Finally, there is this:
Here he is confusing good arguments – no bailouts for failed bankers – with a sort of vengeful “fuck-you!” spite against bankers in general. If Sir Simon wants to make the case against “too big to fail” bailouts of bankers, argue for a genuine free market in banking rather than the statist, moral-hazard disaster we have now, and insist that the Keynesian madness now in vogue be challenged, I will be cheering him on. I suspect I might have to wait a while. January 19th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Royal Society for Public Health no doubt sees itself as a worthy collection of people who are axiomatically on the side of the angels. I mean, who could be against public health? In truth they are a terrifying and truly totalitarian outfit who operate with a presumption that the state has super-ownership of the physical bodies of everyone in Britain. Now I am of the view that defence against infectious plagues is a legitimate role of the state because it is a collective threat… a plague, like a fire or an invading army, does not respect property lines and so this is the whole reason to have a ‘nightwatchman state’. But that is not the view of people like the Royal Society for Public Health. No, they take the view that ‘public health’ follows on naturally from state run medical care and gives the state the right to decide pretty much anything that can impact on an person’s health, regardless of that individual’s preferred choices, even if those choices are personal ones that do not place other people at risk. They have issues a manifesto for nothing less than the nationalisation of your body and the intrusion of the state, on grounds of protecting your health from yourself and others who agree to be around you.
Of all these statist policies, number 1 is particularly invidious, with our technocratic masters seeking a sumptuary law on alcohol (i,.e. a tax to stop poor people drinking), number 12 seeks to regulate our choice of what we eat. But by far the worst of all is number 10, this is the one which tells you everything you need to know about these people and the profoundly, unabashedly thugish nature of their world view… the state can help itself to your body parts by default. Post mortem conscription. Frankly I am all for organ donation, but at the moment, I carry a card expressly forbidding my organs to be harvested post mortem as the very notion these people are presumptive owners of any of my mortal remains is simply intolerable. But then as they demand the right to regulate everything about your physical existence prior to death, I suppose it is no surprise they think nothing of helping themselves to your carcass after you die. These people are the very worst kind of self-righteous technocratic curtain twitchers, the true spiritual heirs to the folks who in the first half of the twentieth century had people with birth defects sterilised or has troublesome people lobotomised, on ‘scientific grounds’ of course ‘for the public good’. Naturally such Guardian reading caring sharing folks would see drawing such analogues as a grotesque calumny, but in truth they exhibit the same intrusiveness and obsession with controlling the lives of others, it really is the same psychopathology, just repackaged for the 21st century with the current notions of ‘best practice’. These people must be opposed… but not just politically, they need to be seen socially for what they are and abominated for their desires to regulate the lives of everyone around them. They presume to occupy the moral high ground but they do not and the more people who openly and publicly reject their axiomatic presumption of state controls over the very bodies of people, the sooner we can start to reclaim the culture of people who belong on a psychiatrist’s couch to help them deal with their abhorrent desires to use force against those who wish to live their lives without interference and according to their own judgements, with the positive and negative consequences of that accruing to themselves alone, like real adults. The people behind this manifesto are detestable and they need to be told that to their faces. January 18th, 2010 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It says something about our prospective future prime minister that when he decided to respond to accusations of being a lightweight, he did so by granting privileged access to the “most fashionable man in Britain”, and that the subsequent book that was produced (for which he was paid £20,000) and the subsequent articles that continue to be produced (Jones recently wrote a 3,288 word piece on Cameron for The Mail on Sunday), have resulted in revelations such as the fact that Cameron doesn’t really like Pot Noodle, that he needs six or seven hours’ sleep a night, that he has “small flecks of grey in his thatch” and that his karaoke song of choice is A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles, because “even I couldn’t muck up a song like that”. January 14th, 2010 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Free association is one of the bedrocks of civil society, so when ‘faith based’ schools start complaining about the secular state interfering with who they can and cannot admit, my first response is to urge these folks to inform the state that it is none of their god-damn business. It is surely a matter for religious group themselves to define their own congregation. In short, if they actually have any deeply held principles, and if they do not, why call themselves ‘faith based’ at all, they should simply refuse to comply with the state’s demands. Just point blank refuse. To their credit some Catholic adoption agencies shut down last year due to the state demanding they operate in contravention of Catholic principles (by placing children with homosexual couples), but it remains to be seen if any schools will do likewise and shut down rather than comply, or better yet, simply ignore the regulations on who they admit. But that said, at the same time that these schools should refuse to obey secular direction of their religious based institutions, they must also refuse to take a single penny of state money. Why? Because if they take the taxpayer’s coin… coin which has been extracted from believers and non-believers via the political system… they cannot then complain if that money comes with politically imposed conditions. January 11th, 2010 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Britain, a woman alone in her own home cannot even brandish a knife to defend herself, let alone actually use one.
The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive. If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as you can, no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect). And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives. Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards. Myleene, you had the right instincts and you have my respect… your only mistake, and it is a big one, is to assume the cops in the UK are on your side and a young mum home alone with her child was legally entitled to defend herself. They ain’t and you are not. You have the moral right to do whatever it takes to defend yourself from intruders, but the police have no interest in such niceties. The state is not your friend. January 9th, 2010 | 96 comments - (Comments are closed)
Helen Evans, who runs Nurses for Reform, a campaigning organisation dedicated to free-market options for healthcare in the UK, got to meet Conservative Party leader David Cameron a couple of weeks ago. The Daily Mirror [here, here and here] and the Daily Telegraph found out about the meeting and offered their own take on it. Broadly, I agree that the proposals are in the right direction, although I have concerns about some of the tactics suggested and their formulation, which I deal with later. The bit that was not previously familiar to me was the idea that a barrier to entry should be at least lowered, by amending local planning rules to make it easier to open a new healthcare facility. I’m told the Conservative Party already favours this for schools, so the extension to clinics should not be difficult. Having read the briefing document presented to the Leader of the Opposition, I disagree with one element of the strategy being proposed, specifically this passage: “the [National Health Service] NHS should be renamed the National Health SYSTEM and that under its auspices patients should benefit from a universal right to independent hospital care and treatment.” A “universal right” is something that a government could be justified in declaring war to defend, like “freedom from slavery” or freedom from the use of confessions extracted under torture in criminal trials. It could certainly be a pretext for new taxes, a new bureaucracy, more regulations, and the restriction of other “non-universal” rights. Sadly, this call for declaring that privately-provided healthcare is a right could become the very instrument for imposing regulations (such as US Medicare-style price controls, or French-style government control on where doctors can practise [link in French]) that violate patient and physician freedom. To give a specific example: could a private clinic be fined for not providing 24-hour accident and emergency access? I would expect a government agency to do just that. Meanwhile, of course, government facilities which operate “in the public interest” would be excused. A second concern comes in a later paragraph: “health censorship must be outlawed and patients must be empowered with greater access to information.” Outlawed? Must be empowered? By what agency, regulation, funded by what taxes or levies, with what powers of inspection and control? These may seem like quibbles, but the law of intended consequences suggests that the wording of reforms can be as important as their spirit. Consider the US Constitution’s First Amendment:
Does it say that Congress cannot give money to the Food and Drug Administration to hunt down anyone making claims about the alleged benefits to cancer patients of drinking grapefruit juice? No it does not. It means it, I think, but can I prove it to the US Supreme Court? Probably not. It might be more boring to do, but the best way to remove censorship would be to revoke the clauses of those laws and regulations that allow it. As for “empowerment,” if this comes from the government it will mean a Department of Truth in Advertising demand for a quarterly report from all private providers as to how they inform the public, with fines for not reaching a wide enough audience. On the positive side, Nurses for Reform finds that the ownership by a government department of most of the UK’s hospitals is a potential conflict of interest. There is the temptation to hide problems, to restrict information about alternative (often newer) treatments, the cozy relationship between the government employees in the NHS and those of the Department of Health who are supposed to watch them. Dr Evans is therefore absolutely right to suggest the immediate transfer of ownership of NHS hospitals out of “public ownership,” and she is also correct that the “Secretary of State for Health must no longer have any say over when or where hospitals are built, opened or closed.” On the issue of advertising, or freedom to communicate with the public in general, the major benefit would be that people could get an idea of which were the better brands (either cheapest, or best quality, or best balance between the two). If we think of how Aldi and Lidl can co-exist with ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and independent grocers, we can see how variety of branding can lead to beneficial competition: new treatments, more options and probably less queues. Personally, I see no point whatsoever in delaying the reform of NHS funding: it merely prolongs unnecessary suffering and provides more opportunities for opponents of change to mobilise, like Gorbachev’s “perestroika” versus the liquidation of the soviet system. Having little expectation of any progress under a new Conservative Party government this coming year, it would be a pleasant surprise if Dr Evans’ proposals came to fruition. But at least no one can now claim that the case was not made. [UPDATE: corrected link for Daily Telegraph article] January 7th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple: Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie. Mr Devil’s Kitchen didn’t mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply. I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all. I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us? January 7th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anatole Kaletsky still inhabits the mental world where debt-driven crises are cured by more debt, where the damage inflicted by madly cheap money can be cured by, er, even cheaper money. And in the process, he dismisses anyone who might demur from this fantastical notion as mad ideologues or right-wing troublemakers:
So perhaps Mr Kaletsky can explain why, if Brown was such a great man, he presided over a situation as finance minister when the UK ran a budget deficit even when the economy was – according to official statistics – growing reasonably strongly before the crisis. And maybe he can explain why, in previous historical episodes, such as in Britain during the early 80s or in the early 1920s in the US, the economy recovered from recession without massive government spending and oodles of cheap central bank money. Of course, Kaletsky is right to point out that this massive pile of public debt that has now been built up will have to be reduced, and probably far more severely, than the UK’s opposition Conservatives have been willing to let on. But then such a process is bound, by the logic of Mr Kaletsky’s own neo-Keynesian macro-economics, to drag on any future recovery, since such a debt reduction programme is bound to involve tax rises as well as public spending cuts. By “anti-Keynesian academic ideologues” – as opposed to sober-minded sages such as himself – Mr Kaletsky is presumably referring to what can be loosely described as the Austrian school of economics, a school that regards money not as a metaphysical abstraction to be manipulated at will by a handful of central bankers and their political overlords, but as a claim on real resources, which cannot be simultaneously used by different people at the same time. Instead of sneering at such views, it would be more edifying if Mr Kaletsky, and those who share his views, could address them cogently. Here is a decent article on a related theme. January 7th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I get the feeling that the next general election in Britain could be the first one to be seriously altered in its overall result by the internet. I definitely hope so. My ideal result would be for Gordon Brown and David Cameron and that LibDem guy all to emerge from the election feeling equally humiliated, and all sounding like they are on the same side, that of Big Politics, while all the conviction parties, the silly parties, including silly conviction parties whose silly convictions are the absolute opposite of my own convictions, do far better than they were supposed to and compared to the amount of and nature of the mainstream media coverage that they got. In particular, I hope that UKIP does really well. I’ve heard the complaints about this party, most of which boil down to the claim that they are all just too weird. But scratch any active participant in any political party and pretty soon the weirdness spills out. My feeling-stroke-wishful-thinking along these lines is based on seeing things like this: I came across that here, a few days ago. It’s basically a greatest hits compilation of UKIP snippets taken from the European Parliament, mostly about Climategate, with a few bits from some internet TV show in the USA spliced in. I particularly like the Liverpudlian guy. That EU Parliament is an odd place. People make these little speeches in it, which almost none of the people present pay any great attention to, but which, on YouTube, can sometimes escape into the wild, to the point where mainstream media non-coverage becomes impossible to sustain. More fundamentally, even if such non-coverage persists, as I expect it to persist at least until the forthcoming general election, so what? More and more people can now receive such messages as these anyway. Enough to embarrass Brown, Cameron and Whatsisname? Maybe. As I say, I do hope so. January 5th, 2010 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
An Islamic group called islam4uk, who are a front organisation for the islamo-fascist group al-Muhajiroun, want to march through Wootton Bassett carrying “symbolic coffins” as a protest against the ongoing British participation in the Afghan civil war against the Taliban. My suggestion is that the good people of Wootton Bassett reply by throwing “symbolic bricks” at the Islamo-fascist protesters, should they actually ever march down that town’s streets. Just symbolic bricks of course, made of sponge cake… or maybe bricks of good English bacon or Danish butter as I am sure the cheerful chaps of al-Muhajiroun will get the joke… not real bricks, because we do not want any Islamo-fascists to get their brains bashed out by our jolly japes… well, not whilst they are in Britain at least. But what I would really like to see is for Islam4uk carry out a march carrying symbolic coffins through a street in beautiful downtown Bazarak in Panjshir Province in Afghanistan. Just about everyone there is a muslim, so what could possibly go wrong, eh? Go on, guys, give it a try. January 4th, 2010 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
As Michael Jennings has already reminded us, it is now that time of year, when we look back at the rest of the year. I too will now look back at 2009. Whereas Michael trots the globe, my preferred outdoor activity is walking around London, taking photos, an activity which, as of now, remains more or less legal. And one of the things I especially like to photo is Evening Standard headlines. Not the headlines in the actual newspaper itself, but the ones on the outside of the contraptions behind which the sellers of the Evening Standard sit. I don’t do this as obsessively as this guy, but I do it every few days or so, whenever a particularly intriguing or doom-laden headline hoves into view. Click on all these headlines to get the original picture that I took, often a bit prosaic, as in: just the headline and its immediate surroundings; but sometimes with further fun and games, in particular further headlines next to the one I’ve featured in the little squares below. So, for instance, to consider just the first two snaps, on Jan 5, besides the amazing news that it was quite cold in January 2009 (just as it is quite cold now – see Dec 22(a)) you can also see talk of “TORY TAX CUTS”. We wish. Still in January, you can ponder the ever widening gap that separates the ever more bogus hero Barack Obama from the real deal: “CAPTAIN COOL IN RIVER JET CRASH”. The most regular themes are: economic woe, politicians cheating on their expenses, the consequent relentless criticism of and plotting against the Prime Minister, and the equally relentless way the Prime Minister just bashes on with his ruinous activities, seemingly impervious to all complaints. See especially June 5, which is worth clicking on for, I humbly submit, artistic reasons This is certainly my favourite photo of all these, in terms of the atmosphere it evokes and the memories it will stir in me in future years, one of the main reasons I take photos being just remind myself of what I was interested in, whenever it was. I love that digital cameras automatically attach dates to everything. So, here we go. There are three for July, because none of the three headlines you see seemed to me to deserve exclusion. January 5, 20 – February 11, 19:
March 19, 23 – April 15, 24:
May 2, 5 – June 5, 24:
July 10, 21, 31 – August 11, 26:
September 8, 10 – October 8, 20:
November 17, 19 – December 22, 22:
Well, I hope you liked all that, even if without a lot of clicking. You may now be saying to yourself that November and December have become pretty anti-climactic, and you would be right. For there is another story here, besides all the stories alluded to in the headlines. These photos serve not just as a random walk through the year 2009, but as a probable elegy for the Evening Standard itself, and certainly for the long London era of Evening Standard headlines in the streets. Click on October 20 for the first clue. That’s right. Some time around then, the Evening Standard stopped costing any money, and started being handed out free. At first the guys giving it away carried on with the billboards, but I knew that this practice would soon fade away. If no money is being made in the street from these newspapers, why go to all the bother of advertising them in the street. So it is that if you click on the last picture of all, you see that where there used to be informatively alarming stories about doom and disaster, now there are only forlorn signs saying that the ES now costs nothing. This switch to the ES being a giveaway came only a few months after its takeover by a Russian Oligarch. How soon before the ES vanishes altogether, becoming itself the subject of a few more doom-laden headlines in other organs, before it sinks from the memory of Londoners? December 31st, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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