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Waitrose sells Horse and Hound magazine.
Huh?
Didn’t they ban hunting, like, years ago? Yes. Yet Horse and Hound is still there on the hotly contested shelves of the Waitrose magazine rack, and in the posh aspirational section right next to Country Homes & Interiors to boot. I suppose some of the reason for H&H’s survival must be down to upping the quotient of writing about Princess Zara and her horse Toytown and downing the quotient about hunting. Even so, it must be galling for the anti-hunting activist community. Not what they imagined back in the heady days of 2004 when they were offering to help the government and police enforce a hunting ban.
At this point I could either launch into a detailed, link-filled account of whatever it is hunts actually do these days or I could just vaguely mutter some half-remembered stuff about how there is some get-out clause that allows them to chase the foxes with as long as they don’t actually kill them, or if they do it’s collateral damage or done for research or something. I shall do the latter and make a virtue of it, because vague half-remembered perceptions and their political consequences are what this post is actually about.
It didn’t stick. Thirty years plus of campaigning, thousands of letters to the editor, millions of Ban Hunting Now badges, at least three private members’ bills, Royal Commissions galore, keeping the faith in the dark days of Thatcher, then the dawning hope that this Bill might be the real deal, First Reading, Second Reading, Committee, Third Reading… then that last minute farrago with the Parliament Act when the Lords cut up rough, then finally Royal Asssent (through gritted Royal teeth, yeah)… all that and it still didn’t bloody stick. The hunts are still there, shooting foxes by firing squad or whatever they do, and the sabs are still there cutting off peoples’ heads with gyrocopter blades or whatever they do, and when the Tories get in, as they almost certainly will in three months time, they will repeal the ban.
I will rejoice. I have never seen the appeal of hunting, still less hunt-following, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow-citizens seem to like these pastimes, as their ancestors did, and a large proportion of the human race still do. The anti-hunt argument that does have some power to move me is the one about preventing suffering of a creature who can suffer. I myself prefer not to think too deeply about Mr Fox getting killed by dogs – but I do not see that it differs much from what Mr Fox does to rabbits. It’s a predator thing. As for the argument about humans, get lost. On those grounds the new puritans had about the same moral right to stop their fellow humans hunting foxes as they would have to stop their fellow mammals, the foxes, hunting rabbits. Another thing, it bugged me to hear people who, if they were to learn that Amazonian tribesmen, having been forced to give up their ancient traditions of the hunt, had taken to soccer and Playstations instead, would be heard from here to the Amazon squealing about Western cultural oppression – it bugged me to hear these same people cheering on the Western cultural oppression of their own tribesmen.
As well as rejoicing to see these puritans discomfited, I will rejoice because the repeal of the ban is a retrograde step. When one has gone in a wrong direction a backwards step is a good thing. Every generation or so the progressives have the presumption buried in their name for themselves knocked out of them and the whooshing noise is pleasing. Yet for most of the my lifetime their presumption has been justified. The progressive ratchet slips a little but mostly it moves on. What a liberation it would be to see the clock turn back, just to show it could! What strange new vistas it might open if one bad law were repealed. We could repeal some more. The smoking ban… the European Communities Act 1972… it might even have an effect overseas; at present most people seem to assume that President Obama’s historic achievement in passing the US healthcare bill is just that, historic. A historic change is a change that stays changed. But history turns round sometimes, as the original puritans found out to their cost in 1660.
So the repeal of the hunting ban will be a fine thing, and on that morning even I shall hear something of the
..long-drawn chorus
Of a running pack before us
From the find to the kill.
But the end of a bad law and the good example its end sets will not be the only reasons to rejoice. Sure, repeal will annoy the progressives but – as the fox understands the huntsmen – a law going against them for once in a while leaves their worldview intact. What I really will value in the repeal is that it will be symbolic completion of a process that has already happened. The Royal Assent on this one may be good fun for her Maj, and me, but the really subversive thing is that people will say, “Oh, they’ve got rid of that law… didn’t know it was still on the books, actually. I’m sure I saw Horse and Hound on sale on Waitrose.”
It was grimly amusing to watch as TV interviewers tried to get some straight answers out of the UK government and the Tory opposition about what items of public spending would and could be cut to get the finances under control. George Osborne, shadow Chancellor, was pretty evasive, as I have come to expect. Well, for those who want to see some sort of shopping list of cuts, the Taxpayers’ Alliance has come up with a handy list of items deserving of termination.
It is a melancholy fact to face that while most of us, most of the time, like to imagine that we live our lives by some sort of moral code, and respect our fellows as beings deserving of respect if they do not threaten our lives or property, some people do not live by such a code, nor care. One particular species of maggot in our world is the person who likes to verbally and physically abuse disabled persons.
The issue of care and protection of the mentally and physically handicapped, raising as it does issues of personal autonomy, concerns about abuse of state power and medicine, etc, is too big an issue to push into a blog post. No, the point I want to address is the narrower one of whether it makes any sense at all to create another “hate crime”: the crime, as it were, of hating disabled people. In brief, I think creating such a “hate crime” is foolish, albeit an understandable move driven by those with honorable motives to protect the weak.
Let’s be clear from the get-go that I regard those who hate, and who act on that hate, of disabled people to be scum of the earth. It does bother me, though, that a crime of say, assault on a person and his property should be treated as being far more serious because the state has tried to measure, or establish, the hate that exists in the mind of the attacker. A crime is a crime, surely. If an able-bodied man is mugged in the street, does it make any specific difference in terms of sentencing the criminal, assuming the criminal is caught? The area where physical or mental disability comes into play in sentencing a criminal is where, say, the disability clearly meant that the disabled victim could not defend himself. That is why assaults on the aged and infirm, and on children, are treated – at least supposedly – more severely than assaults on say, the holder of a karate black belt. Of course, in investigating a crime, the fact that a suspect has a motive such as hate of group X or Y might be useful in helping to narrow down a list of suspects. However, as a factor in sentencing, the idea of “hate crime” strikes me as nonsense.
What next – political hate crimes where a person is sentenced for the crime of “hating” those in public office or who are members of certain ideological/political groupings?
Policy Exchange has just published a “research note” purporting to show that the tax on cigarettes in the UK should be increased, and that “that every single cigarette smoked costs the country money – 6.5 pence each time someone lights up.”
If you read the paper [pdf], you will find it is an astonishingly dodgy dossier. Here is how the figure is made up:
Taxation of tobacco contributes £10 billion to HM Treasury annually; however, we calculate that the costs to society from smoking are much greater at £13.74 billion. Every cigarette smoked is costing us money. These societal costs comprise not only the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion) but also the loss in productivity from smoking breaks (£2.9 billion) and increased absenteeism (£2.5 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of smoking related house fires (£507 million), and also the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers (£4.1 billion) and passive smokers (£713 million).
The notion of “cost to society” is a pretty weird one.
Leave that aside for a moment. Add up costs and revenues to the state, which might be one semi-logical way of determining whether the smoking in some sense “runs a deficit”, and using Policy Exchange’s own figures you get a big surplus for the Treasury. Even if you assume all house fire costs are borne by the state and not partially by insurers and householders, and there are no errors in the headline figures, then you can only get to £3,549 million. (Have you noticed how public policy research generally involves implausible numbers of significant digits, and at the same time utter absence of error estimates?) On that basis smokers are contributing roughly £6Bn annually towards public spending.
But what are we to make of the suggestion that counting “lost output” is meaningful? To my mind the idea that an economic aggregate represents a collective wealth that may be politically attributed and redistributed is repulsive even if it is coherent (which I doubt). The state’s royal We, which Policy Echange is channelling here, may in turn choose to impersonate you and me and everyone else, but it only controls the taxed margin of other’s outputs. Output and taxation are apples and oranges. It is meaningless to add them together. Unless you want (or deserve) a punch.
And even were it not meaningless, there’s an accounting fraud here. If you count output putatively lost to smoking, then you must also count the gains. There is the output of the tobacco industry, distribution and retailing in the UK to consider. Imperial Tobacco alone had a gross profit for the year ending September 2009 of approximately £5.3 billion. The CTC industry consists of tens of thousands of small shops. Honest research, however dubious its theoretical basis, would attempt to estimate the value-added, too. It would also be clear – without referring to a paper cited in the footnotes we cannot tell whether the cost-of-illness measure used in determining those “lost outputs” also includes the gains to third parties in pensions unpaid and public services unused by people dying early. If you are going to add apples and oranges, you should also tell us explicitly whether you have subtracted pears.
But what set me off on this chase was actually just one of those headline figures. Most of the margin of costs over gains in this strange sum is covered by the £2.9 billion allocated to the “output lost to cigarette breaks”. How do they know? “[A] number of studies have investigated workers taking breaks in order to smoke, and have tried to quantify this time at between £915 million and £3.2 billion per annum.” Hm.
Read through to p13, and you discover that the number of studies was… two. Er, no. It was one… Or some sort of strange interpolative hybrid… I cannot decide. Make your own mind up:
McGuire et al. estimated that £915 million annually is lost on the basis that average smokers spend tenminutes a day smoking, while light smokers and part-time workers would use approximately half of this
time. The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) used similar initial assumptions on average smoking time to
calculate that some £2.6 billion would be saved through the introduction of smoke-free legislation. Using
McGuire’s estimates of 5.2 million working smokers, with the RCP’s estimates of ten minutes a day smoking
reveals an intermediary figure of £2.9 billion.
I think that is ‘intermediary’ in the sense that a magician is an intermediary between a rabbit and a hat.
However they get there, if someone thinks that cigarette breaks ought to be a determining factor in public policy, rather than a matter for negotiation between employer and employee, then I suggest that it would be a good idea if they are kept as far as possible from the levers of power. This lot are said to be influential on the presumptively incoming Cameron team. Oh dear.
The sheer venality of the current political class, while not necessarily a radical departure from what has been the case in the past, still has the capacity to make me rub my eyes in amazement. Get a load of this:.
Tony Blair waged an extraordinary two-year battle to keep secret a lucrative deal with a multinational oil giant which has extensive interests in Iraq.
The former Prime Minister tried to keep the public in the dark over his dealings with South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corporation. Mr Blair – who has made at least £20million since leaving Downing Street in June 2007 – also went to great efforts to keep hidden a £1million deal advising the ruling royal family in Iraq’s neighbour Kuwait.
In an unprecedented move, he persuaded the committee which vets the jobs of former ministers to keep details of both deals from the public for 20 months, claiming it was commercially sensitive. The deals emerged yesterday when the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments finally lost patience with Mr Blair and decided to ignore his objections and publish the details.
Of course, the fact that Mr Blair makes a lot of money is hardly a reason for criticism per se, and given that the story is in the Daily Mail, a noisy mixture of rightwing populism on social issues, economic nationalism and Blimpish anti-Americanism, I tread a little carefully. But even so, it is pretty galling that a man like Blair who has largely risen to where he is on the back of artifice and bullshittery of heroic proportions should be making so much money. Also, considering that one of his most contentious decisions to support the war to topple Saddam was always going to be attacked by the usual types as being “all about oil”, it does seem incredibly crass for this man to validate the usual Blair/BushHitler/Halliburton/Blackwater/blah blah conspiracy theory tropes of the Michael Moore left and Raimondoesque right.
Oh well, at least he can keep Cherie Blair in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. I would not be at all surprised if Blair ends up becoming a tax fugitive from the UK.
Mr Blair is, of course, a classic example of the political class so ably described by Peter Oborne, the British journalist. No doubt Messrs Obama and Sarkozy are taking notes.
In some ways UK politics has reverted to the 18th Century model, as described by the likes of Lewis Namier, when different gangs of folk with remarkably similar views scrapped for the spoils of office. And as Mr Blair now shows, those spoils are remarkably lucrative indeed.
Dr Butler’s work is a follow up to his book “The Rotten State of Britain” – itself a fine book explaining many of the problems this country faces.
In “The Alternative Manifesto” Dr Butler concentrates on the terrible economic position that Britain finds itself in, what really caused this position and what should be done about it.
Unlike the United States there is little challenge in Britain to the establishment view that all our problems are caused by “greedy bankers” and “lack of regulations”. The “lack of regulations” point is utterly absurd as there are endless national and indeed international regulations (for example the “mark to market” rule was part of the international financial regulations agreed, years ago, in Basel, Switzerland).
And, as for “greedy bankers”, they are indeed greedy, but to blame their greed for the crises is like blaming the speculators of “charge alley” for the problems of Britain in the 18th century – many great figures of English literature did this (as to attack the wicked speculators diverted attention from the politicians who were paying many of the great figures in English literature), but that does not alter the fact that it was the “public credit” itself, the endless government borrowing, that was at the root of the economic problems and the political corruption – not the speculators in the debt, however wicked they may have been.
Even today with our fiat money and fractional reserve banking taking beyond any level of sanity – even the most crazy banker can only build a pyramid of debt on new money that the governments themselves have created, and indeed it is these governments who are normally the loudest voices demanding that banks “expand credit” – lend more money.
However, presently Dr Butler’s works are the only books dissenting from the establishment view (the view that the root of the problem is the greed of bankers and the solution is yet more taxes and regulations) that one can find in (for example) high street book stores.
→ Continue reading: ‘The Alternative Manifesto’ – Examining the diagnosis, and possible cure, of Britain’s ills
I really, really hope that Nick Clegg, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, does not hold the balance of power at the next General Election, if this Spectator article, “Can Nick Clegg Sing the Blues?”, is a guide (the article is behind the Speccie’s subscription firewall).
Mr Clegg, the article says, is trying to reach out to supposed Conservative voters by arguing for tax cuts. But as is clear, the cuts are only for low-earners and not for anyone else (I certainly do support tax cuts for the poor, in case anyone brings this up). He wants, for example, to impose a so-called “mansion tax” on properties worth £2 million or more and wants to raise the level of capital gains tax from its current 18 per cent to 50 per cent – a huge jump – on those whose annual income is £150,000 or more. In other words, CGT will skyrocket for the sort of entrepreneur who can, or hope, to make a decent capital gain on a business that has been launched. As the supply-side school of economists likes to point out, once depreciation for wear and tear and inflation is taken into account, a 50 per cent CGT rate can in fact be more like 70 per cent, largely nullifying the gain and likely to hammer entrepreneurial activity. Given that top earners are already due soon to be paying 50 per cent income tax, not to mention other tax hikes, the process will drive yet more folk abroad and deter wealth creators from coming into the UK. The likely upshot of this will be a less active stock market – which will hit pension fund investments – hardly a great idea from the LibDems’ point of view – and likely as not, erode, rather than acquire, more revenues.
There is also a quote, on page 14 of the magazine, that also proves to me that Mr Clegg is a numbskull: “The Tory inheritance tax cut, he said, would help people who don’t actually spend their money, they just squirrel it away'”. In other words, if you have wealth, either from your own efforts or from inheritance, and save it – you are a parasite, a dead weight. Mr Clegg clearly thinks that saving is bad, that “hoarding” of money in a bank account, or whatever, is a terrible thing, and that we should all be spending our money like mad down the High Street. Maybe he thinks it would be better if trustafarians were all down the dog track or the casino rather than sitting on a portfolio.
It is almost hard to summon breath to point out that it is precisely the high level of consumer spending, funded by debt rather than by real savings, that in part explains much of the current economic mess. We need to encourage, not discourage, savings. And given that as folk get richer, they typically invest and “hoard” a relatively high percentage of wealth, it is folly to hit them since they are a key source of capital for future investment. Folk on low incomes, by contrast, have low savings for the rather obvious reason, of course, that they struggle to make ends meet with what little income they have.
In fact, if the Tories have any sense – not much unfortunately – they should boldly confront the insane, Keynesianism-on-drugs mindset that says that spending is always a good thing and that savers are all rich, selfish bastards who should be taxed. Many years ago, FA Hayek likened this form of economic thinking to quackery. As usual, the great Austrian economist was being far too polite.
This is splendid almost beyond words.
Now go make your own!
Hat tip to John Farrier
Oh Jesus wept, just put the leadership of the Tory party out of our misery and get it over with. The ‘secret weapon’ of the Tory Party is a pro-Euro corporatist whose ability to alienate actual conservatives has been proven every time the bastard has rolled out over the last couple decades.
The Tory party is facing a widely detested and demonstrably failed government and the fact they are not forty points ahead in the polls shows just how far they have their heads up their own collective backsides… and now, just to dispel any lingering doubt, they dust off Ken Bleedin’ Clarke. Unbelievable.
Of course, when I say that that is what Strathclyde Fire and Rescue (“making our communities safe places to live work and visit”) preferred, I do acknowledge it cannot have been pleasant to sit around listening to her desperate cries for the last six hours of her life while rescue equipment that could have brought her out from the mine shaft into which she had fallen stood inactive. But it was that or disregard a memo.
According to the Times,
An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.
A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public. A memo had been circulated in Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations months previously stating that it was for use by firefighters only.
Tough call. We must hope that the eighteen firefighters present (according to an account in the Scotsman) supported each other.
I am a little confused by the fact that the this rope equipment was specified for use by firefighters only. I suppose this restriction is to avoid untrained people being rescued.
NickM, Samizdata comment thread regular who gigs over at CountingCats, pretty much sums up my own views about the Tories and David Cameron at the moment. Which got me thinking: what would happen if, heaven forbid, we got another few years of Gordon Brown in Number 10?
This is all getting very ugly indeed. For a start, sterling is falling fast in the exchanges. There is, I think, more than an outside chance that if long-term government bond yields start to rise faster to attract lenders to lend, it will push the UK back into the recession from which it only recently – if you believe the data – recovered. I also think this government is quite capable of reiimposing exchange controls, which means that tourists, for example, would not be allowed to take more than a piddling amount of cash out of the UK. Of course, such a policy would not be announced in advance but imposed as an immediate measure. But it is a prospect to bear in mind. It is a bit academic in my case, but it is worth moving any spare cash you might have offshore, assuming you can do this without incurring a heavy charge. With what investments I do have, I tend to make sure that a fairly high proportion are in economies that are not heavily exposed to sterling. I am also a bit of a long-term dollar bear, given that the US also suffers from massive debt problems and that the dollar is also losing its reserve currency status, albeit slowly. I also favour commodity-backed currencies (the Australian dollar, for instance.)
Next year, I can qualify to get a Maltese passport, which, among other things, makes it easier for me to live in places such as Canada, apparently. I am going to look into this seriously. In the current environment, it pays to have a Plan B. I am lucky: as we don’t – yet – have kids, me and the missus will not have too great a trouble getting out, although I would contemplate it perhaps even more so if I did have children. I have worked abroad from time to time, so some of the logistics would not be a mystery to me. My only major reservation at the moment is that if I did move, I would not want to be too far from my parents, who haven’t been in the best of health lately and are not getting any younger.
UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback (well, most of it, anyway). First of all, my support for the freedom to migrate – as in the above instance – does not mean that I can expect to go where I like, or change the culture of the country to which I choose to live, or impose my values on such places. Which means that I do not dismiss the worries of those who have been concerned about, say, the influx of folk from very different cultures into the UK (ie, from the Muslim world). There is also the injustice, of course, of migrants taking up welfare benefits in the countries to which they enter – that clearly should stop. But such important caveats aside, as I have said, the freedom of exit is, if you think about it, the ultimate freedom as it protects other freedoms. If the situation becomes intolerable, it is glib for someone to argue that I am somehow “harming” my fellows who stay behind by leaving. If a state can ban or seriously hamper any individual from leaving a country of his birth, tht person is a serf.
One commenter by the name of Tim thinks my argument for leaving is somehow unprincipled as I will be causing, albeit in a tiny way, the very sort of problems (a falling pound, etc) that is bothering me in the first place. That argument does not convince. One might as well object to my refusing to use the services of a firm any longer because the firm will lose sales. Yet the firm, if it is run by intelligent people (big if) will react to the loss by trying to make itself more attractive. If a country is losing people and their departure is a “harm”, then surely that very fact is an incentive for countries to change course, to encourage people to enter that country rather than leave. Or take another analogy: socialists get upset by the idea of school choice because a school will be “harmed” if dissatisfied parents pull their kids out and send them somewhere else.
Every time Labour show a whiff of recovery the pound crashes.
– Guido Fawkes comments on his graph showing that The Market Hates Labour.
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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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