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I see the UK Chancellor, Alistair Darling, is making the point in the House of Commons that the financial crisis will not deflect the government from bringing about a low-carbon economy, despite the fact that such a change, by definition, will be costly. I am watching his statement in the House right now. He has also referred to the current economic climate as if it were an outbreak of a virus or a meteorite impact from outer space.
There is a risk that these people are sincere about all this. That, in fact, is the danger: not that such folk are liars and charlatans, but that they actually mean it.
These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening.
– David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars’ meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday.
(Hat-tip: The Register)
Every so often, the MSM offers up a nugget of shining truth:
Houses of Parliament ‘infested with vermin’
Of course, we have been saying that for years.
I feel a sense of personal relief about David Cameron’s latest announcement, to the effect that all talk of the next Conservative government matching Labour spending plans will now be abandoned. Thank goodness. I am an earn-little-spend-little old geezer, and until today I was staring at some kind of Weimar Germany/Nazi Germany future in which my savings were all gone, along with any surviving shred of ability to earn any money to replace them. That still may be my future, and the future of many others. But things are now looking up, a bit.
Opposition matters. Oppositions matter. What a government knows will be attacked from across the Commons and in the TV studios is one kind of policy, which they still might do but which has political risks attached to it, as well as the less worrying problem, to a politician, of the policy failing and blowing up in all our faces in a year or two’s time. But what a government knows an opposition will keep quiet about is something else again. The opposition won’t oppose now, and can share the blame later. I still blame Mr Cameron and his party for the mess my country has got itself into, because for a few crucial years they failed to oppose Mr Brown’s spend-spend-spend regime where it mattered, in the form of promises to refrain from such profligacy when themselves elected. But at least they have now done their switch, and Labour wastefulness will now be scrutinised, moderated, and even perhaps significantly curtailed.
I have been reading The Spectator’s CoffeeHouse blog recently, and the cry recently arose there in the comments on such postings as this that the Conservatives have been getting an unfair shake from The Media. Well, yes. That’s what The Media does. But a clear and convincing message, as I recall an earlier Conservative opposition leader by the name of Thatcher proving quite eloquently in the late 1970s, can cut through such bias. The basic reason for Conservative media feebleness in recent weeks, and the consequent bizarre rise in the opinion polls of Mr Brown, who caused the crisis but at least seemed to know better than his opponents how to climb out of it, has been that the Conservatives have had nothing coherent to say. “We wouldn’t start from here – this is all their fault”, as I heard Conservative spokesman for something-or-other Alan Duncan saying only last night on Newsnight, is not a policy; it is a mere accident report. The question now is not: Who the hell did this? It is: What the hell do we do now? Until today, the Conservatives were offering no answer.
It may be wishful thinking on my part, something I often indulge in, but I still hope for a semi-intelligent Conservative government quite soon now, and a Labour electoral melt-down which they will recover from very slowly if at all. And I may yet get to die in my bed, rather than under Charing Cross Bridge.
Last night I was lucky enough to get invited to a smart awards ceremony in London marking achievements in the world of luxury goods and services. There were folk from various brands and companies such as Chanel, Aston Martin, and the like. Lots of nice expensive champagne, dishy women and impeccably dressed chaps. At the end of the event, an award was given to a certain Vivienne Westwood, one of Britain’s most famous fashion designers. She started her career back in the 1970s in the world of punk, associating with Malcolm McClaren, who went on to manage the Sex Pistols, before moving on to other fields. To describe Ms Westwood as a gloriously bohemian figure is an understatement: she wore this amazing red dress, had bright orange hair and her face was painted a sort of white to create the impression of an eccentric 18th Century party-goer in the court of Versailles.
I was struck by two things. On the one hand, Ms Westwood is a great entrepreneur. She has a fashion business empire that stretches around the world, employing loads of people, creating jobs and income, not to mention fashions, for thousands of people. My wife adores some of her stuff. She has been heaped with honours and is the toast of Milan, Paris, London and New York.
And yet as soon as she opened her mouth in the ceremony last night, we were treated to meandering monologue about how how “Britain has far less culture than France”; how cheap labour is the evil that causes wars, how mankind is threatened with extinction in a few year’s time; how the French were great because they had central planning back in the 17th Century to create a fashion industry, how she was soooooo glad that Obama was in the White House…..on and on it went, bringing together in one speech an amazingly concentrated collection of fatuity.
It keeps amazing me how people in business, even tremendously successful businesspeople, can hold views that would make any sixth-form pupil cringe with embarrassment. But part of me loves the free market precisely because even an eccentric like Ms Westwood, while decrying global capitalism, can make a mint out of it by selling people stuff that they want. Just don’t ever take her views on world affairs seriously.
Oh well, at least she is more fun to watch that Polly Toynbee and like I said, she has created a great business.
I thought this ought to be shared here:
Dear Ms Featherstone
I think the people who should truly say sorry for such events are the opinion leaders of the Guardian. Please allow me to explain.
Last week I visited (as a doctor) a family in a council estate. The mother was concerned about her 12 year old son. She was very pleased that her older son was now on incapacity and would therefore do well for himself in terms of money. There is nothing wrong with this older boy that makes him incapacitated, but that is another story. She also had a 14 year old daughter, who while I was there, constantly argued with her mother demanding money for cigarettes. The three children had three different fathers, all absent. The kids, while I could see were still children, gleamed with malignant insolence. I can see them turning into damaged adults. I feel sorry for the trap they are in – the trap created directly by the welfare state whereby the family, and all those in the neighbourhood, see welfare as a lifestyle option. They live in squalor but have more wealth than most people I knew in India; they certainly have more material comforts than I ever had growing up in Delhi.
The Guardian describes such families as poor. The Labour party wants to throw money at the family. The Guardian readers blame Margaret Thatcher for this state of affairs, smug in their modern pieties, their intellectual laziness, and their stupidity masquerading as sanctimonious concern. I used to work with slum children in Delhi; they had very little, but even the most physically disabled amongst them made an effort.
There is no hope for Britian. Civilisations dont die, they commit suicide. And before they commit suicide, they read and believe the Guardian.
I truly and deeply feel sorry for all the children who are the victims of the welfare state. Things are much, much worse for the slum children in India, I saw more dignity among them and certainly greater hope.
I am not sure if you will understand this message. I am too tired to explain further. Either you will get or you wont. Either way, it will make no difference to anything.
I think I know how he feels.
via Old Holborn
Ah, the children of the night! What sweet music they make:
Plans by Gordon Brown to make everyone a potential organ donor unless they actively “opt out” will be roundly rejected by the Government’s official advisory body next week, The Times has learnt.
The Prime Minister and the Chief Medical Officer for England believe that thousands of lives could be saved by introducing “presumed consent” – where everyone is automatically placed on the organ donor register unless they or their family object….
The recommendations are not binding on the Government and ministers may still bring legislation forward.
Of course they will. They must feed.
Guido Fawkes, in a break from his usual occupation of digging up scandals on our political class, instead focuses a bit more on the underlying policies of the UK government and the opposition. He rightly notes that sterling’s falls against the dollar undermine Gordon Brown’s attempt to frame the crisis as something that has hit Britain from afar, like the impact of a meteorite or SARS virus. Many of Britain’s problems are home-grown. Guido also reminds us of that little-noticed adjustment to the Bank of England’s inflation target back in the early ‘Noughties. Brown removed housing prices from the index of inflation that the BoE targets. Result: house prices no longer figured as a reason for setting interest rates. Brown, in a word, helped make the property price bubble worse than it might otherwise have been.
Now, I know some of us hardline defenders of free market banking will say that this is a quibble about how to run state monopoly money, and they have a strong point about that. But clearly, even the supposed wondrous Brownite creation of an independent central bank turned out to be an illusion. No wonder sterling is falling against the dollar and the euro. As I work for an export business, I guess I should be grateful.
Brown, in his current efforts to create a narrative as “Gordon the statesman who fixed the crisis” reminds me rather of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten, the UK Royal Family member and disastrous military commander and Indian Viceroy who managed, at least for many years, to create the idea of him being some kind of hero. Sooner or later, Brown is going to get, and deserve, the Andrew Roberts treatment. (Roberts helped to annihilate Mountbatten’s reputation).
Simon Heffer concludes this Telegraph piece about why there must be public spending cuts, despite the public statements of all the political parties which by omission suggest the contrary, with this:
Having just witnessed the American election, I am aware of one other point. In the run-up to elections, people say absurd things about the economy to garner votes. Barack Obama has made $1.3 trillion of spending promises. He will shortly have a rendezvous with reality. He will not deliver on those promises. He will instead have to preside over a financial situation whose full horror we have yet to see here. Wiser and older heads in his administration will need a plan to deal with reality, even though one was not promised during his campaign.
This is what we need here. An early election – which Mr Brown might as well call, since the Tories have been found out and are slipping back in the polls – would at least get all the lies and idiocies out of the way. One party would then have to confront reality, just as Mr Obama is about to have to do. Then we could end the pretence of a pain-free recession, and get on and take it. So long as our politicians feel they must butter us up and make out that what is to come won’t hurt a bit, the only way is down.
All the lies and idiocies? That would be asking too much. But you can see what he means. My first reaction was: what a frightful commentary on the state of public opinion just now, if no politician dares tell it like it is. But then again, it is the very fact that Cameron is not telling it like it is, but instead just following idiotically behind Mr Brown, that is causing his current decline in the polls, which I confess I did not see coming.
I can’t recall who said it – I think one of the Coffee Housers – but the best recent comment on the Conservatives I heard said something like: Cameron was picked to deal with good times, in a way that Blair was doing, and Brown subsequently couldn’t. But face Cameron with a catastrophe, in which the option of pretending to be nice to everyone no longer exists, and he is a rabbit caught in the headlights. Mr Brown loves a good catastrophe and is benefitting from this one now, even though it is to an appalling extent a catastrophe of his own making. Like I say, I did not see that coming. The voters now face a choice between clever and determined but deluded, and nice – well, polite, in a smarmy old Etonian manner – but bewildered.
One thing I do seem to recall saying a few months ago, although I can’t recall when, was that Cameron believed he merely had to say and then do nothing in order to sail into power and stay there for a decade. Only “events” would upset such a calculation. Now, those events have arrived. Optimistic Conservatives presumably now hope that Cameron is “keeping his powder dry”, and will stir up a rhetorical storm come the actual election campaign, whenever it materialises and when it will be too late for Brown to steal all Cameron’s brilliant policies. But I am starting to think that Perry de Havilland has had Cameron’s number all along. There are no brilliant Cameron policies. There is no Cameron powder, or not the sort that accomplishes anything. Which means that a general election now would simply prolong the reign of idiocy, no matter who wins.
Tim Worstall, whom I read daily, has a good post dealing with the idea that it is somehow wicked for banks to charge a higher interest rate for a mortgage than the official base rate as set by the Bank of England (or any other central bank, come to that). It is, as he says, a matter of pricing for risk. Lending money to a person with a relatively small deposit – or collateral – relative to the total value of a loan is risky. I am going to have to renegotiate my mortgage in the next few weeks, and because the pricing of risk has risen dramatically, I can expect to pay more even though my loan-to-value ratio is quite low and I have a decent amount of equity, while both my wife and I earn a reasonable amount of money. It is not a great situation to be in, but it could be worse. For many years I chose to rent and stash up enough money to put down a good deposit, as did my wife. That, by the way, is one reason why there is a basic injustice when relatively prudent folk get taxed to bail out the imprudent, such as a person on a 100 per cent mortgage.
To be honest, had the price of risk not been artificially reduced by recklessly loose monetary policy over the past few years, we would not be in this pickle in the first place, but that’s another story.
Whenever you hear a politician, particularly a Tory politician, use the term “fiscally responsible“, this is a codeword for… will make no difference.
The true meaning is “we will not actually reduce the size of the state, we will just move the pain around a bit”.
You might think this is good news. From The Times:
Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ – People living in council houses will no longer be entitled to a subsidised tenancy for life under Whitehall proposals to address waiting lists. New tenants would have fixed-term contracts under the plans, with regular reviews every few years, The Times has learnt. […]
At the moment anyone allocated a council home can usually stay for life, irrespective of circumstances. People in council homes paying subsidised rents can end up relatively wealthy, and in some cases they can bequeath the tenancy to their children. Frank Dobson became a Cabinet Minister while living in a council flat in his London constituency.
But no, even this is not a move to logic and fairness, removing privilege from state clients and getting the state out of people’s lives. The bit I cut out reads:
If a tenant’s financial position improved he or she would be encouraged to take an equity share or to move to the private sector. If they refused they could face higher rents. The right to a council home is also likely to be tied to a requirement to have or be actively looking for a job.
The measures are being considered by Margaret Beckett, the new Housing Minister, in the most radical shake-up of the social housing system for decades to ensure that those who deserve council homes get them.
So this is not, repeat not, a plan to reduce dependency, to diminish the proportion of the population in receipt of the taxpayer’s subsidy, nor even to relieve poverty.
It looks like the proposals will be both more intrusive, bureaucratic and moralitarian than the present ones. Instead of in old socialist style checking people are poor enough to qualify for subsidised housing and leaving them to it, on the (generally correct) assumption that the dependent poor are unlikely in general to get much better off, and not worrying if some do, we are to look forward to a new grand scheme of supervision, whereby people are compelled continually to immiserate themselves for the inspectors in order to keep their roof. So there is to be a new premium to be created for inadequacy and profligacy.
But the dependent class may not be too miserable or helpless. The very people who in a reasonable humane system we might be willing to help (those too feeble or disturbed to be able to earn a living) will not be the ones that are targetted for assistance, but those who have or are actively looking for a job, who show every sign of being able to look after themselves, in other words.
How to explain this? It is neither likely to be economically efficient, nor is kindly (foolishly or otherwise).
We need to note that as a project it embodies Gordon Brown’s puritan obsession with “hard working families”. I do not particularly care if people are feckless or pleasure seeking as long as it is not at my expense. I rationally wish I could be a bit more feckless and pleasure seeking myself, but I can neither afford it, nor do I have a sybarite’s soul. But the Brownite regards suffering and struggle, social compliance, and resentment of the easy life, as the core moral values.
And this is of a piece with the politics of New New Labour. For the struggling compliant, resentful of others pleasure, are reliable voters for the gifts of authority. The feeble and disturbed who can make no shift for themselves are not voters at all. This is a plan to build, and politically police, a new client class.
[To pre-empt the objection that at least it gets rid of privileged access to council accomodation to party apparatchiks and local government employees, I would point out that that form of corruption is already obsolete. Such people now get subsidised equity as often as subsidised rent, and get to live with others like themselves, not among the lumpenproletariat on council estates, because they have a claim as key workers. Key workers (who are largely middle-class and paid above average, even including town planners and Connexions advisers) constitute another client class of the state that has been silently established this last decade. Welcome to nomenklatura UK.]
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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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