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Times have changed, voters want the pendulum to swing back from spending towards tax cuts. Rumours are circulating in the Westminster Village that Gordon and Alastair are preparing to announce tax cuts. Which will, even if they are only rhetorical tax cuts, in a stroke make Dave and George look ridiculous as both Labour and the LibDems promise tax cuts and the Tories are left high and dry stranded on the high tax centre ground … – Guido November 9th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Short cryptic link-posts, of the sort which will make absolutely no sense as soon as the link stops working, seem to be accumulating here just now, so here’s another. Check this out. It’s Friday Ephemerus (?) number one at David Thompson‘s today. Seriously, forgetting about the short cryptic thing, but assuming you now know what I am talking about, I think this might make a good visual metaphor for the television people as they chatter about the Glenrothes bye-election, just won by Labour. Suddenly, David Cameron must now be becoming afraid, very afraid. Is the utter cluelessness of the Conservatives about all the financial turmoil grabbing defeat for them from the jaws of victory? Are they starting to McCain themselves? Are they, the party that is confused and hesitant about doing the wrong thing, going to be beaten yet again by the party that is unconfused and brazen about it? November 7th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is magnificent. November 6th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):
[Reported by The Register] Twice is coincidence…
Three times is enemy action…
I take it that “adds value” means ‘supports us’; “legitimate protest” means ‘sneering at our enemies’; and a “more responsible manner” means ‘without questioning our control of the discourse’. November 5th, 2008 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
So I pop in to Guido’s, and at the top right, item (as of now) one in the Seen Elsewhere section, is a link to this short posting at the UK Libertarian Party blog:
Alas, the writer of that posting, Guthrum, is unable to reveal his source. Meanwhile, the comment war sputters along at the original TPA posting, tax cutters trading abuse with selfless public servants who argue that if councillors are paid only peanuts the results will be ever more simian. But I reckon the problem goes deeper than that. What with all the statutory obligations now piled upon local councillors, these people no longer actually make local decisions; they merely oversee the local versions of decisions made by others, in London and in Brussels. They are the local arm of a nationalised or EUropeanised industry. Few who are even sane would want a job like that. Hence the following, from a TPA commenter:
And nobody sane would want to spend all his spare time quarrelling with someone like that. Whenever anyone tells me that the Lib Dems are becoming semi-sane, I picture someone like Conroy and say to myself: no they aren’t. To Samizdata’s American readers, i.e. to most of them by the sound of the comments these days, let me add that not everyone in the UK behaves like Conroy, or thinks like him. Besides which, you too also have the occasional Community Organiser wandering around trying to get noticed, do you not? But I’m guessing yours have better teeth. November 4th, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph, urges Britons compelled to pay the outrageous tax, sorry, licence fee to the BBC should refuse to do so following the recent episode over two radio presenters who chose to mock an elderly actor about one of the presenters having had sex with the actor’s grand-daughter. I urge readers to read the Moore article. It is devastating and gets to the heart of why the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross saga is not just a minor issue, but a brutal example of what is happening in the culture of the UK. It is a lamentable fact about Britain that one of the things we are best known for these days is braying vulgarity, rudeness and cruelty, although certain issues, such as football hooliganism, seem to have become a bit less of a problem in recent years. For example, I tend to find US television far funnier, far sharper and yet also less cruel. Of course this is a generalisation – I am sure Samizdata readers living abroad can give me examples of cruelty-as-entertainment – but in the UK, it is becoming more and more the norm, not the exception. And the BBC, paid for by a tax, is at the heart of it. What is even more pathetic about the brutality of this culture is that its targets are not powerful dictators or scoundrels, since that might be dangerous. It is the sheer cowardice of these folk that appals. As Sean Gabb has written, the BBC is part of the “enemy class”. As libertarians, we need to realise that privatising the odd bit of the state is not enough. The BBC, as part of the media class that is so interwoven with the political, corporatist class, must be destroyed, totally. November 1st, 2008 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
I must say that one of the few gratifying aspects of the current financial turmoil has been the way in which one of the UK’s biggest banks, Barclays, has decided to spurn any offers of help from the UK government – ie, the UK taxpayer – and raise funds from mostly private investors. In its recent raising of about $12 billion of funds to improve its capital position, Barclays made it clear that it wanted to stick with funding via the commercial market because, if it had drawn on the UK state moneys that have been provided for the likes of Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, it would lose its freedom to set pay, among other things. Now, free market purists may object that the Middle Eastern funds that have pumped cash into Barclays are not entirely private sector organisation and of course they have a point. But the fact is that as a taxpayer, I haven’t been asked to write a checque to Barclays, in contrast to other UK banks. Barclays has also kept its affairs away from the hands of such characters as Alistair Darling, the UK finance minister. Those banks which have taken state aid face the risk that the confidentiality of their clients, especially in the wealth management area, could be compromised. Of course, even before 9/11, banks have been required to compromise on secrecy due to things like money laundering laws and the like. But there is no doubt that once a bank becomes an arm of the state, such erosions of client confidentiality that have already occurred will increase. And the reaction of certain parts of the media has been interesting. On Friday evening, the BBC economics correspondent, Robert Peston, told us in that extraordinary voice of his how Barclays shareholders would be penalised by having to pay a higher amount to obtain funding than if they had, like good little corporatists, gone along to the UK Treasury. Peston, as a corporatist himself and creature of New Labour, cannot fathom why a bank wants to stay out of the public sector. Barclays’ executive bonuses may be “obscene” as far as Peston is concerned, but at least Barclays avoided some of the worst excesses of the credit boom. It is, as a result, relatively strong as a bank. Barclays must be thankful that it lost a merger battle to buy ABN Amro last year. If its refusal to eat from the state table annoys BBC journalists – who of course are paid out of a tax – then the bank must have done something very right. One cannot exactly say that of a lot of banks these days. November 1st, 2008 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Dizzy, of Dizzy Thinks fame, recently made an interesting prediction, concerning the attitude of Brits towards the USA:
I do doubt this. I think that much anti-Americanism is really anti- a particular part of America, and this hatred is felt with equal strength by other parts of America. President Bush, after all, is not only hated in Britain. Many Americans hate him too. And Obama is from a very different part of America to the part that gave us President Bush. Obama is from one of the parts that hates President Bush. I recall the Clinton years. Had the (very large) part of Britain that now hates Bush wanted to hate Clinton, it would have had at least as much to work with as it has had with Bush. But it didn’t want to hate Clinton, and it didn’t. Likewise, it won’t want to hate Obama, and it won’t. Well, we shall probably soon see. October 30th, 2008 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC’s television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London. For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don’t remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record. Now here’s where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don’t worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it’s warming; when it gets cold, it’s warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it’s warming twice as fast. Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition. What does predict the weather we’re having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit] Here’s a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008’s weather than anything cooked up by the “capitalism causes tsunamis” crowd. Farmer’s Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists. October 29th, 2008 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
I must say I find all this global warming business to be jolly exciting. October 28th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over a year ago, when parts of the UK were inundated by floods, I remember the Spectator’s Rod Liddle moan that one reason why the water was running off the ground and into the rivers so much faster was because of all the additional immigrants crowding into the UK at the time. (Yes, really). It was a nonsense argument: much of the worst flooding was in places like Gloucestershire rather than in London, the former hardly being a hotbed of immigration. But hey, if you are in the business of defending zero-sum economics and the “lump of labour fallacy”, not to mention hold a general dislike of foreigners messing up the view, any stick will do. It turns out that tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of immigrants want to go back to their country of origin because of the changing economic landscape, and may do so. So Rod and his other worriers can sleep easy. Britain is now able to breathe free (sarcasm alert). On a side-note, I’d add that with a recession now occuring, dislike of “foreigners” taking “our jobs” is going to become an even more toxic political issue, particularly where among the low-paid, arrivals from abroad do depress wage rates, if only in the short run. But then one should consider the shocking fact that during the boom years, immigrants were taking half of the new job vacancies in the UK, despite there being a large amount of unemployment among the indigenous population, a terrible indictment of the tax and welfare system’s destruction of work incentives. October 23rd, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Spectator politics correspondent Fraser Nelson spots that Gordon “off balance sheet” Brown, as I will now continue to call this shit of a national leader, has devised an accounting wheeze to remove the tens of billions of public debt involved in the Northern Rock bailout from the public accounts. As a result, Brown can claim that the UK public finances are fine, nothing to look at here, please move along. As Mr Nelson points out, Brown engages in practices that politicians are only too keen to condemn when applied by banks. But at least banks, if they try to remove certain default risks off their balance sheets, use forms of tradable insurance policies known as credit default swaps. I’d be interested to know how exactly Brown & Co. intend to hedge out the risk that Northern Rock does not return to any form of profit. This disconnect between the talk of prudence on the one hand and financial trickery on the other will, I hope, be the undoing of this overrated bullshitter from north of the border. Brown is damaging the age-old Scottish reputation for plain dealing. No wonder so many Scots want to cut loose from the UK. I don’t blame them. October 21st, 2008 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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