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Home Office plans to require registration of mobile phones (and to register the identities of hotel guests (pdf), record who calls whom and what they read online, etc …) have a familiar feel. In the Soviet Union, all printing machinery and typewriters were registered just in case they might be used for ‘anti-social’ purposes, when the people who had access to them could be tracked-down, watched and questioned.  October 21st, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The polls have not been kind to the dominant media narrative. Taking lessons from their coverage of Obamamania, the fourth estate puffed up and justified the representation of Brown as a political superhero, straddling the globe whilst other leaders squabbled like pygmies beneath his legs. I am not sure where the source of this hagiographic support stemmed from, but the source in part, is Brown as a personification of the nation. The appearance of undertaking such a role allowed an orgy of headlines about how Britain as Brown saved the credit crunch. That the mainstream media grasps this story is a testament to their insecurity. It is narrative of a nation in decline: febrile, brittle, with reporters suspending critical judgement. Once the real events start to seep out, it is clear that three weeks of Broonmedia, following the distortions of blanket conference coverage, have not stirred the polls beyond some decline in the Tory lead. Perhaps the media confused Obama and Brown. If the media are now more prone to herd behaviour due to the narrow bases of their recruitment and education, this represents a further step change in their retreat from their audiences. When they hear the same message bleating from their television, radio and newspapers, people will turn to other sources and other traditions to explain their situation. October 19th, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
…They would make Guido Fawkes an advisor on how to fight the next election. Of course Guido (aka Paul Staines), whom I know and like, prefers, as I and many other bloggers do, to give party politics a wide berth in professional terms. He is far more effective doing what he is doing now and obviously has a great time doing it. But as his example shows, the guy has more sense on how the Tories should go after the absurd notion of Gordon ‘off-balance-sheet’ Brown than any number of folk working in Tory HQ. Think about it: the Tories should put up posters with the Brown comment on “no return to boom and bust” over, and over, and over. That this man, who has presided over deteriorating public finances during a relatively strong period of growth, sold our gold reserves at a fraction of their current value, raided pension funds and shafted taxpayers should be able to pose as some sort of economic Winston Churchill is a joke. October 17th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is no “responsible” route out of recession – we need radical action to rescue the economy. We need a growth package and we need it fast, the sooner it is in place the quicker we will be out of recession. – Guido Fawkes was underwhelmed by David Cameron’s latest speech October 17th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Corporate industrialists are frequently not keen on free markets. They are fond of order, safety, and “fairness” or “a level playing-field” – which means everybody doing things the same way they do. They like a managed world, because management is what they do. So no good comes of appointing them as regulators. Technocracy joins with bureaucracy. Here is Adair Turner interviewed by The Guardian (perhaps in itself a significant choice of forum):
Translation: “We have to destroy The City in order to save it.” This is ‘risk’ as understood by a safety fanatic – one-sided, and totally unrelated to choice or to return.
More than necessary? And who will pay for such artificial premiums? Whoever the FSA decides to tax or fine. It is a predatory organisation: a Self-Financing Regulatory Agency. So it wil have to find more occasions to punish and to license in order to fund more intervention, licensing and punishment.
A prime lesson of the Great Depression for most commentators has been that shutting down free trade in goods in order to protect industrial markets made the depression deeper and longer than anyone could have imagined. It stopped trade and industry recovering from the shock. That our Government is looking to blame foreign investors for our problems and is taking measures to frighten them off, and that Lord Adair is advocating, as the cure for a financial market crash, tight supervision of the surviving free markets in finance and commercial instruments, suggests the lessons have been rather badly understood. They risk stopping the financial markets recovering from the shock. October 17th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
(Guardian)
(Daniel Hannan, Times) At least they shot de Menezes in the head. For a business whose bank has been terminated on executive orders, the experience is rather like how I imagine it feels to drown in your own blood. Of course if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear. The government is benevolent, and always acts in the best interests of everyone. Foreigners are a threat. We must remember that. The government says so. So it must be true. October 15th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Iain Dale quotes an astonishing piece of dialogue from a Daily Mail interview by Alison Pearson of Gordon Brown. First Dale recycles interminable chunks of sob stuff about Brown’s children and Brown’s eyesight. Pass. But then comes this:
He did indeed actually say this, once, at a conference. So, not an actual lie. But, as Iain Dale points out, he said it without the “Tory” on many, many other occasions. The implication is that Labour boom and bust is fine. This is the kind of drivel that this man is now reduced to spouting. Brown then explains that this particular Labour bust is not really a bust at all:
Yes, and he’s managed to bring the price of oil down too. With his superhuman powers of self-delusion, and his apparently unshakable determination to continue wrecking my country, this man reminds me more and more of Robert Mugabe. Brown himself is already a failure, doomed to electoral defeat. That is now a given. What interests me is what effect all this insanity, institutional and personal, will have on the Labour Party, whose recent feeble attempts to replace Brown seem now to have fizzled out. Sadly, there seem to be enough faithfully moronic Labour voters to keep a rump of Labour diehards in the House of Commons in quite substantial numbers. But then what? They promised an end to boom and bust. They boomed, after a fashion. They are now busting, and how. And they stuck with the lunatic who said and did all this to the bitter end. What sane person would vote for these incompetent and spineless nutters ever again? Labour could well go the way of the early twentieth century Liberals. However, I suspect that David Cameron will actually be quite happy, after he wins the next election, to face opposition benches which are clogged up with Labour living dead, rather than populated by people with plausible things to say and serious complaints to voice like lots of new and young and optimistic Conservatives or Lib Dems. Blair coasted along for a decade on the public’s loathing of the Conservatives. Cameron now looks content to do the same, on the back of a near-universal loathing of Labour. I may be misjudging Cameron and I hope I am. But I fear that I am not. October 11th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 At least someone is enjoying themselves. The taxpayer has always paid his bills, except in his childhood, when God did. And now he gets to use unlimited power to seize whatever he likes and congratulate himself that he is punishing bad people for taking risks in the hope of making money for themselves. pic hat-tip: Guido October 10th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peter Mandelson’s re-appointment to Gordon Brown’s cabinet is a potential disaster, and not just for Britain. I have always liked Mandelson more than any other Labour politician. I ought to hate him, because his strategic genius gave us the New Labour revolution of the last decade. But his lucent unwillingness to pretend he is an imbecile, to conceal the fact of his cunning, or to act out his party’s customary hatred of private enterprise, even while his pupils execute their vile populist capers, is to me endearing. Maybe that is why I’m worried more than stunned by his return to British politics. While most commentators are mesmerised by the story of Brown’s feud with The Prince of Darkness, and the daring of playing with Labour Party’s own resentment of him by bringing him back from Brussels, I am more interested in strategy. Do not just look at the flashy sacrifice; see how it changes the board. There is now a gap in the European Commission. Brown will appoint one of his favourites to it, and have far reaching influence on Europe, and therefore Britain, even after he steps down. This can be seen as a subtle purge by bribery, and as a retirement strategy. A preparation for the Brown legacy. There is now a gap in the European Commission. Whoever fills Mandelson’s Trade portfolio will be replacing one of the most free-trade-friendly commissioners that the EU has ever had, in a financial crisis, with protectionist populism surging on both sides of the Atlantic. Brown’s legacy could easily be a trade war and a real depression. October 4th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I realise that I keep going on about it, and I realise that I dissent from the view often expressed here that the next British government (Cameron’s) will probably be no better than this government now, but if I were allowed just one more thing to say about Gordon Brown and his government, it would be that I wish people would stop saying or writing this:
Mr Brown is not a good, decent man. He is an utter shit, and his utter shitness is inseparable from the difficulties he now faces in continuing to be Prime Minister despite his obvious unsuitability, and to the miseries he is still inflicting upon the rest of us. I will not expand at length about Brown’s shititude. Suffice it to say that Gordon Brown is the living embodiment of the phrase “he won’t be told”. When he is told, he shouts like a spoilt but thwarted seven year old, until whoever it is just gives up or goes home and pretends to be ill. And all his henchmen are like this too. All who care have heard the stories. All who can bear to think about them now know of the blunders, and of the refusal to do anything about them except increase the doses of poison. Brown himself is beyond hope, and he will be subjected in due course to the modern, humane version of hanging, drawing and quartering (which is a whole hell of a lot more humane than he deserves), either by his underlings or by the voters. I will merely content myself now with explaining why otherwise sane-seeming journalists like Alice Miles (the one linked to above) keep repeating this obvious tosh about Brown’s goodness and decency, despite all of them knowing perfectly well that it is tosh. It is just possible that if the explanation – the one you are about to read – of this strange phenomenon were to get around commentators might be persuaded to stop talking this particular brand of tosh. The explanation, briefly, is that when you are denouncing someone as a complete waste of space and begging the earth to open up and swallow him, you find yourself wanting to say something nice about him, anything nice, to prove that you are being fair, that you are willing to give him credit for his virtues, such as they are. And this is where this absurdly false cliché about Brown’s goodness and decency has come from. Brown is a good and decent man (and I am a kind and fair-minded and good-hearted person for saying so), but blah blah blah. But he is a crap Prime Minister, his decisions have all been disastrous, he has wrecked the economy, he is an unreconstructed state centralist despot despite decades of evidence proving the evilness of such despotic centralism, his speeches are intolerable, he must go, he will not go, they must dump him, they will not dump him, the country cannot take much more of this, blah blah blah. But the truth is simpler. Prime Minister Brown has no virtues. None. He is a bad and nasty man. And blah blah blah. It may not serve the argumentative purposes of commentators to find no nice things to say about Mr Brown at all, but it would serve the truth far better. September 24th, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I went in search of funny quotes, like the one at the start of this posting, but instead found mostly sensible ones, like this (via here):
That’s Community Reinvestment Act.
Now there’s a thought. All those quotes are from Americans, about America. But it is at least as bad here. Today, on my wanderings in London, I came across a headline in a free newspaper that went Darling declares war on City’s risk culture.  What new horrors of intervention will be inflicted upon the British economy by this dying government of ours, in its dying months, as they forget about the country as a whole and concentrate on trying to keep the loyalty of their core vote? September 23rd, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The country’s gone to the dogs, the economy’s going down the toilet, crime is through the roof, I’m on half the wages I was two years ago and am barely keeping my head above water and crossing my fingers that I’m going to even have a job in six month’s time, like lots of others no doubt, and all these assorted wonks do is wiffle on and on about which interchangeable dipstick is going to which interchangeable, ineffectual government department next. Who the chuff is Alan Johnson? Who the chuff is Ed Balls? Who the chuff cares? Just clear off the whole damn lot of you. – Blognor Regis gives his opinion yesterday about some recent reshuffle speculation September 23rd, 2008 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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