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I don’t often praise The Times. It is too often busy pleasing the administration of the day, in order to maintain regulatory tolerance for its proprietor’s market dominance. But this is wicked, in both senses. Commentary on Chancellor Darling’s performance yesterday includes a nonsensical Labour-loyal diatribe from Roy Hattersley… which is beautifully undercut by this by-line:
November 25th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A few months back – I don’t recall exactly when – I voiced my irritation here at the notion, regularly voiced by members of our commentariat until I said to put a sock in it, of leaving Britain to go and live somewhere else, usually the USA. I now officially withdraw this irritation. The sooner large numbers of Brits start voting with their feet, the sooner some kind of sanity may be restored to our public finances. Voice isn’t working very well just now, but there still remains exit, and the sound of people exiting is actually one of the loudest political voices there is. Remember which way the Berlin Wall pointed? Idiot Western apologists for Bolshevism talked their way around everything else about the Evil Empire, but that they couldn’t explain. Remember when the success of Hong Kong as an alleviator of dirt-poor poverty and as a facilitator of the wildest of wild dreams was likewise denounced by the same idiots as a cruel and exploitative fantasy? Again, the statistics of who was then swimming, through what and in which direction, were the most telling of the lot, long before the economic numbers coming out of Hong Kong began to prove all those daredevil swimmers so magnificently right. And here, now, nothing would concentrate the minds of our political class on doing the right things rather than stupid things like a mass stampede for the exit. If you are thinking now of leaving, do it. This would not only be selfishly sensible; it would be downright patriotic, just like regular voting for something sensible, only more so. In the event that any of our masters actually want to rescue our country from its present mess, nothing would be more useful to such persons than the pitter patter of adult feet, leaving for less insanely governed places. I still have hopes that Mr Cameron is now taking deep breaths and preparing himself to lunge for just this sort of glory. Call it the audacity of hope. So, as the Americans say: way to go! But: where to go? Which countries are now the best bet for that alternative lifestyle, where you get to work, pay only moderate levels of tax, and are able rationally to hope that your grandchildren might do better than you instead of worse? The USA? Not now the obvious choice it might once have been, and in any case, how – legally – do you get in? My suggestion is: Ireland. As the great Guido explained yesterday:
Apart from that peculiar “whomever”, that strikes me as likely to be very right, and a very good bet for a good place to go to. And as Guido makes clear, the pitter-pattering has already begun. And, look, Guido now has an update to that posting:
And I bet it’s not just non-doms. I bet that us doms are already joining in. Pitter patter. November 25th, 2008 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Amid all the words that will be written about the UK government’s Pre-Budget Report statement yesterday, many will no doubt focus on the utility, or otherwise, of proposed measures such as creating a new, higher 45 per cent tax band on people earning £150,000 or more. Maybe even some supply-siders will point to the destructive effects, the counter-productive consequences, and the likely exodus of entrepreneurs and wealthy citizens, if the tax hike becomes law – after the next election. And they will be right to do so, of course. Throw in the impact of cuts to tax allowances and rises in national insurance payments – a tax by any other name – and the real upper rate of tax is heading towards 50 per cent. I hope all those middle England Jeremy’s and Fionas who voted for that nice Mr Blair and who turfed out the Tories are feeling suitably chastened. But the core of the problem with resisting such egalitarian acts of robbery is that pointing out the bad economic effects of such measures is not enough. Large swathes of the UK public do not care, or assume that they will never be very rich anyway, so why should they be worried? The current government and public sector, with state, inflation-proofed salaries, could not give a damn either. What is lacking from almost all political and media analysis of the increased steepness of the progressive tax code is a moral element. Progressivism is a looter’s charter. There is no coherent, objective principle by which one can say that a person earning XXX should contribute say, 40 per cent of their income to the State while another person, on a higher figure, should pay 50, or 60, or even 80 per cent. It is about as scientific as plucking figures at random from a telephone directory. This is not just unwise, it is wicked. The only reason I can think of for progressive tax is to offset the potential regressive impact of taxes on consumption such as VAT, sales taxes and the like. However, in practice the people who might benefit from any offset are not the same as those who get hit by a consumption tax in the first place. Far better, in fact, to cut through the web of complexity and introduce a flat-tax where the whole population, apart from the poor, pay the same percentage of their income, preferably at a much lower rate. Of course, the ultimate objective is not just flatter taxes, but lower, or no taxes, at all. But although this appears so much dreaming at the moment, anyone who wants to make the moral and philosophical case for lower taxes and against egalitarian thieving must do so in such moral terms and not expect that economic arguments will win the day. What Alistair Darling proposed yesterday was to clobber people for no other reasons than they happen to be well off and he knew quite well that his tax increase will garner relatively little revenue. But he does not give a brass farthing. This government is now acting out of spite. I finish with this quote, taken from here: “The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without rudder or com pass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit.” November 25th, 2008 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. November 24th, 2008 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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) November 20th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every so often, the MSM offers up a nugget of shining truth:
Of course, we have been saying that for years. November 19th, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. November 18th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. November 18th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I thought this ought to be shared here:
I think I know how he feels. via Old Holborn November 16th, 2008 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ah, the children of the night! What sweet music they make:
Of course they will. They must feed. November 14th, 2008 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
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). November 14th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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. November 12th, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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