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I am more than usually depressed by the report of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that is published today. A Bill of Rights for the UK? is a reaction to the present administration’s kite flying for a “British Bill of Rights and Duties“, and goes to confirm my suspicion that human-rights lawyers are equipped with a tin ear for political discourse as part of their education.
They do not see the fierce conditionality of Rights-and-Duties. They are in their eunoetic little universe of the kindly legislator not the populist fury. Rather than a reaction of horror at the transparent desire to entrench ergate slavery to a corporatist ‘civic republican’ state as a citizen’s lot, there’s a mild whinge that the Government isn’t speaking clearly enough – no grasp that there is a different language in use:
33. We regret that there is not greater clarity in the Government’s reasons for embarking on this potentially ambitious course of drawing up a Bill of Rights. A number of the Government’s reasons appear to be concerned with correcting public misperceptions about the current regime of human rights protection, under the HRA. We do not think that this is in itself a good reason for adopting a Bill of Rights. As we have consistently said in previous Reports, the Government should seek proactively to counter public misperceptions about human rights rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true.
That I could support. And the discussion in the same section makes some sense of reframing the ECHR and the Human Rights Act to give better protection to individual liberty against the state. However, it doesn’t face up to the Government’s agenda, which is entirely opposite. It doesn’t, as any Bill of Rights worth the name would do, presuppose the implacable hostility of authority to the exercise of freedom.
The rest is horror. Chandler called the game of chess “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency”. You would need to harness a gigantic advertising group – WPP, say – for a full year, to piss away as much brain and education as has been wasted in the construction of the Outline of a UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms. Given the task of criticism and reflection, they have been reflexively orthodox. Not just the committee, but most of their witnesses, have demonstrated that, if it contingently makes the owner deaf to political meanings, the purpose of the tin ear in human-rights legal education is to pour jurisprudential treacle directly into the brain.
→ Continue reading: Like your manifesto, comrade
Depending on whether or not they get lucky with the weather, the Beijing Olympics might not, or might, turn into a PR disaster both for the International Olympic Committee, who chose Beijing, and for the Chinese Government, who assured the IOC that pollution in Beijing would not be a problem. But, pollution in Beijing is already a problem:
Thomas Rohregger’s first breath of Olympic air was not what he expected. “I hadn’t thought that it would be so bad,” the Austrian said after his first training ride. “Really awful, my lungs and even my eyes are burning.”
Rohregger rode only the flat stretch of the road race course and didn’t get into the climbs. “That’s why I tried to ride a bit faster. But the pressure on my lungs was nearly unbearable. Three hours of training felt like six hours,” said Rohregger to Austrian television sender ORF.
I’ve been linking to news about Beijing pollution for a while now from my personal blog, and the man from Blognor Regis, to whom thanks, added that quote-and-link to my latest posting on the subject.
I also added a bit at the end of that same posting about how the architectural planning of the Beijing Olympics has been done by the son of Albert Speer, who is called Albert Speer. Albert Speer senior being the man who did a similar job for Hitler’s Olympics in 1936. My thanks to Mick Hartley for blogging recently about that. As another of my esteemed commenters said, you could not make it up. But as soon as I had stuck up that bit about Albert Speer Jnr., I worried that maybe someone had made it up, and that I had fallen for one of those internet hoaxes. I checked every date involved to see that it wasn’t April 1st. It seems, amazingly, to be true. Apparently Michael Jennings of this blog emailed me in April about this Speer connection, but I paid no attention then and can find no trace of this email now. My computer must have swallowed it. Or maybe I thought he’d made it up and deleted the email on purpose.
Undeterred, Michael J today emailed me another Olympic link worth following, to a Slate piece which asks of the Beijing Olympics: What could possibly go wrong? Pollution is number two on the list. Four is that the TV coverage might get screwed up, and five is that these Olympics may inflict food poisoning on lots of the athletes.
Blogging personally, and in my capacity as a London council tax payer, my biggest worry is that it will all go very smoothly, that many British people in particular will be very impressed and excited, and that Britain’s politicians will then be encouraged to spend even more billions in tax money on the London version of this idiocy in four years time than is set to be spent anyway.
We are sometimes told by its defenders that the National Health Service is the envy of the world. Well, I wonder if all those countries yearning for socialised medicine are dreaming of this?
Janet Daley writes what I think is a wrong-headed article on how, if the Labour government gets rid of Gordon Brown and elects some younger, more “Blairite” leader claiming to support reform of public services, that this will put pressure on the Tories and may even convince enough gullible UK voters to stick with Labour.
I am sorry, but the problem with this thesis, which alas reflects how even an astute observer like Janet Daley has become a solid member of the Westminster Village, has little connection to reality. The UK public has had 11 years of New Labour. It remembers how, in the late 1990s, we were told that Labour could reform the Welfare state in the same way that only Richard Nixon could fix relations with the Chinese in the 1970s. Since then, the Welfare State has mushroomed, with its vast increase in the number of officials, a hideously complex system of tax and welfare credits; the education system becomes ever more bureacratic and despite a few improvements, falls way short of what one would expect, given the increase in spending. The NHS remains a mess: I have met quite a few NHS users who have, for instance, suffered from the MRSA bacterium. The public knows this. They just do not trust the Labour Party any more.
Of course, they are scarcely more trusting of David Cameron and the Tories. The problem for them is that their leading political figures are – with a few exceptions like William Hague – inexperienced in the world of business or life outside politics generally. Cameron gives me grave cause for concern; he is cast from the same, suffocating centrist mould as Blair. But there is just the remotest chance that some of the statist juggernaut might be arrested if the Tories were to win with a sufficiently large majority. It is a slim hope, but I do not see much else on the table.
Following Brian’s lead, I predict a legislative scorched earth as well as a financial one, when the UK parliament returns. It is not just that the present administration realises its days are numbered and will try to get more of The Project through, and to construct extra-parliamentary power structures as bunkers to occupy in opposition. All over Whitehall, departmental pet projects will be being dusted-off (e.g) and presented to weak ministers, the hope being to get them through before a new, critically-minded, Government takes office and crowds them out with plans of its own.
The question I have for Samizdata readers is this: what will the neo-puritans set out to regulate… suppress… ban next? Smoking is nearly fully suppressed. The work on alcohol has truly begun. Government intervention into our personal lives: what’s next?
* [This is an allusion, so I pray our editorial pantheon will let the contraction stand. I’m I am not about to write anyone an email like this one, however funny it might be. And I suspect they’d they would take my login away if I did]
For the leader of the Labour Party and our Prime Minister things are terminally frightful, but they are now looking just as bad for the Labour Party as a whole. I have been pondering the consequences of the latest Labour electoral reverse by reading the Coffee House blog, which is now my favourite political (as in who’s-in-who’s-out) blog, as opposed to the metacontext stuff that we do here. Several points stand out:
For the benefit of those who have not been following this, Labour have just lost their twenty fifth safest seat in a by-election, to the Scottish Nationalists this time. If they can’t hold seats like this, what can they hold? Gordon Brown is clearly electoral death, even in Scotland, maybe particularly in Scotland. For as long as this appalling man leads their party, no Labour MP can feel safe. So, you would think, all they need to do now is get on the phone to each other and decide on an alternative.
But, the trouble is that, closely related to the above, the semi-plausible Labour Party leader, among the half-dozen or so semi-plausible choices, with a majority that is most likely to survive the next general election is … Gordon Brown! Pick any of the others, and what remains of Labour could go into the next Parliament with a leader who has just lost his seat.
Even if they do pick another Prime Minister, he or she will be a new Prime Minister. This is not like the chaotic Conservatives of the nineties and noughts picking yet another new Opposition Leader. This will be a rabble of discredited politicians choosing another national political leader, having just themselves picked the previous dud. That uncontested succession is looking like more and more of a blunder, and what is more a blunder by the Labour Party as a whole, not by the mere Prime Minister. And as the travails of the present incumbent incompetent illustrate so well, you never really know how well or how badly some new guy will do. Even cabinet ministers don’t get anything like the kind of sustained media glare shone on them that Prime Ministers do. A new guy will be a leap into the unknown. If he’s no better than Gordon Brown …
The governing parliamentary party is now a complete shambles, and worse, a complete shambles which seems to have no obvious way of rescuing itself, which is what the word complete always means in such circumstances. David Cameron is now saying: let’s have an election now. The country can’t wait until 2010. I think Cameron’s timing is spot on. Earlier I here speculated about the already then widely touted idea of scorched earth, between now and the next election, the scorchers being Gordon Brown and his Labour Party, and Britain being the scorchee. Now it looks like the Labour Party is about to get a terminal roasting right now. Maybe others can see some kind of way out for these people now, but I can’t. → Continue reading: Now for the Labour implosion
If you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is … well … shit.
– with his usual tact and sensitivity Devil’s Kitchen hints at a reason why the voters of Glasgow East might just consider not voting Labour any more
Coffee House has a posting today which says something we may be hearing more and more about in the next year or two: “Scorched earth”. If what Fraser Nelson says is true, then I certainly hope we do. Nelson says that Gordon Brown is now borrowing and spending like there’s no tomorrow, for him, but in a way that Prime Minister David Cameron will have to find the money to pay for. Nelson harks back to a Brown proclamation from way back, which went like this:
“I can give you a guarantee that is our fiscal rules, that we must uphold. And that is the basis of… and that discipline is the basis on which I think people have seen this Government as competent.”
That policy, says Nelson – linking to an FT piece which is, alas, stuck behind a registration wall – is now being forgotten about.
The assumption Fraser Nelson seems to be accepting is that in addition to hurting the country (party political blogs don’t tend to dwell on that aspect of things very much), this will hurt the next Conservative government (a much weightier consideration). Instead of pulling back on government spending, the way that other more responsible national governments are now doing, Brown, egged on by the trade unions upon whom the Labour Party now depends financially, is hell-bent on borrowing still more. Not content with wrecking his own administration, Brown wants also to wreck the next one.
Like a retreating army, he doesn’t want the advancing Cameroons to have any advantage at all. …
And then Nelson continues:
… Debt is a boring subject, but it means we’ll all pay more taxes for longer.
Debt is a boring subject. Hm. I’m not now in debt myself, thank heavens, but I suspect that debt is something that the people of Britain understand better and better with every week that now passes. Boring? Scary, more like. And if the Conservatives keep saying, as Fraser Nelson just did: more debt means higher taxes, that will surely get everyone’s attention. Tax increases are not boring, we already know that. Look at the damage that the recent income tax increase did to the Prime Minister’s standing and job prospects.
I suspect that, if Gordon Brown continues to send out signals like this, to use that phrase that politicians are so fond of, this may actually play right into Cameron’s hands, politically. Cameron has made a point of not ruling out tax increases. This is not because he likes tax increases, he is now saying, but because the British economy is now such a huge mess. Brown is now smashing up the nursery, and Cameron and his oh-so-fiscally responsible Conservatives will have to tidy it up.
Meanwhile, if the Labour Party as a whole does not either restrain or dump Gordon Brown, it will stand accused at the next general election of having brought about this disaster, perhaps even deliberately. Labour already faces electoral carnage. This could make it a lot worse for them.
The one thing that the Conservatives might do to save Labour would be if they kept quiet about this until the election campaign, on the grounds that they don’t want Labour stealing their policy of fiscal semi-sanity. Such an attitude would be too clever by half. If the Conservatives keep even relatively quiet, and then try to make this kind of mud stick only after colossal further damage has already been done, they too will stand accused, deservedly, of having contributed to the disaster. If, on the other hand, the Conservatives loudly denounce Brown for this borrowing-and-spending right now and keep on denouncing him, it will be a win-win game for them. Either the Labour Party listens, and the Conservatives don’t get landed with too horrible a bill when they duly become the government. Or the Labour Party stuffs its fingers in its ears, and gets wiped out for a generation at the next election, and maybe for ever.
This particular Labour government was elected because it was going to be different. This Labour government was, above all, not going to do, well: this. Fiscal responsibility was the big promise of 1997, repeated and repeated during the years after 1997. Gordon Brown was during those early New Labour years the very personification of this supposed new rectitude. This was the very thing that made New Labour so particularly New. So if this Labour government ends by doing … this, again, not only will it be all the more frightfully punished for its big lie, but the lie will linger in the electoral memory for decades. This Scorched Earth moment could be the difference between a mere electoral stuffing, such as Thatcher’s opponents, and then Blair’s opponents, all had to live with so painfully until the political weather changed, and something altogether more complete and permanent.
I hope, for the sake of my country, that the Labour Party, alerted or not by the Conservatives to the oblivion they now face if not to the mere damage to Britain that they are doing, sees the logic of this argument (in other words I hope that others besides me put this argument forward) before too much further damage is done. I realise that it is dreadfully naïve to be thinking of something as politically beside-the-point as the mere good of the country, but I live in hope.
But not expectation. The short- and medium-term prospects for the British economy now seem appalling.
Such are my internetting skills that I had to go here first, and then to here, before finally getting to here, the final here being a Telegraph piece about the restoration to the people of Britain (or maybe, it’s hard to tell, the mere restatement of) the right of forceful self-defence.
Home owners and “have-a go-heroes” have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution.
So, if someone breaks into my flat in the dead of night, and I get lucky with my late uncle’s old cricket bat which I still keep handy just in case, I won’t have to be quite so fearful of legal complications.
There is, after all, something to be said in favour of lame duck governments, desperately trying something – anything – in order to save a few fragments from the forthcoming electoral wreckage.
My guess is they were ploughing through the tedious and now desperately dispiriting rigmarole of yet more focus grouping, with very little to show for it indeed other than deepening hatred of the government, until suddenly someone piped up with something about “if I break the skull of a burglar when all I was trying to do was protect my home I didn’t do anything wrong” or “it’s ridiculous that old men who fight back with their walking sticks get arrested but not the scumbags who attack them”, or some such. And the entire room exploded with unanimous agreement. And then they tried it on a few more focus groups, and got the same response. And since this is an actual policy proposal, and not a mere howl of loathing, and since nothing else seems to be persuading anyone that this government is not a total disaster when it comes to restraining criminals in any way whatsoever, why not give it a try? “I mean, at least we could make an announcement.” Which is what I of course suspect this to be. The government screws up the small print in every other law it passes these days, so I expect this law, in the unlikely event that it ever materialises any time soon, to be just as bad, and quite possibly to be yet another few sneaky steps in the wrong direction rather than any sort of step in the right one.
No matter. That this government is even pretending to talk sense about the right to forceful self-defence – instead of the usual evil tripe about waiting several days for the police to show up, maybe, with counselling pamphlets – is a huge improvement in the political atmospherics of my country. Many of this government’s supporters will be thrown into well-deserved torment and angst on this topic. Unreconstructed lefties will regard this announcement as just one more reason why the forthcoming collapse of this government really doesn’t matter, which is all to the good. Saner lefties, still determinedly wrong about such things as income tax but less wrong about this topic, will feel free to make themselves heard, and to praise their government for this bold initiative. The opposition will scrutinise the proposal for evidence of the duplicity that I pretty much now assume. And, you never know, it just might be genuine.
Meanwhile, am I allowed to say, sotto voce, that I did, sort of, see this coming? I wonder if those who commented derisively on the apparently absurd optimism of that earlier posting saw this latest proclamation coming. Even I am amazed at how quickly the tide may now be beginning to turn. Because, restoring (or maybe just re-stating for the benefit of judges and policemen who now assume other things) the right (itself no small thing) to forceful self-defence leads will lead directly to further discussion, about the means of actually being able to set about doing such defence. I have my cricket bat. So, how about a gun? The principle has now been conceded. Now let’s talk practice.
Definitely a small victory, and maybe, just maybe, something slightly bigger than that.
I am currently watching the head of Equitable Life, the UK life insurer that made massive losses a few years ago, demanding that you and I, the UK taxpayer, put our hands in our pockets to compensate EL’s policyholders for their losses. They are complaining that mistakes taken by government caused many of the problems it suffered.
Leaving aside the ins and outs of the case, in general principle, I think it is outrageous that anyone claiming to be a senior manager of a commercial business like Equitable Life should have the brass neck to demand that governments, ie, taxpayers, should bail them out. Yes, some of the rule changes made by governments can harm a business – the tax changes on pensions by Gordon Brown in the late 1990s are a classic case in point. There may, as a result, be something to be said for demanding repayment of taxes wrongly levied on a company, for example. But why should a taxpayer, say, who has no likelihood of a decent private sector pension, be taxed to save the blushes of business executives on six-figure salaries or affluent policyholders who have lost a portion of their pensions? There seems to be no awareness of the perverse, and often regressive, redistribution of wealth that is entailed when these demands for compensation emerge.
It is true that Equitable Life has done quite a bit to honour some of its debts. However, asking the UK general public to put right the rest of the mess is a step too far. And there is another reason for objecting to such corporate welfare, since every time taxpayers foot the bill for another financial Snafu, it creates a fresh moral hazard, and encourages financially inept firms to imagine that if anything goes seriously wrong, the taxpayer will put everything right.
The BBC, anticipating the upcoming school holidays in the UK – lasting several weeks – has a news item up about the soaring cost of providing facilities for children to give them something to do. The story does not address the crucial question of why the cost is soaring. Is it increased regulation of child-care staff, or what? But beyond that, there clearly is a problem here, particularly for youngsters who are entering their teens and quickly find themselves getting bored after the first flush of pleasure of having free time wears off. When I was a kid, I was incredibly lucky to be brought up in a part of the world where I could help my parents run our family farm. At the age of 13 or 14 I was allowed to drive some of the farm machinery during the annual harvest. Under current UK health and safety regulations, all this would be made illegal, I suspect. I was paid an actual weekly wage based on the hours I worked on the farm. I remember thinking how cool that was. Many of my mates at school had summer jobs of various kinds, played some sports, went biking up to the coast, etc.
It seems to me that in part of the discussion about what “should be done” about feral kids armed with knives, there ought to be a recognition that one of the main problems that young people face in and outside school is boredom. And that can be cured, possibly, by working. We have to overcome our strange squeamishness over the employment of minors in actual jobs. I think that the rules and regulatory burdens should be relaxed so that apprenticeships become much easier for an employer to provide. I think some, if not all, of the young tearaways who are so worrying policymakers might actually feel proud of having a job, of earning money, of being able to brag about this to their lazier friends.
And please, dear commenters, do not tell me that all this is optimistic pie-in-the-sky speculation. We have a significant problem in the UK of young people who are a, being forced to stay in school well beyond the age at which they wish and can learn anything, and b, denied the opportunity to work, and c, becoming attracted to the fake charms of gangs and violence. By rejecting our horror of teen-labour, we might help to fix some of these problems.
Say what you like about our embattled UK prime minister, but he does at least have good taste in a place to relax on holiday: the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold. I am not sure if the locals will be thrilled at all the security types who will inevitably swarm all over the area, though.
Southwold is a charming, small place. It is the home of Adnams, the brewery of excellent beer. Now, my recommendation to Mr Brown and his family, in a spirit of generosity, is to pack the complete works of Ludwig von Mises in his luggage, visit the local pubs and go for some nice coastal walks. As a result of all this exercise, reading and drinking, he will return to Downing Street a wiser and better man.
Sizewell B nuclear power station is down the coast. You can actually see its massive dome from Southwold beach. I rather like it.
One word of caution to Mr Brown’s entourage: a lot of Suffolk folk have guns.
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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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