The UK authorities issued warnings of a freak rise in water levels in the North Sea yesterday, caused by a combination of tidal/atmospheric forces. There was a fear that flooding along the east coast of the UK – in places like the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts that are familiar to me – could be as bad as in 1953. Fortunately, some of those fears have abated, but not disappeared. The Thames Barrier flood defence has been put up. The warning was made in good time, so hopefully no lives are at risk. The report linked to here makes little mention of what the situation is on the other side of the North Sea, such as in the Netherlands. Odd.
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Maybe I am misinterpreting it, but is there not a vast increase in taxation for the middle classes in HM Government’s legislative programme? Mysteriously it was one of those measures left out of the Queen’s Speech, but there it is, plainly, in the list of Bills:
Since this will not be part of the Finance Bill, either, so not caught by the media feeding frenzy round The Budget, when will it be covered? But it is a rise in the marginal income tax rate for the employed middle classes of 10% (or 20% if you look at the impact on their employers wages bill, which really determines what they can get paid). Since there are no other details currently, who knows what other effects on other groups might be? It is a classic example of the bureaucratic governmental stealth technique. Announce things nominally openly but in circumstances when you hope no-one will pay any attention. Execute them in silence, by stages, as if inevitable, to minimise resistance. If people later squawk at all, they can be told, “It was announced; there was a consultation; the vast majority of consultation responses were favourable; it went through parliament where there was an opportunity* for debate; it is now the democratically decided law.” The only cure for this is media attention. Where are the Capitoline geese? – * Of course there is always opportunity for debate in Parliament, but since 1997 the Party has steadily, increasingly, chosen to restrict debate. November 7th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It is hard sometimes for someone who lives in what might be called the “Westminster village” to understand how monumentally boring are all the commentaries in the political press about Which Cabinet Minister is In and Who is the Favoured One of Gordon, etc. In the Daily Telegraph today, Rachel Sylvester ponders the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alisdair Darling, is a puppet of Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister. Oh, the horror. To be honest though, much that I despise this government, it seems to show a lack of historical perspective to complain about the sheer dominance of a Prime Minister over Treasury affairs. I have been reading Douglas Hurd’s rather good biography of Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister of the mid-19th Century. As premier, Peel delivered budgets himself rather than get his Chancellor to do so. The budgets, which overthrew the Corn Laws – a system of trade tariffs – split the Tories at the time between the old landed gentry (who wanted tariffs) and the ‘Peelites’ (who wanted laissez faire). But Peel was using his old prerogative as ‘First Lord of the Treasury’ as the Prime Minister is known, to take the lead in economic and financial affairs. In the late 1980s, the same happened when Nigel Lawson, the Chancellor of the time, tried and failed to persuade Mrs Thatcher to accede to his demand that Britain join the European exchange rate mechanism (we did eventually join it, and a right disaster that turned out to be). Gordon Brown is guilty of many sins, but leading economic policy is not one of them. The problem is not the personnel, but the policies themselves. None of the major figures in the current government favour a more modest role for the state; everything else, my dears, is pure detail. November 6th, 2007 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state. Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls’s speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn’t the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies – in this case a para-Party body – last a long time? It bears close reading: Excerpt I:
Phew – not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be – they’ll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, “building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them – but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights…”. It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not? Don’t you love that “our young people”? Völkisch, nicht wahr? Excerpt II:
So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000. November 6th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
As we like to remind you every 5th of November, Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions…  November 5th, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
If only we had a Samizdata Freedom-Fighter Award then I would resoundingly nominate this man:
And, while we are about it, perhaps we should have a ‘Posturing Political Prat Award’ as well. [P.S. For our US readers, ‘two fingers’ is the British version of ‘flipping the bird’ and a time-honoured gesture of defiance.] November 5th, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Exciting news for British schoolchildren. Early leavers ‘will not be jailed’ (PA). Except of course they will be under control orders, in effect; incarcerated and enslaved part-time. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” ran the old slogan. This policy is pretty clear evidence that what’s offerred to many in the state school system is not education. If you have to force people to take something, then it is not plausiible that it is of use to them. There is no problem selling education and training to those who want it. Even very poor parents in London often find money for extra lessons or private day-schooling on top of the taxes they pay to imprison other people’s children. The prison function of the system reduces its value to others. Put aside for the moment whether it should be paid for from taxes or not. How much more cost-effective would state education be if it were voluntary, and the classes were full of eager participants and even the grumpiest teenagers present were those whose parents or peers had persuaded them it was worthwhile? How much better would the curriculum be if it had to attract an audience by being interesting or useful, rather than prescribed by bureaucrats? How much better would teachers feel about their work if it didn’t include the roles of commissar, bureaucrat and gaoler?
Since if you are at school you are barred from employment without the permission of the authorities, I imagine they will pay the fines with the proceeds of robbery and prostitution. Well done, Balls! November 5th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is like a compass-that-faces-south… always wrong but useful nevertheless because as long as he is dependably wrong, he can still be used when plotting a course. His latest pearl of wisdom is the solution to reducing the numbers of children acting irresponsibly by engaging in violent crimes: Stop holding them responsible. His logic is hard to fault. If you deem than a child cannot be responsible for their actions, clearly they cannot therefore be irresponsible… voila… less children acting irresponsibly. In fact by definition no children can be said to have acted irresponsibly because the very notion of judging responsibility is disallowed. In a political and law-enforcement culture in which ‘that which is not measured never happened’, I can see the attraction of this approach. But then again Britain’s welfare state treats everyone regardless of their age like an irresponsible child, incapable or unwilling to look to their own pensions, medical care, etc. etc, so perhaps there is a bigger meme at work here.
… the Archbishop says, and then promptly weakens the seriousness of what they do by suggesting a child can cause the death of someone and get away with it, whereas an older person cannot. So how is that not weakening the seriousness of what the child has done? Also I am curious, how is taking away responsibility going to encourage more responsibility? Perhaps the following is what the Plod will be told to do:
Oh, and mothers too, they also should not be held responsible for some reason. It is all down to too many bad movies and Britain’s ‘gun culture’, whatever the fuck that means in a country which probably has less civilian guns in total than almost any single US state other than the very smallest ones. I wonder of God’s Idiot would describe a nation without much in the way of musicians or musical instruments as having a ‘musical culture’? However would we manage without the Church of England to guide us, eh? November 3rd, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most people in the UK, and many abroad, are familiar with the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who was shot dead by Metropolitan police as a suspected suicide bomber on 22nd July, 2005. The latest in this saga is that the shooting was ruled a breach health and safety laws. Well, okay, I am fairly sure that Jean Charles de Menezes would have felt his health and safety were not well served by the people who shot him dead. But surely coming to that conclusion cannot have taken more than two years of deliberation. The Met screwed up big time and killed an innocent man in a horrific way, that was clear fairly soon after the event. But at the risk of seeming heartless, mistakes happen. I am not saying the Met should not be raked over the coals for this horrendous error (indeed they should be), but one can still take the view that the principle of shooting dead suicide bombers who are in public places is still a rather good one, just so long as the people doing the shooting have a bloody good reason to think the people they shoot are indeed suicide bombers. That is not a casual qualification of principle… if the decision-making processes used by the Met to make such calls is always likely to be as defective as it demonstrably was on 22nd July, 2005, then we need to be convinced that this is no longer the case if we are to ever trust the police to make that sort of decision again. But that is a fairly straightforward managerial question… it seems to me that the real issue that needs to be settled is not ‘did the police screw up’ (clearly they did) but rather was the police’s response to its dreadful mistake criminal? We were fed a stream of completely baseless lies in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Jean Charles de Menezes looked middle eastern (he did not), he was wearing an unseasonable padded coat that could have hidden a bomb (he was not), we was running towards the train (he was not), he ran when challenged by armed police (he did not), he jumped over the turnstile (in fact he used his god damned travel card)… The CCTV footage? It was not turned on. And then it was but it did not record. And then it cannot be found. Lie after lie after lie. The real questions which need to be answered are not “were the health and safety laws violated?”… An innocent man was shot in the head seven times by the police for Christ’s sake! Of course it was a mistake, no one thinks the police intentionally shot the wrong man just for the hell of it. The question is, why are the people who then tried to cover it up not looking AT THE VERY LEAST at the end of their careers and more reasonably, prosecution for conspiring to pervert the course of justice? What were the names of the people behind each of those falsehoods? Presumably the people who said those things are still working for the Met. Otherwise what? Did journalists just invent those claims? I would really like to know. I have watched the coverage waiting for these things to be asked and not seen anything along those lines. Instead, we hear about ‘health and safety laws’. Amazing. Mistakes happen and that is tragic. But if the police (who exactly?) then try to cover that fact up, lethal mistakes will continue to happen, which is a catastrophe. That is the real issue. November 2nd, 2007 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing. So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty? The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on ‘watch the report’ to see for yourself). I kid you not. Someone somewhere deserves a medal. October 31st, 2007 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British government has just “admitted” that its figures for foreign workers employed in the UK are wrong by more than 30%, or 300,000 people. Of course we don’t know that the new figures are right, either. But it has very satisfactorily illustrated they don’t matter in the slightest. The Liberal Democrat spokesman is telling the truth when he says: “Getting these figures so wrong further undermines the credibility of the government’s claims to be able to deliver a well-managed system for foreign workers.” But the intent behind his statement is dead wrong. It is none of the government’s business to manage any kind of system for foreign workers, and getting these figures so wrong undermines the credibility of doing so at all. This sort of thinking is just a version of the lump of labour fallacy. More workers doing more things for other people and supporting themselves means everyone is better off, not that others are deprived of something. Nor – as the error shows – does government need to know who people are and what they are doing in order to carry on with its other activities untroubled. It just needs to respond to provide services as they are required (and self-supporting individuals don’t really require much). The conceit of planning and censuses is undermined here, too. Demand manages itself. Meanwhile, in the unreal world, all politicians are piling onto the current bandwagon of jealousy of foreigners. David Cameron has signed on to the idiocy with gusto. The politics of virtual threat will actually be reinforced by the concrete evidence that there is nothing to fear. “It so much worse than we thought, that absolutely nobody noticed,” they cry. Something must be done! Starting with more counting, more monitoring and more control so that we never fail to notice nothing untoward happening ever again. October 30th, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over on The First Post, Richard Ehrman has written an article called Immigration: Britain’s wake-up call that gives us a splendid example of how the left and right generally share ‘meta-context’ (the unspoken axioms that we take for granted when we discuss something):
The fact the population is growing in Britain is shocking, apparently. Okay, yet for some reason I am not shocked. However why is this something we should regard as a “wake up call”? Personally I am hearing something more like a dinner bell being rung. Richard Ehrman is associated with Politeia, an allegedly market-friendly think tank, so why should ‘we’, by which I very strongly suspect he means ‘we-as-taxpayers’, be building houses, roads, schools and hospitals for anyone? In less benighted times the arrival of more people would have been referred to as a ‘growing market’ (i.e. a good thing) rather than an impending liability which needs a “wake-up call” to alert us to a problem. Let me quote something very germane that was uttered yesterday at the Libertarian Alliance conference in London, by Shane Frith of Progressive Vision on more or less the same subject:
Quite! If indeed much of Central Europe is decamping from their homelands and heading for this Sceptred Isle, what an excellent time to abolish the decrepit socialist legacy systems (which are rather like running 1980’s era computers in 2007 and then wondering why things do not work) that have inexplicably survived into the Twenty First century. Time to replace them with adaptive market driven approaches that are neither distorted nor crowded out by an idiotic and fantastically inefficient state run medical system, preposterous public sector housing and ever more dumbed down state schools. None of these things, not one, is logically something the state should have anything to do with. As I have argued before, perhaps the changing demographic realities may force exactly the sort of changes that should have been introduced decades ago. And if that is true, it is yet another reason to thank the latest wave of immigrants. Guys, you might actually save us from ourselves. Vitajte v Londyne! October 28th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
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