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It is all too easy to imagine a future in which our grandchildren will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having had a grandparent or great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service, or was a District Officer in Bechuanaland. –Jeremy Paxman, keeping hope alive for millions of Britons August 24th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Let’s see if we can spot the flaky reasoning in this letter to The Times (of London), as prompted by a good(ish) article by Daniel Finkelstein today:
First, the writer assumes as a matter of course that “inter-generational inequality” – however defined – is of itself a bad thing, a thing to be prevented by limits on any wealth bequeathed above a certain level. For this writer, he/she assumes that no person should have, in this case, an amount higher than say, £500,000. But why on earth should the state rule that people should be banned from receiving, as a gift, more than whatever some egalitarian thinks is the “right” amount? So the inheritor may not “deserve” it in some sense but so what? If a person does not deserve to inherit £1m, neither do his fellow citizens deserve to have that wealth evenly divided up among themselves, either. I think it was FA Hayek who pointed out that in talking of deserve, we talk of deserve in the eyes of someone else, like a father, boss or God who decides that Johnathan Pearce or AN Other “deserve” to receive X or Y out of the multitudes. But dumb luck in inheriting money or good looks or a high IQ is just that: luck. Luck is neither undeserved or deserved. Through aeons of time, we have evolved into human beings with things like opposable thumbs and relatively large brains. We did not “deserve” those, either, so does this mean we should hold ourselves back to benefit our less fortunate creatures? August 22nd, 2007 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
People worried that Britain’s supposedly overcrowded, damp island will soon burst at the seams from rising population levels should always remember that although immigration has been high lately, so has the exodus of many people. Of course, if you are bothered about underlying trend, it is not exactly cause for celebration that so many Britons, especially if they are young and talented, want to get out of here as quickly as possible. To say that this thought has not occured to the Samizdata crew would be an understatement. (Although one might debate whether yours truly is young or even talented). In the 1960s, there was talk about a “brain drain” from high-tax Britain. The situation is a little different now: I think the reason(s) for leaving are as much about the regulatory climate, the bloody awful weather, crime, the general ugliness and boorishness of Britain, and the better perceived better chances of raising a family. I am not saying that all these reasons are valid: countries like Australia or the US have their own problems and having been to the States regularly, I find it bizarre that that country is held up as a beacon of freedom sometimes, if only because some states like California seem hellbent on copying the worst regulatory excesses of Europe. But such caveats aside, this exodus ought to be an issue for Gordon Brown and the opposition to think about. If such large numbers of people want to leave, it is sending out a message. August 22nd, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Edward Paul Brown was a premature baby whose birth and death took place within minutes of each other on February 23rd 2007 in a lavatory in Queen’s Hospital, Romford. Eighteen weeks into her pregnancy, his mother, Catherine Brown, was told that there was no amniotic fluid surrounding the baby in her womb. This meant that the baby’s chances of survival were minimal and her own life was threatened. Catherine Brown took the “devastating” decision to abort. Even those (such as I) who generally oppose abortion, will see this as a hard case – and I hope that any comments do not get sidetracked onto that issue. So. We have a woman in hospital waiting for the procedure that will abort her baby, a child she had wanted to bear and raise. Not a pleasant situation at any time, but what followed next was disconcerting to read about even for those who have grown weary of NHS “war stories”. I first saw this in the Times (Baby’s birth and death in lavatory of hospital with no trained staff), but there is a considerably more detailed account in This Is London (Mother forced to give birth alone in toilet of ‘flagship’ NHS hospital) (A very similar account appeared in the Daily Mail.) Both headlines understate the peculiarly modern horror of what happened. The reader gets a picture of nurses trying to help, but out of their depth because Queen’s Hospital did not at that time have a proper maternity unit. That picture is wrong. The part of it that is wrong is the “trying to help.” The nurses declined to help. August 21st, 2007 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
It looks like those advising and supporting Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, are determined to blackguard his prospective Tory opponent Boris Johnson by any means necessary. First we had Doreen Lawrence (who has been cultivated by race-activists over the last decade to the point of co-option) wheeled out in The Guardian, to wave her son’s shroud and say:
A classic piece of noughties argumentation: a champion victim finds him offensive. He should not be considered. But note also the visual metaphor: “look at themselves… look at him”. This morning The Voice carried the news that: “London’s mayor Ken Livingstone will next week issue a formal apology for his city’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade”.
It may just be coincidence, but I prophesy that Ken will not be shy of inviting other mayoral candidates to do the same, hinting that they if they will not, it is because they are racists who secretly approve of slavery. We know where Boris stands. In the logical, historical, position. Nonetheless, officials from such organisations as Blink (the 1990 trust), and Operation Black Vote (which is supposed to be a non-partisan organisation encouraging electoral participation), have already described him as “a hardcore racist” and “bigoted”. I suppose that we should not expect much better of professional agitators and their stooges. Boris is presented as a cartoon racist – using racial and class stereotypes. “Look! he’s blond, blue-eyed, with an Etonian accent” they are saying. “He’s cavalier about things right-on people feel strongly about, wickedly western, rational and white.” That is a narrative calculated to appeal to their fellow quangocrats and positive-discriminators, beneficiaries of the Crimson Newt’s largesse, and to buttress them in their self-righteousness. But it also projects contemptuously low expectations of London’s black people in general, treating them as an ignorant client class who will lap up the most shameless propaganda. It is to be hoped London’s general public, black and white, will take the man as they find him, not as he is painted by an overt attempt to organise ‘racial loyalty’ at the polls worthy of the BNP. If Londoners are urged vote for Boris or against him on the basis of the colour of their skins rather than their individual consciences, it isn’t Boris dividing London on racial grounds, it is those doing the urging. I do not know if they are, but the thought that a significant number Londoners might be sufficiently ghettoised to follow the call is thoroughly depressing. August 20th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Readers will recall the conniptions with which the UK Government and its media proxies met a Conservative policy paper from John Redwood (not actually a party policy) recommending reductions in red-tape. The horror was Mr Redwood projected to reduce the compliance burden on business by approximately £14 billion. No cut in public spending was mentioned. Given the way bureaucracy works, removing inspections and forms does not necessarily mean reducing the number of inspectors and form-monitors. Now comes some analysis that shows both sides were making a fuss about nothing. The way the current government operates, £14 billion is peanuts – roughly the annual rise in the direct cost to the general taxpayer and the regulatee of new bureaucracies. Lets not attempt to count compliance costs. No-one else has. But the Economic Research Council has been doing some sums. As reported in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph (and appearing shortly on the ERC site):
Now there is a wrinkle here that seems to have been sidestepped by The Telegraph and the ERC: much of that increase is reclassification combined with expansion, particularly of chunks of the NHS. Reclassification is also a ratchet device – it puts bits of government machinery beyond ready scrutiny by calling them independent and lets them be pumped up independently of the departmental budget. But nonetheless it means the Tories, had they the nerve (and if they thought it would work as a political strategy), should have no difficulty in promising £50 billion in actual tax cuts, with the lifting of any compliance burden mere spin-off, rather than the main event. You can make your own list of favourites for culling from this document [3.5Mb pdf], though reading a 372-page list of official bodies may be a distressing experience. It may also be funny, for those with a sick sense of humour. This body does not appear to spend anything, yet, though there is provision for £200,000 a year in state funding, and administering its existence and listing must cost something:
It is not that “you couldn’t make it up”. Most writers of fiction would be ashamed to invent anything so banal in its pointlessness. Whatever happened to mandarin prose? August 20th, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ruth Lea (thanks to Perry for pointing this out to me) has what is a pretty good analysis of the upcoming regulatory juggernaut to hit the City out of Brussels. I won’t expand much further other than to say that without the City, the UK economy would be a shadow of what it is now. Of course, in the short run, the UK government has been content to let financiers make their big bucks because it pulls in so much taxable revenue. More fundamentally, however, London’s position as a great finance capital on the planet is not secure; while regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley have driven some US businesses to the UK, Brussels-generated laws could hamper the UK and drive that business outside the EU, although natural inertia and the benefits of London’s accumulated legal and financial expertise are strong assets. Never forget the Swiss. The weather is okay, the trains work, the Swiss mountains are great for skiing in the winter and although I am happily married, I have always rather admired their women. If you are a 30-something banker with no ties, London is not necessarily superior. Of course, if the Scottish nationalists were not such lefties, they’d be playing the Adam Smith card and campaign to turn Edinburgh into a sort of tartan low-tax paradise, and take a leaf out of the Irish book on how to revive an economy (no, the Irish economy is not all about EU grants, in case anyone brings that one up). August 17th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
A report in the Times (of London) states that one of the UK’s leading charities, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), has told gap-year students (students taking a period of time off between school and university or whatever) not to take part in costly and often useless aid projects. Indeed. Far better to encourage students not to take a gap year off at all, but to work hard, get a job, and then use all their energy and idealism to campaign to scrap all tariff barriers, trade “pacts” and other distortions of the world trade system. As a subject for reading, this I highly recommend. I wonder if any university dons care to put it on their students’ reading lists? August 14th, 2007 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
I take no pleasure in reporting this, but it seems to be going unsaid in the British press. British forces are painted, particularly by broadcasters, as having achieved a measure of success in Basra due to superior British peace-keeping techniques honed in Northern Ireland. The truth is very different. To quote from a report;
The Washington Post reported a senior U.S. intelligence official yesterday saying that “The British have basically been defeated in the south”. The article went on to say that British forces
In May Blair visited the Basra HQ and came under mortar attack – not a sign of pacification. The head of the armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, told the BBC that success depends “upon what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place… I’m afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations for Iraq, and for the south of Iraq.” The reality is that once British forces exit Basra the fighting will escalate into a full-scale civil war: Mission failure. This begs the question – what now is the plan in Afghanistan? They are a people who fought the Red Army and won. The Soviets were brutal and were still defeated. Is NATO going to match and exceed that brutality in pursuit of “victory”? Afghanistan should be monitored closely and elements that present a clear and present external danger should be eliminated. It is not the job of NATO to impose Western values by force as Rome’s Imperial Armies once imposed Roman law. August 9th, 2007 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
George Walden, the former Conservative education minister, Foreign Office mandarin and now a writer on various affairs, makes the claim that the Tories may have a hunger for office but lack a clear idea of what they would do. That is true up to a point; but I think it has already become pretty obvious that Cameron’s Conservatives are a pretty centrist lot, with no great obvious desire to shrink the state, reverse the enormous burdens of regulations and tax, or to roll back the intrusive legislation that has robbed owners of private property, be they homes or businesses, of many freedoms to dispose of their property as they see fit even with the consent of their fellows. And when I consider some of Walden’s advice, I wonder what would be gained by taking it:
Consider “the cynical denial of the need for identity cards or longer detention for terrorist suspects”. Oh really, George? If it is “cynical” for the Tories to deny that we “need” ID cards that proved useless in preventing terror bombings in countries like Spain, where people have ID cards, then the more cynicism, the better. And if it is “cynical” for the Tories to show occasional flashes of respect for the English Common Law, and the web of checks and balances that this legal order contains, then I say “well done Mr Cameron” – a rarity from yours truly. Here is some other advice from Walden, of equally dubious quality:
Apart from agreeing with his description of the NHS, I accept little else. Walden skirts around the fact that the NHS is a monopoly funded out of general taxation, is mostly free at the point of use; there is little serious competition from the private sector (although this is slowly growing) and therefore there is little incentive either for people to arrange their own health affairs more intelligently or for health providers to cater more carefully for what people want. (And in case anyone raises the case of the US health system to bash private medicine, I should point out that the US system is so warped by litigation risk, regulation and restrictive practices that it is hardly a model of laissez faire). Walden then goes on about the supposed evil divide between state and private education and wants to blur this: does this mean that independent schools lose their independence, which is precisely why they appeal to parents and pupils in the first place? What would Walden say about the constant desire of governments to raise the school-leaving age, creating a new grouping of bored and disruptive students? Does Walden not realise that the way to improve education is to inject a sharp dose of competition and parental/pupil choice across the board, through a voucher system or tax-deduction approach? On the contrary, Walden wants the Tories to make the state even more dominant in education, it seems. The Tories are getting lots of advice these days. I doubt any Tories spend a lot of time reading this blog but for any that do, the best advice I could give them is to advocate policies that expand the liberty of the individual and get the state out of our lives. Period. All else is blather, even if it comes from supposedly clever people called George Walden. August 9th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
As people involved in this blog know I am not exactly shy about attacking Conservative party policy either nationally or locally. So it is only fair that I present good news when there is some. The other night the MP for Kettering, Mr Philip Hollobone, was formally readopted as the Prospective Conservative Party candidate for election as member of the House of Commons for Kettering. Why is this “good news” or a “reason to proud”? Because of what he said. Mr Hollobone informed the score or so people who had come for the meeting of the Executive Council, of the local Conservative Association, that he believed that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should leave the European Union – and that he had said this publicly and would continue to do so (which is why I can mention it here) whatever Mr Cameron thought about this matter (although, in the interests of fairness, I must make clear that Mr Cameron has not said that a person may not hold this opinion). Mr Hollobone then left the room and a secret ballot was held. It is a rule that numbers can not be given. However, in this case they are not needed – as there were no spoilt ballot papers and no opposing votes (work it out). Both good news and a reason to be proud. By the way, in case anyone thinks I had something to do with any of the above, I did not say a word in the entire Executive Council meeting. As the meeting was not public I will not mention what other people said. However, there were no comments opposing Mr Hollobone’s position. August 7th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Lately it seems that hardly a week goes by that we do not get some new chilling preview of the Police State that many in the political class are trying to bring about . How about this one?
Of course as the government freely admits, it will use this to monitor everyone’s movements for all manner of purposes beyond “air-rage” or people using the NHS. I can only imagine how quickly the list of thing that will get you stopped at the border is going to grow. Sorry, you have an appointment with a ‘social’ worker next week and we need to make sure you turn up. Failed to put your recycling out? BBC tax not paid yet? Outstanding parking tickets? Your carbon ration has been used up? Your kiddies refusing to attend the local educational conscription centre? You think I am joking? August 6th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
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