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Once again the ‘we know whats best’ brigade is out in force, targeting pharmacutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. They are upset about some obscure point of medical research. However the tactics that they are employing are rather sinister, even for the creepy ‘animal rights’ fraternity.
Animal rights activists threatened small shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, with public exposure yesterday unless they sold their shares within two weeks.
Shareholders, many of whom are pensioners, were sent anonymous letters saying that their names would be put on a website unless the shares were sold.
GlaxoSmithKline has set up an information page for shareholders, which is welcome. However the company is deserving of censure, or, indeed, of a right-royal kick in the bollocks over this matter. Shareholders have a right to privacy and how the animal rights fanatics managed to obtain shareholder details is a question that the company should make great efforts to find out the answer to.
Given the highly emotive and irrational nature of the animal-rights lobby, this is not a matter that GlaxoSmithKline should be taking lightly.
Several times I have called for the Tory Party, at least in its current form, to be put to the torch so that a viable and genuine opposition party can form in Britain (even if it is called ‘The Tory party’) as an alternative to Blairism in its various forms.
But as I am hardly bashful about my hostility to modern conservatism, dislike for democratic political parties in general, contempt for that invertebrate David Cameron (or Tory Blair as I like to call him) and the whole class of people who appointed him, I do not expect my views to carry much weight with folks who take a less bile spitting view of the political system than me.
However it would seem that Peter Hitchens, who has been by any reasonable definition the very epitome of a core Daily Mail Tory and ‘sensible’ mainstream establishment figure, pretty much takes the same view that the current Tory Party needs to be destroyed. I have been mildly incredulous to read some of his more recent article in which he has started saying things which are more or less identical to a wild-eyed anti-establishment chap like me on this issue, and moreover for pretty much the same basic reasons.
I cannot help but wonder if all those large bodkins I have been sticking in this David Cameron doll I have dangling in front of me via a little noose have not started to pay off.
Today is local council election day in England and Wales. As a voter in the area of Westminster, I decided to stick to my local Conservative councillors since whatever I think of the national party (not all that much), the local lot seem to have done a reasonably decent job, and I know them reasonably well as sane individuals, so I duly put my cross against their names. At a national level, meanwhile, it is hard to figure out quite what the Tories are doing. They are confronted by a ruling Labour establishment in meltdown mode, corrupt, incompetent, arrogant and, on the field of civil liberties, positively dangerous. Yet so far leader David Cameron prefers to romp around in the Artic Circle to prove his supposed Green manliness to Guardian Man. All very unimpressive.
Oh well. At least Boris Johnson is honest about the future of the Tory Party: a sports club. Maybe Dave and Boris should pack up their bags and run a light entertainment show. They might even make a decent go of it.
Police state’s cannot work unless people cooperate with them, and the supermarket Tesco is doing eaxctly that: helping make Britain’s emerging police state a reality.
A man took some photographs to be developed taken whilst deer hunting (showing him posing with a deer he had bagged), to his local supermarket, Tesco. However when the staff saw the developed pictures, they called the police because they felt the images ‘inappropriate’, although he had broken no animal cruelty or firearms laws. So how do the police get involved when something is deemed ‘inappropriate’ rather than ‘criminal’? Nevertheless, the police duly did get involved and moreover according to the article they questioned the man for “several hours”. Unless there is a great deal more to this story that came out in the article, I cannot see what this guy did to justify being questioned at all, let alone for “several hours”.
Now this raises more questions: firstly, what could they possibly question him about for ‘several hours’? If they were trying to ascertain if he had a licence for the weapon in the picture, surely all they needed was his name, a police computer terminal and about five minutes of some police office worker’s time. So what exactly where they asking this man to justify?
Also, Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, does not think that his company was the one who was acting in an ‘inappropriate’ manner, strangely stating:
Tesco does not discriminate against any lawful section of the community.
Sir Terry has not thought that statement through clearly as it is manifestly not the case (and if he dislikes that assertion, his lawyer is free to contact me). To ‘not discriminate’ would mean Tesco treats lawful gun owners the same way way it treats lawful dog owners and lawful car owners (all of which must be licenced).
So, following that statement of non-discrimination, I wonder if every time (or even occasionally) the staff at Tesco photolabs see a person driving an automobile in a picture they develop, something that can only be done lawfully in Britain if you have insurance and a valid driver’s licence, do they call the cops so they can grill the guy in the picture and make him produce proof his vehicle was licenced? If they do indeed do that, well, then I suppose Sir Terry is correct and Tesco do not ” discriminate against any lawful section of the community” as they really do apply the same standards to everyone. If that is not the case, then Sir Terry is not being truthful as clearly they do indeed discriminate against a lawful section of the community, namely those who own licensed firearms.
Needless to say I will never shop in a Tesco again.
Now recent British history is changing.
Last week we heard that the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, had offered to resign but that the Prime Minister refused to accept his resignation. The PM subsequently told the House that he did not know the details when he rejected that resignation.
Yesterday the PM told the News of the World that he might have to sack Clarke, depending on what happened. This morning it emerges in The Sun, the News of the World’s stable-mate, that, “BUNGLING Home Secretary Charles Clarke did NOT offer to quit last week over the freed foreign convicts scandal. He told the BBC he had offered to go — which infuriated Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
Those of us who have been seized by the strange idea that the reason a PM might reject a resignation without asking for more details could only be in order to be able to deny knowledge later, can take comfort. It never happened.
That the serious press, read by a tiny proportion of the public, may have carried stories in which Blair supported his Home Secretary, and that he told the House of Commons something similar, carries no weight. Many millions of tabloid readers are subvocalising the much simpler truth: that Tony has been badly let down, and investigations are going on to discover how badly.
And as to the Battle of the Cowshed, I believe the time will come when we shall find that Snowball’s part in it was much exaggerated. Discipline, comrades, iron discipline! That is the watchword for today. One false step, and our enemies would be upon us. Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back?
I am not the fondest of the Home Secretary. But he does serve his providential purpose, which of late has been to bluster to bully and to sneer at anyone who dare suggest there was anything wrong with the Blair administration’s attitude to liberty. This has been a valuable service to the nation, as it seems to have woken the liberal chattering classes from their torpor to realise that People Like Them (the New Labour elite) will do infinite evil with the best intentions. We need to keep Charles Clarke.
On the other hand, the Home Office itself should go. The spiffy new office in Marsham Street should be levelled, and the the glass pieces, broken small, preserved on the site as a sterile three-acre monument, eternally reminding us that it is more useful than what it replaced. Some parts a reasonable state needs, and they could be transplanted to places they might flourish.
What parts of the Home Office would we be better without?
The entire Communities Directorate for a start. Whether you like the CRE or not, it is hard to see any benefit in a subdirectorate in the Civil Service for “Race, Cohesion, Equality and Faith”. Are those things anything a government can, let alone should, control?
Then there is the Office for Criminal Justice Reform, a nasty project to seize control over the Criminal Justice system and get rid of all that inefficient unpredictable matter of fair trials, messily standing between the police and the prisons that the department owns. It is at best Home Office empire-building, at worst a threat to the rule of law.
Everone here knows my views on the Identity Cards Programme by now. The state has no right to determine who you are, permitting it to keep a life-long permanant record on you is a recipe for totalitarianism.
Without a department one would not need a mountain of shared and administrative services. They probably would not be missed. Entirely incidentally, those most offensive bits of the Home Office, the organs that originate sheaves of new criminal offences every year, and continually tweak the law to make convictions easier, would be gone.
What’s left? Crime. ‘Offender Management’. Immigration. Passports. → Continue reading: Save Charles Clarke!
David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer – in this case, journalist David Tebbutt – asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government employee, Miliband will not even publish the query, let alone answer it.
This, in a blog discussion about how MPs and ministers can prove to us through blogging that they do listen to taxpayers and are not as out of touch as we silly people imagine.
The state is not your friend and politicians certainly do not work for you, no matter whose propaganda (theirs or the taxpayers’ rights’ groups) you have bought into. Taking your money under threat of violence and actually working for you are not the same thing. David Miliband is one of many who take your money and work on their own agendas, on which self-promotion is paramount. This is an obvious fact, and David Miliband’s abuse of his taxpayer-owned blog is just one more piece of evidence which proves it.
I submitted the following comment to the David Miliband promotional blog:
Dennis Howlett – who I know personally and like – misses the point about the difference between other blogs and this one: This blog is not the private property of David Miliband. It is being financed by the taxpayer and is using government (taxpayer-funded) resources.
Which makes it all the more disgraceful that David Miliband refuses to publish comments that might make readers realise his ‘integrity’ is not quite what it seems. (I do not expect this comment to be published, either, but only hope it imbues David Miliband with some degree of shame when he reads it, if he is capable of feeling such a thing.)
Quite apart from this abuse of a taxpayer-funded blog, this is a sterling example of abhorrent customer service. Then again, when the customers don’t actually choose your ’service,’ and are forced under threat of violence to pay for it, you have the freedom to be endlessly selective about which ones you pay any mind. Right, Minister Miliband?
Jeff Jarvis is consulting the BBC, and is excited over the Beeb’s claims that it wants to “reinvent” itself. Here is what I said to Jeff:
Jeff, the point is that the BBC doesn’t want to ‘reinvent’ the very worst element of itself: the funding via shakedown of Joe Public. We’re not talking about a situation where a small percentage of the income tax or sales tax a person pays over a year is diverted to the BBC. One cannot own a radio or television without paying a ‘protection fee’ – Mafia-style – to the BBC. Don’t pay? You get a huge fine, and if you don’t or can’t pay it, you are thrown in prison.
The BBC is not going to ‘reinvent’ the threat of violence under which they operate. It’s not even a remote possibility. Ask some of your contacts there what the odds are, and I assure you they’ll laugh in your face.
The facts are inconvenient and chilling, but they are facts. Isn’t that what journalism is supposed to be about?
I really do not understand how people – not just Jeff, because there are a hell of a lot of them – who would be outraged over being shaken down by corporate interests can be so qualm-free about being shaken down by politicians and bureaucrats. Then again, these are often the same people who fully realise how incompetent and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are, yet want to give them more and more responsibility for running a big chunk of our lives (healthcare, education, you name it). Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
Events in UK politics are moving so fast at the moment that it is hard to know what will be the composition of the British cabinet by the end of this Bank Holiday weekend. Reuters, along with other news media is reporting that five of the foreign nationals released from British gaols – who should have been deported back to their original countries – have re-offended. The scandal of the released overseas prisoners back on the British streets looks set to send Charles Clarke down the political U-bend.
All very bad and I weep no tears for the jug-eared Home Secretary. A thought does occur to me, though. We make a fuss about foreign prisoners being released onto the streets rather than being deported, and of course a primary duty of a government is to protect its citizens from foreign menaces. But many thousands of British-born prison inmates who are released from often pathetically short sentences re-offend too. A few years ago I was mugged, an experience all too common in London, and it is frankly no difference to me whether the person was a foreign re-offender or British.
The negligence of Clarke’s department means he must resign, in my view. But let us not, in our understanderble desire to send these creeps, fools and knaves to the political dustbin, ignore some rather basic facts of penal life. My problem is not simply that we should send offenders back to their country of origin, it is that we send them to prison for often insanely short sentences in the first place.
Charles Clarke appears before an Eminent Jurists Panel, spruced up and professional, to defend the undermining of due process and roll his eyes backward, because they just do not get it. Terrorists, they kill people, we need security.
“I defend it categorically,” Clarke told the Eminent Jurists Panel at a hearing in central London. The orders give some capacity for the state against people we don’t feel able to pursue through the courts in a normal prosecution.”
Clarke today rejected those arguments in his testimony, suggesting the panel may have failed to grasp the gravity of the terror threat.
“I don’t think you understand,” Clarke said. “Do we just somehow pretend it’s not there?”
That was the response of the Home Office to foreign prisoners who were designated for deportation after completing their sentences. They just slipped away… into the community.
Matters were made worse by Clarke’s admission late Tuesday that he did not know where most of the offenders, who include three murderers and nine rapists, were.
Among the offenders, five had been convicted of committing sex offences on children, seven had served time for other sex offences, 57 for violent offences and two for manslaughter.
There were also 41 burglars and 20 drug importers among those released back into the community without considering their removal from Britain.
Our Home Secretary has taken personal responsibility for this slight hiccup.
Clarke, who has accepted personal responsibility for the ‘shocking and systematic failure’ of his ministry and the immigration agencies in dealing with the cases, said Tuesday evening: “I certainly don’t think I have a duty to the public to go – I have a duty to sort this out.”
All the foreign prisoners released will be served with a ‘super-ASBO’ (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) trademarked TB, and supervised by the Probation Service.
Charles Clarke, the current boot boy in the Blunkett-Howard tradition, is upset that the government’s abridgement of fundamental rights is being called for what it is. It is at least a good sign they feel the need to be a bit defensive as previously they scarely seem to try and diguise their contempt for notions of privacy or personal civil liberty.
Although the Tories (or at least David Davies) have said in the recent past that they would scrap the whole monstrous ID card plan, I wonder if that will remain their view if they actually end up in power with this scheme already in place. I have my doubts that any party which so recently has Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard as its leader really has any honest commitment to civil liberties.
Mr Clarke pointed to recent articles in the Guardian, Observer and the Independent newspapers which made “incorrect, tendentious and over-simplified” statements about Labour’s record on civil liberties.
– BBC Online
The pieces I’ve seen there were actually considerably more accurate than his rebuttals, and relied not at all on the circularity and misleading literalism that is the foundation of any Home Office statement. But maybe he’s worried about anyone else getting into the business of tendentiousness and over-simplification in relation to civil liberties. That’s his (and Mr Blair’s) job.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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