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Today Mr Blair and his cronies will bring their banning Incitement to Religious Hatred (i.e. death to another part of what is left of free speech) idea before the House of Commons.
Normally one must be careful not to use the word “evil” in politics. One must not claim a monopoly of virtue for one’s own side in any political debate as one may always be wrong and, even if one is correct, the people on the other side may simply be honestly mistaken. They may be voting for a bad statute, but they are not themselves bad people.
However, the vile scheme that is the banning Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill has been exposed so many times (and in so many places) that no member of the House of Commons can honestly say that they did not know what they were voting for.
There is no question of (say) “the balance of argument” or “people of good will taking different sides”. The people who vote for this bill (in the hopes of their party getting some Muslim votes – and, of course, not from tolerant Muslims) are voting for something they know to be evil, and that makes these members of the House of Commons bad people, unfit to serve in the ‘Mother of Parliaments’.
I hope that a full list of the Members of the House of Commons, and their constituencies, who vote for this measure is published and widely distributed so that people will know who not to vote for in the next General Election.
I also hope that people who live in the constituencies of the MPs who vote for this bill write to them to, politely, express their horror and disgust with what they have done.
I recently decided that I wanted to upgrade the CPU on my desktop computer. As it happened, the particular CPU I wanted was in short supply in the UK, and as prices here were substantially higher than in the US I decided to buy it from a shop in Seattle via ebay. It was quite possible that I would have to pay British VAT when the CPU was imported into the UK, but even after this I would still save substantial amounts of money.
So I ordered the CPU, and yesterday it arrived. I received a note in my mailbox telling me that some taxes were owing. Oddly, though, the taxes stated on the note came to about 26% of the price rather than the 17.5% VAT rate. I went to the depot, paid the taxes, and picked up the CPU. A sticker had been placed on the package, and this explained the discrepancy between the amount I calculated and the amount I was being charged. In addition to the VAT I was being charged a £8 “clearance fee”. You see, I was not just being charged taxes. I was being charged an additional amount to pay the tax collectors to charge me taxes.
Forgive me for being pissed off by this.
The Tories could simply abolish entire government departments that the ‘man in the street’ really does not give a damn about (such as the DTI for example) and save huge amounts of money… but far from cutting pointless state expenditures, Cameron is in the process of making it politically impossible for him to do anything but ape Blair. Why? Because there has been no meaningful attempt by the Tories to even make the idea of a smaller state something that is simply a feature of normal political discourse. They have left the thinking to the other side and now have to fight every battle on ground Tony Blair has chosen for them.
The Tories have had more than a decade to put in the intellectual ground work for cutting the scope of the state and to argue their positions on the basis of several rights, and yet have done nothing of the sort because that is not what most of them believe. That is hardly surprising given the pathologies of the sort of people who are drawn to politics: they do not get involved because they want to wield less power than the previous guys who ran things. Understanding politicians and what they are likely to do is much easier once you realise that almost everyone in politics (even the ‘nice guys’ who wear sensible cardigans and remind you of Wallace and Gromit) have more in common psychologically and morally with your typical member of a street gang than with most of the people who actually vote for them.
However where does that leave people who do want a less intrusive state and cannot bring themselves to believe the Tory party does not give a damn about them? Well it leaves them trying to convince themselves that Cameron is just playing a clever game because the alternative is just too dreadful. He is the man who will save us from those who are incrementally destroying our competitiveness and strangling our civil liberties because, well, he has to be, who else is there?
But even if his conversion to ‘soft socialist’ economics is because he is going after LibDem voters who think high taxes and regulations are a good thing, it would at least require Cameron to also make a pitch based on civil liberties, the one differentiating issue where the LibDems make sense, and yet the main thrust of the inconstant Tory opposition to ID cards is based on their cost.
Those of you who think Cameron is just being clever should go watch Peter Sellers in ‘Being There’ and realise that what you are mistaking for cleverness is in fact just emptiness.
The ‘Conservative’ Party is now admitting what any twit should have figured out long ago: voting Tory will not result in lower taxes. Moreover they are trying to make it seem like a virtue. One sound axiom is that whenever a Tory politician uses the word ‘sensible’, it is time to bend over and think of England because they are using the word as a euphemism for either surrendering power to Brussels or keeping your taxes nice and high, and this is clearly the Tory party at its most ‘sensible’.
It always makes me laugh when people like Cameron and his shadow chancellor George Osborne blather on about how they will provide ‘stability’ as if the economy is something that could not possibly work without constant political interference.
The Tories are quick to tell us how Labour has squandered Britain’s economic advantages (as indeed they have) and yet Cameron’s boys seem to bend over backwards to assure everyone that a Tory government will be nothing more than Blue Rinse Blairism. Yet if ‘stability’ is so important rather than a radical change, surely the most ‘stable’ thing would be to just leave the current Blairites in government.
John Hutton, Work and Pensions Minister, runs a department that has not improved either. Watching Andrew Marr’s impartial televisual feast this morning, Hutton sat down following Fiona Millar’s defence of comprehensive schools and Chris Huhne transferring his skillset from journalism to tax increases. A green paper on welfare will be published this week as a preparation for a new bill on the benefits system. Finding a gap between the latest revolution on criminal justice and educational appeasement, Hutton proposes radical measurements. Doctors will have to monitor and report on how many sicknotes they issue.
Doctors could be offered bonuses for cutting the numbers of long-term sick notes they issue as part of a radical plan to slash incapacity benefit claims,.
Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton said that the proposal was under consideration as part of the Government’s package of welfare reforms.
“It has been mooted and I think, again, this is something we would like to talk to the GPs about,” he told the BBC1 Sunday AM programme.
No doubt league tables and auditing will follow; a harsh judgement but the micromanagement of benefit and dependency that is proposed will not work. Yet again, the response of the government to a perceived problem is measurement and management, in a centralised reporting structure. The policy is reported to have some teeth:
Ministers want to drastically cut the 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit (IB) at an annual cost of £12.5 billion, by getting those who are able to do some form of work back into jobs.
It is expected that the green paper will include proposals to cut IB payments by up to £10.93 a week for claimants who refuse to attend a job interview, rising to £21.86 for a second refusal.
The Government is also planning to install employment advisers in GPs surgeries – with claimants being assessed to see what work they are capable of doing before they can qualify for IB.
Even the name of the benefit is to change in order to underline the new approach.
“Incapacity benefit implies that you are incapable of doing anything, it is completely hopeless. I think we shouldn’t take that view,” Mr Hutton said.
Such teeth may be drawn in the face of Labour rebels, since many backbenchers will oppose taking money from those identified as incapacitated by the benefits system. Lo and behold! what remains: some spin as ‘incapacity benefit’ is rebranded, perhaps as ‘Brown’s munificence’ or ‘for the trouble you took to vote Labour’; and lots of shiny new part-time public sector positions to reduce the headline figures.
The real solution is more straightforward: privatise provision with incentives to reduce the figures and get those drawing benefits back to work. If you are filmed playing squash on a ‘bad back’, there may be some bad news: London Transport probably will not employ you but you can still join the RMT.
One of the contenders for the leadership of Britain’s Liberal Democrats is Scot, Menzies Campbell, known as “Ming”. I am not sure how he got this moniker. Was it because his friends thought he resembled the villain of the Flash Gordon series, Ming the Merciless?
I feel sorry for his supporters. They are destined to be known as a lot of mingers.
(That’s enough adolescent humour, Ed).
Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.
So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with ‘Middle England’, is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?
All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say “regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them.”
There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron… but of course I would love to be proven wrong.
I have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk?
The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science.
The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
To see a term like “Blairite Tyranny” bandied about on a blog like this by people who think things like civil liberties actually matter, is to be expected.
However to see those words in print at all in the mainstream media is quite remarkable! More of the same please.
It is not much fun being nearly sixty, but it does have some advantages, one of which is that you can just about remember political debates now long dead, of a sort which younger people may have little idea about.
And during the nineteen fifties, I recall, there was a debate, at any rate in Britain, engaged in by diehard free-marketeers, about the long term consequences of the Welfare State. The name of Anthony LeJeune springs to mind, but most of his recent writing nowadays seems to have been reviews of crime stories. Anyway, these diehard free-marketeers said that the Welfare State would corrupt the working class and turn then from the upstanding citizens that they then mostly were into barbarians. Diehard non-free-marketeers genuinely could not imagine this happening, and dismissed such fears as absurd. Most politicians, similarly unable to imagine that times might seriously change, concurred with the diehard non-free-marketeers.
Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.
I consider the Prime Minister’s somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point. → Continue reading: Abolish the Welfare State and restore some Respect
William, Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times says:
In Parliament, particularly in the House of Lords, there is a growing reaction against such social control [as identity cards]. Most of us think policemen should not be turned into busybodies, warning people not even to discuss adoption by homosexual couples; arresting them for any trivial offence; threatening smokers and publicans; and galloping after fox-hunters. We resent this on behalf of the public, but we also resent it on behalf of the police.
In the history of Britain there have been many periods when liberty was threatened. The immediate threat is a government with a lust for control, with little respect for liberty or for the House of Commons, but enjoying the opportunity of using new technologies for social control. The British are certainly less free than we were in 1997 or 2001. The fightback will be laborious and difficult, but there is a new mood.
There is small sign of such a new mood on the Government benches. Is there one in the country?
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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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