Al-Quaeda has called Queen Elizabeth II an “enemy of Islam”, not least for her being the ceremonial head of the Church of England. I of course hope that the vast majority of Muslims living in this country do not think the same way. In any event, let’s hope Prince Charles takes notice.
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The leader in this week’s Spectator kicks off with this zinger of a paragraph:
No further comment required, surely. November 12th, 2005 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Earlier this year the British government overturned the old “double jeopardy” rule, that previously meant that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence. Today, Reuters reports that the first case of a man to face jurors for a second time for the same alleged crime is to go ahead. This is another step down a slippery slope, precisely because the argument for ending the rule is so seductive at first glance. It is possible to sympathise with victims or relative of crime victims who see a person whom they think has gotten away with it. Many years ago in the course of my then job, I watched several court cases in my native East Anglia and saw people get away with crimes on technicalities. It was maddening. But – the double jeopardy rule existed for a reason. If people can be repeatedly tried for the same crime, it creates a potential very bad and unintended consequence: police and the Crown Prosecution Service will become lazy in the preparation of cases. Why bother to get a case presented as powerfully as possible and with as much care if you think that if X gets acquitted, one can always have another go, and another, and another….? The potential for abuse of power from double jeopardy is at the core of why the rule exists. The law in the United States was based on the English model. Hard cases, however appealing, make bad laws, as they say. This is a bad day for justice in Britain. There have been a lot of them lately. November 10th, 2005 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
All over the UK tonight, the sky will be lit up with fireworks and the evening will reverberate with a lot of loud bangs as folk mark Guy Fawke’s Night. Here is a nifty website explaining all about the event, what is commemorated and why. I’ll be off to Battersea Park later this evening to enjoy the fun. I hope people use their common sense and don’t get hurt. Here is an informative book about the early 17th Century plot to blow up Parliament and the subsequent anti-Catholic crackdown. There is also even something called the Gunpowder Plot Society. When I was a student living in Brighton, I once went to nearby Lewes, a town that stages a massive series of processions and bonfires every year. It is pretty non-PC in that a lot of people have muttered that such an event, especially one that involves burning effigies of a 17th Century Pope, stirs up ugly prejudices. I can sympathise up to a point with the grumblers. When I went along to the event there was the smell not just of gunpowder in the air but quite a lot of aggressive body language on display (although that may have been due to the potent local ales). I am glad to say that, all this time on, anti-Popery hysteria is mostly a thing of the past in Britain (apart from the odd bit of nuttiness at Glaswegian local football matches between Celtic and Rangers). Alas, it lingers on in Northern Ireland. November 5th, 2005 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here are the latest statistics on crime in Britain. Police statistics, according to this BBC report, show that violent crimes have gone up, while another survey shows that violent crimes are broadly stable. (The usual health warnings about statistics obviously apply). However you look at it, crime is high. Regardless of what one thinks about the potentially civil libertarian worries about millions of CCTV cameras now scattered around the country, it hardly appears that they are very useful in deterring crime, which as far as I know, was the stated purpose for the things. October 27th, 2005 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
Something extremely interesting has just been reported on Newsnight. David Cameron has apparently been saying for some time now (but I missed it until now) that he is against “opposition for opposition’s sake” and that the Conservatives may well be voting for the Government’s latest education reforms. David Cameron is and has for some time been the Conservative spokesman on education, and he seems to be handling the Conservative response to these proposals. Yesterday I did a posting concerning Cameron, and the consensus among the Samizdata commentariat was that nobody knew what Cameron stood for, or what any of his ideas might be. But I think what we have here is an idea of great importance. Maybe not an especially original one, and long overdue, but extremely potent mevertheless. The Conservative Opposition has spent the last decade opposing everything that the Government has done, a process which I particularly associate with William Hague, but which his successors have not fundamentally altered. And since the Government has been relentlessly “triangulating” – i.e. stealing whichever Conservative policies they think are popular or which they think will eventually prove popular because they think that they will in the meantime work – this has meant the Conservatives suffering from a permanent, yet self-imposed, philosophical incoherence. One moment the Conservatives would be saying that something or other that the Government was talking about should be more market-oriented. A moment later, some other Government initiative that was more market-oriented would be complained about. Complained about, as Cameron has apparently said, for the sake of complaining. One moment the Government was being not tough enough on terrorists, the next moment too tough, for doing pretty much what the Conservatives had just said they should do in another context. This is not opposition, so much as opposition-ism. It says: whatever they do is wrong! Never mind why. Never mind what we would do, or what we really think of it. Denounce it! We just scrape up whatever mud we can find on the floor and chuck it at them. No wonder the Conservatives have won parliamentary battle after parliamentary battle, but have been slaughtered again and again in the electoral war. What would the Conservatives do, if they were the Government? For the last ten years, they have offered no sort of answer. And for this reason, there has been, in the competitive sense, no opposition, because no alternative Government that it made sense to even consider voting for. All anyone knew about the Conservatives was that they did not like the Government. Big surprise. But that is not a policy; it is a mere emotion. It has condemned the Conservatives to relentless irrelevance and unending public ridicule. Now, if this “Cameron doctrine” is what it appears to be, and more to the point, if it goes into action right across the board, with David Cameron imposing it across the board in his capacity as Conservative Leader, New Labour will finally face what you might call a New Nightmare. Take these education reforms. Blair says they are intended to make schools more independent and self-governed, and less controlled by local authorities. This is very Conservative friendly stuff, and not at all Labour friendly. There is a good chance that the massed ranks of Labour MPs will not vote for these reforms in nearly sufficient numbers, but that a more unified Conservative Party will see the reforms through nevertheless. This will split the Labour Party from top to bottom. We are doing Conservative policy! And with Conservative help! And in spite of our core beliefs! Repeat that procedure every time Blair presents one of his reforms, but oppose ferociously when they resort to old fashioned, Old Labour, collectivism, and suddenly it is a new Parliamentary ball game. It gets worse for Labour. In the electorate as a whole, the question will start to be asked: if we already have a Government that does Conservative things, despite its own supporters, and if that is what that nice Mr Blair thinks should be done, then does it not make sense to vote for the real thing, and vote in a real Conservative Government? This is a tactical switch that the Conservatives should, from the purely political and competitive point of view, have done years ago. Finally, they have done it. Or then again, maybe they have not. Cameron might not win the Conservative Leadership. Davies might go back to crass oppositionism. Cameron may win, but it may turn out that “opposition for opposition’s sake” was just a nice sounding phrase to win him the job, and he will then forget about it and carry on with the mud slinging. But, this might just be a political turning point. October 24th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
An Algerian man was arrested and put on trial in Belfast. We hope the evidence they have is of more substance than the mere presence of 25 disks of downloaded information on explosives. If that were ever to become a definition of crime in and of itself, I fear every technically inclined 14 year old in the Anglosphere would soon be imprisoned. The defendant was living not far from a neighborhood controlled by Protestant Paramilitaries, most likely due to the presence of cheap housing. October 23rd, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent? Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story. But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude � honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which � is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron’s type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one’s best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate. The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job. → Continue reading: Posh politicians and not-so-posh politicians who actually do things October 23rd, 2005 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now I am a great believer that any company should be at liberty to hire or not hire anyone they damn well please for any reason whatsoever (contingent on the terms of a freely agreed employment contract, of course), regardless of whether or not the reasons are sensible or utterly capricious. So when a tax funded body like the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service says…
… I do not automatically think this is a bad thing. I also do not much care for bigots and racists and personally I would not hire a member of the BNP either. But then I would also not hire a communist, a socialist, an islamist or all manner of other folks, simply on the basis that I find their beliefs monstrous and therefore have no wish to enrich them. But I would like to get some clarification on a few points from the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, seeing as they are a public sector body… would they take a similar position for regarding someone who was a communist or who advocates other forms of violence enforced collectivism, or is only trying to impose national socialism beyond the pale? What about someone who supports radical Islamist organisations that what to impose Sharia? How about members of Sinn Fein, the political wing of an outfit that has murdered thousands of people? Also, are members of the neo-fascist BNP now going to be permitted to stop paying for the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, or is their money still welcome? Just asking. October 22nd, 2005 | 93 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not exactly a fan of David Cameron, the 39-year-old (same as yours truly) who won a crushing majority of votes for the Tory leadership from fellow MPs. Yes, he is obviously bright, telegenic, youngish, and might have appeal outside the Tory ranks, but er, could we actually find out what he actually believes in, please? What on earth does this mean, for example:
Huh? The rest of the Reuters article offers zero illumination. Now, I realise that expecting politicians to set out their stall in full has its risks. As a regular commenter, Verity, put it the other day, if a politician has a goodish idea, the chances are that Blair will steal it, or at least pretend to copy the policy (what happens in reality is a bit different). Politics is rather like business in that regard. Meanwhile, Clive Davis wonders whatever happened to meritocracy in politics? October 21st, 2005 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 21st, 2005 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
It never takes more than a week or two to have my dislike for the political class resoundingly reinforced yet again. In particular, those who wish to see a Tory government rescue our civil liberties from the predations of New Labour would do well to read this and this and then ask themselves why they think voting for these people is going to make the slightest bit of difference when push comes to shove. October 20th, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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