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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.
In my bitter and twisted way I often resent people being given good jobs when they have no clear talent for these jobs. Before going back to Bolton (I still have not set out) for my pointless course (pointless because I have not been “allocated 120 documented teaching hours” and therefore can not pass) I went over to a local supermarket to get a something to eat.
I started to read the Daily Telegraph, the leading Conservative newspaper in Britain and came upon an article by Mr Boris Johnson (Conservative party MP and journalist). The article was about the recent announcement of the closure of a car factory in Coventry in the English West Midlands. Fear not, argued Mr Johnson, for although this particular factory is closing, industry in general in the United Kingdom is doing well and unemployment is only 4% of the workforce.
The problem is that unemployment was 5% of the workforce in January (and I bet it has gone up since then). and industrial output has been falling for over a year. I actually agree with the thrust of Mr Johnson’s article (that we should not copy French regulations – although quite a lot of regulations have already come in over the years), but the careless attitude to facts irritates me.
Christopher Booker (of the Sunday Telegraph – the sister paper to the Daily Telegraph) regularly attacks journalists (including Mr Johnson) for getting the facts wrong (on the EU and other matters). But these journalists (and people in other walks of life) just carry on writing and speaking as if facts do not matter. How is it that people can get high paying and important jobs and just not bother about what they are doing? For example, Mr Johnson will have at least one paid ‘researcher’ – so it is not as if it would be a great effort for him to get the facts right (he just does not care – just as many other important people just do not care).
I know I have said it before, but it offends me that (for example) David Cameron (who has a degree in Politics Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University) talks as if he did not understand what the words “social justice” meant (i.e. the belief that income and wealth should be “distributed” by government in accordance with a pattern held to be just). Does he really believe in ‘social justice’? In which case he should not be a member of the Conservative party – let alone the leader of it. Does he not know what the words mean? But he is not Ian Duncan Smith (an ex leader of the Conservative party and ex-army man who also uses these words, but can not be blamed for not knowing what they mean) he has (as I said above) a degree in PPE from Oxford – how did he get the degree if he knows nothing about basic political philosophy? Or is he trying to trick people by using words he thinks they will like whilst not caring about the formal meaning of these words? In which case he is dishonest.
“Mr Cameron is not dishonest, he is a nice man and Mr Johnson is a lovely man”.
No Mr Cameron is not a ‘nice man’ – nice people do not call “most” (the exact word was “mostly”) of the members of another party “closet racists” without a very good reason. He was not referring to the genuinely racist neo-fascist British National Party (BNP), who pose no threat at all to the Tories, but rather the anti-European Union United Kingdom Independence Party, who do indeed take votes from the Tories. He also refused to apologize – and then got the party Chairman (arch plotter Francis Maude) to come out with even more smears.
And of course this is the same Mr Cameron of the PR work for Mr Green of Carlton television. When Mr Green was busy using shareholders money to try and prop “On Digital” Mr Cameron not only denied it was happening he said “if you print that I will have you sacked” to several financial journalists.
Mr Johnson is not a “lovely man” either – he cheats on his wife and then makes a little joke of it (in the hopes that he can get out of trouble). He also made great play of how anti-EU he was (when he stood for Parliament) – and then voted for the arch EU fanatic ‘Ken’ Clarke to be leader of the Conservative party (Mr Johnson then, I believe, supported Mr Cameron in the last leadership election).
These men have no honour and no ability, other than the ability to somehow get to the top.
“It is just because you are bitter and twisted Paul” – well that is true, but I still do not see why Britain has to have so many people in high positions who do not care about truth. It is as if the entire ruling elite (almost regardless of party) want to be the “heir to Blair” as Mr Cameron is supposed to have claimed to be.
Government spending, taxes and regulations are all on the rise in this country and have been for quite some time. This has happened many times before in history, but there is a odd thing about this time.
Most people seem to think that we have a ‘free market’ government, and that Mr Blair is very ‘pro-business’. I can understand people thinking the government is very close to some businessmen (the people who are connected politically), but there is a view that this is a general ‘free enterprise’ regime.
In the past Marxists held that various Labour governments were “really pro-capitalist” because these administrations were not as collectivist as Maxists would like. However, it is more than a few Marxists today. It does seem to be a common view that a state of affairs where way over 40% of the economy is spent by the state and what is left is controlled by a vast web of regulations is a ‘New Labour’ system where the government has turned its back on ‘social justice’ and is not doing enough to ‘help the poor’.
In the United States the wild spending Bush administration (responsible for the Medicare extension, “no child left behind” and the biggest increase in ‘entitlement’ spending since the days of L.B.J. and Richard Nixon) is held, by some people, to be ‘free market’. But then (like Nixon) Mr Bush is a Republican (who are supposed to be free market – even if they often not so) and has actually cut taxes (by some definitions).
In this country there should be no such confusion – the government is from the Labour party, and taxes (as well as spending and regulations) have been increased and are increasing – yet the view persists that this is somehow a pro free enterprise administration.
Many in the Conservative party seem deeply confused. For example Michael Gove MP writes in Forward! (the journal of Conservative Way Forward – I wonder if the people who control this journal know that ‘Forward’ [in various languages] was the name for first Marxist and then Fascist newspapers in 20th century Europe) that President Bush is not “concerned” enough about the “very poorest” and should have more of a “one nation social obligation” (supposedly John McCain would be more collectivist than George Bush and would, therefore, make a better President)
If this waffle means that President Bush should have spent even more money on the various health, education and welfare programs then Mr Gove knows nothing about what has been happening in the United States (but then Mr Gove has little interest in the United States, other than his desire that it should make war in various places). However, it is clear that Mr Gove (and his master Mr Cameron – the leader of the Conservative party) also think that there is not enough statism here.
The words ‘social justice’ are often used by some people in the Conservative party, as if there was no knowledge that basic point of being a Conservative is to oppose ‘social justice’ (statism – specifically the “redistribution of income and wealth”) and to support justice (private property – to each their own). The virtue of benevolence (what used to be called the virtue of charity) is indeed a good thing – but it is a different thing from the virtue of justice. It does no good (indeed it does vast harm) to confuse the concepts.
So we have a government that is greatly increasing the size and scope of the state and an opposition that seems to think that the government has not gone far enough. I suppose it might be claimed that Mr Gove and Mr Cameron are so deeply moved by the thought that there are poor people that they are willing to try anything, even “social justice”, in the misguided hope that it will reduce (rather than increase) poverty.
However, I am poor and I have not noted Mr Gove or Mr Cameron rushing to me and offering me a job or other aid. I know of no evidence that they have some deep feeling for the poor. At the base of their words does seem to be a belief that they well get more votes by talking and writing in this way – i.e. they think that even after the orgy of spending, taxes and regulations of the last few years, the people of this land are still in love with the “public services” and with “social justice”.
Perhaps they are right. As I have noted, many people do seem to think of Labour statism as ‘New Labour’ free enterprise. It is very odd.
This morning Andy Burnham MP was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that the government intends to make the British ID card an unrepealable fait accompli before the next general election:
I’m keen to see plenty of ID cards in circulation come the next election” […] The whole landscape will have changed by the time if – and it’s a big if – the Tories ever get anywhere near power.
This evening the NO2ID campaign launched its response:
I see that the Labour Party has decided to bash the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, using the image of a chameleon riding a bicycle. Ouch. I am not sure what is more damning: the chameleon image or the bike. Of course, this blog has already vented a fair deal about the supposed limitations of Cameron, so I will not tarry long on this point, other than to say that some of the fizz seems to have gone out of the Cameron charge of late, although it may be that he is simply waiting and watching while Blair, enmeshed in scandal and policy paralysis, meets his political Waterloo. I am still unconvinced whether Cameron will play a convincing Wellington, however.
Not content with bullying its own population, the British Government is now spending taxpayers’ money to export the culture of fear. This from the website of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to Romania:
With approximately 100 illegal immigrants deported from Britain to Romania every month and 250 Romanian asylum seekers registered last year in the UK, the Home Office and the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) decided to launch this publicity campaign in March 2005.
The existence of the IOM ‘Managing migration for the welfare of all’ is unwelcome news to me.
[…] But how does a state achieve the balance between the need for control of its borders and the need to facilitate movement across its borders for legitimate purposes such as trade, tourism, family reunion and education?
…asks the IOM, seeking to explain its purpose, but begging the question. The assumption is that states will naturally ban travel and trade (which is what ‘control their borders’ means) and then decide what are ‘legitimate purposes’ for permitted movements. But this is a convenient doctrine invented by states in the 20th century, a generalization of the conditions of the Tsarist police-state and the petty, nationalist bureaucracies that emerged in the 19th.
Where – let alone why – I choose to live or travel is no business of states, unless I am doing injury to their citizens. By going from place to place I do accept that places are different legally as well as culturally and physically. If there were no differences there would be no point in travel. But the natural condition of borders is openness. They are just lines on a map.
When the British left is worried about getting its vote out, a standard tool in the box is the scare story about “the extreme right” (meaning not us but the racist parties), being about to break through. This is not generally convincing nationwide, but that does not stop it being tried. Before the general election the New Statesman published an absurd story/slur that 1 in 5 Britons could vote far right – which spintastic headline involved counting UKIP, Veritas, and the English Nationalist Party as the much the same thing as the BNP and the National Front.
Now they are at it again for the local elections. Margaret Hodge, an impeccably New Labour minister, is quoted more or less everywhere today. (Though, now the story is more or less everywhere, she seems to have resiled from it somewhat. Strange that, a highly experienced, high profile minister mis-speaking in a set-piece interview for a national.)
As the BBC has it:
White working class voters are being “tempted” by the British National Party as they feel Labour is not listening to their concerns, a minister has said. Employment minister Margaret Hodge said the BNP could win seats in her Barking constituency in May’s council polls. She told the Sunday Telegraph many constituents were angry at the lack of housing and asylum seekers being housed in the area by inner London councils. The BNP said Labour were ignoring fears over “mass immigration” to the UK
You might think she is trying to have it both ways – and succeeding – by pretending to worry about xenophobia, while simultaneously acknowledging it, and suggesting it may be catered to. As anyone who had read the Labour general election manifesto might suppose it would be, what with half a page on e-borders, asylum and ID cards as immigration control.
But there is another possibility. The working-class voters of Barking and Dagenham might genuinely prefer the BNP. Not for its racist tendencies, but because they would rather vote for a less authoritarian variety of socialism than that offered by Mrs Hodge and her colleagues.
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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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