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Yesterday I marvelled at the notion that David Blunkett had the gall to suggest that victims of miscarriages of justice should be charged for ‘room and board’. That this has not featured on the front page of every newspaper in Britain is also shocking to me. It seems to me that when there has been a miscarriage of justice, the state should bend over backwards to make amends as fulsomely as possible and make lavish restitution for damages done both directly and indirectly for the life it has unjustly disrupted. If justice is administered ‘in the name of the people’ then surely amongst the endless litany of grotesque uses of the public purse that consume billions and billions of pounds, this would be a rare legitimate public charge that few would dispute.
However what is even more baffling to me that the Tory Party is not queuing up in the Commons to denounce Blunkett in the most extreme language allowed in Parliament. Why are they not trying to use this latest affront to common decency and natural justice and using it to paint the Labour Party as the party which tramples over civil liberties? They should be relentlessly calling for Blunkett’s head over this and what do I hear? The sound of silence. Anyone who harbours delusions that the party of Michael Howard will be their champion for civil liberties against the ever more authoritarian Labour government really needs to see them for what they really are.
Regardless of whether or not the government manages to get this measure accepted or not, the mere fact Blunkett can even suggest such a thing without sparking clamourous calls for his removal from office is both a damning indictment of the moral and political vacuity of Britain’s political parties and a chilling measure of state of Britain’s culture. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong and see a ground swell of anger emerging in the press and polity in the next few days but I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to hear the views of some of Britain’s blogging Members of Parliament on this issue.
Given my extremely low expectations, it takes a lot for a British government to actually amaze me.
Well they have managed to do exactly that. The people who rule us are not misguided, they are actually evil.
It is a very nervous time for those of us in Britain stupid enough to be self-employed, in this age of grasping government. Because Gordon Brown is desperately short of cash and he is also desperately scared of raising any more income tax from voters employed by large organisations. So where does that leave him? It leaves him staring at me and a few other hardy self-employed souls standing out here in living-on-our-own-wits land, ready to take the hit to fill his £10 billion black hole of unfunded borrowing.
Gordon Brown is a great fat sweating thieving spurt of the devil and I hate him with every twisted fibre of my being. But I think I am going to hate him even more on Thursday morning, after his UK government budget statement on Wednesday, because the small print is almost certainly going to show me owing Her Majesty’s Government up to 70% of my direct ill-gotten income, which I currently exploit out of the oppressed banks and City corporations of England.
If he does do this, by making me pay all sorts of national insurances on dividend income, for benefits I am ineligible to claim, to try to effectively turn me into an employee of the state, he may be clever enough to remove all of the wheezes we use out here in self-employed land, to get ourselves off the hook.
→ Continue reading: Entering Gordon’s black hole
There is something very Georgian and 18th Century about this but I suppose it qualifies as entrepreneurialism of sorts:
The final punch lands, exploding the fighter’s nose into the braying crowd, and the broken, unseeing, bare-knuckle boxer submits. The winner lifts his bleeding hands in celebration, knowing the victory won by his fists will line his pockets.
Welcome to the boxing underworld of bare-knuckle fighting, where the exhausted victor can hobble away with as much as £50,000 in cash.
Tax-free cash as well I should think.
These brutal confrontations have long been outlawed. But even now in country lanes, fields, barns and warehouses, grown men are pitting themselves against each other to settle old scores – and earn big money – at the risk of appalling injuries.
A reaction to the ‘risk aversion’ culture, perhaps?
Organisers say the police rarely break up a fight – it’s easier to let the contest finish naturally than risk a riot.
Also they might get the crap beaten out of them.
Ricky English, an unlicensed promoter, has signed up hundreds of fighters in the three years since he started in the fight promotion game. It is big business – he is organising fights up and down the country, charging spectators up to £50 a head.
“This is for the novices,” he said. “Fighters won’t go amateur any more. They’re sick of all the rules, the standing counts and the tap, tap, tapping. They want to have a fight and earn money. And they’re earning money.”
So is he trying to tell us that overregulation has spawned a thriving ‘underground’ industry?
“It’s great fun. I had one fighter with a glass eye who’d take it out before a fight. Crowds just love it,” said Rocky Rowe, who promoted unlicensed fights for many years. “It’s a bit like karaoke.”
Surely it cannot be that painful?
Equitable Life is a mess, that is for sure. The responsibility of making sure the people who look after your money can be trusted ultimately lies with the owner of the money… the pensioners, the beneficiaries of what Equitable Life actually does. However if fraud or other gross misrepresentation is involved, and not just incompetence, ineptitude or misfortune, then things do change somewhat as it becomes a criminal matter.
However Equitable Life is massively regulated, so many of its weird business decisions must be seen within the context of the weird distorted environment within which it operates…
So yes, there is an argument that as the state should therefore also be liable for the mess. But then if you accept that, given that the British economy grows more regulated by the day, that would suggest investors should be lining up to claim tax money from the state every time anything goes bust. After all, what makes Equitable Life’s casualties any different from the casualties of any other business cock up?
What happens when idiotarian values, movements or policies collide? When EU clashes with animal rights activists…
Thousands of animals face laboratory tests involving industrial chemicals because of new European Union legislation. The EU measure, called Reach (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), is intended to impose strict regulation on Europe’s chemical industry. It will require new laboratory tests on animals for 30,000 separate chemicals currently in production in Europe. At present, each country has its own laws governing testing.
In reply to Dr Spink’s question, Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, said Reach required 20,000 chemicals to be tested on at least 25 animals – a total of 500,000 tests. Another 4,000 substances would require 1,500 animal tests each – six million in all. The number of tests for the remaining 6,000 chemicals was not stated.
Or when “environment-friendly” energy sources meet conservationists…
Wind farms – the “environment-friendly” energy source – are threatening to push the golden eagle, one of Britain’s rarest birds, into extinction. Conservationists say that the rapid spread of the farms in Britain – encouraged by Government subsidies for renewable energy projects – poses a grave threat to birds of prey. Other species at risk are osprey, red kites, merlins, kestrels, honey buzzards, ravens and peregrine falcons.
Both of these articles in one day. More and faster, please.
This sounds promising:
The Tories’ flagship education policy to give parents more freedom to choose their children’s schools is to be dramatically expanded, the party has announced.
The “pupils passport” will be rolled out across England and Wales rather than just inner city areas as originally planned.
And so on. Basically it is education vouchers, but not called that.
There is even a good soundbite on offer:
“Under the Conservatives you’ll be able to go to the right school even if your family lives in the wrong street.”
Nice one. I was going to put this posting on my Education Blog, for obvious reasons. But thinking about it, I think the real significance of this announcement may be more what it says about the general attitude of the Conservatives.
Much as I dislike Tories because of the way they talk, dress, are, etc., this sounds very promising. Their problem for the last decade or so has been that they have simply stood up in the House of Commons and read out all the complaints everyone has had about what the government has done, is doing, or is about to do, regardless of whether the criticisms add up to a coherent alternative attitude to government. This tax increase is bad, but so is that spending cut. This attack on freedom is bad, yet this other attack on freedom is insufficiently ferocious. And their handling of the Iraq war has been a mess, I think. We aren’t sure about the war as a whole, but this … (fill in the detail of the week that they happen to be moaning about) … is terrible.
But this education announcement actually suggests a bunch of people who think that they might one day be the government. Three of four more announcements of this substantial sort, and the public might start to think of the Conservatives with a modicum of respect.
This is not what everyone would ideally like for education. That would be for everyone’s child to become a genius, with no effort, as a result of an infinitely powerful and infinitely nice Prime Minister with an infinitely nice smile waving an infinitely magic wand over each child’s head, causing all children everywhere to get ahead of all the other children everywhere else. But people are starting to get that a wish list is not necessarily a workable policy.
The Conservatives are never going to be liked. But people are starting to despise this government, for announcing rather too many wish lists – each one headed “dramatic new policy”, “radical shake-up”, etc. So even if people still quite like Tony Blair, they are starting to lose respect for him. If they ever start respecting the Conservatives more, then that will be a new phase of British politics, and a potentially Conservative phase.
Simple really. Give them a vested interest to do so, a financial interest in fact. Create vast numbers of public sector jobs funded from the disloyal private sector and then what do you have? You have 7.4 million people (plus their families) who owe their ‘jobs’ to an expanding state and whilst the Tories are hardly the party of small government, it will hardly have escaped the notice of state employed workers that the number of public sector jobs from Maggie Thatcher onwards had been falling for 15 years… and under Labour they are growing at an astonishing rate.
However the real ‘loyalty lock-in’ comes not from merely giving people a job but rather from providing them with not just a lavish pension but an unfunded one at that! This means that only tax money can redeem these pension plans in the future because, unlike a private sector pension which is backed by investments (investments the state regularly raids for their own uses), there is nothing other than a government promise to pay with other people’s money underpinning what Mr. Buggins from Whitehall intends to retire on. As this is of course economic madness, only someone with a direct vested interest would vote to perpetuate such a giant ponzi scheme.
Alas, people directly effected by something like that are far more likely to be dependable focused voters, whereas a private sector employee may well not see the direct causal link between their declining purchasing power and their public sector neighbour’s pension plan.
Labour’s strategy is multi-election political genius. And of course by the time the economy implodes, people will have either largely forgotten what caused the problem or when faced with cutting pensions in fiat money to telegenic old grannies, will find someone else to blame (Capitalists, Jews, White People, Black People, Arabs, Americans, etc. etc.).
But then as the high priest of amorality once said, in the long run we are all dead anyway.
One of the many perils associated with declining birthrates is that it makes it much easier for the social-working classes to nationalise children:
Every local authority in England will be required to appoint a director of children’s services in a bid to improve child welfare under legislation due to be unveiled by the government.
An “information hub” will be set up in 150 local authorities to record details of all the children in the area. Each child will have an electronic file – including their name, address, date of birth, school and GP – that states whether they are known to social services, education welfare, police, or youth offending teams.
Other measures expected in the bill include the creation of a children’s commissioner for England, who would protect the rights of children and young people, and statutory children’s safeguarding boards, responsible for coordinating local child protection work among social services, the NHS, the police and other agencies.
Only they don’t call it ‘nationalisation’ any more. Now they call it ‘protection’ but it amounts to same thing.
Sometimes, just occasionally mind, I actually quite miss the old-style firebrand lefties and their revolutionary rhetoric. At least they were honest and open about their ambitions and, in many ways, that made it a lot easier to tackle them head-on.
One of the very few benefits of Tony Blair being Prime Minister is that he and his supporters are hollowing out the Labour Party :
Labour was in disarray about how to deal with its “serial rebels” after splits emerged among ministers last night over high risk plans to bar dissident MPs from standing at the next election.
Miss Armstrong – furious at mass rebellions over top-up fees, foundation hospitals and curbs on asylum seekers – wanted rebels to know they could be deselected by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee unless they pledged loyalty to Tony Blair.
To watch a time-honoured institution like the British Labour Party rip itself asunder is tragic. Just tragic.
It will come as no surprise to anyone with a 100+ IQ and a modicum of knowledge about how the world works that Robert Mugabe and his murderous kleptocrats have appropriated more that £100 million (US $190 million) in aid sent to Zimbabwe by Britain and the EU.
As that was only to be expected, I cannot say it adds significantly to my loathing of the Mugabe regime. What does fill me with utter contempt is that the people responsible for this utterly predictable outcome still allowed the money to be sent in the first place.
As I have previously argued many times before about foreign aid, to send money for ostensibly humanitarian aims to a nation governed by a tyranny is to become the logistic support arm of that tyranny: insulating the regime from the economic (and hence political) consequences of its actions and thereby indirectly, but in a very real sense, making the regime more likely to survive than would otherwise be the case. That is true even if the humanitarian aid does indeed reach the people and projects it is targeted at.
This however is even worse than that. To send aid to Zimbabwe is to underwrite the tyrannical Mugabe regime directly as according to the latest report, 89% ends up in the pockets of Zimbabwe’s rulers rather than being spent on the humanitarian objectives for which it is intended. Thus not only can the people who sent the money not bask in their delusions that they have at least done good for those who benefit from the worthy projects, they might as well be buying weapons for Mugabe’s police and paramilitaries, not to mention making the bankers and shopkeepers in Zürich rather happy. They are directly supporting the tyrants with large cash injections.
As I disinclined to believe that the people in charge of the governments and agencies in question do not know full well where the money is going to end up, that makes them knowingly supporters of the regime. Which means they are supporting this:
Hilary Andersson, of the BBC’s Panorama programme, reveals how thousands of youths are being taught to rape, maim, torture and kill in Zimbabwe’s terror training camps – and now Robert Mugabe intends to make the camps compulsory for all the country’s young men and women
[…]
A former official with the Ministry of Youth, Gender and Employment Creation that oversees the camps, explained the government’s thinking. “You are moulding somebody to listen to you, so if it means rapes have to take place in order for that person to take instructions from you, then it’s OK,” he said. He was so horrified that he left his job with the ministry in disgust. Rape is just one of the ways camp commanders are able to turn their charges into unquestioning automata. The training methods vary from camp to camp, but the pattern is consistent.
If all that was happening was that the Guardian reading classes were getting a warm fuzzy glow because they were supporting British tax money going to ‘help stamp out poverty in the third world’, then that would be bad enough, given the reality of what this distorting flow of cash really does. But as Zimbabwe slowly morphs into an inept ‘North Korea Lite’, the platitudes and wilful ignorance of some are now directly funding truly monstrous horrors and misery because they are too damn lazy to think the whole issue through.
Of course if our political masters did not know this was going to happen when they decided to send huge chunks cash to a place like Zimbabwe, then they are naive to the point of idiocy and have no business being in charge of vast amounts of other people’s money to begin with.
So which is it?
There are several things which annoy the hell out of me regarding the ongoing ruckus over whether or not the British intelligence services have been spying on Kofi Annan and the UN generally, as alleged by Claire Short.
Firstly, the UN is nothing less than a logistics agency for tyrants around the world, insulating them from the economic consequences of their policies and ostensibly giving them equal standing with liberal human rights respecting regimes. Thus the notion that this institution’s leader, Kofi Annan, is some sainted figure beyond reproach (and beyond espionage) is both bizarre and repugnant. If we are to get any value from our pilfered tax money at all, I would hope some of it is spent spying on the corrupt functionaries at the United Nations.
Secondly, whilst I will defer to our in-house lawyer David Carr as to whether Claire Short’s actions constitute treason, at the very least I can only marvel how she was not immediately charged under the Official Secrets Act and thrown in jail… but silly me, I forgot there is one rule for the political, establishment and another everyone else.
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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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