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On a long taxi ride through London this afternoon, I spotted an excellent article by Stephen Glover, of the Spectator, on the increasing government control of the UK press via its new ‘watchdog’ regulator (read: Censor). This is a splendiferous bureaucrat body bearing the relatively innocuous and seemingly inexpensive title of Ofcom:
Well worth a read. Let me supply you with a flavour:
Ofcom is the brainchild of an interfering and overbearing government. We have never been closer to state control of the press.
Hey, I could have written that, even in a really bad mood! I like it!
Say what you like about my MP, Boris Johnson, he does still occasionally knock out a magazine with the odd great article. What does surprise me about Mr Glover’s article is not the increasing control of the press from this New Labour Luvvie watchdog, but the parasitic salaries that these busy-bodies have awarded themselves. They are simply incredible:
The first thing we learnt was that the regulator had awarded more than 70 of its staff contracts worth more than £100,000 a year in pay and perks. This was significantly in excess of Ofcom’s earlier estimates. Evidently this new arm of the state will be quite a little gravy train. Lord Currie, the chairman, and, it so happens, a good friend of Gordon Brown’s, will be paid £133,000 a year for a four-day week. Stephen Carter, the regulator&’s chief executive, receives £250,000 a year.
Blimey O’Reilly!
Seventy apparatchiks on more than 100k a year, who do not actually produce anything except government censorship diktats. Incredible. Even Julius Caesar’s Romans would’ve blanched at this proto-imperial excess.
Well done Stephen Glover and Boris ‘The Blonde One’ Johnson for publicising this New Labour larceny and blatant attack on the UK free press. The Speccie will probably get their publication license revoked, as a result. But, heck. It will be worth it. Keep sticking it to them, Boris!
Dr Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific non-governmental mass murderers in recent history, has killed himself. There will be an enquiry as to why he was able to commit suicide, but to my mind the real mystery is not his death, for which few tears will be shed, but rather why he did the things he did.
Good riddance.
The reasoning is clear and simple: if you drive a car, you must have too much money for your own good. It is time that HMG relieved you of some of this burden:
Motorists convicted of speeding may have to pay compensation for victims, the government has proposed.
The plan, published on Monday, is one of several changes to the funding of victim support services.
Motorists given a prison term or suspended sentence would pay £30 to a Home Office fund providing victim and witness compensation and support.
Those fined for speeding or driving without insurance would face a levy of £5 or £10…
He said a victims fund would put more money into services such as practical support, information to victims of rape and sexual offences, road traffic accident victims and those who have been bereaved as a result of crime.
So, if you get caught speeding, you get punished for sexual offences and murders.
Not that the absurdity will matter in practice. I predict that not a single real victim of any real crime will ever see a single penny of that money ever.
When reading the Telegraph on Saturday, I came across an article tucked away somewhere on the fourth page that left me foaming at the mouth. It was about the plans expected in Labour’s next election manifesto to force taxpayers to contribute up to 30 per cent of the cost of running all political parties. I have been waiting to calm down so I can blog about it coherently, and today I noticed that the good Dr Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute has raised his voice already in a letter to the Editor of the Telegraph:
He [Lord Triesman, Labour’s ex-general secretary] says that sound policies need good research, and that is expensive. But taxpayers already pay huge amounts for policy research from our universities. And yet more is freely available from independent bodies and think-tanks.
Taxpayer funding only consolidates the status quo. It will go to the biggest existing parties. How are newcomers (and radical new ideas) to break through when the old guard is awash with funds to use against them?
I can just hear the Labour policy apparatchiks scratching their heads and saying Hmm, we haven’t thought of that, honest…
As Natalie Solent mentioned in a Samizdata.net article yesterday, Robert Kilroy-Silk is taking heavy flak for his remarks about the Arab world and has been brow beaten into a rather ignominious apology.
I was just interviewed on BBC News 24 to put my views on this affair and I pointed out that whilst I found his remarks full of nasty collectivist generalization, many of the points he made about what passes for civilization in the Arab world are simply facts… people do indeed get their limbs chopped off as punishment in Saudi Arabia, women are indeed second class citizens (if they are even citizens at all), human rights are ghastly across a great swathe of the Middle East, the last time the Muslim world was a hive of innovation was in the 12th Century etc. etc… all these things are simply facts.
Yet my point is not to defend Kilroy-Silk, of whom I am not a particular fan but rather to wonder why it is that Robert Fisk and John Pilger can make equally sweeping and egregiously collectivist statements about Israel and the United States without so much as a murmur from the Guardian reading classes?
I have been slightly ill for the last couple of days, and I still am. And one of the consequences of feeling ill is that if you are quite old, you also feel old. And one of the symptoms of advancing age is that you start to fret about how almost all the news seems to be bad. (Well, course it is bad. That is its nature.)
But today, not all. From today’s Independent:
The vast majority of people from ethnic minorities feel British even if they were not born in this country, according to a report from the National Statistics department.
Racial attacks and recent political gains by the British National Party are leading to long-established immigrants becoming increasingly determined to assert their right to be in this country, it is claimed.
The research by the department, formerly the Office of National Statistics, is the first time that ethnic minorities have been asked how they feel about their national identity, rather than about their actual origin. It revealed that both first generation immigrants and those who were British-born had a strong sense of identity with their adopted country.
It would seem that we here all have one thing to thank the BNP for, which is that by claiming loudly that all these newcomers are not British, they have provoked them into insisting that they are.
I recall attending a meeting about five years ago, it must have been, at which we all talked about ethnic issues – issues meaning when people with different coloured skins fight with and shout at each other – and I was struck by the vehemence with which some of the least white people (both visually and sociologically, so to speak) present were most vehement about being British. Struck, and rather pleased. And it seems that my merely anecdotal research has been duplicated nationally, and has come up with the same answer. And I’m very glad.
After all, one of the nightmare futures for this country was that it would stop being one country at all, to the point where different fragments of it became identified not just with different bits of the ex-country, but with different bits of the world. Like the Balkans, in other words, where three different world religions (Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam) contend at one explosive meeting point. Was that the future my generation (the last “British” generation) had bequeathed to its descendants? Apparently not.
Of course this new Britain will be – already is – very different from the old one I grew up in, and in which my mother still lives, in the leafy suburbs of the extreme west of Surrey (the bit where Surrey, Middlesex and Berkshire meet, mostly peacefully). But since when was the deal ever that your country remained the same from one century to the next?
In many ways what this means is that Britain has become rather more like the USA, more a country of immigrants and less a country of people who can trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest (the Norman Conquest being the event that turned this country into an Anglo-French melting pot).
Many further questions remain unanswered by surveys like this. I wonder, how would the young son or grandson of a family recently arrived in Britain from India, say, have felt watching the brilliant production of Shakespeare’s Richard II that I watched last Monday evening on the television. And I wonder exactly what he would have made of the fact that the actor playing the Duke of Aumerle, one of the doomed Richard’s favourites, was played by a black (Afro-Caribbean) actor? (Maybe nothing at all.) Did that young man feel that this is his history he was watching, as well as mine? I don’t know, but I hope he did.
The Conservative Party (or as Monty Python would put it, the Silly Party) has a cunning plan to cut bureaucracy. Appoint bureaucrats to decide how much bureaucracy is really necessary!
Now why didn’t I think of that? 
This morning I was watching the news about the US requiring UK passport holders to either provide biometric information on it or stand in queues and pay money for visa for any visit to the US. Bugger. And I was looking forward to travelling to the US more regularly in the future. It did strike me as a move out of the blue and rather harsh in the light of both the Anglo-American relationship and the global trade and tourism links between the US and the UK. But, I thought, the terrorism meme has won the day and the US is going to ‘protect’ itself back to the Middle Ages.
However, as the day progressed I have learnt that the situation may not be as bad the media represent. Apparently, the news reports that talk about passengers having to have biometric passports containing fingerprint details as well as digital photographs are, quite simply incorrect. It is true that discussion has been taking place between the USA and all of the 27 countries on the visa waiver programme regarding mandating this information on the machine readable passports currently being issued and it may be that some countries will have to comply. However, at present, no such stipulation has been enforced and it is felt “unlikely” that such measures will be forced upon the UK.
For the time being nothing has changed. The position remains as originally stated by the US – all travellers from the UK had to be in possession of machine readable passports by 1st October 2003 or would require a visa. The deadline was subsequently seen as unachievable and it was extended until 26th October 2004. Advice given to corporations by their agents acting as liason to the US Embassy and the Foreign Office remains that UK travellers will have to be in possession of a machine readable passport by the 26th October in order to gain entry into the USA under the visa waiver scheme. (A machine readable passport is one with the electronic strip on the back and containing a digital photograph of the holder).
I am still confused. Despite my reservations about the BBC and other major media I find it hard to believe that they would report such a huge factual error about this matter and got ‘biometric’ confused with ‘machine readable’. I am quite anxious to know the truth not only for the impact such measures would have on my personal travel arrangements but also their implications for introduction of biometrics into documents in the UK in general. Daniel Johnson points out in the Telegraph today:
British passports are not, of course, biometric; nor, for that matter, are American ones. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the Government will be speeding up their introduction – as a form of ID card – before you can say “David Blunkett”.
The Telegraph also has doomsday reports about his issue. Can anyone tell us what’s really going on?
In the pre-Christmas rush I have missed an email from someone at Ofwatch, who describe themselves as promoting the interests of adult subscription service viewers in the UK.
The BBFC (the British Board of Film Classification) are conducting a survey asking people if they agree with the way sex and violence are currently classified at all levels including R18. The last time they did this they were forced to relax the censorship of 18 classification film a little as most people were in favour of more choice for adults.
The survey opens up in a popup window the first time you visit www.bbfc.org.uk (and only the first time unless you clear your cookies). It is a simple multiple-choice form that doesn’t take long to fill in and can be completed online or even better, printed and posted (printed responses may carry more weight).
If you can spare a few minutes it is well worth completing it. I can guarantee that the likes of Mediawatch will be asking all their moaners to fill it in, so we desperately need a few open minded people to help balance things out and prevent the corrosive influence of the rightwing fundamentalist Christian groups who are opposed to just about everything and anything with an 18 certificate (or even a 15 certificate in many cases).
Apologies and hope that those interested in such matters still have a chance to participate in the survey.
After asking this question a while ago, I think I now have the answer as to the point of socialism. For despite Britain’s crumbling police system, where seemingly every day unprotected bystanders are punched, knifed, and shot, by lowlife scum, in a pursuit to spend grubby stolen fivers on narcotics, the purpose of socialism has become clear. For where lumpen prole John Prescott could be fighting in the British Cabinet for innocent individuals to have the right to defend themselves, a right he personally cherishes, he’s pursuing far more worthy aims instead, ones really worth getting out of bed for, in one of those four houses he currently occupies.
For have you ever burned yourself or your children, in the bathroom, with red hot scalding water? Have you ever then thought immediately afterwards that I wish the state would intervene here, because I’m obviously far too stupid to either look after myself or my children? If you have had these thoughts, then help is now at hand. For Captain John Prescott, Champion of Children, is going to step in and rescue you. He’s going to make it compulsory for all new installed hot taps, in British bathrooms up and down the land, to have heat regulators fitted to them, to prevent you pitiful serfs from hurting yourselves and depriving the state of its rightful income taxes if you take a day off work to recover.
You’ll have to pay extra for these tap fittings, of course, skewing the economy, but generating extra sales tax income for HMG. And naturally the state will need extra bureaucratic regulators to regulate all of these compulsory thermostatic regulators. No News Corporation link, I’m afraid, but here’s what I read in ‘The Sun’ Newspaper, this lunchtime, over my black pudding, sausage, bacon, and eggs (which came to you today, from the excellent ‘Piggies’, on St James Road, in Surbiton, Surrey):
JOHN Prescott has landed himself in hot water — over trying to control our hot water. The Deputy Prime Minister says taps in new and refurbished homes must have a thermostatic control to stop people scalding themselves. But Prescott has been accused of Big Brother tactics. Tory housing supremo David Curry said: “This regulation-obsessed Government is now trying to regulate the elements.”
And so the ratchet tightens another click.
There’s been lots of talk here in the UK, over the past few days, about the core beliefs of the Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard. This fragrant Man of Wales published these core beliefs in the Times Newspaper, last week, basing them heavily upon the spirit of the American Constitution.
About a year ago, I would have signed up to them. But since then many good men and women have directed my thinking towards an entirely different direction. So I wondered this evening, after trying to avoid the issue for several days, if I could still support the Tory party, especially after their former Chairman, Norman Tebbit, recently declared on the BBC that he greatly admired public service broadcasting.
So, right up to the minute here on Samizdata.net, what would your beliefs be? Here are Michael’s: → Continue reading: A Welshman protests
Tony Martin was clearly a trailblazer:
A proposal to allow homeowners to use “any means” to defend their homes, has topped a BBC poll on the bill people would most like to see become law.
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme asked listeners to vote on suggested Private Members’ Bills, with the first choice taking 37% of the votes.
Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, whose fatal shooting of a burglar in 1999 sparked a national debate, welcomed the result.
As well he might. For him this is a vindication. For others, though, this is an embarrassment, not least of all for the Conservative MP who was supposed to be Tony Martin’s champion:
Tony Martin’s MP, Conservative Henry Bellingham said the idea went too far by suggesting homeowners should use “any means” to protect their property.
For politicians this potato is just too hot to touch. The mere mention of rights to self-defence is enough to have them scampering away whelping like whipped curs. Nor do I expect that this synthetic exercise is going to make so much as a dent in the established view that defending oneself from barbarity is morally more reprehensible than the barbarity itself:
More than 26,000 votes were registered by listeners taking part in the poll and the winning bill will now be presented to the House of Commons by Stephen Pound MP.
He will need to persuade the 20 MPs who have been chosen to put forward Private Members Bills to take up the poll winner’s suggestion.
He will have more chance trying to persuade Osama Bin Laden to book his daughters in for pole-dancing lessons. Me being cynical? No, not at all. Just hear what the same Stephen Pound has to say about the whole thing in the Guardian:
Stephen Pound, Labour MP for Ealing North, who was one of the programme’s judges, expressed surprise at the high vote for such a controversial plan among listeners to such a programme.
“My enthusiasm for direct democracy is slightly dampened,” the MP told Today. “This is a difficult result. I can’t remember who it was who said ‘The people have spoken – the bastards’.”
Hmm, colour me skeptical but I have a hunch that his heart is not really going to be behind this campaign. These people are always agitating for ‘more democracy’ until it jumps up and slaps them in the face. Democracy is only supposed to be for the compliant: no ‘bastards’ allowed.
Mr Pound, however, is one of the more sanguine respondents. Elsewhere there is enough sqwauking and clucking to drown out a poultry market. The Guardian is already denouncing the result as a fix:
The BBC was warned yesterday that it may have fallen victim to a mass lobbying campaign after a controversial plan for a “Tony Martin” law topped a Today programme poll yesterday.
Suspicions were raised when thousands of listeners voted for the mock parliamentary bill which would allow homeowners to use “any means” to defend their homes from intruders. Such a law would have protected Mr Martin, who was jailed for the manslaughter of a teenage burglar, Fred Barras, in 1999.
And from the BBC article, linked above, a dire warning of what such mad and irresponsible ideas would lead to:
But leading criminal barrister John Cooper warned that the idea was dangerously flawed.
He said: “The law as it stands at the moment, despite its critics, is functioning. If you are in your house and you are attacked by someone or threatened by someone, you can use proportionate force.
“We do not live in the wild west. This legislation that is proposed effectively may well turn us into that.”
Thus proving that it is possible to be wrong on more than one level. For a start the ‘wild west’ was nowhere near as wild as legend would have it. But I’m quibbling here because I sort of know what he is driving at. He thinks RKBA and a right to self-defence would result in a desolate landscape riven with feuds, lynchings and random acts of carnage. He is still wrong though because that is exactly the type of scenario we are heading for now. The virtually unprotected citizen is easy meat for predatory.
Having assumed a monopoly of the crime-control business, the British state has found it cannot actually do that job and, increasingly, is disinclined to even try. The only thing they can maintain is the pretence by landing like a ton of bricks on any citizen who dares to be more than a docile farm-animal.
The result of the BBC poll gives lie to the whole facade. People are losing faith in the ability (and even willingness) of the state to come to their aid in time of crisis. As the police spend more of their time collecting taxes and scoring brownie points with their political masters, this disquiet will only grow.
[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
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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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