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It is now 2004 and may I take this opportunity of wishing all Samizdata readers a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
As for me, I have resolved that I will be in the same bad mood this year that I was in last year. It makes perfect sense. My enemies don’t change their ways, so why should I change mine?
It is time to stand up for the “nanny state” – for Jowell and Hodge and, in other areas, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. And also, in general, for the state’s right and duty to involve itself in questions of diet, health, family budgets and good parenting.
So it turns out that all the leftie carping about ‘big food’ in 2003 wasn’t a joke after all. They really mean it. I predict, before the end of 2004, a ‘burger tax’.
The crucial point which critics of the nanny state fail to mention is that individuals and families don’t stand alone. None of us lives in a neutral social space, unharassed, and free to make wise long-term choices. Whatever the philosophical ideal, in the real world we are bombarded by corporate messages cajoling us and our children to consume and borrow. We are inhabitants of the more, now, spend-it, eat-it society, which – let us not forget – boosts the profits of the multinationals.
We are also inhabitants of ban it, tax it, regulate it society which – let us not forget – boosts the profits of the political classes.
Health-hectoring is now being added to enviromentalism and ‘anti-racism’ as a legitimating ideology of the ruling class. Another self-sustaining justification for their power, wealth and status. Nothing new about that of course, only now they are prepared to put the whole process on public display before nailing it into place.
This just in:
A boss who gives each of his staff a turkey every Christmas had the shock of his life when the Inland Revenue hit him with a £6,000 tax bill.
Turkeys are “benefits in kind” apparently, which they are now getting very hot on. Another of those stealth taxes, in other words.
This time there was a happy ending, because he complained and they changed their minds. Christmas turkeys are trivial, they said, perhaps after thinking about the publicity angle.
Good luck next year mate, and a Merry Christmas to all our readers.
Ok, socialists, answer me this! What exactly is the point of your stupid idiot religion? I thought it was all about stealing money off the rich to give to the poor, you know, the old Robbing Hood theme. That’s why I used to support it.
But under ‘New’ Labour, it seems the spirit of the that filthy old capitalist miser, Scrooge, is alive and well and inhabiting the numskull mind of Dawn Primarolo, that overpaid chauffeur-driven socialist bigwig, who never misses a five-star cooked meal, or a round of Christmas drinks, down in the oak-panelled warmth of Her Majesty’s Treasury.
Just in time for Christmas, it seems Red Dawn is going to claw back some welfare benefits from the poorest in society, in order to get Gordon’s borrowing down a bit, so he can continue subsidising wealthy Guardian Readers with tax credits, to fund their post-Christmas skiing holidays in France.
Not quite why I was prepared to man the barricades with a copy of ‘Militant’ and a pair of unnecessary NHS spectacles to make me look more credible.
You socialists, and anyone else who votes for ‘New’ Labour, ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You and your party are beyond the pale, ‘stealing’ off the very poorest in society, particularly at this time of year. Shame on you. All of you. You disgust me.
That it demonstrates the total corrupt hypocrisy of welfare state socialism is of course obvious, perhaps even to those of you wearing pink-tinted NHS spectacles. But how can you continue living with yourselves and supporting these sleek self-pampered crooks in the New Labour executive when you hear news like this? Or maybe you’d prefer to bury your heads in the sand when hearing news like this? I know I would if I was still with you. I succeeded in this cowardly behaviour for years, much as you’re probably doing right now.
Consider this, though. Maybe this kind of rank hypocrisy is inevitable because socialism doesn’t work. I know, it’s a real mind-bender isn’t it? Maybe it’s even time you woke up and came over to join us on the light side? Consider it as a New Year’s resolution.
You’re all welcome, anytime, by the way. You just have to drop hypocrisy off at the door.
I don’t believe in ghosts but even I have to confess that this qualifies as spooky:
Closed-circuit security cameras at Hampton Court Palace, the huge Tudor castle outside London, seem to have snagged an ethereal visitor. Could it be a ghost?
“We’re baffled too — it’s not a joke, we haven’t manufactured it,” said Vikki Wood, a Hampton Court spokeswoman, when asked if the photo the palace released was a Christmas hoax. “We genuinely don’t know who it is or what it is.”
In the still photograph, the figure of a man in a robe-like garment is shown stepping from the shadowy doorway, one arm reaching out for the door handle.
The area around the man is somewhat blurred, and his face appears unnaturally white compared with his outstretched hand.
“It was incredibly spooky because the face just didn’t look human,” said James Faukes, one of the palace security guards.
“My first reaction was that someone was having a laugh, so I asked my colleagues to take a look. We spoke to our costumed guides, but they don’t own a costume like that worn by the figure. It is actually quite unnerving,” Faukes said.
Follow the link and have a good look at the photograph. At first site, I will admit that the image is quite unsettling. However, it is not a ghost. Even if one accepts that human beings can survive physical death and then flit between this world and the next in ethereal form, how, exactly, do they manage to do so while remaining fully dressed? It would take quite a lot of convincing to persuade me that garments possess an eternal soul.
So perhaps this is an elaborate fake? Or some trick of the light? If it is the work of pranksters they deserve some credit for conjuring up such an admirably creepy illusion.
The Soham murder trial is finally over and Ian Huntley is on his well deserved way to a life behind bars. Should he somehow manage a reincarnation, he will still have a second life sentence left to serve.
What I found most interesting in the news tonight was the telephone poll taken by Channel Five. 94% of the respondents believe there should be a death penalty for those who kill children. If the murders of those two lovely young children had happened in the US, such a public opinion would not seem surprising. But for the UK? My jaw may require wiring.
Now… how many children was it Saddam murdered?
It is not enough for some bureaucrats just to loaf about, coming in late, going home early, taking long lunches, and generally living the life of medieval lords and ladies. No, a few of them actually try to find work to do, usually to please their political masters, to make it look as if politicians and civil servants are in some way useful. So, in a bid to justify their taxpayer-funded index-linked pensions, the boys and girls in Britain’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have decided to launch an investigation into an alleged price-fixing scam amongst Britain’s three largest cigarette companies. Is there any evidence? If there is, it’s probably been written on the back of a fag packet, after some boozy Friday in Whitehall.
Did somebody forget to tell the OFT that of every £4 pounds spent on cigarettes, in the UK, £3 pounds and twenty pence goes to big fat Gordon, in the Treasury, to waste on Cabinet Office taxi fares, in the biggest monopolistic price-fixing scam of all? So the cigarette companies, those unacceptable faces of capitalism, whose golden goose profits prop up Her Majesty’s Government with billions in tax every year, are apparently manufacturing the cigarettes, getting them to the consumer, providing the retailers with a decent handling fee, and still conniving with the few pennies left to ‘rip off’ the consumer? No doubt they are also threatening rival cigarette manufacturers with menaces, if they try to ‘butt’ into their market. Maybe they have hired a few ex-Inland Revenue bottom inspectors, for the task?
However, have I got news for you, oh wondrous denizens of the OFT. Do not dig too hard and kill your golden goose. If you do, it might become a bit too obvious why it is we do live in ‘rip off’ Britain. The people ripping everyone else off are the government, and all of its agents, including the over-salaried nose-pokers in the OFT. Take another flexi-day off, for pity’s sake. Just let the rest of us get on with our lives.
Some cynical commenter I cannot remember who or where said that this weekend our naughty Labour government would choose now to bury some bad news which it would like out there but ignored. Sunday is a bad day for such trickery, but maybe there was something along these lines today.
However, my inclination is to suspect that the real Story That Just Got Buried, at any rate in Britain (Instapundit was all over it from the start, just before the Saddam Captured story broke, i.e just after he was actually captured), so far, is this, in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. Okay, not buried exactly. The Sunday Telegraph is not buried. Shall we say: temporarily drowned out, by which I mean ignored, for the time being, by the British electronic media.
Anyway, buried or not, it is a huge story, if true:
A document discovered by Iraq’s interim government details a meeting between the man behind the September 11 attacks and Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, at his Baghdad training camp. Con Coughlin reports.
For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.
So, ergo, it cannot be true. Right? Too good.
But what if it is true? I know, politicians – Tony Blair even – telling the truth, whatever next? But suppose, just suppose, that the Powers That Be have known all along and for absolute sure that Saddam and Al Qaeda were totally in bed with each other, but that they could not reveal how they knew because had they revealed their evidence that would have jeopardised, you know, ongoing operations, i.e. their source(s) close to Saddam? But could it be that this has now changed, what with SH now being safely in the bag? That makes the most sense of everything to me, not least the curious behaviour of our Prime Minister, apparently so willing to hang himself out to dry over this war, but actually sucking his critics into what a spin doctoral friend of mine calls a “killing ground”? “I told you to trust me. You should have.” I can hear it now.
I do not have time to comment at any more length as I am now off to an impromptu Samizdata social, but Melanie Phillips, to whom my thanks for reminding me that I had read this story yesterday and like her been very struck by it, does comment some more. So go read her.
Written in a rush. So apologies for misprints and/or contorted prose, which I reserve the right to clean up later.
“Good evening, this is the news from the BBC, 25th December 2010. Several arrests were made today after a dawn raid on an illegal Christmas celebration in Hertfordshire. Acting on a tip-off, armed officers swooped on the residential premises where they found a secret grotto, a fully-decorated Christmas Tree and up to two dozen suspects unwrapping gifts and singing carols. The police also recovered large quantities of contraband including a plate of mince pies, a string of fairy lights, a whole stuffed turkey and a sackful of toys.
The raid came as a part of ‘Operation Tolerance’ which is designed to curb the alarming spread of Christmas-crimes in the community.”
That’s a joke, right? Ridiculous? Alarmist? Wildly over-the-top? Gross exaggeration? Undue pessimism? Perhaps.
A church has been told that it cannot publicise its Christmas services on a community notice board to avoid offending other religions.
The Church of England may be the established faith of the United Kingdom. But Buckinghamshire county council regards it as a “religious preference group” and the ban was upheld yesterday.
A spokesman for the Tory-controlled council confirmed the distinction, explaining that because the service contained Christian prayers it was against policy.
Margaret Dewar, who is responsible for the council libraries, said: “The aim of the policy is to be inclusive and to respect the religious diversity of Buckinghamshire.”
Peter Mussett, the council’s community development librarian, said his member of staff was right not to display the poster.
“We have a multi-faith community and passions can be inflamed by religious issues,” he said. “We don’t want to cause offence to anyone.”
Well, they managed to offend me.
I disagree almost completely with George Monbiot’s political ideas, but I share his curiosity about the Revolutionary Communist Party, that’s Living Marxism, no: LM (as LM for Living Marxism as in L for nothing M for nothing), no Spiked, that is to say Institute of Ideas. Who are these people?
Here is the Monbiot version, from last Tuesday’s Guardian:
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers “about complex scientific issues”.
In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation’s journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.
All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.
I am in favour of good science, progressive technology, and I’m pretty sure I like genetic engineering insofar as I understand it. Above all, I’m in favour of what Monbiot calls “individuation”, and despise the idea that this makes me or anyone else who believes in it “far right”, i.e. (the old smear) in league with Nazis (who flatly opposed “individuation”). And “confident individualism” sounds great, and I believe that it is restrained by the confident individualism of other individuals. I’m against gun control, and against banning tobacco advertising.
So, does all that make Spiked/Institute of Ideas good guys? Apparently. → Continue reading: Revolutionary Communist Party as in Living Marxism as in LM as in Spiked and Institute of Ideas – I agree with George Monbiot: who are these people?
It annoys the hell out of me when I hear the chattering classes in Britain describe this country’s decrepit socialist National Health System as ‘the envy of the world’… and it astounds me when idiots in the USA think it should be emulated over there.
As someone who has all too much first hand contact with the NHS, as well as having been at the tender mercy of other nation’s healthcare systems when I have broken bones, crashed cars, got shot, fallen through a weak floor, head-butted a flying bottle, been bitten by snakes/dogs/rats/, skied into trees, caught exotic unpronounceable tropical diseases and all the other things that happen to folks such as myself who travel to far off places and foolishly venture out of the hotel… and I can assure you that the NHS is at its best nothing special compared to much of the rest of the world and at its worst, it absolutely sucks. I certainly never saw a dirty ward in a hospital in Croatia or Ghana or the USA like those I have seen in Britain’s state run hospitals.
In reality, not only does the NHS provide indifferent care (an appointment I needed once took 11 months to arrange), it does so at vast cost and in reality a large chunk of the burden of healthcare is done privately. In fact, the NHS could not survive without a large healthcare private sector, the size of which Eamonn Butler points out over on the Adam Smith Institute’s own blog.
When my grandfather was gravely injured a few years ago, the treatment he received from the NHS was adequate – but after it became apparent that he was not able to look after himself any more due to brain damage, my family ended up shelling out well over £40,000 ($70,000) per year to keep him in a private nursing home which did not smell of piss. I am not complaining, after all what the hell is money for if not for something like that? However the role played by the non-state sector is a largely unsung one and I wish more people in Britain realised that the fact the state does not provide a healthcare service does not mean one will not be provided. If the state did not take such a whack of tax money to fund the monstrosity that is the NHS, far more people would have healthcare insurance.
Of course that might not end up costing much less than the existing system but the evidence outside Britain suggests it would certainly produce a higher quality system than the one of de facto healthcare rationing in use in the UK now.
It seems Arthur Laffer’s famous curve is finally starting to bite into Gordon Brown’s economic plans, you know, the ones based on hope, pie in the sky, and getting one solitary day past the next general election date. Apparently Gordon is puzzled by Britain’s steady economic growth, of approximately 2%, but its fall in tax revenues, last year, of around £8 billion pounds.
Well, Gordon, it’s like this. If you borrow £37 billion pounds, plus a few other hidden tens of billions on public-private ‘partnerships’, you’ll get apparent economic growth, because all of the paperclip suppliers in the country have been working flat out to feed all of those nice new shiny government bureaucrats with nice new shiny stationery equipment. But one day all of those paperclips are going to have to be paid for, Gordon. I know, it’s just terrible, isn’t it?
And having hit the wealth-generating sector of the economy with a cornucopia of new taxes and regulations, since 1997, Gordon, the latest being an extension of IR35, and then having thrown the proceeds at your friends in the wealth-spending sector of the economy, you’re about to hit what we credit-card junkies call ‘economic reality’. That’s when the credit card company finally stops letting you borrow any more money from this month to pay off next month’s minimum card payment. Bummer.
If I were you, Gordon, I would get that Tony Blair out of office, right now, or at the end of January at the very least, to take his job. Then land poor old Alistair Darling in at the Treasury, so he can carry the can when it all goes bang. Does that sound like a plan, Gordon? Good. Glad we’ve got it sorted.
I’d send you a bill for fifty quid, for this consultancy advice. However, I sense that although you possess the economics of a half-wit, possessing political cunning to your fingertips you’ll already have the Tony Blair Hutton/Top-up fees assassination plan well in hand. Nice job on preparing his ejector seat excuse, by the way, “for reasons of my health”. Top quality.
The Conservatives have at long last committed themselves to a tax-cutting agenda:
The Conservatives plan to offer tax cuts at the next general election in a shift aimed at highlighting the divide between their policies and the tax increases introduced by Labour.
So is that settled then?
Oliver Letwin issued a statement clarifying the party’s position after earlier appearing to slam the door on a manifesto commitment to reduce the tax burden.
In an interview with the Telegraph yesterday, he surprised senior colleagues by declaring: “We will not go to the polls at the next election saying that we will reduce the tax bill.”
Er… so it’s not settled.
A spokesman for Mr Letwin said: “The Tory party has always and will always be a low tax party.
So they are going to cut taxes?
“We will not make any irresponsible promises or do anything which that put the public services or Britain’s finances at risk.”
Or, they’re not.
So that’s clear then. Or not. They want low taxes. Or they don’t. Or they do. In principle. If nobody minds too much. They have made a commitment. Or not. Well, a bit of a commitment. A qualified promise. More of an aspiration really. An idle thought. Just a suggestion. They are going to run it up the flagpole and see if the cat licks it up. But not yet. Soon. Maybe. Possibly not though. Let’s not be too hasty. The Conservatives are muddled. Well, a bit muddled. Not coherent at all. But they expect to be. Sometime. Cannot promise when. Er, what was the question? Can’t we change the subject? Good grief, is that the time? They have just remembered..er, a very important appointment. Must dash.
[My thanks to Melanie Phillips for the links.]
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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