…“some stories stand out. The one that confuses me is the call for Britain to trial some form of ‘universal basic income.’ What exactly do people think we’ve been doing for the past two years?”
– Sam Ashworth Hayes, in the Daily Telegraph (£).
|
|||||
|
August 24th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.” To the Guardian’s Steven Morris, responding to a government consultation is another of those famous irregular verbs that changes its form according to who does it.
“Powerful UK gun lobby” my breech. It has lost every legislative battle in my lifetime.
Making it easy for members of the public to respond to a Green Paper or other public consultation exercise is usually just the sort of thing the Guardian supports. The whole point of such things is that anyone with an interest in the subject is encouraged to give their view, and all advocacy groups consider it a core part of their function to tell their members that such consultations are taking place and to advise them what to say. Would anyone really prefer that a democratic country went ahead with a proposed new law without seeking input from all viewpoints? The answer to that is yes, some would prefer exactly that. Among them is Peter Squires, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton. He says,
The consultation could turn out to be farcical in one of several ways. But if you want to give it a go, here is the link again. The deadline is tomorrow, 23rd August 2023. August 22nd, 2023 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“What strikes you when reading about any number of NHS scandals since then isn’t so much the systemic failures, it’s the instances of individual cruelty to patients. Bereaved parents repeatedly told the Ockenden report about a lack of compassion from staff and some even said they were told they were responsible for their own child’s death. All of this amounts to a sense that the health services continually privileges the institution over the needs of patients at the most vulnerable times of their lives. When you consider how utterly inhumane that is, it becomes easier to understand how the NHS could contain a monster like Letby.” (See here for details on the Ockenden saga.) – Alys Denby, Editor, CapX, in a weekly letter to subscribers of that platform. Denby writes about Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted last week of murdering a number of babies in a NHS hospital. Monsters can flourish in certain institutions, and it strikes me that those that are treated as near-sacred institutions provide cover for them. The NHS needs to be nuked from high orbit for various reasons, and these scandals surely add to the list. August 20th, 2023 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The crux of the objection was that I considered the actions of West Yorkshire Police to be akin to an organised crime gang engaged in a kidnap. It’s a strong allegation, which demands some justification, so here goes. Kidnap is a common law offence, made up of four distinct elements. The taking of one person by another… with force….without their consent… and without lawful excuse. The screams of the girl attest to the fulfilment of the first three elements, but what of the fourth? Did the police have a lawful excuse to behave as they did? Here’s the technical bit: Section 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 cannot be committed where the suspect (in this case, the girl), and the victim (the officer) are both in the same private dwelling. The clue is in the name. It is the Public Order Act, designed to address alarm, harassment and distress carried out in a public place. For the arrest to have been lawful, the police would need to demonstrate a mistake as to fact. In other words, that they genuinely mistook the hallway and cupboard beneath the stairs in which the girl was hiding for, say, the town hall steps or other public place. Ignorance as to law is not a valid defence. Ever. What the police did was the equivalent of pulling over a car on the verge of breaking the speed limit and arresting the driver for burglary. August 16th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
West Yorkshire Police must now justify the officers’ actions in terms of lawful arrest and proportional force. Failure to do so would significantly undermine public trust, especially among people with autism and other disabilities. Unless there is far more to this story than meets the eye, if they cannot justify their actions, at the very least some Plod need to lose their jobs and ideally face prosecution. August 11th, 2023 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is. I have watched it and it is very good. Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money. My only quibble is that it repeatedly refers to banks creating money out of thin air, but there is some substance to ‘thin air’, which, after all, can sustain respiration and hold up aircraft. August 5th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A FEW months ago I wrote here about how William Hague had become a Davos poster boy. I explained how influence and groupthink could turn a libertarian Thatcherite into a globalist, authoritarian technocrat. Shortly afterwards, Hague completed one of the most astonishing U-turns in politics. In a dangerous step towards a Chinese-style social credit system, he joined Tony Blair to help him force ID cards on the public. How people change. In 2004 he voted against Blair’s Identity Card Bill. He voted against it again in 2005. In fact when he was in opposition in 1998, this is what he thought he believed:
However, by 2013, Hague was rejecting claims that the government were spying on the public. The fatal words were ‘law-abiding’ citizens have ‘nothing to fear’. The perennial defence of the dictator. When politicians ask why no one trusts them any more, you can reply in two words: William Hague. At least Blair has been consistent. Read the whole thing. Strongly recommended. August 3rd, 2023 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anyone who gloated about the “de-banking” of Nigel Farage over his account will now realise, or they should have anyway, that the sword is double-edged:
It is too easy to roll the eyes, and say “karma is a bitch”. What appears to be the case is that, as discussed in my post here, and in the comments, we just don’t have a fully free market banking system in the UK and much of the world today. The next time you read some idiot going on about “unbridled capitalism” or “neoliberalism”, point this out to them. July 28th, 2023 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader. I wrote in reply to this issue about “rights” to banking, because I think it is too easy to just throw down the ideologist purist card on the table and assume that ends the matter. No so fast, Batman: In a world of laissez faire capitalism, absent the distortions of bailouts, the central bank drug of easy credit, endless compliance regulations and so on, barriers to entry to create banks are far lower and there would be hundreds more banks. They’d be relatively small in some cases, and be fiercely competitive. With some operating not with full statutory limited liability protection (but only under the Common Law), people running these banks would be a lot less careless and more focused on building value. There’d also be fewer hiding places for a culture war phenomena to flourish in. Instead, banks would be about capitalism, period. It is notable, however, that many of these desirable features don’t exist in the Western banking system today, although a few “challenger” banks and digital offerings are quite good, and may win business as a result of a backlash against some of the things going on. But in general, banking in the UK, and US, is intertwined with the State. Many firms have been rescued with billions of pounds, dollars and euros of taxpayers’ money. To open an account, you have to go through an increasingly severe KYC [know your client] and anti-money laundering regime, and banks that fail to comply can be fined and in extremis, lose their licences. Fines worth tens of billions have been imposed on banks over the past 20 years, for example. Ideally, any commercial entity ought to be able to refuse to do business with people, however rational or irrational that decision should be, and we should let the brute force of free enterprise weed out bigots. Bigotry and stupidity are costs. That’s actually what tends to happen over time. A problem is that in a mixed economy, some of those competitive forces are attenuated. When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating. In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.” And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all. July 21st, 2023 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have a dilemma. I want to write a post about how creepy it is to take a photo of a stranger and put it on social media with a deniably mocking comment. The easiest way to illustrate this would be to post the tweet that caused me to write the post. But if I do that, I am guilty of the same behaviour. Then again, to have any hope of turning public opinion against this trend, people like me who object to it have to demonstrate that it actually happens. I will compromise by linking to this tweet but not in a way that makes a picture of it show up on the page. The tweet’s already viral; any extra clicks I send its way will make little difference. The tweet says,
The accompanying photo taken from a few feet away shows a unremarkable-looking old man. Like it says, he is sitting on a train, minding his own business and reading a Wetherspoons menu. The picture itself doesn’t make him look stupid or anything. The thing that makes me begin to dislike Joe Shabadu, whoever they are, is that caption about the old guy reading the menu for fifteen minutes. It being a Wetherspoons menu is relevant. For the benefit of readers overseas, Wetherspoons is a chain of pubs operating in the UK and Ireland. As Wikipedia says, “Wetherspoon targets a mass-market offering of low-price food and drink.” Though I have always found them to be pretty good for the price, your local “Spoons” is not where the cognoscenti go. Some people boycott Wetherspoons because the chain’s founder, Tim Martin, was loud in his support for Brexit. So we have it pointed out to the world that this old chap was reading a pub menu for fifteen minutes, and the pub concerned was one associated with the proletariat. I think the tweet was meant to make us laugh at the old man for being a bad reader, or for going to Wetherspoons, or both. The person who wrote the tweet tries to claim otherwise, but I was not convinced. The general tone of the replies was heartening. A typical one was, “Let the man be. Why take a photo and post it? Doing no harm.” Another said, “Maybe he struggles to read and doesn’t want to be embarrassed when he gets there? Shame on you.” Other replies were more light-hearted. Someone speculated that he could be one of those “mystery shoppers” paid to sample the pub’s fare anonymously before reporting back to the management. I related to this one: “You’re acting like you don’t read shampoo instructions when you run out of battery on the toilet.” When I used to commute on the Victoria Line I always had a book or a newspaper with me. Mostly this was because I find it hard to go an hour without reading. Partly it was so that I could escape in spirit when a stranger’s gaze rested on me for too long. July 20th, 2023 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not even Jeremy Corbyn, the most odious public figure in Britain since Oswald Mosley, should be de-banked due to political views. Banking is a highly regulated state protected cartel, they should no more be allowed to do this than to de-bank people for being Jews or Black. If what was done to Farage (and even people simply related to him) is allowed to stand, that’s it, we are now in China territory, an actual full-blown tyranny. July 20th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Relatives of Nigel Farage have also been refused bank accounts, former Ukip leader reveals”, reports Gordon Rayner at the Telegraph.
None of this would be a problem if there were anything like a free market in banks. Given the public anger on this issue, it would be a great opportunity for a proudly non-woke new bank to establish itself. Unfortunately, as Johnathan Pearce pointed out in this post, “And we wonder why normal people avoid going into front-line politics”, there is nothing like a free market in banks. Update: If you want to read the 40-page dossier that Coutts compiled on Farage that he obtained via a Subject Access Request, Guido Fawkes has it up on his site without a paywall: READ IN FULL: THE 40-PAGE COUTTS DOSSIER DEFENDING DE-BANKING “RACIST” FARAGE Another update: Nigel Farage receives apology from Coutts after bank account row. That report from Sky News does not impress. It says, ‘Mr Farage claimed to have a 40-page document that proved Coutts “exited” him because he was regarded as “xenophobic and racist” and a former “fascist”‘ as if there were some doubt as to the document’s existence. Then it says, ‘the chief executive of the Natwest Group, Alison Rose, has apologised for “deeply inappropriate comments” made about him in documents prepared for the company’s wealth committee’, seemingly unaware that the documents prepared for the company’s wealth committee formed part of the same aforementioned 40-page dossier. When NatWest’s own chief executive has acknowledged that the document is genuine, you would think that Sky News could accept it too. July 19th, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||