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Back in November 2003, I predicted that the end result of the anti-junk-food campaign would be ‘sin taxes’:
Then on to Step 5: the levying of ‘sin taxes’ on hamburgers to ‘encourage a change of behaviour’. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.
I hope I will be forgiven for this brief episode of smugness because, not only has my prediction come to pass, but it has come to pass rather more rapidly than even I had anticipated:
A Downing Street-based policy unit has proposed a plan to place a “fat tax” on junk food in an attempt to tackle the rising incidence of heart disease.
According to The Times, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit raised the prospect of extra duty or VAT being imposed on some of the nation’s favourite foods after heart disease overtook cancer as Britain’s biggest killer, and more young people started developing diabetes.
That is what it was really all about. All the media-hype, all the hand-wringing, all the brow-furrowing and all the phoney ‘caring’. It was all an elaborate ploy by the public sector classes to get their hands on more of your hard-earned. It really is all about revenue.
I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.
The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, held a press conference today outside No.10 in response to the nationwide strike by civil servants.
Mr. Blair informed the assembled members of the press that the Government had decided to respond to the threat of industrial unrest among public servants by arranging for the entire British state sector to be outsourced to India.
Stunned journalists pressed Mr. Blair for an explanation for this radical and controversial move. Mr. Blair said:
We have considered the matter carefully and we have consulted with various experts in the field. The conclusion we have come to is that it is simply too expensive to go on governing Britain from Britain.
The news was greeted with a mixture of boos and cheers but the Prime Minister continued undaunted:
It is the only logical solution. Young, well-educated Indians are quite capable of running the British state at a fraction of the current cost. We have taken steps to ensure that there will be no reduction in either the quality or quantity of public services while saving the taxpayers money.
Though confronted with some angry questions about the fate of the NHS, Mr. Blair declined to comment further:
Look, I’d love to help you but the simple fact is that the NHS is no longer my responsbility. If you have any questions about the continued provision of public sector health care in the UK then I suggest you telephone 08700 4568000 and speak to Jasvinder in Bombay.
Mr. Blair then ended the conference and, ignoring the protests, walked back into No.10.
A spokesperson for the Civil Service Trade Union, Unison, said he was “shocked and saddened” by the news and that he would be ballotting his members on further industrial action.
A 365 day per year strike of course, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.
Tens of thousands of civil servants of sundry favours are walking out in all manner of protests at plans to cut the vast throng of half a million or so people employed by the state by a paltry 80,000.
Yes, I realise those people will get paid for the time they are off the job but I wonder what might happen if folks noticed that the world did not come to an end just because chunks of the state stopped working? Perhaps people might actually get used to the idea of living without them.
More and faster, please.
So what’s the difference between socialism and conservatism? Judging by the spitting and hissing of the Labour Party’s Douglas Alexander, in conversation this morning with Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, it’s about £20 billion pounds. This is the vile slash-and-burn difference between the amount Mr Letwin says he can trim off the government’s future spending plans, and the amount the Labour Party are aiming to trim off the government’s own spending plans, at least according to a leaked internal government sponsored plan, from Sir Peter Gershon.
This trimming of £20 billion pounds is going to require immediate and severe cuts to skoolznozpitals, say Mr Alexander. Tish, says Mr Letwin, we’re simply going to grow public spending just ever so slightly slower than you are. Which as a British taxpayer, I found particularly reassuring this morning, while stuck on the M4 motorway trying to get onto the M25. → Continue reading: Dancing on the head of a pin
The sound Christopher Booker of his notebook in the Sunday Telegraph asks the age-old questions – What do we pay taxes for?
He then proceeds with a list of ‘mundane’ examples of people being charged for things done to them by government agencies such as HM Customs, the Home Office immigration department. He points out that the old principle that government is funded by taxpayers to carry out its duties seems to be breaking down in all directions. Well, it has taken him a while to notice but better late than never.
My reader concluded: “Presumably we can expect the same ‘user must pay’ principle to be applied to the cost of providing the health service, policing, prisons, libraries and state benefits.”
But the question remains, what then do we pay our taxes for? (Until the day, of course, when the Inland Revenue charges us a fee for reading our tax forms and taking our money.)
The answer is obvious – the taxes are necessary to support disabled black lesbian single mothers living in council estates…
Last year saw a further rise in anti-semitic incidents in the United Kingdom. Both Muslim fundamentalists and the far right were involved in a more assertive and targeted campaign against prominent Jewish citizens. This indicates that anti-semitism in Britain is conforming to the European pattern, established on the continent in the first years of this century, without a strong response from many governments.
Whilst disagreeing with pundits who view this phenomenon as a cultural shift towards dhimmitude and Eurabia in that Europeans recognise and accommodate the superiority of Islam, there is no doubt that the issue of Palestine and the actions of Muslim fundamentalists has provided a lodestar for more traditional anti-semites. To this can be added a countervailing bias in the media that has promoted a discourse where all terrorist casualties in Israel are unfortunate and where all Palestinian deaths are victims. This has also stimulated a Manichaean view of the conflict with goodies and baddies, a framework that its supporters consider is the defining stupidity of those they oppose. As a consequence, the view of Israel and of Judaism in general has merged, and an unsympathetic span of views with shared arguments has arisen that shades from dislike of Israel to out and out anti-semitism. → Continue reading: British Anti-Semitism
I believe I detect some tantalising signs that the Many-Headed Hydra of the British State is, at last, beginning to eat itself:
Institutional racism is a “blot upon the good name of the NHS”, a report on the death of a black patient has said.
An inquiry said the failure to give ethnic minority people proper mental health care was a “festering abscess”.
It follows the death of schizophrenic patient David Bennett in 1998, after he was restrained at a clinic in Norwich.
Retired High Court judge Sir John Blofeld, who lead the inquiry team, said the death of Mr Bennett – known to friends as Rocky – was “tragic and totally unnecessary”.
His team said it believed institutional racism was present throughout NHS mental health services.
This ‘institutional racism’ thingy has turned out to be a very useful multi-purpose weapon. Perhaps they should drop one into Iraq to help quell the insurgents.
In any event, considering the disproportionately high number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who work in the NHS, I find this accusation very hard to believe. In fact, I will go as far as saying that it is bunkum. Bunkum on stilts. Bunkum with knobs on. About as plausible as an EU anti-corruption drive.
It made more than 20 recommendations including the demand that NHS staff working with the mentally ill are trained in “cultural awareness and sensitivity”.
We have to respect the fact that some people choose to be stark, raving bonkers and that that choice is just as valid as people who happen to be in full control of their mental faculties. All states of mind are the same and doing things like eating spiders and lurking around public parks flashing the old one-eyed trouser snake at little old ladies are merely alternative lifestyle choices that we should celebrate. In fact, these people are not barmy at all, they are just….differently conscious.
But, truly, this is a puzzlement. The NHS is the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the public sector and the only thing still holding that wheezing, cankered Leviathan together is the commitment and morale of the staff working within. What better way to dissolve all that goodwill than by subjecting them to the kind of Inquisitional ordeal that ‘cultural awareness training’ entails?
Do these accusers not appreciate or realise that the possible consequences of their campaign might be to cattle-prod this most sacred of sacred cows straight into the merciless metal teeth of the abbatoir? Or perhaps they do realise but they simply do not care? Perhaps the years of unimpaired success have so sharpened the appetites of these professional race warriors that they have become like ravenous wolves, turning on their class confreres and ripping out great gobs of flesh in a feeding frenzy?
Well, either way, I say it is best to let nature take its course.
Being an ideologue of purity in the purist mould of teetotaller George Best, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that the once politically invincible British Conservative Party is rapidly becoming untenable even to me, yes to me, a proud member of the intellectually lightweight jellyfish club. Witness this quote from today’s Daily Telegraph:
But there is also speculation that he [Oliver Letwin] will offer to spend more on health and education than Labour to rebut claims that the Tories will starve the public services of extra cash
Flubber.
We are being warned that there is an obesity ‘timebomb’ in Britain (which is to say, as in so many things, we are headed where the USA leads). The great and good of the medical establishment intone in sententious voices that “a far-reaching national strategy is needed” to deal with this.
So we can look forward to the state taking even further control of our very bodily functions, for our own good of course, no doubt starting with the children interned in state’s educational conscription centres. But then why the hell should we care about this whole problem? If obesity causes us to fall ill, we have the state’s National Health Service to look after us and pick up the tab! If being a porker makes us unhappy, we have the state’s social workers to tell us that there is nothing for us to worry about and in any case, how dare anyone utter ‘fatists’ slurs? Do these nasty doctors calling for “a far-reaching national strategy” not realise that by stigmatizing fat people, they are undoing the work of thousands of Guardian reading self-esteem councilors paid for out of tax money?
The solution to this statist regulatory tangle is to set one part of the social-welfare class again the other in a bitter begger-thy-neighbour “our victims have it worse than your victims” battle to the political death.
We could be on to a winner here… Let the welfare state eat itself.
I’m not fat! I’m a
horizontally challenged victim
of the capitalist system!
I have just been working my through a collection of essays by the noted British writer, Theodore Dalrymple, (that is not his real name, from what I can guess), who has spent much of his professional life dealing with muggers, burglars, murderers, drug addicts, the homeless, the variously abused, and other inhabitants of that twilight zone we might generalise as “the underclass”. It is a great book, full of harrowing detail, often illuminated by mordant wit and unintended humour.
Dalrymple could, I think, be fairly characterised as a social conservative. That a Britain full of grammar schools, nuclear families and draconian punishments for infractions of the law is his desired state of affairs cannot be in doubt. He subscribes to the view, unless I have misread him, that the social reforms of the 1960s, while perhaps containing some good elements, were taken as a whole a social catastrophe for the working class. But were they? Do we really want, for example, to a return to when homosexuality was a criminal offence? And has some of the loosening of old social taboos been quite the disaster he claims? I am not so sure.
Some of his targets – such as state welfare and education systems – deserve all the muck he heaps on them. But I have problems with the relentlessly gloomy tone of the publication, and this goes, I think, for a lot of commentary one gets to see from the conservative side of the cultural spectrum these days. Apart from the usual hints that we should go back to some sort of social order resembling the 1950s of myth and memory, there is very little in the way to any positive solutions to the ills on display.
What struck me about Dalrymple’s book is how different he is from our Victorian forbears. As well as setting out the problem, the generation that brought us the gospel of “self improvement” looked at the ugliness around them and said, more or less, that “it doesn’t have to be like this”. And they acted.
And it doesn’t have to be like this. We have seen, in New York for example, a dramatic fall in violent crime, due to a determined effort at proper policing.
And in that, I think, lies the point that the United States, unlike Britain, has not yet given up. If we are to deal with some of the issues Dalrymple mentions, it will not be enough merely to point out the ugliness around us from the elegant citadels of the Daily Telegraph’s editorial offices. We will need to sketch out how we get to a better place. For if we don’t, then Dalrymple will become nothing better than a very articulate bore.
You know, unlike my proprietor, I’m beginning to warm to Transylvania’s very own Michael Howard. But he just keeps failing to take his own thoughts to a natural logical conclusion.
After an ideologically mixed start, particularly with his comments about drugs, and support for his mini-me, David Blunkett, he’s still just coming out with platitudes, rather than policies, particularly with his speech yesterday entitled, The British Dream:
Too many are cheated of the decent education that is essential for people to make the best of their lives. Too many are cheated of the first class health care that they deserve. Why? Because we have a State that does too much, that interferes too much, that is too unaccountable.
No Michael, it doesn’t interfere too much. It just interferes. If more government can’t improve a situation, then surely less government is even better. And where does this logically end up? With no government at all. → Continue reading: The British dream
Just as the Tory Party (the party that has given us Chris Patten, Edward Heath and Ken Clarke) cannot be counted on to reverse the march into regulatory Euro-statism (they at best slow the rate at which it happens), similarly the Tory reaction to plans by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett to lower the burden of proof in criminal cases where the state really wants to convict someone is one of essential support.
So… we are left with only one half-way significant party who seems to care even the slightest about civil liberties in the court room: The LibDems. But then again, when it comes to regulatory statism and abridging economic free association in society at large, the LibDems are even more keen than Labour to replace all social interaction with politically derived formulae for just about any kind of behaviour you can think of.
And people wonder why I urge folks not to vote for anyone? So how does one resist the increasingly panoptic regulatory state? Good question.
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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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