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Are politicians actually capable of thought and articulation or they merely making noises in return for which they think they are going to get rewards?
Barely two weeks after Michael Howard trumpeted his alleged belief that “the people should be big and the state should be small“, he weighs in on the side of big state and against the little citizen:
A future Conservative government would reverse Labour’s downgrading of cannabis from Class B to Class C, Tory leader Michael Howard has said.
His intervention comes a week ahead of the change to Class C, which will place cannabis alongside anabolic steroids and prescription anti-biotics and mean police will rarely make arrests for possession of small amounts of the drug.
Mr Howard said: “After thinking about this very carefully, we have come to the view that the Government’s decision is misconceived and when we return to office, we will reclassify cannabis back to Class B.”
Mr Blunkett’s changes introduced a “muddle” which would send a signal to young people that cannabis was legal and safe, when it was not, said the Tory leader.
Well, there is a germ of truth here in that HMG is most certainly in a ‘muddle’ but at least it is a muddle which is shambling along, after a fashion, in a sort-of, vaguely right direction. The motives may not be entirely logical or even honourable but I think it’s results that count here.
But am I to believe that Mr Howard has thought about this ‘very carefully’? Cannabis is only illegal because people like Mr Howard demand that it be so and the question of whether or not it is ‘safe’ (whatever that means) is entirely irrelevant. If he genuinely wants to the state to be small then he is hardly likely to achieve that aim by reinforcing the principle rubric behind big government, i.e. that it is necessary in order to manage the citizen’s health and welfare.
So is Mr Howard (a) disingenuous or (b) really not thought this through at all?
I think we have a right to know.
The natives are finally growing restless. Well, some of them are, at any rate and, for just for a change, this is grass-roots agitation of the righteous sort.
Yes, the people behind the Taxpayers Alliance are as mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. The strapline says it all:
Campaigning for lower taxes because it’s our money
Right on, brothers and sisters and Amen and, might I just add, about bloody time too. Ever since the mid-90’s, when the producing classes were finally bullied and browbeaten into dolefully accepting that higher taxes would result in better government services, they have stoically maintained their stiffer upper lips while the fiscal thumbscrews have been steadily tightened.
But the government services they thought they cherished have remained as crap as they ever were and now, finally, a few of them have realised that they’ve been took, they’ve been had.
But (and you all knew that there just had to be a ‘but’) as pleased as I am to finally see these few worms turning, they still have some way to go before they address the ‘root causes’ of their problems:
We have already found £50 BILLION of unnecessary government spending to cut (without closing hospitals or schools, or cutting pensions). That is more than enough to abolish Council Tax or take a big slice out of Income Tax.
The objects of their attack are what they see as the ‘waste and inefficiency’ of the government as if those things can somehow be magically eradicated while leaving the public sector largely intact. However, ‘waste and inefficiency’ are not bugs requiring elimination in order for the welfare state to function properly, they are systemic features of the welfare state itself.
For as long as these campaigners continue to accept the fabian argument that services like healthcare and education must be provided by the government, then their otherwise noble campaign will remain fatally flawed. It leaves them wide open to the counter-argument that state and schools and hospitals must have the necessary ‘resources’ and sooner, rather than later I think, they will find themselves running smack into that brick wall.
But, that said, they are still doing the right thing. Or, at least, starting to do the right thing. I hope it is the thin end of a very thick wedge.
[My thanks to reader Gawain Towler who provided the above link via Terence Coyle.]
It is a seldom-recognised fact that the British are world leaders in the art of grumbling. By a long margin, it is our most popular national pastime. In fact, if grumbling was an Olympic sport (or perhaps synchronised grumbling) then it would be British competitors taking gold, silver and bronze. The other nations do not stand a chance.
And I can find no better example of this kind of world-class, cutting-edge grumbling than this article by Philip Johnston:
Do you ever feel like Howard Beale, the character played by Peter Finch in the film Network? He was a news presenter on American TV who became so frustrated at the refusal of anyone to listen to reason that he invited viewers to open their windows and yell into the streets: “I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.”
Such conspicuous expressions of indignation are more acceptable in America than they are here. When we are as mad as hell, the most forceful manifestation of our emotions tends to be a resigned shrug or a heavy sigh. Understatement is one of our endearing national characteristics; but it also means we can more easily be taken for a ride.
And that is why we lead the world in grumbling. We have the ideal training programme.
Our predisposition to react benignly to developments that would have other people taking to the streets is to be applauded. But this quintessential mildness relies on governments, local councils and others who can interfere in our lives to do so only when it is absolutely necessary, and then in a fair and balanced way. The current Government is no longer able to identify this fulcrum. It brings in legislation because it believes that its very function is to pour forth a cascade of new laws each year, even when there is no demand for them.
Suggest to a minister that he might try to get through the parliamentary session without legislating and he will look at you as if you are crazy. Propose that existing laws should take effect before new ones are introduced and expect a blank stare. After all, what are politicians for if not to bring in laws? “We legislate therefore we are,” should be written on the gates of the Palace of Westminster.
But what else are politicians for? Pray tell, Mr Johnston?
For those fed up with high taxes, street crime, late and dirty trains, inane regulations, the unjustified use of fines and charges, bloody-minded parking restrictions, excessive public sector waste, preposterous European directives, multi-culturalist busybodies, useless and unaccountable council officials and six-hour waits at the local hospital’s A&E centre, a shrug and a sigh are no longer enough.
And so what? What follows from that? If Mr Johnston is proposing that our time-honoured traditions of heavy sighing, eyeball-rolling, muttering and impotent resignation are no longer sufficient grist for the national mill, then so be it, but where do we go from there?
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about walking in London, and just before I got to Parliament Square I encountered a demo. It was not raucous or unpleasant. It was nice. It was old people complaining about their council taxes, which obviously I am all in favour of.
Following the example of supreme Samizdatista Perry de Havilland, I now take my DigiCam with me whenever I go a-wandering, so I was able to start snapping. At first it was just nice old people accompanied by nice policemen, with nice buildings in the background, but only very crude signs to say what it was all about. However patience was rewarded, and some of the signs were highly informative.
27.2%. Ouch! Whatever happened to stealth taxes? (Hey hey LBJ, you killed 27.2% more kids today than yesterday, you bad bad person. Not the same ring to it, somehow.)
And this one takes onlookers into the university lecture theatre.
Okay, okay, I’m excited, and I want to know more. How can I follow it up?
Wow, a website. They say, in fact Perry just said it to me in connection with this post, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I reckon best of all is pictures with words embedded in the pictures, explaining everything. Preferably with an internet link.
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?
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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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