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I do believe it was Voltaire who came to Britain some time in the 18th Century and described the state of affairs here as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’.
Fast forward to the 21st Century. New aristocracy, new rioting:
Hundreds of homeowners rebelling against record council tax increases are facing prison after being summonsed to court for non-payment of their bills as part of a protest which has been dubbed the “Can Pay, Won’t Pay” campaign.
The rebels are angry over the increase in council tax rates that have soared by as much as 40 per cent in the past two years. They have vowed to go to jail rather than pay up.
For non-UK readers, the tax they are referring to is a local property tax which has, indeed, soared to iniquitous levels in the last two years putting an intolerable burden on homeowners with low or fixed incomes.
The current system was brought in to replace the infamous ‘poll tax’ which was excoriated and villified by the left as ‘wicked’ and ‘unfair’. It inspired a campaign of civil disobedience and widespread rioting which, probably more than anything else, did for Margaret Thatcher.
So does anybody think that the ‘caring’ left will get behind this new revolt? I think we all know the answer to that.
“I am not paying. I will not let the bailiffs in and I am prepared to go to jail. I have no family, so if I do end up in prison I’m not going to upset anyone. At my age I don’t feel that it matters if I have a criminal record.”
A brave and nobel expression of sentiment but one which highlights the weakness of such tactics. People with a career to pursue, a business to run or a family to raise cannot afford the risk of incarceration so this is a situation where just a little enforcement will go a long way to quelling the revolt and securing a high degree of compliance.
Also I cannot help but feel that the campaign slogan of ‘Can Pay, Won’t Pay’ (a twist on the anti-poll tax slogan of ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’) will prove a godsend to the establishment lefties who will be able to demonise the rebels as ‘selfish’ and ‘greedy’.
The rebels do have a website called Is It Fair? but even that, as far as I can tell, misses it’s real target. Calls for a ‘better distribution of central government grants’ are not going to help them or anybody else in the long run.
Monstrous over-taxation is not fair or wise or just or good and while I wholly sympathise with the people who are being rapidly impoverished by them, I fear that their rebellion will do little to improve matters.
It is often argued that the Conservative Party must move to the Left to win. It must tone down the tax-cutting agenda, and take the centre ground.
Sounds plausible, but reality is different. At a recent dinner of the Imperial College Conservatives, David Davis revealed that the all-important swing voters are more free-market than normal Tory supporters. According to a Conservative Central Office survey, 87% of swing voters think taxes are too high, compared with only 80% of loyal Tories.
So if you hear the nonsense about “gaining the centre”, tell The Enemy Within to go to hell.
This morning as I was reading the Daily Heap of Newspapers for some blogging inspiration but I could not get past the front page news about the WMD dossier and the tragic end of the alleged MoD ‘mole’. Dr Kelly has been ruthelessly used as a pawn in the game far less civilised than chess between Downing Street and the BBC. By the way, I agree with this analysis of the situation.
The reason I cannot get excited or outraged about the ‘sexed up’ dossier containting evidence about Saddam’s threat to the Western world and his WMD capabilities is that I expect that of anything that comes out of the many-mouthed hydra called Government. Do you really believe all those statistics about the economy, crime, schoolsandhospitals? I sure don’t and never have. True, the spin has acceralated under the Labour government and not only because of Alistair Campell, who is merely an embodiment of the New Labour cavalier attitude to reality. I am not stranger to the public relations techniques, however, I expect that even I would be taken aback by how calculating, manipulating and truth-spinning the whole exercise has become.
This is because the current set of politicians regards such practises as the very business of ‘professional’ government. Keeping the media ‘on-message’ has become far more important than the facts underlying the message itself.
Therefore, paradoxically, I think if anything the WMD dossier has been spun less than the usual stream of propaganda from Downing Street. This is because the tension before the conflict had been so high, that even the spin-doctors at No 10 would have appreciated the hightened exposure they were facing. I bet you that they actually took care not to spin too much and stay with ‘just the facts’.
That they failed so miserably is not evidence that they needed to exaggerate the threat Saddam posed to the Western world. It shows that, under scrutiny, even when the government tries to be honest and credible,their routine lies and disregard for the truth leave them looking like used car salesmen.
Governments lie because that is what governments do
To expect otherwise is to expect a government
not to act like a government.
The political storm over the government’s ‘Iraq dossier’ seems to have taken a rather macabre twist:
Police searching for the weapons expert suggested by the government as the possible source for a BBC story on Iraq say the body they have found matches Dr David Kelly’s appearance.
In fact, the TV news is now reporting that the recovered body is that of Dr.Kelly.
Let the conspiracy theories commence.
My dear pal Brian Micklethwait was not exaggerating; Tony Blair is, indeed, in deep trouble.
Judging from this article in the Independent the assault on his premiership has just been ratcheted up to a whole new level:
Supporters of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, have launched an extraordinary attack on Tony Blair, portraying him as a “psychopath” and “psychotic”.
Blair loyalists are furious about a string of hostile articles about the Prime Minister in the current edition of New Statesman magazine, which is owned by Geoffrey Robinson, a former Treasury minister and a close ally of Mr Brown.
Another article in the magazine is headed “What is the point of Tony Blair?”, while a third declares: “The question of Tony Blair’s sanity can no longer be avoided.”
This is pretty grim stuff. It is one thing to disagree with a Prime Minister’s policies but quite another to denounce him as a ‘psychopath’. I cannot recall any serving Premier being publicly subjected to quite such a vicious attack. And from members of his own party, to boot!
Mr.Blair may have been warmed by the adulation he has received in Washington but back here in Britain, he has got serious problems.
It is a little known fact but Britain is a world-leader in the manufacture and distribution of paranoia. We even export it.
For most of the time our public officials are hard at work busily churning out the stuff for both the domestic and foreign markets. But, what happens when one health-panic runs headlong into another? Well, the whole machine just grinds to an embarrassing halt:
A council has forbidden pupils to apply sunscreen in school – in case other children suffer an allergic reaction.
Cancer Research UK, which launched the Sun Smart campaign to warn of the dangers of the sun, said it was “amazed” by the policy.
Manchester City Council says it is following health and safety guidelines.
Pity the poor child, stuck out on a limb, while two different nannies squawk at them with two entirely conflicting demands. Maybe the nannies could solve the problem (and do everyone a real favour) by just dropping dead from worry.
“I think we were bamboozled by the Prime Minister into doing the right thing.”
– Michael Portillo on This Week, BBC1, small hours of today
Last night the BBC showed, on Newsnight, a report about why Tony Blair is so well-liked in the USA. He is a persuasive debater and arguer. The USA’s right wingers like him because he stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush over the Iraq war, and the USA’s left wingers like him because when he stands shoulder to shoulder with Bush he makes Bush look like a fool by comparison. That kind of thing.
It was a deft move by the BBC. The government have been complaining that the BBC are anti-Government and anti-Blair. Now they can say: look, here was a piece about how well Blair has been doing.
But exposing Blair to the world as being liked by American politicians is to do him no favours with the massed ranks of the Labour Party, parliamentary and out in the constituencies. Those people, by and large, don’t like American politicians, and especially they don’t Like George W. Bush Jnr. When they could think of Bush as just a joke, he was just a joke. But now he’s bad, bad, bad. With friends like him, Blair needs no enemies.
Two Guardian stories have just been punching home the message. This one points out, for all the usual Poltical Editor type reasons, that Blair is now looking wobbly.
But it was another article by an until-now Blair supporter and true believer, from yesterday, that really caught my attention. This paragraph is especially revealing and bullseye-hitting:
The key issue for Blair seems to be his own sincerity. He is desperate to convince us that he believes in the rightness of his actions. This has been a faultline in his personality from the very beginning. It’s instructive, in this context, to consider the ways in which he differs from Thatcher. Thatcher never claimed to be Good, just Right. Blair’s political personality has always been predicated on the proposition “I am good.” His brilliantly articulate impersonation of earnest inarticulacy has all along been tied to this self-projection as a Good Man. He is careful about not touting his religion in public, but he doesn’t need to, since the conviction of his own goodness is imprinted in everything he says and does. It is one of the things he has in common with the party he leads, and one of the reasons people are wrong when they say that Blair is a natural Tory. Thatcher’s sense of being right fits into the Tory party’s self-image as the home of unpopular and uncomfortable truths. Blair’s sense of being good fits the Labour self-image as the party of virtue: the party we would all vote for if we were less selfish and greedy.
It is Blair’s reputation for goodness, among his own most devoted supporters, which has taken such a knock with this Weapons of Mass Destruction business. To people like me, who never believed in Saint Tony in general or in much of the pre-war hooplah about WMDs in particular, the only surprise was why such a canny operator as Blair should have hung himself on such a nasty hook But for the true Blair believers, this stuff is really hurting.
It reminds me of what I vaguely recall someone saying a thousand years ago about Nixon, just before he resigned. If people like this (i.e. some Nixon true believers the guy had just been talking to) think that something very bad has happened, he’s in serious trouble.
A quite splendid editorial in the Telegraph from George Trefgarne:
If Mr Blair signs the European constitution – which he seems determined to do – it will, as far as I can see, be the end of Britain as a serious independent power. It will also lead to the gradual redesigning of our institutional framework.
The euro beckons. Taxation and regulation would increase as we tilted towards the European social democratic model. Judging by the woes of Germany and France, economic growth would be lower and unemployment higher.
I can add little except a recommendation that the whole article be read in order to fully appreciate the monumental folly that Tony Blair seems determined to commit.
Every so often (and it doesn’t happen often enough for my liking) the British public remind us of the yawning gap between received wisdom and wisdom.
Ever since the 1940’s it has been a core article of faith among the left (and more than a few Conservatives I might add) that services like healthcare and education can only be provided for the masses by central government and funded by general taxation. They even have the gall to denounce alternative models as ‘unworkable’.
Well, if the results of this survey are anything to go by, that canard may be reaching the end of its shelf-life:
Voters are prepared to pay for health insurance if it guarantees them better and faster care, according to a ground-breaking new poll that suggests the public is far more open to radical ideas than politicians realise.
The survey finds strong support among taxpayers for a range of controversial policy alternatives, including giving parents the right to choose private schools for their children and American-style “zero tolerance” policing.
I wonder if there is still ‘strong support’ for British-style “zero tolerance” for self-defence?
The poll appears to contradict the Prime Minister’s claim that voters are opposed to health and education solutions that allow individuals to decide where their money is spent.
And it would also appear to contradict my long-held belief that the British public would never relinquish their single-minded devotion to the National Health Service. The day when consumer expectation finally outstrips the ability of the state to keep up with it may be closer than I had imagined.
[EU for Britain has] been more like getting mixed up with the mafia. First it’s an innocent poker game, then some girls show up, then you need to borrow some money, next thing you know a beefy fellow in a string t-shirt is giving your kneecaps a non-therapeutic massage, and you’re wondering, “Hey, I just wanted to play a little poker. Where did these concrete overshoes come from?”
– T. Hartin’s comment on a Samizdata post
Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has gained Cabinet approval to push forward his plans, for compulsory ‘Magic Eye’ ID cards, for all British citizens.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are entering the abyss.
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