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History certainly does have a knack of repeating itself here in the UK. Just as we’re about to embark on another war against a mustachioed despot, we’re all set to bring back rationing:
“A ban on marketing fatty, salty and sugary products at youngsters is one of the options supported by the study from the Food Commission campaign group.
It also backs those calling for a nationwide promotion of healthy foods and a possible “fat tax” on junk food advertising.”
But why stop there? Why not compulsory jogging every morning? Followed by an invigorating dip in ice-water? How about mandatory colonic irrigation, too?
Actually the question is redundant, because, whoever the ‘Food Commission Campaign group’ are, we all know that they have not the slightest intention of stopping there. They wll get what they want and then move on to Stage 2 (and Lord alone knows what that consists of). And because this is Britain we can all more-or-less write the script for these campaigns now. It is even becoming mundane.
I don’t know who these campaigners are but perhaps, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, it will transpire that they have some connection with the WTC attacks. Then the Americans can come and drag them all off to Camp X-Ray.
P.S. Don’t forget the hoods!
Yesterday, the Assets Recovery Agency has been set up to seize the wealth of previously untouchable “Mr Bigs” who have not been convicted of an offence but whose way of life is paid for by crime. It will take on cases referred to it by UK police forces, Customs & Excise, the Inland Revenue, the National Crime Squad and the Serious Fraud Office. Its work is considered so sensitive that its agents will be allowed to use pseudonyms – including in court – and the Government refuses to say where it is based.
The Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) will not have to prove that the people whom it prosecutes are guilty of any crime. The onus will be on the man with the Jaguar, the gold bracelet and the holiday home in Ocho Rios to show that he came by his luxuries legally. Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which set up the agency, cases will be decided on the balance of probabilities, rather than the stricter criminal test of certainty beyond reasonable doubt.
The prosecutors will need only to accuse someone of living ‘above their means’ to bring them to court (without a jury, I might add), if they have “reasonable grounds” for believing that their wealth had been acquired illegally. However, it is the owner’s responsibility to prove otherwise and assets could be seized on the “balance of probabilities”. This is a far cry from the “beyond reasonable doubt” requirements of the criminal courts. It will, therefore, be possible for the civil courts to seize the assets of someone found not guilty in the criminal courts. Oh, and the presumption of innocence has gone out of the window long before the judge’s ‘balancing act’.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary elaborates: The agency is coming after the homes, yachts, mansions and luxury cars of the crime barons. This is also about cracking down on local crooks well known in their communities for their flash cars, designer clothes and expensive jewellery but no legitimate means of income.
And Jane Earl, director of the ARA reassures:
If you have a large house and five places in the Caribbean, with no visible means of support, no rich aunties who have recently died leaving the odd five million and no successful lottery tickets, it will not do to say that someone gave you the money.
It is as if all their hatred is directed not so much against criminals as against the trappings of wealth. If Mr Blunkett and Ms Earl think they have a case against somebody, they should be made to prove it.
Oh, but they can’t do that because the justice system is so screwed up. Let’s hire some anonymous thugs then. First we get the Bad Big Criminals and then let’s see what we can do without any competition…
I don’t suppose that anybody outside Britain or Greece has even heard of the Elgin Marbles and in neither country are there a great many people who are likely to be get exercised over them.
That said, these ancient Greek artifacts are something upon which a small number of people have quite robust opinions and I happen to be one of them.
The ‘Elgin Marbles’ are currently housed in the British Museum in London and are made up of 56 sections of the frieze sculpted by Phidias around the Parthenon. They were acquired and brought to London by the British diplomat Lord Elgin early in the 19th Century from their original home in Greece and where, despite their grandeur and beauty, they had been abandoned to the twins corrosions of the elements and indifference.
For many years, the Greek government has been campaigning for the return of the Marbles to their original home in Greece. In this, they are supported by a large section the British arty/literatti/celebrity set who approach the issue with the same kind of fuzzy-headedness and sophistic feel-goodery that they approach everything else.
Much of the left in Britain has also taken the side of the Greeks in this issue, not out of any particular fondness for Greece but because, for them, the Marbles are a rude reminder of British imperial acquisitiveness and arrogance and their continued presence in the British Museum a standing affrontery to the culture of self-abasement and guilt that they have so assiduously fostered on these shores.
However, the entire matter has been off the radar-screen for some time and it may be because the ‘usual suspects’ are otherwise noisily engaged in the matter of preserving Saddam Hussein’s regime, that we have been treated to a rather bold announcement from the British Museum’s director:
“The director of the British Museum has said that the Elgin Marbles should never be returned from Britain to Greece.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Neil MacGregor said the sculptures, which once adorned the Parthenon temple in Athens, should remain in London.
He has also ended discussions with a British campaign group seeking their return to Greece.”
Good for you, Mr.McGregor. I was not only delighted by this announcement but also (pleasantly) surprised, given the recent low-profile of the issue. It has set my mind to wondering whether Mr.McGregor has at all chanced upon a very recent essay on the matter by Sean Gabb:
“Needless to say, I am strongly opposed to returning the Marbles. If I had my way, they would stay in London forever – preferably joined by anything else we might in future be able to bribe out of the Greeks or the other successor states of antiquity. Indeed, if Lord Elgin did anything wrong, it was to leave too much behind when he finished his work in Athens. He should at least have taken all the pediment sculptures and another caryatid. He might also have dug up some of the statues buried after the Persians destroyed the old Acropolis in 480BC. The world of culture would be all the better had he done so. Just compare the Caryatid he took away with those he left behind, and ask if he really did wrong. However, rather than continue with its mere statement, let me try to justify my opinion. I will review the case for returning the Marbles.”
I usually make a point of arguing a given matter from my own bat, but I am not averse to using someone else’s bat in circumstances where their bat is both bigger and wielded with such admirable adroitness. Sean’s tightly argued and highly learned essay is quite the most the comprehensive and definitive case for retaining the Elgin Marbles in Britain and I do not hesitate to strongly recommend it to everyone regardless of whether they are British or not.
Of course, I can only speculate as to whether or not Mr.McGregor has read the essay and was inspired by it in the same way I was. Probably not. More likely it is just coincidence in which case it is a welcome synchronicity and an indication that level-heads are starting to fight back on this issue.
I have finally worked out to link to specific items in stephenpollard.net. Stephen Pollard is a man whom Samizdata.net readers should all be told about if they haven’t been yet. In addition to having his own blog, he also contributes regularly to this blog on European health issues run by the Centre for the New Europe (although linking to stuff in that is truly complicated and I won’t attempt it – just scroll down). And he’s a mainstream journalist of renown.
Two recent postings that get inside his head well are this, about Milton Friedman, and this, concerning the demonstrations last weekend, which also appeared in The Times. Here’s the conclusion of the Friedman posting:
Milton Friedman’s influence on the Left extends well beyond the NHS voucher. The congestion charge, introduced in London on Monday, has been lifted straight out of the professor’s 1951 essay, “How to Plan and Pay For the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need”: “[on] a crowded road…it would be desirable to discourage traffic…the people who drive on a road should be charged…in proportion to their use of the service”. As Ken Livingstone has put it: “I nicked the idea off Milton Friedman”.
Third Way, Shmird Way. Stand back, Tony Giddens; step forward, Milton Friedman, guru of the Left.
I also liked following this link, to a report about the events of June 7th 1981. Clue: CND ought to have liked it, but I’m guessing they didn’t.
From time to time the question surfaces on Samizdata: how come the British Conservative Party is doing so badly? One of the most coherent and convincing answers I’ve come across lately is to be found in Free Life, the (now all electronic) journal of the Libertarian Alliance, from Manchester based libertarian historian Steve Davies, responding to a piece by Sean Gabb. Davies explains how the British electoral system now hurts the Conservatives. But, he says, their problems go deeper.
… Simply, the electoral coalition put together in the 1920s has split into two sharply distinct and increasingly hostile groups of voters. This happened between about 1989 and 1997. So the split in Conservatism today is not just a matter of divisions within the Parliamentary Party or the wider Party. It’s a split in the electorate. That means the issues facing the party are much more profound than a matter of who the leader should be. It also makes everything far more problematic, given our electoral system.
The two groups of ‘right wing’ voters today can perhaps called Tories and Whigs. To use stereotypes, Tories are older, of either below average or well above average income, live in seaside resorts, rural areas and older industrial areas. They are Daily Mail and Telegraph readers, they are strongly socially conservative, very hostile to the EU, dislike multiculturalism and favour very strong controls on immigration, are supportive of the war on drugs. They are hostile to socialism and much of the welfare state but support some parts of it such as the NHS (for now). Although they generally favour free markets this is becoming less true all the time. They increasingly do not like globalisation and dislike large corporations. Whigs are younger, average to above average income, and live in suburban areas including suburbanised parts of the countryside. They are economically liberal, often very much so. They hope that the government is going to sort out the welfare state but suspect it isn’t and are becoming increasingly hostile to it. They are very socially liberal, much less bothered about immigration and dislike anti-immigrant campaigns. They favour relaxing laws against drugs or outright legalisation, they are very relaxed about homosexuality. They don’t like the EU particularly but don’t have the visceral hostility of the Tories and they don’t like appeals to nationalism because they have a very different sense of national identity to the Tories. They like and support many kinds of multiculturalism. Many read the Telegraph but they are also Times and Independent readers. They absolutely hate and despise the Daily Mail.
… The problem is that, increasingly, Whig and Tory voters just do not like each other. Policies and, above all, rhetoric that appeals to or inspires one group of voters will alienate the other. So having a campaign concentrating on attacks on asylum seekers, family values and national sovereignty will inspire the Tories but alienate the Whigs. Emphasising personal liberty via ‘hot button’ issues like homosexual rights and drug liberalisation will please Whigs but enrage Tories.
Davies goes on to speculate about how all this will play out. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, he reckons they’ll be captured by the Whigs, and won’t actually split.
It is a strange experience finding myself supporting Tony Blair, the man who presides over my ongoing robbery by the British state, let alone quoting his remarks of yesterday approvingly, but I suppose these are strange times:
There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which, if he is left in power, will be left in being.
I just wish the people marching yesterday would spare us the nauseating claim to the moral high ground and, if they still oppose the war, just acknowledge that theirs is an emotional rather than a moral argument and that the reality of their position is that if they get their way, Iraqi people will continue to die at the hands of murderous Ba’athist socialism in Iraq whilst they smugly congratulate themselves on their ‘having prevented a war’.
Preventing the overthrow of the people who did…
this…
and…
this… 
… to the people of Halabja with a weapon of mass destruction (poison gas) is the reality what those marchers are trying to achieve.
Regardless of how you feel about George W. Bush or Tony Blair or capitalism or Israel or the Palestinians or globalisation or anything else, that does not change the fact that the continuation in power of the murderous Saddam Hussain and his Ba’athist thugs will be the consequence of appeasement. Is that what you want? Is it?
The entire world, apart from a few evil American warmongers plus Tony Blair, took part in an anti-war demonstration in London yesterday with millions of inter-galactic aliens joining other peace protests around the galaxy. Organisers claim that the march is sure to topple well-known right-winger Blair, allowing him to be replaced by the cuddly lovable Ken Livingstone, Mayor of the People’s Republic of London.
“We never liked Blair in the first place,” said some bloke in a scruffy jacket with corduroy arm-patches. “The whole way he managed to get elected was always suspiciously un-socialist. But now we are really hoping the country will rise up in revolution and institute Ken in his rightful role at last. If the Houses of Parliament spontaneously fall today, maybe the Americans can get rid of their president tomorrow and let Hillary Clinton take over the world! Erm, their insignificant burger-ridden country.”
“But don’t Americans like their president? I mean, they chose him in an election, right?” asked a reporter for extreme rightist media propagandists, Fox News.
“No, the whole American electoral system is rigged by right-wing Capitalists to help them win despite having only a minority of the vote,” explained the corduroy guy. “Real democracy would prove that the people want Marxism, obviously, as Marxism is for The People; it’s self-explanatory!”
In his speech at the Labour spring conference later yesterday, Mr Blair told delegates that if they want to send him to the Tower of London and let Saddam have his way and produce the bloody nukes and give them to Al Qaeda then, fine, he is sick of the lot of them, and he just hopes their bunkers will hold if they get enough warning to climb inside before the bombs start flying. He stressed that if they want to support evil dictators why don’t they all bloody well go and live in Baghdad and see what it’s like, or they could try Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or that Korea place whichever one it was, any one of a number of countries on the US’s list for upgrading sometime when they get round to it.
Mr Blair then requested a large bowl of warm soapy water water, and washed his hands on the rostrum, while everybody watched not knowing quite what to think. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, called on the entire party to get behind Mr Blair and give him “full support” as he is worried about what might happen to his own job if Blair is beheaded.
Yesterday Downing Street urged the protesters taking part in the anti-war demonstrations around the country and the world to remember the brutality in Saddam’s regime and see how they would feel about having their civil servants routinely executed, before realising this was not a very good argument, and going back indoors for toasted muffins.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said that if a million people turned out to march against the Government – as some are claiming – they would equal the number of Kurds who fled Iraq after the Gulf War because they were being oppressed by Saddam. However, he assured the British people that they would not be gassed by their own government at this stage.
Last night Downing Street denied reports that Mr Blair was angry at the protesters and rejected claims that he was trying to avoid them. “He believes that they have an absolute democratic right to protest and if they want to they can,” a spokesman said. “He just wants them to f*** off.”
Not much commentary is needed really about his protest in London, but judging from the placards, more people seemed interested in Palestine than Iraq.
A rolling river of political incontinence
I guess they want to give Saddam time to develop nuclear weapons, thereby giving themselves someone else to protest against
… but Saddam Hussain not wanted for murder by Socialists Workers apparently
At least this one is amusing
I wonder if they could find Iraq on a map?
Hell, I wonder if they could find Britain on a map
Actress & pro-totalitarian activist Vanessa Redgrave
One protester made the serious tactical blunder of assuming David Carr was in agreement with the marcher’s objectives. He explains the error of her ways.
I have never seen so many Arabs in London
This chap wants the world to look like that paragon of human rights and civic virtues, the Palestinian Authority
Socialist Dictators of the World Unite! And another guy was waving a Soviet flag (the picture of that did not come out unfortunately)
No, war will cease when men no longer stand up to fight against tyranny
Your intrepid blogger can feel his brains being sucked out…
All the usual people really. Yawn.
David Carr and I are off to take pictures of the Pro-Saddam Hussain/Anti-Liberation of the Iraqi People demonstration in London this afternoon… I hope to have a report up this evening.
I am no expert on the general state of current events, national politics, etc., so I will (try to) keep this short. Basically, I was watching This Week on BBC1 last night, and they (Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott, Andrew Neil) were saying that Tony Blair is in real trouble. We have become so used to Blair being badmouthed by his lefties that this time we might be missing that it may actually matter.
I believe that the underlying story is that the Conservatives are now in such unprecedented disarray, or are thought to be, that the lefties now reckon they will have a five-to-maybe-even-ten-year run of doing their worst before the voters come to their senses and switch to someone else – someone else dull, sexually bizarre, bald, embarrassing, in a word Conservative, but someone else. Whether the lefties are correct about this isn’t the point, it’s what they now think. The same underlying fact explains why Labour now feels that its stealth taxes don’t any longer need to be so stealthy. Blair’s problem is that he has done such awful things to the Conservatives that the Conservatives no longer function as a threat to wave in front of his lefties, the way they have since the mid-eighties until about three months ago. In other words this could be another of those “sea changes” you read about, the last one being when Labour got its act together in the late eighties. Now the Conservatives are regarded as more hopeless than ever before, and the lefties are getting bored with merely humiliating them. That’s no fun any more. They want some lefty action.
Glenda Jackson (Oscar and bar but now also MP) did a very dramatic soundbite type speech in the Commons yesterday, along the lines of: “I’m not ashamed of my Party. It’s my government I’m ashamed of.” The times they may be achanging.
There’s to be a big demo tomorrow in London against the “war”, and it may actually be quite big.
Portillo (who does very well on Newsweek by the way – he is now the one true Conservative heavyweight performer, in my opinion) reckoned that if the UN doesn’t oblige with another anti-Saddam resolution Blair might be f*%*ed. Only Chirac can save him, quoth Portillo. Which, it occurs to me, is not only an extremely bad position for Blair, but also for Britain (i.e. for all of us anti-EUers).
Chirac: we support your Guerre, you support EUrope on everything else. Blair: okay.
Parenthetically, it was also much discussed that the New Labour reputation for spin, culminating in that embarrassing “report” that was cut and pasted from something on the internet and then doctored embarrassingly, has resulted in our government simply not being believed about all this Heathrow security flapping. Just when they really need to be able to face the cameras and say this is for real, and be believed, they are being accused of using the Army as theatrical stage props.
Are you allowed to say at the end of a posting that you don’t know if any of the above is true, but that in the meantime it sounds like it might be interesting and important? I hope so, because I just did.
So the British TV tax has gone up by another £4.00 (1.5% above inflation) to provide the unelected lefty-establishment BBC with an extra hundred million for lavish lesbian costume dramas and unintelligible Open University nonsense.
As someone who could rather do with a cheque for £116 (the new license fee) right now, I seriously resent the assumption that tricking ever more money out of people is justified or good. As a capitalist, I think stealth-taxing is undermining our economy, putting people out of work and creating extra poverty. And as an arty-farty, I can see with my own eyes that the BBC does not deserve the cash: there is nothing on BBC1 that one can not find on ITV, and nothing on BBC2 that Channel 4 does not do just as well and with the exact same political bias.
I went to the BBC’s own website to see what they had to say about it, and found this:
“Why doesn’t the BBC take advertising? Because this keeps the BBC independent of advertisers and other commercial pressures.”
Actually, the BBC is stuffed full of advertising: mostly advertising for itself and its own products. But do the plotlines of ‘Coronation Street’ (ITV soap) get bent out of shape by endless sponsorship references, while ‘Eastenders’ (BBC soap) remains impartially naturalistic? Of course not. And I doubt that all the commercial TV and radio stations would accept that their news is rubbish because their journalists are influenced by advertisers, either.
“The BBC’s Governors ensure instead that it is run in the general public interest. They are accountable for the BBC’s independence, and also ensure that it reflects British culture and minority interests.”
So the BBC’s governors know what is good for us better than we know ourselves: paying them £116 a year is good for us, and choosing to watch the independent, erm, commercial channels clearly rots our minds. Minority groups don’t buy advertised products, therefore they don’t watch non-BBC TV, therefore non-BBC TV does not show anything they might like to watch.
“If the BBC carried adverts or sponsorship, commercial pressures would dictate its priorities instead of the general public interest.”
But people choosing what to buy is the general public interest: it’s ordinary people doing what they want with their own money. If people don’t buy any more revolting liqueurs because of “Sex and the City” sponsorship, the sponsorship will stop and the annoying mini-ads will go. But the point is, however annoying those ads, who do you know who would choose to pay £116 a year to opt out of seeing them? Exactly. Which is why it’s illegal not to pay for the BBC, even if you only ever watch commercial channels and cable.
What I loathe most of all, however, is the idea that living off coerced money rather than earning it like everyone else makes you a superior benevolent authority better able to judge and further the ‘interest’ of the people you stole from. That’s why Marxism is the same as organised crime, except worse.
I want my £116 back.
A law firm with a fetching name, Public Interest Lawyers intends to prosecute Prime Minister Tony Blair for war crimes at the new International Criminal Court (ICC), if an Iraqi war goes ahead.
Phil Shiner of the law firm is leading a campaign to prosecute leaders in the seven-month-old ICC, if military action goes ahead without a second United Nations resolution expressly authorising force, or if any Iraqi civilians are killed in bombing campaigns.
“The ICC brings a new international context to war – Blair now has to consider his individual accountability.”
The ICC’s independent prosecutor can initiate proceedings at the request of a state or can receive evidence from anyone, and then decide whether to prosecute, subject to advice from three of the court’s 18 judges. The prosecution will be based on the fact that national leaders could be held individually responsible for war crimes and be tried as ex-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has at a separate court for former Yugoslavia.
The United States fiercely opposes the ICC, saying it would infringe U.S. sovereignty, but Britain has ratified its treaty and would have to give up any citizen the court wanted to try.
“The ICC will now place a serious constraint on Blair.”
Oh really?! That must make Blair quake in his boots. I fervently hope he ignores the self-righteous and attention-seeking bunch of idiotarians. The International Criminal Court, what a brilliant idea, I hear people cry, just like the UN. The picture comes into focus once the client of Public Interest Lawyers’ who initiated the proceedings is revealed! Enter CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament! And I thought they were all in Iraq making sure Saddam gets disarmed and prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. You can’t rely on anybody these days.
But there is a serious lesson for Blair and the UK government in this farcical episode – next time read the small print on all those treaties and agreements and codes and declarations you are signing, in case the Tranzis decide you are not dancing to their tune. It seems that in this case, the US knew better…
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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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