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Sir Denis Thatcher, husband of Baroness Thatcher has died peacefully this morning in a hospital in London. He was 88. You know what they say, behind every great man, there is a great woman. Well, behind the great woman of the British politics in the 80s was this great man… Update: Here is obituary published in the Guardian. June 26th, 2003 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Children are always a bit of a knotty problem for libertarians (yes, I am still using that word until a better one comes along). I have almost lost count of the number of arguments I have engaged in concerning their rights or absence thereof and I have still not reached any (or very many) satisfactory conclusions. So it is with the question of physical punishment. Every instinct I possess and every principle to which I subscribe tells me that hitting children (albeit a moderate smack to the posterior) is wrong. You can camouflage it in as many codes of discipline or doctrines of necessity as you wish but the bald fact remains that it is an assault. If assaulting somebody is wrong (and I should hope that most sane people will agree that it is) then surely it remains wrong notwithstanding that it is administered by someone who otherwise loves and cares for you and is intended to provide some sort of memorable object lesson. If I strike out at my wife, co-worker, best friend or next-door neighbour I run the risk of prosecution and a lawsuit. But not so if I strike my child. I find it extremely difficult to justify this distinction. In fact, if anything, a child should have an even stronger presumption of physical integrity because they are incapable of mounting anything like a plausible self-defence. So, while my mind is not closed on the issue, that is where I currently stand and that is what I currently think. But, however starkly I may oppose the physical punishment of children, I am even more stridently opposed to the idea of appointing the state as guardian:
Heavens to Betsy! We’re ‘out of step’. Quick, somebody crank up that metronome. Actually this is not a fresh hell. There is a dedicated coterie of toweringly self-righteous do-gooders who have been campaigning for years for a ban on all physical punishment to be enforced by the state and every couple of years or so they manage to force their agenda on to the front pages. I am implacably opposed to them. Quite aside from the fact that these people are so obnoxiously condescending, there is no way I want to hand an excuse to the ‘Social Working Classes’ to drive the thin end of what is sure to prove a very fat wedge in between children and their parents. It will provide further justification for them to go trampling all over people’s private lives and accelerate the process of family nationalisation and resulting social disintegration. A few red rumps are by far the lesser of those two evils. Fortunately, I can cast aside my customary pessimism because there appears to be no chance whatsoever of this law getting onto the Statute Books. At least not yet. I allowed myself a cheer of relief upon hearing a government minister on the radio news this morning give it the unequivocal thumbs-down. I don’t believe there has been any great examination of ethics involved; more likely their minds are concentrated by the fact that (for a change) the overwhelming majority of public opinion is against any state intervention in this area. I think HMG might be tempted if they knew they weren’t going to face such stiff public opposition. And I am with the British public on this one. Well, sort of. I do think that assaulting a child is wrong regardless of the intentions behind it but I am equally sure that legislation is a cure that will prove worse than the disease. Parents should raise their children, not the state and I hope sufficient numbers of parents share my sentiments. That is far from a perfect solution but maybe it is the least worst solution and, in any event, it is the best I can do. June 24th, 2003 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
On the BBC Today program this morning, Labour Party Leader of the House of Commons, and Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain floated the idea of increased income taxes. As he’s the semi-official Voice on Earth, for the internal workings of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s mind, his attempt to start this ‘debate’ can be assumed to have been cleared by Downing Street. Is this the last desperate throw, by an increasingly desperate Prime Minister? In the interview, the BBC Radio 4 Presenter, John Humphrys, tried to press Mr Hain on this ‘debate’, but didn’t get the minister further than saying the rich would be ‘asked’ to contribute more, for the common good of the public services. Mr Hain refused to define what is ‘rich’, and refused to define how much income tax would be going up by, except to say it wouldn’t be “punitive”. Mr Humphrys put forward the figures of £50,000 pounds a year as being the Labour Party’s definition of rich, and 60% per cent income tax, as being a ‘fair’ contribution. Mr Hain did not refute these figures, merely avoided answering the questions in his self-styled ‘debate’. Given that Tony Blair hinted at more tax increases, earlier in the week in his Fabian Society speech, it seems he is ready to formally break his 1997 ‘pledge’ to not increase income tax. But does this really signal it’s time up for Tony Blair? Andy Duncan June 20th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a lot of people are aware, the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale at midnight tonight. In the UK, the recommended retail price of the book is £16.99, which is fairly typical for a new hardback novel (although expensive for a children’s book). However, Britain’s booksellers are using it as a loss leader, and it is thus going to be available for much less than this. Amazon is selling it for £8.49, and the cheapest I have seen it advertised in a shop with physical premises is £9.99. Judging by the prices of the other books in the Harry Potter series, the paperback edition of the new book is likely to sell for £7.99 (when it comes), so the effect of all this discounting is that the hardcover of the new book is selling for close to the price of a paperback. Obviously this is good. Consumers will be saving money. Poor people (or cheap people) who normally wait for the paperback in order to save money will be able to buy the hardcover, thus saving their children from social death. There will be happiness and light in the world. Capitalism is a fine thing. Remarkably, as recently as 1995 this discounting would have been illegal. Believe it or not, book prices in the UK were fixed. Under something called the Net Book Agreement, it was actually illegal for a bookseller to sell a recently published book at any price other than the one set by the publisher. Supposedly, this was so that publishers could make money from popular books and thus subsidise more “worthy” books, or something. (In reality, it protected specialist bookstores from supermarkets and other stores that merely stocked a few bestsellers). When the price fixing was abolished, various literary establishment figures came out of the woodword and said how terrible this was. I remember some famous author (Harold Pinter?) saying something like that removing price fixing on books would “Lead to a decline in the number and quality of books published in the UK. In fact, we will end up will a lowest common denominator publishing industry like the one we have in America”. And my goodness, we couldn’t have that, could we. What fate could possibly be worse than being like America? In any event, British bookbuyers (many of them children) over the next couple of days will save a total of something like £25 million due to the demise of the net book agreement. Politicians often favour indirect subsidies over direct ones because indirect ones (although always actually more expensive) are often hard to quantify. It’s always interesting when an event like this gives you some actual numbers for an indirect subsidy. £25 million is a lot of money. You could buy David Beckham for that. June 20th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a comment on this posting by David, I promised to say when Sean Gabb’s then promised piece on the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor by the current British government appeared. What is interesting is Gabb’s objection to this move. He doesn’t mind all that much when it comes to substance. What he dislikes is the abolition of the office itself, that is to say of its title. Such moves, says Sean, and there have been many others, cut us off from our past and destroy our sense of our national history. And this is probably deliberate, he says. It is an article, you might say, about the power of words. But don’t take my word for it. Read the words yourself. It’s quite short. June 18th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I must say I am shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the gazillions of pounds of taxpayers money that has been thrown at the state health and education sectors have not made a blind bit of difference. Who says? Why, none other than our Glorious Leader, Tony Blair:
‘Higher taxes’! Of course, that’s the answer! Damn, why didn’t he think of that sooner? Er, except he did think of it sooner. He thought of it back in 1997 and we have been paying increasingly higher taxes ever since. Oh never mind, just hike them up again, that’s bound to work. Keep digging, Tony. June 18th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Are you gainfully employed? If so, does your wicked employer make all manner of unreasonable demands upon you, such as actually turning up for work or doing the job you’re being paid to do? Up until now, there was no means of redress for such manifest injustice and rank exploitation. But, lo, the dark ages are at an end. Thanks to the Health & Safety Executive, all employers must now comply with a ‘Stress Code’:
Now I don’t profess to any expert medical knowledge or even any medical knowledge at all but even I know that a broken foot is a broken foot and pretty easy to detect. But how on earth is something as subjective as ‘stress’ going to be either properly identified or measured? Well, the bright sparks at the H&S have come up with a forumla:
If that isn’t a charter for malingerers, clock-watchers, perennial malcontents and compensation-sniffers then I don’t know what is. And, short of being paid to go the park every day and feed the ducks, what job doesn’t involve some level of stress at some point or other?
And I wonder how many of those are actually ‘I’ve-got-tickets-to-the-football-match’ kind of ‘stress’? It would be tempting to suggest that there is some insidious political agenda behind this but I honestly don’t believe that much thought has gone into it. More likely it is another classic case of bureaucratic empire-building which, as in this case, is usually done on the back of quackery, junk science and manipulated statistics. The result is the same regardless. British entrepreneurs, already snowed under with laws, regulations, diktats and directives, have yet another welfarist function to fulfil and, I daresay, yet another sheaf of related forms that they will be required to waste their time completing. I have a dream about just how much more prosperous and innovative our society could be if its wealth-creators were not required to spend so much of their productive time jumping through government hoops and avoiding state-created bear-traps that have no right to exist. It is rather similar to the dream that, one day, somebody in the parasitical public sector will realise that there is only so much blood they can draw out of the private sector before the latter simply rolls over and dies. I am not at all confident that either dream will be realised any time soon. June 18th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
My article yesterday about the Aidan Rankin piece in the Spectator, and some of the feedback in the comments section, got me thinking about the state of that magazine these days. Frankly, it is a much diminished force, even though in raw terms it has a larger circulation than 20 years ago. I recall first reading this weekly back in the middle of the 1980s, when it had writers of elegance and dagger-sharp wit, such as the late and much missed Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn Waugh), ex Daily Telegraph editorial writer Colin Welch (a great student of Hayek and other classical liberal writers), Ferdinand Mount and much more. There was even dear old drunken Jeffrey Bernard musing at the back of the mag about his slow vodka-assisted march towards the Grim Reaper, love of horseracing and racy women. Alas, with the exception of the incomparable Mark Steyn and the odd individual firecracker of an article, there is more to annoy than charm about this publication today. It reached its high point, I think, when Charles Moore was editor more than 10 years ago. It has never really managed to hit the heights consistently since. It is all too often snobbish, cliched (like the Rankin article quoted above), and inexplicably still gives a perch for that old bigot, Taki. The Spectator used to be a great sounding board for some of the more challenging ideas coming from conservative/libertarian circles. But today the magazine has lost much of its intellectual espri de corps. Instead we the likes of Matthew Parris bemoaning the demise of Saddam Hussein, for goodness sake. I think change is needed. The current editor, Boris Johnson, is obviously too busy working as an MP and working on his role as the Young Fogey for the 21st Century to spend a lot of time improving the magazine. Something needs to be done. I am of course far too modest to suggest a possible replacement. June 17th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
We have received a number of e-mails from our readers in the past couple of days asking for our views on the decision (or, at least, attempt) by Tony Blair to abolish the office of the Lord Chancellor which he announced as a part of his cabinet reshuffle at the end of last week. The Office of Lord Chancellor has been around for some 1400 years. He is the head and the overseer of the Judiciary and he is responsible for appointing Judges and running the Courts. But, he is also a member of the Executive as he sits in the Cabinet. He is, if you will, the interface between the Executive and the Judiciary. Some have suggested that this is a less than ideal method for ensuring judicial independence but, in fact, rigourous observance of custom has served to maintain judicial independence very effectively for a very long time. Blair intends to abolish the Chancellor and replace him with a independent committee to appoint Judges and an ‘Office of the Constitution’ to advice the government on constitutional matters. This has all presented (to the extent that it has been explained at all) as merely the latest stage of the Blair ‘modernisation’ agenda which is intended to provide us with more accountable, responsive government…yadda, yadda, yadda. What is not being said (but which, fortunately, is not being overlooked) is that Blair is trying to eradicate Britain’s remaining constitutional arrangements so as to render us more EU-compatible. Not to mention, of course, that the new offices are highly likely to be staffed with manipulable Blairite cronies. However, this is not quite all going to plan. There is a hubbub from senior Judges and much of the press and Blair has been forced to give a statement explaining his actions in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Added to which, there is the possibility of a legal challenge because nobody seems quite sure whether the Prime Minister actually has the power to abolish the Lord Chancellor. As best as I can tell, the power may exist but, by custom, it has never been exercised so nobody is entirely sure if it does, in fact, exist and, if so, under what circumstances it may be exercised. Oh it’s all a big mess and it is for that reason that we have not yet (as some or our readers inquired) plunged in with our usual robust denunciations and insights. This is just one of a whole batch of country-altering measures that the executive seems to be rushing into enactment with unseemly haste. In fact, the hits are coming so thick and so fast that it is difficult to keep up to date with it all, even for a group effort like this blog. My take, for what it’s worth, is that all this chaos is the result of Blair’s fawning promises to Brussels. Suddenly, he has realised that we are not ‘Europeanised’ enough to be swallowed whole and hence the frantic, sweaty haste to disassemble our constitutional arrangements and render us fit to be served up to new masters. A fitting metaphor I reckon for Blair and his minsters seem as nothing more than harrassed waiters working frenetically to prepare the banquet table prior to the imminent swarm of hungry VIPs. The day soon cometh, methinks. June 17th, 2003 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UK government has been announcing a number of changes to the membership of its Cabinet recently. Topping the news billing was the resignation of Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary. He is a key Blair ally and who had fought tooth and nail to set up “foundation hospitals”, which were a very tentative step towards making the health service more flexible. (I stress the word tentative. The change is a zillion miles from what I would like – total privatisation). He has gone, supposedly to “spend more time with his family”, to use the hackneyed expression, according to this report by Reuters. And yet that report by Reuters does not mention the significance of Milburn’s departure at all. Why not? Blair is in trouble at the moment for the shambolic state of our public services – sure to be a future election issue – and allegedly exaggerating the WMD threat in Iraq. A key ally of his has gone. You would have thought this fact would have been noted. It surely suggests that Chancellor Gordon Brown, who was at loggerheads with Milburn, has seen off a key rival. Be interested to see what the estimable Stephen Pollard, who has been following this issue with customary rigour, makes of all this. June 16th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
British troops injured in war are being forced to pay for private medical treatment or join the long patient lists waiting for operations on the National Health Service. A staffing crisis in the Defence Medical Services (DMS) means that more than 10,000 soldiers – the equivalent of 15 infantry battalions – are currently not fit for frontline duty. Large sections of the Army will be declared un-operational because of the number of troops waiting for surgery unless there is an emergency injection of cash. Commanding officers have been rationing the private treatment but the amount of money available to each unit for private healthcare is not enough to reduce the number of servicemen and women waiting for operations. The Telegraph reports:
In addition to the pain and inconvenience caused by the injuries, service personnel are “medically downgraded”, if the injury prevents them from carrying out their duties. They are unlikely to be able to undertake courses which are physically demanding and cannot be deployed on military operations. Their pay can decrease and they may be passed over for promotion until fully fit. This is just one example of how Blair’s government is treating the armed forces. The undermining of the British military is a result of a profound distrust of it by the New Labour establishment, despite the fact that the armed forces are the only state entity that has consistently bailed the government out of its botched policies (foot and mouth crisis) and allowed Tony to play a world statesman (Afghanistan, Iraq). Blair achieved a measure of uncritical popularity with the American public, due to his support of Bush’s determination to depose Saddam. He risked his job and support of his voters at home in order to do that. It may be commendable and we wholeheartedly supported his efforts that resulted in the liberation of Iraq. We did so without any delusions as to his statist convictions, in which near messianic zeal mixes with autocratic tendencies. However, those on the other side of the Atlantic harbouring inflated opinions about Blair, and occassionally making preposterous comparisons of Blair to Winston Churchill or other great British statesmen, should examine the way their pet foreign leader behaves on the domestic scene. Let the Telegraph article be an eye opener to the true nature of the valiant Prime Minister Blair and his tightly led pack of ministers. We at Samizdata.net do not trust the man further than we can throw him. So watch this space, we will be reporting on the latest development in Blair’s successful dismantling of other worthwhile British institutions.  
Churchill Not Churchill June 15th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here are extracts from a letter by Geoff Bean, an English dairy farmer, addressed to Steve Williamson, a “Special Enforcement Officer” of the agency in York. The York farmer bought builder’s rubble to make repairs round his farm, but received a letter stating that since his land did not have the benefit of a Waste Management Licence, this depositing of “waste” was in clear breach of the law and requesting that Mr Bean submit to a formal interview under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) to “establish” his involvement in this unlicensed waste management operation.
The “waste” for which he had paid good money was about to be put to valuable use replacing the floor of a barn and resurfacing his farm tracks.
Mr Williamson repeated that Mr Bean must submit to interview “under caution”. Mr Bean agreed to spare some of his valuable time to assist Mr Williamson in his “futile attempt” to justify his “bureaucratic red tape”, but reminded him that, since slavery in this country had been abolished, he would expect reimbursement at “£150 an hour or part thereof, plus VAT”. That’s the spirit! But rejoice ye not, since whether Mr Bean will face criminal charges for his breach of EU law, the agency cannot yet comment…  From Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker’s Notebook Update: If you think this is outrageous, you might want to share your thoughts with Mr Steve Williamson himself. And while you are at it, why not to cc his boss, the regional director Mr Andrew Wood. We have done a bit of research and think these email addresses will work, given the format of the Environmental Agency emails. June 15th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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