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I share Perry’s high opinion of Alice Bachini’s Libertarian Parent In The Countryside blog, provided only that she is able to keep it going, which it looks like she might.
Even if she doesn’t she’s already supplied many good blogules, of which my favourite so far is this, the best short explanation of the exact place of “spin” in British politics that I have yet come across:
… New Labour’s gift for spin was never what enamoured them to the British public, it’s more complicated than that; in fact, we just thought spin was what professional politicians did, and we wanted a not-totally-incompetent government to manage the economy for us, so we voted for the one that spun competently thinking maybe they were capable of adding up a few numbers as well. Or at least that they would actually be in their offices looking at a few numbers now and then instead of just hanging out in brothels wearing football shirts and hiding brown paper bags of money about their persons. Anyway, spin was the price for competence, we thought, which is why we’re still paying it.
The hangers out in brothels etc. are Britain’s Conservative Party, in case you live on the far side of the moon and didn’t recognise them. I’ve been saying something along these lines in conversation for years, but never got around to telling the universe.
The entire quoted paragraph above was in brackets in the original, a flying-off-at-a-tangent in a piece that was basically aimed at Tony Blair’s dress sense, body language, etc., provoked by a Telegraph photograph of the Great Leader.
There is a certain kind of right-wing pundit whose hatred for British Prime Minister Tony Blair is so great that, even when the man takes a stand worth supporting, such as Blair’s brave backing of Bush over the case for deposing Saddam, the rightwinger will always find some way of qualifying his support with a kind of low-tempo sneer. Sadly, Tory MP and Spectator magazine editor Boris Johnson just cannot quite bring himself to resist a barb or two in Tony Blair’s direction over this issue.
Of course, Johnson does have a valid point. If we are able and willing to oust Saddam who poses a threat to the West due to the alleged acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), then why not move to oust the brutal Zimbabwe dictator, Robert Mugabe, who has unleashed violence and mayhem against holders of British passports in that afflicted country? A fair point, but Mugabe is at least not yet attempting to get WMDs, at least as far as we know.
And on another point, Johnson omits to mention that Blair’s strong support for Bush, in contrast to that of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is another sign that Blair is backing the Anglosphere horse rather than the Euro-federal one. And for Boris Johnson, a so-called eurosceptic, that should be cause for celebration. Or maybe Johnson is not quite such a skeptic as he makes out.
Over on Airstrip One they’re getting themselves in something of a lather over the prospect of British involvement in any attack on Iraq. Hadrian Wise is forthright:
“There are many reasons for opposing British participation in an American attack on Iraq, but there is only one good one: that it is not in our interests.”
Really? I have what I consider to be jolly sound reasons for taking quite the opposite view.
Anyone who has not been in hibernation for the last 20 years must surely by now have noticed that Britain as a sovereign nation is being subjected to a remorseless process of extinction by degrees and I think it uncontroversial to suggest that, if Britain is subsumed into the Holy Belgian Empire, then any further discussion of British national interests will have been made entirely redundant by virtue of there no longer being a country called Britain. Are we agreed? Good. Let’s move on.
Given the above-mentioned scenario, one would have thought that the most screamingly urgent national interest would be to avoid it all costs and I suggest that a good way of avoiding it would be by steadfastly maintaining our strategic alliance with the USA whose own national interests are, as has been widely noted, growing increasingly inverse to the more nebulous concerns of the Europeans. This is an opportunity that British patriots could not, dare not miss.
As Our Glorious Leader maintains his pledge to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Americans, he alienates not only about two-thirds of his own political party but, far more importantly, drives an ever-deeper wedge between Britain and Brussels; a wedge that can only prove to be vital to our national survival. Does Blair have the political capital to throw us into the war against Iraq and get Britain into the Euro? I think not. The choice confronting us, therefore, is a) the extinction of Britain or b) the extinction of Saddam Hussein. Ooh, that’s a tough one!
Now before anybody embarks upon a lambast of my apparent callousness, I do realise that waging war on Saddam will, in all likelihood, lead to loss of both British troops and Iraqi civilians. I want to assure all that I am not indifferent to this but we’re talking about stark national interests here and, in that context, such sentimentalities do not get a look in. They never have and they never will.
So, as far as I am concerned, Tony Blair is doing the right thing and I cannot tell you how strange it feels to type those words. This is because I, along with many others, always believed that he saw his own destiny as future President of Europe. But I now suspect this may have changed. I think that the hand of history that Blair feels on his shoulder has shoved him rudely onto a different track; a track that I, as a patriotic Englishman, find most agreeable and one that I could scarcely have conceived of on September 10th 2001.
First, they came for the Haggis and I said nothing, because I did not eat Haggis
Then, they came for the Oysters, and I said nothing, because I did not eat Oysters
Then, they came for the Pheasant, and I said nothing, because I did not eat pheasant
Then, they came for the Venison, and I said nothing, because I did not eat Venison
And finally, they came for the Pate de Fois Gras, and there was nothing left worth eating!
David Harthill wants to know who, on the probable eve of a war with Iraq, is really ‘worth the money’. He has a thought on the firefighters’ pay demand…
…which, attempting to emulate the incomparable Scrofulous Steve, I thought might work better as an animated gif.
Current conditions:
A firefighter’s pay for an 18 year old starts at an annual £16,305, not including overtime at an hourly rate of £11.16. After 6 months this rises to annual £17,061 and £11.69 per hour respectively, and rises to a maximum of £21,648 / £14.82 after 15 years service without promotion.
[Source: FBU website]
By comparison, an infantry soldier’s pay starts at £12,578 and can rise
to a maximum of £15,290 without promotion. No overtime is available –
you work as hard and as long as you have to.
[Source: British Army website]
Has anyone visited the Fire Brigades Union website? They don’t mince words:
“…the Fire Brigades Union is part of the working-class movement, and, linking itself with the international trade union movement, has as its ultimate aim the bringing about of the Socialist system of society.”
David Harthill
…about The Daily Telegraph.
In an article called Bags of Sense apparently the ‘right wing’ Telegraph’ thinks it is okay for the state to tax us 10 pence per plastic carrier bag at supermarkets because:
Taxes are generally disagreeable. But this case is different. For one thing, the charge was not introduced as a surreptitious way of raising revenue. Nor has it had unintended consequences. Whereas the increase in tobacco taxes has led to smuggling, and rising fuel duties have encouraged hauliers to fill up across the Channel, the bag levy has altered consumer behaviour precisely as envisaged.
And so the Telegraph, which on one hand claims to be at the crusading vanguard of defending our civil liberties against the state with their ‘A Free Country’ campaign, is nevertheless happy with the concept that it is perfectly okay for the state to impose “changes to consumer behaviour” provided the objective is not really to raise revenue.
Sorry, but most taxes are not ‘disagreeable’, they are actually immoral theft backed by the threat of violence and this one is no different. I do not want the state having any say whatsoever in my private ‘consumer behaviour’. Of course one must keep in mind that The Daily Telegraph is a Tory newspaper, and thus actually has nothing against vast acts of statism per se, just so long as ‘The Right People’ are in control of them.
Bags of Sense? Bags of Bullshit actually.
I am referring to Harold Pinter, that well known playwright and signatory to the ‘Free Slobodan Milosevic’ campaign.
It seems he has avoided dying from cancer for a while, which I am sure will gladden the hearts of socialist mass murderers the length and breadth of Yugoslavia and Republica Serbska. I am sure his friends at the Tatler will be thrilled.
Vermin one and all.
A useful pointer for those of you determined to stem the spread of Tranzi ideology: it seems to rush in to fill a vacuum. The vacuum in question here is the British medical establishment in the form of The Lancet, its leading publication.
According to the Sawbones Union, what the world needs is a global body to direct economic development. Thus proving that just because someone is a doctor doesn’t mean they’ve actually got any brains.
The article includes this thigh-slappingly hilarious assertion:
“It says there is no consensus on the best policies for development, as there has been no scientific analysis of what works and what does not.”
Hmm, I diagnose an advanced case of Economic Illiteracy. I recommend that they be locked in a room with Paul Marks three times a day before meals. If symptoms persist, then I’m afraid that the condition is probably terminal.
If you like shooting guns for sport then it follows, as a matter of unalterable logic in today’s world, that you must be a nutter, a psycho, clearly not the kind of person to invite to dinner parties and definitely not in tune with today’s world. Well, that at least is the message given out by our ‘splendidly objective’ state-owned broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
In an excellent article in this week’s edition of the Spectator, Michael Yardley shows how Britons’ recent success in shooting competitions at the Commonwealth Games were blanked by the BBC.
I particularly liked this paragraph:
“Shooting by law-abiding individuals remains an icon of liberty and thus a target for destruction by the apparatichiks of the nanny state. Shooters understand what political correctness is about: the empowerment of the central state by means of the disempowerment of the individual. Accept the idea that the individual is not to be trusted, that there is a need for wardens of thought in a world without sharp edges or real risk, and the battle for freedom is lost. You might, meanwhile, like to take up shooting just because it is fun.”
Well, on the latter point, I am doing just that. I am off to Las Vegas in September to attend a Front Sight course, in what promises to be three days of excellent handgun shooting practice. It is such a shame that this noble sport cannot be practised in the UK.
It may have caught the eye of readers in the UK the other day that the Inland Revenue has redesigned its logo. Samizdata.net brings you a special preview!
In case anyone who has been observing the Tory Party in Britain has not noticed, they have not been doing very well for rather a long time now. In spite of years of Tony Blair’s less that glorious ‘precedency’, the Conservatives are still trailing a very distant second place in England and are more of less nonexistent in Scotland, riven everywhere by factions fighting over control of the carcass of the Party and quite bereft of any distinctly identifiable ‘Tory’ ideology. In fact there is not even any sign of an intellectual or political ‘wave of the future’ starting to build up… not even a ‘ripple of the future’ really.
Now we are being told by Norman Tebbit, the Dr. Harold Shipman of British politics, that what the Tory Party really needs is a purge of any ‘libertarians’ (i.e. anyone who likes non-white sportsmen or dislikes the state telling them what to do with their genitals or actually has anything resembling a new idea).
Of course Tebbit has quite a lot of experience masterminding Tory party purges. He shut down the Federation of Conservative Students in 1987, thereby guaranteeing the Conservative Party would become an ideology-free zone from then onwards.
Funny how the party has been in decline ever since it eradicated its most radical and highly motivated roots. They don’t call it ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing.
How else does one explain this?
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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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