Everything the Tories did to crash the economy, Labour criticised them for doing too little of.
– Guy Herbert
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Assume all public bodies have the same goal â and it isnât what it says on the tin. You might think the Committee for the Promotion of Postage Stamp Collections is obsessed with postage stamps, or the Sewage Treatment Works Agency is fascinated by sewage. Actually they both do the same thing: they grow their budgets. They do this by talking about the vital importance of postage stamps and sewage, yes, but building their empire, creeping their mission and employing more people is the main thing they strive to do every day. Evidence for this comes from their public pronouncements which are dominated by demands for greater budgets, and their private conversations, ditto. In all of recorded history, there is probably no instance of a quango requesting a smaller budget. August 4th, 2022 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Readers of this blog know that I sometimes use the writing style called ‘English understatement’ – and though I’m Scottish, I’m also British and have a claim to it. So when I read
I definitely felt my culture was being appropriated. However, I’m not sure whom to accuse. Instapundit referred me to Liberty Unyielding, who prefaced their quote of it with ‘As the New York Times notes,’, and the NYT may just be quoting the remark of the nurse practitioner who ran the intake interview at the shelter. She obeyed her supervisor’s order to admit the recently-paroled-yet-again-as-now-harmless and even more recently reclassified-as-now-female Harvey, but even after the murder of Susan Leyden (whose body parts were so chopped up and miscellaneously discarded that determining her gender identity, never mind her identity, may have taken the pathologist some time), it could be the nurse thought it prudent to express her agenda-questioning doubts only in this very cautiously-phrased way. So I’m not clear whom I should demand be cancelled by Twitter, Facebook and everyone else. Meanwhile, I clearly have to work harder on my English understatement skills if I am to keep our culture distinct from the one across the pond. In the good old days when Trump was in the White House, there was no doubt which side of the Atlantic stood for understatement and which didn’t, but it now appears that when the cabal stole the election they also stole that clarity. I am working as best I can to recreate it, and welcome in advance any commenter’s constructive critique of how well or otherwise I’m succeeding. BTW, I wasn’t looking, still less hoping, for occasion to write more posts like this one – but that’s not the only thing in the last two years that I was not looking or hoping for. August 3rd, 2022 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I first saw this story, “Daughter who buried father in illegal woodland pagan funeral avoids jail”, my outrage-meter went off the scale at the apparent violation of religious freedom. Unnecessarily, it turned out. Eirys Brett was not in court for conducting a pagan funeral. She would still have been in court had the funeral service been the Order for The Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer. She was in court because she did not register her father’s death and because she buried him in a place not set aside for that purpose:
The judge was not without sympathy. He said,
It is not clear to me whether the woodland area where the late Mr Brett was buried was on his own land. If it was, I can see no reason why he should not be buried there. However, if the vaguely specified “woods” were not his woods, I do see a problem. If I found out that someone had buried their dead relative in my garden I would be disconcerted, however well they cleared up afterwards. It is the second charge that interests me more. She failed to register his death. In the UK it is a criminal offence not to register a death. Why? As an inveterate reader of detective stories, I can think of some good reasons for this law. But as a libertarian, I feel obliged not to simply accept it because it is a law that goes back to the days when the State laid fewer burdens on us than it does now. What do you think? August 2nd, 2022 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Remember this? “Glastonbury 2017: ‘Ohh Jeremy Corbyn’ chant sweeps festival as revellers get political”
I had forgotten the link to “Seven Nation Army”. The Glastonbury set are fine with army-themed song titles – armies that actually fight, not so much: “Jeremy Corbyn urges west to stop arming Ukraine”
August 2nd, 2022 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s quite a lot in that paragraph but it’s this idea of “spheres of influence” – so beloved of Jonathan Mearsheimer – that I am going to concentrate on. What is a “sphere of influence” I wonder? I suppose it is an agreement between powerful states that one of them gets to control a third state’s domestic and foreign policy. The key word here is “agreement”. Has the United States, or Nato or any Western institution ever accepted that Ukraine was part of Russia’s sphere of influence? I don’t think so, not least because I don’t think that the US has ever formally accepted the idea of “spheres of influence”. At least not for the rest of the world. It claims it for itself. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration used to refer to Nicaragua and El Salvador as being in “America’s back yard”. In other words those states were not going to be given a choice as to which path they took even if Cuba was for some reason. Of course, in that case there was no one able to seriously contest America’s contention. That does not apply in Ukraine. But other than Central America, does the US have spheres of influence? Is Britain, for instance, inside America’s sphere? It doesn’t seem to be. If it was we’d still be members of the EU. And I’d have an SLR on my wall. And as for France and Germany they might as well be herding cats. So, no, the concept of spheres of influence does not appear to be one that the US recognises. What it recognises – however imperfectly – is self-determination, freedom, democracy, that sort of thing. If you are a democracy, and embrace freedom, the US will support you if it can. Or, as John F Kennedy put it – words that are carved in stone on his memorial in Runnymede, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” So, if anything, the war in Ukraine is not a battle over spheres of influence but a conflict between two completely different concepts of international relations. For what it is worth I think the American doctrine will win. The prospect of freedom means that the Ukrainians have sky-high morale. The fact that they are being aided by free(-ish) countries means they have – or will have – vastly superior equipment. July 31st, 2022 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone posted this on Twitter…  And Twitter suspended their account. Thou shalt not blaspheme against the True Faith. July 30th, 2022 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ex-soldierâs supposed crime? He had posted a trans-BLM-swastika on social media. This emblem was originally designed and posted by Laurence Fox and re-posted by many others â including the Daily Mail. Its purpose was to highlight the authoritarianism of âtrans-activistâ groups such as Stonewall, whose influence runs so deeply in the police (and in Whitehall, local government, universities and employers) that one of the attending police officers was even, according to Harryâs report, wearing a rainbow badge saying âHampshire Policeâ on it. Harry is right to say that the rainbow flag is a political symbol, and that the police are legally obligated to be impartial (but they arenât). Imagine the situation at some Hampshire Constabulary office where these same officers were sitting down assessing the complaint theyâd apparently received about the ex-soldierâs post mocking the rainbow flag â which is a lawful statement in common law and also protected by Article 10 of the ECHR. They can hardly have been unbiased â one look down at their rainbow badges would have told them what to do. They simply cannot claim that they acted impartially when they themselves wear as insignia the very symbol being mocked. – Ian Rons And by the way, I think this is the swastika giving the wokesters the vapours…  July 30th, 2022 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
The video embedded in this tweet from Laurence Fox apparently shows someone being arrested for tweeting. I cannot see the video, but the top comment says,
Apparently the arrest had something to do with that meme that shows four LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flags (my goodness, “Newsround” has changed a lot since John Craven presented it) arranged so that the triangular inserts form a swastika. Fox’s Wikipedia entry says, “In June 2022 Fox tweeted an image of a swastika made from the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag with the caption ‘You can openly call the [Union Jack] a symbol of fa[s]cism and totalitarianism on Twatter. You cannot criticise the holy flags’. This led to him being temporarily suspended from Twitter for a day.” This tweet from Richard Taylor of GB News may show the same video. As you can probably tell, I am not at all sure what is going on. Is my inability to play the video censorship by Twitter, or just my old computer not being up to the job? Some accounts seem to imply that that the threatened arrest was not carried through, although that reassures me very little. As we have all seen, making the process the punishment has been a very successful way for the police to chill free speech while avoiding having to defend their actions in court. July 29th, 2022 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
[The WEF crew and associated elites] are not Marxists. Marxism is rightly discredited (it really is) to all but a lunatic fringe. Even âCommunistâ China is not really Marxist, not in any way that Karl Marx would have recognised. These people owe far more ideologically to Henri de Saint-Simon or even Giovanni Gentile, which makes them far more dangerous, because so few people have any idea who Saint-Simon or Gentile were. – Perry de Havilland July 29th, 2022 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
We need to talk about how demented the elitesâ crusade against modern farming has become. As a result of the global lockdowns and the war in Ukraine, the world is experiencing some pretty serious food shortages. A report published by the UN last month said that around 180million people are dealing with âfood crisisâ in 2022, and an additional 19million people are expected to face âchronic undernourishmentâ in 2023. And what are the elites doing in the face of this crisis of sustenance? Bizarrely, perversely, theyâre making it harder for farmers to grow crops, to make food. This is worse than fiddling while Rome burns. Itâs flicking matches while Rome burns. July 28th, 2022 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Tories are skilled marketers of the âfreedomâ side in that equation. Thus, we find Truss promising to âliberaliseâ planning laws and Sunak urging the need for more post-Brexit âderegulationâ. But the main populist element in the Conservative governmentâs mandate cannot be ignored: âtake back controlâ. That means securing the nationâs porous borders, having a zero-tolerance policy for any indulgent woke guff which distracts vital public services from fulfilling their true purpose, repatriating our laws and courts, presiding over infrastructure projects which serve the common good, and rediscovering that whackiest of reactionary notions: that the police exist to suppress crime. The police in modern Britain may be the best example of control and freedom being abused in equal measure. Soft on actual crime, they take a serious interest whenever a law-abiding person strays from the shackles of political correctness. They will sooner quiz a TERF than catch a thief. July 27th, 2022 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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