The election has dealt a major blow to the political class, though it hasn’t been a catharsis; we still hate them.
– Raedwald
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… the Greens won an MP in the enclave of Brighton, but their share of the vote fell. I find this quite amazing, really. After five years of relentless environmental yakkery in the mass media, bombarding us on all channels at once, the Greens received a lower share of votes than the BNP. All that most Greens can now look forward to is to return to their yurts, and prepare for recycling. – Andrew Orlowski, writing in the Register, and reaching the fairly sensible conclusion that the reason every political party did badly was because they are all intellectually bankrupt, and the public is starting to get this. Read the whole thing. May 7th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It is amusing to be honest. The Tory party faces a PM with no actual mandate, who is as charismatic as a bowl of cold Scottish porridge and who has presided over economically calamitous times… and the best the Tory Party can do is… 36.1 percent. I now look forward to some bracing political paralysis and hopefully the unedifying mess of a hanged… I mean hung parliament… hanged would be most edifying indeed. With a little luck the inevitable steaming pile of discordant political prima donnas will further discredit the whole establishment with their antics. I can only hope that in the coming months this period will do lasting damage to the Tory party in order to provide a wedge of daylight for the likes of Libertarians and UKIP to exploit. The ‘Middle of the Road’ is where you generally find road kill. May 7th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, it was Samizdata wot won it. Perry de Havilland said a plague on all their houses last week. Chris Cooper said last night that he’d voted for none of the above. And the result? None of the above. A plague on all their houses. Who says blogs don’t have any influence? Here are the various plagues: Conservatives: A horror story. No absolute majority. Will Cameron manage to contrive an absolute majority after another general election? (Think 1974.) Will he be able to contrive any kind of government in the meantime? Maybe and maybe, but there’s a world out there, and what Cameron has to do about that may make him even less electorally appealing than he is now. Cameron has been all at sea ever since the boom went bust. As have … Labour: A horror story. In terms of percentage of the vote, Michael Foot did a tiny bit worse in 1983 than Brown. That’s Brown’s only comfort. But now, do they try to cling on or do they walk away? Neither choice makes them look good. Unelectedness versus “we made the mess but the rest of you must sort it out”. LibDems: A horror story. Cleggmania fizzled out ignominiously. Yet they can still decide everything, in the short run. So which of two profoundly unappealing big parties do the LibDems pick? Neither choice makes them look good. Plus: do they plunge the political system into a huge row about proportional representation? But the problem is not how they’re picked; it’s what the hell they now do about that world out there. And what the hell kind of “mandate” do the LibDems now have to demand anything at all? Yet if Clegg comes away from all this with nothing, what will his party think? Others: BNP, UKIP, Greens, etc. My impression is UKIP did not too shabbily, but not too shabbily doesn’t really count. At least the Greenies got a stuffing. SNP hardly laid a glove on Labour in Scotland. Just heard a politician talking on the telly – I think somebody called Tony McNulty:
Boris Johnson agrees. Now I’m watching him say that the voters hate all the politicians, and have found a way to make all of them suffer. All those us who wanted the whole damn lot of them squirming as a result of this election have now got our wish. Now Brown is making a speech. He’s trying to cling on. May 7th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Written by a character called Paul B, over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog. I happen increasingly to agree. While I yield to no-one in my admiration for much of what Scotland has brought to Britain and to the wider world – this book is a wonderful description – the brutal fact is that Scotland is now exerting an outrageously one-sided, and disproportionate, influence on British affairs. Its politicians have carefully natured a client state in the big cities such as Glasgow, where a huge proportion of the locals subsist on state benefits. If, as the Coffee House commenter suggests, we were to make it possible for Scotland to operate as an independent nation, then the Scottish Labour Party machine, a profoundly corrupt one and similar to the Chicago Democrat machine that gave the US Barack Obama would no longer exert its malign influence on England’s affairs. It is time to cut Scotland loose, both for its interest, and more to the point, for those who want to see the back of the Scottish Labour Party and its arm-lock on UK affairs for the past decade and a half. In the meantime, I suspect that the international bond market is going to have the casting vote on what happens next after this inconclusive election. May 7th, 2010 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
I always go to the polls. I dutifully scrawl some libertarian slogan on the ballot. Some vote-counter reads it, puts my paper in the “spoiled” pile, and – who knows? – maybe has their life changed by a Damascene conversion to the cause of liberty, years later. A pitiful exercise? Perhaps. But I could not bear to stay away and be thought apathetic. I have given up trying to make my nearest and dearest understand. She says I am opting out – or sitting on the fence – or I think I don’t make a difference. I try to explain that my vote makes precisely as much difference as hers: namely, infinitesimally more than zero. Her vote and mine are symbolic acts. My explanation is useless too. Suppose there were a “None of the above” box on our ballot papers? Should I use it? Or would that be validating the whole rotten system? Do those who stay right away and watch the movie channel making a more valid protest? Abstaining even from a “None of the above” box would be an act of exquisite hyper-rejection. Hmmm … attractive. May 6th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
An hour after the polls closed, and the BBC has tortured its exit poll to death. They keep on talking it down, because they can’t believe that the LIb Dems can really have lost seats, as the exit poll says. A single election result is in. A rock-solid Labour majority has been slightly dented by the Conservative swing. Vernon Bogdanor extrapolates it to say that the Conservatives will get an overall majority. The limited pleasure of the election broadcast will fade soon. I enjoyed the first few minutes as the BBC’s ludicrously garish setup battled with good old-fashioned gremlins. One panel of a giant bar graph of the projected seats vanished for several minutes. Michael Gove’s artificially rejuvenated mug loomed at us while his mike failed utterly. Jeremy Paxman bellowed at an interviewee as if he could make him respond faster that way, for all the world as if he’d never encountered satellite delay before. Mariella Frostrup thinks it’s terrible that we’re all in (strangely pronounced) thrall to the markets, and what a pity we haven’t invented a better and more humane way to manage our finances. Watching her say that makes me want to go to bed, and not in a good way. Oh bloody hell. Jeremy Vine is knocking down huge trains of CGI dominoes for some reason. Generations yet unborn will injure themselves laughing at the Beeb’s presentation tonight. May 6th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s conceivable, although I promise nothing, that I may do some of this “live blogging” thing, come the early hours of tomorrow morning. It depends on my mood at the time, and on such things as computer availability, dongle workability and so forth and so on. Somehow I doubt that Perry de Havilland will be hanging on every result. And oh look, he just said it again, see immediately below! So, if none of us here manage it, but if you nevertheless hunger for this kind of thing, how about paying attention this this guy?
Well, if it’s your kind of thing, he says he’s going to start around 10 pm. Maybe Perry might even want to give it a glance. He and Simon Clark of Taking Liberties, who wrote the words quoted above and to whom thanks for the email alerting me to this, do seem to be on the same wavelength. May 6th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Benedict Brogan wrote a Telegraph article called “Election 2010: a bracing reminder of the price we pay for political freedom“, in which he notes the cost to Britain’s young soldiers in Afghanistan in juxtaposition with the scenes of election tumult. Well I can think of several arguably good reasons for western troops to be fighting in Afghanistan but I sure hate to think of anyone dying for political freedom… freedom, sure… but that qualifying word in front does rather change things. Politics is what we call the struggle to control the means of collective coercion. It may be a process we cannot avoid but it is, at best, a necessary evil… and most of the time it is just evil without the necessary. Freedom is essential and worth fighting for… but anyone who died to defend political anything died for all the wrong reasons. What does ‘political freedom’ even mean in Britain? The right to vote who gets to rape you? Britain’s political system is not something to get all misty eyed about because most politics has nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom” but rather forcing people to do things they would rather not do. It is for the most part about people using the proxy violence of the state to take things they want and punish people they do not like far more often than it is about dealing with the genuine collective threats of plague, disorder and war. And as for this being an ‘extraordinary’ election, as the linked article claims, I cannot recall one where it mattered less which of the largely interchangeable plonkers on offer gets into Number 10. All that will change is which of set of rapacious thugs says who gets snout space at Westminster’s trough filled with other people’s money. But of course many will vote Tory on the ‘lesser evil’ principle and no doubt act surprised when Cameron more or less does all the things he has said he will do to prop up the intrusive regulatory welfare state. People voting for an ever so slightly lesser evil (and quite possibly not even that) will get exactly what they vote for… another evil government. Nice one, guys. Today is the day that nothing important really changes. May 6th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they’ll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication. And they are still bashing ahead with this policy, as I serendipitously discovered when I got home last night and was browsing through an internet site called Weird Asia News. Mostly this site features weird headlines concerning weird stories like: Papuan Police Recruits with an Enlarged Penis Denied Job; and: Britons Suffer Chemical Burns From Chinese Sofas, which I suppose I ought to care about more than I do what with me having bought a sofa myself not that long ago; and: South Koreans Revolutionize iPhone Market with Sausage Meat Stylus, the last one being a lot less interesting than it sounds. But in among such drollery is to be found this report, entitled Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown, about how they are even now, still – well, as of last month anyway – enforcing this exercise in national suicide.
At Perry’s, conversation later ensued about why they unleashed this madness. What were they thinking? What are they still thinking? My guess was that this began as a classic communist response to shortages. Communism always causes shortages. Faced with their shortages, the Chinese Communists figured that if they could only reduce the number of people suffering from these shortages, the shortages would go away. If that’s right, then, as Perry said, this was another of those Fixed Quantity fallacies in action. Also a classic case of a doomed attempt at economic calculation under Socialism. My further guess now is that this has become a pissing contest between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, with the government now being too bloody stubborn to back down. If they give up on this policy now, that will suggest either (a) that it was wrong for them to have persisted with this for so long, and maybe even wrong for them to have done it at all; or else (b) that they no longer have the power – the balls, you might say – to enforce such arrangements. I have heard it suggested that it is simply that the Chinese government fears the Chinese people and wants to thin the numbers down. When this policy got started, the Chinese government was much more completely in charge than it is said to be now. But if that is the thinking, why impose a policy that results in millions of sex-starved men wandering around? That’s not going to keep the peace. May 5th, 2010 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Guido Fawkes wryly notes that the Financial Times, which for a long time has backed Labour in its editorial pages, and for a long time taken a ploddingly, predictably, wrong-headed stance on many issues (such as joining the euro), has now come out for the Tories. Of course, the FT, like the Economist – which has also backed Cameron – is a purveyor of conventional wisdom, so it may be that a centrist, social democratic paper like the FT feels fairly comfortable in backing a party that has not shown any considerably conservative political views. But as Guido says, there may be another reason in that the FT has seen some of its readers die off or defect to other, more robustly pro-market, publications. If the latter is the case, then that is an admirable lesson to be learnt: if you want to see how a product has to change in the face of consumer trends, look at the business media. May 4th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I seldom read the Independent, but today the blogosphere lead me to this story, about an Indy journalist, Jerome Taylor, who got beaten up for the crime of investigating electoral fraud in East London.  I also learned something that I did not know, about the art of being beaten up:
I never knew that, but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Punched in the face is not good, but you really don’t want to be kicked in the kidneys. Presumably Taylor managed to remain standing. It reminds me of an old Elton John song that I have always quite liked. Luckily for Taylor, he was saved from further punishment by a nearby onlooker who intervened, which was enough for the beaters-up to go away, two of them “into the candidate’s house”. Good bit of journalism, that last bit. Your face is a mess, but you still clock the vital fact about your attackers. I hope (a) that Jerome Taylor’s career prospects improve as a result of his ordeal, and (b) that both the barbarians who did this and the barbaric puppeteers they were doing it for live more miserable and complicated and dysfunctional lives from now on. Raedwald, the blogger who lead me to this story, says that it was “naivety or foolishness ” that got Taylor into this fracas. Maybe so, but that strikes me as a bit harsh under the circumstances. Isn’t trying to learn the truth about things, sometimes naively and foolishly, going where people who already know it all are too wise to venture, what journalism is all about? Also, was that Good Samaritan onlooker who chased away the villains also perhaps being rather naïve and rather foolish? Again, maybe yes, but it’s a good thing he did what he did. May 4th, 2010 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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