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Brace yourselves for a truly shocking prediction:
Just think, if it were not for this ‘influential group of economists’ none of us would have had even the merest inkling that increased taxes were even remotely possible. March 21st, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Well, I expected Big Blunkett to try and take advantage of the Madrid atrocity to pursue his own political ends. Even I didn’t expect him to do so this quickly or this blatantly. The Sunday Times reports that a row has erupted in cabinet after Home Secretary David Blunkett attempted to change the agreed government position on compulsory ID Cards. According to the report, Blunkett is attempting to sneak in to the draft Bill a clause that will allow a rapid move towards compulsion. This move is bitterly opposed by Jack Straw, Alistair Darling, Paul Boateng and Patricia Hewitt. Although the draft was apparently published “earlier this month”, it seems clear that Big Blunkett is relying on public fear after Madrid to cynically push through his pet scheme. We need to remind people at every opportunity that Spain already has a national Identity Card system – and it did nothing to stop the Madrid bombings. Cross-posted from Big Blunkett – Watching David Blunkett March 21st, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
By every standard that can be measured, participation and interest in electoral politics in this country is in precipitous decline. With every year that passes the figures for voter turnout, party membership and financial donations drop a few more points down the graph. The process is slow but apparently inexorable and (for obvious reasons) it is sending an adenalin-rush of panic coursing through the veins of the political classes:
Says Leader of the Commons and Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain, who appears to be far less concerned with political bankruptcy than with the very real threat of financial bankruptcy:
So Mr. Hain is proposing that the funding that he and his colleagues have signally failed to amass through voluntary donation should now be taken by force. In return for this ‘generosity’, civil society will be merged with ‘the party’ to become a single living, breathing, sweating, symbiotic creature of state.
Some people will believe that. But then some people will believe anything. March 21st, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mentioned en passant in another alarming article in which David Blunkett threatens yet further abridgements of civil liberties under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, it is noted he and the European Commission advocated the idea of…
Oh wonderful. March 20th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Far be it from me to find anything hopeful about the PSOE election victory in Spain last weekend. After two election terms of relative fiscal sanity and an end to the grotesque corruption of the Felipe Gonzalez era, a return to PSOE government is bad news for Spain. It is also extremely bad news for the rest of the European Union, as this represents a shift away from pragmatism towards an (even more) collectivist EU agenda. It is not however, necessarily good news for terrorism. Among the multitude of scandals faced down by the previous Spanish Socialist government the ‘GAL affair’ looms large. GAL was the name assumed by a anti-ETA terror group in the 1980s that entered France and murdered ETA members and supporters. I no longer have the details but there was a spate of terrorist attacks on Basques living in the Bordeaux area, as well as closer to the Spanish border. Following the arrest of several GAL members it transpired that they were all either members of law-enforcement agencies and the armed forces, or recently had been. It later emerged that the money to finance GAL came from the Ministry of the Interior and was signed off ultimately by the Minister. Whilst the Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez himself was never proven by documentary evidence to have sanctioned the GAL death squad, let me just say that if he ever wins a libel action on the issue, I will be amazed. Two things are worth noting, firstly that both the French and Spanish governments were under Socialist control at the time, second that Spanish public opinion was firmly on the side of the death squads: the only non-Basque critics of the policy tended to shut up because it was their own party that was doing the dirty deeds. In France the President from 1981 to 1995 was François Mitterrand, the former far-right youth organisation member turned founder of the modern French Socialist Party. It is worth noting his record as an Interior Minister in the 1950s. In 2001, one of the big political scandals was the publication of Services Spéciaux: Algérie 1955-1957, by the retired General Paul Aussaresses. The French Left went beserk and managed to get the retired former leader of the Action Service to have his Légion d’honneur withdrawn. They also tried to get his pension removed. The ostensible reason was that General Aussaresses had exposed and admitted the use of torture against Algerian terrorists during the Battle of Algiers. In my copy of this extremely interesting book I find on page 12:
My translation: For his part, François Mitterrand, the Minister of the Interior responsible for the French administrative districts of Algeria, believing that the police was powerless to maintain the Republic’s peace, sent his chief advisor to the Ministry of National Defense to resquest the use of troops [including the 11th Shock Paras, better known as the Action Service]. He also declared without ambiguity on the 12th November, before the Chamber of Deputies [French House of Representatives]: “I will not tolerate negotiations with the enemies of the Fatherland. The only negotiation, is war!” It took the removal of the French Socialists and the introduction of the General de Gaulle to bring about appeasement of the Algerian terrorists. There is a strand of Western Socialist thought that takes the secular State seriously. I seriously doubt if there will be any safe-haven for Islamist terrorists in Spain for the forseeable future. Jacobins ain’t soft on Terror. March 20th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you were to read a book a week, between the ages of 10 and 70, taking two weeks off a year for Christmas, give or take, this would give you an achievable target of about 3000 books to read in an average lifetime, before you would have to take that train to meet your Maker. Assuming fifteen hundred of these are strictly entertainment by Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Isaac Asimov et al, to get you through the night, and five hundred are by Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn et al, to blend some serious education with some palatable fiction, this leaves you with about a thousand strictly educational books to educate yourself with, about life, the universe, and everything. Not many. Now we could discuss what nine hundred and ninety nine of these books could be, in a must-be-read anti-statist canon. Books by Von Mises perhaps, or Rothbard, or Pinker, or Popper, or Hitler, or Marx, or even Hans-Hermann Hoppe. But there is one book which should come ahead of all these others, in my humble opinion, particularly for those who wish to understand the origins of the modern state and its calamitous works. And that book is The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. A major Florentine diplomat and part-time militia general around the turn of the sixteenth century, Machiavelli lived in an age of turbulence and Renaissance-inspired change, and astonished the world of international politics with his study of classical, mediaeval, and from his point of view, modern government, which he formulated in ‘The Prince’. Its tenets became the substrate in which all of our own subsequent politicians have been swimming ever since, with its mixture of candour, violence, treachery, and skulduggery, a world in which a modern government can both mouth its belief in the rule of law and licence its agents to kill its enemies at will, wherever they may be, and however innocent they may be before this sanctified rule of law. The book is simply astonishing. → Continue reading: Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince March 20th, 2004 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday evening I was channel hopping by way of relaxation and chanced upon a UKTV History programme about the Cold War, and in particular about the doings and sayings of the rocket scientists. (Here is the UKTV History home page, but I can find no internet reference to this particular programme.) The programme seemed fairly good, on the whole, but towards the end of it there was one glaring – not to say outrageous – non sequitur. → Continue reading: The UKTV History channel – underestimating Ronald Reagan and his rocket men March 20th, 2004 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
No doubt many readers of this site are of the libertarian persuasion after reading scholarly tomes by Ayn Rand, or Karl Popper. Not me, though. I simply observed governments in action, and compared them to the workings of the free market. One interesting thing I have observed over the years is that even governments who present themselves as ‘friends’ of the free market get the political urge to regulate, with the purest of motives, to ‘help’ the market along. Markets aren’t like that, though. Even the best intentioned meddling by governments have consequences that are undesirable. Consider the Australian government’s well intentioned meddling in the Australian property market… → Continue reading: The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions. March 20th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Trafalgar Square is located at the geographical centre of London and, next to ‘Big Ben’ and the Houses of Parliament, it is probably this country’s most famous landmark. Named after the 1805 battle, the Square is dominated by a 200 foot column on top of which is perched a bust of the Horatio Nelson, the Admiral who let the Royal Navy to victory over the French and thereby saved Britain from Napoleonic invasion. The column that bears his name and image was built from donations offered up in tribute by a grateful nation. In the four corners of the Square there are four plinths. Three of them are occupied by statues of King George IV, General Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock. The fourth plinth is empty and has been since around the middle of the 19th Century. A few years ago I became vaguely aware that there was something of a campaign to find an appropriate monument to place on the fourth plinth. I say ‘vaguely’ because I paid little attention to this campaign, partly because I have better things to do with my time and partly because I learned that the process was to be decided by means of a competition under the auspices of the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. I anticipated that I would most likely disapprove of the outcome. My instincts proved trustworthy yet again for, this last week, the winner was unveiled.  Alison Lapper, pregnant
As you may already have guessed from the image, Ms. Lapper has never led anyone into battle nor has she ruled a kingdom. Instead, she has managed to bear a child despite being quite severely disabled. → Continue reading: We are the masters now March 20th, 2004 | 95 comments - (Comments are closed)
As Taiwan’s democrats get bullets before ballots, France demonstrates its exceptionalism once again. This week the French navy began joint exercises with the Chinese navy. No, really. Not content with just lobbying other EU countries to lift the arms embargo on China imposed in the wake of the Tiannamen Square massacre in 1989 (who says the French are always against free trade?), they are training with the Chinese navy. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said they would be China’s biggest ever joint military exercises with a foreign power. (Note to Beijing, it took Churchill a single day to sink almost the entire French navy, but maybe you have not got many seafaring friends to learn from.) Taiwan obviously is anxious about the situation – which they describe as a threatening show of force. The French not content with cruising the seas with Taiwan’s mortal enemy recently condemned President Chen Shui-bian’s plan to hold a referendum on missile defense as part of this coming Saturday’s election, prompting Taipei to suspend top-level ties with Paris. I suppose with reduced opportunities for arms sales to Iraq the prospect of equipping the Chinese military appeals. Paul Staines March 19th, 2004 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Spotted at Samizdata.net HQ, a well known Samizdatista demonstrates multi-tasking…  … he may well have also been touch-typing on a laptop under the table using his toes. March 19th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The drivers of Britain’s famous black cabs, especially those widely used in London, are renowed for the robust independence of mind they bring to their job. Enterprising, hardworking and usually full of sharp intelligence, the drivers of our black cabs are a welcome reminder that parts of the British economy are in fine fettle. (My only beef is that they all seem to be West Ham soccer fans). The same holds true north of the border, I am glad to say. This week I was up in Scotland for a business conference and on my way from Edinburgh Airport, the driver immediately felt free to tell me what he thought of British finance minister Gordon Brown (also a Scot) and his budget. (Brown delivered his budget speech to the House of Commons on Wednesday). It is fair to say that this obviously hardworking driver despised the whole tax-and-spend culture of the present Labour government. The driver waxed lyrical in his hatred of Scotland’s new spendthrift and recently devolved parliament, wasteful public spending across the board, and of course, the ludicrously bloated costs of the new Scottish parliament building. The latter subject, in particular, is a scandal of monstrous proportions. The people of Scotland are truly steamed up on this issue. My driver was true to the bracing laissez faire values of that great Scot, Adam Smith. My only problem, though, was that I understood only about a third of what the chap said. March 19th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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