Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.
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Just another stone in the bucket:
I have never been a big fan of GW Bush’s domestic policies, although the primary complaint from the loyal oppo has generally been along the lines that he isn’t a big enough spender/regulator. Still, the refrain that “But Kerry would have been worse” is starting to wear a little thin. Between the Rovian big spenders and the prudish blue-noses pushing their own nanny state, the Republican Party’s status as a better home for libertarians than the Democrats is getting more and more dubious. Truly, libertarians are being cast into the wilderness, with their only company a smattering of gibbering anchorite “true believers” and associated hucksters. Why, its getting almost as bad in the US as it seems to be in Britain! May 9th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have now had some time to reflect on the outcome of last week’s General Election. In many respects it was something of a non-event. Nobody seriously expected any result other than another Labour victory and the only matter which gave rise to any material speculation was the size of the Labour majority. As it transpired, that majority was considerably reduced, providing some electoral benefit to both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but nonetheless leaving the re-elected government with a perfectly playable hand. On the face of it, last week’s elections appears to have changed nothing. Tony Blair is still the PM and his brand of ‘modernised’ social democracy appears to be what the public have again decided they want. Yet, a closer analysis of the voting figures reveals what I believe to be a significant development, albeit one that may take a while yet to manifest itself. I will expand on this but, before I do, I want to make a few observations about the other two main parties. → Continue reading: Naked May 8th, 2005 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
These are difficult times in Western car industry. The Economist magazine reports that dark clouds are gathering in parts of the world economy, pointing to a slowing of consumer spending, higher interest rates and large government budget deficits (facts which may start to really hit the re-elected UK Labour government). I hope the Economist is wrong since I have a mortgage to pay and bills to meet, but its arguments are quite convicing. And one possible harbinger of trouble right now is the car industry. The recent demise of British carmmaker Rover is well known. Across the pond, however, two even bigger auto firms have hit trouble, and yet caused surprisingly scant news coverage outside the serious parts of the MsM and the business news pages: General Motors and Ford. GM and Ford have been downgraded to “junk” status by international credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. That means that as far as S&P is concerned, GM and Ford are risky debtors, and there is a relatively high chance that the rustbelt companies could default on their debt. The downgrade has sent shockwaves through the financial markets, forcing many big investors, like pension funds, to wonder about the wisdom of holding corporate bonds at all. The problem may be confined to these firms. GM, for example, make a lot of the big SUVs that environmentalists get steamed about, and these monsters of the road are now proving more difficult to afford in a world of high oil prices. There is also a glut of cars on the world market and the industrial growth of China and India, and indeed of parts of Latin America, are a growing threat to GM and Ford’s home market. Britain’s car industry has been through a torrid period since the 1960s, but even in the world’s largest economy, making cars is proving increasingly tough. May 8th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite…If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there – the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field – is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right. – Richard Dawkins, from a collection of brilliant essays, “The Devil’s Chaplain”, crushing all manner of shoddy thinking. May 8th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 We would like to invite our readership to speculate about who is who? Update:  All you need to do is give Perry a nice cat and he immediately reveals himself to be a complete softie. May 7th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Daily Mail’s print headline screamed “You gave him a bloody nose!” and the Sun snickered that Tony Blair had been given a “Kick in the Ballots”. Excuse me? Blair wins a historic third term with a good sixty plus seat majority and this is being portrayed as something less than a major political triumph for the Labour party? If ever there was an instance of how the mainstream media has a remarkable talent for making an ass of itself, this is it. This was not a ‘vindication’ of the Tories (as suggested by the print edition of the Telegraph), it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant. One way to see this is that Labour has pulled off a historic victory (which is an indisputable fact). Another way to look at this is that the Tories have suffered a historic defeat. That even after all these years they still cannot be accepted as a viable alternative shows that they are far worse historically speaking than any other British Tory party for a very long time indeed. So I got the result I wanted. Sure I loath Labour’s ghastly regulatory statism and contempt for civil liberties but Michael Howard is now no longer leader of his party and the cabal around him which turned the Tories into Labour-Lite has been shown to be losers of quite some magnitude. Now maybe, just maybe, something better can come along as the scale of their failure starts to sink in. In the comment section of my previous post on this blog, many people seemed to think I was urging ‘libertarians’ not to vote for the Conservative party because it was not the small government libertarian leaning party of my dreams. Well sure, but that is not who I had in mind. I was really not thinking about ‘libertarians’ at all when I urged people not to vote Tory, I was thinking about Tories. The reason I am delighted that millions of conservatives did not vote for Michael Howard was that the Tory party is not a conservative party and enough people realised that for the right result to happen. For as long as the Conservative party is peddling nothing more than the same old “give us your money for skoolzandhospitals” crap as Labour and the LibDems, they really should be shunned by millions of people who describe themselves as, well, conservative. And that is exactly what happened. May 6th, 2005 | 118 comments - (Comments are closed)
Xavier Méra has a piece up at Institut économique Molinari about the continuing and seemingly never-ending EU vendetta against Microsoft. Concluding paragraphs:
Well, it sounds to me more like that Microsoft, having been ordered to do business differently from the utterly reasonable and beneficial-to-all-except-rivals way that it wants to, may have introduced a little minor self-inflicted sabotage, Atlas Shrugged style, in order to make the EU regulators feel like the prats that they are. Either that, or they are maybe indulging in that alternative version of sabotage that consists of doing everything you are told and nothing else, which always causes havoc. Few things ruin complicated technological systems more quickly and more completely than pure obedience. Okay, if that is what you bastards say you want, that is what you will get . . . And I say that they have a perfect right to do all of that. I have always thought that bitching about Microsoft including Media Player in Windows is about as sane as complaining about a car company including hub caps on its cars, on the grounds that this discriminates against disappointed hub cap suppliers. Which it sort of does, but so bloody what? By the way, the first version of this posting that I stuck up was entitled, in error: “The EU versus the EU (again)”. (I decided to change it from “Microsoft versus the EU” to “The EU versus Microsoft”, but only got half way.) But maybe this was not such an error. Self destruction is what the EU often seems to be all about. May 6th, 2005 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
9.30am BST Yes, Labour’s 60-65 majority was achieved with only 36% of the vote – an all-time low for a winning party in Britain. That reflects an election in which the traditional party labels didn’t quite capture the real divisions in the electorate. Nonetheless, I’d say it’s worse news for the Tories – not just because it’s an unprecedented third consecutive loss for the party but because such recovery as there was was so pathetic. In the days before the election, a lot of Tories told me that the real measure of their success was whether and by how much they’d break the 200-seat barrier. And even that was a conscious effort to lower expectations. The Conservatives are presently on 195 seats. That would have been regarded as a disaster for Thatcher, Major or even William Hague, and swift resignation would have followed. The Tory leadership’s ability to spin this as a great “improvement” is confirmation of just how shrivelled the modern British Conservative Party really is. May 6th, 2005 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some brief news about the UK General Election. With some 40 or so constituencies still to declare, ZaNu-Labour have (as expected) won a third term in office, though with a much reduced majority. Tony Blair looks rather chastened. The Conservatives have done rather better than I (or anybody else) had expected. Michael Howard looks rather pleased. The truly hideous Leninist-Democrats have gained a few seats but, fortunately, nowhere near as many as they were expecting. They are still in third place by some distance. Oh and George Galloway is back in Parliament. I will offer up some more thoughts later and as soon as I have some time to spare. May 6th, 2005 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
First impressions that this is going to be a much worse night for Labour than some polls have suggested. Exit polls are pointing to a big cut in the size of Labour’s majority. Early days yet. May 5th, 2005 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
German’s leftwing SPD politicians have been bashing those symbols of hated capitalist activity, private equity buyout funds which look out for distressed firms, sell off some of the assets and reconstruct the remainder in the hope of turning a business around, before selling it at a profit. How shameful. Such people are “locusts” destroying Germany’s economy, scream the politicians (who of course have been doing a tremendous job on that score). In fact, I find all this abuse rather encouraging. If entrepreneurs see value in the German economic landscape, and perceive there are rich profits to be made in turning around businesses and then flogging them off, it is very good news indeed for the country’s economy. By releasing capital from uneconomic areas and focussing it on lucrative new bits, the overall pie gets bigger, jobs get created, and productivity is also increased. In fact, one could almost create a new economic law: the amount of abuse raining down on entrepreneurs is directly proportional to the good they do. I haven’t seen much reason to doubt this law yet. May 5th, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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