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As people involved in this blog know I am not exactly shy about attacking Conservative party policy either nationally or locally. So it is only fair that I present good news when there is some.
The other night the MP for Kettering, Mr Philip Hollobone, was formally readopted as the Prospective Conservative Party candidate for election as member of the House of Commons for Kettering.
Why is this “good news” or a “reason to proud”?
Because of what he said.
Mr Hollobone informed the score or so people who had come for the meeting of the Executive Council, of the local Conservative Association, that he believed that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should leave the European Union – and that he had said this publicly and would continue to do so (which is why I can mention it here) whatever Mr Cameron thought about this matter (although, in the interests of fairness, I must make clear that Mr Cameron has not said that a person may not hold this opinion).
Mr Hollobone then left the room and a secret ballot was held. It is a rule that numbers can not be given. However, in this case they are not needed – as there were no spoilt ballot papers and no opposing votes (work it out).
Both good news and a reason to be proud.
By the way, in case anyone thinks I had something to do with any of the above, I did not say a word in the entire Executive Council meeting. As the meeting was not public I will not mention what other people said. However, there were no comments opposing Mr Hollobone’s position.
Lately it seems that hardly a week goes by that we do not get some new chilling preview of the Police State that many in the political class are trying to bring about . How about this one?
Tens of thousands of people who have failed to pay court fines amounting to more than £487m would be banned from leaving the country under new powers outlined by the Home Office. Ministers are also looking at ways of using the new £1.2bn “e-borders” programme to collect more than £9m owed in health treatment charges by foreign nationals who have left the country without paying.
The programme, to be phased in from October next year, will also allow the creation of a centralised “no-fly” list of air-rage or disruptive passengers which can be circulated to airlines. The e-borders programme requires airlines and ferry companies to submit up to 50 items of data on each passenger between 24 and 48 hours before departure to and from the UK. With 200 million passenger movements in and out of the UK last year to and from 266 overseas airports on 169 airlines, an enormous amount of data is expected to be generated by the programme.
Of course as the government freely admits, it will use this to monitor everyone’s movements for all manner of purposes beyond “air-rage” or people using the NHS. I can only imagine how quickly the list of thing that will get you stopped at the border is going to grow. Sorry, you have an appointment with a ‘social’ worker next week and we need to make sure you turn up. Failed to put your recycling out? BBC tax not paid yet? Outstanding parking tickets? Your carbon ration has been used up? Your kiddies refusing to attend the local educational conscription centre?
You think I am joking?
9/11 was blowback. It was blowback for the USA making movies featuring nudity. It was blowback for rock and roll and Jack Daniels and hog-roasts and pornography and Marilyn Monroe and Baywatch. It was blowback for not being part of a caliphate. Mohammed Atta was an architect(!) and what really wound him up was that in his native Cairo the Hilton Hotel and the Bank of America towered over the medieval mosques. Oh Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine always gets dragged up as a “legitimate” grievance but that’s pure window dressing. Why has no Arab state done a bloody thing to aid the Palestinians? And by the way, my definition of “aid” does not include bunging $25000 to the family of a “martyr” who has blown up in a Pizza Hut. The PA has basically been bank-rolled by the EU and oddly enough not in fact by their fellow Arabs and brothers in Islam of the Arab League. Why do you think the oil sheiks didn’t pony up the dough?
– Regular commenter Nick M in this thread.
And not just for other people, which is the usual way of things:
I am responsible. I think. I care. I hold myself back from all sorts of desires and wishes which are impulsive, brought on by the clamour and disturbance of this corrupt over-materialistic world we live in, separated from nature and in intense competition with each other. We live in a sick society which is not going to cure itself. Like small children, we need forcibly calming down, we need to be held to account, we need to ‘learn’.
You may find this deeply disturbing as a view. But then, I’m not romantic about our so-called ‘liberties’ as Henry Porter is. I’m not a sentimentalist about old-style ‘freedoms’.
A commentator on Henry Porter’s article Each DNA swab brings us closer to a police state on the Observer website. Depressingly much more where that came from.
The neo-puritans hate their own desires and the possibility of choosing between them. They think surveillance is good because ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’, and they know you need watching in case you might do something wrong. They have bad impulses too, which by awful effort they control. The total control of the state – conceived as an undesiring arbiter of good – can relieve us of the burden of choice and keep us working for the good of society. It will free us from fear; because the freedom of bad people, who might be anyone, is what we have most to fear.
Putin’s Russia continues its heroic great march backwards in time. The ‘weaponization of psychiatry‘ is something that never went out of style in China, where people can be described as ‘politically deranged’. The use of psychiatric detention against political enemies has a long history in the not-so-post Communist world and so I can hardly say I am surprised to see this being done again in Russia.
Contrary to what people might sometimes suppose “ought” to be the case at a blog like this, I have never felt that I have been under some sort of pressure, imposed either by myself or the editors, to write solely about politics or Big World Affairs. Yes, of course, we bash the various statist intrusions, the general crapness of David Cameron, Green reactionaries, islamofascists, privacy-trashing New Labour politicians, etc, etc, but of course we also write regularly about science, spacefaring and so on. And as regulars will know, I often mention fillms or films that have become part of the public conversation. My last comment about so-called “art house” films drew from one, perfectly polite commenter the remark that “why cannot I write about something important?”.
I think films are important, because they are part of culture, and, whether we like or not, the contents of a film, just like a painting, piece of sculpture, novel, ballad or poetry can sometimes – not always – say something interesting about the sort of values that permeate a society. To borrow from Ayn Rand for a moment, art can reveal the philosophy, world view, or “sense of life”, of the person who made that book, film or picture. (A person who prefers to listen to atonal music may have a different psychology or outlook to someone who likes rock n’ roll, for example). The artist may not himself be aware of that philosophy or be able to articulate it clearly, but it exists. In the case of arthouse films, for example, particularly of the sort that were produced by the Europeans like Bergman, Traffaut and Godard, they they certainly did tell us something about the state of the culture at the time: anti-bourgoios, anti-heroic, not very interested sometimes in actual drama, sharply defined characters or plots; the tone was often ironic (sometimes very funny), amused, but also very dark at times. The films fitted into the intellectual world of the time, to a world still recovering from the long-dominant strains of socialism and collectivism in vogue for much of the 20th Century. There are exceptions and oddities to this sweeping statement of mine, of course, but as a generalisation, I think it holds a fair amount of water.
On one level, arthouse films can and are enjoyed for being quite entertaining, even brilliant (I might rent out Bergman’s the Seventh Seal to see if it as good as the commenters say) but the reason why I chose to write what I did was because I agree with the likes of Toby Young and even Jeremy “The Rottweiler” Paxman that a lot of what passes for great art from such film directors is pretty thin gruel indeed. Art is important, because it says something about the civilisation in which we happen to live, often far more so than any number of books in a library.
Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day and say: I’m free to think and to speak.
– Actor Jimmy Stewart
Earlier this evening I was reading the on-line Telegraph and clicked on a link about a Taliban leader being killed in a NATO air strike in what I assumed was going to be Afghanistan… and to my surprise I ended up at an article about the interminable queues at British airports! So this NATO air strike against the Taliban was where exactly?
I looked again a bit later and the links were appropriately sorted out but as someone who has just passed through the nightmare that is Heathrow, for one glorious moment I thought some public spirited member of the armed forces stuck in one of what Adriana calls “the security theatre queues” had snapped and called in a long over due air strike on Terminal 2.
To someone like me who is desperate to see the regulatory centrist ‘Conservative’ party lose the next election to the regulatory centrist ‘Labour’ party, is always agreeable to see the Tories turn on their own. Even those benighted party loyalists who think that it does not matter what policies one advocates just as long as you win, it is finally starting to dawn on them that Dave is not even going to do that.
So I must say I had a few chuckles at Simon Heffer’s delightfully bitchy sneer at Dave Cameron’s crass duplicity (everyone expects a politician to be duplicitous but crassness is unforgivable).
In his Today interview, Dave chose to insult a range of people, from former Tory treasurer Lord Kalms to ex-Europe spokesman Graham Brady, for daring to disagree with him. Such people don’t attack his policies, but rather his lack of them. It is little wonder, therefore, in the aftermath of this astonishingly infantile behaviour, that we should now choose to examine Dave’s personality. He has shown himself to have exceptionally poor judgement, to be entirely untrustworthy and to be, in short, a rather nasty piece of work: which, as regular readers will know, is what I have always thought he is.
More and faster please.
The impulse to control everything pervades those who make up the governmental class. That is, after all, why someone decides to spend their working life in politics and applying the collective means of coercion to others. The extent to which this desire to impose force backed control can be realised is exactly what defines whether or not you are ‘free’ or a ‘slave’ of the state.
So when yesterday I read that the state plans to take DNA samples that will be retained forever, from people accused of speeding or littering or failing to wear a seatbelt, I realised that if this happens, we will have finally reached the point where the only response left to being stopped for even the most minor offence, is to run and if need be to use violence to escape, and to make no apology for that if you are caught. The offences are trivial but the prospect of being DNA sampled upon being accused of a trivial offence, and that being kept on record forever, is something worth getting violent about. Being fingerprinted is bad enough but this is intolerable.
The only thing that will stop this appalling state of affairs from coming to pass is if enough people react with outrage to this proposal.
The sooner my affairs contrive to let me get out of this godforsaken country the better.
Maybe I should point out this story to my lovely Japanese sister-in-law. I wonder how many ordinary British people, never mind women, do things like this to make money?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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