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As well as the hypocrisy of a man who seemed at times to delight in locking down fellow citizens during the pandemic, here are some other reasons for enjoying the spectacle of this turd being forced to spend time having rotten tomatoes, dead cats and other items thrown against him in the stocks:
Among the beneficiaries of his department’s largesse are Topwood, a company run by his sister and brother-in-law, in which he has a 20 per cent stake, which secured a contract with NHS Wales worth £150,000; Alex Bourne, who used to run Hancock’s local pub and won a £30million deal for Covid tests despite having no previous experience in the sector; and Hancock’s married lover Gina Coladangelo, appointed to a taxpayer-funded role, and her brother, an executive at a private healthcare company which has won a string of public sector contracts.
From an article by Daniel Miller.
What is perhaps unsurprising is that there is not more anger about this. It’s as if this level of jobs-for-the-boys/girls is now par for the course. The ironies abound. A few years ago, the UK enacted something called the Bribery Act, designed to stop UK companies bribing officials and others into winning contracts. To be clear, it is not stated anywhere I know that what Hancock (an unfortunate surname) did was illegal, but it sails pretty close to the wind. Directors of companies and those in public positions have to disclose a lot these days. I’ll be interested to see what ultimately happens.
To go all libertarian “meta-context” here, a berk such as Hancock is political road-kill, a footnote to history as and when it this melancholy period of history is written. But what he represents is how in the hunt for fame and riches, the public realm attracts such bottom-feeders. Brass neck, a certain pushiness and so forth, can take certain people very far. With such a large chunk of our lives controlled or mediated by the State, such creatures flourish. Large C and small conservatives are supposed to understand all this. Yesterday, the US marked Independence Day and the Founders crafted the Constitution and the elaborate set of checks and balances with such issues in mind. What is troubling about today is that I see zero sign anywhere, and certainly not from the Boris Johnson administration, about learning wider lessons from the venality on display in the Hancock case.
Addendum: I see the Queen (who would have been advised by Mr Johnson) has conferred a collective George Cross medal on the National Health Service. In the eyes of some, the NHS should have been renamed the National Covid Service over the past 18 months or so. To honour a socialist entity such as the NHS is quite a bold step. The only two other collective holders of the GC are the island of Malta (my second nation by marriage) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
“The truth is that China has come out of the lockdowns grimmer, stronger and more assertive. The world we knew has gone.”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph today (behind paywall).
He is writing on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. An organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and which continues to run a heavily authoritarian and dangerous place. It is nothing to celebrate – quite the reverse.
Democracy is this thing over here. Civil liberty is this other thing over here. They’re both desirable – as are apple pie and ice cream – but they are different things.
[…]
To get confused between these two ideas is to get close to ensuring that we achieve neither. Sure, we want democracy so we can throw the bastards out. We also want to have areas of life that simply cannot be affected by whoever is in power – those civil liberties and rights.
– Tim Worstall writing ‘If you confuse Democracy with Civil Liberty you’ll end up with neither‘.
Of course, none of this stopped the 40,000 England fans at Wembley on Tuesday evening. The popular “Ten German Bombers” might have been banned by the FA, but the fans sang it anyway. So too endless renditions of “Three Lions” and “Sweet Caroline”, without even a modicum of social distancing.
[…]
On Tuesday evening, after the match, I quietly celebrated Mass in church, without singing. While at prayer, we were being enthusiastically serenaded by the celebrations of a very different kind of communion in the pub over the road. I concede, given that our church was flattened by the Luftwaffe on the first night of the Blitz, I was not all that horrified at the thought of the RAF shooting down German bombers. No, the irritating thing about it was more visceral: others were allowed to sing while we were being silenced.
– Giles Fraser
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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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