What is the fundamental difference between church indulgences and emission allowances? Primarily it is that critics of allowances are not burned at the stake. Presumably because it would cause too many emissions. Otherwise, however, it is the same idea.
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UPDATE 9.30am BST, 7/7/2022 ‘Boris Johnson to stand down as Tory leader after wave of resignations’ – BBC. UPDATE 7.30pm BST, 6/7/22: Et tu, Brute? ‘Boris Johnson latest: Nadhim Zahawi leads cabinet call for PM to go’, the Times reports. Zahawi was given the job of Chancellor by Boris a little over twenty-four hours ago. This is better than Game of Thrones. Oops, my bad, the Times headline changed a few seconds after I posted the link. Now it says Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has “joined her cabinet colleagues Grant Shapps, Nadhim Zahawi, Michael Gove and Simon Hart in calling for his resignation.” UPDATE 7pm BST, 5/7/22: The Tory MP who spoke to Tom Swarbrick of “the final hours and days of this Government” was not kidding. The Wikipedia entries for Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid are changing minute by minute. Original post from this morning follows: ‘Downing Street claim Boris forgot about FCDO investigation into Pincher’ – Guido Fawkes:
LBC radio presenter Tom Swarbrick says, ‘A Tory MP gets in touch: “We are eeking out the final hours and days of this Government. We aren’t talking about weeks or months”’. Speaking as someone who misspelled “siege” as “seige” in a post title a couple of days ago, I am in no position to get snippy (when did that ever stop me?), but the present participle of the verb “to eke out” is “eking out” not “eeking out”. Never mind. The only possible comment is “EEEEEK!!!” Is it Sir Keir Starmer’s hour to shine then? Maybe not. Also from Guido: ‘In the last month the implied probability of Keir Starmer resigning as Labour leader this year has risen from under 10% to over 30% as gamblers increasingly believe the Durham Police investigation could go badly for Starmer.’ If Starmer quits the political stage, he will do so having done something that makes the prospect of a Labour government a lot more palatable for many: ‘Starmer ends Labour silence on Brexit as he rules out rejoining single market’, the Guardian reports. Does he make this commitment to respect the result of the referendum out of principle? Of course not – he has ratted twice, once when he said, “The referendum is clear and has to be accepted. We can’t have a re-run of the question which was put to the country”, then jumped on the People’s Vote bandwagon as soon as it became temporarily popular, and again when, as Diane Abbott correctly observed, he dropped every single one of the 10 pledges he made in 2020 to get elected [Labour] leader. The pledges were insane, but even so, his abandoning his previous promises with such ease causes me to doubt any future ones he might make. What times! What next? UPDATE: What next? This! Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid resign as Boris Johnson apologises for Chris Pincher ‘mistake’ – from the Guardian‘s “UK politics live” thread. (I put updates covering later developments at the top of this post.) July 5th, 2022 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I was arrested & thrown in cell by cops for putting rubbish bags next to my bins EIGHT YEARS ago – the Sun.
The charge was for fly-tipping, but Ms Underwood says that at that time in 2014 she had only just moved into the property and found the bins already filled by the previous tenants, so she put her own rubbish in bags next to them. It never occurred to her that this was not allowed, let alone an offence that would be pursued for eight years. Who is the Inspector Javert of Knutton, Staffordshire? Surely their devotion to duty should be recognised. There, out in the darkness Unless… the Sun did let slip that this lady works as an OnlyFans model. I very much hope that had nothing to do with the police pulling her in.
July 4th, 2022 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I’ve farmed this land my whole life. I won’t sell.” A scene like this could have come from the trailer for a cowboy movie set during a ranch war, or perhaps for a film set in a future propertarian dystopia. I wouldn’t have guessed Cambridgeshire, 2022. This series of tweets by the Fews Lane Consortium beginning with the words, “This is Clive’s farm. Clive has lived here his whole life” and later including the words,
describes a situation that reminds us that, although it is certainly true that the State is the prime oppressor, it is not the only oppressor. When I was first getting interested in libertarianism, I remember reading a lot about scenarios that were a challenge to it – e.g. where a property owner could inflict outrageous harm on another person without breaching the latter’s property rights – but as the years went by, the prime oppressor kept my outrage-tank filled and I’m afraid I largely stopped thinking about such things. Perhaps I am off the hook. In the modern UK any question of land use inevitably involves the State, in the form of your friendly local council. This report from 2020 suggests that the developers might be hand in glove with the prime oppressor after all: “Cambridgeshire council ‘completely ignoring the law’ is taken to the High Court”:
and
I must also bear in mind that I have only heard one side of the story. Nonetheless, I think that supporters of property rights should think about hard cases like Clive’s. What do you think about it? July 2nd, 2022 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
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