This [Tory] weakness and mealy-mouthed reluctance to hit back at legislation that Rowling has described as ‘ludicrous’ and many believe is the most dangerous threat to free speech ever enacted in the UK, is as puzzling as it is maddening. There is surely a great opportunity here for the Scottish Conservatives, if only they could grasp it. The Tories should be at the forefront of the opposition, not loitering in the shadows. And some sort of clear and robust opposition is desperately needed. No one yet knows what the immediate or long-term effects of the Act will be, but the options appear to be bad, awful and downright terrifying. While the police have now said they will not prosecute Rowling following a deluge of complaints against her, they will certainly have a much-expanded workload for years to come. That means they will likely have to give up on even more of the common variety of crime. And they only recently declared that they would not be investigating allegations of wrongdoing without leads or CCTV footage available.
Maybe the Tories think they can outsource civil liberties protection to the writer of children’s books and a comedian. Perhaps it is for the best.
Could it be that the Conservatives are simply following Napoleon’s advice: “Never interrupt your enemy (SNP) when he is making a mistake”. This stupid Act will destroy the SNP, especially its leader given all the publicity surrounding his totally racist “everyone is white” speech. It could even do for the trans movement if Police Scotland does decide to arrest a few people for misgendering – pour encourage les autre – and JKR jumps in with her expensive lawyers.
They don’t need to interrupt them making a mistake, all they need to do is announce they are opposed to the legislation in question. That would be sufficient. But AFAIK they haven’t even done that.
Calling them Conservatives it is an offence to the principle. They conserve nothing and have no intentions of doing it.
And they never will. This is why the Tories must utterly burn to ash if we are ever to have an actual small-c conservative party in the UK.
No, they are neither smart enough to be that clever, nor possessed of a single pair of bollock between the lot of them. They lack both the wit and fortitude to take a principled stand.
A vote for ‘Conservatives’ is a wasted vote indeed.
Tories delenda est!
Vote Reform!
John Galt said:
Had myself a little look-see at that-there “Reform Party”. If you want an outsider’s opinion? You’re being scammed by the same people who’ve been running the Labour/Conservative fraud on you for the last few generations. You put “Reform” in, you’re going to get more of the same.
From my (extremely) cheap seat, here in the far-off hinterlands of these formerly United States, it looks to me as if “Reform” is something of a British version of what happened with the Tea Party: It has been pithed, spread out on a board, and dissected such that it no longer exists as what the tin says. It’s been co-opted by “Professionals”, which is something that ought to tell you that you’re only going to get more of the same under a different banner.
My take on the whole thing? We need to rid ourselves of “professional politicians”. Ain’t nobody should be able to make a “career” as a Member of Parliament or Member of Congress. Nobody.
Same-same with high-level bureaucrats. Careers? Nope; short-term appointments for everyone above about the level of office manager or shop foreman. Limit of five years of government service of any kind over the course of a lifetime. Period. No more. And, if you’re a failure in civil life? No role in government whatsoever.
The issue here is that most of us have misidentified the problem: It’s not the parties; those are empty husks after having been cordycepted by “career” bureaucrats and politicians. Neither of which should be professions in a representative democracy. You can’t have “career” government figures in charge of anything and expect that you’ll have any say whatsoever in your own governance. Once it is allowed to become “Them” and “The Rest of Us”, you done f*cked up, boy…
My prediction? You put in Reform, you’re going to have exactly what you already did: Government by the least qualified scum on the face of the planet, ‘cos you made the mistake of leaving all that dosh on the table. You should not be at all surprised when the dog takes your Easter ham off and gnaws it down to the bone; it’s what they do. It was your mistake for leaving it out there, smelling all tasty and juicy.
You want to fix things? Make it impossible for ANYONE to have such an obscenity as a “career” in governance. Five years at at any role above shop foreman, and that is it. No more.
Oh, and all of this applies to NGO and Quango positions, as well. No lifetime appointments to the boards of things like the Ford Foundation or whatever faked-up entity that Soros built. That all counts, ‘cos of it being “public service”.
(Pours himself a red wine!) I guessed as I typed my comment after lunch, and before starting work again, that the sky would fall in on me! I totally agree with you all, the Conservatives are useless and deserve to be wiped out.
I was 18 in 1968 and got to vote for the first time in the general election of 1970 (Heath was it?). I have voted at every opportunity ever since except the year when Tony Blair was elected. I was in Brazil on business at very short notice.
I’ve usually voted Conservative, but I voted for UKIP in the EU elections and I voted to leave the EU, and I voted against joining the EEC in 1973 (?).
I don’t remember the candidate I voted for when I lived in the north – it was a safe Labour seat anyway. But where I live in Wiltshire is a safe Conservative seat – for now.
I’ve met our Conservative MP on five occasions, once at a gathering at the local Tory chair’s house. Andrew Murrison is a nice enough guy, and as an ex-navy surgeon, he’s quite smart. But I found him very unworldly. He had very little understanding of business, the private sector, and Mr and Mrs Average. I’ve written to him many times, but all I get is a boilerplate, party-line response.
There is little doubt in my mind that we are badly served by the 650 MPs in Parliament, and even worse is the Lords. But how do we get MPs with intelligence and a wide range of experience especially of the private sector?
This is the part that struck me (the usual anti free speech is so unsurprising it seems redundant to comment to the smart people here).
And they only recently declared that they would not be investigating allegations of wrongdoing without leads or CCTV footage available.
That is shocking. Isn’t it the police’s statutory duty to investigate all crime? Have the Scottish police entirely given up on their most fundamental duties of public safety, crime prevention and prosecuting malefactors? Or is speaking out of turn now the only serious crime in Scotland?
FWIW, the way to reduce crime is to make prosecution for crime inevitable. This is a recent realization for me who has always had a “hang ’em high” approach to this. But it is not the severity of a rarely applied punishment that deters crime, it is the certainty of any significant punishment that deters crime.
Apparently, even now with their new toy of prosecuting people for speaking their minds, they have no intention of applying the law fairly. Rowling undoubtedly violated this new law. The fact they aren’t prosecuting her for it tells you all you need to know about the purpose and application of the law — namely it is for persecuting their political enemies, and engendering a sense of fear of government among the population.
It is hard to believe that Scotland, of all places Scotland, is the world leader in this nonsense. Scotland is a land full of practical, salt of the earth, fundamentally tolerant and decent people. They are steel workers, and coal miners and ship builders, not baristas and dog groomers. How did Scotland become the woke capital of the world?
Yet Another Chris said:
Your error, and everyone else’s, is that you’ve evaluated this character strictly on “intelligence” and “nice guy” criteria.
Guess what? Those are meaningless when it comes to decision-making in governance. You’d be better off hiring that asshole reprobate shop foreman down at the local garage, and making him a member of parliament for a few years. Why? Because he knows things from experience, and has had to actually make things work in the real world…
Your current MP might do well in an advisory capacity, but he needs someone else doing his actual job as an MP. Someone with that most rare of superpowers, common sense and wisdom.
Minute you described him as “unworldly”? That’s your damn problem, right there. You have to have people making decisions in governance that are practical and “worldly”, and you ain’t usually getting those from a background in government service as a doctor. You might, but it’s not typically a standard trait. There’s a reason that the military regards doctors as hired help, and generally denies them command authority over anything other than medicine and sanitation…
Fraser…
I suspect that your image of Scotland is a bit outdated. The voters of Scotland obviously approved of this BS, because the arseholes in charge of it all were voted in by a majority, and nobody has made even the slightest protest at this crap.
So, they’re getting just what they deserve, good and hard. Hardly unexpected… This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to what your politicians are getting up to, and fail to make sure they fear you more than they do the special interests. The electorate in Scotland has rolled over for this BS for generations, and will likely continue to do so. Because, they’re basically so many little lambsies, waiting for their lairds to show up and tell them what to do.
All the troublemakers and nonconformists were driven out of Scotland to the various colonies. The ones left behind? Trimmers and conformists, all. Good servants of Empire, whoever is at the top… They bred all the things we think of as “typical Scot” out of the population by driving them away. You want the Scot that made Scotland what it was? You have to go overseas, where they all wound up. You’re not finding it in Scotland; those are the result of domestication, first to the Brits, and now, apparently, to whatever passing demagogue happens by. Even ones that tell them that they’re bad white people, and deserve to die. They’re too stupid, these dregs of Scots, and too inured to being told what to do to have any chance at independent thought. Basically, they’ve become Eloi with Glaswegian accents.
Or, at least, that’s how it appears to this expat scion of the Scots-Irish diaspora.
Kirk, I am that asshole. I started as an engineering apprentice at a maker of trucks and buses some 57 years ago on (then) $20 per week. Then I moved on into the retail motor trade as a service manager (one above a foreman!). But I started with nothing and four kids later I had to knuckle down and earn some money. There was no chance that I could become a politician, I was too busy making ends meet. I’ve done some stuff like chairman of school governors, but I’ve had to decline offers to stand in the local political arena – eg for the local council. When you start with nothing, it’s a steep hill to climb. Now I’ve climbed the hill, I’m too old.
On intelligence, I’ve met quite a few other members of our Parliament. I once met and briefly interviewed the (then) prime minister, John Major, on press day at our national motor show. And, yes, you are correct – they are not the sharpest knives in the box. Term limits to rid ourselves of professional politicians are the solution. But the politicians are not going to be the turkeys that vote for Christmas (or Thanksgiving). All we can do is punish them in the polls. In the UK that means the Conservative party has to be decimated.
The situation in the US would seem to be far worse than ours. You have professional politicians and the worst example has to be Biden. From what I understand, he’s never had a proper job. And somehow, your politicians enter Congress or the Senate poor and retire as millionaires.
@Yet Another Chris
Term limits to rid ourselves of professional politicians are the solution.
Term limits actually don’t solve the problem. The politicians in reality don’t have much power when they go up against the civil service and the institutions of government. To them one politician is pretty much like another (with exceptions like Liz Truss or Donald Trump… whom they destroy.) Term limiting politicians looks like a solution but it isn’t. The real problem is the swamp. The only actual fix is to get rid of the employment protections the civil service has, certainly at the top levels, where a new President can simply fire someone who doesn’t carry out his policy, something that is largely impossible now. By no means am I saying that’ll fix things, but it is a necessary step before things can be fixed, and is about as likely as Hillary Clinton asking me to be her Vice Presidential running mate.
Oh, I feel dirty even just saying that.
You have professional politicians and the worst example has to be Biden.
He is the very epitome of a politician. He has never had a job, just a salary of about $200k as a senator and $400k as President, nonetheless he is a multimillionaire. He is the usual fake smile, baby kissing, make up stories to make you look good, hollow suited phoney. A man who is self evidently deeply corrupt, deeply on the take, and selling himself off to the highest bidder, actually several highest bidders. I’d say he was a political whore but that would be so very unfair on actual whores. He has no principles whatsoever beyond his own aggrandizement and enrichment, as is evident from the fact that the policies he espouses passionately today are the opposite of the ones he espoused five years ago. He may be the most loathsome creature in DC, which is quite an achievement in a city also populated by McConnell, Pelosi and Schumer.
Britain’s electoral process is far superior to the US. FFS, you can’t get elected president in the US without spending multiple billions of dollars. Something that is simply illegal in the UK.
@Yet Another Chris,
As I’ve been saying for years, the system has been deliberately biased to favor the “High IQ” model, with the intent of forming a managerial class of technocrats. What the idiots behind that missed is that a.) they used the wrong criteria to select said class, and b.) all they’re really doing is recapping the evolution of feudalism, but with different people on top. When the whole feudal thing got going, it was predicated on who had the strongest right arm, best horsemanship, and so on. Idea was, let them run things, they’re going to defend us best.
And, as we saw with feudalism, the technocratic elite turned out to be just as or even more flawed a proposition than the ancien regime of the aristos. The idea is that the “smartest people” should run things, but then we left the identification and definition of “smartest” up to those idiots who first proposed the system, and… Well, what we wound up with was rather more of those meritless bastards rising to the top because they “did so well on all the tests…”
The ones they wrote.
Ain’t that a surprise?
The reality is that we are operating off of a very flawed and inadequate definition of “intelligence” when we start talking about those tests and all the rest. Not a hint of actual performative evaluation ever gets into it all, when we look at it. Outside engineering and medicine, there are no feedback loops during the education and acculturation process for many professions, no quality control, and we observe an increased loss of fidelity with reality in nearly all fields. How many times do you have to hear “Forget everything you learned in school…” or “We don’t do it like that, here… Forget what you were taught…” before you start to question the basic value premise of the modern academic experience?
I mean, OK… Yeah. I see some value, but when I look at a lot of the modern work-product these creatures of the academic twilight realm produce? Dear God, but do I wonder. And, with good cause. Hell, even the engineers that churn out a lot of modern technology make me question the process used to create them… Ever tried doing basic maintenance tasks on a modern car, for example? Yikes… I’d wager that a lot of them wouldn’t know which end of a wrench did what.
There’s a huge gap, a growing one, between the tacit knowledge acquired through experience and hard work, and the sort of academic knowledge acquired through formal schooling. The people with the academic background are clearly unfit for purpose, looking at their works. I mean, how many billions of dollars are we going to pour down the rathole of “homelessness” before someone says “Yeah… Ya know, about that? What you’re doing ain’t working… Get out of the pool, go find something else to do with yourself, and we’ll try something else… Like, what Great-Grandfather did, with workhouses and work camps for the vagrants…”
The problem with these people is that they’ve managed to make professions out of grift, and that the politicians are participating in it, plus enabling all of it. I want a full forensic accounting done, for where all this money has gone over the course of my lifetime. When I was in high school, the US national debt went over a trillion dollars; today? Best estimate is that it’s somewhere slightly south of forty. Don’t even ask about all the unfunded mandates… So, where’s it all gone? I don’t see it in the roads or other infrastructure… Where did it go? Who got it? Who gave it to them?
I don’t recall ever having been asked by any of my representatives for permission to beggar my hypothetical grandchildren. I have voted against every spendthrift I could identify; I did not consent to this vast debt being taken on. So, why should I pay it off?
If I have to? Baby, lemme tell you what: All the political freaks and geeks had better be lined up in front of me to get their bank accounts shorn first. Along with the rest of their property… The political class in the last few generations has pulled off the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of ever, and I want to see them dealt with as they deserve.
The Conservatives seem to have been hijacked by the ideological equivalent of the Cordyceps fungus. Their every action seems calculated to appear as though they are chasing the approval of those who wish to wipe conservatism from the political landscape, while at the same time doing everything possible to identify anyone who might still be tempted to vote for them, from the small landlord to the working-class patriots of the ‘Red Wall’ and making strenuous efforts to put them off ever doing so again.
Fraser and Kirk, spot on. I’m pretty sure that politicians don’t run anything. Here in the UK it’s the civil service. You only have to look at countries like Belgium which,I believe, didn’t have a government for 15 months because a coalition couldn’t be agreed. Everything just carried on.
@Kirk
I suspect that your image of Scotland is a bit outdated. The voters of Scotland obviously approved of this BS, because the arseholes in charge of it all were voted in by a majority, and nobody has made even the slightest protest at this crap.
FWIW, I think Scottish voting is motivated in a quite different way than you imagine. A lot of it comes from a desire to be separate from England, not in an independence kind of a way, but distinct and different. There is a deep resentment toward England in Scotland that has very complex historical roots (and, FWIW is completely unjustified.) And that is why the SNP dominates Scottish politics. It is about identity rather than their particular positions. Scotland is a moderately left wing country, in the sense of that that used to mean. It was driven by unionized labour in the Steel mills, coal mines, ship building, dock workers and so forth.
But it is a part if this complex shift that is going on in left wing politics from pro worker, unionized labour, fight against the man, to this new identarian politics that pretends to be Arthur Scargill, but is in fact wine sipping liberal ladies, who put sweaters on their chiuauas and spend their lives trying to find something to be offended at. Which is very odd, since in many respects they are the very opposite of each other. It is not what Scottish people are like outside of Kelvinside in Glasgow or Morningside in Edinburgh.
And FWIW I don’t agree with your premise the Scotland has been entirely stripped of its talent by immigration. Scotland is, and always has been, one of the most innovative nations for its size since the Scottish Enlightenment.
Fraser Orr said:
Who the hell said anything about “talent”, whatever that is. I clearly said that Scotland had been domesticated, both by the Brits and themselves. All the “troublemaker” Scots left; all that are there now are the deracinated remnants who’re best suited as little sheepsies, herded about by their betters…
Tell me I’m wrong. If I were, these cretins who put this anti-free speech law in place would never have been elected in the first place. I’ll lay you long odds that they won’t be thrown out of office, either.
“Talent” ain’t got shit to do with being a free man. Character clearly does, and I’m afraid that “character”, as I’d define the term, has been driven and bred out of the modern Scot.
Sad though I am to see it. About all Scotland is good for, these days, is breeding welfare recipients and wannabe Imperial lackeys. Hell, any Empire will do; they’re not even willing to stand for their own island’s homegrown version, preferring to be part of the European Union’s slave-state.
If that weren’t true? They’d have lynched these bastards by now, for even suggesting this “hate speech” thing. Hell, they’d have lynched the sumbitch back when he started whinging about “whites” in a white nation like he belonged there more than they did…
Sheep. Ripe for the shearing, and they’re going to get sheared. Soon. Meanwhile, the actual independent-minded and troublesome Scots of the diaspora are stocking up on ammo and honing their blades. They won’t be riding to the home country’s rescue, either; they’ll just be waiting for the trouble to bring itself to their doors. At which point, we’ll see.
Scotland ain’t what it was, either in terms of independent spirit or “talent”, whatever the hell that is. Most of both qualities left for greener pastures, generations ago.
Y’all should feel free to term-limit your own representatives. That’s your call.
For me, not a chance. First, no one is going to tell me that I can no longer vote for my preferred candidate simply because we’ve hit some arbitrary time limit. (Except for prez – I’ll accept Constitutional correction.) The idea that democracy can come down to “here’s our approved list of people you can vote for” riles me.
Second, some of the most effective politicians in office – effective in quelling and dominating the Swamp, I mean – have been those who have been around for a long time. They tend to know more about process and rules and the arcane ways with which arguments can be quashed or brought to a vote. They know where the bodies are buried. They know the players, just from having been around them so long.
Biden isn’t an argument for term limits. He’s an argument for a smarter constituency.
It’s a lot like the “everybody hates lawyers, except for their own lawyer” thing. We might dislike longtime reps, but I want one for my own.
@bobbyb, I agree with your take on this. At least we have some, very limited, control and influence over our elected representative. The problem is the ones we don’t get to elect. The ones who can’t even be fired.
The theory is that the “Buck Stops Here” at the President’s desk. So the civil service is accountable to the president who is accountable to the people. But that isn’t at all what happens. If someone works for you, but you can’t fire him for incompetence or insubordination you aren’t really the boss. And the civil service protection laws are in place precisely to prevent that sort of accountability.
Riddle me this, bobby… How do you do away with the career politician without putting some form of term limitation in place?
We can clearly see the inimical effects of career politicians and untouchable career bureaucrats. They’re literally bankrupting the system for their own purposes; if you doubt me, try calling the Bureau of Land Management to complain about their practices. Do note, however, that the parties in the EPA who were responsible for killing a few thousand miles of river in Colorado were not only given performance bonuses, most of them got promoted…
It’s pretty clear that the electorate cannot discipline itself so as to rein in the careerists. The only way I can see to make this work is to restrict EVERYONE in positions of power or authority in the government to no more than five years of office/service total. No more revolving door; no more retirement sinecures; no more “unfireable”, and a hell of a lot less chance for corruption. Add in full forensic accounting upon entry and departure from Federal or State service, and there you are: You’ve solved a significant portion of the problem of the “Deep State” acting in its own interests.
Is it perfect? No. However, comma… It’s better than what we have going.
As for the “institutional expertise and memory”? LOL… Dude… Have you ever worked with these assclowns? We already have a state-in-being where we have to reinvent the goddamn wheel at every partial turn of the thing; the number of idiot revisitations of bad ideas that didn’t work the first two or three times they were attempted is legion. I could spend a week just going over the ones I experienced personally in the Defense realm. We ain’t going to lose much, in terms of “institutional memory”; they’re already nonexistent.
Kirk: I need to distinguish here between elected pols, and hired gov workers.
For the pols, there’s one fool-proof way to get them out. Unelect them. Well, given our country’s voters, maybe not really fool-proof, but possible. As I said, it riles me when people tell me I cannot vote for my choice of candidates because of their rules. It’s too easy to make up new rules, and narrow my choices.
As for the workers: I do accept the Civil Service protections that we grant to hired gov employees, because I don’t want a return to the pure patronage systems of the past. Used to be, a new mayor would move in, and he’d bring with him all of the people who helped him win, and we’d have new traffic engineers, new garbagemen, new cops and firemen, new DMV clerks . . . we lost a lot of competence with every new election. Not sure we can afford that anymore. Not sure we’d get any quality employees without that protection. I doubt I’d sign on to a non-management slot when I knew I might be out after the next election.
But . . . in the CS system, there are still upper slots where a new boss can replace the person there with their own. Not many upper slots, though – and that’s where I can see a possible partial fix.
I think we should expand that list at the top – of people whose jobs are dependent upon the boss still liking them. The new boss – prez, governor, whatever – ought to be able to dig a lot deeper into that upper echelon of employees and replace them. That’s where policy gets made, that’s who orders the actual workings of an agency, and a new boss HAS TO be able to replace at least those people. If you’re an agency drone, your job shouldn’t depend on being aligned with the Boss. But, if you’re a manager or supervisor or policy wonk, yeah, it def should.
So, instead of just being able to replace the big boss, the new Boss ought to be able to replace the managers, asst managers, etc, down to the level where policy is no longer made. That would be a Civil Service change.
And, yeah, I have worked for and with these people, for decades. Some of the smartest, best motivated, and good people I know are long-term gov agency people, or local elected officials, and a few are national scope. We have more than our share of the other kind here in MN – graft, racist policies, stupidity are all rife. But I have known, and still know, people in all levels of government who are simply excellent for us to have there.
@bobby b,
Really? Now, do tell me what these “simply excellent” government workers have done to rein in the bad actors like Comey in the FBI… I’ll wait.
The issue here isn’t competence; do you want a bunch of highly competent monsters like Heydrich growing up in your government? Because, that’s what we’ve got, and the “simply excellent” types you revere so aren’t doing a damn thing to police them. You can see that in just about every dysfunctional police agency across the country: “It isn’t worth my pension; they won’t come when I call for help, some dark night… I have to look the other way…”
Your problem is that you think that an effective and efficient government is your friend. It isn’t. You want competence, or you want liberty? You can’t have both, human nature being what it is.
The problems we have in government accrue from two intermingled things: On the one hand, we’ve given it far too much power, usually on the premise that “Someone ought to make a law/do something…”, and the other being that we want “the best” running the organization “doing something”. Well, guess what? You get the problems we have with the government from those two attitudes plus time. There’s only one way to break the damn thing up, and that’s to do away with the permanent floating bureaucracy and the career politicians. Sure, they’re competent… But, at what? You really feel well-served by the LBJ and Nancy Pelosi types? Because, that’s what you’re enabling with your ideals of “I wanna vote for who I want to…”
There’s a truism about power corrupting, one that you might want to pay attention to. My philosophy is minimize the time in power, and prevent these goons from growing into the monsters that they almost inevitably become.
You want “highly competent career politicians and officials”? You’re basically asking for someone to be your master, because that’s where that path ends. If the organizations did a better job of self-policing, your ideas might work. Demonstrably, they do not, sooooo… What do you propose to deal with the problem?
I’d submit to you that if you need all this “genius” and “competence” invested in governance…? Well, you might just be doing governance wrong. This isn’t 18th Century France or China under any of its multitude of eventually-failed dynasties.
Government as a concept is highly flawed. The history of China is a perfect exemplar of why you want your government limited and small, obedient to the citizen. The minute you let it get out of hand, you’ve got your Klaus Schwab types co-opting it to turn you into a domesticated animal. You might want to contemplate how Republican Rome became Imperial Rome, and then transitioned to feudalism in tiny incremental steps, every one of which involved your “simply excellent” public “servants”.
I think the essential flaw here is that people want to be governed, told what to do. That doesn’t work; the demand for governance is a two-way street of evil, in that the governed lose their agency and ability to operate independently, and the governing become far too accustomed to lording it over the “lesser orders”.
In the end, it’s corrosive as hell to both parties, just like slavery is. Ideally, the government that governs best… Governs least. Which means you limit it drastically.
I mean, seriously… What actual good have all these “simply excellent” people done? Are you happy with the state of things where you are? Isn’t that Minnesota, the poster child for good intentions paving the way to hell? I can think of a lot of ways that state would be better off without the efforts of all those “simply excellent” people…
@Fraser Orr
Education, Education, Education and Media. You can change a country with Media and controlling the Education complex in 20 years, lets says 2 generations.
Germany was not a Nazi country in 1916 it was in 1936.
I read a Scottish newspapers and they are all horrible: monocultural, with very limited subject span and always same tropes and narrative. If all journalists think the same about most subjects then you have a One Party Regime because everyone thinks the same about everything even if you got the vote. The Overton Window is so restricted that there is only one way of thinking.
Perry:
The obvious question is:
Not even a single bollock??
@bobby b
As for the workers: I do accept the Civil Service protections that we grant to hired gov employees, because I don’t want a return to the pure patronage systems of the past.
I understand why you say this, but this “patronage” is another way of saying “accountability”. The fact that the administration comes in and sweeps out the old means that you and I have some small say in who governs us, because we know he is going to bring in his people, or keep the existing people if they are good. The fact that they do it badly, the simony and graft, is something we can and should blame on the politicians.
But for the very same reason you (rightly) oppose term limits — because nobody has a right to tell you who to vote for — you should oppose these protections because nobody has a right to force you to take this guy as Head of the Transportation Department, or Headmaster of your kids’ school or, pertinent today, head of the county medical board.
The fact that politicians want to sell these offices is a reason to kick the politicians out, or not vote for them, not a reason to handcuff the options of the guy good guy who is elected to office.
You might well say that it is a pragmatic solution — we have bad politicians so we need to slow them down, and perhaps you are right. But that is exactly the same argument for term limits. As to having qualified or not technicians, again it is the responsibility of the politician to ensure capable people are in these jobs. If they don’t they should be voted out of office.
I appreciate you sharing your experience of good government workers, and I have met a small number too. But my experience is that governments are fat, over staffed with underqualified, unmotivated people. And why shouldn’t they be? If you can’t get fired and discipline, promotions and all that kind of thing are out of your boss’ hands, you get exactly what the typical government worker is.
I clearly remember sitting in a room with my sales guy in the Illinois capitol building pitching for a one million dollar two year project. In that room were about thirty government workers, and only about two of whom spoke. The pork was so deep the floor oinked when I walked on it. FWIW, I wrote the RFP for the project because the project manager was too lazy, and tilted it heavily to my product, and they still gave it to an utterly unqualified competitor who was known for their lobbying efforts. Needless to say, the project was an utter failure. (Not that I’m bitter or anything 😀)
Just when I thought that my fellow Conservatives were (finally) making-a-stand – we are show that, at least in Scotland, they are not really doing so – yet more gloom to start the death with.
By the way – this piece of Scottish legislation is not really about “Trans” people, it is really about making opposition to a certain religion a criminal offence – to be punished.
The “Trans” stuff is a distraction (to fool people about the real intent of the legislation) – and so the talk about J.K.R. misses the point.