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I used to be a Mr Angry of Henley-On-Thames, whenever I listened to Radio Pravda’s Today program, but now I listen strictly for laughs, particularly since the New Labour machine and the BBC started sniping at each other, in their bloody marxist schism. And today did we have a humdinger.
Their reporter, Nicola Stanbridge, went out with some Environment Agency rubbish inspectors (no, I’m afraid I’m not kidding), to find out what they’ve been getting up to, out there in the real world, on their taxpayer-funded salaries. It turns out that organised crime is now running massive fly-tipping operations, in the UK, as it gets rid of waste for cash-strapped companies more cheaply than “proper” waste disposal agencies. I can’t remember the text, word for word, but it went something like this:
Reporter: So here we are in Birmingham, standing on a pile of smelly fly-tipped rubbish. What are we looking for?
Rubbish Inspector: Any refuse with names and addresses on it, like water bills.
Reporter: What do you do with it?
Rubbish Inspector: We bag it, and tag it, and then invite those named to an interview, under caution, where we investigate why their names and addresses have been found in illegally fly-tipped rubbish. If they cannot provide a satisfactory explanation, we prosecute them.
Okay, so far, it wasn’t too bad, at least, not for a draconian state like the UK with civil “servants” who love threatening people, and a country mired in increasing petty regulation, with 1 in 4 of the working population engaged in “services” for the government. And I’ve no love for organised criminals, particularly those who dump hazardous waste onto private property. But then it got really interesting, as back in the studio, they interviewed the chief executive of the Environment Agency (I bet that’s a nice salary). The Today programme wanted to know why this had only become a problem in the last few years. This was the gist of the reply: → Continue reading: Terminator IV: Rise of the rubbish inspectors
I had a strange experience last week, whilst camping on the Pembrokeshire peninsula in Wales. And no, it wasn’t the 16 hours of continuous rain on Thursday which almost flooded us out; you come to expect that kind of thing if you go camping in Wales. No, it was the strange and magnificent monastic retreat of Caldey Island.
For those who’ve never been to the Tenby area of Little England, in Wales, this is a small island just off the coast which is privately owned by a small group of Trappist monks. These Cistercian Trappists are an offshoot of the Benedictine monks, with the Cistercian monastic order being originally formed in 1098 by St. Robert of Citeaux, who thought the Benedictines were getting a bit lax and cavalier in their ways (for example, by failing to maintain a rigid vow of silence, every day, between sunset and sunrise).
And boy, are these Cistercian monks serious, even in modern times! They get up every day, at 3:15am, for a silent vigil, pray a further six times during the day, and then go to bed at 8pm. They eat no meat, except on either holy feast days, or if they’re ill, and follow vows of poverty, chastity and religious obedience. But after reading Murray N. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, the week before I packed my estate car’s roof rack with tent, wellies, and waterproofs, I was struck by the almost Rothbardesque island nature of this tiny sliver of Terra Firma. → Continue reading: The monks of Caldey Island
Interesting news emerges from the crumbling Blair regime, of Downing Street’s education supremo, Andrew Adonis. Charged with the task of persuading Britain’s higher earning tax serfs to abandon the private education sector, to throw their children into the mind-numbing morass of the Guardian-reader dominated state “education” sector — I prefer the term “serf-provision” sector — it appears Mr Adonis is himself considering the hideous evils of going private.
In a plausibly deniable way, he’s thinking of sending his son to the fee-paying, and German government subsidised, Deutsche Schule. The words self-deluding and fraudster spring to mind. But coming from a government already boasting the services of Lord Falconer, the crony who failed to become a Labour MP because of his honest refusal to stop using private schools, and who reached the heady heights of ministerial office despite the wretched idleness of several hundred elected Labour backbenchers, it may instead reveal the often hidden mental pattern of the rest of our lords and masters.
For in their world, they are our noble shepherds, and we are their humble sheep. They lead and we follow. And do not the sheep need corrals, or comprehensives, to pen them in, to teach them how to eat grass, grow wool, and be sheared? And do not the leaders, and their offspring our future leaders, need the marble Platonic academy at the top of the hill, to teach them the ways of their glorious guardianship of our otherwise free-market wolf-infested lives? They deserve it, for all the christian sacrifices they’ve made, taking from our backs all of our painful burdens of choice and freedom, and bearing them on our behalf, as Jesus did with his cross. Does not the word “Adonis” itself mean “Lord”, in biblical Greek?
And what better an academy than a German-speaking school, to prepare the new aristocracy’s new baby aristocrats with a correct language specification for the century ahead, in an EU world based upon the magnificent Rhineland economic model? A private education subsidised by the taxpayers of Britain, who toil to pay your inflated wages, and the taxpayers of Germany, who your son will one day rule over as part of the expansive rentier establishment? Marvellous. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer hypocrite.
As an aspiring student of liberty, I’ve read some books, such as Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which sorted out complex conceptions I’d previously struggled with, and read other books, such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which just blew my mind straight out of the water. But in my quest for classical liberal enlightenment, over the past five years, I’ve had the occasional good fortune to stumble across a few rare gems which have cracked open both nuts.
These rare and concise works of genius have crystallized my ragged thoughts and exploded them into a dagger-sharpened clarity, to achieve, for me, a double-whammy Wow effect.
You may have enjoyed some of these masterpieces, yourself, such as Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Von Mises’ The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. I see the world through a far clearer lens, after having read these paradigm shakers, than I ever did before, through an unformed fog of Platonic statism.
Socialists, particularly, hate these books. Because to read them, and to understand them, is to reject socialism’s own evil hate-filled religion. And if we were to let these red Borg force their nauseous European super state upon us, these books would soon get jettisoned onto their mass tribal bonfire. But which one would get tossed on first, in a square, in Berlin? There can only be one. And I think I’ve just read it. → Continue reading: The late late book review
Oliver Letwin, the UK shadow Home Secretary for the Conservative Party, has said he remained “highly dubious” about any move towards a compulsory ID card.
Come on Oliver, you can do better than this! How about saying something more like the following:
The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, forsooth, can try to force me to carry one of these draconian internal passports, in his attempt to turn this former land of liberty, into a socialist police state. But I will rot to death as a prisoner, in the Lubyanka gaol of his choosing, before I ever carry one of these modern forms of an Auchwitz tattoo. I am not a number. I am a free man.
Obviously, you may wish to be slightly less strong than this, as any professional Westminster politician must, I suppose, agree to be bound by any laws ratified by Parliament (except Dawn Primarolo, of course, the Treasury minister who refused to pay the poll tax).
However, I currently possess a full-length poster of you, which I garland every day with fresh flowers, and I need something a bit stronger than “highly dubious”. A Conservative copper-bottomed promise, from you, to abolish ID cards forthwith, the day after an election victory, would do the trick.
I hate to be shameless about this, but a promise like this would also gain you hatfuls of votes. It’s grubby I know, but unless you want me to replace your poster, with one of the eminent Mr. David Carr, you need to show me what you’ve got; what I’ve seen so far isn’t yet good enough.
Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has gained Cabinet approval to push forward his plans, for compulsory ‘Magic Eye’ ID cards, for all British citizens.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are entering the abyss.
Clare Short, who resigned as international development secretary in the aftermath of the Iraq war, said Mr Blair should pass on the leadership before things got “even nastier”.
Christopher Lee must have died and gone to heaven, when Peter Jackson offered him the role of Saruman, in Jackson’s stupendous Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Having read the book, many times, Lee will have appreciated every single nuance, every single eyebrow movement, and every single evil grin, of the grotesque Saruman character, as this Maian angel descended into a Sauronian hell, within the mortal clutches of Middle-Earth.
Like many other sad people, sexually unfulfilled in the desperate years of teenage, I also wade through the pages of the masterly Lord of the Rings, every year, to try to cure myself from the terrible memories of all those laughing girls, who walked away from the spot-ridden boy. Or at least, every other year; I now alternate it with the Silmarillion. → Continue reading: Clare gets nasty
With his surname partially derived from the Gods, and his standing as an Englishman of Scottish descent, you may already know I love Iain Duncan Smith, beyond the edge of reason. But yesterday, in Prague, he ripped open his long silence, on the European issue, and moved to lead the Europe-wide revolt against the long-planned socialist super state. Which, for those of us in the “Get out of Here” Euro-nexus, within the Tory party, is excellent news; it confirms our faith, in why we voted him in, as leader.
As the Maastricht rebel leader strutted his stuff, he even picked up a favourable review from Alastair Campbell’s scoop-favoured creatures on The Sun. Trevor Kavanagh, their maverick political commentator, feared by the Downing Street lie machine, and a man, by order of Rupert, beyond the reach of Labour-supporting editor Rebekah Wade, also said about Duncan Smith:
Europe will hear him and Britain will agree
In my opinion, IDS is the bravest man, in British politics, from the entire period of the last 30 years. Can you imagine having woken up, every morning, for the last two years, and then been forced to view the world through his semi-oriental eyes? He has been vilified, pilloried, and humiliated, in every newspaper, on every Channel 4 news programme, and on every BBC web page — virtually every single day — for being a charisma-less, hopeless, and witless fool. But he has come through this burning fire, to nudge ahead of Phoney Tony in the polls, much to the incredulous bafflement of the New Labour-Guardian-BBC aristocracy, which rules this once glorious, and sceptred isle.
It’s a fragile lead, admittedly, and there’s still a lot more work for IDS to finish, to cement it in; even assuming it’s not Gordon Brown who ends up as the initial beneficiary, from Tony’s fall; and yes, it’s a shame about that bovine statism, inherent within the general Tory Party; and yes, I would prefer a straight decision to just get out of the EU Dodge City, right now. But on the topic of Iain Duncan Smith, army officer and gentleman; I am a believer.
Now call me a big kid, if you will, and Stephen Pollard certainly doesn’t pull any punches in his article, on the topic, but I used to really enjoy reading the Harry Potter novels, even in public, even on trains, and even in preference to Murray N. Rothbard economics textbooks. (No, I hear you cry, how can you say such a thing?) But not any more.
For me the magic is either dying, or has already died. And it seems I’m not alone, for a Booker-winning author, A S Byatt, has also just slated the latest tome. Which is a relief, because I thought it was just me. → Continue reading: Potter losing his magic?
The BBC’s political editor Andrew Marr has reported that “senior Government sources” believed that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq.
Oh dear.
Now let me state my position. I was all for the war against Iraq, and still believe the UK took the right decision to go in, with our US allies, to remove its disgraceful socialist dictatorship. But spare a thought for poor old Tony. He had to convince all of those Guardian readers, and all of those who marched against his policy, as well as those of us who’d already decided the rules changed, when two hijacked planes flew into the twin towers.
So Tony spiced things up, a bit. And thereby hoisted himself on the petard of WMD. And now he’s beginning to twist on it, ever so slightly, in the wind. In the last two days, in a subtle, nay, almost undetectable, change of emphasis, he’s abandoned the line of saying the weapons will be found. He is now saying, quite categorically, that evidence of the weapons will be found.
Now weapons of mass destruction are one thing — a bit of plutonium here, a bit of uranium centrifuge there — but evidence? What constitutes evidence? An old copy of the Cairo Times, with a handwritten Arabic scrawl on the back, saying ‘The Fist of God is in place, Sire’. Will that do? I suppose that depends on either how many people in GCHQ can write Arabic, or whether you’re a fan of Frederik Forsyth.
But the interesting thing is this. Did you spot the change of emphasis, when Blair switched to it on Tuesday? I must fess up, and say I didn’t. He’s a slippery devil.
But those nice kind clever people, at the BBC, did, bless them. Isn’t self-inflicted fratricide, between lefties, simply excellent entertainment.
Nothing surprises me about this shower of idiots, collectively known as the UK government, but sometimes their crass shamelessness still manages to astonish me. After six years of adding nothing to the UK road network, other than the insane pink Kremlin lane, from the first class lounge at Heathrow, to the drawing room of 10 Downing St, comes a U-turn of almost epic proportion.
In 1997 they won the election, under a pledge (remember those?) to impose a road building moratorium, in order to bring those of a green persuasion into an anti-Tory rainbow coalition. In 1998, they told us building more roads to ease the road congestion, on the M25, was “not an option”, and in 2000, they held fast to the anti-roads position that “simply building more and more roads is not the answer.” So what do they do, in 2003? Yep. You guessed it. They are going to build more and more roads, in a huge new road building programme, mainly concentrating on widening the M25, and the southern stretches of the M1. Incredible.
Does the word hypocrisy never spring from these people’s lips? Do the lies, which tumble so effortlessly from their spin-doctors’ word-processors, never keep them up at night? Do they actually manage to catch themselves, in the mirror, each morning, and think to themselves, what a good-looking and upstanding politician you are? Or do they shuffle out of the door, ashamed, and afraid? Sorry, I was forgetting these people are socialists. All the New Labour lies will be worth it, one day, for the greater good. Some time real soon now, apparently.
But, linking to Mr Carr’s story, from earlier, do I detect a tang of bare panic?
After stealing £40 billion pounds, annually, from the motorist, and then pouring it into the black hole of the railways, which get worse by the day, I think they might have realised the game is up. This may be their last throw of a taxpayer subsidy, from a pot which is rapidly dwindling. They can not admit to themselves that socialism does not work, of course, propped up as it is on a crispy bed of lies, so they have done the next best thing. They have simply blanked out, from their minds, the last six years of their failed policies.
No doubt they will call this new roads programme a ‘Fresh Start’, or a ‘New Beginning’, or some other such Stephen-Byers-style nonsense. But what they will not admit is that they have dropped the ball, big style, and made a complete hash of their fabled 10-year plan — even Uncle Joe had the sense to only impose 5-year plans!
I do not claim an authoritative knowledge on transport issues, and you may want to go here to find such a thing, but from where I am sitting, it looks to me like a severe case of headless chicken street, down there in Whitehall. They are on the ropes, and the poor loves just don’t know what to do about it.
And with the Tories rising in the polls, remarkably even ahead of St. Tony’s party, the New Leftist panic is in. So let’s steal some of the Tories’ policies; let’s abandon our own ‘principles’ of car-bashing, and let’s try to buy back some of those hateful south-eastern votes we’ve lost. They will not bring in any of Tory Tim Collins’ more sensible road privatisation plans, or private road toll schemes, or cut the outrageous levels of fuel duty, but they will try to keep Mr Commuter, of Epping Forest, happy, with an extra ‘free’ lane, on the M25.
I must say, as somebody who had to commute from Oxfordshire to Surrey, every day, for six months, I would welcome a new lane, but I have got news for you, Mr Blair. Six years of nothing, and then a big splurge to try to buy back my favour, ain’t going to work. You are like the girlfriend who chucked me out, who then asked me back when she could not get her grasping hands on anybody else. You had your chance. But you blew it. Big time. Thank you, Tony, and goodbye!
And now, to paraphrase Mr Carr, as we watch the tigers in valley, a green-striped tiger joins the BBC-striped tiger, to attack the red-striped tiger. Let’s just sit back, and enjoy the view! 
There really are some clots out there, nearly all of them collectivists, of one kind or another. You give them a debating point, they complain about the debating hall. You give them a nice hall, they complain about the expense of the hall. Whatever the point is, they avoid talking about this central issue, and stick to some peripheral soft target. They perhaps even convince themselves, after enough posts of gibberish, that they’ve won the debate, rather than had us laugh at them, in the very best style of Jeremy Paxman interviewing some New Labour ministerial half-wit. And then, when we do sometimes manage to press them to actually talk about the matter in hand, they start shouting, and screaming, as soon as they realise their childish threatening game is up.
But aside from these fun and games, what they’ve failed to realise, is that the reason most of us classical liberals are classical liberals, no matter what our starting position was — whether socialist, fascist, communist, Last Tory Boy, or whatever — is because we have been prepared to argue our case in a sensible calm fashion. This argumentative debate is often an internal one, too, arguing with ourselves, as well as an external one, arguing with others. → Continue reading: The unbearable lightness of clots
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