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Sometimes the internet opens one’s eyes to whole new ways of seeing the world. A fabulous comment over on David Davis’s semi-blog (no permalink I could see, under “Sky News Debate with Tony McNulty”): David Davis doesn’t want a real debate on the Orwellian State – he wants a controlled one that’s only on his terms with safe people like Tony Benn and Bob Geldof. July 8th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 That great economist Gordon Brown is at it again. His depth of understanding of real people and the real world is unrivalled after 11 years of prudent stewardship of the UK’s whole economic wellbeing:
Back-to-front puritanism. Sounds to me like the ‘problem’ is food is so relatively cheap that Britons don’t mind wasting it. (Encouraged by bureaucratic nonsenses such as use-by dates, no doubt.) If something is genuinely expensive and hard to get, people do not throw it away.They don’t plan meals in advance and store food carefully because they can afford to live at their convenience and with less effort. We are so rich in the western world that the price of basic food and of energy has only a marginal effect on our living standards. That’s not to say consumers and producers, unless prevented from doing so by state bullying in some unpredicted direction, won’t change their behaviour because of that marginal increase in costs. They certainly will. What they won’t do is simply less of the same thing, nor will they without threats follow the puritan agenda. The whole social and economic system will adapt in a million different ways by changes in factor prices, taste and technology. Brown seems to think we should always be striving and suffering towards some abstract common goal, however. So the facts don’t suit. So it is with ‘recycling’. Driven by targets and prohibitions and propaganda, it has become a national obsession. But this is at the cost of subsidy and taxation that uses up resources and displaces people from other activity. Some re-uses are enforced; others are now forbidden. It has more to do with the taboos of governmentalism than any rational allocation of resources. There used to be quite a lot of voluntary recycling, the measure of the utility of waste reclamation being the price of the materials. Much of it has been stopped. That ‘waste’ food would have had value and been sold to pig-farmers not so long ago. Banned. On no evidence. For no other reason than it suited the bureaucracy. July 7th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Duchy of Cornwall proudly announces that the Prince of Wales’s old Aston Martin has been converted to run on bio-ethanol – which is sourced as surplus wine from one of his Wiltshire estates. Which is fine by me. If a very rich man wishes to spend his own money in mildly strange ways, and is not really hurting anyone, then who am I to complain? (I personally benefit from the other-wordly advantages of living on the Crown Estates, and very nice it is too, even as a humble tenant without grace and favour.) I think he should sack his PR, though. What is presented as a noble austerity for the sake of the planet comes across as a highly elaborate self-indulgence, when just laying up the Aston for a slightly less thirsty car would surely achieve the same thing. One might also say (and it might be the truth): “We had a lot of wine we couldn’t sell, so we looked around for something sensible to do with it, and discovered we could use it as fuel – even for the Aston Martin.” But they didn’t. Quite the reverse:
That quote’s in all press, so it isn’t a mis-statement coming out in a single interview. It was what the Clarence House establishment decided it would be best to say. They seem to think it is better to advertise not sane frugality, but his massive use of resources in being green – in judgment. ‘Champagne socialism?’ Is that when middle-class people drink it? In – you know… – restaurants? July 2nd, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
To succeed in modern politics you should take care to be a bland, self-preserving, sober, drugless, funless, dull-witted bore for years beforehand. – Libby Purves, discussing leftyluvviedom’s cultivation of the Two Minutes Hate1 against Boris Johnson. —- July 1st, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
You may not know that a Home Office minister is touring the UK holding ‘consultation’ meetings about the National Identity Scheme, and that it is more nonsensical than even the average government consultation exercise. She is, however, and nothing will be allowed to stand in her way. 3 members of NO2ID were arrested this morning for “suspected breach of the peace” while protesting outside the venue of the Edinburgh consultation exercise. Making ministers look bad will these days get you hustled away by police, apparently. The reason the ‘consultation’ is even more fatuous than usual is this. There is no question the intention is to go ahead: the legislation was passed two years ago. And any questioning of the plan is ruled out of order – if not, indeed, arrestable. The object of this tour is to gather together “stakeholders” – businesses and voluntary organisations, and to persuade them that helping the government strong-arm their customers, staff and volunteers into enrolling will ultimately be for the good of all. In fact it seeks suggestions from them how best to get universal compliance. Rounding up any dissidents is the last resort, of course. Update: Apparently 9 people are still in custody at time of writing (18:20 BST). Hat-tip: Glasgow Herald, who called me for a statement. Update 2: (06:23 BST) You can read the account of Geraint Bevan, of NO2ID Scotland, here. (The hard scientists among our readers will be pleased to know that the ‘Dr’ signifies Geraint just got his PhD in engineering.) June 30th, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC reports that our mad government is about to attempt to warp time by the application of law:
How is this going to work with mortgages, and those annuities that HMRC forces people to buy with their pension funds on retirement? Women live longer, so they get less for their money in retirement annuities, which they wouldn’t with another investment. (Digression: Annuitants also pay more tax than they might from some other forms of investment. This is one explanation for HMRC maintaining insurance companies in this monopoly. That’s slightly more creditable than the one that senior tax officials and treasury ministers are accustomed to give more effort to understanding of the problems of the big financial institutions than those of ordinary pensioners because they have an eye to supplementing their own retirement funds by directorships and consultancies.) It gets weirder:
You don’t say. The capacity for bureaucrats lunacy, personal distress, and horrifically abstruse legal dispute where racial and sexual discrimination is both banned and permitted at the same time is going to be vast. I predict an efflorescence of debates between ‘equalities’ officials in which several contradictory standards are created. (Should recruitment ‘represent’ the locality or the country at large? is its current makeup relevant? Or can you hire an exclusively Kazakh workforce because they are the only Kazakhs in the country?). Ethnic and other demographic categorisation of individuals will be even more ramified. And employers will be under more pressure to collect information about people’s family background and personal habits in order to ensure they are either correctly not discriminating, or discriminating correctly.
All animals are unequal, but some animals are more unequal than others. All it requires is an official licence. June 26th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 24th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I rather like this observation from
He’s completely right. The Most Reverend, the Most Fluffy, Archbishop Rowan Williams is, in his determined niceness, on precisely as solid ground as is his scarey African co-churchman whom I just heard pronounce on Radio 4 that The Bible says the punishment for homosexuals is death and we are not entitled to disagree with God’s word. The ground is precisely as solid because it really amounts to ‘Because I say so. This is what scripture means because this is what I wish it did mean. It accords with the sort of society I want to live in, and therefore it is correct.’ At the risk of waking the throbbing-veined antimussulmen among the commentariat, the same is true of all proponents – and almost all interpreters – of a religious world-view. Those who say cosily with Tony Blair that Islamist terrorists are engaged in a “dreadful perversion of the true faith of Islam” are on precisely as strong a ground as both the followers of ibn Qutb and their countersupporters in western fearfandom, who say that that is what Islam ‘really’ is. Tapdancing in a vacuum. The assertion of ‘truth’ is meaningless without the possibility of falsehood. The oxymoron ‘true faith’ invariably means the model of a religion, his own or someone else’s, that the speaker prefers, the one that gives him the most explicable, grippable, world. They all say, without any real self-doubt, and without the glorious dramatic irony of Alf Garnett: “It stands to reason.” No it doesn’t. It is the opposite of reason. All of it. June 23rd, 2008 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
The assault on liberty could be worse than it is in the United Kingdom. We are nothing like Zimbabwe, say – or Jersey. Jersey? Yes. And I don’t mean the partly imaginary lawless land of the Sopranos and Frank Sinatra. The supposedly sleepy tax-haven and holiday resort a few miles off the Normandy coast, the oldest possession of the English Crown still in hand*, has entirely astonishingly, and almost secretly, converted itself a police state in the last fortnight: The report in the Jersey Evening Telegraph is so concise it can only be quoted in full:
Why? What crisis of state is afflicting the Channel Islands? Suspicious British readers may note that Jersey ministers are accustomed to do what they are told by the UK government. The facts that this peremptory administrative action shortly preceded the House of Commons debate on police detention powers, and that the resistance to HMG’s policies had had some effect by pointing out there are other jurisdictions, where the gutters do not run with human blood, in which long detention without charge is unknown, may be entirely unrelated. * Pedant’s corner: the dukes of Normandy held the Channel Islands for more than a century before they took possession of the English Crown. June 20th, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blimey! This is what the deputy leader of the BNP said about the Davis by-election:
It seems they have principles deeper than the anti-immigrant feeling that people like me assume is their prime appeal. That’s a very pleasant surprise, though for this open-border freemarketeer rationalist and sexual anarchist they have a little way to go to catch my vote. HMG on the other hand makes a big fuss about its ‘anti-racist’ credentials, but is happy to appeal to xenophobia at every conceivable opportunity in order to promote the destruction of liberty for its own sake. June 19th, 2008 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
… we have given people new rights to protest outside Parliament … – Gordon Brown on “Liberty and Security” … omitting to mention that until 2005 there was a general liberty to protest outside Parliament, and giving just a little bit of it back, having fortified the area in the meantime, is not all that impressive. Read the whole thing, if you haven’t been paying attention while a free country changed into something else. June 17th, 2008 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
A crackle of buzzwords in the braes. The Scottish government has “bold proposals to deal with the issue” of the “impact on crime and anti-social behaviour” of people drinking alcohol, which is reputedly “often cheaper than water” in some Scottish supermarkets. Where that leaves the stereotype of Scots as careful with money, I don’t know. Why would they buy water from supermarkets rather than getting it near-free from a tap? Perhaps they are all drunk. To solve the problem of cheap and plentiful products and consumers willing to consume them, it is proposed to institute minimum prices – with the enthusiastic support of specialist retailers, from whom the “cheaper than water” claim comes – and to raise the minimum age for buying alcohol to 21 in Scotland. The evidence that this will do anything to mitigate the alleged problems is, of course, lacking. Also in the absence of evidence, I have a prediction about the effect on crime of minimum prices and reduced availability for alcohol. Crime will go up. Not only will new criminal offences have been created, but since many will find it more difficult to get booze, some of them will steal it. June 16th, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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