There is one thing more wicked in the world than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.
– W.K. Clifford (1845 – 1879)
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BBC Farming Today naturally took an interest in how the new food and rural affairs minister, Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, who is a vegetarian (thus “Veggie Benn”, his father having been “Wedgie Benn”), would get on with livestock farmers. This morning an interviewer probed his convictions: – BBC: Why are you a vegetarian? Benn: I am a vegetarian – and I have been a vegetarian for 35 years – because of a personal decision I took not to eat meat. A classic piece of political honesty, I hope you agree. [An exercise for title wonks: He is ‘Rt Hon’ now, since he’s been in the cabinet for a while, and thus a Privy Counsellor. However, was he ‘Hon’ before that? Wedgie Benn disclaimed his viscountcy, which will revive on his death. Not that they would, but are his children entitled to style themselves “The Honourable” in the meantime?] July 3rd, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Those idiots want health. But what we need is more life. – Tattooed Marie, a Parisian barmaid, quoted Á propos smoking bans on Spiked. June 30th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a bit scary:
The study found 54% of Americans regard atheists as dangerous or threatening. It is not just because I am an atheist that I find this disturbing. I would like to suggest that it is an example of a more general tendency among the populations of even advanced states to react more strongly to the imaginary dangers of things they don’t understand than to real threats. It is an inexhaustible fuel for authoritarian populism. June 20th, 2007 | 142 comments - (Comments are closed)
You really couldn’t invent this if you tried. Or at least I couldn’t. It is real ad, from the Guardian Online:
The government scheme to ban smoking in public places in Britain is currently reported as about £100 million over budget, at somewhere in the region of £1.6 billion. But I am not sure that counts local government expenditure, which this is. June 19th, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society. As they discuss great issues of the day, they discuss them from the point of view that the earth is flat. If someone says, ‘No, no, no, the earth is round!’, they think this person is an extremist. That’s what it’s like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC. – Jeff Randall, formerly the BBC’s business editor. The BBC does quote this against itself, but my experience of the bien pensant left in the media suggests that it will not be much apprehended inside the corporation. June 18th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not only is innocent until proven guilty on the way out. The idea of limited and defined punishment for crime is too. It appears the Sex Offenders Register which is supposed to…. well, I am not really sure what it is supposed to do, other than provide meat for the slavering tabloids, creates an ad hoc police power to get you banned from performing on TV. The BBC reports Police alert over TV contestant, in which a police spokesman says:
One does not suppose the “victim or victim’s family” could remain unaware after an entirely predictable national media alert. And the consequences for the man concerned of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who had no reason to know being told in the broadest terms he is “a sex offender” and the rest left to the mob’s squalid imagination? While ‘sexual offences’ is a broad category, from thought-crime, to bad manners, to genuinely consensual but officially barred conduct, … to the most serious violent crimes, one can be registered for any of them, even if there is no trial and no other punishment. The public obsession runs only one way, however. June 16th, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Among the rank-upon-rank quangocrats and glorious anomalies of the Queen’s birthday honours, I was struck by an example of the coyness that draws attention to itself: OBE – William Anderson; Grade B2, Ministry of Defence; London. No citation. No location. All other London awards carry the postal out-code (e.g. “SW1A”, “W8”) of the recipient or their office. Grade B2 is a junior executive grade, and one usually only gets an honour for being head of something, even in the civil service. This all stands out as odd. So why do it? If Mr Anderson’s work is too secret to mention, then it seems just a tad silly to go to great lengths not to mention it in this ostentatious way. It would have been easy to invent something boring that insiders would know to be a cover story (most fellow OBEs are getting the award for work in organisations no-one outside them will have heard of before). Or the honour itself could have been made secretly. June 16th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a rather gloomy public service announcement. I wrote about the Serious Crime Bill in January. Since, it has proceeded quietly through the House of Lords, almost unchanged. Yesterday, so suddenly that I did not know it had happened, and was talking today about how NO2ID should brief MPs for its appearance, it received its Second Reading in the House of Commons. It is amazing that there has been no large scale protest about this If you live in the UK (or are a voting ex-pat), you have a few weeks to write to your MP before it becomes law. Update: In response to popular demand, some more information. Here are: On Part I of the Bill, a briefing note on Serious Crime Prevention Orders from the Conservative Liberty Forum. On Part II, a somewhat more technical briefing (pdf)on the mindboggling abolition and replacement of incitement at common law from Liberty. On Part III, A briefing I wrote (pdf) on the data-sharing aspects for NO2ID. Which may collectively clarify what I’m going on about. Or not. But take my word for it, this is very bad indeed. Worse than ID cards. If you have an MP, write to them. June 13th, 2007 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a story told of more than one matinée idol, and no doubt actionable, so let us call him The Star. The Star was rumoured in a big Hollywood prostitution case to have been one of the most regular [I almost wrote “biggest”] clients of the latest martyred madam. An interviewer caught up with him. – “Mr Star, is it true you hired call-girls.” It seems our madly interfering government now wants to police our private lives a bit more closely, and thereby make them a bit riskier. According to The Times:
A marriage or civil partnership is a clear, deliberate, decision. I don’t think the state should control the form of family that is possible, but at least those particular controlled forms are optional, and formally delineated. This opens the way for officialdom to delineate and the courts to investigate any relationship for an actionable degree of intimacy, and for divorce lawyers to open a whole new field of speculative actions. Divorce lawyers will just love the idea that there’s no minimum length of ‘intimate relationship’ involved, and that unilateral reliance by one party can create a liability for the other. And they’ve been agitating for it for years (e.g. in Solicitors Family Law Association, Fairness for Families: Proposals for Reform on the Law on Cohabitation, 2000 – sorry, can’t find that online). It would be an impressive feat on behalf of the state to make both marriage less attractive (some of its appurtenances – for those who want them – would come free) and at the same time to make sex and friendship outside marriage more risky – and possibly more risky the more affluent you are. It might do some good of course, undoubtably there are people who are mistreated by partners or mistaken about their rights. But to punish every other single person in Britain for the cruelty or ignorance of a few is an appalling way to go. The parade of motivated winners tells you what you need to know: mad clingy girlfriends, scrounging scrubs of boyfriends, family lawyers, smug marrieds, investigators, officialdom, and prurient tabloids. I can see a spin-off gain for the proprietors of anonymous, deniable, premises for lovers’ assignations. (Brighton?) Perhaps the Argentinian or Japanese speciality hotel businesses would get emulated here. But that would still be risky for the rich and famous. The only people certain to come out with improved credit (in both senses): proper, professional, prostitutes. June 11th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not particularly in favour of sucking up to the Saudis, or of political subsidy for the British arms industry; but can someone please explain why this is vicious nasty corriuption that ought to be internaltionally banned even if it is the custom where the deal is done, and this is a UK local government policy raising a mere £2,500 million a year, in June 8th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Home Office [Bureau of State Security for overseas readers] would be ludicrous in its crudity, if it did not present such a threat to liberty. Bids for more arbitrary power are always, but always, acompanied by a scare story. Today’s example: Reid proposes register for terror offenders
Is juxtaposed with: Security checks on petrol tankers in London
The first story is filed by the Times’ home affairs editor. The second by an interesting chap called Sean O’Neill, co-author of The Suicide Factory a highly sensational account of Abu Hamza’s career at Finsbury Park mosque. According to his agent’s website:
Mr O’Neill has something of a speciality in reporting the suspicions of the authorities. He clearly has very good police and intelligence contacts, and can make a livid story out of a change in a police checklist. But the inclination of such unofficial official contacts will be to feed such tidbits to the press to suit themselves, knowing an energetic journalist will make much of them. June 7th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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