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Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
It is not universal.
It is confiscation.
It is not asking. November 19th, 2024 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I wish I were only talking about this: “Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury” (This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.) But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this: “Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans” November 10th, 2024 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box?” asks Jan-Werner MĂŒller in the Guardian. Along the way, he takes a minute to say this about Ronald Reagan:
This line of thinking seems odd. Sixteen years had gone by between the murder of the civil rights activists – almost certainly a crime carried out by Democrats – and Reagan launching the Republican campaign at a place nearby. Evidently Professor MĂŒller thinks that a place where a crime occurred must remain off-limits for political activity for longer than sixteen years, lest having a campaign event there be taken as endorsement of the crime. If one took seriously the argument made by Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton that the infamous pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 meant that Trump’s rally in the same venue in 2024 was tainted by co-location, then the time for which a place must not be used for political activity after a crime or extremist political event would be at least 85 years. This would rule out almost all of America. Good thing the limit only seems to apply to Republicans. Update: having written the post above, I found that the point I wanted to make today had already been made far better in 2011 by David Kopel, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy website (now at Reason magazine): “Reaganâs infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi”. November 9th, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Britain did not benefit from (slave) labour anyway. We did not then have a state controlled economy, we do not now have a state controlled economy. Britain didnât own the slaves so itâs not Britain that – even if you can prove that there should be reparations – which should pay for owning the slaves it didnât. This does then rather leave the reparations argument being that Barbados – or whoever – needs to go around suing, individually, the estates of those who owned slaves. Good luck with that one. With the small proviso that in more than a few ways, the UK does indeed now have a fairly state controlled economy, I agree with Tim as usual. October 28th, 2024 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Global calls for reparations are only growing louder. Why is Britain still digging in its heels?”, asks Hilary Beckles, the chair of the Caribbean Reparations Commission. The original version of this post said, “The answer is that even Sir Keir Starmer, the man who suffered the swiftest fall in popularity of any incoming British prime minister since polling began, has enough minimal awareness of political reality not to touch this one.” Then I saw an update to the Guardian‘s daily politics liveblog. It said, “Starmer ‘open to discussing non-cash forms of reparatory justice for slavery'”. Wow. This is like a man on a life-raft being open to discussing non-meat based forms of food justice with the circling sharks. The BBC has up a story that currently has the headline “Commonwealth leaders to defy UK on slavery reparations”. The BBC’s original headline, under which it was posted to the /r/ukpolitics subreddit, was “Commonwealth heads of government to defy UK on reparatory justice”. The UKpolitics subreddit leans strongly left, but the most-recommended comment was this one by redditor LycanIndarys:
October 25th, 2024 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have heard that Trump was quite entertaining at the Al Smith Memorial dinner, but this riposte from the Guardian’s Helen Sullivan displays true comic genius. Her effortless mastery of the role of the po-faced straight man (replace “mastery” and “straight man” with gender-neutral equivalent terms if required) is a joy to behold.
I particularly loved Sullivan’s deadpan re-telling of Trump’s jokes in the character of a robot explaining human humour: ‘…if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,â Trump says â it is a transphobic joke’ and ‘Trump claims â not clear if joking â that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this’. Do I detect a call-back to a famous anecdote about one of Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons depicting life in the trenches during World War I? The cartoon in question, headed “So Obvious”, shows an old soldier – probably but not certainly his recurring character “Old Bill” – slumped wearily against a brick wall with an enormous hole in it while his younger companion looks on. The caption says,
According to the Bairnsfather’s Wikipedia article, in the next war along, the Nazis, puzzled by the apparent paradox that humour about grumpy British soldiers seemed to actually raise British morale, made careful study of the phenomenon and explained it to their own soldiers, using this very cartoon as an example:
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, even an employee of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, ever really believed that it was necessary to explain that the hole was not made by mice. I suspect that claimed “Nazi textbook” was in truth written by some chap in the British Ministry of Information who enjoyed his work. Helen Sullivan continues in that great comedic tradition. October 19th, 2024 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
A year ago today, like millions of others, I saw Palestinians celebrate the murder of Shani Louk:
The link with the text “Palestinians celebrate” takes you to my post of that title. The quoted text takes you to the Wikipedia article with the title “Killing of Shani Louk”, which describes how her half-naked corpse was paraded in triumph to the mob, and how members of that mob happily filmed it and shared the videos with their friends. A detail it does not mention but which is burned into my memory is that the Hamas men sat on her dead body, as if it were a hunting trophy. Usually when I post a Wikipedia extract, I strip out the numbers in square brackets that show where the Wikipedia article links to a source. In this case I have left them in. If anyone reading this has the slightest doubt about whether these events really were as depraved as they sound, prepare yourself mentally then follow those links to confirm it for yourself. Remember as you look that Shani Louk was but one of 364 festival-goers murdered by Hamas. Nor was she the only victim paraded before a Palestinian crowd most of whose members were not members of Hamas. What struck me about that mob was that there was no pretence that Shani Louk was guilty of anything, even by their standards. There was no claim that she was a blasphemer against Islam or an Israeli soldier – the fact that her body was displayed in her underwear flaunted that she was just a random Jewish woman they had caught and killed. Kemi Badenoch MP, one of the contenders to be the next leader of the Conservative party, recently and astonishly caused controversy by saying ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’. I agree with this statement. Some cultures are worse than others. Now that ISIS is gone, Hamas-ruled Gaza is probably the most horrible culture currently present on Earth. Please note that this makes absolutely no difference to the obligation of Israel to adhere to the laws of war, even against an enemy that does not. It just lets the Israelis know what to expect from Gaza if they do not defeat Hamas. Should we conclude that the Palestinians, or the Gazans, are an accursed people by nature? No. There is a dark mirror to the past in the fact that Shani Louk was half German. In living memory Germany fell as low as any nation in human history. Let us not delude ourselves that the attempted extermination of the Jews was carried out by the Nazi party alone. A brave but tiny minority of Germans who were not Nazis sheltered Jews, a larger minority at least did not report their suspicions that their neighbours were doing so, and the majority obeyed the Nazis so long as they remained in power. Who would have dreamed eighty years ago that one day the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin would be illuminated with an image of the Star of David to remember Jews murdered in a pogrom? Yes, a mere symbol, but a true symbol – Germany re-joined the family of nations decades ago. What brought about this change? The complete military defeat of the Nazi regime. Cynics observe that the change did not happen until after the defeat. Optimists observe that it did happen after the defeat. October 8th, 2024 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier this year, Bruce Caldwell, a biographer of Hayek (and a sympathetic biographer, not someone out to traduce him), gave this Hillsdale College talk about the Austria-born economist’s arguably most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. This Youtube segment runs for just over 16 minutes. I think it is an excellent talk. The book influenced a generation of politicians and intellectuals, such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph. It came out at a time when a number of important writers were beavering away in illustrating the weaknesses and dangers of socialism and state central planning: Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, Joseph Schumpeter, Isabel Paterson, and Henry Hazlitt. They were seen as outliers at the time, but by the period of the late 1970s when the Keynesian/Big Government consensus was breaking down, a partial counter-revolution in economic and some political thought took place. (Looking back, the 40s was a remarkable time for good, pro-liberty/anti-tyranny writing. Harsh times can have that effect.) As many of our readers know, this counter-revolution was incomplete. Sections of the public sphere, such as higher education, were not swayed by Hayek’s arguments, at least in their most profound sense. The State remains a bloated monster; in the UK, taxes are at post-1945 highs, and large numbers of work-aged “adults” (I use inverted commas for a reason) aren’t interested in working and subsist on the taxpayer instead. Regulation of business and human relations is a problem. But…it is also important to understand the gains made in the late 70s and during the next decade or so, and why they existed. They took place because people with good insights were able to find an audience when the shit hit the fan. The solid, smelly stuff is hitting many fans now, and this is a time for advocates of ordered liberty, to coin a term, to make the case aggressively, passionately and with a “happy warrior” mindset. Remember how bleak the cause of freedom must have looked when Hayek sat down to write this book, or when George Orwell wrote 1984. The older I get, the more I think that it is not enough to be intellectually right; you also need to seize the moment, to have an argument to make that is digestible and understandable in any era. (Here are reflections on a book written about all this in the mid-80s and where we are now, by Kristian Niemietz.) As the late Brian Micklethwait liked to write, to win an argument, you need to have one in the first place. October 6th, 2024 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
The current tax rate as a proportion of net national income (according to the Adam Smith Institute) is 44%. See if you can guess what it was in a) 1924 and Answer below the fold. October 6th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
It looks like Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system and Arrow anti-ballistic missiles have mostly succeeded in intercepting the missiles sent by Iran. The Iranian regime did not send drones this time because having them shot down by the Jordanians last time was embarrassing. I saw this quote by John Podhoretz on Twitter:
To which Dan McLaughlin added,
October 1st, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Charles Moore in the Telegraph. Sue Gray was the civil servant, at the time much lauded for her impartiality, who wrote the “Partygate” report that brought down Boris Johnson. If she had then retired, or stayed in the civil service, or got any other private sector job than the one she did, her place in history as a minor avenging angel would have been secure. But what she actually did was leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Her failure to declare that she had been in communication with Labour over this job offer while still a civil servant was a breach of civil service rules. Even if it had been within the letter of the rules, it was an obvious breach of their spirit, as more than one angry civil servant has said to me. Of course her salary is up for debate. She did not pass out of politics by going to work for the Labour Party, she passed into it. And her salary in her current position of Downing Street Chief of Staff is paid by the taxpayer. September 28th, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When in a hole, stop digging,” the saying goes. They dug a lot of holes at Kamloops Indian Residential school but, as described in 2022 by Professor Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the UniversitĂ© de MontrĂ©al, they have not found a single one of the 215 bodies allegedly buried there. Nor have they found any since. They did not stop digging, though. They simply announced that “their investigation was proceeding but would remain confidential to preserve its integrity.” (That Wikipedia article is quite something. In its current form it is full of talk about “denialists”. Wikipedia was not always like this.) Some people might be glad to discover that, despite extensive investigation, there is no evidence to support rumours of the secret mass burial of hundreds of children. Not Leah Gazan, an MP with the New Democratic Party, though. As reported by the National Post:
September 26th, 2024 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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