Significant paws

I'm off lecturing on a Mediterranean cruise until the end of the month, and happy to be able to let the dust settle before venturing any more opinions on how the cookie is going to crumble.

I'm sad that several commentators I previously admired have succumbed to spiteful vituperation in the wake of the general election. The Tory-LibDem coalition seems to me the best we could hope for from an electorate that remains largely oblivious of the desperate state of the nation's finances.

Strip out all the fraudulent accounting tricks with which Brown tried to conceal the full extent of his sabotage of a once healthy economy, and the situation is much, much worse than anybody appears willing to admit - for the moment.

All those lamenting the 'might have beens' are perversely overlooking what a great deal has been achieved. The NuLabour 'project' has been defeated: the attempt to achieve a one party state through bribery, intimidation and electoral fraud has been rejected by the vast majority of the British people, and the way is now clear to reform the institutions of the state so that the crypto-communists can never again threaten to take it over.

And, praise be, we will no longer have to see or hear the psycho cyclops and the rest of the chippy Scots carpet-baggers who have done so much deliberate damage to England over the past worse than wasted thirteen years.    

The Cotswolds sow

Running contrary to my earlier, untypically up-beat post about nemesis overtaking notorious troughers, Tory Nadine Dorries increased her majority in Mid Bedfordshire.

This is the person who claims a cottage in the Cotswolds, 55 miles from her constituency, as her main home, so that she can claim a second home allowance for the house in her constituency where her daughters live. She it was, also, who denounced the expenses scandal as a 'witch-hunt' that might drive some MPs to suicide.

Fat chance.

Anyway, today's Sunday Times reveals that she has claimed over £40,000 in expenses for services provided by a company owned by her friend and neighbour Lynn Elson. Alas for Nadine, her Commons researcher from 2005 to late 2008 has blown the whistle on this cosy relationship, alleging that Elson never produced anything to justify the expense.

The voters of Mid Bedfordshire might wish to ponder an old Jewish proverb: trick me once, shame on you; trick me twice, shame on me.

Political naïveté

Maybe it´s just the blogs I follow, but a carping anti-Cameronism appears to be widespread among those who should be celebrating the annihilation of the NuLabour project. It should be possible to combine an outsider's distaste for professional, principle-lite politicians like Blair and Cameron with recognition, however grudging, that they are good at what they do.

What they do is win power, to be able to dispossess their opponents and dispense favour to their supporters. The most dependable supporters, in turn, will be those who see politics as a step up in social status, band-wagon jumpers who thirst to seem important, to wallow in other people's money, and to be fellated - literally in some cases, metaphorically in all - by the political groupies.

To such people, proportional representation (PR) is enormously attractive. Under PR, Cameron would not now be lamenting that so many of his 'A-listers' failed to win seats. The hung parliament does, however, give ample scope for the sort of high level stitch-up that is a characteristic of the PR system.

Blair was able to reshape the Labour party in his own image because he offered it electability. Cameron has done the same, which I am quite sure was what he had in mind when he proclaimed himself 'the heir of Blair' in contrast to the graceless class warrior Brown.

Right now, with the prospect of office mouth-wateringly close, the  only dissent Cameron will face within his party will be from those who know they have no hope of favour. Ditto, in spades, Clegg and the Lib Dems, none of whom has ever had any realistic prospect of office before now.

Amusingly, both Blair and Cameron have posed as 'modernisers', whereas what has emerged is a reversion to pragmatic factionalism held together by patronage, the default setting of politics through the ages.

So many losers

'Not their finest hour' mourns Gerald Baker in the Wall Street Journal:

Britain woke up yesterday to the unsettling realization that, for the first time in more than 30 years, no one had really won. In the time-honored fashion of British sporting ineptitude it seems likely that it will eventually be the team that lost least badly that gets a chance to form a government. As the largest party, David Cameron's Conservatives are deemed the ones most likely to succeed in frantically trying to cobble together some kind of an administration.

Unfortunately for Britain, the crisis of governance revealed by the election campaign that crawled to its anticlimax on Thursday comes at an especially bad time. In a way it was fitting that no party really won this week. The most depressing aspect of the campaign was the poverty of real choice on offer to the British voters - even in the teeth of one of the fiercest economic challenges the country has faced in the last 50 years. The U.K. has, according to data from the European Commission published last week, the largest fiscal deficit in the European Union, at 13% of national income, even larger than the U.S. deficit. The scale of Britain's spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s.

Only part of this mess is owed to the financial crisis and recession. Even after a strong economic recovery (should there be one), the U.K. will be running a large deficit. In short, Britain is one of the largest of the sovereign debt challenges that threatens the global financial system. For Britain itself, the message of what has been going on in financial markets in the last few weeks, where nervousness about the sustainability of the public finances of Greece, Portugal, Spain and others, is clear - get your fiscal house in order.

But this week, as this nervousness deepened and markets fell further, it was as though the British political parties seemed to have agreed on a pact not to frighten the voters with any serious talk about the towering scale of Britain's fiscal crisis. Other than bromides about the importance of reducing debt, and some general and implausible plans to rein back spending on "fraud, waste and abuse," there was little on offer from any of the parties to confront the challenge.

In fact, even as they paid lip service to the scale of the fiscal dangers, the British political leaders' promises to voters seem to involve more spending increases. On Wednesday, the day before the election, British televisions were in split-screen mode; on one side Messrs. Brown, Cameron and Clegg roamed the country competing to offer more money for health spending, education or the environment. On the other side, Greece, member of the euro zone, was burning as the political consequences of years of failing to address mounting debt problems were laid bare.

To be sure, Britain's public finances are much more manageable than Greece's. Its debt is less than half that of Greece's in relation to its national income. But the direction of the U.K.'s economics and politics are clear - and run directly counter to the nation's pressing needs. The reality is that the state has - in economic terms - become so dominant in Britain, the public largesse so pervasive, that the political costs of reining it back are seen as dangerously high for any party that wants to get elected.

At over 50% of national income, the public sector in the U.K. is now as big as in Scandinavia, higher than in Germany, and up from the roughly 40% it accounted for from when Margaret Thatcher left power to the early years of Tony Blair's Labour government. Even as the recession fades, and that share falls somewhat, the U.K. will still be left with a vastly expanded government role.

The political challenge of rolling back that growth - something all parties are at least notionally committed to - is that any effort by politicians to cut spending is met with howls from those who get hit by cuts. In the U.K., the universal principle behind much of the public spending - a free-at-service national health service for example, or a child benefits program that awards tax credits to all families with children, whatever their income levels - entrenches still further the role of the state - and weakens still further the resolve of politicians to tackle it.

Consider this: In Scotland - the birthplace of the intellectual founder of free-market economics - the state now accounts for 60% of national income. The political consequences are unsurprising. The Conservative party, once the staunchest defender of Adam Smith's ideas, is now the fourth party north of the border: On Thursday it won one of the 59 parliamentary seats there.

It's hardly surprising, then, that in the U.K. as a whole, the Conservatives, confronted with an alarming slide in the opinion polls, retreated from an earlier warning that, if elected, they would need to pursue a policy of austerity, and fell back instead on vague promises of cuts that threatened no real hurt to the large army of recipients of public money.

Healthy legacy of the expenses scandal

Of  the ten most outstanding scumbags (counting the Kirkbride-Mackay matrimony as one), none remain in parliament. Shahid Malik was the only one to try to brazen it out, and Labour lost his seat of Dewsbury.

• Elliott Morley did not stand and Labour just held on to Scunthorpe despite a 9.18% swing against.
• David Chaytor did not stand, but Labour lost Bury North anyway.
• Margaret Moran did not stand and Labour held Luton South (see previous post).
• Ben Chapman did not stand and Labour held Wirral South (see previous post).

Douglas Hogg (the moat), Julie Kirkbride and husband Andrew Mackay, Peter Viggers and John Butterfill did not stand, and the Tories held their constituencies. Bill Wiggin's constituency was abolished.

The other side of the coin is that of the zero expenses claimants who stood for re-election (several did not), only the Lib Dems' Susan Kramer lost Richmond Park - but that was to Zac Goldsmith, who probably won't even claim his salary. Against which another Lib Dem zero claimant, redistricted Sarah Teather, stomped her Labour rival in new Brent Central with a swing of 11%.

Zero claimant Martin Salter, disgusted by the behaviour of his peers, did not stand and Labour lost his seat of Reading West with a massive swing of 12% against. 

Mark Oaten, boy renter as well as expenses cheat, did not stand, but the Lib Dems lost Winchester anyway with a 9% swing against. Lembik 'Cheeky Girls' Opik claimed the maximum and lost Montgomeryshire for the Lib Dems with a swing of over 13% against.

Character matters, after all.

Time for a new Great Reform Bill

Labourite electoral corruption was rampant, but a diffuse investigation would be a waste of time. Better to concentrate on anomalous results where corruption is most likely to have affected the outcome. The following are the ones where a close result and a lower-than average swing against suggest it would be most worth digging:   

• Birmingham Edgbaston - Labour majority of 1,274, swing against of only 0.47%
• Bolton West - Labour majority of 92, swing against of 5.88%
• Dudley North - Labour majority of 649, swing against of 4.73%
• Eltham - Labour majority of 1,663, swing against of only 1.82%
• Luton South (ex Margaret Moran) - Labour majority of 2,329, swing against of 4.59%  
• Oldham East and Saddleworth - Labour majority of 103, swing against of 5.08%
• Rochdale - Labour majority of 889, swing against of only 0.79%
• Tooting - Labour majority of 2,524, swing against of only 3.6%
• Wirral South - Labour majority of 531, swing against of only 3.98%

Whatever else an eventual Con-Lib administration might do to reform our corruption-prone electoral system, they should start by abolishing the postal vote for all except those who can prove disability or unavoidable absence, institute a total renewal of the electoral register, and require proof of identity at the polling station for all future elections.

They should also undo 13 years of Labour gerrymandering to produce numerically balanced constituencies, and legislate meaningful punishment for electoral intimidation and fraud.    

Ex unum pluribus

An election where the two main parties firmly managed expectations down has gone as managed. Pointless to speculate how it might have gone if the electorate had been offered a choice on any issue that really matters.

No clear winner, and even the shattering of Lib Dem hopes has still left them with considerable leverage - in Westminster. What is to come may be a foretaste of a political future under some kind of proportional representation.

There is another possibility, however. 'One Nation' Toryism seems to have been dealt a death blow, with the Soviet Bloc in the north clinging to the hope that the state will continue to milk the prosperous, solidly Tory south in order to keep it in the stagnant, corrupt style to which it is accustomed.

The unarguable winner is the permanent civil service, because in the absence of a clear political mandate the response to the financial crisis will be crafted by Whitehall. Which in turn means a very big win indeed for the EU. Regional government now looks not only inevitable, but democratically desirable. I have believed for some time that the imperial construct known as 'Great Britain' has lost all vitality. The election seems to confirm that it has also lost the veneer of political legitimacy.

Scotland joined Great Britain for economic reasons that can now be satisfied by autonomy within the EU. The same consideration applies to long-conquered Wales, and the two parts of Ireland deserve each other. For an historian it is fascinating to note that the economically backward areas of England that rebelled against Henry VIII's brutal centralisation remain not only economically backward but also dissident from the rest of England.

It seems to me that the key to the whole issue is whether there remains sufficient will in the English heartland to remain tied to a bunch of dependent and resentful regions. For my part, I think it would be best - for all concerned - to end the association.

Bitchy Boys' Balls

Flogging a dead bitch, I know, but the following is the standard BBC response to complaints about its flagrant bias in all things political and most things economic and social, followed by a deconstruction:

It isn't always possible or practical to reflect all the different opinions on a subject within individual programmes [1]. Editors are charged to ensure that over a reasonable period [2] they reflect the range of significant [3] views, opinions and trends in their subject area. The BBC doesn't seek to denigrate any view or to promote any view [4]. It seeks rather to identify all significant [3] views, and to test them rigorously and fairly [5] on behalf of the audience [6]. Among other evidence [7], audience research [8] indicates widespread confidence in the impartiality of the BBC's reporting.

1. This is an assertion of the right to be selective. Impartial = all opinions, unweighted.
2. Who defines 'a reasonable period'?
3. Who defines what is 'significant'?
4. This is an outright lie. Management dictates a corporate line on many issues.
5. There cannot be anything 'rigorous and fair' in a situation where a single entity can define the law, control the evidence, and be the judge and jury of its own cause.
6. An audience that has been declining for years, while the BBC poll tax has risen sharply. 
7. What evidence? Collected by whom?
8. It is to be expected that the small percentage of the population that watches BBC reporting will believe it is impartial - people are always comforted by the affirmation of what they already believe.        

Going tits up

The Sun has published yet another compelling argument for voting against the militant mingers of the Labour and Lib Dem parties. One of the pictured Page Three women is quoted as saying:

The basis of Lockean thought is his theory of the Contract of Government, under which all political power is a trust for the benefit of the people. His thinking underpins our ideas of national identity and society. Please don't let those who seek to ban our beauty win.

It's a serious point. As Kurt Vonnegut memorably dramatised in 'Harrison Bergeron', one of the short stories published in his 1968 book Welcome to the Monkey House, the Labour Party ideal of social equality can only be achieved by denying the intelligent, athletic and beautiful members of society the right to benefit from their good fortune. 

In the story, the levelling down is directed by Handicapper General Diana Moon-Glampers. In Britain it as been directed by Arch-Minger Harriet Harperson. Hence her party's embrace of primitive, bigoted Muslims who force their women to bear full-body bags and who sell their votes. 

Very progressive.  

Scientific breakthrough

This from a viral email ;-)

Researchers have discovered the densest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Gv has no electrons, hence it is inert and its presence has been detected from its property of impeding every reaction with which it comes into contact.

Although Gv has a normal half-life of 4-5 years it does not decay, but instead undergoes a process in which  mass actually increases over time, since more morons become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Gv is formed whenever morons reach a critical morass.

Tory Manifesto: a curate's egg

Pleasantly surprised by the wry wit at the end of Cameron's introduction to the remarkably detailed party manifesto:

Together we can even make politics and politicians work better. And if we can do that, we can do anything. Yes, together we can do anything.

One warms to someone capable of taking such a self-deprecatory risk in a close-fought campaign. For the rest, the 'contract with the voters' may seem a gimmick, but it does offer up a hostage to fortune that deserves to be taken seriously. When the US Republicans campaigned against Clinton under the banner of 'A Contract with America', they were competing for legislative seats, not promising an executive programme.

As far as I am concerned, the following is the key undertaking (my italics):

We will scrap ID cards, the National Identity Register and the Contactpoint database. To protect our freedoms from state encroachment and encourage greater social responsibility, we will replace the Human Rights Act with a UK Bill of Rights. We will review and reform libel laws to protect freedom of speech, reduce costs and discourage [weasel word, that - it could easily be prevented] libel tourism. Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves. We will strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data. We will take further steps to protect people from unwarranted intrusion by the state, including:

• cutting back intrusive powers of entry into homes, which have been massively extended under Labour;
• curtailing the surveillance powers that allow some councils to use anti-terrorism laws to spy on people making trivial mistakes or minor breaches of the rules;
• requiring Privacy Impact Assessments of any proposal that involves data collection or sharing;
• ensuring proper Parliamentary scrutiny of any new powers of data-sharing

Against which there is this absurdity:

We will increase the proportion of tax revenues accounted for by environmental taxes, ensuring that any additional revenues from new green taxes that are principally designed as an environmental measure to change behaviour are used to reduce the burden of taxation elsewhere.

Actually the whole section on 'Building a Green Economy', based as it is on an exploded pseudo-scientific scam, is arrant nonsense. And that's where the notion of a contract becomes a major hurdle, because one cannot dismiss this obstinate wrong-headedness as a soon-to-be-forgotten electoral platitude.

Raising energy costs does indeed change behaviour: it makes everything more expensive, to the savage detriment of those on small fixed incomes.

Why I call them journo-pukes

'Hooray! Paddy socks it to the self-serving spooks' crows the endomorphic Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph, apropos the ad hominem riposte of ex Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, who once served in SIS, to criticism of his party's 'deviation from the cross-party consensus' on national security by, inter alia, ex-head of SIS Richard Dearlove.

'One of the minor mysteries of British political life', writes Gilligan, 'is the awe with which the pronouncements of the security services are often greeted – even though empirical experience clearly shows that those pronouncements are no more reliable, and quite often less, than in any other branch of the bureaucracy.'

One of the major mysteries about British journalism is how a little shit who put words in the mouth of a confidential source, and gave up that source's identity as soon as he was leant on, emerged from the disgraceful episode with his reputation enhanced and a job as the Telegraph's London editor.

I'm not sure whether the soaring career trajectory of Gilligan or that of the oleaginous Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan, following his dismissal from the Daily Mirror on suspicion of insider trading and for publishing manifestly fake photographs of British troops mistreating Iraqi prisoners, more perfectly sums up why the British public rates the honesty and integrity of journalists well below the politicians they report on.

I know it is why I regard them as scum unless I have positive proof to the contrary.

But to return to Ashdown's alleged expertise: Dearlove was a key member of the extremely successful SIS attack on the Russian Intelligence Services, whereas I doubt if Ashdown even recruited an agent during his brief spell in the Firm. However, he could not have failed to learn enough about the trade to know very well that the humint on Saddam was as good as it gets.

The error lay in believing that Saddam was telling the truth to his innermost, Tikriti circle. Now, ask yourself: you have hard information that a psychopathic dictator, who has previously used chemical weapons in war and on his own people, and who has defied seventeen UN resolutions demanding that he permit verification, is boasting to his intimates that he has a secret biological warfare programme. Do you:

1.  Assume that he is lying and risk a biological attack on a major western city?
2. Take the bastard out on the ground that he is overdue in hell anyway?

Gilligan's great 'scoop' was to get CBW expert Dr David Kelly to agree that the dossier put together by Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell, himself a journo of the pukiest, had 'sexed up' the evidence. In fact Campbell was give the impossible task of justifying the invasion to parliament and public without even hinting at the nature and source of the intelligence on which the decision to invade was taken.

So, Gilligan was not only cowardly and unethical, but his biggest story was subsequently shown to have been based on a totally false premise. What better recommendation could there be for a British journalist? They hold everybody else to levels of consistency and accuracy that empirical evidence shows they do not even pretend to live up to themselves. 

Schadenfreude

Ref the dying spasms of the NuLabour regime, I cannot improve on this splendid post by Mr Eugenides.

Blair is 'il cunto di tutti cunti'. I bow to a master of multicultural vituperation!

For me, the 'Portillo moment' will be if that little snerge Bercow is defeated by Farage.

Brown is as Brown does

It would be nice if, just occasionally, Brit political journo-pukes would connect up a few dots. The current trials of Greece within the European Monetary Union does not prove a damned thing about the wisdom - or otherwise - of having stayed out of EMU.

The principal reason Brown prevented Blair's Gadarene rush into the Euro was because he did not want the constraints it would have imposed on his plan to fire-hose money at the state bureaucracy. Unlike their Greek counterparts, British officials show a Stakhanovite zeal for obeying not only the letter but also their own vision of the wider intention of EU regulations.

Those regulations, strictly applied, would have prevented some, not all, of the false accounting and statistical legerdemain with which Brown disguised the vast extent of his deficit spending. The damage Brown deliberately did with his massive tax raid on the best funded private pensions in Europe will be compounded by the inflation that must inevitably follow the laxative policy of 'quantitative easing' (printing money).

The laxative would not have had to be taken in such gargantuan doses if Brown's insatiable appetite for costive taxes and borrowing had been restrained. Or even if he had respected the rule he announced when posing as a prudent chancellor of saving during a boom in order to spend during a bust. He waived that rule, saying it was rendered obsolete because he 'had abolished Tory boom and bust'.

His aim, all along, was to privilege state employees over the private sector, in which he has been entirely successful. And to cap it all the swine has been permitted to get away with posing as the 'safe pair of hands' by contrast with his inexperienced opponents. The Americans call it chutzpah, which is defined as murdering your parents and then appealing for sympathy because one is an orphan.

The NuLabour plan was to make themselves the 'party of government' by employing so many people and buying off so many more that they would remain in power for ever. Plan B, which Brown has followed ever since opinion polls showed the Conservatives enjoying a substantial lead, has been to poison the well for his successor.

I also suspect that Brown and all the other chippy NuLabour Scots carpet-baggers secretly hate the English. They have been a compacted stool in the body politic for far too long, and their passing is an essential first step towards economic health.

But they will leave a lot of inflamed Marxhorroids behind (sic) to make life as difficult as possible for those who have to clear up their mess.

Irredentism

A degree of autoproctology is forgiveable during an election campaign, but it is as well to come up for air from time to time and take a look at the international scene.

Maybe not. Have a look at this map of the homeland claimed by the Kurds.

Some five years ago, discovering that the merchants in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar with whom my lady was haggling were Kurds, I made a reference to 'Kurdistan'. They shuffled their feet and looked over their shoulders before assuring me loudly that there was no such place.

But there is, and it does not require a degree in history to predict the most probable outcome of a people with a strong cultural identity having won a considerable degree of autonomy for themselves in one of the three neighbouring countries across which they are currently distributed.

Happily, unless some future prime minister tries once more to show how Britain can 'punch above its weight', that is one geopolitical shit-storm we should be able to stay out of.

Hard core Labour

The Spectator has picked up an interview in a local paper by Manish Sood, Labour candidate for North-West Norfolk who - it should be noted - is campaigning on a platform of 'taking Britain back to the 1970s.' 

Funny, with the IMF hovering in the wings that's what I thought the NuLabour government has effectively done. Still, the apparatchiks at Labour HQ are going to have a hard time labelling Manish as racist. No doubt they will say he was displaying 'false consciousness' when he declared:

Immigration has gone up which is creating friction within communities. The country is getting bigger and messier. The role of ministers has gone bureaucratic and the action of ministers has gone downhill – it is corrupt. The loss of social values is the basic problem and this is not what the Labour Party is about. I believe Gordon Brown has been the worst Prime Minister we have had in this country. It is a disgrace and he owes an apology to the people and the Queen.

I think the country has become much smaller, in every sense, but no argument with the rest. 

'Enabling' acts

The Enabling Act passed by the German parliament after the Reichstag fire gave Hitler the power to pass such laws as he judged necessary to preserve the security of the state. More recently, the dictatorship of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela has been established on exactly the same renunciation of parliamentary responsibility.

Of course that couldn't happen here. After all, modern European political consciousness is supposed to have been vaccinated against such folly by the appalling example of Nazism.

The hell it can't. Every single piece of legislation originating in the EU and incorporated into domestic law - a perfunctory exercise, given that international treaties take precedence over domestic laws - contains an 'enabling' provision that empowers unelected officials to alter the law without further reference to parliament.

Power without responsibility - every bureaucrat's dream. But it can't all be blamed on the corporatist EU. Take the legislation poised to become law concerning taxation, which is still a matter for national parliaments to define. Big Brother Watch has picked up and developed a Daily Mail report on this piece of totalitarian shit with a post by the woman behind the story - Anne Redston, a Visiting Professor in tax law at King’s College London (my italics):

HM Revenue and Customs have drafted new laws penalising ‘deliberate wrongdoing’ - but this isn’t about hiding money in foreign bank accounts. Instead, ‘deliberate wrongdoing’ is defined as an act capable of causing a ‘loss of tax.’ This in turn is defined as ‘relief, reduction, repayment or credit of any kind.’ These definitions mean that any advice on saving tax could be subject to a penalty. The maximum penalty is 100% of the tax ‘lost’, but with minimum £5,000 (reduced to £1,500 if you confess your wrongdoing to HMRC before they discover about it). There is also a ceiling of £50,000 - but this is per person, per tax, per year, so it could be much higher.

In other words, the HRMC turds seek to make legitimate tax avoidance illegal. If, in other words, I advise you to claim tax credits of which you were unaware, under the terms of the new legislation I will be committing an illegal act. 

To put it another way, having created the most complex and inefficient tax code in the world, HRMC now wishes it to be a crime for anyone to advise another how to mimimise tax within the laws HRMC itself has created.

Although HMRC says it will only use the powers ‘reasonably’ or ‘proportionately’, once a government body has such draconian powers, the temptation to use them is overwhelming. The taxman already deploys the anti-terrorism powers in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) over 5,000 times a year. And councils are using the same powers to check your rubbish bins.

I do not see any likelihood that the next administration, which will be desperate for revenue, will reject this power-grab by the fiscal police. After all, it is already illegal to film wrong-doing by our body-armoured, black-clad criminal police.

Might as well not have fought World War II. The fascists have won in peace what they failed to impose by war.

Snookered

Nice one today from Mac in the Daily Mail. The caption reads:

Psst. We haven't potted a ball for three hours now. Are you being paid to lose too?

Pretty good analogy with this snorer of a general election. In the absence of substance, such interest as the campaign has aroused has focused almost entirely on personalities.

Meanwhile a hung parliament, the only outcome that might permit the Labour pukes to continue robbing the country blind, may well have been decided by the naked exercise of bribery, intimidation and fraud.

Postal vote fraud

Given the massive abuse of the postal voting system by the Labour pukes last time around, why is anyone surprised that they are at it again this time, on an industrial scale?

Seven million postal votes - are you kidding? If they have not padded the electoral rolls with at least a million phantom voters, and bought another million or so from the 'community leaders' they have bribed so assiduously, I shall be very surprised.

About that 'racist' Arizona ordnance

Rather odd that it should be considered racist for a state to pass a law identical to federal law, in essence confirming that illegal immigrants are - er - illegal. As to why Arizona has taken this initiative, the following information comes from FBI and Department of Homeland Security reports:

• 83% of warrants for murder in Phoenix, AZ, are for illegal aliens.
• 86% of warrants for murder in Albuquerque, AZ, are for illegal aliens.

There's lots more, but those two will do. Just thought I'd mention it, given that as usual the Brit press is echoing the limousine leftist New York Times. 

The statist Ponzi scheme

I have despised Jon Snow ever since he was the point man for the anti-British coverage of the Falklands War by the Bitchy Boys Club. My contempt deepened when I chanced to see a broadcast of him wearing body armour in the Baghdad Green Zone, which featured reports by some extremely brave Iraqi journalists out among the insurgents. Snow whined that he could not get out to ask the questions he wished answered, leading one to wonder why, in that case, he had gone to Baghdad at all. Plus one can easily imagine the 'questions' he wished to ask:

How much do you hate the Americans?
Were you provoked to resistance by the criminal invasion of your country?
Etc.

So it was with distaste that I tuned in yesterday to 'Election Uncovered - What they won't tell us', a programme on C4 presented by Snow. I'm glad I did. Apart from the fact that NuLabour and the Lib Dems were represented by senior but still active party members, and the Tories by the Beeb whore Portillo, who made a point of stating that he was no longer a member of the Conservative Party, the built-in bias was less blatant than usual.

The truly revealing aspect of the discussion was that the whole thing was slanted to present current levels of government spending as desirable but, unfortunately, no longer affordable. So, according to Snow's programme, what 'they' are not telling us is how the massive structural deficit can be tackled without upsetting the status quo.  

A pointless discussion, therefore. Because the structural deficit is the product of a fundamental imbalance between the private, wealth creating sector, and statist, wealth consuming parasitism. The imbalance is not unique to Britain, nor is it solely the product of NuLabour's attempt to perpetuate itself in power.

It is manifestly impossible to close the structural deficit without upsetting the status quo. The term itself identifies the structure - the Welfare State - as the source of the deficit. What was so revealing about the programme was that everybody present shared the view that the preservation of the Welfare State was more important than the long-term welfare of the people it supposedly exists to serve.

A Ponzi scheme is one in which revenue from new investors is paid out as dividends to earlier investors without having been used for any intervening economic activity - other than enriching the administrators of the scheme. Private individuals who run such schemes eventually go to jail. Those who have administered such schemes for the state get to appear on television to argue, very reasonably and persuasively, that it is essential to keep them going.

The Police State we're in

Damn! I thought I was pretty up to date about the sinister increase in unaccountable police powers over the past 13 years. I HAD NO IDEA of its full extent until I read 'Domestic Extremism - secretive, unaccountable, therefore untrustworthy Police units' on Spyblog.

I used to be a spook, and at the beginning chafed at the many restraints put on our ability to do our job. But I came to understand that all those elastic bands were designed to make it damned difficult to indulge in ill-considered action.

It came down to this: the British political/judicial establishment judged it preferable to accept a considerably less than possible level of security from foreign and domestic threats than to empower the intelligence and security services to the point where they might become a law unto themselves.

Seems that consideration has gone right down the toilet. To modify Lord Acton's dictum: unaccountable power tends to corrupt, absolutely unaccountable and anonymous power corrupts absolutely.

It may be that these secretive police organisations will behave with restraint while they are led by people who grew up in the old tradition - but once today's young apparatchiks take over, the consequences of abandoning centuries-old guarantees of civil liberty will become starkly apparent.

Monetary union has delivered a 'German Europe' after all

So mopes the admirable Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today's Telegraph.

Why so gloomy, Ambrose? Who pays the piper calls the tune - except in the case of Britain, the next greatest net contributor, whose officials are always anxious to surrender the national interest on the altar of the Great God EU.  

I cannot see why the most populous, prosperous, well-organised and fiscally sober nation in Europe should not dominate the Union. It sure as hell is better than the Napoleonic fantasies of the French.

The least defensible sacred cow

Running out of leftist dicks to suck vested interests to appease, a few days ago Cameron pronounced himself 'probably the most pro-BBC Conservative leader there's ever been.'

That's insane.

The Bitchy Boys are never going to give a fair hearing to the Conservative Party, on any subject. As Hippiepooter blogged back in February (sorry - I saved the text but not the link):

As a youthful Tribunite member of the Labour Party in the late 70’s it was clear to me that the only real bias at the BBC was towards the Left, and I was against it as it was bad for democracy. When Tony Blair assumed leadership of the Labour Party, this bias went into overdrive. It was patently evident to anyone semi-politically literate that pre ‘97 Tony Blair’s office was running an anti-Tory smear campaign in concert with the BBC to get elected, and once elected proceeded to govern with the same appalling contempt for democracy.

And, be it said, with the same, systematically unscrupulous support of the BBC until he committed Britain to the invasion of Iraq. Bear in mind that multiculturalism, like global warmism, was categorically ruled a subject not open to debate by BBC management even before the anus (sic) mirabilis of 1997.

I am not the slightest bit interested in why the BBC is so flagrantly and irredeemably biased. I don't care if it stems from youthful distortion in the Workers' Revolutionary Party politico-sexual cult, or a fondness for dusky buttocks, or simply the usual leftist self-sustaining conceit.

It suffices that its senior members, not satisfied with skimming off public money to their own production companies, have also voted themselves incredibly generous salaries and pensions and refuse to submit public accounts. 

There can be no progress towards a healthier political culture while by far the most significant cultural outlet and the greatest source of cultural patronage in Britain is in the hands of a gang of corrupt opportunists whose limousine leftism is maintained by a regressive Poll Tax.

If the NuTories can't even summon up the courage to excise that poisonous quango, then what use are they?

It's all about CULTURE

Amid growing signs of turmoil in the Labour camp, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, yesterday insisted that a hung parliament posed no risk to the recovery. 'It’s utter tosh that it’s bad for the economy', he told The Sunday Times. 'Take Germany. They have had a hung parliament since the second world war, and they manage to organise themselves.'

What an unwittingly revealing statement! Darling is a senior member of a party dedicated to the proposition that the people of Britain are incapable of organising themselves without being coerced by the state.

There is some truth in that perception. Even under National Socialism, the Germans showed a far greater ability to organise themselves than the British. But they only became a nation state in 1870, and 'localism' was in their collective political DNA.

I suspect the reason why Cameron's big idea about devolving power downwards has not caught on is that most of the British either do not understand or actively reject the concept of taking responsibility for their lives. I also suspect that while it is relatively easy to erode liberty, it is extremely difficult - and may be impossible - to force people to be free.

As I blogged previously - Thatcher led the horse to water, but the nag refused to drink. I can see nothing in the behaviour of the British since then to suggest that their fear of freedom and its attendant responsibilities has in any way abated. To the contrary - their supine acceptance of the gradual surrender of representative government and Common Law to the EU, the erosion of freedom of speech, of trial by jury and the ease with which a manifestly communist 'equality' agenda has been imposed, all argue that they are quite content to live without the freedoms that once made British society distinctive.

For such a society, a hung parliament would be a disaster. But then again, the only likely majority party professes to be determined not to offer the 'stamp of firm government' with which the British people, for all their chronic bitching about the inadequacy of their leaders, are most comfortable.

I sincerely hope I am wrong, but contemporary Britain does seem to prove the truth of the Jeffersonian adage, drawn from his study of the corruption and decline of the Greek and Roman civilisations, that a people without virtue cannot long be free.

More Libertarian Party bollocks

On the Daily Politics last 15 April, Chris Mouncey, who blogs under the name of Devil's Kitchen, got torn a new fundament by Andrew Neil. He was forced to apologize for one of his many vituperative blogs and emerged to offer his resignation as leader of the Libertarian Party, membership 450.

In other words, he was held publicly accountable for statements he had made, and bottled it. In a subsequent grovelling blog he explained that he now had something to lose, to wit a job in which he is doing well, and regretted the intemperate language and personal viciousness of some of the blogs he wrote when things were not going so well for him.

Today he teed up on Burning our money, another blogger, for allegedly demonstrating bigoted ignorance about immigration (see More bollocks about immigration). Once again Mouncey lets his personal life do the talking. His American wife had an appalling time obtaining residence, so he denounces Britain's laberynthine immigration rules, which 'the government keeps changing - sometimes retrospectively - in order to pander to the depressingly large number of hysterical, ignorant bigots who reside in this piece-of-shit country'.

That would be the government that deliberately opened the doors to unlimited (non-EU) immigration, specifically to alter the electoral demographics in its favour. Perhaps I am insufficiently attuned to the nuances, but doesn't Mouncey's point of view coincide exactly with Gordon Brown's, carelessly expressed into an open microphone?

It is not only perfectly legitimate, it is libertarian for a community to set its own rules and to require obedience to those rules from all who wish to join the community. If there is not at least a minimum of cultural consensus, there is no prospect of the uncoerced self-governance that is the libertarian ideal.

When the Labour Party set out to alter the demographics in its favour, it assumed that the immigrants would become clients, and that the reaction against it by the indigenous population would take a sufficiently unpleasant form to burnish the Labour Party's self-image as the keepers of the 'progressive' flame.

What the Labour pukes did not anticipate was that the unpleasant form the reaction took would be the BNP, which is the Labour Party with added racism, in previously safe Labour constituencies where the pressure on services, schools and housing became unbearable.

To condemn as 'hysterical, ignorant bigots' those who accurately perceive that their situation has been altered for the worse by mass immigration is projection. It is those who dismiss their legitimate concerns who are hysterical and ignorant, and nakedly authoritarian to boot.

Reverse metamorphosis

What's with this 'Mr' shit? And 'Sir'; and 'Lord'? All are suffixes indicating honour or respect, and there are damned few people in public life who deserve either. The honours bazaar is a joke, and if we do away with 'Mr' then we won't have to resort to the irritating 'Ms'. This is a demotic society in which formal politeness is an increasingly ludicrous anachronism.

As to the hereditaries, most of their titles date back to male or female whores who got lucky, making them even less worthy of honour than those who buy their titles for whatever pleasure it may give them in life. Away with the lot of them, and if in time this means we shed the royals - well, they seem to have made the transition to 'Hello'-fodder quite successfully, and most of them will no doubt welcome being relieved of irksome public duties. A monarchy cannot survive as a tourist attraction; the buildings will do the job perfectly well.

There is no point in preserving the wings of the butterfly. The British state has passed back through the pupal stage and should shed the frills and furbelows with which it seeks to disguise its essential grubbiness.

Rats and sinking ships

I have always wondered why rats that prudently abandon a ship they judge is going to sink are taken as an exemplar of disloyalty. Seems to me that any rats that stayed on board such a ship would be extremely lazy or stupid, and their extinction would improve the gene pool of Rattus rattus.

Thus the left-wing Guardian's abandonment of the Labour Party - after prudently banking the last pre-election week of income from the vast amount of government advertising that has kept it going for the last 13 years - proves nothing except its desire to survive. Its readership has nowhere else to go, and ads for jobs in the state sector are going to be as rare as hen's teeth for the next several years - so why stay on board the foundering NuLabour scow?

The Guardian's new-found enthusiasm for the Lib Dems recalls its support for the SDP when it broke away from the left-lurching Labour Party of the early 1980s. Journopukes are swift to bray in derision if politicians adapt their policies to changing circumstances; but of course when they do it, it's quite different.

It's principled, innit?