Welfare trap

Following from Burning our Money:

As [Secretary of State for Work and Pensions] Ian Duncan-Smith spelled out once again in yesterday's consulation paper, after 60 years of our gargantuan welfare state, Britain's workless poor face a welfare trap of life-mangling proportions.

The paper contains the following chart, showing how the trap works for a couple with a single earner on the Minimum Wage, and two children. The family can certainly increase its net income (vertical axis) as the earner works more hours (horizontal axis), but only by a horribly small amount (focus on top net income line).

This means that those at the National Minimum Wage are less than £7 per week better off if they work 16 extra hours and earn an extra £92, the result of a marginal deduction rate of 95.5% on earnings between £126 and £218. The report presents three possible reforms:

1. A universal credit - all benefits combined into one easily understood and to administer universal benefit.
2. A unified taper - existing range of benefits that would be withdrawn as earnings rise through a taper applied to overall benefit eligibility, rather than the individual benefits as is now the case.
3. A single benefit/negative income tax. 

If ease of understanding, administrative simplicity and motivation to work were the principal objectives, option 3 wins going away. But it is the most expensive in the short term and would demand - I suspect in vain, given the quality of the people involved - a major change in the mind-set of the army currently administering benefits.

The Coalition government may want to do the right thing, but it has no incentive whatever to endure the cost and disruption of a policy that will only pay off beyond the 5-year electoral cycle.

U-turns

Journopukes on both sides of the Atlantic like to crow "U-turn" after governments abandon a proposed or actual policy when arguments against it prevail, or more often if it proves too politically difficult to implement.

First of all the term is grossly over-used: "U-turn" describes a complete reversal of policy, which is unusual. If the strategic intent remains the same, then the abandonment of a failed or politically unworkable tactical means is simply pragmatic common sense.  

Furthermore it is more than a bit too strong for journopukes to demand foresight and consistency in others when they themselves never admit to being mistaken - about anything. Yet they are only playing with words. Very few journopukes are capable of making the transition to doing something practical. 

What puzzles me is why ministers so often tie themselves in knots to avoid admitting they made a mistake. It is as though they become infected by the laughable culture of omniscience that has Whitehall denying errors for decades even after a blatant policy failure like the Falklands War, complete with official inquiries and histories designed to demonstrate that the Mandarinate can do no wrong.  

One of the least esteemed virtues in politicians is when they have the wit to recognize they are in a hole, and stop digging. Something along the lines of: "It seemed like a promising approach to the problem, but it has proved unsatisfactory in practice/impossible to implement" would deflate most media bubbles. 

ASBOs

Richard Sennett, a decidedly lefty professor of sociology at LSE and professor of social science at MIT, has a dynamite article in the Guardian titled "The ASBO is an icon of New Labour negligence". He celebrates the abolition of the Anti-Social Banning Order, Tony Blair's flagship policy to deal with youth pre-criminal disorderly behaviour by - umm - criminalizing it. 

Blair thought social behaviour could be "reformed" top-down, and in this, exactly missed the point of my work. Cultures hold together or fall apart for reasons that transcend power. On the housing estate in Chicago where I lived as a child, frail African-American grandmothers and Italian grandfathers issued something like ASBOs and these were likely to be obeyed: the grandparents commanded a moral authority which no policeman or social worker will ever possess. Of the 17,000 ASBOs issued from 2000 to 2008, 55% have been breached, so the new government is looking for something else.

Good social behaviour among adolescents is all about family countering peer pressure. This is not quite a matter of family "values": kids who routinely go to the pub with their parents get a different education in drinking than teenagers who only swill with each other. So too with meals: working-class adolescents who regularly eat meals with their parents have proved less likely to fall into crime than kids who clean out the fridge on the run. "Values" arise from the habits of everyday life; they are not abstract imperatives: no law could command people when to eat and drink, and with whom.

Note the typical lefty parentheses around family "values". You can just see him doing that stupid American thing with hooked fore and middle fingers wiggling to show disdain for non-PC terminology.

Problem is, you sad old lefty, your argument coincides exactly with what those you dismiss as right-wing have been saying for decades. The matriarchs and patriarchs you recall no longer exist because their function was utterly - and deliberately - subverted by "progressive" social policies designed to turn the lower classes into clients of a state apparat manned by a new lower middle class of parasitic government employees.   

Surveillance state

The Coalition government promised to "ban the use of powers in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) by councils, unless they are signed off by a magistrate and required for stopping serious crime."

The gross abuse of RIPA by local councils to spy on possible misdemeanours are detailed in this pdf from Big Brother Watch. 

So now the Chief Surveillance Commissar Commissioner has issued his Annual Report into Surveillance in the United Kingdom, which confirms that RIPA requests continue to spiral upwards, yet dismisses public concerns in a couple of paragraphs suggesting the problem is blown out of proportion by the media.

So, in keeping with the mantras of openness and transparency, a sense of proportion will be restored by revealing details of errors and abuses - right? Of course not - the number of such lapses:

. . . is very small when it is compared to the numbers of requests for data which are made nationally. I am not convinced that any useful purpose would be served by providing a more detailed report of these errors. I should add that neither I nor any of my inspectors have uncovered any willful or reckless conduct which has been the cause of these errors.

The man in Whitehall knows best - you peasants should just shut up and be grateful.

The Met Office does it again

A Telegraph article illustrated by the notoriously faked photograph of polar bears on a melting iceberg reports that UK Met Office has trumpeted the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report for 2009 that proves that global temperatures have risen over the past 50 years - by a whole degree Fahrenheit!

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said variability in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain, does not mean the rest of the world is not warming. Fair enough. But then he adds "greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation".

No half-way well informed sceptic denies that the world is warming, as it has been since the last of the Little Ice Age minima in 1850. Likewise nobody who purports to be a scientist should describe one of a large numbers of variables as the sole, let alone "glaringly obvious" explanation, furthermore on the basis of a fifty year sample that covers only the period that climate catastrophists wish to highlight.

More on Huhne

Christopher Booker takes an axe to the disaster-about-to-happen Energy Minister Huhne and his policies in the Daily Mail. James Delingpole does likewise in the Telegraph. Although Booker rightly describes Huhne as "a 24-carat green ideologue", neither commentator appears to be aware that Huhne is simply parroting the gospel according to Amory Lovins, as highlighted in my post of 25 July.

Huhne is far too intellectually limited to have worked anything out for himself. Like so many British soft lefties, he draws his certainties from having selected a personally congenial explanation-of-everything from the cornucopia on offer from the US academy, and will cling to it with single-minded determination. 

He also probably calculates that he can't lose. If he can implement his policy, he will be hailed as a wonder-worker by his fellow eek!-o-freaks; and if he is sacked, he can pose as a martyr. Either way, his ultimate aim may be to wreck the Tory-LibDem coalition, to emerge as the big fish in the microscopic pond of the LibDem socialist wing.

Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR)

In a Guardian article Lars Calmfors, chairman of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council, comments that when the Coalition government set up the British equivalent OBR, it failed to grasp the need for the absolute independence that gives a financial watchdog credibility, ignoring the experiences of similar bodies set up recently in Sweden, Canada, Hungary and Slovenia, and long established in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United States.

It was not just that experiences with similar institutions elsewhere were ignored – and academic discussion of them not taken into account – but that a number of established principles for such bodies were actually violated. . . .  The OBR's independence must be taken more seriously. The British debate is moving in the right direction. But it needs to move more. And the debate would benefit greatly from being less national and taking more account of experiences elsewhere.

Gosh, who would have thunk it? Whitehall ignoring the precedents and experiences of other countries! Much better to muddle through - look how well it's worked for the last hundred years or so. The envy of the world.

Beyond satire

Article in today's Telegraph:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader, says Paul the Octopus, who correctly predicted the outcome of World Cup games, is a symbol of all that is wrong with the western world. "Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values," he said.

Big Society at work - in California

This video of the citizens of Bell, California, getting rid of their corrupt city council illustrates why Cameron's "Big Society" is a non-starter in Britain.

One of the principal reasons why British governance became so over-centralized is that local governments are, in the main, run by self-serving, deeply corrupt cliques; yet such is the power of political tribalism that they tend to get re-elected regardless of their performance.

The classic example is Doncaster Borough Council, which has had more scandals than Chicago over the last 36 years, yet until recently remained under total Labour party dominance (see here and here and, hilariously, here). It is an almost exclusively white, lower class borough.

Broadly speaking two kinds of people are drawn to local government: deal makers drawn by the money-making possibilities of the planning permission racket; and idealists who become rapidly disillusioned when they have to deal with the random whining of "the people" and become putty in the hands of the racketeers.

An apathetic and willfully ignorant population is not going to step up and demand the changes needed at the grass roots level; and without the healthy - and effective- activism shown by the citizens of Bell, the decentralization of Cameron's "Big Society" will simply enable local councils to steal more.

Afghan war in maps

From the Guardian:

Locations of IED attacks correspond exactly to the following map from The Heritage Foundation:

Simon Jenkins - arsehole of the week

In an otherwise unexceptionable Guardian article on the Wikileaks dossier of Afghanistan war logs, sixty-seven year-old Simon Jenkins, in his time an eminent journopuke (knighthood in 2004) and more recently author of books on Britain's architectural heritage, ends with the following stupidity:

I cannot avoid the conclusion that, just as the Pashtun are said to be "hardwired to fight", so now are certain western regimes. War is about sating the military-security-industrial complex, a lobby so potent that, long after the cold war ended, it can induce democratic leaders to expend quantities of blood and money on such specious pretexts as suppressing dictators in one country and terror in another.

If Jenkins had bothered to read up on the subject he would know that armed forces and arms manufacturers hate wars. Wars expose the personal and institutional inadequacies of the armed forces, reveal the flaws in weapons systems and also reduce the long production runs that characterize peacetime procurement, which fatten the profits of the manufacturers and the wallets of senior officers and officials.

Oh, and what about those boring old lefty comments about "the military-security-industrial complex" in "certain western regimes"? The outstanding examples of the former are Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba - and are we to understand that only western regimes make war on rogue regimes? Silly man.

Cameron and Turkey

Interesting. In a hard-hitting speech in the Turkish capital Ankara, the usually mellifluous David Cameron has damned French and German opposition to Turkey´s membership of the EU (full story and video here).

Now that is realpolitik at many levels. Turkey is teetering on the brink of abandoning Kemal Ataturk's disestablishment of Islam and the public snubs it has had to endure from the EU have pushed it in that direction, which would have highly undesirable consequences for NATO. The advent of Turkey would also, certainly, slow the Gadarene rush to ever-closer union within the EU. Whether Turkey joins or not, Cameron's words will cement good relations between the UK and Turkey. Oh - and he has neatly skewered German and French diplomatic hypocrisy.

Domestically he has also, of course, outflanked the Labour pukes yet again. 

Didn't think he had it in him.

Who says Americans don't do irony?

Following from a friend and the internet.

In response to a popular US radio talk show host's observation that, as an Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination to her according to Leviticus 18:22, the following response was posted by a Jewish professor.

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination ... End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. What do you think would be a fair price for her?

And so on. The conclusion is unimprovable: "Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging."

The unwise talk show host's Wikibio is here.

Quangos - a failed expedient

Let us recall that Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations got their biggest boost under Margaret Thatcher. She had been compelled to buy off the Civil Service with additional pay and privileges because she needed to cover her back while confronting the trades union in Britain's traditional industries, which had long been kept going only by subsidies and tariffs.

Having won that battle, she then had to deal with the privileged Civil Service, many of whose departments were, and had been for some time, "unfit for purpose" - as Labour Home Secretary John Reid judged the Immigration Service to be in 2006. Quangos were an attempt to inject some dynamism into the state sector, while also vastly increasing political patronage.

Taken together, Thatcher's two tactical expedients proved to be a colossal strategic error once the Labour party got back into power. The privileging of the Civil Service over the rest of society was accelerated, while Quangos staffed with the Labourite faithful proliferated. Given that reforming the Civil Service is going to be a long drawn-out battle of attrition, the new Coalition government simply had to dismantle the largely parasitic Quangocracy, much of which duplicated the functions of the formal government departments and was largely staffed by the same sort of people.

The oldest and most influential of them all is the BBC, which most Brits do not see as a Quango at all. If it is to be humbled, it may be necessary to mount a steady campaign to make the public aware of how corruptly self-serving it is while stripping away its many profitable sidelines that compete disloyally with private enterprise. Maybe best not to hold your breath on that one.

The following list from the Independent is remarkable for the sheer number and range of the institutions that are set to be abolished, with voices raised in defence of very few:

ABOLISHED
Arts
UK Film Council
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council
Advisory Council on Libraries
Legal Deposit Advisory Panel
Advisory Committee on Historic Wreck Sites
Health
Health Protection Agency (HPA)
National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA)
National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse
Alcohol Education and Research Council
Appointments Commission (CQC)
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (by end of this Parliament)
Human Tissue Authority
Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (to be made a self-funding body by charging a levy on regulators)
NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement
Education
General Teaching Council
Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency
British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA)
Ufi Ltd/Learndirect
Learning & Skills Improvement Service
Institute for Learning
Business and Economy
All eight regional Government Offices: South-West, South-East, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, North-West, Yorkshire & the Humber and North-East
Eight out of the nine regional development agencies (the exception being London) and some of their local subsidiaries: Advantage West Midlands, East Midlands Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward, South-West Regional Development Agency, South-East England Development Agency, East of England Development Agency, North-West Regional Development Agency, One North-East
Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property policy (SABIP)
SITPRO (Simplifying International Trade)
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Advisory Body (WAB)
British Shipbuilders Corporation
Standards and Verification UK
Hearing Aid Council
Investors in People UK
Home Office
National Policing Improvement Agency
Environment
Sustainable Development Commission (funding withdrawn)
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
Agricultural Wages Board, the 15 Agricultural Wages Committees, the 16 Agricultural Dwelling House Advisory Committees and the Committee on Agricultural Valuation
Inland Waterways Advisory Council
The Commons Commissioners
Infrastructure Planning Commission
Commission for Rural Communities

MERGED
Arts and Sport
UK Sport with Sport England
National Lottery Commission with the Gambling Commission

UNDER THREAT
Arts
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, English Heritage, Heritage Lottery Fund, National Heritage Memorial Fund – could be merged
Advisory Committee on National Historic Ships (declassified, functions transferred to another body)
Theatres Trust (declassified, so can act as an independent statutory advisory body)
Churches Conservation Trust (could be declassified, pending talks with the Church of England)
Visit England and Visit Britain (status, role and functions will change)
Design Council (under review)
Business
Local Better Regulation Office
ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service)
Local Better Regulation Office
Ofcom (in the short term losing its policy making power)
Food
Food Standards Agency (its responsibilities have been much reduced)
Environment
Carbon Trust (could be merged into new UK Green Investment Bank)
Education
Partnership for Schools (school-building)
Training and Development Agency (was facing the axe, may now be spared)
Society
Children's Commissioner for England – under review
Equality and Human Rights Commission – budget reduced, faces further cuts

Eating this one for my post of 11 July (here) lamenting that the Coalition had not moved fast enough against the Quangocracy.

Patience, Ockham, patience. Cutting the egregious crap out of government is difficult, because it is so hard to differentiate it from the rest.

Homophobia

Homo- is a Greek prefix meaning same, equal, like, similar, common. Not to be confused with the Latin word homo, which which means humankind.

Phobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by extreme and irrational fear.

So, "homophobia" means an irrational fear of the same. Thus in the semantics of sexual politics, it must have been devised to describe somebody who is in frightened denial of his or her own homosexuality.

Or alternatively it is a typically illiterate import from the Americans, the Humpty Dumptys of the English language, for whom a word means what they choose it to mean.

Why British TV is so dull

Nick Cohen has a good debate going on this subject in Standpoint. I can't improve on the following:

American dramatists are not public service broadcasters. They can make dramas, which are far worse than anything we see, and far better. British television is a part of the establishment, with public-service obligations set by a state that gives knighthoods and peerages to senior station controllers on their retirement. Broadcasters seem to think that they have to show that at the end of every story the virtuous are rewarded and the wicked punished. They have to pretend that there are no problems with, say, multiculturalism or suggest that all decent people share the outlook of an upper-middle class human rights lawyer or Liberal Democrat MP with a healthy trust fund and tender conscience.

Yet public service broadcasters operating under the same establishment guidelines produced excellent dramas from the 1960s to the 1980s. Why they cannot now is still something of a mystery. My gut instinct remains that British television has a structural problem (discussed in this post) stemming from too much power being in the hands of too few commissioners, and an unwarranted self-esteem stemming from its production of formulaic programmes, which sell well internationally but which are ultimately pap.

Crow eating time. Watching "Sherlock" on BBC1, the first of three stories with Conan Doyle's creation operating in modern London. It is really very good - witty, pacy writing, fine neurotic lead performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, clever supporting role by Martin Freeman as Watson. Then there was a superb "Top Gear" with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, and a moving tribute to Ayrton Senna. Gulp.

Must have mislaid his gun

Huhne's energy policy

Let's assume that Christopher Huhne, the LibDem Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is not an imbecile. If he is not, which obviously some would dispute, then why is he claiming that a massive increase in heavily subsidized wind turbines will meet the baseload (note that word) energy short-fall that Britain will face when it closes its aging fossil-fuel generating plants?

Even optimally located wind turbines deliver at best twenty percent of their design capacity (report here). And they often deliver none at all, as when they totally failed to deliver during the coldest days last winter. The only non fossil-fuel energy generation option that can possibly make up for the impending baseload deficiency is nuclear.

And Huhne has ruled out subsidies for a new generation of nuclear power plants.

So, still clinging to the concept that he is not an imbecile, what is his agenda? It would appear that he has totally bought into the gospel according to the "deep" eek!-o-freak Amory Lovins, whose view is that "It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it."

The idea is to force people to use energy sparingly by reducing supply and raising the cost. As for the massive hit it will inflict on the economy, reducing tax revenues while increasing unemployment and all the social pathologies that go with it, the elderly who will freeze to death, and so on - well, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, can you?

You don't have to scratch very deep below the veneer of "saving the planet" to find the drooling lust for genocidal social engineering that lies beneath.

Demophobia

Every year the Rhythms of the World (ROTW) festival draws thousands to the little Hertfordshire market town of Hitchin, where I have lived for the last 18 months. Funnily enough, in 1955-6 I attended a prep school very near here, during a brief interlude between living in Cuba and Chile. 

Having missed ROTW last year, I was determined to enjoy it this time, and ambled over to the Priory park, an attractive but none-too large venue, not long after the gates opened at midday. It was enchanting. People of all ages and ethnic groups, capering children and seriously disabled individuals in motorized wheelchairs; the whole human spectrum, all happy, polite and considerate.

The music was fun (I particularly liked an almost all-female group called "The Bush The Tree and Me", who were having such a good time that it was infectious) and the wide range of nibbles and ethnic cuisine served by friendly (and generous) young people was the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately I become extremely uneasy in crowds, and by about 3pm the number of festival goers had reached the concentration that triggers my phobia. They were still happy, polite and considerate, but gradually I went from really enjoying a rare occasion to mix with strangers to feeling beset. So I left before it escalated to the sweating, short-breathed, and toes-curling-inside-my-shoes stage. 

I have felt the same about crowds for as long as I can remember.  I wonder where the hell these autonomic reactions come from?  

Boys in Black (part 3)

Police Constable Stuart Davidson wrote an anonymous blog about police abuses and the wastefulness of British police bureaucracy and therefore became the target of a statist man-hunt before revealing his identity in 2007 after emigrating to Canada, where he swiftly found  job with the Edmonton police.

Writing as David Copperfield, his article in today's Telegraph identifies all the fundamental ways in which they do things better in Canada. Best to read it in full. 

"Left" and "Right" - terminology for simpletons

Daniel Hannan returns to the charge about the British National Party being "left-wing" in his Telegraph column. Most tellingly, he quotes the following from the neo-Marxist New Statesman. Well, what the NS stands for used to be called the "New Left" long ago; maybe "Geriatric Left"? All very boring.

A brief skim through BNP manifesto literature brings to light proposals for the following: large increases in state pensions; more money for the NHS; improved worker protection; state ownership of key industries. Under Griffin, the modern-day far right has positioned itself to the left of Labour.

As Hannan goes on to elucidate, the term "right-wing" has been utterly devalued by becoming synonymous with whatever offends the petit bourgeois perception of what is "nice":

There is only one sense in which the BNP is right-wing, and that is the BBC sense. Our state broadcaster uses the epithet “right-wing” to mean “disagreeable”. It thus applies the term equally to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Vladimir Putin, Timothy McVeigh, Eugene Terre’blanche, Orthodox Jews, the Taleban, the Pope, the Orange Order and David Cameron.

The point is that unqualified "left" and "right" has been a false dichotomy for a very long time. It arose from the seating in the Chamber of Deputies of the Third French Republic, with Radicals on the left and Conservatives on the right. It was a convention, like Marxism, born of conditions peculiar to the 19th century and subsequently overtaken by vast changes in commercial and social organization, by greater sophistication in political economic thought and by vertiginous advances in scientific understanding.

If the terminology has any remaining meaning at all, it must be that the "left" believes in an ever-larger state and the "right" believes in keeping the state as small as possible. Theoretically, therefore, totalitarianism can only be "left wing" and anarchy "right wing"; which is manifest nonsense.

While the setting questions are distorted by the preoccupations of Anglo-American "political correctness", a more nuanced appreciation of where one stands in a three-dimensional political spectrum can be obtained through taking the test at the Political Compass website.

I ran a check-list of the BBC's agenda several times, trying to aim off for my own prejudice. Every run found it on the extreme left; but with only minor variations, the corporation also came up moderately libertarian. So, the question is whether its belief in an ever-larger state can possibly co-exist with a seemingly contradictory commitment to individual liberty. Only through the agency of an all-powerful but benevolent Platonic elite, I would have thought - which is pretty much on the money with reference to the BBC's original Reithian remit.

Here's my own result:

Greens attack European Climate Exchange

How perfectly marvellous! Some greeny hackers attacked the European Climate Exchange website and substituted this excellent home page.

By the way, what a stupid name that is. What, are we going to exchange our climate with someone else's? 

As an early environmentalist (born of observing the destruction of coral reefs), my hatred of the climate catastrophist scam was born when I returned to university (in Florida) in the early 90s to get a better grounding in biological and ecological science. What I found was that the green gurus were psychotic misanthropes and that environmentalism had become a well-developed academic scam, with researchers compelled to give their requests for funding an environmental twist.

That was even before Al Gore's climate catastrophist band-wagon really got rolling, with its single-minded demonisation of carbon dioxide and its blatantly totalitarian political agenda, and sucked all the energy out of the broader environmentalist movement.

The left tries to politicise everything, and everything it politises turns to shit.

So, well done the greenies who attacked one of the most egregious manifestation of the scam; but sorry they still don't realize that multinational corporations are simply hitching a ride on the far greater scam being perpetrated by national and international bureaucratic oligarchies.

My generation, still talking shit

Sixty year-old Will Hutton, the epitome of the old school bien pensant limp lefties who have done so much irreversible harm to this country, tells us in the Guardian that we must "Stick up for the BBC. It's the last bastion against rule by the mob." Look it up if you like; I can't be bothered to link it.

He contrasts what he amusingly calls the fairness and impartiality of the BBC with the "poisonous public culture" in the US, which, he says, is the result of abandoning the fairness in broadcasting doctrine twenty years ago. Well yes - that standard was abandoned because it was impossible to enforce, and worked exclusively for the benefit of the the limp left.

The bile, unfairness and lack of restraint in the blogosphere is infecting the mainstream media and thus American politics. Senior American politicians and officials of all political persuasions despair about its impact on political debate and policy. Tough decisions – on banks, on fiscal policy, on defence, on the Middle East – have become almost impossible. An organisation such as the BBC, committed to impartiality and accuracy, is seen as a last bulwark against populist government by the mob. Yet in Britain one wing of the coalition government is set upon attacking it, regarding the American media model as one we should copy. Matters are made more ominous by the degree of emerging cross-media dominance by News International – matched only in a western democracy by Berlusconi in Italy – that will be further sealed when Mr Murdoch's bid for the balance of BSkyB he does not own is nodded through by the coalition. Lack of courage by weak politicians, with Blair and Brown especially culpable, is set to bequeath Britain the worst of the Italian and American media. Our culture and our democracy are at stake.

For individuals like Hutton, the definition of "fairness" is when their point of view is privileged. He used to be chief editor of the Observer. Should we perhaps be paying a subsidy to that dying publication because it is so "unfair" that only old limp lefties still read it?

Even if the BBC were genuinely impartial in its news coverage and political commentary, I would still regard it as demonstrably unfair and blatantly corrupt that a self-serving clique, living unjustifiably well on a regressive tax supplemented by commissioning shows from their own production companies, should continue to exercise what amounts to a cultural monopoly.

The Final Green Solution

The quotations at this site should remove any doubt about the anti-human agenda of the climate catastrophists.

The last time we had such a critical mass of murderous ideologues, we hanged their leaders at Nuremburg.

Further to my last

Tom Bower's article in the Guardian's CiF column on Richard Desmond's acquisition of TV Channel 5 sums up the mixture of snobbery, envy and personal vindictiveness that characterises so much of British "quality" journalism. Bower's Wikipedia entry reads as follows:

A former Panorama reporter, his books include highly critical unauthorised biographies of Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown and Richard Branson. He won the 2003 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for Broken Dreams, an investigation into corruption in English Football. His biography Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge was published in November 2006. 

The final sentences reveal the axe he has to grind, which really should disqualify his comments about Desmond from serious consideration:

An unsuccessful libel case over a passing mention of Express proprietor Richard Desmond in the book was heard in July 2009. A biography by Bower of Richard Desmond, Rough Trader, awaits publication.

Which puts into context Bower's opening salvo:

The choice of Richard Desmond as the new owner of Channel Five beggars belief. Never before has a government regulator (Ofcom) lowered the threshold for the suitability of the prospective owner of a TV channel enough for someone like Desmond to control a potentially lucrative franchise. Desmond's success owes much to the general ignorance about his rise to power. Protected by Britain's libel laws and a pact among newspaper proprietors not to attack each other, Desmond has successfully concealed his colourful past to become a major media player in London.

In other words, buy my book. And oh, by the way, if Channel 5 is such a "potentially lucrative franchise", why did it go for a mere £103 million? Desmond offered twice as much as any other bidder, and Ofcom had no choice but to approve a sale that preserves the channel's independence.

It's always been time to leave

David Selbourne, who it seems is "a political philosopher and theorist", argued for the motion "Too late to save Britain. It’s time to leave" in a recent Spectator debate, edited version here. Amusingly, he argues that unbridled or even "voracious" free market ethics lie at the heart of Britain's decomposition.

There is a simple test for this argument: where are the tens of thousands of young professionals who are leaving this country going? Is it to countries with more or less "free market ethics"? Are they not, in fact, seeking the best rewards for their skills? And is that not the essence of the free market in labour?

A couple of paragraphs at the core of Selbourne's presentation epitomize his philosophical incoherence:

The country’s broadly shared values rested, among other things, on convention, on common law and custom, on a sense of community despite social inequality, on respect for public service and on a belief in the work ethic. They have not survived the self-degrading moral and market free-for-all which has been unleashed upon the land. It has reduced the citizen to a mere customer and consumer, and has invited so many free-loaders - from duck-house parliamentary cheats to fiddlers of the welfare system, indigenous and incomers alike - to take liberties with this battered country rather than to fulfill their obligations to it.

Moreover, the truth about these matters is not in the exclusive possession of either left or right, but lies between them: you cannot strengthen ‘social cohesion’ while privatising public institutions which hold civil society together, or by slashing public provision in order to pay for the harms caused to the polity and the economy by unbridled private interest.

Where to start? Perhaps with the trade-off between the Welfare State and the Work Ethic? How can that be attributed the "market free-for-all"? Common Law has been supplanted by Statute Law as a direct result of membership of the protectionist and corporativist European Union. What has that got to do with the free market in anything?

More to the point, if the argument is that relative economic freedom has produced ugly results, does that not argue that the ugliness was there before the freedom permitted it to reveal itself? An ugliness incubated during the preceding decades of economic "planning" and "scientific socialism"?   

But the gem is Selbourne's assertion that "you cannot strengthen social cohesion while privatising public institutions which hold civil society together". Back in the good ol' days for which Selbourne yearns, what was it that held society together and generated civic responsibility? A shared history, culture and tribal identity, perhaps? And has it been the evil free market that deliberately destroyed these fundamental elements of social cohesion, or Marxist-dominated public institutions such as the educational establishment?

Leaving aside the inconsequentiality of Selbourne's argument, were I a young man I would certainly wish to bail out of Britain. Indeed when I was a young man, in the 1970s, I did. Although there were several "push" reasons for returning, the main "pull" was that I had failed to persuade my sons to emigrate when things seemed to be going well in Britain, and I did not want to miss out on seeing my grandchildren grow up.

As to where to go, my point has always been that although the grass is not necessarily greener in other pastures, I do not know of another which has the combination of stubborn popular ignorance, unwarranted institutional conceit, profound intellectual indiscipline even among the university educated, society-wide laziness and endemic managerial incompetence that makes Britain such an existentially dispiriting place.

Not for nothing did NuLabour seek to refresh the national genetic pool by encouraging mass immigration. The basic problem with Britain is the British. How they got they way they are today is the result of a cascade of bad decisions dating back a long time, compounded by an adamant refusal to learn even from domestic experience, and a complete inability to understand why other, more successful cultures do things better.

Darling demands an apology

Alastair Darling, Gordon Brown's Chancellor of the Exchequer, is demanding that his successor George Osborne should apologize for bad-mouthing his (Darling's) optimistic forecasts about the British economy.

If the NuTories had any balls, Osborne would reply that he'd be happy to apologize to Darling, if he in turn would apologize to the country for creating the largest structural deficit in peacetime and for borrowing so much money that the interest is swallowing up all the cuts in government spending before they are even made.

He might also require Darling to apologize for being a loyal member of a government that involved the country in two disastrous wars, surrendered sovereignty to the EU in breach of a manifesto commitment to a referendum, and imposed a mass of suffocating regulations on the private sector while indulging every whim of the parasitic state sector.

But he can't, can he? Because the NuTories and their LibDem ideological soul-mates have no intention of pulling out of the wars, permitting a referendum on membership of the EU, or of confronting the state sector unions.

Boys in black (part 2)

Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, makes a strong defence of the proliferation of CCTV cameras and the retention of the DNA of all ever involved in a police inquiry on Critical Reaction. The article is titled "For the Record" and sub-titled "Is there a case against CCTV and the DNA database, or is it a case of feeling good about oneself?"

BS, my good sir. The case against CCTV and the DNA database is that the assault on civil liberties by the Blair-Brown regime has persuaded quite a large proportion of the public that the government is their enemy, and that the police are a self-serving instrument of oppression.

Davies' argument draws on the standard false dichotomy between security and liberty. The first depends on coercion, the second on consent. No surprise to find a Tory favouring coercion, but it sits ill with the "trust the people" line of his party leader.

Not the least of the transformations of British public affairs over the last decade or so is that defence of civil liberty is now seen as "right wing", and that the reflexive police statism of persons like Davies represents the oh-so respectable middle ground of British politics.   

Boys in black (part 1)

Yesterday the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that no charges would be brought against the policeman who struck and knocked down Ian Tomlinson (video here), who died a little later. The incident took place while the usual yahoos were demonstrating against the G 20 summit on April Fool's day last year.

Tomlinson's offence appears to have been a surly unwillingness to get out of the way of the riot police and their dogs. Police Constable Simon Harwood, who resigned from the Metropolitan Police in the late 1990s following an incident of road rage, and faced a charge of excessive force when employed by the Surrey police, has been suspended ever since the Tomlinson incident. Coroner Mohmed Saeed Sulema Patel, who found COD to be heart failure despite evidence of internal bleeding, has also been suspended.

The real scandals here are that Harwood was ever re-employed by the Metropolitan Police, let alone assigned to riot control, and that Patel was still employed by the Home Office. He was disciplined by the General Medical Council in 1999 for telling reporters that Roger Sylvester, a 30-year-old who died in police custody, was a crack cocaine user, and has 26 charges pending before the General Medical Council relating to four post mortem examinations carried out between 2002 and 2004.

It follows, does it not, that whoever appointed Patel to perform the autopsy on Tomlinson surely knew there was a good chance he would make such a mess of it that, whatever his findings, the DPP would be unable to proceed to a prosecution of Harwood with any hope of a conviction. 

I don't know how anyone can summon up genuine indignation about this latest manifestation of police impunity. The creation of reasonable doubt around the illegal actions of its members has been standard operating procedure for the British police for as long as I can remember.

Inshallah

The Muslim Shahid Malik was the Labour MP for Dewsbury 2005-10. In 2007 he became Britain's first Muslim Minister as International Development Minister, and subsequently served as a Justice Minister, Home Office Minister and finally as Minister for Race, Faith and Community Cohesion at the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Malik lost his seat following boundary changes and in the wake of revelations about his financial arrangements by the Daily Telegraph, which devoted five front page stories to his expenses in May 2009. This led to Malik's very brief resignation as Minister for Race, Faith and Community Cohesion, reinstated after a perfunctory investigation by Gordon Brown's adviser on ministerial interests. He was subsequently investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, while the Legg panel cleared him of charges relating to the second home allowance. In the end, Malik was required to repay only £1,340, but the barrage of bad press must presumably have affected his re-election chances.

Lest one should think that the Daily Telegraph selected him for particular attention because of his race, consider this video (with a headline that overstates the case) and ask yourself how such a rabidly sectarian individual could ever have been appointed, let alone reinstated, in a ministerial post that included the term "Community Cohesion" in its title. Happily the new government has abolished the Prevent programme that Malik, backed by Jack Straw, perverted from its original purpose of encouraging Muslim integration.

But it says a lot about the society the previous regime was intent on creating that Malik could only be nailed through the trivia of expenses, rather than through the frank denunciation of his outrageous public utterances and his damaging support for seditious Islamist organizations.

America has so much to learn from Britain

So says Oxford and Stanford academic Timothy Garton Ash in a hallucinatory Guardian CiF column titled "Obama must wish he were Cameron". Yeah, that thought must have crossed The One's mind as Cameron flew across the pond in a scheduled flight to pay ritual homage. But it gets better:

One of the most visible (and audible) differences between British and American politics can be summarised in three letters: BBC. Having a dominant public service broadcaster, still committed to notions of fairness, accuracy and balance, preserves an environment in which Obama's kind of nuanced, liberal centrist politics can flourish. In Britain, that is. America's "culture wars", fought over issues like abortion and gay marriage, may be less virulent than in the last two decades. But as Palin skits around endorsing "pro-life" Republican candidates for November's mid-term congressional elections, they are still salient. This is a cultural politics unimaginable in contemporary Britain, where the social liberalism of the 60s has won even among self-styled Conservatives.

So - one point of view, relentlessly broadcast by a regressive tax-funded, nepotistic and self-serving corporation is preferable to robust public argument. While of course opposition to state-sponsored infanticide is just so backward by comparison with the enlightened consensus that has made Britain such an uplifting place to live.

Public sector swinishness

Given the British state's habit of imitating only US policies that have proved to be disastrous failures, this YouTube interview with California activist Steven Greenhut is well worth watching.

Greenhut is the head of a Sacramento-based website reporting on the ruinous folly of California's state government. He has recently published Plunder! How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation. 

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

I hate lefties

So says stand-up comedian Tom Greeves in Critical Reaction. Hear him, hear him! Key paragraphs:

Nor do I buy the notion that Lefties, however misguided, are nicer people than those on the Right. Cobblers. Lefties are typically mean-spirited, bossy, self-absorbed and indifferent to most people they actually meet. The middle class ones bleat on endlessly about the plight of the worker, or the African, or the female, but would never dream of having a carpenter over for supper. The nominally working class ones are, to the casual observer, workshy oafs who take any opportunity to down tools and go on strike. Both classes of Leftie revel in bullying people, and use the humbug that they are championing the rights of the many or of the underdog as cover for being horrible and getting power for themselves.

Make no mistake, it is sheer misanthropy that motivates most protestors. Theirs is a very clever ruse. They persuade the credulous that they are obeying their social conscience specifically in order to indulge their anti-social – and often violent – tendencies. Thus Marxist thugs terrorise Northern Ireland and the British mainland for decades, animal rights [sic] activists batter human beings, and students revel in smashing up property because they claim to be “anti-globalisation” – a term which should be dismissed not only as economically illiterate but racist, seeing as global free trade is the only hope for countries mired in poverty.

No stronger retrograde force

In an interview on Muslims Debate, Dutch politician Geert Wilders explained why he is hostile, not simply to jihadism, but to the Islamic faith as a whole. He quoted Churchill's words, written 111 years ago:

Besides the fanatical frenzy, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist where the followers of the Prophet rule or live. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to a sole man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. 

It would certainly come as no surprise to Churchill, were he alive today, to see secular Western leftists making excuses for the most reactionary aspects of Islam. Like the devout Muslims, they are defined by their passionate desire for submission to a cause that will relieve them of the need to think for themselves, and to take responsibility for the abject failure of their faith to deliver a better life for all those on whom it has been murderously imposed.

Double standard or simply cowardice?

Britain and Ireland both expelled Israeli diplomats (intelligence liaison officers) over Mossad's use of forged British and Irish passports for the hit on the piece of shit Hamas terrorist Mamood al-Magoo last January. Both nations were careful to specify that it was the abuse of their passports that had moved them to take action.

OK. Now that it has been established that the Russian FSB used forged British and Irish passports to establish the comic opera net of illegals recently rounded up in the USA, may we expect the expulsion of the declared FSB liaison officers in London and Dublin?

Of course we can't. The institutional cowardice of King Charles Street and Iveagh House will prevail.

Lefties attack BBC bias

An article in the New Statesman takes Michael Gove to task for criticizing the Bitchy Boys' Club for leftist bias. Not so, says the NS, rattling its life-support tubes, in fact the BBC has a conservative bias.

Funnily enough, I agree with the lefties on this one; except that what the corporation above all wants to conserve is the top-down, statist configuration of British politics and society, so that the Bitchy Boys can continue to enjoy all and more of the rewards of private sector without being subject to any of its risks.

The NS finds it particularly sinister that Gove said:

I believe in value for money. It maybe a concept that was alien to the last government and it may not be a concept that the BBC would like to see applied to public expenditure, but I believe that it is important that the taxpayer gets protection for the money that is spent on his or her behalf.

To which the NS replies:

Gove's line fits neatly with the Conservative narrative that the BBC is biased towards the left (which my colleague Mehdi Hasan has argued against). The conflation of "the Today programme" and "the Labour party" is an example of this victim mentality. It is quite a clever technique to portray anything that questions your view as evidence of bias (even if it is just that: a question), although his churlish manner will not have done him any favours. That final - rather spiteful - remark is just the latest hint that the BBC is next in line for some painful cuts.

So, mentioning value for money is 'spiteful'? The linked 2009 Mehdi Hasan article argued that the BBC speaks for 'the establishment' and is therefore biased towards the right. Actually, it is the propaganda arm of the civil service, and as such biased only in favour of whatever suits the bureaucratic oligarchy.

To call that a bias towards either "left" or "right" is idiotic.

Compare and contrast

The following are two passages from an interview in Stanford Magazine of the late (died after I wrote this) Biology Professor Stephen Schneider, a leading climate catastrophist. The interview contains many other internal contradictions, but I think the paragraphs I have selected are the most striking.

The primary lasting impact [of the CRU emails scandal, tediously dubbed "Climategate"] will be that it has delayed climate policy by a year or two - which, if the Congress tips away from Democrats, could delay it by eight or more. A number of countries believe that we should all have collective action to protect the commons. But if the biggest polluter in history, the United States, doesn't do anything, [other countries] can use that excuse to do nothing. I do not believe it'll have any long-lasting impact on the credibility of climate science, because it is fundamentally sound. Unfortunately, the likely coming super heat waves and the hurricanes that will take out parts of Miami and Shanghai, for example, will show that, in a politically tangible way. And nobody will remember Climategate 10 years from now.

OK - so in Schneider's expert opinion [umm - may one ask how a biologist qualifies as an expert in climatology?] super heatwaves and devastating hurricanes are a likely result of the brakes put on the climate catastrophist band-wagon by Climategate. Yet later Schneider says:

We know we have a rough 10 percent chance that [the effect of global warming] is going to be not much; a rough 10 percent chance of 'Oh, My God' [the catastrophist scenario]; and everything else in between. Therefore, what you're talking about as a scientist is risk: what can happen multiplied times the odds of it happening. That's an expert judgment. The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.

How does a ten percent chance become the "likely" outcome? The "average person" is perfectly competent to detect the gross illogicality at the core of Schneider's "expert judgment".

Causes of crime

Lord Chancellor Clarke has dropped his pants to reveal why he has pronounced that building additional jails will not be necessary to accommodate Britain's burgeoning criminal class.

The Telegraph quotes Clarke denying that crime fell after 1993 because Home Secretary Michael Howard increased penalties.

No one can prove cause and effect. The crime rate fell, but was this the consequence of the policies of my successors as home secretary or, dare I gently hint, mine as chancellor at the beginning of a period of growth and strong employment? We will never know.

While the vanity of this dislikable man is nothing new, his statement betrays either total ignorance of the vast body of work indicating that the link between poverty and crime is extremely tenuous, or else the total cynicism of a man who has decided to cut the prison budget without regard to its social impact.

Crime falls when criminals know there is a strong likelihood of being arrested, and if arrested a strong likelihood of being convicted, and if convicted a certainty of meaningful punishment. None of these conditions have been met in Britain ever since judges ceased to turn a blind eye on police "fit ups" in the late 1970s; but thanks to Howard the third condition was at least partially met until it ran into the stubborn refusal of successive governments to build the necessary penitentiaries.

The police have given up on defending the helpless, the Crown Prosecution Service is a joke, and our prisons are academies of crime in which the morality of the jailers is in many respects inferior to the code of conduct among the inmates. So, says Clarke, why don't we just give up? After all, most of those involved on both sides of the criminal justice system are unshakable Labour voters, as are most of their victims. 

Remove the cigar from the above picture and you get Clarke's message very clearly.

CRU: successive coats of whitewash didn't work

The US Department of Energy (DoE) is still withholding its annual grant of approx £130,000 to the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia pending its own scientific review of its work.

My italics, but the emphasis comes from the fact that the DoE, one of CRU's principal sources of funding since 1990, had previously stated that the renewal "was placed on hold pending the conclusion of the inquiry into scientific misconduct by Sir Alastair Muir Russell."

In other words, Muir Russell's conclusion that the "rigour and honesty" of the CRU denizens was not in doubt following the massive leak of highly compromising emails last November has failed to convince the DoE.

However, since any genuinely scientific inquiry would have to encompass Pennsylvania State University's whitewash of CRU collaborator Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann, there is no reason to believe the DoE's inquiry will be anything more than a cost-cutting exercise by a department totally committed to to the climate catastrophist scam.

CRU's real offence in the eyes of the DoE is that its carelessness has undermined the scam and as a result, perhaps, it will be judged ineligible to continue to benefit from it. I doubt if the funding will be ended permanently, however, as that would involve the DoE admitting that it (gasp!) has failed to exercise proper oversight of how US tax-payers' money has been spent for the last 20 years.

But the DoE's extremely public snub to the august Muir Russell may force Whitehall to face up to the fact that shoddy inquiries by even its most eminent figures are no longer fit for the purpose of covering up its many and contumacious failures.

Source (behind paywall): The Sunday Times, 18 July 2010

Gordon Brown was a dangerous tyrant

So said Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge in his speech at the annual dinner given for the Judiciary by the Lord Mayor of London. 

Actually, that is not what he said. He said King Henry VIII was a dangerous tyrant, and that the Statute of Proclamations of 1539 was the ultimate act of submission by Parliament, in that it gave the king's proclamations the same force as acts of Parliament.

Judge was perhaps too tactful to remind his audience, which included Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke, that the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in 1933 conferred the same powers on Chancellor Adolf Hitler. And that more recently, in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez has obtained the same powers (also called 'enabling') from his suborned and intimidated legislature.

But he was not so tactful when he went on to point out that the last parliament passed a large number of acts that granted Gordon Brown and his henchmen similar powers. Specific examples Judge cited were:

The Banking (Special Provisions) Act 2008 granted the Treasury the power to make:
(a) such supplementary, incidental or consequential provision, or
(b) such transitory, transitional or saving provision, as they consider appropriate for the general purposes, or any particular purposes, of this Act

But the power goes further. It expressly provided that an order may
(a) disapply (to such extent as is specified) any specified statutory provision or rule of law
(b) provide for any specified statutory provision to apply (whether or not it would otherwise apply) with specified modification.

Underlining the gravity of this, Judge observed (my italics): "So we have an Act of Parliament which expressly grants to the Treasury power to disapply any other relevant statute bearing on the provisions of the 2008 Act or indeed any rule of law."

The same process is at work with section 51 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. This enables any Minister of the Crown, by order to make such provision as he or she considers appropriate in relation to any provision of the Act. The order may:
(a) amend, repeal or revoke any existing statutory provision,
(b) include supplementary, incidental, transitional, transitory or saving provision.

Judge commented (my italics again): "So the new constitutional arrangements can be revisited by ministerial order, directed not merely to amendment repeal or revocation of any provisions in the Act itself, but directed at any of our existing statutory provisions."

He failed to add that every item of EU legislation rubber-stamped by Parliament contains similar 'enabling' powers, conferred not on elected ministers, but on anonymous bureaucrats.

As Lord Judge says, this is a matter of the utmost seriousness. The Coalition have promised a "Great Repeal Act", but it will be prepared by the unconditional Europhile Ken Clarke, so there is no chance whatever of a democratic renewal.

Graduate tax

Trying to think of something that could possibly be right about the old lefty Vince Cable's plans to introduce a graduate tax to replace tuition fees.

Nope - can't think of one. Like all lefty nostrums, it assumes that the majority of the target population will stay in Britain. The possessors of soft degrees may well do so - but there is no evidence that those degrees (including all MBAs save those from the most elite business schools, none of which are in Britain) increase lifetime earnings.

Law is a uniquely special case, medicine rather less so, but otherwise those who get degrees that are valued internationally will simply emigrate, and bid the British state kiss their arse. 

So let's call it what it is: the Brain Drain Acceleration tax. What is it about the concept of supply and demand that seems so unfathomable to the lefty mind? 

Many a true word: The Daily Mash

Damn, they're good! Following is from "Cameron beginning to realise exactly who he's in charge of" in today's The Daily Mash:

Prime Minister David Cameron was on the brink of resignation last night after finally realising what British people are actually like. Downing Street insiders said that since learning of the Facebook tributes to idiot murderer Raoul Moat, Mr Cameron has become increasingly depressed and has talked about taking up watercolour painting and moving to Umbria.

A senior cabinet minister added: "What he absolutely must not do is go onto Facebook, the Guardian or the Daily Mail and start reading through the comments. If he does then there's every chance he will try to steal a nuclear submarine and give it to Iran. It'll be a bit like Hunt for Red October except that it ends with a load of warheads pointed at 60 million twats."

Constitutional historian, Denys Finch-Hatton, said: "I have always believed that the defence of the realm can only be guaranteed if the prime minster does not interact with ordinary people under any circumstances. Because if they do, they invariably walk away from the encounter thinking, 'I hope that person dies incredibly soon'."

Put not thy faith in politicians

"Europe falls out of love with Barack Obama" says Nile Gardiner in today's Telegraph. While perhaps true of countries which retain some self-respect, I doubt if it applies to Britain. The toad Clinton unfailingly attracts adoring crowds when he visits this country, despite regarding it with contempt when president.

But to talk of "falling out of love" with another country's president simply points to the childishness of projecting yearnings onto a distant figure in the first place. The One is what he always was, the product of the corrupt Democratic Party machine in Illinois, with extremely little executive experience. His mandate came about because of the swinish abuse of power by the Republican Party and because of white guilt or, in the case of my vote, a desire to take the wind out of the sails of race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton.

It should have come as no surprise that a president from the left wing of the Democratic Party would prove to be highly divisive domestically, to the detriment of his party in Congress. Over-represented as it is in academic and media circles, the "left" in America over-reaches because it sincerely believes that the country - and the world - is athirst for "progressive" leadership.

The last similarly deluded individual to occupy the White House was Jimmy Carter, who also came to power on a wave of revulsion against Republican swinishness. By the end of his only term, Carter had reminded the American people that Democrats are poor stewards of the economy and that "niceness" does not cut it in international affairs. I have put blanks in Gardiner's closing paragraph to illustrate the strong sense of déjà vu:      

[                      ] may not have been the most popular figure in Europe when he was president, but at least he was respected by European leaders, and feared by his enemies. In contrast [                     ] is not only disliked abroad, but also increasingly isolated among America’s allies, and viewed as weak by America’s adversaries. So much for his boast of “restoring” America’s standing in the world.

Rolling back the state

The Adam Smith Institute has published Taxpayer Value: Rolling back the state (download PDF), which itemizes how to reduce the number of people employed by Whitehall and the Quangos by almost 27 percent to deliver savings of £55 billion a year. The cull would include the abolition of the Department for International Development and the Department for Communities and Local Government

Other pie-in-the-sky recommendations include the privatization of job centres and the integration of the tax and benefit systems. But the prize for most unrealistic recommendation goes to the proposal that the military take over procurement from the MoD and purchase equipment off the shelf.

Think that one through, lads and lasses. The technical aspects of procurement are very largely in the hands of senior officers already. And whatever the cost, domestic sourcing for some military kit is essential: remember that Belgium refused to honour a contract to supply artillery ammunition to the British during the Falklands War in order to ingratiate its own arms salesmen with Argentina.

The biggest savings in procurement could be brought about by demanding common, tri-service specifications that would thereafter be set in stone. It is duplication and "gold-plating", much of it corruption-driven, that has made MoD procurement a stench in the nostrils of all except those who profit from it.  

Civil Liberties - glimmer of hope

Having previously reported two strikes against the new government for back-sliding on its election commitment to repair the damage to historic civil liberties inflicted by the Blair-Brown regime, have to applaud HomeSec Theresa May's announcement that a review of the draconian (and much abused) anti-terrorism legislation of the past few years will be led by the newly ennobled Ken Macdonald, QC.

Lib Dem Macdonald is a former director of public prosecutions and founder of Matrix Chambers, which has done so well (and none better than member Cherie Blair, QC) out of the Human Rights Act. It seems likely there will be a role for Shami Chakrabarti, the telegenic head of the civil rights pressure group Liberty, who calls it "a once in a generation opportunity to reform counter-terror measures and bring them within the rule of law."

Ex-Labour HomeSec David Blunkett is quoted by the Sun as saying: "A review pre-determined in its outcome by nominees to serve on it and the individual to oversee it is an insult to the British people."

Just like every other official inquiry or judicial review, then.

The Sun also quotes "a senior security source" saying: "There are fears the Government have not thought through the implications. "You either have complete security or complete civil liberties - you cannot have both."

A typical false dichotomy, of course. But since "complete security" is a chimera, let's settle for as many civil liberties as we can recover, because the last few years have proved, yet again, that citizens have far more to fear from arbitrary power exercised by the state than from foreign or domestic terrorism.

It's going to be intriguing to see how Macdonald and Chakarbarti finesse the issue of "hate speech" - for finesse it they surely will. Both of them have made statements in the past that indicate their belief that freedom of speech should be curtailed when it offends their oh-so "progressive" sensibilities.

It really should not be difficult for such fine legal minds to draw a line between stating a point of view that offends a lot of people, which must be protected, and incitement to commit a crime, which should be prosecuted.

But they won't even try. Phariseeism* is too deeply entrenched in the legal profession.

*Defined by Jesus as trusting in themselves that they are righteous - and despising others

Britain's debt overhang

The Office of National Statistics has been permitted - at last - to publish its estimate of the "off-balance-sheet" liabilities that have been accumulated by the state. The ONS itemised the public sector's main liabilities as:

• Future payments for the state old age pension: £1.1- £1.4 trillion
• Unfunded public sector pensions for teachers, NHS staff and civil servants: £770 billion to £1.2 trillion
• Payments under private finance initiative contracts: £200 billion
• Contingent liabilities (eg bank deposit guarantees): £500 billion
• Nuclear power plant decommissioning: £45 billion
• Impact of financial sector interventions: £1- £1.5 trillion

The Independent comments that "the figures imply a huge inter-generational transfer - broadly in favour of today's baby boomer generation at the expense of younger people and future generations." Indeed it does, and all the more damnably since:

The baby boomers and their parents have also benefited from phenomena that are unlikely to be enjoyed by future generations, including: free university education, including maintenance grants; mortgage interest relief at the highest marginal rate of income tax; property booms that saw a massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old; free long-term care for the elderly; the proceeds of privatisations of state assets; and the demutualisation and distribution of reserves of the the former building societies and life offices.

And the political outcome of all that largesse was the Blair-Brown regime, which more than doubled the burden inflicted on posterity. It seems that only now is the country having to face up to the long-term social and economic consequences of the sense of entitlement arising from the perfectly understandable determination of the war-time generation not to be screwed as their parents were after World War I.

Quote for today

From a post about lack of business confidence under The One by Victor Davis Hanson in NRO; insert any of hundreds of alternative names from the ranks of  "progressive" politicians and the statement holds true. That "sense of foreboding" is one of the principal factors underlying Britain's intractable economic under-performance, and has been the driver of high quality emigration for as long as I can remember.  

Capitalism is in large part psychologically driven. Confidence, optimism, and a sense of calm about the future foster risk and investment, while worry, pessimism, and a sense of foreboding ensure timidity and stasis. [                         ], who is mostly a creature of the university and the dependable government payroll, does not seem to grasp that fact.

As simple as that

Despite Google, one knows so little about political commentators that it is always a surprise when they tear aside the velcro strips holding together the dirty mackintosh of their professional personae and expose their inner being to the revolted gaze of the reading public.

Thus Gerald Warner, whose well-crafted rants in the Telegraph I have quoted approvingly from time to time, in an article criticizing the Roman church for making it too easy for Anglicans to defect from their schismatic institution and back into the arms of the Holy Mother Church.

Once any individual becomes convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith, he is under an immediate obligation to make submission to the Sovereign Roman Pontiff and any delay in doing so is a sin against the Holy Ghost, imperilling his salvation. The notion that formal adherence to objective truth can be made conditional upon being allowed to retain the cultural expression of schismatic practices defies the spirit of conversion. One either believes or disbelieves: it is as simple as that.

So - it transpires that Warner's strong criticisms of totalitarian climate catastrophism and of appeasement in the face of Islamofascism are simply partisan attacks on superstitions that compete with his own. Let's run that passage again as multiple choice.

Once any individual becomes convinced of the truth of [name your superstition], he is under an immediate obligation to make submission and any delay in doing so is a sin against the one true faith, imperilling his salvation. The notion that formal adherence to objective truth can be made conditional upon being allowed to retain freedom of thought and expression defies the spirit of conversion. One either believes or disbelieves: it is as simple as that.  

How interesting - a man who seemed to be a rebel against group-think turns out to be just another pathetic submissive raving about the "objective truth" of something that in the next breath he admits is an article of unquestioning faith.

It is indeed as simple as that.

Read it and weep

In a posting unwisely headed "Ethics", an apparently notorious lefty blogger (never heard of him) called Richard Murphy proposed that the Guardian should close CiF to those who oppose climate catastrophism as stridently as he defends it. Seeking to clarify his position, he added the following comment. Pay particular attention to the deathless illogic of the last two postulates.

I did not suggest the silencing of ideas
I suggested the silencing of thugs and bullies
Something very different indeed
It some (sic) happens in some sectors they have a rather strong overlap
But if those sectors can learn to live in the mainstream of society, respect others, refrain from abuse and engage in civilised debate that’s fine
Otherwise their attempt to silence discussion should be stopped
Because that is what thugs do

So silencing discussion is thuggery - but not when it is done by the bien pensant "mainstream of society"?

What is libertarianism?

A while ago, after the Libertarian Party's Chris Mounsey was obliged to apologize for one of his profane postings by Andrew Neil on the BBC's usually childish This Week programme, I dropped Mounsey's blog (Devil's Kitchen, renamed Devil's Knife after the public apology) from my reader. For the apology, not for the original vehemence. Feel I should reinstate it after reading the text of what Mounsey contributed to a Voices of Freedom debate at the Institute of Economic Affairs, which is an eloquent expression of what "libertarian" means to me.

The liberal torch is not carried by the LibDems, or any other politicos; nor is it carried by the elite who form part of the state-perpetuating establishment - all of whom are like big children playing house, putting on airs of supreme importance and throwing their weight around as if the actions of government are the most significant and serious actions of all.

It's the actions of regular people that are the most significant, serious, and worthy of respect, and they don't deserve to be treated like dolls when, in reality, the only truly and moral libertarian proposition is that they should be masters of themselves.

They did so in the past, and their aspirations were crushed by corporate whores and political shills: and in removing the ability of people to organise themselves, these evil people also removed the desire for them to try. It is this that has led to our "broken society" - the cynical ambitions of the vested interests, backed up by the monopoly of violence that a corrupt and venal state willingly brought to bear upon its people.

Once Great Britain

Spot-on opinion piece by Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting in the CiF column.

What "punching above your weight" means in practice is unbridled ambition and massive risk-taking. The obvious parallels with BP are those other former giants of British corporate power, the banks HBOS and RBS. All are now cautionary tales of corporate hubris. In 1998 Blair made a speech in Dublin in which he talked of Britain "emerging from a post-imperial malaise". It was the era of Cool Britannia and the beginning of Blair's military adventures: culture, finance, military participation and corporate ambition were the key, mutually reinforcing, planks of his project.

One by one they have either led us to some form of disaster (financial sector, BP), or to embarrassing failure (liberal interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan). Last August Newsweek's London bureau chief, Stryker McGuire, wrote a front-cover article on how time was up for "once-great Britain". He argued that Blair had tried one final stab at greatness by locking Britain into America's wars, but that he was merely postponing the inevitable decline in the country's place in the world.

Bunting is an historian and is presumably well aware that "unbridled ambition and massive risk-taking" was what made Britain a world power back in the day. Also that the "Great" in Great Britain had nothing to do with world power and that the title came about as a result of the political union of the England and Scotland in 1706-07.

So, cheap American digs at the country they displaced on the world stage aside, what remains? That Britain should learn to live inside its means, that those means do not extend to fighting wars alongside the hyperpower, and that far from "emerging from a post-imperial malaise", under Blair's frivolous leadership the country jumped right back into it.

The empire was won by a small number of people, mainly Scots, who found escape abroad from the suffocating mediocrity of their country of birth. Those people are gone - but the suffocating mediocrity remains.

Moral equivalence

Although the logical fallacy of tu quoque (you're one too) is a staple of the juvenile repartee that passes for political debate in Britain, it is surely incumbent on those who regard themselves as "scientific socialists" to eschew rabble-rousing and debating tricks - because, after all, their core conceit is that their beliefs are the product of dispassionate reasoning.

It is also, for purely pragmatic reasons, deeply unwise for people who notoriously do not practice what they preach, to point the finger (another form of ad hominem argument) at political opponents who may be likewise hypocritical in their own way. People in glass houses, sauce for the goose, etc.

Yet even a casual perusal of leftist contributions to, for example, the Guardian's "Comment is Free" column (which may be assumed to be selected by Guardian staff to represent the best that their co-religionists can produce in the polemical line) it is perfectly apparent that their preferred forms of argument freely employ all the logical fallacies. Check them out with this handy summary of Aristotle's list:

1. Sweeping generalization
2. Generalization from a special case to a general rule
3. Affirming the consequent (because A implies B, therefore B implies A)
4. Denying the antecedent (because A implies B, therefore not A implies not B)
5. Appeal to authority (ad verecundiam)
6. Attacking the person, not the person's argument (ad hominem)
7. Appeal to populist sentiment (ad populum)
8. Appeal to fear (ad baculum)
9. Appeal for personal sympathy (ad misericordiam)
10. Using affirmation in the absence of proof (ad ignorantium)
11. Introducing a factor extraneous to the matter under discussion (ignoratio elenchi)
12. Demonstrating a conclusion by use of a premise that assumes that conclusion (petitio principii)
13. Assuming one thing is the cause of another without establishing a causal link (non sequitur)
14. Assuming that A causes B because B follows A (post hoc ergo propter hoc)
15. Assuming that coincidence is proof of similar causality (cum hoc ergo propter hoc)
16. Exaggerating an opponent's premise in order to ridicule it (reductio ad absurdum)
17. Loaded question (when did you stop beating your wife?)
18. Misrepresenting an opponent's argument in order to demolish it (straw man)
19. And the ever-popular moral equivalence, or even moral superiority, based on the abject reasoning that because you or your ancestors harmed me or mine, when I do the same to you it is morally justified.  

It is certainly not my contention that I, or anyone else, can aspire to immunity from the lure of scoring cheap debating points in the heat of argument; only that they are most commonly scored by those who know their views are based on partisan faith rather than on a common standard of morality or on evidence-based reasoning.

I am well aware that I am inclined to those logical fallacies that serve to strip socialists of their pose of being more intelligent, as well as more virtuous, than those who do not share their faith. My problem, shared by all who have tried to refute their arguments logically, is that for all their "scientific" conceit, their arguments are so irrational that one must either get down in the mud to wrestle with them or else give them the unilateral advantage that cheats always enjoy over those who play by the rules.

It's an explanation, not an excuse. I wish it were otherwise, but until we start educating our children in logic, so that they may discount irrational statements and learn to question, rather than simply rebel against, received wisdom and unjustified authority, we are compelled to fight those who seek to force humanity into the straight-jacket of their dogma on the ground and with the weapons they choose.