Crow: Rowan Williams off the arseholes list

My thanks to Archbishop Cranmer for drawing my attention to this speech by the self-styled 'hairy lefty' Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, at King's College, London. Crow-eating time.

The man's an academic theologian - shouldn't have judged him on second-hand soundbites, they are not his thing. The speech contains much serious thought and so, as Cranmer says, the MSM has not and will not report it because even religious affairs journopukes lack the intellectual capacity to process it into something they can use.

The following seems pretty unequivocal and if the Boy Wonder can acquire some humility might help him sell his Big New Idea by recognizing, first, that there is nothing new about it at all, and, secondly, that wise politicians respect the barrier that separates their sphere of activity from those of private conscience and genuinely voluntary association:

I intend in this address to reflect a little on the implications of our current discussions around the 'Big Society'. My hope is to suggest ways in which it can be a vehicle for serious rethinking of our national and international priorities at a time when some of our conventional pictures of left and right in politics are under question. This certainly doesn't mean that we should see it as a sort of halfway house between different sets of principles. I believe that the possibilities are more radical than that, involving the development of a new set of principles – or perhaps, as I shall also be suggesting, not so new after all. A politics, national and international, of local co-operation and 'mutualism', rooted in a sense of political virtue and appealing to human empathy – this is, as far as I can see, a large part of what my religious faith has always looked towards. That faith will be shared by some but not all in this audience; I hope that what I say will have some resonance with those who do not begin where I begin, and may even suggest that there is some significant intellectual and moral capital to be discovered in the world of theology as we seek for ways forward for a society currently facing the likelihood of pretty high levels of anxiety and disorientation.

Eating crow - Nick Clegg isn't an arsehole

In an interview published in the Guardian (!), the LiDem leader said the following:

I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.

He goes on to condemn the Blair regime's assault on civil liberties in the strongest terms:

It was the outright derision towards the criminal justice system… and extreme disdain for due process. For Blair the criminal justice system was an impediment to keeping people safe.

Last April I dared to hope that if the LibDems held the balance of power, it might do more than any other electoral outcome to restore the civil liberties raped by the Labourite pukes. I wrote: "on the principle of deeds, not words, the solid Lib Dem vote against all of the [authoritarian Labour legislation] makes them the party to vote for if you give a damn about civil liberties".
 
They have come though on civil liberties with the Protection of Freedoms Bill, published last Friday. Don't take back a word I've written about old prune-face and other LibDem ministers, but gotta eat a crow on this one.

Shame they are such fools on AGW and the EU. 

Eating crow - Channel 4

Because of my loathing of Jon "Poppy Fascism" Snow, dating back to his role in the Bitchy Boys' contemptible performance during the Falklands War, I seldom give Channel 4 a look.

I really should have hit the "reset" button after C4 aired Martin Durkin's Great Climate Warming Swindle. Given the intellectual climate (sic) within the media/luvvie milieu, that was brave.

Tonight from 9-10:30pm they are to broadcast another Durkin special, this time on Britain's national debt. It's called Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story, and the blurb says:

Film maker Martin Durkin explains the full extent of the financial mess we are in: an estimated £4.8 trillion of national debt and counting. It's so big that even if every home in the UK was sold it wouldn't raise enough cash to pay it off. Durkin argues that to put Britain back on track we need to radically rethink the role of the state, stop politicians spending money in our name and introduce, among other measures, flat taxes to make Britain's economy boom again.

So, congratulations to C4 for doing what its charter calls for, unlike the other outfit that continues to seek inspiration only up its own marxhorroid-choked arsehole.

Just get rid of old shagged sheep-face, could you?

Eating crow - the Treasury won the big one

"Britain’s borrowing costs have dropped to the lowest in a generation, falling below those of Germany, Europe’s biggest and strongest economy, reflecting in part investor confidence that the government can bring the deficit under control", reports the pay-walled FT. "George Osborne, the chancellor, vowed on Thursday that he would not retreat on his plans to rein in the deficit, the most ambitious effort to cut public spending announced by any major economy."

"The spending cuts outlined by George Osborne have won international backing and leading global economists said the plans were 'tough, necessary and courageous'," reports the Daily Mail. "The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) praised the Coalition for producing a 'concrete and far-reaching plan' to tackle the £155billion annual deficit left by Labour."

Eating crow: tuition fees

It took reading Jonathan Freedland's ludicrously nostalgic exegesis in the Guardian to snap me out of MSM-style tunnel vision about the changes to university funding of which the Browne report is only a part. It also involves killing off all the useless degree courses and the pseudo-academics who are the only people who benefit from them.

Browne has radically extended the business logic, opening the door to a world where a place at Oxford or Cambridge costs more than one at Keele, and a course in science sets you back more than one in theology. Some forecast that elite institutions will soon demand £12,000 or even £20,000 a year. Even if the government sets the limit at £7,000, it still represents a shift in our very notion of public services.

No shit! It seems Freedland still doesn't get it - and to my shame, I momentarily forgot - that the whole thrust of the Coalition government is to change British perceptions of what public services are for.

It took several years for New Labour to break the public trust; the coalition has done it in just a matter of months. The spending axe may barely have fallen, but trust in politics is already in shreds.

What planet does this guy inhabit? Trust in politics was in shreds long before this lot got into power. Do the words "Expenses scandal" ring any bells?

Eating crow: MoD civilians

I've been repeating the politician/mainstream media line about MoD civilians (by implication bureaucrats) outnumbering infantry without checking the facts.

Comes Think Defence to put me straight (also here). 

9,600 are in the Trading Funds, that’s the Met office, Hydrographic Office, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Defence Support Group. All of these provide vital services to the MoD and all but one actually return a profit.

10,500 are locally employed civilians outside the UK, educating service families children, maintaining the estate and running stores for example. 2,700 are in Defence Estates, 7,700 involved with Policing and Guarding and 2,700 in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.

Squawk, gulp.

Tony Blair surprises

OK. Time to eat a REALLY big, squawking crow.

Blair is giving the very considerable proceeds of his autobiography to the Royal British Legion.

Damn! There's nobility in the man! I'm going to find it hard to stick banderillas in him from now on. Curses.

More crow-eating

In my comment yesterday on David Aaaronovitch's article on the brutalisation of women in some societies, I said his father was a Hampstead Jewish communist. I based that on the fact that David A went to Gospel Oak Primary School - as did my sons - which backs onto the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. In fact the catchment area for the school is middle class Camden, not wealthy Hampstead.

My subliminal argument stands - people from aspirational middle class homes make unconvincing Marxists. But I shouldn't have gilded the lily. 

Crow eating time

How trivial of me to speculate whether The One was in political trouble. He is of course in a world of trouble because the USA is down the fiscal toilet, as the following linked article in Bloomberg makes crystal clear. (hat-tip Scott)

Embarrassing to find myself succumbing to the same infantile "who's in, who's out; who's up, who's down" speculation that I find so irritating in the mainstream media. I grovel.

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.