TTFN

Off to the Caribbean for a month on the good ship Discovery aka the "Love Boat". Lecturing, believe it or not. During the trip will be returning to Cuba, my birthplace, for the first time since I visited my Dad in Santiago right after the 1959 revolution.

Will be giving talks on Elizabeth's Sea Dogs, Slavery, Pyrates, the Wars for the Caribbean, the Libertadores, the Spanish-US war of 1898, Yanqui Imperialism, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

Doubt if I'll be blogging much, if at all. So here's wishing you Happy Holidays and all the best for the New Year.

Frank Field - saying the previously unsayable

The biggest transformation of anti-poverty programmes since the war will "require a testing of some of the 1940s welfare state’s sacred cows" says the Guardian. Can't remember a report, ever, commanding the sort of broad-band support ( here, here and here) that has greeted Field's response to Cameron's challenge.

Frank Field is a Labour MP and a life-long anti-poverty campaigner who, in 1997, was charged by Blair to "think the unthinkable" about social security when he appointed him Minister of Welfare Reform at the DSS and made him a privy councillor. His ideas, then, were killed by Chancellor Broon and Field's boss at the DSS, Harriet Harperson, with Blair wimping out as usual, so Field resigned in 1998.

"Poverty is a much more subtle enemy than purely lack of money" he writes, affirming that financial poverty is NOT the dominant reason why disadvantage is handed down from one generation to another. This is hardly the unthinkable - thousands of parents, teachers and social workers have thought this forever. However it is saying what was unsayable in a Labour regime intent on turning a majority of the population into clients of the state.

This time around, Field's ideas have received the whole-hearted and public support of Oliver Letwin, the Conservatives’s chief policy thinker, while Cameron and Clegg have published a joint letter to Field praising the report as "a vital moment in the history of our efforts to tackle poverty and disadvantage".

Thirteen wasted years. And still polls indicate 40 percent of the British support the Labour pukes. Most of that 40 percent will bitterly resent attempts to give their children a better chance in life.

Labour - the crab bucket party

As others see us 3

"Contagion and other Euro-myths" by John Cochrane in the WSJ ($):

This is not, in fact, an Irish bailout. It's a bailout of the European (including British) banks that lent a lot of money to the Irish government and Irish banks. If European governments want to bail out their banks, let them do so directly and openly - not via the subterfuge of country bailouts. Then they should face the music: How is it that two years after the great financial crisis, European banks make so-called systemically dangerous sovereign bets, earn nice yields, and then get bailed out again and again?

The NHS - envy of the world

The Patients' Association today released Listen to patients, Speak up for change (pdf here), a collection of firsthand accounts of hospital care of older patients from across the NHS detailing serious failings in standards of nursing care, poor communication with relatives and an ineffective complaints handling system.

Patients Association President Claire Rayner, who died earlier this year, was quoted as saying "Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I'll come back and bloody haunt him!" Her son wrote the foreword this year and reports that she died angry at the inhumane treatment she sometimes received from nurses and doctors.

As she said time and again if even she, with her public profile, reputation for straight talking and acute knowledge of the mechanics of nursing and medicine could not get the treatment she was entitled to, what hope was there for others?

"Let the haunting begin", said her widower, as though Cameron were responsible for the deplorable standards of care in the NHS after a decade of having money fire-hosed at it. For that matter why, given her "acute knowledge of the mechanics of nursing and medicine", did it come as a shock to Claire herself that the NHS treats the dying elderly as "bed blockers"?

Patients' Association Chief Executive Katherine Murphy said:

Surely the essentials of nursing care are what every patient deserves and should get? The NHS should get this right all of the time. Lack of help with eating and drinking. Lack of help with personal hygiene. Lack of help with toileting needs. It is clear from the stories we hear on our Helpline that too many patients are being badly let down. It’s a scandal and it’s outrageous that has been persisting for years. Families are left with a life sentence of grief, with no lessons learnt and the same failings continuing.

An intelligent comment from a labourite

"We don’t see it, but our arrogance stops us from listening" on Labour Uncut by ex Labour party GenSec (January 2006 until resigned November 2007 over Donorgate) Peter Watt is the first piece of intelligent commentary I have read from ANY Labour party apparatchik in many years.

There is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure. It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous. We then mistakenly define ourselves as being distinctive from our opponents because we are morally superior rather than because we have different diagnoses and solutions. It is lazy, wrong and politically dangerous.

Shame he did not realize that self-evident fact when his mob was in power. What he says has characterised the so-called "progressives" from their Fabian beginnings in the 19th century. They have always been Pharisees and, regrettably, a recantation by someone marginalised for putting party before country is not going to change anything.  

Brendan O'Neill - quote for today

Excellent post on the hypocrisy of the Guardian and the New York Times over the material obtained from anti-American obsessive Assange. Oddly, Soothscribe O'Neill does not mention the more glaring hypocrisy, which was their refusal to print the Climategate material because it was "stolen".

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘the public interest’, as defined in these discussions, has very little to do with the living, breathing public. The higher valuation given to the highbrow tittle-tattle spouted by Wikileaks in contrast to the lowbrow tittle-tattle spouted by the News of the World is really a question of taste, of preference, even of snobbery (‘our gossip is worthier than yours!’), yet it gets dressed up in the pseudo-democratic lingo of the public interest. What these journalists and editors really mean when they talk about ‘the public interest’ is what they think is good for the public – what they have decreed, in their closed-off meetings using some narrow legalistic definitions, to be edifying and respectable enough for publication.

Parliamentary swine-whine about expenses

Here we go again. Back in 2002 the pigs in parliament successfully smeared and then destroyed the career of Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Elizabeth Filkin because she was, unconscionably, trying to make them live according to their own rules of conduct.

Now we see an orchestrated press campaign (sample here) against the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), which was created in the aftermath of last year's revelations of just how shameless the parliamentary pigs are. Said swine will vote today to register their disapproval of having their access to the trough restricted.

And you know what? They'll get away with it. The Majorites are back in power and, led by the odious William Hague, they fully supported the Blair regime's attack on Elizabeth Filkin.

Milipede trampled

Generally dislike the bitchy commentators that infest Brit journopukery; but fair's fair - Quentin Letts' description of the Leader of the Opposition in the Daily Mail is one for the anthologies:

The lower right side of Mr Miliband’s mouth gaped. His eyeballs, two magnets, fought for unification.

He does have a peculiar physiognomy. I wonder if he was dropped on his head as a baby?

Hutton's contemptible interim report

His brief was "Fair Pay in the Public Sector", but of course he did not limit himself to that and had to drag in the wealth-creating sector, as though it provided any basis for comparison. Burning Our Money takes apart the dishonest use to which Hutton, like all his kind, puts the word "fair".

But what else could anyone have expected from a BBC/Guardian-Observer journopuke? Not only that, along with the laughable Giddens he supplied such little intellectual content as Blair's NuLabour ever possessed. Here are his titles - read 'em and weep. Note the homage to the Welsh gas-bag Bevan in 1997 and the title of his latest book.

Could someone please tell me why Cameron appointed him to lead this inquiry? Oh - silly old me - of course, he's the Heir of Blair.

Them and Us: Changing Britain - Why We Need a Fair Society (2010)
The Writing On The Wall China and the West in the 21st Century (2007)
A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World (2003)
The World We're In (2002)
Co-editor with Anthony "Third Way" Giddens, Global Capitalism and On the Edge: Essays on a Runaway World (both 2000)
The Stakeholding Society: Writings on Politics and Economics (1998)
The State to Come (1997)
"The Scene Shifts, the Legacy Remains" in The State of the Nation: the political legacy of Aneurin Bevan (1997)
The State We're in: Why Britain is in crisis and how to overcome it (1995)

Bohemian Rhapsody

"Mercury turns wetland birds homosexual", reports the BBC. 

I don't trust myself to comment.

Terry Pratchett - soothscribe

Reading TP's 2009 book Unseen Academicals reminds me how often I have been struck by his pithy insights into the human - well, at least British - condition. Apropos the fact that you can keep live crabs in a bucket without a lid because the others will pull back any crab that tries to get out, he writes:

Crab bucket, thought Glenda as they hurried towards the Night Kitchen. That's how it works. . . Practically everything my Mum ever told me, that's crab bucket. Practically everything I've ever told Juliet, that's crab bucket, too. . . It's so nice and warm on the inside that you forget there's an outside. The worst of it is, the crab that mostly keeps you down is you.

Hottest Year Ever

Two hot (sic) links:

"Norway at 140 Year Record-Breaking Cold" on Hockey Shtick

Daily "Hottest Year Ever" updates on Tom Nelson

If it weren't so pathetically tragic, it would be funny to watch the climate scamsters squirm.

Latest poll of LibDem party members

Joanna Hughes - arsehole for today

"What were the CPS and the courts thinking?" she bleats in the Spectator. 

A mother jailed for retracting allegations of rape by her husband [1], (allegations she now says were truthful [2]) has been freed. A few days ago, appeal judges overturned the eight-month sentence of which she had served seventeen days, ordering her immediate release. A triumph for common sense and compassion, but why was she jailed in the first place? Yes, the CPS thought she’d lied under oath and invented a rape claim - and that’s serious – but, as it turns out, her husband intimidated her into retracting the claim [3]. 

1. Her husband made these allegations?
2. What possible legal weight can the retraction of a retraction of a serious accusation have?
3. If so, a crime. Is he being prosecuted? No? Then it's another unsupported allegation, isn't it?

And on it goes. The "violent" father refused to hand over his children to the woman's sister. Who says he is violent? Why the hell should he hand over his children to the sister of a woman who tried to put him in jail? Have the child welfare gestapo taken the children into care? No? Then he is clearly not an unfit father.

Ah, but Hughes has a woman's way of knowing, before which phallocentric concepts like evidence and logic pale into insignificance.

"It's a sad world where stringent justice has such savage consequences" says Hughes in closing. What "savage consequences"? That a perjurer should go to jail? Surely it's even sadder when perjurers do not go to jail.

I know no more than Hughes about the case, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary a woman tried to ruin her husband by making a very serious and false accusation against him. The way the justice system is set up today, he would have had to prove his innocence - a practical impossibility when it is no longer permissible to impugn the testimony of the alleged victim.

Then she changed her mind. Possibly all she wanted to do was scare him, but the police and the CPS are fully entitled to take a very austere view indeed of being dragged into a domestic on the basis of perjured testimony. So she was punished to deter other women from doing the same thing.

Shame they can't do the same for female journopukes who confer automatic victim status on "a mother" regardless of her actions. May we consider the possibility that her children might be better off without such a mother?

Vince Cable - wanker

My own personal instincts - partly because I am the Secretary of State responsible for universities and partly because I think the policy is right - are very much to vote for it. But we have got to vote as a group, collectively, and we are discussing how we do that. My position is somewhat different but I am willing to go along with my colleagues. We are a disciplined party, we work together. We are clearly going through a difficult period over this issue and we want to support each other.

Statism in the UK - demoralised and demoralising

The first in the BBC2 series "Age of the Do-Gooders" presented by Ian Hislop, Private Eye's gnome-in-chief, was the polar opposite to the "Berlin" shite fronted by Matt Frei. 

Hislop does not try to make himself the story in the brow-beating US presenter style caricatured by Frei, so he was able to cover a lot of ground and also make a few important points in what used to be the traditional English manner - understated and assuming his viewers are bright enough to draw their own conclusions.

There was, however, a point of what I am sure was unconscious irony, which was the praise heaped on Charles Trevelyan for instituting civil service exams, after which - according to Gus O'Donnell, the current head of the Civil Service, bureaucrats became brighter and politically non-partisan, their job prospects no longer dependent on nepotism and cronyism.

Yeah, just like you, Gus, and all the other senior bureaucrats who trimmed their sails to the NuLabour wind, most of whom - following in their hero Blair's footsteps - have moved on to lucrative jobs with the corporations they favoured when in office.

Not mentioned was that Trevelyan got the idea from the very high standard of administrators selected by the very demanding examinations run by the - nasty, exploitative and (gasp) private - East India Company. And that the highly qualified EIC "do-gooders" kicked off the Indian Mutiny, the biggest crisis of Victoria's reign.

But still, the point Hislop was trying to make was good. Only a highly moral civil service could have won the prestige and power that ultimately led to it being entrusted with the administration of the Welfare State. Unfortunately, as the great Victorian intellectual Lord Acton wrote, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Less often quoted was his elaboration of that theme:

There is no worse heresy than [to argue] that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

The greatest tectonic shift that has taken place in British society in my life-time has been the corruption of the public service ethic. When I was a (highly qualified) young man, public service was still seen as an honourable career choice, which you took knowing you could have earned more in the private sector, because it offered the prospect of making a direct and positive contribution.

That is quite clearly no longer the case at either end: the civil service is now hugely privileged over the private sector, and it is rightly held in contempt by the subject population for its inability to do anything well - other than to feather its own nest. I doubt if many spirited individuals still join the civil service, and those who do must sacrifice their intellectual and moral integrity, or else their self-respect must lead them to resign.

I believe the tipping point came when Thatcher had to bribe the civil service so heavily to keep it "on side" for her confrontation with the trades unions. But the demoralisation began long before that. By the late 1970s the corruption of the judicial system had become a scandal too great to cover up any longer, while international comparisons cruelly highlighted the contumacious ineptitude of British statist management.

At some point the idea that Britain was a worthwhile enterprise drained away, and the public service ethic went with it. And without that ethic, public administration degenerated into parasitism. It really does not matter whether an excessive investment of power corrupted the civil service, or whether corruption within the civil service made it horrifyingly apparent that it wielded far too much power. The result was the same.

There was, is and ever more shall be only one way out of the declining spiral of a civil service becoming more and more corrupted and demoralised by its inability to deliver what politicians and people demand of it, which is to greatly reduce its functions.

Hislop's do-gooders created institutions that reflected their own high and self-confident moral purpose; absent that self-confident high moral purpose, those institutions have exerted a deeply demoralising influence on the whole of society. What is required is a frank acknowledgment that institutions have a finite life-span, and that without the spirit that animated them, the achievements of the great Victorian reformers are a harmful incubus.

Matt Frei - pretentious bore of the week

Of course he's one of the Bitchy Boy faces and by definition an arsehole, but I would have expected Frei to make a better job of Berlin. His attempts to imitate Alastair Cooke from America have been laughable, of course, but dammit - he was born and spent his first ten years in Germany. If he was going to be interesting on any subject, it should have been on his heimat.

But no - disconnected visuals barely linked by superficial commentary with portentous background music. WTF did he think he was doing on top of the Brandenburg Gate? From Frederick the Great to Hitler, the only link material was on Marx, Liebnecht and Luxembourg and some socially "meaningful" art.

Hello? Heard of Bismarck? Unification of Germany?

What a waste of time, money - and of an opportunity to inform, educate and entertain.

Kyoto Protocol Scorecard

Global cost: $868 billion
Global warming supposedly averted by 2050: 0.009°C
Carbon dioxide emissions reduction: 0.3%
Cost per 1°C of global warming supposedly averted by 2050: $96.4 trillion

From Hockey Schtick

Ambrose Bierce on climate catastrophism

In his immortal Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defined a ghost as "The outward and visible sign of an inward fear".

There is no point in continuing to belabour the eek!-o-freaks for their desperate clinging to discredited - sound of trumpets - SCIENCE. The whole debate long ago moved completely away from anything as mundane as verifiable facts. They continue to believe, passionately, because life would be intolerable for them if they did not.

To persist in pointing out that the bogeyman is the product of irrational fear, deliberately ramped up by pseudo-academics and by cynical political and business vested interests, is a waste of time. The scam will continue to run for as long as the frightened lowmids invest it with all their fears of national and social demotion.   

As we can see in the person of the truly ridiculous Chris Huhne, it appears to be the flag that the lowmids have nailed to the mast of their sinking ship. Damned if I know what can be done to strip the crowd cover from the scamsters. 

I was once married to a beautiful and talented woman who was almost disabled by fear. I kept thinking that if I could help her to see that her fears were irrational, she would blossom. But as each bogeyman was exposed to the light, she simply created a new one in the darkness.

Insecure people are a bottomless pit: you can shovel reassurance into them forever, and never fill the void.

The primacy of politics over markets

In a preface written for the French edition of his Tract on Monetary Reform (1924), Keynes described the attitude of the French government in terms that apply with even greater force to Angela Merkel:

Each time the franc loses value, the Minister of Finance is convinced that the fact arises from everything but economic causes. He attributes it to the presence of a foreigner in the neighborhood of the Bourse or to the mysterious and malignant influences of speculation. This is not far removed intellectually from an African witch doctor’s ascription of cattle disease to the "evil eye" of a bystander and of bad weather to the unsatisfied appetites of an idol. - From Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance (2009)

Hat-tip: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard