Britons Shall Be Slaves

F.A.B.

2011-12-12T10:57:00.000Z

F.S.

The British and queuing

2011-09-01T14:14:00.004Z

I saw something odd this morning during the rush hour, just outside Gunnersbury station in west London. At the bus stop there was a queue of people, a genuine queue, maybe thirty or forty feet long.

I confess I found it an arresting sight, having realised around a decade ago that somehow or other, at least in London, imperceptibly, the British practice of queueing at the bus stop had evaporated and had been replaced by nebulous groups of people who would wait until the arrival of the bus before converging on the entrance door like bees around a hive. I recall, those many years back, realising that things had changed, trying for a bit to hold out against it, resentful of it, then caving in at the futility of my lone protest.

So what was different this morning at this bus stop outside Gunnersbury station? Well, the answer seems to be that the queuers were waiting for a company bus to take them to one of the nearby mega-offices. I say "seems to be", because my bus arrived before I saw this, but it was because no one, not a soul, stirred from the queue to get onto my red double-decker that I remembered having seen these company buses - there's one I think for Sky, which has offices or studios close by - stop there before, although never with sufficient numbers of customers waiting to warrant a queue. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe these people were waiting for another red double-decker, in which case my working hypothesis falls flat.

And that working hypothesis? It is that a necessary and perhaps sufficient condition for queueing is the prior existence of potential queuers who recognise something common in each other, even if they don't actually recognise each other.

In other words, queueing as good behaviour (which I take it to be) only matters where bad behaviour - jostling - would be noticed by peers.

Thinking about it, this can be no more than a necessary condition. Were it a sufficient condition then denizens of small Italian villages would also queue.

Ken Clarke should go, but let's be clear about why

2011-05-18T18:50:00.002Z

So Ken Clarke is in the firing line for offending a weird modern piety, the one that says "rape is rape" and there is no distinction for sentencing purposes to be drawn between one rape and another. So, no distinction between a forcible rape committed by a 15 year old sibling on his ten year-old brother, on the one hand, and, on the other, a rape of a woman too drunk to know what is happening by a man who, because she's so drunk, needs use no force. No distinction, then, between the rapist who beats a woman senseless, drags her into a darkened alleyway in the dead of night and forces himself on her dimly cognisant, perhaps feebly struggling body and the husband who tires of his wife's headaches, or who learns of her adultery, and finally loses his self-possession. None? Golly, who knew it was that simple?

Meanwhile, in sentencing any other offence, judges assess the gravity of the offence for an offence of its type. Murder may be murder, but a premeditated hit, planned and paid for is treated more seriously than a crime of passion. Just for example. Theft from an employer is treated more seriously, as a breach of trust, than "dipping" from a stranger's handbag in a cafe. Of course we can differ as to the merits of these varying assessments, but it's surely clear that the commission of a nominally identical offence is capable of being sentenced for a variety of differing aggravating and mitigating features.

As I understand Ken Clarke's gaffe, he was explaining that if the average sentence for rapists is five years then that average, as is the way with averages, hides a wide variation of actual sentences for more or less serious rapes ... just as is the case with any other offence. I'm not here expressing any sentiment as to the rectitude of the sentences handed in this country for rape, or for any other offence, much less am I considering Clarke's proposal - and this was why he was being interviewed this morning - to discount sentences by half for early pleas, and I certainly don't mean to defend Clarke, for reasons which will become apparent. I'm simply noting 1) the plain construction of his words, 2) the drearily predictable response to them with its attendant illustration of the bounds of political discourse as determined by the High Priests of What May Be Thought and Said and, finally, 3) Clarke's own increasingly, as today has progressed, craven response - which is the real reason why he should go.

As to 1), enough said...for those governed by rationality.

So far as concerns 2), this is closely related to 3): the cravenness of most of the political class when confronted by icky, sticky altercations of the type witnessed this morning in Clarke's interview, tells us all we need to know about the real quality of such "big beasts" as Clarke. Granted he is not a pigmy in the Jacqui Smith mould but he is a very good example of the principal reason for the triumph of those odd people who, among other things, demand that they be recognised as victims of greater moral standing than others, and the militant feminists are of course foremost among this unedifying, enervated crowd. "Rape is rape", they cry. Well, yes. And? Murder is murder and theft is theft and robbery is robbery and so on. Assuming these people are not completely stupid - which may be a big assumption - what they really mean when they demand obeisance to this catechism is not, "there is no distinction to be drawn between one rape and another", it is, "do not argue with my suffering, which is above all others or I'll scream and scream until I'm sick". And this is only slightly more pathetic and tedious than the collective rolling over of the political elite whenever the catechism is repeated, whether or not, as in this case, by a news media Tribune of the People on behalf of the High Priests, or by the rape victim to whom Clarke was speaking. And if it is only slightly more pathetic and tedious, it is infinitely more sinister. Which is why a serious parliamentarian would stand up to it, or damn yer eyes. Clarke didn't. He never was made of the material that would. That's why he should go, and that's why he shouldn't never have returned.

And by they way, if there are any sob sisters reading this then swivel on the following: three and-a-half years ago I was stabbed and almost killed. The attack has left me with, in all likelihood, permanent parasthesia, in other words a disability from which I will never recover rather than a few minutes of profound unpleasantness and fear (which I also experienced). Some months after the attack, the culprit having been identified and sentenced to "seven" years (ie three-and-a-half) on a guilty plea, I was contacted by email by a genius at the Probation Service who wished to know whether I wanted any conditions attached to the licence of my attacker when he was eventually released. In his email, this genius referred to my assailant as "the victim". Doubtless this was the result of carelessness, and perhaps a man ill-suited to his exact job within the Probation Service. So seriously, girls, get a grip.

Al Murray is a genius, but...

2011-05-18T14:21:00.003Z

I am currently reading Think Yourself British, a spoof self-help book by the Pub Landlord, aka Al Murray. I'm a bit late coming to his comedy, never having got into it before but on TV a couple of months back I saw a replay of what I imagine was his breakthrough performance from about ten years ago. What really impressed me what the extent to which the performance was improvised and it was clear to me as a result of this that he'd really developed the character of the Pub Landlord to make improvisation as apparently effortless (I'm sure it wasn't in reality) as he did. But it was also a performance brimfull of learning, albeit eclectic surface learning and I recall thinking to myself that, like Sacha Baron Cohen, he must be a product of Oxbridge rather than a run-of-the-mill university ... and indeed I gather that he was indeed at Oxford; Murray's crass alter ego is a product of strong intellect and a good education.

In short, he is IMHO a genius. The essence of his comedy is having us laugh gently at a certain type of Britishness and the pill is further sweetened by jokes, mostly about foreigners and especially the French and Germans, which would be dull or only slightly funny in the hands of a real saloon bar bore but which are riotous in the hands of the satiric Landlord; we're laughing at ourselves for laughing at others, and everso slightly enjoying laughing at others in the process ... it's not a guilty pleasure but a self-conscious riff and the audience is in on the joke.

And it's in this vein that I'm reading Think Yourself British, with its constant footnoted reminders against any mention of the phrase (copyrighted to Murray, natch) "Help Yourself" of the scores of MPs found last year with their hands in the till. In short, like his comedy, there is seriousness here as well as larkiness. But although in these footnotes he allows himself a prod at these MPs by naming them and their misdeeds in conjunction with his copywrited (sic?) phrase, there is for the most part no use in asking what Murray's own opinions are, his comedy is too deft and gentle for that. He may be a clever and well-educated man poking fun at Little Britishness but, as I say, it's never shrill and it's always leavened with enough insight and learning for the coin of his jokes to have another side. Take this for example:

"Thumping Somebody

"I'm not allowed to actually advocate this as a coping strategy for legal reasons, but we all know, don't we, that there are times when only thumping somebody will do...Whatever the trigger is, you know that belting the living daylights out of him is the only thing that will make you feel better.

"But the there's the whole business of explaing yourself to the police, or to the wife...and the thing is, I actually have a really good strategy for coping with this bit. I do! It's to start weeping and banging on and on about how you have unresolved issues, and how what you really need is therapy, and a shoulder to cry on. Try it - it's absolutely amazing what you can get away with. This country's fucked."

It starts out brutish, somewhat sinister, amusing only because it's the Pub Landlord talking, but then raises the thorny question of what the thug does when he meets reality. Boorishness confronts the law. And then wins again! But also, no matter how in on the joke we are, who seriously maintains that weeping and talking about unresolved "issues" and what you really need is therapy doesn't get you anywhere? He may be an oaf (that is his character), but he speaks sooth.

Then there's this, on Darwin and Evolution:

"Charles Darwin's big idea was called Evolution...It depends on a process he described as Survival of the Fittest, whereby the Fittest would be the ones who ensured that their extremely fit DNA was passed on to future generations, whilst the feebler and stupider specimens...would not succeed...thus gradually weeding themselves out.

"Charles lived in the nineteenth century, before the invention of the housing estate, which was to knock his precious theory into a cocked hat. Nowadays your average housing estate inhabitant has maybe nine children by ten different fathers (there's always one she's not a hundred per cent sure about), and what's more she has begun this process at the age of about sixteen. This means she's more than likely a grandmother by about thirty-three or thirty four, and a great-grandmother by about fifty. As a result the DNA (and of course the DSS) has been spread across four generations inside half a century, to a pool of maybe eighty individuals, all of whom are hell bent on carrying on the same process as hard and as fast as possible. After all, there'll all want council flats too."

Now you could argue that this is funny purely because it's classic saloon bar bore material and we all know that saloon bar bores, when we don't have to listen to them, are amusing because they're pitiable. Right? And yet.... factually what's wrong with this saloon bar bore's analysis or description? Looks pretty accurate to me.

Now maybe Murray had no particular ambition when he wrote this. Maybe he was just riffing on his character. Or maybe he's a fully paid-up Guardianista who finds this funny only because he thinks it's appalling that some people think like this, and the amusment is one of contempt. I don't know. I'm aware in writing all of the above that I've attempted to analyse comedy and jokes, which is rarely wise. But I ask again: what, factually, is wrong with his criticism of council estate denizens and the extent to which they turn the theory of evolution on its head? Indeed one might argue that the whole point of the welfare safety net is to turn Evolution on its head, to ensure that people do not survive "merely" because they are the fittest.

Al Murray's a genius, and I've no idea what he truly thinks. But no matter how essential it is to his comedy that we the audience are on board with its basic assumptions and frames of reference, there is - irrespective of his intentions, and he may as I say be horrified by what I've written - something deeper in his meaning and I suspect we're not supposed to recognise it, because then it might not be funny. Or, perhaps more accurately, to do so would leave us less sure of what we are laughing at and about.

Recycling insanity

2011-05-16T14:11:00.002Z

I often think that everything in this country is upside down, that what ought to be the natural and desirable state of affairs has been turned on its head. Celebrity chefs and footballers earn fortunes, surgeons earn a pittance; the honest and hard-working are penalised by redistributive taxation that both rewards fecklessness and (therefore) encourages it; institutions of higher learning - indeed institutions generally - are neutered in what should be their avowed goals in favour of abstract ideological ambitions usually manifested in quotas; the omnipresent application of the precautionary principle whose costs, financial or otherwise, are never measured and which usually ends up causing more harm than good, people supposedly living in poverty are routinely fat* ... these are broad brush examples but they can be illustrated by thousands of examples from daily life, thousands of instances with which we're all familiar from the newspapers ... the sexually incontinent jihadi claiming hundreds of thousands in benefits to support his massive family (...ies), the free NHS breast enhancement for transsexual soldiers, the foreign criminals who cannot be deported, the politicians who claim taxpayers' money for things the rest of us must pay for ourselves, the university turning a blind eye to academic underachievement in favour of quota fulfilment and on and on ... and on and on

... and then there is recycling.

The photograph above was taken recently in my kitchen. Mrs Lud takes seriously the threats of the local council to criminalise us for failing to sort our rubbish as it sees fit, hence the pile of detritus next to the bin which makes this very expensive (at least as far as I was concerned when we bought it) kitchen resemble a student squat or the corner of a shanty town. And like so many others thus threatened, she is either not persuaded or not open to persuasion on the argument that landfill is a NIMBY political problem not a problem of lack of space, or that if one is concerned about scarce resources and hence the need to recycle then any cost-benefit anaylsis of recycling must consider the efficient allocation of those resources that go into recycling**, that is: can this effort - the rinsing of the cans and bottles, the paper towels to dry them,the separate trips to the separate collection bins, the manufacture of those (plastic) separate collection bins, the deployment of separate collection trucks - be better deployed in some other way? For that matter, perhaps we should buy another bin or two to accommodate this irrational overflow and if so should it be plastic (oh, the environmental horror!) or more of the sleek Brabantia variety, all of which will itself ultimately have to be recycled and would in any event require those ghastly carbon emissions to be conveyed from the source of manufacture to our door...?

But to return to my original point: everything in this country seems to me to be upside down, and in that photo we see a very good example, for compliance with the law requires us to make a rubbish tip of our kitchen thereby reversing centuries of domestic sanitary progress.

* Murderers get "life", which means 15 years, or whatever. Every other offender sentenced to custody serves half, except the very many who serve less even than that. Oh, and importers of recreational pharmaceuticals for retail to voluntarily consenting adults can expect more bird than anyone who hasn't committed a double murder.

**It's worth remembering the bleeding obvious that prices reflect supply and demand thus, if there is a concern that the world will run out of glass, or the raw materials that make glass, then the price of glass will increase and demand for a secondary market in the supply of second-hand glass likewise will increase. In other words, those empty wine bottles we're required to recycle would have commercial value to us once the wine has been drunk and there would be no need for them compulsorily to be recycled. Similarly, the fact there is little or no commercial value in old wine bottles tells us something important about the need (in fact, lack thereof) to prioritise recycling glass.

Yes, but the kid WAS fat

2011-03-03T11:33:00.003Z

Jamie's Dream School, a new TV series in which Sir Oliver has gathered luminaries together to teach delinquents, the hope being that the best in their respective fields can do something with these adolescent reprobates that ordinary teachers cannot.

He's assisted in this by an ordinary headmaster.

One of the luminaries is Dr David Starkey, whom I know from from first hand academic experience to be both a brilliant lecturer and scholar. Not that that is a terribly original insight. It also assumes that you actually have an interest in history and want to be there listening to him.

So Starkey's trying to teach these borstal rejects and, to be fair, he's obviously not used to that kind of audience, a fact which, again to be fair, Sir Oliver subsequently appreciated. Anyway, one of the kids baits the said Starkey, who rises to it in short order and (not for nothing was he once known as the rudest man in Britain) tells the said sprog that he's fat. It's all on camera.

Oh, and the kid is fat.

And there, to all intents and purposes, ended the lesson. The kid had been disrepected. The matter's taken up. And here we get to the nub or gist of things. The headmaster, drafted in to assist, takes the kid's side. He'd rather lose the teacher than the kid. Starkey is apparently unrepentant.

My own view is that he showed poor kid management skills, although that is scarcely surprising. But the real point, it seems to me, is this: the clash of wills and educational cultures exemplified on the one hand by the disrespected fatty and his headteacher and, on the other, by David Starkey. The headteacher says that Starkey's verbal putdown embodies all that's wrong with education in this country.

Eh? Starkey is a product of what was once one of the world's finest educational systems, and of teaching which emphasised deference to the teacher (in the sense at least of deferring to him), obedience by the child, rules and so forth.

The fatty is a product of a contemporary system which this headmaster has presumably played a role in creating.

So in backing the kid not the teacher the head sustains the current system, the system that created the delinquent chubster.

And if Starkey exemplifies the educational system of which he is a product, what is the worst that can be said of it by reference to him? He is one of the world's foremost authorities on English courts and monarchs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, has been at the top of this game for a good 25 years (to my knowledge), has taught in some of the finest academic institutions and tutored countless spotty undergraduates. But he's no good with truculent, misbehaving teenagers.

So which do we choose, the system producing delinquent chubsters or the one producing brilliant historians? Granted, it may not be a zero sum question. but school is pointless for children like these unless discipline rules. There might be better ways of doing it than weak jokes at the expense of fatties, but in seeking to govern the class Starkey grasped the basic point that such as the headmaster deliberately refuse to consider. It seemed to me that Starkey understood these children very well indeed...as he remarked early on, their problem is not low self-esteem, it's that they have too high an opinion of themselves. Theodore Dalrymple, I think, said as much some years back.

December 12th

2010-12-12T11:05:00.000Z

Birthday.

On PJ O'Rourke

2010-11-24T17:09:00.003Z

Ian Dunt broadly approves.

http://www.politics.co.uk/reviews/culture-media-and-sport/review-p-j-o-rourke-at-intelligence-squared-$21385811.htm

But given the quality of his reasoning, I wonder whether O'Rourke is glad of this.

For example, Dunt writes:

'Ultimately "entitlements" [why the scare quotes?] like free [now 'free' deserves inverted commas] healthcare for all maximise freedom because health is the prerequisite for all other freedoms'.

Blimey.

Not only does this circular little rejoinder sidestep rather than, as intended, confront O'Rourke's distinction between 'gimme' rights and 'get out of here rights', it begs questions which make a mockery of it.

For starters, is health the prerequisite for freedoms or does it maximise freedom? For they are not the same thing at all: freedom is an absolute value. It is incapable of being maximised. On the other hand, if I have no access to a car, my ability (which is what Dunt calls 'freedoms') to participate in the Paris-Dakar rally is non-existant.

Second, does having a cold limit my freedom? Obviously not. Having Alzheimer's might diminish my abilities, but there's little contemporary medical science can do about that anyway, and healthcare free at the point of demand, such as the NHS, tends only to say, 'Sorry, the best drugs are too expensive'. So much for healthcare entitlements maximising freedom. Or abilities.

Third, excessive drinking will damage my health. Is excessive drinking an enemy of freedom? Seriously? Is it not in fact an exercise of freedom, albeit a poor choice, which may ultimately diminish me?

In short, Dunt seems incapable of distinguishing the absence of others' coercion (ie freedom) from factors inhering to us as individuals which may prevent us reaching our full potential (ie disabilities). 'Free' healthcare may assist us in overcoming disabilities, but only at the expense of our freedom.

He goes on:

'Similarly universal free education allows people to assess choices. There is no real freedom under ignorance'.

Put aside the deplorable quality of universal 'free' [my scare quotes, as before, because of course someone has to pay for it] education, particularly by comparison with its voluntary predecessors, is he really suggesting no one ever made good choices before universal free education was introduced in the 1870s? Is the philosophers' State of Nature, then, a tyranny? The logical reductio of this claim is just this: the absence of coercion (ie liberty) is tyranny when combined with an absence of reading and writing! At the very least, Dunt's conception of tyranny would surprise a free-thinker in present-day North Korea.

And then there's this:

'There is also, I would have thought, a strict minimal benchmark of material possession, under which political freedoms become irrelevant. After all, what use is the right to privacy if you have to sleep on the streets?'

In point of fact I should think rough sleepers would welcome a bit of privacy on their chosen doorsteps, but I'm no expert on the matter. In any case, is Dunt saying that mediaeval peasants should not in principle have been freed from serfdom? Jaysus! On that analysis, a man living in what passes for poverty in 2010 Britain should be indentured to, what...? the state?

If he's on welfare, one might say he already is.

Dunt's case, then, is that if you are poor you have no wish to be free. How odiously condescending.

Some looters are more explicit than others...

2010-11-11T13:34:00.002Z

http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2010/11/London-Student-Demo-5-390x285.jpg, these being students protesting about getting less free stuff, London 10th November 2010.

The Old Bailey

2010-08-13T15:24:00.002Z

The Old Bailey has a matron.

And not just any matron. I am told by a colleague who recently spent some time there on a trial that other members of staff treat her with the deference due to an old-fashioned matron. "Good morning, matron", they say.

This pleases me enormously.

In the Bailey's lifts, on the wall, is a sign telling you what to find on which floor. Next to the floor marked 'matron', I had forcibly to restrain myself from scrawling the word 'Realllly'.

But what I want to know is this: how did such a venerable institution as an old-fashioned matron at the country's principal criminal court escape the levelling tendencies of Harperson, Blair, Brown and the gang?

How did they miss abolishing the Bailey's matron, in their great reinvention of the nation, when so much else was swept aside and bulldozed as outdated, sexist, racist, colonialist and all that other gay stuff (quoting freely from South Park)?

Why do politicians continue to talk to the news media?

2010-03-11T16:47:00.002Z

Imagine you're an elected pol., and you want to communicate with the proles, tell them what a wonderful job you're doing, apply a little of the old oil with a view to enhancing your electability. What do you do about it?

The problem is, sort of, a logistical one: if you're a British MP for example, you've probably got somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 voters in your constituency. Assume a turn-out of 60% in any given election, that is 30,000 to 60,000 voters you need to be able to communicate with, clearly more than can be spoken to in person or even, in all likelihood, at mass rallies if such were the vogue. If you're a politician with a national portfolio, like a party leader for instance, or even an MEP with a constituency of a half million voters, the problem is compounded.

Until recently, the answer to this problem appeared to be: use the news media, talk to journalists directly and issue press releases widely to any news agency with a distribution network, get them to do your dirty work for you.

There was just one small problem with this. Journalists started, I think probably sometime in the early sixties after satires like That Was The Week That Was, to become less deferential towards politicians, less willing to report them obligingly in their own terms, and readier, it followed, to look behind and between their words for hidden meanings, to analyse, compare and contrast. There developed, as a result, a very uneasy relationship between pols. and hacks. The pols. needed the hacks for the reasons already stated, the hacks needed the pols. as an easy source of news (even when nothing had actually happened, so much as one pol. would, for example, issue a press release attacking an opponent; in such cases there was often no literal exchange of words between the attacker and attackee, just a dispute by proxy carried out over the newswires).

In time, the pols. started to adapt to the changed environment, charming some hacks into compliance (I think it was Stephen Glover at The Spectator who used to call The Guardian's Roy Greenslade 'Roy Campbell Greenslade' because of his suspected proximity to chief Blair spin doctor Alistair Campbell), feeding others stories at the expense of their rivals and freezing out other unfavoured hacks altogether. Not that the hacks took this lying down, their methods evolved, too, as did their sophistication in understanding how they were being used. Even sections of the public developed media savvy, and learned to look behind the heat in a news story to try and understand whether there was any light to be perceived.

That, I think, was the point at which the internet age came in; pols. and hacks co-exisitng in an uneasy dance of dependance, helping each other and, increasingly often, ruining each other.

Well, not quite. By the mid-1990s journalists were routinely ruining politicians, whether through sordid revelations or - as in the cases of Archer and Aitken - court cases. But the shoe was rarely on the other foot. George Galloway, several years back won a libel action against The Daily Telegraph's allegations that he had been on Saddam Hussain's payroll (although I think he won on the rather rarefied grounds that they hadn't given him a chance to comment before printing the allegations), but certainly my unscientific perception is that his win was unusual; it's the news media that usually claims pols.' scalps, not the other way around.

But even if I am wrong about that, why would any elected politician in the age of the internet and digital camera uploads to computers wish to talk to these hacks? You can buy a cheap computer with a built-in camera for a couple of hundred pounds. I assume most pols.' allowances pay for internet connectivity. For a little more they could buy themselves slightly better cameras, with improved picture capability. Then download via myriad web-based sharing sites whatever talking head op-eds. they wish to share with their target audiences. Why would the pols. not do this? Why continue to use the traditional news media, with all its ability to disrupt, distort and filter the pols.' message?

'Dave' Cameron, of course, has used his online 'webcameron' in just the way I am suggesting, but this sort of usage by pols. is still unusual. Why? Given that pols. can, for the first time in history, and for almost no cost set up a telecommunications system that enables them to communicate directly , if they so wish, to the whole of humanity (or at least that sizeable section of it which has internet connectivity - 70% of British households in 2009, according to the ONS), why continue to bother with newspaper and TV journalists?

I can think of several answers to this.

First, an intellectual failure by pols. to perceive that they no longer need journalists in the way that, historically, they did.

Second, the persistence of the niaive belief held by pols. that they can ride the news media tiger without ultimately being consumed by it.

Third, the fact that many pols. are inveterate gossips and like dishing the dirt on colleagues, policies, who's up, who's down, and so on.

Fourth, closely related, vanity: pols. like talking to journos because it makes them think someone is listening to what they are saying. And talking off the record to hacks, that is, unattributably, gives them power without responsibility.

Fifth, fear. And this is the biggy. My guess - and it is no more than that - is that pols. fear that if they plugged themselves and their prognostications into an online forum, let's call it, IvorGestyynogg-BigginMP.blogspot, where voters could log on an see what their eponymous MP thought on a given subject, hardly anybody would pay them any attention. Come to that, what point is there in the citizenry going to the trouble of trooping up to London to watch a debate in parliament, or switching on the telly to the same end, if, were said citizenry sufficiently interested, they could simply log on and find out at their convenience what select politicians were saying. What would be the point in a deliberative, legislative body like parliament?

In other words, if the citizenry is sufficiently interested all it needs do is log on to find out what its respective MPs, MEPs, etc. are saying and doing. As a building, at least, there is little or no need for parliament.

On the other hand, if the citizenry is uninterested, what is the point of the MPs, or at least, what is the point of those currently in place?

The internet is, as is often noted, a remarkable tool for transparency in the market place of human dealings. I daresay that at some point we will, most of us, realise that this applies equally to what politicians think they have to offer us. What then?

Birthday

2009-12-12T07:37:00.001Z

December 12th. 35.

A lamentable ignorance of human nature

2009-08-18T10:58:00.002Z

I did not used to mind registering to vote. Every year I got a form asking me to confirm my details and address. For practical voting purposes that seemed reasonable.

But this year for the first time, Barnet LBC, my local authority, has seen fit to headline the usual form with a veiled threat (see above). Now, I mind very much indeed.

For 20 years I have told anyone unlucky enough to be within earshot that my 'line in the sand' on Big Government, the point at which I was willing to go to prison for disobedience to nanny's petty-tyrannous diktats, was identity cards. It still is. But now I am obliged to add compulsory voting which, bearing in mind the above, is surely now realistically on the cards.

Why can't these bastards leave us alone? The answer, I suppose, is that they do not wish to face the possibility that we can get aling just fine without them.

Debtors' Prison

2009-02-04T08:22:00.002Z

I love the way Reuters locates this under the "Oddly Enough" section.

Of course debtors' prisons were, ahem, abolished over here in Blighty as a result of the work of the great reforming novelist Charles Dickens.

This is very well put

2009-01-24T08:52:00.002Z

"The function of a university (as explained by Gramsci and Marcuse) is to produce minds indoctrinated with 'progressive' thought - so indoctrinated that any ideas that are hostile to the cause will be rejected by them (without consideration), and reject them with great hatred.

"Universities are not totally successful - in that most students are just given a vague mind set of support for 'progressive' ideas and a built in hostility to 'reactionary' ideas, but only in a very loose way, enough to, say, vote for Obama - but not enough to kill for him. They become the sort of people who think the Economist is free market, laugh at the "humour" of the Communist comics on Radio 4 without actually sharing their ideology and do not see anything odd in the selection of books in British bookshops."

- Paul Marks

Question

2008-12-29T17:10:00.002Z

I think it was Max Weber who claimed that bureaucracy, as much as democracy, was the enemy of aristocracy.

I would go further and suggest that bureaucracy is the enemy of everything, albeit a perhaps necessary evil.

My question, just thrown out like, is this: can bureaucracy be its own enemy? can it destroy itself?

12th December

2008-12-12T08:22:00.000Z

Remembering a birthday.

Property is theft, right on!

2008-12-12T08:11:00.004Z

According to a BBC news reader on TV this morning, if the people of Manchester vote in favour of a congestion charge it will "free up" three billion pounds for investment in public transport.

Oh yes, all that money will be "freed up", as opposed to being held captive by all the people to whom it belongs.

And then it'll be invested, we know that, because there will be a measurable return, like interest on a bank balance. Not at all like vague assertions of generalised benefit. Nothing at all like that.

Praise God Barebones

2008-11-16T09:33:00.003Z

Will they ever leave us alone, these bossy Puritans?

They are entitled to their opinions but their insistence on endlessly pushing us around with legal cattle prods ought to be, ahem, banned.

How I hate them.

Can this be what Russell Brand meant?

2008-09-08T18:51:00.004Z

Russell Brand says:

"On behalf of the world. Some people, I think they're called racists, say America is not ready for a black president. But I know America to be a forward-thinking country because otherwise why would you have let that retard cowboy fella be president...?"

So black people are like retards? Vote Obama because you should feel sorry for him?

Apparently undaunted by hubris, he claims to speak for the rest of the world. Was anyone else not consulted before he claimed to speak for us, or did he merely miss out the Lud part of the sketch?

For my own part, at a pragmatic rather than rhetorical level, I am far more concerned with who's shunted into place as EU 'president' than with with who is elected to run the USA, which is after all the business of its own citizens, but then I lack Mr Brand's standing in America where his intervention is, I imagine, viewed not as gross discourtesy and impertinence but as a welcome and intelligent contribution to the presidential race.

In other news, Lee Jasper, a man one supposes of similarly impeccable 'progressive' credentials has called for the creation of black-only schools to beat gang culture and to raise standards.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23552199-details/Lee+Jasper%3A+black-only+schools+will+beat+gangs/article.do

What is it with these proggies? One compares black people to retards, the other says apartheid is fine because they're a bunch of thickies.

If I said that I'd be lynched.

Doubtless they both cleave to standard anti-racism rhetoric - Brand, in the quote above, seems to be disparaging racists - but their words reveal collectivist assumptions that dare not speak their name: retards are x, black people y, Americans z and so on.

Obvious generalisations save time, I don't have a problem with them (see 'Our Africans vs. their Africans', below) provided always that individuals are ultimately judged by their actions, I just don't understand how any of what Brand and Jasper have said supports the contention that all people and all cultures are equal.

Perhaps they're both individualists, after all.

Our Africans vs. Their Africans

2008-08-24T11:28:00.006Z

I am delighted to say that I have done a splendid job of avoiding news of the Olympic games. It is has been difficult, given the saturation coverage, but several weeks devoted to covering my eyes and ears whilst going "la, la, la, can't hear you" seems to have worked, and little news has seeped through. It was not until last night that I first heard mention of Hussain (sp?) Bolt. I gather he runs very quickly.

However, be my ignorance of these matters never so determined, it would take a deaf and blind lobotomy patient to be unaware of the dominance of ethnically African athletes in the 'proper' sports. (Tiddly-winks, figure-skating, basically anything involving points, simply doesn't count). Indeed this dominance is long-standing.

There was a time when even to draw attention to such a fact was to risk social ostracism of the most aggressively supercilious and patrician kind, but I sense that that time has passed. And it's only right to point out the dominance of, say, Caucasians in the swimming pool. But therein lies the difference: for every Moroccan or Ethiopian runner, that is to say an ethnic African possessing a Moroccan or Ethiopian passport, there is a young man or woman of, say, Ethiopian descent and in possession of a French or British passport; but how many Caucasians/Anglo-Saxons, call-us-what-you-will, carry Ethiopian passports? How many white Nigerian champion swimmers are there?

To ask the question is to know the answer.

Does it matter? Well since I couldn't give a flea's toss about the Olympics, no. But actually that's an evasion because the same situation holds true in the World Athletics Championships, about which I am not nearly so scathing. The point is: in all the national triumphalism, here and in other countries, when you filter out all the events the Africans can't afford to compete in, to what extent is a G8 national team's success dependent on its importation of African athletic talent?

Now a multiculturalist might say, "Hang on, there are British Africans. Britain, or any other country can take pride in the athletic achievements of its young, their ethnicity is irrelevant".

Hmm. I think my response is that that's wishful thinking. Consider the Soviet-US space race and the famous joke that success was a question of which side had imported the best German rocket scientists after the war. That's a partial truth, of course: success also depended on factors like the amount of money available for R&D, but the parallel is broadly identical.

So what are those who trumpet British Olympic success actually saying? Well, a team participating under the Union flag won a lot of gongs. But then so do Chelsea and Manchester United, and in neither case is the appendage of 'English club' anything more than a flag of convenience. And, interestingly, since these are private businesses, the correct-thinking political elite sees no difficulty with proposing curbs on the importation of foreign players; would it propose the same in respect of the publicly-funded British Olympic team?

Once again, to ask the question is to know the answer.

Perhaps a flag of convenience is exactly what national identity has become in a great era of volkerwanderung. But is that sufficient to constitute a tie that binds? That question brings us back to the multiculturalists who, in their zest for world government and the brotherhood of man irrespective of historic, blood or community ties, would certainly hope not. And if the multiculturalists are right to perceive the dissolution of ethnic national bonds, and indeed the dissolution of national bonds full stop, what then is the point of national pride in a team by definition antithetical to a national identity? The Union flag is now just a logo, which is an ironic outcome of a policy pursued, as often as not, by socialist internationalists hostile to logos.

For my part, aware as I am of the ethnic variations in Caucasian British identity even before the Empire Windrush, I am reluctant to ascribe my national identity to racial homogeneity. Which is not to say that racial homogeneity does not assist in defining certain nationalities. But I do think a shared history is important to British identity. Or was. And I regret its passing, mainly because no decision-maker has ever asked me or, the millions whom I suspect are like me, if we minded that this was what they were going to do. The truth is that those decision-makers, of all political parties, never gave a damn. They simply did what they wanted. Call me a bluff old recidivist, but I resent that.

The success of the British Olympic team, and the apparent popular pride in it is, then, the product of decision-makers who despise that very same popular voice, when it suits them.

All Must Have Prizes

2008-08-23T07:11:00.003Z

You learn something new every day. Yesterday I learned that BMX bicycling is now an Olympic sport:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121939048353863217.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

There are other activities, too, which have not yet received the recognition which is their due. Olympics-watching, for example. Think of all those Olympics-watchers out there, heroically dedicating their time to sitting in front of the TV hour after hour in the hope of punching the air triumphally when someone they've never met signals, by punching the air tiumphally, that the time is ripe so to do. Points could be awarded for the number of sores gained by the individual arse during a bout of Olympics-watching, and for pounds and ounces added through devoted motionless viewing.

In other news, and unconnected to his electoral woes, Mr Brown has promised to mug me for a 'contribution' to a popular cause:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080822/twl-brown-s-cash-boost-for-athletes-41f21e0.html

It seems that GBP260m was splashed on 'Team GB' (Jesus wept) for 2008, and double that is planned for 2012. And so far, I see, we've won twenty squillion more medals in things the Africans cannot afford to compete in than ever before. So why stop at GBP520m? I mean if GBP260m gets us this much gloire, why not spend everything we have. Then, we will rule the worlddddddd...

That's the trouble with Mr Bean, I mean Brown. His vision is so limited. "Now we want to turn two weeks of sporting success into ten years of sporting triumph", he says. Only ten years? Why not a thousand?

Row harder, everyone, the Great Helmsman has a Plan...

To ask the question is to know the answer

2008-08-07T09:23:00.006Z

BBC1, this morning, a programme called "Breakfast".

It's a sort of magazine, helpful if you want to find out the weather and travel news, without exposing yourself (usually, anyway) to the Today Programme's obnoxious agitprop.

So I'm swilling my coffee whilst ironing a shirt, waiting for said travel/weather, and one of the presenters, Sian something-or-other is interviewing a chap from, I think, N.I.C.E.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence. Bit of a misnomer, really. It's more a sort of central planning committee for NHS drugs expenditure. If N.I.C.E. is not and says a drug is too costly for the NHS, then the NHS doesn't use the drug.

And that has happened today, in respect of some kidney treatment drugs (see link, above).

And at one point, Sian Thingummy asks this chap: why don't you put pressure on the pharmaceutucal companies to bring down the costs of these drugs?

Now, leave aside the economic illiteracy of this question. Ignore, if you can, its incitement to extortion. Instead, can you imagine, if the story was about food prices, and La Thingummy was talking to a chap from Tesco, would she really ask him to put pressure on farmers to lower their prices?

Farmers good, big pharma bad.

This is genius

2008-08-07T08:36:00.002Z

Sheffield University lecturer Marcus Phillips took indecent photos of two young girls.

Boo! Hiss!

He has been successfully prosecuted and ordered to undertake 150 hours' unpaid work.

Hurray!

But. Well now. It seems that in his spare time Dr Phillips runs a photography business. He "creates portraits of fairies combining digital technology and the original photographs of his models.

"He was asked by the parents of the two girls, aged 10 and 12, to create a portrait of them which involved taking close-up photographs of various parts of their bodies, which were then superimposed on top of each other, to create the fairy images. The girls' parents were present at some of the photo shoots.

"However, when Phillips went to have the pictures developed at his local branch of Bonusprint, staff there became concerned about the images with showed the girls topless and alerted police, who arrested him.

"Sheffield Crown Court heard that Phillips, a tutor at Sheffield University, ran a photography business in his spare time which specialised in turning photographs of clients into 'ethereal' images of fairies....

"Because of the girls' ages, the photographs fell under the legal definition of indecent images of children.

"He was sentenced to 150 hours community service by Judge Lawler QC, who said there was 'never a sexual motive' for the photos.

"Passing sentence he added: 'You always acted perfectly properly and their parents were perfectly law-abiding, sensible people who cared for their children.

"'What is clear is that you had no base motive, no sexual motive and there was not any question of deriving sexual gratification from what you were doing.'"

A couple of thoughts.

First, for the CPS to prosecute this (or any) offence, a CPS lawyer must decide that it is in the public interest so to do. Personally, not a big fan of this 'public interest' malarky, I think it's just a helpful carte blanche to justify whatever an individual thinks is important. Be that as it may, on any view, where was the 'public interest' in prosecuting this man?

Second, if he 'always acted perfectly properly' (per Hizzoner), then where does the judge get off in giving him 150 hours' community service? I have consulted the current edition of Sexual Offences Law & Practice and there is no mention of minimum sentence requirements for such an 'offence'.

And I'll tell you what, even if there was a minimum sentence for this kind of thing you can bet it's not 150 hours' work in the community.

In short, if Dr Phillips' behaviour was proper, why was he prosecuted? And if it was proper, why was he not given a nominal sentence, a 50 quid fine, say?

Oh, and why did the parents get off scott-free? Why were they not joined on the same indictment?

Still, lucky old Dr Phillips "will not have to sign the sex offenders' register."

Letting the cat out of the bag

2008-06-18T09:46:00.003Z

"Four union activists have been branded racist for using a pamphlet with a three wise monkeys cartoon.

"The four said they published the 'hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil' illustration to lampoon union leaders who 'refused to listen' to members.

"But union bosses said the image was directed at a black committee member.

"Glenn Kelly, a member of Unison's national executive council, is one of the branch officers facing a disciplinary hearing for publishing the cartoon.

"Mr Kelly, who is secretary of Bromley Unison in south-east London, said: 'It's an appalling misuse of a serious issue of fighting racism. 'It's an attempt to silence those, like myself, who say some of the leaders have got too cosy with New Labour.' "

An appalling misuse of the issue of racism? Misuse? What there are uses for racism? I wonder what they might be, from the point of view of a trade union activist...

To those who deny the existence of God, a message from the flood-stricken plains of England: believe us, he is real

2007-07-06T09:48:00.000Z

'Cos like, think of all the damage done by like organised religion, yeah.

Islamicist appeasement quote of the day

2007-04-18T08:44:00.000Z

'Of course, there are laws that come into conflict with specifically Muslim beliefs and customs. Honor killings, forced marriages, and polygamy pose real problems. “Although France officially prohibited polygamy in 1993, current estimates suggest that anywhere from 150,000 to 400,000 residents, many from Mali and neighboring north African countries, still live in polygamous households.” On the other hand, France and other countries are redefining marriage to include same-sex and other arrangements. “If two men or two women can be married, the logical grounds for prohibiting heterosexual polygamy are eroded.” So long as laws against polygamy are not enforced, there is no need for a clash of cultures.'

Taken from The Much Exaggerated Death of Europe, by Richard John Neuhaus.

I particularly enjoyed the last line: so long as the laws against murder are not enforced, there is no need for an increase in murder statistics.

Disintermediating democracy

2007-03-19T09:12:00.000Z

Does this show that people have lost faith in democracy? asked Ed Stourton of John Simpson on this morning's Today programme.

They were talking about this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6464277.stm

So. Bearing in mind that nothing has actually happened but that this 'survey' is the top news story on the BBC website this morning http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/default.stm, we have two journalists talking to each other, exchanging their opinions on air about a flagrant piece of news-generation (the 'survey') and fretting about loss of faith in democracy????

How do they keep straight faces?

The entire purpose of this 'survey' as a news item, giving the likes of Simpson the chance to pontificate thereon (at our expense), is to disintermediate democracy: to undermine and bypass the importance of representative institutions and to superimpose on the deliberations of elected representatives the narrative of these self-appointed People's Tribunes. And then they have the temerity to worry about whether people are losing faith in democracy.

Gawd bless the toffs for worrying on our behalf.

Where are the Muslim Not In My Namers?

2007-03-18T21:54:00.000Z

"Rabbi J.L. Fishman, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive, had, according to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report of March 28 [1944], while condemning the 'acts of terror' [by the Zionist Stern gang against British forces in then-Palestine], gone on to say that the British Administration had 'brought about such despair among those who resort to violence that they do not know what they are doing'"

Golly, so that's where Cherie Blair got it fromhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2051372.stm

However, this 1944 equivocator appears to have been in a minority - at a time when millions of his fellows had already been deliberately murdered and one's sympathy for equivocation might otherwise have been awoken:

"[Colonial Secretary Oliver] Stanley pointed out that Rabbi Fishman's remarks 'did not conform' to the statements made by other responsible Jewish leaders who had condemned the killings. In reply, Shertok [of the Jewish Agency] was emphatic, telling Stanley that these 'outrages' should be regarded 'as the acts of people who were really insane', while Professor Namier commented: 'these people were criminal lunatics'...

Granted, there's a hint of back-sliding in that use of the words "insane" and "lunatics" but, seriously and given the next paragraph in particular, is it possible to imagine the community leaders of the moderate Muslims about whom we hear so much reacting with this determination to deal with those of their religious fellows who give the majority such a bad name?

"...On April 6 Eliahu Golomb, speaking at a Press conference in Tel Aviv on behalf of the Jewish National Council of Palestine stated that if the 'mad career of the terrorists continued', despite Palestinian Jewry's efforts to stop them by moral force, then physical force would be needed: 'We would be obliged', he said, 'to punish the [Zionist terrorist] culprits because they are a vital danger to ourselves'.

"On the following day, April 7 [1944], the Haifa correspondent of the Palestine Post reported the view of the senior Police Officer in Haifa, that the death of two Jewish terrorists recently shot by the police was the result of the 'cooperation of the public, which had given valuable information to the police".

- From Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (1981), p. 187.

There are no lazy ethnic minority soldiers

2007-03-09T15:38:00.000Z

None at all, in fact.

All ethnic minority soldiers are paragons of martial virtue.

In other news, a Tory MP, B.L. Unt, shadwo spokesman for European Cohesiveness, has been rightly sacked for drawing attention to the proportion of the EU's budget that goes up in fraud each year.

Said Party Leader Davis Cameron, "There is no place in society, much less in a modern Conservative Party, for this kind of anti-European discrimination".

An apology

2007-03-07T14:53:00.000Z

Every now and again I have that experience of, as it were, hearing for the first time a word or phrase I have in fact used hundreds of times. Often, it's a name, for instance: there is a peculiar out-of-bodiness to the realisation that "I am an 'Edward'", and "that is how my name sounds".

So this morning, for reasons of mental free association, I found myself 'hearing for the first time' the phrase 'a pain in the arse'. I have used this phrase, ooh, about eleventy-twenty times in the last year. But I had never given it a moment's reflection. It was always a reflex usage.

And I thought about it, its meaning, its sound, what would have prompted the first user of this phrase so to use it .... that sort of thing.

Sitting on the Number 13 bus, I started sniggering. If any of the people seated opposite me on that bus - and I fully appreciate you might have wondered if I was about pull down my velvet gaberdine pantaloons prior to swining from the handrails - are reading this, I apologise for my tourette's-like behaviour.

Just promise to think about the phrase, that's all.

An Englishman's castle is his, er ... no it's not

2007-03-01T16:30:00.000Z

New series of Grand Designs on Channel Four last night. I love this progamme. So matey boy buys this castle in North Yorkshire, planning to rebuild the ruins and make it livable. And, no word of a lie, guv, the first thirty minutes of a ninety minute programme were given over to his dealings with bureaucrats at English Heritage who had the legal power to prevent him doing with his property what he wanted.

And that takes no account of the remaining segments of the programme periodically dealing with same.

In other words at least one-third of this sorta-documentary about building and architecture in fact was about getting around the pen-pushers.

I realised it was like living in Italy, or Bolivia, where palms have to be crossed, letters written, pleas made, desperation revealed (so the bureaucrats can feel good about exercising their powers in the man's favour). And the whole thing takes months.

Apocryphal insights into the costs of immigration

2007-02-27T11:55:00.000Z

In an idle moment at court yesterday I found myself perusing the front cover of my notebook. This is where I write the names of all my clients in the Crown and Magistrates' courts, a sort of ready-to-hand index. Not for the first time I was drawn to the number of, ah, how to put this delicately, non-English names thereon.

Non-English names? In this era of multicultism, whatever can this mean? Surely Abu-Abbas is every bit as English as Fothergill. Whatever. The point was, there were a good many more Abu-Abbas', and Diaconus and Lukombos and Chens than there were Fothergills, Urquharts and Farquhars.

Now, some of the former now doubt hold British passports. Many do not.

So here's a straw poll, taken from the covers of my three most recent notebooks:

Current notebook: fully two-thirds of my clients have 'non-English' names.

Immediately prior notebook: just over one-third of my clients have 'non-English' names.

Third notebook: almost fifty per cent of my clients have 'non-English' names.

This is necessarily a crude yardstick of the criminal costs of immigration since some of the 'English names' are actually those of immigrants - 'Mr Johnson' being a classic Nigerian a.k.a., for example. Also, I have not counted the Irish names. So the true figure in each case is probably higher.

But on average between the three notebooks, very nearly fifty per cent of my clients have names that are obviously not of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Bear in mind also that many of these people will require free interpreters as well as free legal representation. In addition, most criminal suspects are either living on the proceeds of their criminal activity, or claiming benefits (or both). Very, very few work.

Of course it's a difficult subject. I have written about it before, here,

http://britonsshallbeslaves.blogspot.com/2006/05/oh-dear-more-tory-tripe.html

and noted that out of a prison population of between 70 and 80,000, some ten thousand are foreigners - and this figure takes no account of those custodies of, ahem, foreign extraction.

So if we assume that the true proportion of defendants of foreign extraction* being dealt with by the criminal justice system is somewhere between the 13 per cent suggested by the prison population and the almost fifty per cent suggested by my straw poll - i.e. almost one third of all defendants - then what is the appropriate reaction? Are we supposed to be cool with this figure? No big deal and awfully bad taste, old chap, to raise it?

*UPDATE: I MEAN EITHER FOREIGN PASSPORT HOLDERS, OR THOSE MORE GENERALLY OF RECENT FOREIGN EXTRACTION.

At the cutting edge

2006-12-20T14:58:00.000Z

The 'artist' known as Banksy, I was interested to hear, is an anti-capitalist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy

Golly, these radical go-ahead anti-establishment types, eh? There's simply no knowing what provocative stance they'll come up with next!

You: proles

2006-09-06T20:07:00.000Z

The more I see of these banners the mayor of London, one Livingstone K., has erected along various promenades of the metrop. the more perplexed I am.

Let us not imagine he supposes many of us notice the collectivist triumphalism, or the sheer weirdness of compelling people to underwrite this sort of nebulous feelygoody propaganda – and let’s face it: he’s probably right; how many people have not been beaten into insensitivity by this sort of thing over the years?

Indeed, let us suppose that young Livingstone goes about this business of banner-erection in the sublime knowledge that he will never be called on this behaviour.

What, then, does he imagine he achieves by this, by these banners proclaiming WE ARE LONDONERS?

Can you imagine the conversation that led up to it? Perhaps it was a committee. Maybe a PR consultancy was drafted in.

What did Ken think, though? I want people to associate their sense of belonging to collectivism? I want people to see these banners and understand we never stop working for them? I want to end disunity? (whatever the hell that is) I want to create a solidarity movement of Londoners?

Truly, I cannot conceive of a motive for the mayor’s actions which does not in fact hold Londoners in the uttermost contempt.

The not so, er, independent

2006-09-06T20:05:00.000Z

Here’s a funny thing. About a week ago The Independent ran a front page splash about how British business was arguing for more mass immigration

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article1222597.ece

At the time it struck me as odd that the Indie should be concerning itself with the interests of business. But there you go.

Anyway, today’s Telegraph contains a story – which is not on the front page – about how the head of the CBI wants a pause for thought before any more mass immigration is allowed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/09/06/cncbi06.xml

Naturally I was keen to see what the Indie’s take on this would be, since it is so keen on news about immigration and what also on what business wants. Strange to report, however, that this fine example of Telling It Like It Is to the lefties who already agree with it has buried the news at the bottom of a story on page blah blah about how this same CBI chief, in the same speech, was actually focusing on lack of trust in business leaders.

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article367219.ece

Now course the Indie is entitled to its views and I would expect nothing less of this Thunderer of the Left than that it should swing its muscle behind immigration, regardless of whose interests are adduced in support. Mass immigration is an article of leftie faith.

But isn’t it time to rethink the newspaper’s title? I mean come on, can we please stop pretending this is some kind of ‘centre ground’?

Interlude

2006-08-31T20:06:00.000Z

Whilst on the subject of political language, its uses and abuses, I was driving north along the M1 today, to Luton. Now Luton is so hideous it makes Slough look like Venice. But anyway, as anyone currently familiar with that part of the M1 will know, there are roadworks crawling all over it.

The interesting thing is that they begin and end with a huge hello/goodbye sign written almost entirely in English of the 1997 Blair vintage. Remember when it was all the rage to point out the Dear Leader’s (as he then was) tendency to dispense with prepositions and pronouns, as in: “Strengthening communities, building cohesion, destroying marginalisation” (I just made all that up, but it sounds pretty lifelike)?

So these signs on the M1 say things like “Improving roads, reducing casualties, making you a better person”. I exaggerate slightly, but the gentle reader will take the point.

And it struck me that alongside Tony Blackburn and Neighbours, A. Blair and his then putter-of-words-in-the-mouth, Alastair Campbell, are the greatest single influences on the way English is today spoken in these islands.

Of course I do not include the underclass in this, their patois being an ignorant mix of Ali G and Jay Z (sic?), but for everyone else south of the border? Reflect: Blackburn, derided in the seventies for his Tony the Tiger twang (“Hulloooo, mmmmate!”), is now standard estuary English as practiced by BBC presenters; Neighbours, which ca. 1987 exported that dreadful Australian hippy habit of making a statement sound like a question (“And as I was driving along?”), well this is so ubiquitous I can hardly listen – quite literally, I can hardly bear to listen – to people who speak like this. But as instances of influence on the language, these are surely incontrovertible.

But Blair and Campbell? All that telescoping and bullet-pointing. They presaged a new linguistic dawn, they really did.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean this in a good way.

ANTI-GAY FIREMEN

2006-08-31T20:04:00.000Z

ANTI-GAY FIREMEN

That is, unhappy firemen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5301334.stm

After they have been through the re-education camp, oops sorry, I mean diversity training, they may continue being unhappy, but they will not be anti-gay in any other sense.

The story of the Glaswegian firemen refusing to distribute leaflets at a gay march raises many points. For a start, the position of the firemens’ union, at present tactfully silent, but surely facing the possibility that its own brand of economic egalitarianism is put to the test against the gay lobby’s social egalitarianism.

Indeed, I was struck in reading this story, by its similarity to Mo Mowlem’s sending out a special branch officer to buy her tampons when she was Northern Ireland Secretary. Classy bird that she was, she dispatched the unfortunate man whose job it was to protect her life with the words, “It’s all part of my mission to civilise the Ulster male”.

And then there’s the ludicrous statement of the spokesman for Strathclyde Fire and Rescue, “Firefighters cannot, and will not, pick and choose to whom they offer fire safety advice”, as if the firemens’ refusal to distribute leaflets at a political rally (would they be disciplined for failing to turn up at the Tory conference?) is analogous to a refusing fire fighting advice to someone who happens to be gay.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Glasgow also made an interesting point about the conflict between conscience and ideology when he said, “That the officers concerned are being forced to undergo diversity training is alarming. The duty to obey one’s conscience is a higher duty than that of obeying orders”. Ouch!

But finally, the whole episode struck a chord with me because I am presently re-reading 1984. The Strathclyde Fire and Rescue spokesman said, “The nine now accept that they should have performed their duties. Their refusal was a fundamental breach of their core responsibilities”.

“…why do you imagine that we bring people to this place? [O’Brien asked Winston Smith]

“…No! Not merely to extract your confession, nor to punish you [But] to cure you! To make you sane! … We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

“…You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston … We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission … We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us … We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him”

And to think, Orwell expected they would need electrocution and a phobia of rats to convert heretics! He didn’t anticipate the touchy-feely tyrant. Which reminds me: the authorities at Leeds University have been very quiet these last few months about Frank Ellis, the lecturer who was in such desperate need of race re-education. Dagnabbit, I mean race diversity training; I must check up…

Creepy public messaging

2006-08-30T19:04:00.000Z

I've previously had occasion to remark on the creepy collectivistic propaganda on London Underground, particularly under the guise of Transport for London which is the relevant governing agency.

We've had a barrage of posters proclaiming how Transport for London, which is an adjunct of the mayoralty and assembly of London, is 'ours', a statement which even were it true would raise the question: why the hundreds of billboards informing us of the fact? did any of us authorise this expenditure of our taxes?

More recently we've had posters across London and on the Underground which show an array of vehicles: buses, black cabs, bicycles, tube trains - all of which, including it seems the bicycles and black cabs belonging to private individuals - can, in TfL's eyes, be regarded as somehow part of it.

Travellers on the Underground will also be familiar with those announcements which tell you, according to God only knows what criteria, that there is disruption to the Jubilee Line and Hammersmith & City and Distrit & Circle lines, but a good service elsewhere. The intention of this totalitarian tannoy bleating is of course not to inform or enlighten but to humiliate: it is within their power to make us listen to obvious lies.

But then this morning, standing on the southbound Northern Line platform at Leicester Square I had the strangest experience yet. Every minute or so, a recorded message flooded the platform, 'There is a good service on the Northern Line'. That was it. Clockwork regular and a propos nothing at all. It brooked no contradiction and apparently was not updated in light of the fact that I waited six minutes for a train at the height of the rush hour.

Anyway after about the third repetition of this odd bleating out of nowhere, I looked quizically around me, foolishly expectant of a platform of fellow passengers, their brows furrowed in anger, their eyes rolling with disbelief at what they were hearing. But there was nothing. Everyone seemed immune to the catechism.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."

And the bloke sporting the boot is kitted out in London Underground fluorescent vest and truculent pidgin English.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the posters proclaiming "WE ARE LONDONERS" (nominally these posters are the responsibility of TfL, but I suspect the influence of the Borg. And more fool you if you think that's just Star Trek fiction).

UPDATE UPDATE: Oh, and I ought to have explained: the letters ONE in LONDONERS, well these letters are highlighted in a different colour. The posters thus read both WE ARE ONE, and WE ARE LONDONERS. Turns out they are not the responsibility of TfL, but the Mayor instead. And they have started to multiply - they're lining trees along the Victoria Embankment and Park Lane. It's like the preparations for a Nuremburg rally.

Doing its masters' bidding.

2006-08-30T19:00:00.000Z

'Business leaders seek unlimited immigration from new EU states', is today's headline in The Independent. I had no idea the Indie was such a capitalist running dog.

Note to self: remember to tiresomely point out the Indie's sudden conversion to the interests of business next time (i.e. probably tomorrow) it decides to stick the boot in to the profit motive.

A bad day for British insults

2006-08-17T18:04:00.000Z

There's Prescott, and he's been reported as saying that Dubya's crap. Actually, let me put that another way: The Independent - and I realise this 'newspaper' long ago gave up any pretence at being other than a flaky agit-prop rag - but the Indie reports in its front page headline that such is the case: Dubya's crap, says Prezza; closer inspection of the report in question ...

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1219716.ece

(am I the only person with a blog who hasn't mastered links?)

...reveals that in fact "Mr Prescott had definitely used the word "crap" about the Bush administration." So not Dubya in person? Then why the headline? I understand the point about a presidential system, of course, but there are limits to the one-man-to-blame-for-everything school of thought. Can one therefore call into question the bona fides of the Indie as a reporter of record, or is its purse-lipped puritanism so refined as automatically to rebut such suggestions?

Who cares. That is not the reason for my scribbling here today. No. I am concerned about the current state of the well-turned British insult. Piers Morgan recently gave out a fine example when he referred thus to Dolly Draper's marriage to Kate Garraway: 'if I had known the bar was being set so low, I would have had a go myself'.

Superb! Rude, off-hand, callous. All that's best in Britain today. And then we get the oaf Prescott bleating on about how Dubya's crap and 'just a cowboy with his stetson on'. Playground stuff, Yah boo.

I am embarrassed for Britain. We can do better than this if we put our hearts into it. Also, perhaps if there's a grant or some benefits going begging, I could turn me own occipit to it. But until that publicly-funded, er, research comes my way, I fear we are losing ground to those Arab diplomats who refer to each other at regional conferences as 'dogs' and 'weasels'.

Unite, my countrymen: we are nothing if we are not utterly obnoxious and able wholeheartedly to despise Johnny Foreigner. Let us put our backs into it.

New Nuremburg laws, by another name?

2006-08-14T15:44:00.000Z

That's the question this post will seek to address in respect of the post immediately below it about the disenfranchisement of Muslims.

To be more specific, how would disenfranchisement not be akin to the Nuremburg laws?

Well, for a start, it would be determined by a your belief-system and we're already in the habit of policing those: as a man who recently took silk at the Bar told me, "In my interview, they asked me what understanding I had about the importance of diversity in the workplace". In other words, his beliefs determined his fitness to advance professionally. This is not uncommon, as academics with links to Israel or civil servant members of the BNP have found out to their cost.

In other areas, you can be actively punished for holding the wrong views, like the pensioner who was arrested and prosecuted for, if memory serves, demonstrating against the Euro, or thugs who are deemed to have committed a worse offence if their violent behaviour is motivated by racism (apparently those beaten up by non-racists are entitled to see less punishment meted out by the courts to their assailants).

None of which is to say that policing thought is acceptable. Personally I find it odious. But before the suggestion of disenfranchisement is jumped on from a great height by those who are happy latterday Torquemadas in everything else, let us appreciate that disenfranchising someone because of their beliefs already happens and is widely approved of.

So that is the first key difference: the point about disenfranchising someone for their beliefs is to make it too costly to continue holding those beliefs, it is to put that belief system back in its box. Moreover, you can choose your beliefs, you can't choose your race; so where Nuremburg marginalised and punished German jews, it did so on their basis of something over which they had no control.

Second, whatever Goebbels' caricatures of the cunning, rapacious Jew who was bleeding Germany dry in the early 30s, even he - so far as I know - was not able to adduce evidence of Jewish mass murder plots, successful and otherwise, against the German populace. And Goebbels and his fellow travellers had to fabricate evidence of the worldwise zionist conspiracy for global control.

By contrast, savvy British muslim icons like Ansam (sic?) Choudhury, a lawyer, talk glibly and freely about the black flag of Islam flying above Downing street in a new caliphate, while opinion polls consistenly suggest majority British muslim support for sharia in this country, and for jihad. These are the views of British muslims in their own words, without a propaganda minister to filter them or warp them.

In other words, there are many - and who knows how many - British muslims who are in their own words a direct and explicit threat to the English rule of law and our established constitution.

Third, while unpalatable as an option, disenfranchisement may be, as I wrote below, the least worst option: the majority population having abased itself before immigrants for so long now it is hardly surprising that we have welcomed to our national bosom not so much a viper as mewling, spoilt brat and, as with all immature beings who have never been taught discipline and self-control, the longer is it left, the tougher the measures needed to instil these characteristics.

To that extent, disenfrachisement might actually do the muslim population some good - no, seriously, hear me out - by forestalling the pogroms that otherwise must be likely in the not too distant future.

Indeed, if The Independent is to be believed, we are already witnessing a constant kristallnacht of anti-muslim reprisals, so the wind needs to be taken out of the sails of those who wish to beat up on our mohamedan breathren while showing them that something practical is being done to limit the impact of those same mohamedan fifth columnists: where my disenfranchisement proposal touches upon the holding of public office, I have in mind people like 'Britain's senior muslim police officer' who publicly fretted that the anti-terror laws discriminate against muslims. Well I should bloody well hope they do. The problem is not that that should be the case, but that a man charged with enforcing such law has a vested interest in not upholding it.

Finally, Catholic disenfranchisement was of course ultimately repealed (albeit with a fight), after it had put the truculent minority back in their box, after it had successfully assimilated them. That took about 200 years. But, unlike Nuremburg, it was never a prelude to deliberate and systematic genocide.

Discuss.

The disenfranchisement of muslims?

2006-08-13T12:45:00.000Z

In this morning's Chicago Sun Times, Mark Steyn writes:

"The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing "We Are The World," they mean it. And we're being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of "failed states" like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. The Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern multicultural democracy -- legalisms, victimology -- to their own advantage. The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at a certain level Her Majesty's government shares the same problem as their opposite numbers in Beirut: They don't quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so.

"So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by MI-5 and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the one after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen. If you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years all hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he'd have thought you were a kook. If you'd told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be banned except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a security guard, she'd have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a ludicrous imposition. But now it's here. What other changes will the Islamists have wrought in another five years?

"Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we're about to witness the unraveling of the world. "

Driving back from Heathrow on Saturday morning, where I had just had to pick up a relative who had flown in from the States, I reflected on similar lines: it seemed we were just months away from being required to strip at airports prior to donning airline-distributed plastic jumpsuits in which nothing could be concealed, our clothes to be packaged in the aircraft hold; yet, the jihadis would find a way around that, just as with packets of medicine and bottles of 'water' they seem to have found a way around the prohibition on nail clippers and corkscrews.

No, these, our reactions are no more than that. They play the other side by its own rules. Which brings me back to Steyn's point: "[we] don't quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and [we] have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so. ... Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we're about to witness the unraveling of the world. "

Just so. Which brings me to my point: has the time come to consider the disenfranchisement of British Muslims?

Yes, I did just write that.

The last time this was tried was with Catholics after the establishment of the Church of England. Like the British Muslims, Guy Fawkes and others considered themselves as 'British' (or perhaps more specifically, English), and their fellow subjects to be misguided. Like the British Muslims, a significant number were willing to consider mass murder to overturn the established political settlement and replace it with their preferred variant. And like the British Muslims, many Catholics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (they were of course proscribed until after this, but by then disenfranchisment had mostly done its work) could not otherwise have been rendered safe for the rest of the population - nor indeed could their own safety have been much better secured - without disenfranchisement. This could mean the loss of the power to vote, possibly to hold property or public office, and so on. It was, and may yet be, the least worst option.

Undoubtedly this is a drastic response but it seems to me to be a rationale one - at least where the majority population and, just as important, its political elite, possess the will to survive.

Above, I wrote that our present reactions to jihadism play the other side at its own rules. But given the faineant characteristics of much of the majority British population and its political elite, our reactiveness and its default lack of success point not merely to cluelessness but to the fact that so few of us are willing to identify any that might be termed 'the other side'.

If anyone has a better idea how to tackle 'Britons' who wish to murder their fellows in the name of Islam and a worldwide Caliphate, I'm listening....

Oh, no, wait, I forgot: ask the majority lefties for a 'solution' and it's invariably 'more education', 'cuz how could you ever have too much of that? And how could its utility ever be disproved where the obvious rebuttal is 'spend more on education'?

So I retract that. I am not listening to anyone with a bottomless faith in education. Otherwise, suggest away...

UPDATE: I have just run a Google search on the phrase 'disenfrancishement of muslims' and it's come back with a load of subjectivist moody about 'the sense of disenfranchisement felt by British muslims', etc. etc.

No, no, no: that's not what I mean at all. I mean: what about actually, really disenfranchising them? And hell, if they already feel that way, what have we got to lose?

Surrender or go to prison

2006-07-01T11:52:00.000Z

True story this:

In a magistrates' court somewhere in England a young man of good - even exemplary - character, with high quality testimonials coming out of his ears, was this week sent to prison for five months for possessing a bladed weapon in public.

Of course, when I say 'five months' that is peculiar lawyer-speak for two-and-a-half months.

Still, let's look a little more closely at his case.

He's a working man, always has been. As I say, of exemplary character. Stable family life. No drug habit to support, but a bit of a drinker. He does no harm to anyone with his knife. The CPS does not suggest it was his intention ever to do any such harm. When apprehended by the police, he is cooperative from the start, admits he knows he has broken the law and pleads guilty at the earliest opportunity before the magistrates.

The reason he was carrying the knife, and this is not disputed by the police or CPS, is that several minutes previously, he had been the subject of a vicious unprovoked high street attack by a known serious villain - who was initially charged with attempted murder for having tried to stab our man; our man being apprehended by police driving to the scene having first returned home to arm himself prior to venturing back out onto the streets where his assailant was lurking.

There is no suggestion, and his character militates against it, that he went looking for a fight.

So the magistrates adjourn for the probation service to interview him and see what sentence would be most appropriate. The probation officer concludes that unpaid community work would be best and that a prison sentence would serve no purpose.

Now. Put aside for one moment that this man has done nothing more than infringe a regulatory law. Ignore that he has been criminalised for an understandable reaction to a vicious beating which must have left him dazed. Forget that he had no intent to do harm, much less that any harm was done. Forget also, as the lobotomised beaks apparently did, all the other factors mitigating in favour of this bloke.

The law criminalised his actions, not the magistrates.

But what the magistrates, in whose discretion it lay to make him do unpaid community work rather than serve a prison sentence, what they have said is this:

BE PREPARED TO BE STABBED. DO NOTHING ABOUT IT. IF YOU ARM YOURSELF WITH A VIEW TO PROTECTING YOURSELF, WE WILL SEND YOU TO PRISON.

Which is inspired, when you think about it. Absolutely inspired.

YOUR superliminal propaganda

2006-07-01T11:43:00.000Z

London's billboards are currently plastered, above and below ground, with enormous posters proclaiming in sinister 1930s totalitarian lettering: YOUR Transport for London.

Transport for London is part of the mayoralty and assembly of London. At the bottom of each poster, sans real signatures, the mayor and TfL have both signed off. I am not sure why since they are not sponsoring these posters. We are.

I have long been baffled by the psychology of individuals who see nothing wrong with forcing others to pay for their own self-promotion - as well as by the indifference of the public to this. And it did occur to me to email TfL to ask if I could sell my share ... but I didn't think they'd see my point. Or if they did, they wouldn't bother to answer.

So much for it being my Transport for London.

I wonder, even euphemistically, then, in what sense might TfL be said to be mine?

The correct response

2006-05-14T11:00:00.000Z

I live in London, where there is presently a hosepipe ban. Today, and yesterday, my immediate neighbour has spent a total of about four hours using a spray power cleaner on his garden paving. This is connected to a hosepipe. That’s right, about four hours’ worth of hosepipe usage.

What is objectively the correct response to this?

On the one hand I am of the view that state ownership/control of water resources is morally wrong and unhelpful from a purely utilitarian perspective. So why should I give enough of a damn about my neighbour’s hosepipe usage to call the hosepipe hotline?

On the other hand, the schoolboy or prison convict’s mentality of Not Being A Grass is one that instinctively I feel should be anathema to a responsible adult. And I have to concede that, since the water resources are controlled by the government – the water companies are merely proxies – we are all in the same boat and so the government has a point when, as it does with welfare cheats, it encourages us in Soviet style to denounce those who cheat us all. For on the logic of things as they are, people such as my neighbour are indeed cheating me.

Therefore, if I am a responsible adult, what is restraining me from calling the ‘authorities’ and denouncing him? Probably not the fear that he would know it was either me or his other immediate neighbour. Is it that objectively my wish to see water resources taken out of collective state control is best served by seeing that system abused? Am I indolent, insufficiently fired up by the People’s righteous anger at the abuse of their collective rights?

Is there an answer to the moral question of denouncing a neighbour, which exists independently of questions about the rectitude of state control of resources?

Hmmm

2006-05-05T15:01:00.000Z

Here's an interesting question. I thought so, anyway:

What is the regulatory law applicable to Greenpeace?

I had a quick squiz at their website just now and they appear to be a sort of international confederation of trusts. They claim to publish their accounts every year but, unlike most corporate websites, it appears you cannot download those accounts at any time other than publication. At least, I couldn't find them.

Well, fair enough. Greenpeace is in some sense a private organisation. If it is indeed a network of trusts, it's presumably governed by the law relating to trusts.

And if so, it gets off pretty lightly for an organisation whose raison d'etre is lobbying government for regulation of the activities of others. Maybe business needs to turn its attention to advocating iniquitous legislation to control the activities of the tree-huggers.

Of course, I may be wrong and Greenpeace labours under a weight of awful regulatory paperwork which prevents its staff going about their business. It just doesn't seem terribly likely though, does it?

Sod 'em

2006-05-05T14:44:00.000Z

Voters in Barking are apprently incensed that the government has 'done nothing for them', by contrast with the freebies doled out to indigent foreigners - hence the turn-out for the BNP at yesterday's local elections.

I can certainly understand irritation at foreigners being sluiced with beanos at my expense. If foreigners want beanos, they can pay for 'em themselves.

But Barkingers? Sod 'em. Anybody who goes through life expecting government to do things for them, much less attempting to trade their vote for such a bribe, deserves all the misery they can find.

Put it this way: from my point of view as a stranger to the welfare state rampant which constitutes much of Barking, the government does nothing for me while delving into the pork barrel on behalf of Barkingers. The argument cuts both ways, plebs.

Oh, dear. More Tory tripe

2006-05-05T14:24:00.000Z

The Tories have been getting extremely hot under the collar about these foreign criminals who aren't deported. Not for the first time, the bizarre thing about their reaction is that it should take headlines of the sort which have emerged over the past couple of weeks to prompt any kind of Tory call for action.

I mean, if it isn't obvious to the Tories that foreign criminals should be deported as a matter of course, then what is the point of them? This kind of thing should be meat and drink to Tories.

At Samizdata the other day

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2006/05/downing_street.html

Guy Herbert accused me of xenophobia for pointing out that there is in the abstract something distinctly odd about a nation - us - which scarcely notices that of almost 70,000 people in our gaols, at least a thousand are foreigners.

Heigh-ho. On BBC news the night before last, it was revealed that there are in fact about 10,000 foreigners in our gaols.

Speaking truth to power

2006-05-03T19:41:00.000Z

Today's Evening Standard contains the following headline on page 4:

DARLING APPLAUDS STANDARD CAMPAIGN ON RAIL STATION SAFETY

It goes on:

"The Evening Standard's campaign to improve passenger safety at London's stations has been praised in the Commons by Transport Secretary Alistair Darling."

Bravo, lads! That's telling 'em.

I mean, I'm no great fan of the goldfish bowl world of Fourth Estate agit prop masquerading as political Opposition, but really. This is a story that wouldn't have disgraced Pravda during the Soviet era, you know the sort of thing:

PARTY BOSS PRAISES OUR REPORTS ON STEEL PRODUCTION.

My contribution to bipartisan consensus-building

2006-04-25T15:40:00.000Z

Here's a thought. The Left is all hot for 'sustainability' which, for most practical purposes, is a curiously conservative concept.

Well, I'm all hot for destroying the collectivist, corporatist state - in other words, for letting the cost lie where it falls.

You want a doctor, you pay for it. You want a university education, likewise. And if you want someone to collect the rubbish from your home and dispose of it, well, instead of insisting that free landfill sites are handed to you on a plate, why not either curtail your household waste or buy a sufficient plot of land yourself to deal with it.

Let the cost lie where it falls. Trust me, it's the new sustainability.

Important Mark Steyn item

2006-04-11T18:32:00.000Z

Kindly read on:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_iran.html

Think as you are told

2006-04-09T21:53:00.000Z

This evening’s Panorama reports on ageism in the workplace:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone/listings/programme.shtml?day=today&service_id=4223&filename=20060409/20060409_2215_4223_53515_40

Being a BBC programme it naturally takes as its starting point the assumption that ageism is A Bad Thing and that there is nothing to be said against it, that there is nothing to consider other than how to eradicate it.

“It’s clear that there aren’t as many over fifties in the workplace as there should be”. Says who? Says the hack presenting the programme, who gets to use my hard-earned to promote his political agenda.

Interestingly, a couple of the cod academics he gets in to confirm his bias comment that older people are just as much, if not more, able than their younger counterparts in the workplace.

Which begs the question: if business is so wicked and greedy, so efficiently selfish, why does it not hire more of the more able (i.e. older) people?

And before any of the Trots claim that this represents a ‘failure of the free market in employment’, they might wish to explain just where is this ‘free market’ in employment? Where, anywhere, in this country, is there a free market in anything?

But don't worry about it. Just think as the BBC tells you.

All quite true...

2006-04-04T16:09:00.000Z

... what Daniel Hannan writes in the linked article.

But one more point: consider the bottomless arrogance of someone - and Gordon Brown is the apotheosis of this - prepared to use the force of law, not merely to make you do what they want (in the 'public interest', as they would say) and to pay for it, not merely to make you the milch cow of their existence, but consider the psyche, the intellect, the morals of a man who:

1. passes a law
2. that you will give him money
3. on pain of criminal sanctions
4. for him to live the way he wants, doing the work he wants
5. which work involves making you do more of what he wants
6. and giving more money, so he can tell you how well he has done the job(*)
7. all of which he explains is for your own good
8. because he knows better than you what that constitutes
9. and all this makes him virtuous, because he cares

Could such an individual be anything other than a brute and a thief, a megalomaniacal narcissist and Napoleonic self-inflater, a buffoon and a bully? Could such an individual be anything other than half mad with evil?

(*) Do you get to publicise how well you have done your job? Do you get to do it at someone else's expense?

And their point is...?

2006-03-27T14:38:00.000Z

Apparently:

"Almost a year after the collapse of MG Rover, many former workers are paid less and wish they still worked for the firm, according to a report released today.

"Of the nearly 300 former workers surveyed, many now earn substantially less they did than at the unionised plant, by an average of £3,523 a year, said the research.

"Almost half (48%) said they would prefer to be back at the Longbridge factory in Birmingham."

That is according to a poll commissioned by the BBC for the, er, Work Foundation and reported in the, ahem, Guardian. Now there's a self-serving triumvirate of corporatism if ever I saw one.

People of the Servants

2006-03-27T14:21:00.000Z

Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, s. 330 and 331, it is an offence for those working in the financial services sector to fail to disclose activity which they ought reasonably to have suspected relates to money laundering:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2002/20029--k.htm#330

Which is funny because, so far as I am aware, the police cannot be prosecuted for failing to investigate activity which they ought reasonably to have suspected related to criminal activity.

Indeed, I know a policeman who at night once walked past a man he believed was almost certainly a burglar's look-out (it was New Year's Eve; the man was standing on a street corner nonchalantly smoking). Said rozzer did nothing about it. He told me that if he acted on every bit of suspicious information or behaviour he saw, he would never stop work.

Fair enough. But it still doesn't explain why John and Jane Banker are held to a higher standard.

That's good of them

2006-03-24T15:55:00.000Z

The Home Office has a "Purpose, Aims & Values". But of course it does.

The first of those aims is that: "People are and feel more secure in their homes and daily lives".

So we have a government department concerned with how we feel. And how exactly does that department intend to fulfill its aim of making us feel more secure? After all, it's well-known that fear of crime usually bears no rational relationship to the likelihood of it occurring; so the Home Office could successfully crack down on crime, reducing it to unprecedentedly low levels and we, benighted souls, could well continue not to feel as required.

How, then, would Nanny respond?

Frank Ellis

2006-03-24T13:00:00.000Z

I don't know what is more dispiriting. Is it the attitude of the witchfinders at Leeds University who find this man's attitudes uncongenial? Is it the fact that they don't even have the courage to fire him outright, but instead erect a disgusting court of conscience to try him for his views. His views, for God's sake. Or is it the fact that this is all so tediously predictable? (see the very first post on this site).

Oh, and one other thing: look at the Guardian's link, above ... guardian etc./race/story.

So it's a story about race, d'y'see? Not free speech. Or freedom generally. Or baying mobs, or thought police.

Of the quotes attributed to Frank Ellis in the Guardian's article, I could see only one which was racist in the true sense of the word, i.e. another race was disparaged by virtue of its racial characteristics.

I don't have firm opinions on the Bell Curve theory but, say for the sake of argument that Ellis is correct. Factually correct. Would it still be racist to say as much?

If so, the triumph of the flat-earthers cannot be far off...

Chippy Britain

2006-03-21T14:49:00.000Z

Ordinarily, this

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/21/nsuit21.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/21/ixnewstop.html

would be one for 'Chippy Britain' in http://www.falseconsciousness.co.uk/chippy%20britain.htm, but I still can't access the thing to edit it.

Row harder, slaves

2006-03-21T14:45:00.000Z

Can't you hear the speed of the drum beats picking up back here at the galley's stern, you vermin?!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/21/nhs21.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/21/ixhome.html

We must have more effort!

UPDATE: PEERAGEGATE

2006-03-20T13:41:00.000Z

I've just done a Google search for 'peeragegate' and it would seem that I have invented the phrase where the boys and girls of Fleet Street saw fit to hold back on the application of that dread inevitable suffix.

Sorry, but what's done is done.

Peeragegate

2006-03-20T13:21:00.000Z

I'm struggling to get worked up about peeragegate, or whatever imaginative name they're giving the loans for peerages 'scandal'.

It's ... no, too late. I have now actually given up the unequal struggle until such time as someone can explain to me what is the material difference between a rich bloke buying influence/favours from the government and, say, the voters of Longbridge (of Rover plant fame) getting a pre-election bung of my money to vote the 'right' way (you may recall ministers being afraid that the necessary 'correct' votes would not be forthcoming this time last year if Rover was allowed to go bust).

Let me put it even more starkly: what is the material difference between a rich bloke buying influence/favours from the government and, say, Dean and Michaela Scrote, lifelong welfare-staters demanding higher state pensions or better state housing in return for, er, voting the right way?

The only difference I can see is that the rich bloke uses his own money to get what he wants from the government. The other examples I have given do not.

The rich bloke says to ministers, 'Here is some of my money, please give me something which it is in your power to bestow'.

The voters of Longbridge/Dean and Michaela say to ministers, 'Here is our vote; you see that bloke over there, the wealthier-looking one? In return for our vote, please give us some of his money'.

Hey, we care

2006-03-16T10:26:00.000Z

Scene: a magistrate's court, recently. Two defendants, one male (49), the other female (39), both drug addicts with lengthy records for offences of dishonesty and facing a new charge of supermarket theft.

The female is currently on a 'conditional discharge' for an offence of outraging public decency (since she's a drug addict, you can probably work out what this almost certainly entailed). Both are on Incapacity Benefit, of course. Both are, of course, in sheltered accommodation, where they met. Both are on courses of methadone and other drugs rehabilitative schemes.

To the current offfence, both pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity. In the dock, they make a genuinely pathetic sight. Their advocate requests that a fine is imposed by way of sentence (since they have no legitimate income, they would not be paying this: you and I would).

The sentence eventually imposed: a conditional discharge for 12 months (to the woman, the magistrate says, laughably: "You already know what this means, since you are already subject to a conditional discharge. So if you commit further offences, you could be punished for those as well". Yeah, right).

Exactly what do we learn from all of this?

That they, poor creeturs, are thereby saved?

To what end?

They inhabit a pseudo-life, where their actions have no consequences, beyond the transparent misery and bathos of their tragically wasted existences. They are provided with their basic needs, and nothing is demanded of them. They are treated as the numbskull children their own behaviour has encouraged others to consider them as being. Nothing is expected of them.

Indeed, all that is expected of anyone is what is expected of you and I: that we should continue to be complicit in the maintenance of this couple. Our pity is demanded of us, as is our financial slavery.

Pity and slavery.

Out of these conditions, the conditions to which the rest of us have no choice but to capitulate, this couple - no doubt as their health deteriorates, the NHS will provide the necessary hip replacements, largely risk-free amputations, and so on - will be kept alive for many years, just as they are now.

Whatever flaws in their characters took them down this route in the first place, you and I, our pity and our slavery, make those flaws a viable going concern. That is where our guilt lies.

With Tories like this...

2006-03-14T20:50:00.000Z

My local Tory-run council uses Tory government legislation to force (and I chose that word carefully, for criminal sanctions are involved) people to recycle. You have to put particular items in separate bins which are picked up on different days.

Being one of those individualists so hated by the collective, I detest being told what to do (sorry, I mean to say: as an individualist I don't give a toss for anyone else and enjoy micturating over my fellow man), so here's my little rebellion: occasionally, when at a loose end, I wrap bottles up in newspaper, well-insulated as it were, and drop them in the regular refuse bin so that they can't be heard by dustmen smashing when they - the bottles, not the men - drop into the dumper truck.

I like to think that of such tiny acts of rebellion, I get one over on the state and its servants. It's a snowball rolling down a drift-covered slope.

Alternatively, a pathos-ridden act of non-dangerous defiance with worrying implications for my sanity.

To what...

2006-03-11T13:30:00.000Z

...shall Britons be slaves?

Well, among other things, the economically-insulated hand-wringing political orthodoxies of the metropolitan elite.

Take, for instance, the following:

"...the Law Commission in their (sic) latest Consultation Paper No. 177 propose first degree and second-degree murder not manslaughter. Questions remain: should provocation partially excuse an intent to kill, or only an intent to do serious harm, for example? The question would not arise if the Government could recognise that abolishing the mandatory life sentence for murder need not be perceived as going 'soft on crime'...." [my italics]

So exactly how might it be perceived, this abolition of the mandatory life sentence for murder? In what alternate universe is softness tough?

The above extract was printed in a publication called Archbold News, which is a regular updater for criminal lawyers. Archbold itself, the parent volume, is published yearly.

Believe it or not, Archbold is generally reckoned to be a Prosecution-oriented publication. Further comment is superfluous. You either get it, or you don't.

Sentences you don't often hear

2006-03-10T16:02:00.000Z

John Major was apparently right: the main reason he gave against Scottish and Welsh devolution was that it would lead to the break-up of the UK. It seems Lord Falconer has reached the same view of English devolution:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/constitution/story/0,,1728340,00.html

Presumably Lord Falconer has a very, very short memory. Otherwise he would provide a rather better explanation of why devolution was a good idea for Scotland and Wales, but would be bad for England, and of why the former was good for the UK and the latter would be bad for it, than with the following sparkling array of obfuscatory non sequiturs:

'Devolution had proved necessary to preserve the union and its national parliament from the threat of separatists pressing the "nationalist argument" by ensuring representation "where it is wanted", he said.'

So devolution takes the wind out of the nationalists' sails?

'"The mood required change, not at the extremes - either of an entrenchment of the status quo, or an end to the union - but with devolution of power."'

Yup, just a bit of tinkering. Notice how Mystic Charlie divines the public 'mood'. Tell us more, Falconer old scout:

'Devolution had guaranteed the rights of the nations of the UK to keep the union whole, he added. "It has done exactly that. Separatists have been stymied by devolution. And support for separation has flatlined."'

So why not guarantee the right of England to, er, keep the union whole? Why not stymie those beastly English separatists?

'Devolution introduced fairness to the nations of the UK and ensured Scotland and Wales were no 'longer dominated by an overwhelming majority from a predominantly English party, he said.'
Lawks. You mean, there was no fairness in Scotland or Wales before 1998? What none? Exactly what does it mean, that 'fairness' was introduced? that the Celts were no longer to be ruled (sorry, "dominated") by a predominantly English party? Then why is it okay for the English to be ruled by a cabal of Scottish ministers?

As so often with the collectivist milch cow that is democratic politics, I fear the only lesson to be learned is that the merits of the case of are no importance: those who shout the loudest are the ones who are appeased.

Charlie Falconer: bin there, done that

2006-03-10T14:07:00.000Z

I don't know what is more remarkable about this story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/4792490.stm

...the fact that it happened at all (and, my God, there was a department of the 'public services' that could scarcely complain about being under-'resourced'), or the fact that the Lord Chancellor has got involved.

Coming soon to a bin near you: the personal attention of the man occupying the oldest office in the land.

Has the President not yet created a junior ministerial position for Municipal Bin (Plastic & Concrete) Oversight?

Filthy & rich

2006-03-10T13:44:00.000Z

England is getting dirtier. I am not today in reactionary curmudgeon mode, but it is true about rubbish: cartons, wrappers etc. About a month ago I drove to Windsor from London and, leaving the motorway, was astonished to find the roadside verges strewn with the chav detritus usual to Haringey or Woolwich.

In Windsor, for goodness' sake.

Opposite Brent Magistrate's Court there is a piece of communal land (i.e. owned by the council) behind some railings. It is so overrun with rubbish that it's reached the point of no-return. No one will clear it up and no one will stop to consider whether or not to add to the pile.

The street where I live is becoming more and more uninhabitable. This is not imagination, not fond false remembrance of some non-existant past; I've lived there long enough to know it's getting worse.

So here are my top tips for ensuring the country is every bit as Bristol F. as wicked America (have you seen how clean the place is? Clearly they can still get the staff ...) :

1. Local authorities should be given more 'resources'.

2. Local authorities should hire more people to wear day-glo vests and mooch around with a metal prodder trying to look busy.

3. Places like McDonalds should be fined and made to pay for everything.

4. People dropping litter should be fined and given lengthy custodial sentences.

5. There should be a person-to-person local authority-run service to go around picking up litter after us all.

6. The government should introduce incentives to ratting on people, especially family and neighbours, who drop litter.

6. The government must act to create local development zones where corporation tax is minimal if people stop dropping litter.

7. Just generally, the government should do something.

I was going to add, at 8., that people might consider ceasing to drop litter. Clearing up after themselves, as it were. But I thought that would sound kooky.

Clarifying a rather gnomic title to the previous post...

2006-03-09T15:01:00.000Z

I had meant to add that I cannot understand why there is no public appetite for Nanny to intervene to prevent the dominance of successful Olympic athletes. Perhaps Carl Lewis ought to have been made to run with one arm tied behind his back, just to give all the others a chance.

Come to think of it, the entertainment value of watching his silly preening face squirm with such discomfort would almost make it worthwhile, even from my point of view.

Government investigation into unfair dominance of Olympic champions

2006-03-09T14:46:00.000Z

Ordinarily I'd post the following in 'Chippy Britain' on www.falseconsciousness.co.uk, but for some reason the site is being coy with me and I can't access the blighter to edit it. So here goes:

The beastly supermarkets are at it again, driving their competitors out of business. This they must presumably achieve by force. You remember all those armed bands of supermarket workers you've seen ransacking corner shops and burning them down. Oh, come on you remember.

And the good thing is that, as a result, Nanny has decided to have a go herself.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4788916.stm

And you know what, she'll definitely be using force - the force of law which, when you strip away all the paperwork, is the State's monopoly on legitimate violence. Nice to see Nanny putting it to such good use.

Petitioning the monarch

2006-03-09T14:41:00.000Z

That's right, chaps, go straight to the source of the bossiness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/4788710.stm

Oooh, scary

2006-03-09T14:25:00.000Z

Davis David tells Davis Cameron that he'll take his ball home with him if DC takes the Tories to the Left.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/09/ntory09.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/09/ixhome.html

Given that Cameron has already committed the Party to 'social justice', I'd have thought he could safely afford to ignore the warning. After all, henceforth DC only has to say: 'Social justice demands everyone should work for the government for six months of the year' for DD to be completely outflanked ... he didn't resign when 'social justice' was put top of the policy agenda so he can't really complain when it's used (and let's face it: this is how it's used) to justify another turn of the socialist ratchet.

So I don't suppose the superbly-coiffed Cameron is exactly quacking in his boots.

They do not belong to you

2006-03-08T14:59:00.000Z

Your children, that is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1726109,00.html

I particularly like the penultimate paragraph:

"The government, which is concerned about parents taking their children out of school unnecessarily, has teamed up with the British travel industry to launch Every Lesson Counts, a new campaign to highlight the importance of uninterrupted terms. The Department for Education initiative also hopes to persuade travel agents to rethink their prices so that families are not forced to take cheaper, out-of-season breaks in term-time."

The government and British industry. A poor man's Molotov-Ribbentop pact.

It's only a matter of time

2006-03-08T14:36:00.000Z

You just know that the Leeds University lecturer is going to get the old heave-ho.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1726221,00.html

I confess to some uncertainty as to the basis of the delay in Grand Inquisitor Roger Gair's inevitable decision.

Does he hope that a few days' show of bulwark support for the lecturer will somehow assuage his guilt when he eventually caves in?