I've moved

The new place is here. Hope to see you there.

Newsnight tonight

According to Inspector Gadget, PC Copperfield will be on Newsnight tonight. Should be good.

The benefits system

A Very British Dude seems to be doing OK. As he puts it:

[...] I'm a single man, of robust physical health and no catastrophic mental illness. I earn reasonable money - though things are a bit tight as I've just bought a house.

Sounds good to me. Pillar of society rather than underclass, I would say. But the Dude has decided to do a bit of an experiment. He's decided to see just how much he can wring out of the benefits system. He has clocked up working tax credits already..

£32 every 4 weeks. This took a long time to process and I spoke to no fewer than 6 different poeple. Admittedly I did apply for backdating, and refused to answer most questions, but it took a lot of civil servant's time to give me an extra night on the piss every month.

Next up, council tax benefit..

Upon speaking to the call centre, they suggested, no insisted upon a home visit, to help with the monstrously intrusive 18-page form. Going through it, line by line, it transpires that much of this data is unnessesary - but they collect and store the data anyway, like good little facists.

As the Dude says, we don't live in a sensible society.

Read about it here.

More on MCB finances

I posted some weeks ago about the failure of the Moslem Council of Britain to file accounts.

Via Peter Risdon of Free Born John, we now discover that the MCB is an unincorporated association which doesn't need to file accounts. The MCB charity, a much smaller entity, is presumably still guilty as charged of failing to file accounts.

What this means is that the government has been throwing money at the MCB with no idea of whether it is spending the money properly or for the agreed objectives.

This is of course part of a pattern of the government flirting with radical Islam.

The Conservatives in Brussels

A majority of Conservative Euro MPs have voted for the UK to join the Euro.

UKIP it is then.

Did I hear you right?

At the end of Channel Four's debate on Moslems and free speech, did Jon Snow really say that the fact that only 48% of the studio audience thought that Moslems threatened free speech meant that consideration should be given to putting restrictions on free speech in place?

Safe drivers

Longrider has an interesting piece about a call from the safety lobby for the driving licence age to be raised to 18. This follows the death of a baby in an accident caused by a 14 year old driver.

Campaigners called on the government to raise the driving licence age from 17 to 18, with a one-year minimum training period and pointed to the disproportionate number of young male drivers involved in road deaths. Men aged 17 to 20 account for three per cent of drivers but make up a third of convictions for dangerous driving while studies suggest that young men are almost 10 times more likely to be killed than experienced motorists.

As Longrider points out, the logic is flawed since on the evidence presented the age for driving licences should be 20. And of course this is a classic case of the logical fallacy of the slippery slope. If our only criteria for assessing a suitable age for driving is safety, then we should only let people drive when they are at their safest (children will die otherwise, you understand).

According to this study, this would appear to be between the ages of thirty and forty. So the correct policy is to allow driving licences to be issued to those who have passed their thirtieth birthdays and to revoke them after the fortieth. This particular slippery slope is longer than one might expect.

I'm sure I'll live to see it.

BBC bias

While watching 18 Doughty Street for the first time last week I was startled by the producer of the BBC's Newsnight programme tacitly admitting that the BBC had a left-wing bias. He explained it away by saying that the bias was less pronounced than in the past, and I was surprised that none of the other panel members picked him up on this - an admission that the BBC was, and continues to be, biased to the left wing in its output.

Now this seems to be part of a trend for the BBC to admitt to being biased. Biased BBC has the lowdown on the Mail on Sunday's report on a leaked internal Beeb report in which

a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

Last month, Croydonian reported from the New Culture Forum where the BBC's Robin Aitken talked about its "institutional leftism" and of course there is the attempt by the BBC to suppress an internal report which apparently accuses it of pro-Palestinian bias in its Middle Eastern reporting.

If the new media can force an official admission from the BBC that they have been biased then there will be a huge opportunity to bring about meaningful reform - which is to say the abolition of the licence fee.

This is something 18 Doughty Street needs to follow up next week. Get to it Iain Dale.

Also at Biased BBC was a link to News Sniffer, a site which tracks censorship of the BBC's Have Your Say forums. Here's some example of the hate filled bile which the Beeb have been protecting us from, on a forum about whether it's time for tax cuts:

Tax cuts are necessary to maintain our international competitiveness and to encourage people to invest in this country. Unfortunately, it is now going to be very painful to implement. The government have not reformed the public sector or its pensions schemes and have added at least half a million to the public sector payroll. Public sector strife and strikes will be inevitable for any government wishing to reduce the tax burden.

Gordon Brown has ruined the country and squandered some never before seen oil revenues as well as plundering the pension funds and penalising the public with stealth taxes. It would be incredibly easy for the Tories to reverse a large number of these stealth taxes, IF THEY CHOOSE TO. The country cannot continue to compete under the current fiscal framework, and what we will see is the younger professionals leaving our shores for more attractive lives overseas. I have had enough....

It is quite ludicrous that our public sector now employs 7m people as well as all those who are dependent upon it for a cheque each week. Are we really to believe that all of this is absolutely necessary? Unfortunately the public sector has now morphed into what the unions were in the 1970s ie. a power block that must be appeased at all times. If there is any hint of tax cuts be prepared for doctors, nurses and teachers to be used by the public sector as human shields.

Anyone notice a common theme to these comments?

Faking it

Tory Diary reports that John Reid has been ducking difficult questions by pretending to have lost contact with the studio.

Mr Rawnsley was pressing Mr Reid on whether the most serious presenters had been locked up. Just as the question was being put to Mr Reid in the most direct of ways Mr Reid looked like he was going to answer and then said 'I think we've just been cut off'.

Of course what Rawnsley should have done was to tell Reid that he was an incompetent half-wit and a sheep worrier. If Reid batted an eyelid we would have known for sure that he was faking it.