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.

Laugh of the day

Via the Remittance Man we learn that Councillor Bob Piper has being having a bit of a problem with his application to attend the party conference.

After 30 odd years membership, having held virtually every Branch Labour Party position, having sat on the interminable Constituency Management Committee for over 20 years, and 7 years a Labour councillor... this is what it has come to. Some member of Her Majesty's constabulary is going to decide whether or not I am a fit and proper person to go to Party Conference. Thanks a bunch!

I particularly enjoyed the comment from JuliaM

And there you have NuLabour in a nutshell; hopelessly beauracratic, greedy, incompetent AND petty minded little jobsworths.....

Perhaps it's too much to expect Mr Piper to have learned a lesson from this?

In the meantime the folks at Labour Home are worrying that they're going to look a bit stupid
at the conference:

Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC) has ruled out of order 17 motions from CLPs on the leadership election.

If this decision stands, Labour Conference will be the only place in the UK where the issue of the leadership is NOT being discussed, and it risks making us look like ostriches with our heads in the sand, whatever your opinion on the actual question (unless you think like an ostrich, of course).

Schadenfreude is a wonderful thing when you are on the dishing out end.

Leather

Sometimes you have a dull moment and you just fancy reading something that you know will make you really angry. I usually find the Times "Public Sector" supplement just the job, and last week's edition was no exception.

In it we had a piece about Dame Suzi Leather, the new head of the Charities Commission and, by the by, a woman whose very name can excite paroxysms of delight in readers at Laban's place.

It's not terribly exciting - we learn that she knows nothing about charities, but has a background in regulation. She was born in Uganda and has done some paragliding. But then this appears at the bottom.

Career:
1979-84 research officer, Consumers in Europe.
1984-86 trainee probation officer
1997-2001 chair, Exeter and District NHS Trust
2000-02 deputy chair, Food Standards Agency
2002-06 chair, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
2005-06 chair, School Food Trust

Read that again.

She went from being a research officer at an NGO, to training as a probation officer and then, after a gap of ten years was considered suitably qualified to head up an NHS trust. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off.

What on earth was she doing in that ten year gap to suddenly make her top management material? A bit of digging turns up this article which reveals that she was a "homemaker and freelance consumer consultant". So from her published CV she started in her position at the tiller of an NHS trust with no professional management experience whatsoever. This might go some way to explaining the performance of the NHS.

What possible reason can there be for this extraordinary advancement? Perhaps she is just extremely good at interviews or just plain lucky. Perhaps we'll never know.

In unrelated news the Guardian notes:

Dame Suzi, as she has been since January, [is] a committed member of the Labour party.

It's also interesting to compare the press release on her appointment to the FSA to the CV above:

[Sir John Krebs'] Deputy will be Ms Suzi Leather, who has twenty years of experience in consumer representation.

(My emphasis)

Still look on the bright side she says she's going to be robust in making charities submit their accounts on time. Perhaps she'll be dealing with the Moslem Council of Britain who have never actually submitted their accounts since their formation ten years ago.

Leather

Sometimes you have a dull moment and you just fancy reading something that you know will make you really angry. I usually find the Times "Public Sector" supplement just the job, and last week's edition was no exception.

In it we had a piece about Dame Suzi Leather, the new head of the Charities Commission and, by the by, a woman whose very name can excite paroxysms of delight in readers at Laban's place.

It's not terribly exciting - we learn that she knows nothing about charities, but has a background in regulation. She was born in Uganda and has done some paragliding. But then this appears at the bottom.

Career:
1979-84 research officer, Consumers in Europe.
1984-86 trainee probation officer
1997-2001 chair, Exeter and District NHS Trust
2000-02 deputy chair, Food Standards Agency
2002-06 chair, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
2005-06 chair, School Food Trust

Read that again.

She went from being a research officer at an NGO, to training as a probation officer and then, after a gap of ten years was considered suitably qualified to head up an NHS trust. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off.

What on earth was she doing in that ten year gap to suddenly make her top management material? A bit of digging turns up this article which reveals that she was a "homemaker and freelance consumer consultant". So from her published CV she started in her position at the tiller of an NHS trust with no professional management experience whatsoever. This might go some way to explaining the performance of the NHS.

What possible reason can there be for this extraordinary advancement? Perhaps she is just extremely good at interviews or just plain lucky. Perhaps we'll never know.

In unrelated news the Guardian notes:

Dame Suzi, as she has been since January, [is] a committed member of the Labour party.

It's also interesting to compare the press release on her appointment to the FSA to the CV above:

[Sir John Krebs'] Deputy will be Ms Suzi Leather, who has twenty years of experience in consumer representation.

(My emphasis)

Still look on the bright side she says she's going to be robust in making charities submit their accounts on time. Perhaps she'll be dealing with the Moslem Council of Britain who have never actually submitted their accounts since their formation ten years ago.

Non-aligned blogs

According to Iain Dale, this is the 96th best non-aligned political blog, thus confirming my belief that there are around a hundred of us non-party bloggers.

Thanks for the mention though!

Left libertarianism

I've occasionally come across people who call themselves left libertarians but I've always thought it something of a contradiction in terms. You can't force people to do things and then tell them they're free.

Chris Dillow is one such, and he's written a piece at Philosophy etc, explaining why he's not a classical liberal. It's quite interesting in that it has helped me understand some of the thinking which underpin LL ideas. I can't say I'm impressed.

There's lots to take issue with.

1. A missing theory of property duties. [...] To justify inequalities of property, you must demonstrate that the poor have a duty to respect the rich's property. How can this be done?

John Locke had one answer. Private ownership, he said, was OK as long as it left "enough and as good" for others. We should therefore respect others' property simply because it's doing us no harm - there's enough and as good land for us to use. Even if this proviso held in Locke's time, it obviously doesn't hold today. So how can we justify property inequality?

It's not obvious to me that there's no longer enough and as good land for us to use. The quantity of available land hasn't changed - it was all owned by someone then and it's all owned by someone now. If you want it, you just have to buy it.

Besides the whole focus on land as a synonm for property is completely irrelevant in the twenty first century when most wealth is not derived from land, but from industry. "Property" has to be considered in its broader sense. Once you realise this, then it quickly follows that you should respect others' property because they have earned it (or inherited it, or won it in a game of poker) and not you. You should respect it because this is the only basis for a civil society; because only in a civil society can you expect any respect for your property.

2.Autonomy is a real value, not a notional one. Classical liberals [...] devote much effort to defining liberty and justice as the absence of state coercion. They devote less effort to saying why these conceptions are so valuable. Left libertarians, by contrast, believe values matter to the extent that they promote human development and thriving. In some (many?) cases, the mere absence of coercion does not suffice to do this.

Imagine a man dying of thirst in the desert, whilst a bystander has plenty of water, but no inclination to help him. Classical liberals say this is a just position - there's no state coercion.
But most of us would think things would be better if the state did intervene, to force the man with water to help the dying man.

I would have thought that most classical liberals define liberty as the absence of any coercion (as indeed does my dictionary). Slavery was a private institution, after all. Most of the libertarian literature I've read (which is not a great deal, I might say) is quite clear that this is the only basis by which humankind can develop and thrive. Forcing them into particular actions which the state deem important or beneficial doesn't cut the mustard.

The example given, of a failure to save a dying man, looks like a straw man fallacy. I imagine most classical liberals would not condone manslaughter, which is what this is.

3. Self-ownership doesn't justify inequalities. A cornerstone of Nozick's libertarianism is the principle that we own ourselves, so that any effort to tell us what to do is a form of slavery.

This principle, though, doesn't justify inequalities of income, because incomes are jointly produced by individual talents and social circumstances. Thierry Henry's skills as a footballer, Bill Gates' as a software developer or Paul McCartney's as a songwriter would have earned them little 100 years ago. Even if they own their talents, they've no right to the social conditions in which these talents can thrive.

This statement (One might equally turn it around and ask the left libertarian whether equality justifies slavery) is flat wrong. Incomes are not jointly produced, they are recompense to an individual's contract of employment. So what if these people wouldn't have made money 100 years ago? (Computers hadn't even been invented!). People receive reward in proportion to the demand for their services and how much competition there is in the supply of it. If people currently don't want their services very much then they need to be doing something else. Surely it can't be argued that people should be forced to pay more for a service that nobody actually really wants - this doesn't seem very, well, libertarian. (One could be very facetious and wonder if, in 1885, Bill Gates might have argued for billions of dollars a year in payment for the software he was going to write after computers had been invented).

4. Inequality is a form of market failure. This matters, because it shows that the wealth of these people is the result of luck - the luck of being born into the right time, or into the right society.

I don't buy this argument at all. You can't have a labour market unless there are unequal outcomes (ie prices for labour). If the reward is the same to all, regardless of supply or demand for the service, then you have no pricing mechanism, no way to know what services are demanded, no way to know which are not. You have no market in other words. Inequality is a feature, not a bug.

5. Markets don't work perfectly. Classical liberals believe free markets do indeed promote human thriving. This is deeply true - up to a point. But there are problems. Markets generate creative destruction, imposing losses, albeit temporary, upon millions. They don't give people self-determination and autonomy at work, because most firms are ruled by a hierarchical managerialist ideology which might be out-dated.

My response has to be "So what?". The question is whether there is a better way than free markets, the fact that there are failings in markets does not make the case that there is a better way. Besides, most of what are fingered as failings are no such thing. Creative destruction is again a feature, not a bug. It means that the market stops people supplying goods and services that nobody wants. Losses are its way of saying "Stop". Nobody has self-determination and autonomy at work, no. This is because there are other parties with an interest in what you are doing - namely the customer and the employer (who the individual has agreed to take orders from). Nobody can seriously argue that the individual is operating in a void.

6. Demands for equality won't go away. There's another way in which classical liberals are strangely Stalinist. They seem to want to over-ride the huge public demand for state intervention. This ignores the question: how can we preserve and expand economic liberty in the face of this?

This is nonsense. The whole point of liberalism (and libertarianism) is the belief that the individual has an area of autonomy from the state (whether democratically elected or not). The mere fact that a large number of people want something does not, to the liberal or libertarian, justify it.

Quote of the day

Here, in this society, the very wind carries freedom. It carries it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

The judge's closing remarks in the trial of shoe bomber Richard Reid.

(via the Englishman)

Labour party pays bung to unions

Via Burning our money

The Labour government has just agreed to give their trade union paymasters another £5m of taxpayers' money. Our money.

This time it's ostensibly to fund a "legion of equality watchdogs" in the workplace. But it's actually just the latest instalment of the £10m Labour has promised unions in exchange for their continued financial support of the party.

This doesn't seem to have been reported by the BBC.

Fairtrade not fair

Owen Barder notes Alex Singleton reporting on an FT investigation into Fairtrade cooperatives.

It seems that by buying Fairtrade goods you may be supporting exploitation of the poor. The cooperatives are not voluntary, charge high fees for entry and those in charge exploit the other members.

Miscellany

Woman arrested for homeschooling in Germany.

House of Lords says ban on public smoking ignored scientific evidence.

Lib Dem policies

Peter at Liberal Review is, erm, questioning the wisdom of some of the LibDems' conference motions. Like this one:

Conference calls for:

1. Nutritional awareness to be part of training for doctors, nurses and other relevant staff in hospitals and the community so that all are aware of patients at risk of malnutrition in hospital.
2. The creation of national standards on nutrition, to be adhered to by staff of all hospitals, including nutritional scoring on admission and referral to a dietician to be a matter of course for all patients at risk.
3. Hospitals to establish regular meetings of relevant staff to consider nutrition within their own unit.

There are a few quite sensible people in the LibDems. Unfortunately none of them seem to be involved in agenda setting for the conference. I mean, does anyone really think that the answer to hospitals leaving patients to starve (that's what "malnutrition" means here isn't it?) is to appoint a committee to tell them not to?

We can see where this will lead. After appointing a committee to determine the national standards, the party could set up a panel to assess how many patients are in fact getting their nutritional scoring. They could set a target for how many this should be. There could be incentives for hospitals to hit the target and fines for those who don't.

Listen guys, there is no point in having another party whose solution to all known problems is targets and bureaucrats. We've seen the results with Labour already. We certainly don't need another set of targets to get in the way of clinical priorities. All this policy will acheive is patients having their diets assessed instead of their ailments.

The important questions are asked by blogs

It's rare now to see important, insightful questions being asked in the MSM. Blogs are where you go for someone with an indepth understanding of the issues questioning the policies of the government. Richard North is one of the best this side of the Atlantic. His latest piece on the loss of a Nimrod in Afghanistan contains this:

The fact is that, if the Nimrod was providing coordination and carrying out electronic communications intercepts and video surveillance (and it is really hard to think what else it could do – as a marine reconnaissance aircraft, it radars would have been next to useless) then it should not have been there at all. These functions do not require a manned aircraft and, in fact, are better (and more safely) carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as the Predator deployed by US forces and – to and extent, by UK forces.

The lack of availability of UAVs to the British forces in the Middle East is another story of the incompetence which is the defining feature of the government.

Legislative scrutiny.

One of the perils of being a statist is having to come up with excuses for the ridiculous decisions of governments. It's worse when it is a government of your own party whose balls-up you have to explain away.

So I can appreciate the pain the folks at The Daily are currently suffering. The source of their discomfort is the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations which will come into force shortly.

It allows employers to pay younger workers either the youth minimum wage or the same rate as other workers but not anything in between.

So, if you’re employing a 19 year old and a 22 year old to do the same job, you can decide to pay them both £6 an hour. Or you can pay the 19 year old worker £4.25 an hour and the 22 year old £6 an hour.

But it is illegal to decide that the 19 year old deserves a pay rise and give them £5 an hour. Perhaps there is a good reason for that, but it escapes us at the moment.

Me too. Presumably you can't ever pay an outstanding 17 year old more than a merely competent 22 year old either. Poor old Theo Walcott eh?

It gets worse though.

Even more bizarre is Schedule 1 of the regulations, which defines the Norwegian sector of the Frigg Gas Field. There is no reference to this elsewhere in the regulations, the Explanatory Notes, or in the Hansard of the Committee which passed the measure.

What on earth is going on? Has the Government given away part of the Gas Field via secondary legislation? Or is this a practical joke by civil servants that no-one’s noticed until it was on the statute book?

Bizarre is the word. My money would be on someone having cut and pasted something in error, and in the avalanche of new regulation nobody having noticed. An indictment of the quality of the legislative process in this country if ever I saw one.

Still, imagine the chaos if things were left to the market.

Things you won't hear about from the BBC - 2

Via Counterterrorism Blog

The recent Al-Qaeda video which called for non-muslims to convert to Islam mentioned George Galloway and Robert Fisk:

Then “Azzam” turn to two British journalists and thank them for their “admiration and respect for Islam” encourage them to do the final step: Convert. He names British MP George Galloway and journalist Robert Fisk.

British MP gets favourable mention in Al Qaeda video. But you lot don't need to know stuff like that.

The BBC - all the news that's good for you.