Bishop Hill

I've moved

2006-11-07T21:24:00.000Z

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

Newsnight tonight

2006-11-02T20:55:00.000Z

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

The benefits system

2006-10-27T18:09:00.000Z

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

2006-10-27T05:57:00.000Z

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

2006-10-26T20:19:00.000Z

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

UKIP it is then.

Did I hear you right?

2006-10-23T21:22:00.000Z

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

2006-10-22T20:00:00.000Z

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

2006-10-22T17:58:00.000Z

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

2006-09-24T19:41:00.000Z

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

2006-09-22T08:16:00.000Z

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

2006-09-20T19:26:00.001Z

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

2006-09-20T19:26:00.000Z

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.

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

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.

Non-aligned blogs

2006-09-18T09:31:00.000Z

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

2006-09-16T21:21:00.000Z

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

2006-09-13T20:05:00.000Z

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

2006-09-13T19:47:00.000Z

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

2006-09-13T19:12:00.000Z

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

2006-09-12T21:32:00.000Z

Woman arrested for homeschooling in Germany.

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

Lib Dem policies

2006-09-12T20:01:00.000Z

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

2006-09-03T20:15:00.000Z

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.

2006-09-03T18:46:00.000Z

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

2006-09-03T18:33:00.000Z

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.

Things you won't hear about from the BBC

2006-08-29T21:34:00.000Z

Union-run bank risks capital base to support Labour party.

Australian Foreign minister slams MSM for faking photos in Lebanon.

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

Surveillance and rubbish

2006-08-29T21:13:00.000Z

The Englishman has been posting up a storm. Having found a RFID enabled bugging device in his wheelie-bin he was understandably miffed at the council for not having told him that this was going to be happening. And I don't suppose anyone is going to believe that this isn't a step towards billing by weight of rubbish produced, a step which will allow the councils to increase their tax take and their take home pay.

Now for an economic liberal, the idea of billing each person by weight of refuse produced is eminently sensible, and it's important not to lose sight of this. The problem will be that, as I've pointed out, the councils will use pay per kilo to squeeze taxpayers. What would be interesting is to find out if they would be able to enforce the use of their own collection services or if private contractors would step in to provide a cheaper service. Presumably if all your rubbish is collected by a third party your bill from the council for refuse collection would be nil.

Personally speaking I have no problem with allowing private sector companies to RFID tag my bin, on the grounds that they would only be using it for something innocuous like trying to sell me stuff - something I can opt out of fairly easily. With the state, the information becomes part of the all-encompassing national identity database - something I consider much more sinister.

Jock Coats has a good post on the subject.

Unintended consequences

2006-08-23T18:28:00.000Z

Eaten by missionaries reports that, as many predicted, the smoking ban in Scotland is hitting the licensed trade pretty hard.

The Scottish Licensed Traders Association has said that its members report a 10 per cent reduction in alcohol sales north of the border since the smoking ban came into force.

How the Labour and LibDem politicians who voted this law into force can sleep at night is beyond me. I guess you need to be pretty selfish to be a politician.

The EU Referendum report

2006-08-23T15:27:00.000Z

The EU Referendum report on Qana is now complete, and can be seen here.

I find it pretty convincing.

Thought for the day

2006-08-23T14:52:00.000Z

Those who would trade a little liberty for a little equality deserve neither liberty nor equality.

Bishop Hill, with apologies to James Madison.
(Prompted by this thread on Forceful & moderate)

Mass lone demonstration

2006-08-22T15:00:00.000Z

Rachel from North London is promoting a protest against the law which makes it an offence to protest anywhere in the vicinity of parliament.

A recent damn-fool law has made it illegal to protest anywhere near Parliament without official police permission, and comedian Mark Thomas is organising a stunt to highlight the danger and stupidity of having this law in a democracy.

The idea is to get thousands of people all to apply for a permit to do lone protests, and all at the same time. Apparently if there is sufficient notice the police can't refuse.

I guess there is always an upside to incompetent parliamentary draughtsmen.

Censorship at home and abroad

2006-08-21T18:38:00.000Z

Amit Varma reports that moveie channels are being blocked by Indian cable operators following a high court ruling.

I've just received news that the cable operators have stopped showing all paid channels in Mumbai to protest against police raids that were carried out on eight cable operators and three multi-system operators, during which transmission equipment was seized. The cable operators' stand is that the onus of complying with the high court directive was on the television channels, and that they have been needlessly harassed.

Before anyone sniggers at the backwardness of it all, Amit also points out that Tom and Jerry is now censored in the UK.

Pork

2006-08-21T10:45:00.000Z

Guido has been suffering from a lack of tittle tattle to entertain us during the parliamentary recess. Instead he's been occupying himself with a bit of porkbusting.

The PFIing of the NHS is always interesting. Look where a billion* quid is going:
£711 million to Leicester, the constituency of Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health
£272 million to Staffordshire, the constituency of Charlotte Atkins, the Health Select Committee member

Here's a little bit of porkbusting of my own:

High Peak. Labour ultra-marginal constituency - majority of 735.

Its Buxton Crescent & Thermal Spa project won £12.5m from the Lottery.

Now it's had £5m from the East Midlands Development Agency

Coincidence?

Note also that the second article details another £5m being spent in Derby. By another strange coincidence neither of this city's Labour MPs would be considered safe (Margaret Beckett, 422nd safest and Bob Laxton 502nd safest).

All the news you need to know

2006-08-21T09:30:00.000Z

Twenty-four hours after the news broke that Britain has been supplying night-vision equipment to Hizballah, the BBC has still not seen fit to report this information to its readers.

Thank goodness they're not like those commercial outfits eh?

Party funding

2006-08-21T09:14:00.000Z

Labour has quietly been reiterating its financial woes, as rumours circulate that it has run out of cash. Conservative Home says that any suggestion of state funding for parties should be stamped on quickly.

Qana faked?

2006-08-21T09:09:00.000Z

Richard North at EUReferendum thinks he has conclusive proof that at least one of the bodies unearthed at Qana was reburied so that it could be rediscovered for the cameras.

If he's right it could be dynamite.

Fingerprinting children

2006-08-21T09:02:00.000Z

According to the Register

The EU is planning to fingerprint children from as young as six, and earlier just as soon as it is technically feasible, according to documents obtained by Statewatch.

"Over my dead body" would seem like the apposite response.

Via Jonathan Calder

Because of the unique way it is funded....

2006-08-20T20:40:00.000Z

...the BBC has been unable to bring you the news that

Israeli intelligence officials have complained to Britain and the United States that sensitive night-vision equipment recovered from Hezbollah fighters during the war in Lebanon had been exported by Britain to Iran.

Source San Francisco Chronicle

Scottish executive lose the plot

2006-08-20T12:48:00.000Z

From a cursory glance through the papers today:

CIGARETTES would be sold only under the counter if plans being considered by Scottish ministers are implemented.

and

Ministers are considering forcing supermarkets to stop [two for one] offers, which are regularly snapped up by bargain-hunting shoppers across the country.

At the same time they are reporting that

Senior party sources warn there is serious doubt about McConnell's future as leader, amid growing concern that Labour will be hammered at the polls next May.

If they are so concerned about being hammered at the polls, might I suggest that further demonising sections of the population and trying to force up prices in supermarkets isn't a good way to increase their popularity.

Best blog post

2006-08-19T19:52:00.000Z

The best thing you'll read on the web this week will be this from the Belmont Club. It manages to combine Lebanon, game theory and The Usual Suspects in a single post. Whether you agree with the sentiments or not, it's brilliant writing.

The town square test

2006-08-17T20:39:00.000Z

Via the always interesting Dare to Know blog (mainly about homeschooling) comes this article about a girl who decided to go into her local town centre wearing an Israeli flag as a cape. Needless to say she attracted some pretty frightening attention from who opposed her views.

After stopping for some food, we went to our bus stop. By this time, it was around 7:10pm, but still broad daylight (being summer). I was alarmed to find the same guy approaching me again. He stopped in front of me and said “What did I tell you? Take it off. If I see you again with it I'll hurt you.”

This is a pretty damning failure of the Sharansky town square test. The question is whether it is only right wngers who get threatened in this way.

Muslim Council of Britain

2006-08-15T15:09:00.000Z

Wat Tyler has been doing some digging around the Muslim Council of Britain's finances. It appears that since they were founded in 1997 this registered charity has NEVER filed its accounts.

Suspicious minds like mine wonder whether the government's need for moslem votes is unconnected with this oversight on the part of the Charities Commissioners.

What came first?

2006-08-10T21:35:00.000Z

There's a healthy measure of suspicion around many blogsites commenting on the today's news. Typical of them is Europhobia

Yesterday: Major terrorism policy announcement by Home Secretary John Reid

Today: A 'plot to blow up planes' is apparently foiled, and Heathrow airport shut down.

And my first reaction? Utter disbelief and a sigh of resignation.

Pretty much everyone is convinced that there was a plot, but think that the timing of the raids, coming just a day after John Reid's policy announcement, is a little suspicious to say the least.

The question that's bothering me is: were the raids timed for the day after John Reid's speech or was John Reid's speech timed for just before the raids?

If the raids were moved to follow the minister's speech then it suggests an outrageous level of interference in the detail of police work. We are meant to have an operationally independent police service - and with very good reason. It is the job of the police to decide the optimum time for a raid on suspects. If media relations and the government's desire to control the news agenda become a factor in the timing then security is, to some extent at least, compromised.

The alternative scenario - that the speech was timed for just before the raids is, if anything, even worse. There were plenty of bloggers who claim to have thought that the speech heralded a raid of some sort. If the plotters themselves had even half an eye on the news they might have put two and two together in the same way and gone to ground. Reid would have been risking warning off the terrorists.

Either way someone needs to ask some questions.

Mortician from Tyre

2006-08-06T19:55:00.000Z

I've been following the ongoing debate at EU Referendum over the veracity of the photos of the deaths in Qana. If you haven't been following it, the suggestion is that many of the Qana photos were staged. Central to several of the pictures is "Green Helmet Man" who was photographed with several dead children looking as if he was posing for the cameras.

While I've not been completely convinced, it does look a bit fishy to me - certainly some of the continuity looks odd.

Anyway, here's a couple of links which may add to the debate:

Journalist Chris Albritton says he was not under control of Hizb-allah minders. He goes on to say:

As far as Qana, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what the scene was like, other than what my colleagues — who I trust — told me and what I saw on television. As for the death toll going down from 54 to 28, well, that happens. It was apparently a confusing time and the mortician at the al-Bass Government Hospital [on the outskirts of Tyre]gave out some numbers that included people also killed that day but in other places.

You don't come across morticians on blogs often, but this was the second mention today. The other was on this site.

Mark MacKinnon of The Globe and Mail reported from nearby Tyre, Lebanon on July 26, describing the many difficulties caused by the rising death toll in that city. "Abu Shadi, the mortician at the government hospital in the city, agrees. He's processed 100 bodies -- many of them grotesquely mangled and burned -- and on his pickup runs has been forced to leave behind many more that he can't recover from cars and destroyed buildings.

[...]

Based on these descriptions, it seems highly likely that Abu Shadi the mortician and Abu Shadi the green-helmeted "civil defense worker" are one and the same. And, in the double role, Abu Shadi was among the first to arrive, before the media did, with his refrigerated truck that in recent days had been carrying around corpses.

If this identification is correct, then the man who was photographed parading dead children in Qana also misrepresented the casualty figures to the press.

Interesting.

BBC programme on libertarianism

2006-07-28T18:59:00.000Z

Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but readers here may find it interesting.

Link

BBC in T-word shock

2006-07-27T21:07:00.000Z

At the top of the BBC Ten O'Clock news tonight Huw Edwards said that Al-Qaeda's Al-Zawahiri called on every Muslim to join the "terrorist cause".

Cock-up? Or does he get it? Either way, his days could be numbered.

On the air

2006-07-24T20:09:00.000Z

Remember the scene in Star Wars where the image of Princess Leia is projected into thin air above a table top?

Someone seems to have developed a technology for doing just that - yours for the bargain basement price of $20,000.

Suicides

2006-07-24T07:29:00.000Z

Tom Paine at The Last Ditch makes an interesting point about the high recorded rate of suicide among Asian women.

More than 20 years ago, a police sergeant in Nottingham told me that officers routinely accepted Pakistani families' "ludicrous" claims that their daughter had committed suicide, when they believed that she had been murdered in an "honour killing". They did so rather than face criticism from their superiors or adverse press coverage for "racism".

My guess is that all the "additional" suicides are murders.

I think he's probably right.

Unlikely search strings

2006-07-22T07:48:00.000Z

From my referrer log:

BBC Libertarian

An oxymoron if ever there was one.

CoComment

2006-07-22T07:45:00.000Z

Here's a natty blogging tool: CoComment automatically records all the comments threads you leave a comment on and keeps them on a central location where you can revisit them and follow the continuing conversation.

I have lost count of the number of times I've forgotten where I left a comment, so this one's going to be a real boon for me.

The House of Lords

2006-07-19T19:31:00.000Z

Ministry of Truth points out some of the silly things that can happen with our unwritten constitution. Someone says something in the House of Lords. Some others think it's a good idea. Next thing you know you have a new constitutional convention.

[...]the Salisbury convention, which Blair and others in government took to citing so vociferously over the last year on every occasion that their legislation hit choppy waters in the House of Lords, rest on nothing more substantial than a single statement in Lord Salisbury’s response, as Conservative leader in the House of Lords, to the King’s Speech in 1945…

…it would be constitutionally wrong when the country has expressed its view, for this House to oppose proposals which have been definitely put before the electorate.

That, believe it or not, is the Salisbury convention in its entirety.

The Salisbury convention gives every impression of an idea that was made up without any thought. The whole point of an upper chamber is to place some sort of limits on the lower chamber - to stop populist demagogues from committing wholesale vandalism on the country. Atlee may have won a landslide in 1945 but let's face it, in the modern world in which fully 22%(?) of the electorate voted Labour, and only a tiny minority of obsessives read the manifesto, an argument that the Commons represents the will of the people is completely unsupportable. Even if Labour had 90% of the electorate behind them, that would still not absolve the Lords of their duty to stand up for the liberties of the people.

The Lords need to throw the Salisbury convention out and start doing their jobs.

Fisk on missiles

2006-07-19T19:11:00.000Z

The BBC, the world's most trusted news organisation, interviewed Robert Fisk today on the situation in Lebanon. Apparently Israelis are wicked. You know this is true because Fisk is an objective observer of Middle Eastern affairs isn't he? And an expert too - he was writing about Hizb-allah missiles back in 2003:

Take the article in The New York Times by Larry Collins – joint author with Dominique Lapierre of O Jerusalem! – which last month announced that the Syrian-supported Hizbollah resistance in Lebanon had 10,000 missiles that could fly to Tel Aviv and "leave in their wake devastation more terrible than anything Israel has ever known". The missiles are a myth – I travel the roads of southern Lebanon every two weeks and there are no such missiles, as the UN force there will confirm [..].

Whoops.

Feeling down?

2006-07-09T18:32:00.000Z

Cheer yourself up with this: Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky.

Is this real?

2006-06-28T12:00:00.000Z

Jeffrey Archer has a blog!

Hat tip: Chark Blog

On liberty

2006-06-24T18:31:00.000Z

"The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it."

From a legal case of 1569, later cited in the famous case of the black slave Somersett.

Changing the law to criminalise forced marriages could make matters worse, a public consultation on the issue has found.

The Home Office 2006.

More on property confiscation

2006-06-21T20:31:00.000Z

The Englishman notes David Ireland's citing of John Stuart Mill in support of his desire to confiscate private property.

I can't help but refer to the great 19th Century British thinker John Stuart Mill who's [sic] work "On Liberty" discussed the limits of power that the state can have over the individual. His brilliant concept was the harm principle. Briefly it said that people should be free to engage in whatever behavior[sic] they wish as long as it does not harm others.

Seen through this principle the owner of the empty home of course has rights but not unlimited rights. Once it starts harming others whether that be though restricting housing to those that need it, spoiling the appearance of a street or loose slates falling onto playing children the state should and does have the right to intervene.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognise the kind of distortion of the English language so beloved of socialists. Ireland has simply redefined the meaning of "harm" ("injury" according to my dictionary) to suit his purposes. Harm now apparently means not giving someone what they need.

I do hope that David Gillies doesn't agree with this definition because he thinks (commenting on Tim Worstall's piece) that what Mr Ireland needs is stringing up from the nearest lamppost.

Blogging ettiquette and fascists

2006-06-21T17:41:00.000Z

Tim Worstall points us to the blog of someone called David Ireland. This idiot appears to be the civil servant advising the the government on its programme of confiscation of private property - using something called Empty Property Management Orders. This will allow them to confiscate any property that has been empty for more than six months and let it own their own terms to anyone they favour. I guess the principle is to confiscate it from Conservative supporters and hand it over to Labour ones.

You can be absolutely assured that the policy will never affect MPs or councillors.

I'm at a loss as to how to deal with someone who is either so bigoted, malicious or plain ignorant as to support a policy which undermines private property - which as de Soto has pointed out is the very basis of western prosperity. I try really hard to be polite when talking about other bloggers, but really this man is deserving of every vile epithet flung in his direction.

Public sector output

2006-06-19T12:51:00.000Z

Iain Dale notes the ongoing rumblings over David Miliband's blog, which is costing us taxpayers £40,000 a year.

But the giveaway is that two staff spent 40% of their time running it. What do they do? Well I presume they write it, because it bears all the hallmarks of being written by a committee.

Taking a quick look at the simply dire site, it's hard to disagree with this. What is really amazing is that these two public servants have managed to produce a total of 2300 words of output this month. That works out at 32 words per hour each.

In the meantime, I have just produced three hours of public sector output in ten minutes.

Must read post from Dr Crippen

2006-06-04T17:20:00.000Z

Dr Crippen has had some inside information leaked about NHS cutbacks in Northallerton.

The following patients are “deemed” not to need admission from Accident & Emergency Department. (Lovely word, “deemed”. What does it mean? Why not omit if from the sentence? Why not just say “the following patients do not need admission…? But I digress.)
those with an upper limb fracture
those with back disorders
those with a “pelvis lower limb fracture (whatever that may be)
those with “complex elderly musculoskeletal” problems
those with fractures of the pubic rami
The following patients are “deemed” (that word again) to be “unlikely” to need admission:
Poisoning
Angina
arrhythmia or “other chest pain”
those with asthma.

This is pretty terrifying stuff.

Michael Gove on Question Time

2006-06-03T20:31:00.000Z

In recent weeks I've been reading a books on logic - Jamie Whyte's brilliant Bad Thoughts - A guide to clear thinking and Madsen Pirie's How to win every argument.

I don't know if all this has sharpened the old wits up a bit, but when I heard Michael Gove claim on Question Time that people who carried knives were more likely to be victims of knife crime, and implied that it they shouldn't carry knives because of this, the potential flaw in the reasoning was obvious.

Gove appears to be repeating claims made by the police:

A Met spokesman said: "If you carry a knife you are more likely to become a victim of crime and more likely to get a criminal record. Bringing out a knife escalates the scale of violence.

We are invited to believe, then, that carrying a knife makes one more likely to become a victim of crime. This is, when you think about it, a bit unlikely since you are only less likely to be attacked if armed, and more likely to be able to defend yourself. Likewise the claim that carrying a knife makes you more likely to be a perpetrator of crime is on the face of it unlikely. A moment's thought should at least make us question this claim. Someone unarmed who gets into a violent altercation with another unarmed person is presumably just as likely to commit a crime and get a criminal record - but they would probably be guilty of a lesser offence than the person who is armed with a knife.

If the statisticians have compared probability of becoming a victim (or perpetrator) among the general public to the probability amongst those who carry knives, they may well find that the risk is higher among the knife carriers. But this doesn't prove that the increased risk is due to their knife carrying. It might equally be due to some other factor. In order to prove the causality they have to control for these other factors. From the way the police claims are made, I don't think this has been done.

The increased tendency to be a victim is more likely to be due to the fact that people who are involved in violent parts of society are more likely to be victims of crime, and that they arm themselves against that probability. In other words the heightened risk is due to their position in society rather than their carrying knives, which is a symptom of the danger rather than a cause of it.

The conclusion the police and Mr Gove reach - that you should not carry a knife because it "escalates the scale of violence" rests on very shaky foundations. All this is not to say that the apparent increase in knife crime (or its reporting) is not a worry, but a flawed argument is not going to help.

Evolving to localism

2006-05-31T19:14:00.000Z

My last post on the relationship between my ideas of localism and the Campaign for an English Parliament have raised some interesting debate on the CEP site.

One commenter in particular asked a very pertinent question:

Do you really envisage having different income tax levels at community level, some communities levying council tax, others local income tax, tuition fees in some English universities not in others, free prescriptions charges in some areas, not in others etc? it would be chaotic and unmanageable.

This is prime facie a valid criticism, but it's actually based on a slight misconception of what I am proposing. It's understandable though in that I haven't yet set out my ideas for how we would get to the kind of decentralised state I'm after. So here they are now.

My theory is that power needs to reside at the lowest possible level - a level I have called community. This term is strongly suggestive of a very small unit - perhaps a village or a suburb. I picked the term because I felt that it was probably the size of administrative unit that might eventually be settled upon, but this is not necessarily the case. A community could easily be a much larger unit - district, county or (heavens preserve us) region.

What I propose should happen is that powers over most areas of life should reside with communities, but that these powers should be allowed to be passed up to higher levels of government if this is what the community wants. Likewise powers can be taken back if they change their minds.

But, and here's the crux of the matter, I'm not proposing a revolution. The transitional arrangements would be all-important. On day one of the new constitution, the only thing that would change would be the tax system. Power to raise taxes would be passed to the initial set of communities - I assume for the sake of argument that these would be the ancient counties - but it would be assumed as an opening position that all of the other community powers had been passed upwards to national government. So on day one, pretty much everything stays the same. The administration of government and public services is largely unchanged. The NHS is still run from Whitehall, as are the schools and universities.

But underneath it all, power has been taken away from the centre, and a process of experimentation and devolution can begin. Communities can experiment with taking back responsibility for particular areas from the centre. They can try breaking themselves into smaller units if they think that might work. If they do work, fine. If not, then they can pass responsibility back upwards. But it's all evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

All the difficulties in delivering services when there are different systems in place may well be valid, but what I propose offers a chance for people to try to find a way round them. By way of an example it's not hard to imagine a country in which universities charge fees to students, and some communities choose to subsidise these fees while others choose to tax less and not subsidise. Could we get from where we are now to this kind of arrangement? I have no idea, but it is surely not unimaginable that the communities could agree among themselves to have the universities charge the full economic price of their education and let each community decide for itself how much to subsidise. We'll never find out unless we give people the chance to try.

To turn to the taxation side of the equation, I don't really accept the argument that you must have a single system and a single set of rates and allowances countrywide. Even in the UK at the moment, we have rates bills set locally. And while there is a single system for local taxes, this doesn't necessarily need to be the case, as shown in the US, where various states choose to levy sales, income and property taxes. My proposal therefore only needs a single definition of who is taxable where - based presumably on their main residence - in order to function properly.

I don't assume that I have the gift of foresight. I don't know what size a community should be or what powers it should retain. That's for others to find the answers to. But I do think we need a constitutional arrangement which allows them to look for those answers as best they can.

Devolution, but how far?

2006-05-28T18:55:00.000Z

A couple of interesting things have turned up on the constitutional reform front. MatGB at Not Little England has put his finger on one of the most interesting questions of the debate, namely

How do you bring power as close as possible to the people, recognise the existence of England as a unit, and ensure that a Parliament of 80% of the population does not destabilise or undermine the British parliament?

Similar thoughts have been bothering me, particularly when visiting the Campaign for an English Parliament. I've been a sympathiser for the CEP's aims for a while now - I reckon in fact that the advent of an English Parliament would be good not only for the English but also for the Celtic fringe, in that the loss of their subsidies will force them to embrace business in the way that their brethren in Ireland have done.

How then to square this with the ideas that I have put forward here and at Liberty Central (and that MatGB seems to share) for devolution of power down to the lowest practicable levels? What is the point of an English Parliament if all the power resides at community level? It's hard to think of many areas of policy which would sit naturally at an England level were this kind of constitution to be enforced - sport perhaps, but not much else. Then again, I think we need to ask why there is a perceived need for an English Parliament at the moment. The obvious answer is that it is needed to correct the constitutional imbalance created by the government's botched devolution of power to Scotland and Wales. This has created national assemblies for the Celts and therefore we need a national assembly for the English too. On the face of it this is a perfectly valid argument, but underneath it all there is a question of how much of the need for Celtic devolution was in fact national in character, and how much was local - that is to say it was a reaction to overcentralisation of power in London. Having lived in Scotland during the latter years of Margaret Thatcher's term in office, my impressions were that the major objections to her leadership were that she was instituting policies that wouldn't have been chosen by the Scots rather than the fact that her supporters were mainly English.

If then the need to localise power was in fact the important factor in the impulse to devolve power to the Celts, then the desire to devolve to an English Parliament is potentially thing to do. As Bondwoman points out in this piece at the Sharpener, an English Parliament governing a country of 50 million people would still be a very large, and probably very centralised, place. We should presumably conclude that more radical decentralisation is the answer.

If we imagine then that power is devolved to some lower level in England, where does that leave relations with Scotland? If Scotland retains the constitutional arrangements it has now, does that give it an advantage over an England in which power is much more widely dispersed? I would imagine that if ultimate power, and more specifically the power to raise taxes, resides with the UK government then such an arrangement would indeed place the English at a substantial disadvantage as the Scottish executive would be able to act as a powerful voice to influence UK government policy to the Scots' advantage.

However as Bondwoman notes in the same piece, the constitutional shambles will not be resolved without a significant measure of fiscal autonomy. The power to spend money needs to be matched by a power to raise tax. This kind of arrangement mirrors my own ideas on the shape of the constitutional settlement, where the tax-raising power resides at the lowest levels, with funds being passed up to the centre where necessary.

The answer then appears to me to be that there may in fact be no need for an English Parliament, because the constitutional imbalance can be righted and more local government delivered, without it.

Top dog

2006-05-22T19:44:00.000Z

It's always encouraging when you come out top in something. If you type "NHS Collapse" into Google, yours truly comes out top (out of over a million results returned).

That's made my day that has.

Another U-turn

2006-05-21T19:14:00.000Z

The Telegraph reports that the government is going to start a scheme for children from deprived backgrounds to go to private schools.

I've got a great idea for a name. They could call it "The Assisted Places Scheme".

Netvibes rocks

2006-05-16T18:09:00.000Z

Via Chicken Yoghurt I have been introduced to the delights of Netvibes, which is a platform for integrating all your RSS feeds. It's much slicker than Bloglines and much more pleasing upon the eye. The "Wow" moment was when I realised that I could get a feed of my email into the site too, as well as my de.licio.us bookmarks, calendar and more. Suddenly it's gone from being a feed reader to a virtual desktop. Already I have switched my Firefox homepage over from Google (Google can be added as a module) and I no longer look at Google.

I say it again. Wow!

Any reservations? Well, it doesn't seem to recognise all my feeds. I get an error returned from, among others, Biased BBC, Blognor Regis and Liberal Review. Apart from that the whole thing is pretty fab.

More on virtual legislatures

2006-05-16T12:40:00.000Z

Further to yesterday's posting and the idea of a virtual legislature, the liveblogging by the Save Parliament Blog of the Legislative & Regulatory Reform Bill debate in parliament was pretty instructive.

The debate was attended by tiny numbers of MPs and there was no meaningful consideration of the issues. Then at the touch of a button the lobby fodder MPs appear to vote through the government's measures without change.

It's impossible for anyone to follow what is going on from outside.

How much better then to follow through my idea of a virtual legislature where the debates can be had over a period of weeks, with objections and suggestions made both by legislators and members of the public (who more than likely are better informed about the implications than the legislators themselves). There is said to be concern among the ruling classes about disengagement from the political process. Here is a way to reengage people.

Which means it will be ignored.

Legitimate government

2006-05-15T19:28:00.000Z

When I blogged about reorganising society from the bottom up, my main purpose in advocating a continuous process of devolution to progressively smaller communities was that in a highly devolved society it becomes relatively easy and cost-free to escape from tyranny to a better jurisdiction. But during my recent researches, I came across a philosophical justification for it too.

In his Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett sets out what he believes to be the circumstances in which a government can bind its citizens in conscience as well as in fact. Essentially he argues that popular sovereignty as proclaimed in the US ("We the People") is a fiction since a constitution enacted 200 years ago and ratified by the states, rather than individuals, cannot bind today's citizens. Nor can any modern state bind its citizens in conscience since these states are too large to obtain unanimous consent.

He suggests therefore that by devolving power to much smaller units, unanimous consent can be reached and therefore true legitimacy can be obtained.

Now I have no idea how far the process of devolution I advocate could continue before the administrative units became too small, but if the process itself is in fact making government progressively more legitimate then this would suggest a relatively longer process. Only when the units became too small to support the functions they required (eg policing) would the brakes be applied.

One problem that this would throw up though is that if the administrative units become very small then representation in national government becomes tricky. I had envisaged each community sending a representative to the national legislature where they would act as a check on the centralising tendencies of the national government. But if these communities are very small this is clearly impractical. I'm almost tempted to bring back another idea I blogged on in a very throw-away fashion some months ago, which is to have a virtual House of Lords - basically a blog and a poll open to legislators only. Then you can have many more legislators because you no longer need them to assemble in one place.

It's an idea anyway. Thoughts anyone?

Why do I bother?

2006-05-11T19:24:00.000Z

One of my clients, a manufacturer, is suffering from production difficulties and has asked some of the employees to work overtime do make up the shortfalls. They're offering double time. Unfortunately, if the employees do this they will lose their tax credits next year, so they are refusing. This may end up shafting the whole business.

Gordon Brown really is a complete bloody moron.

Quote of the day

2006-05-09T21:03:00.000Z

You vote to abolish Habeas Corpus and the Magna Carta, then you apologise for screwing your secretary?

Harry Hutton on John Prescott

Liberal England: John Stuart Mill: Who should run schools?

2006-05-09T07:46:00.000Z

Liberal England: John Stuart Mill: Who should run schools?

Jonathan Sheppard notes that John Stuart Mill recognised that the state should not be involved in providing education, restricting themselves to funding school fees for the poor.

At the last election the Tory education policy was the only one liberal enough to recognise this. The failure of the Lib Dems to adopt a similar policy is shameful. Quite how they can call themselves "Liberal" is beyond me.

Update: Jonathan Calder, the author of the linked article asks in the comments who Jonathan Sheppard is? Damned if I know, but apologies are probably due to both of them.

Power Inquiry and the Constitution

2006-05-08T20:05:00.000Z

It's all gone quiet over at Liberty Central. The flow of postings has dried up, and visitors to the forums and wiki are few and far between. Unity has indicated that the site will move to a new home shortly which may mean that a relaunch will bring about a revival. We'll have to wait and see.

There's still plenty going on on the constitutional reform front though. This review of the Power Inquiry conference by Davide Simonetti is very interesting. It's encouraging that there seems to be a level of agreement among the opposition parties that something needs to be done, even if they don't seem to know precisely what.

Voter apathy is a constant complaint of politicians and commenters, but nobody seems to put their finger on exactly why this is happening. "People don't feel their votes count" we are told, without anyone getting to the bottom of why this should be so. For what it's worth, my theory is that there is so little to choose between the three main parties that voters are not presented with a meaningful choice. The underlying reason for this is that the parties all have policies developed in focus groups which target a very small number of swing voters. Since they all develop policy in this way they all quite reasonably reach the identical conclusion that a small measure of marketisation in the public services will make this special group happy.

The methods used by the political machines is not going to change in the near future, at least not while they continue to deliver power. Fortunately the Power Inquiry seems to have hit the nail on the head in terms of a solution.

They make the following proposals;

We have to redistribute power from the executive, from Downing Street to Parliament.
We have to restore Cabinet Government.
We have to have a redistribution of power from the central to the local.

The last of these points is the important one, because this is the way to reengage the public in the political process. If decisions about your life, or your public services are taken locally then you are much more likely to feel that you can influence them. But, more importantly, if radically different decisions are made in different parts of the country then people can vote with their feet and live in a part of the country with a political system that is to their taste. This sort of decentralisation is both an enabler of an active civil society and a bulwark against the kind of creeping authoritarianism that we have endured under the Labour government. Unfortunately I doubt if anyone has the courage to devolve healthcare, welfareand education to local government, and the political courage to allow local government to raise its own taxes is surely no longer a feature of our political class.

Even were politicians to pluck up their courage and put in place a constitution that devolved power as radically as this, it would still remain to be seen how these powers could be kept devolved. The lesson of the American constitution is that even quite narrowly defined powers can, in the hands of unscrupulous politicians and quiescent judges, be extended far beyond the meaning of the text. With hindsight, we can draw two lessons from the US.

Firstly, the Seventeenth amendment, allowing for the direct election of senators, was a mistake. Before this amendment the Senators were chosen by the state legislators. This effectively gave local government a voice in central government, and allowed the senate to block the centralising tendencies of the Washington machine. The campaign to Elect the Lords may therefore be misguided: fine, do away with the power of the Prime Minister to choose peers, but let the elections not be direct. We place far too much faith in directly elected politicians - a surprising failing on our part when we have such bitter experiences of them. Indirect elections, while superficially "less democratic" will be a better defence against centralisation and the authoritarianism that will follow it.

Secondly, a UK constitution needs to proscribe even further than the US Constitution, the powers of central government. The Commerce clause allowing Congress to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" has over the years been extended to cover not only inter-state trade, but intra-state trade, manufacturing (which is not commerce), and has now reached the risible stage where Congress has claimed a right to prevent someone growing marijuana in their back garden for their own use (apparently because it might effect the market for drugs). If we are going to frame a Constitution that is going to be effective and which is going to last, we have to be alert to this threat. There is no form of words which Central government cannot wriggle their way out of. The only solution is to devolve pretty much everything.

Reform of the constitution will only work if it is radical. The question we must ask is: "Who are the remaining radicals in British political life who will take on the task of reform?"

Polly is a sensitive soul

2006-04-28T16:10:00.000Z

Those rotten bloggers have been taking the mickey out of poor lickle Polly Toynbee over at Comment is free. Polly was so angwy she threw all the toys out of the pram and censored them.

Big mistake.

Update:

In the face of a barrage of critical comments from readers, they've now put the original comments back. They've also deleted all the ones slagging them off for the original deletions. They just don't get it do they?

Is Cameron a Guardian reader?

2006-04-23T11:02:00.000Z

The Earl of Onslow writes a must-read open letter to the Boy King Cameron demanding to know why the Conservatives are failing to defend the liberties of the British people.

The choice of the Observer to publish his missive is a strange one - or does he know something about Dave's reading habits we don't?

Song lyrics

2006-04-17T19:43:00.000Z

According to the Times, the greatest song lyric of all time was written by a Mr Bono of U2 as follows:

“One life, with each other, sisters, brothers.”

Which is barking, because everyone knows that the greatest song lyric of all time was in fact penned by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Ironically it also seems to have been written about Mr Bono's lyric.

"The wise man breaks wind and is gone"

(From "Thick as a brick")

V for Vendetta and LegReg

2006-04-02T10:00:00.000Z

I chanced upon this posting by a blogger who has just discovered the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (you know, the "Abolition of Parliament Act").

In particular this sentence stood out:

Mental note: Don't read this bill again for a while after seeing V is for Vendetta

Now while this is probably right in terms of preventing immediate acts of violence it really should be considered as a way of getting out the message that we are in deep doo-doo. I wonder if handing out flyers explaining the act and its implications to people leaving the movie would be a good idea.

Smoking ban in Scotland

2006-04-01T20:24:00.000Z

The pub last night was very pleasant. Everyone agreed that the clear atmosphere was very nice, and (with one exception) that the ban was dangerously illiberal.

It was worryingly quiet for a Friday night though.

Thought for the day

2006-04-01T20:17:00.000Z

Many on the left argue that there is a “freedom from being blown up on an underground train” and that this is the most important freedom of all.

This presumably means that they think that the people of the Soviet Union were secure in their most important freedoms.

Which of course is what most of them were telling us at the time.

Conservatives sell out British people

2006-03-29T19:27:00.000Z

The Conservatives have sold out on the ID cards bill.

They'd long since lost my vote anyway.

Wankers.

March for free expression

2006-03-27T19:06:00.000Z

The Belmont Club is pointing out that while the police claimed that flags were not permitted at the march for free expression last weekend because of a bylaw, this didn't seem to apply at earlier demonstrations by Palestinians.

Interesting.

The ALF in Fife

2006-03-25T06:49:00.000Z

I read yesterday that the ALF had visited a local venison farm and tried to release the deer. This is what I found at the front gate.

Fortunately, the perpetrators do not seem to have been the sharpest tools in the box, having cut the wrong bits of fence and failed to release any of the deer, but as the owners point out on their website, escaped deer usually return to the farm in pretty short order anyway preferring a stress-free life on the farm to dodging dog walkers in the woods.

The ALF also managed to leave a minefield of barbed wire for the deer to entangle themselves in. These animal lovers seem quite happy to arrange maiming and a slow death for these deer. They also destroyed a number of wildlife corridors created by the owners.

I daresay the owners would appreciate any messages of support or perhaps the odd purchase from their online shop. I'm sure the ALF would appreciate it if everyone eats venison this week.

Labour and false accounting

2006-03-16T08:47:00.000Z

Blairwatch points out that the Labour party appears to be guilty of false accounting. No doubt an investigation will be launched and it will be found that nobody was responsible.

Crooks, money launderers, receivers of bribes.

Jonathan Freedland on education

2006-03-14T19:39:00.000Z

There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 this morning about the history of education. It featured James Tooley of the EG West Centre destroying his left wing critics. Well worth a listen.

Bottom-up government

2006-03-12T21:19:00.001Z

If we are ever to secure our freedoms political power has to be devolved. Recognition of this imperative immediately begs the question of which powers should be devolved and to whom. Perhaps even more important is how ordinary people can ensure that these powers are not returned to central government against their will. Inevitably governments, no matter which shade of political opinion they represent, will try to centralise power.

One of the beauties of a federal system of government is the way it reduces creeping centralisation by reserving certain policy areas to lower levels of government. Then if freedom is attacked, people can vote with their feet and move elsewhere.

While it's true to say that mission creep has affected even federations like the US, from a UK perspective, a federation looks like a pretty good way to keep power a bit closer to the individual. Certainly it's possible to imagine the UK as a federal state with an English Parliament sitting alongside the devolved administration in Edinburgh and a beefed-up assembly in Wales. But in terms of the subject of this posting the multinational federation solution would largely fail to disperse power in a meaningful way - the English administration would control power over pretty much everything that affects people's daily lives in the same way that the UK government does today. In essence government would remain a top-down affair with behaviour and choices defined for us by an overweening state.

If power is to be devolved and to stay devolved, the Constitution needs to pass power not to national governments but to lower administrative levels. In England this might be the county. Or then again, why not disperse power still further - perhaps to the level of the community? Or even (perish the thought) to individuals.

Whatever level is chosen, power would reside there, but could be passed upwards if the voters so decided. So a community might decide that it wanted to pass power over its school up to county level so as to pool resources and seek economies of scale. Later, if it was dissatisfied with the county administration, it could simply take the power back. Then again, if it wanted to pass control of its school over to a private sector administrator (who might offer similar incentives driven by its own economies of scale) it would be perfectly free to do so.

In order for a system like this to work the tax raising power would have to reside at the lowest level of government. In this way the community in the example above would simply pass on to the county (or the private sector), a mutually agreed level of funding to support the supply of services. It would pass on funds to central government for defence and foreign relations in the same way.

The critical question that needs to be answered by those on the left is: are you willing to forgo giving to central government the power to redistribute between regions. If that power is given to away then devolution becomes a sham and we are left with a shuffling of the deckchairs. Central government can demand what it likes because it holds the purse strings.

A radically devolved model of government will only work if there is a direct relationship between the votes cast and their financial consequences. In essence you can have liberty or you can have redistribution but you can't have both.

Married to the mob

2006-03-01T21:14:00.000Z

It will not surprise many people to hear that David Mills, the multimortgaging millionaire husband of Tessa Jowell is a former Labour councillor.

Mr Jowell's murky past

2006-02-28T14:30:00.000Z

Via Blairwatch, this piece by Craig Murray our erstwhile ambassador in Samarkand:

It is indeed not unusual to remortgage, though it was unusual that she remortgaged with an offshore bank. It is also unusual to remortgage for as much as £400,000. But it is very unusual indeed to remortgage for £400,000, then pay off the full loan, within a month, with spare cash.

What sort of people do such a thing? Well, money launderers.

And if that isn't enough for you:

Mills was under long term surveillance by the Serious Fraud Office for numerous dubious financial transactions. Approximately nine years ago, his office was actually raided by the SFO. As the investigation drew to a close, New Labour came to power. An inside source tells me that SFO staff believed they had a good case, and wondered whether his friendship with the new Prime Minister Blair had any bearing on it not coming to court. A Sunday Times Insight investigation into Mills was spiked by the editors.

Blair covers up (allegedly) for fraudster (alleged). I do love the sound of shit hitting the fan.

Worth a look

2006-02-26T10:51:00.000Z

Channel Four is running a programme by Peter Hitchens called "Stealing Freedom" Should be interesting.

A pretty pickle

2006-02-26T05:44:00.000Z

The Sunday Times has a leading article on the demonstration in Oxford yesterday in favour of the new animal testing laborator. It rightly applauds the protestors for standing up to organised thuggery. Many people will be in awe of the bravery shown by those who took to the streets. As a certified coward they appear to me to border on the insane - facing up to people who have no compunction in using violence against anyone who opposes them.

They can be under no illusions that the police offer any protection from the thugs, the boys in blue regularly making it clear that they cannot offer a protection service those who are threatened. So once again one can only stand awestruck by their courage.

But when you think about it, the implications of this are very profound. The police do not offer a protection service. Their role is limited to detection and prevention. Not protection.

Who then is to protect us? Who will guard those whose opinions attract the threats of the violent fringes? The answer has to be that individuals must defend themselves, but how they should do this is a mystery that nobody will answer. The thugs go armed with baseball bats, or worse. Any law-abiding citizen who attempted to do the same is guilty of a criminal offence.

Once again, I can only shake my head in admiration at the courage of those protesters yesterday.

The BBC reports that there were only 500 of them. This is an extraordinary number representing as it does those willing to take on armed men while they themselves are protected by nothing other than the force of reason. We can wonder how many more might have made their voices heard if there was no threat, or if they believed that they would be defended or could defend themselves.

There can be no doubt that the cause of free speech is under attack in the UK, not only from authoritarian government legislation, but because too many people are rightly frightened to speak out. It is surely no coincidence that the UK is one of the few countries where the Danish cartoons were not published.

There is a gaping hole at the centre of UK law and order policy which must be answered if the liberal value of free speech is to be protected. A written Consistitution is only half of the battle. We must be able to defend ourselves against those non-governmental forces who want to cow us into silence. Unfortunately I don't think we are ready to grasp this particular nettle yet.

NHS waiting lists are no more!!!

2006-02-24T20:55:00.000Z

Truly, the miracles of the NHS are a wonder to behold. The Blessed, Sainted and Truly Oleaginous Patricia Hewitt has, at a stroke, abolished the spectre of NHS waiting lists by simple means of...abolishing them. What genius!

Read about it here.

The NHS. It's the envy of the world you know.

Coalition latest

2006-02-20T21:12:00.000Z

Lots of interesting comment on the coalition around the UK blogs. This worries me a lot though:

"---a Bill of Rights might well set out a belief in the right of everyone to education from 5 to 16 - that's fine, but what it shouldn't and won't do is set out how that should be delivered. "

I had thought that a Bill of Rights was supposed to define what a Government couldn't do. A supposed "Right to education" is defining duties - a duty of government to provide it and a duty on taxpayers to foot the bill.

Are we all agreed on the definition of liberty? It means absence of coercion. Look it up in the dictionary. Education, wealth, poverty and hunger are not liberty.

Is Blair totalitarian?

2006-02-19T20:53:00.000Z

See this list of repressive legislation, and the addenda in the comments. Read it and weep.

British Constitution

2006-02-19T19:49:00.000Z

Liberty Central, the new portal to assist a coalition of the willing to get rid of Labour looks like it's going to be ready to go in the next few days. Unity at Talk Politics is on a bit of a roll by the looks of it.

Meanwhile Chris at Strange Stuff has already been posting a few preliminary thoughts about what should go in to the Constitution which will follow the overthrow. (It's a little presumptious isn't it? You know, getting together a few pyjama-clad geeks to write a new Constitution for the UK).

I thought I'd put down a few ideas on the higher-level stuff by way of complementing Chris's start.

We need to define very carefully what we are trying to acheive. I would worrty that it could rapidly deteriorate into an exercise in trying to hard code particular points of view into law. We've already seen a few favourite policies put forward for consideration by some bloggers. If we can't get these people to understand the purpose of a written constitution then we are sunk from the start.

Likewise, if we start to get a document framed in the language of "rights" then the whole thing will collapse. People will start to define anything they think valuable as a "right", which means that someone else has the duty to pay for it. We cannot (IMHO) have a document which gives someone the right to live at someone else's expense.

My proposal would be that we are aiming to acheive:

1. Limited government: Clear definition of what we believe government is for. What it can legislate on. By way of a radical thought, why not restrict the Bill of Rights only to defining what government may legislate on. Everything else should be off limits. We should not be about defining the hold that some individuals hold over others.
2. Dispersal of power: Between the house of Parliament. Between Parliament and the executive. Between the executive and the courts. Between different levels of government. Between government and the individual.

Political compass

2006-02-18T20:09:00.000Z

I just did the Political Compass test again - I think the last time was a year or so ago. The result was pretty much spot on:

Economic Left/Right: 7.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.82

Political change

2006-02-16T21:02:00.000Z

While the ongoing rolling back of basic freedoms continues unchecked, I do wonder if the blogosphere is starting to stir into action.

In particular MatGB is proposing a coalition to get NuLab out. Essentially it's a "Vote anyone but labour" movement.

Meanwhile Talk Politics wonders about more radical ideas.

The problem here is not any one individual or any one political party but the whole rotten edifice; the modern political class that, today, dominates party politics, the managerialists and the state functionaries. It's like a fucking hydra - you cut off one head (Blair) and two more grow back just as bad.

But is anyone listening to the blogs?

Five Live phone in

2006-02-13T11:29:00.000Z

I caught a bit of the Five Live phone-in this morning while driving back from the school run. The subject was the latest abuse claims coming out of Iraq. As part of the programme we had an interview with someome who was introduced as "ex-US marine" Jimmy Massey. I found this name ever so slightly familiar, and after getting home stuck it into Google where I found this:

Yet another example of the BBC trying to hide the background of their interviewees.

On the same programme we heard someone (an interviewee rather than a member of the public I think - I missed the intro) who claimed that he had been told by the BBC's Caroline Hawley that rape of Iraqi women by Coalition forces was widespread.

This startling claim begs many questions, not the least of which is why, if this is the case, is Caroline Hawley not reporting it?

Pride of Britain

2006-02-12T20:07:00.000Z

From Nip/Fuct, a blog by an NHS doctor:

The icing on the cake was when, on the ward round, we arrived at the bed of an elderly lady. She hadn't been seen by any doctors since her arrival in hospital several hours previously, because it wasn't her 'turn' yet. We were sifting through the referral letter from her GP, and checking her observations on the chart. It was then that we realised she was dead. And she had been dead for up to 2 hours.

Read the whole thing

Quote of the day

2006-02-11T19:31:00.000Z

The future's bleak. The future's Brown.

Outside story. I like that.

More on LegReg

2006-02-10T13:03:00.000Z

That's the Legislative & Regulatory

Tim Worstall has a piece up at the ASI

Think of this as one of those little moments when you might want to gasp at the audacity of our rulers.

He points us to a piece by the Telegraph's legal correspondent Joshua Rozenberg:

Clifford Chance, the world's largest law firm, points out that the Bill "usurps the power of Parliament". In a briefing to clients, it says the only red tape that the Bill would remove is "the red tape of Parliamentary scrutiny for primary legislation".

The Bill - to be debated in the Commons today -would give the Government so-called "Henry VIII powers" to amend primary legislation by ministerial order without Parliamentary debate, the firm says.

Meanwhile, commenters at Bloggers4Labour reckon I'm getting my knickers in a twist about nothing. I hope they're right. They helpfully point out the transcript of the second reading here. I shall be wading through this over the weekend.

Consider Phebas reckons the legislation only refers to secondary legislation and it's all a mistake. I hope he's right.

Update: He has been persuaded otherwise in the comments on the same post.

The P-G on the BBC's cartoon reporting

2006-02-10T09:10:00.000Z

The Pedant General has a must-read summary of the woeful performance of the BBC in failing to report the context of the Danish Cartoons story.

BBC - slowest news organisation in the world?

2006-02-09T21:23:00.000Z

It's now 24 hours since the story about the Danish cartoons having been reproduced in Egypt some five months ago.

The BBC still doesn't seem to have reported it.

Snail media.

More on the abolition of Parliament.

2006-02-09T20:02:00.000Z

Barking Blair's Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, giving ministers the power to amend legislation without reference to Parliament, has started to pick up a bit of notice.

Owen Barder notes that the LegReg Act is conferring what Westminster insiders refer to as "Henry VIII powers".

To my eye, this seems to be the mother and father of all Henry VIII powers. I expect we will be told that, like the abolition of local council elections which has been floated this week, these changes will make the business of government much more efficient and streamlined.

Mind you, if TB wants to chop off his wife's head that's fine with me.

Spy Blog comments on the lack of any safeguards:

This all feels like a replay of the non-debate which happened over the controversial Civil Contingencies Act 2004 Part 2 Emergency Powers, where the Government repeatedly refused to exclude any "core constitutional Acts of Parliament", such as Magna Carta 1297 , the Bill of Rights 1688, or Habeas Corpus, or even the European Communities Act 1972 etc. from being subject to amendment or repeal under Emergency Regulations.

In the end, even the Civil Contingencies Act ended up with the dubious fig leaf, that it could not be used to amend or repeal the Civil Contingecies Act itself (e.g. to extend a period of Emergency indefinately) or the Human Rights Act (which already has huge loopholes for "national security" or "public health" etc).

However, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill does not have even those "safeguards", and, if passed as it stands, would give a Minister the power to amend or repeal or replace any or all legislation, and even the Common Law as well.

Talk Politics has the pithiest comments:

Just when you thought things could not get any fucking worse, bullshit like this turns up on the statute books - if this passes, then we really have got to find some way not just to change governments every now and then but get rid of the whole fucking lot of them.

Sounds like the latest recruit to libertarianism to me.

Murky.org wonders why this is nowhere in the MSM:

This is outrageous, truly outrageous - and I'm amazed that it's not front page news. I only learned of this bill via pointers from friends.

[...]

The real issue that remains is the parliamentary bill to, possibly literally, end parliamentary bills.

The CBI, ever the tool of big government, is supporting the Act.

This needs much wider dissemination. Start blogging, people.

Try Saudi mate

2006-02-09T19:49:00.000Z

Some idiot has written to the Times (and been published!) demanding that blogs be controlled:

I am coming to the conclusion that access to blogging and the internet may ultimately require some form of control, although I cannot imagine how that could, or should, be done. We all need to be informed and this is best achieved by responsible journalism.

My message to the author is: go and live in Saudi Arabia or Iran where they share your views on freedom of speech.

Twenty Major on Abu Hamza

2006-02-08T21:36:00.000Z

Twenty Major has the last word on Abu Hamza. (Not for the easily offended)

Get rid of Labour NOW.

2006-02-07T20:13:00.000Z

I wonder if Bloggers4Labour can come up with a good reason to support a bill giving the government the right to enact legislation without troubling itself with getting the agreement of Parliament?

Time to change sides B4L?

Hat tip: Tom Paine at the Last Ditch