strange stuff

Polly and the Millipede

2012-01-10T20:34:00.002Z

Once she had been soothsayer to the court, the last of a long line that had held that position from her family. She had spent her days examining the omens for the Great Pretender, but at night she had dreamed of a one eyed Viking warrior.

The man that would stride across the world like Odin, and shower gold on the worthy from his mighty staff. Only when her Viking finally came she found his exchequer was barren, and his coffers were empty. Night after night she had penned her appeals to the warrior begging him to shower her in gold. He never did, but she refused to give up hope.

Then the blue painted warriors who had formed an alliance with the bird people to sweep away the old order. They banished her Viking warrior to the icy wastes north of the river and threw her in a tower. These newcomers had no use for her visions of a world where gold fell from the skies.

At first she had prophesized that the walls of their city would come crashing down allowing her warrior to return and free her from her tower. But days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, with no sign of her warrior's return. She longed for her warrior to return. He might not have been able to give her what she needed, but he would at least pretend to listen to her visions. It had been a long time since anybody had. In the end just wanted to find anybody that was willing to listen.

Then one day she saw movement in her cell. A millipede was scuttling across the dirt floor. She reached out with one of her gnarled old hands to pluck up the creature and clutch it to her breast.

"Oh, Mr Millipede how smooth and shiny your carapace is. Will you be my friend? Yes, you shall be my friend. You might be small now, but you will grow. You will become as big like a man, and then you will be able to shower me in gold in the way that my Viking warrior never could."

The millipede chirped and she turned its sounds into words.

"Yes, yes I understand. We shall smite the brutes that claim to rule. The clothiers and heralds will hand over the gold that they have hidden beyond the sea. We shall cleanse our temples of the cheats, asset-strippers and vultures who now live there. The people will rejoice. The blue painted panjandrums of greed will be driven before us. The world is in ruins and we shall make it anew, together!"

Driven by its unthinking instincts the creature thrashed around to escape her grasp. She interpreted this as nods of agreement and laughed with delight. At last here was somebody that would come and listen to her visions, she thought. But she could hold the creature no longer, her fingers had become feeble with age. It slipped from her grasp and disappeared into a hole in the floor.

With her only friend now gone Polly tipped her head back and howled at the moon.

Not so inevitable

2011-08-26T15:35:00.000Z

The Greek banking system is now basically dead. The only thing keeping blood flowing around the corpse is the life support system provided by the EU, if that is turned off so is the greek financial system. Unfortunately for the EU that would mean all of the collatoral that the ECB took in exchange for earlier money transfusions will suddenly become worthless. At that point the ECB itself would find itself scarily close to backrupcy. Pro-EU people always use 'inevitablity' as their standard argument for why the UK should go along with ever closer union, but the only thing that looks inevitable is the self-destruction of the EU's centerpeice and the massive collateral damage that this will cause.

Make the looters pay

2011-08-11T13:42:00.001Z

Forget Guido's gadfly petition on capital punishment. I certainly won't be signing that one as the state has too much power as it is without letting it kill people. However there is one out there that I will sign once the ePetitions server come back online, and would urge other people to. This one simply wants parliament to debate looters losing their benefits. Show them that there are some consequences to their actions.

And suddenly violence is fashionable on the left again

2011-08-07T16:37:00.001Z

After the vicious psycho Anders Breivik decided that the best way to express his anti-immigrant views was to shoot up a summer camp the left suddenly lost it love of violence and denounced it, and anybody that they felt they could smear by association no matter how tangental. It looked like the shock of the horrible murders had finally taught them that violence was not a good thing. Then some riots spring up after one gangster gets shot while trying to murder a police officer and suddenly violence is the best way ever of expressing a political opinion. Even if the only opinion these rioters were expressing was that they wanted more consumer goods. A bit of rioting by people that could be badged as ‘the oppressed’ and violence was something to be praised again. Anybody that does praise the violence enough is not sufficiently ‘right on’ and will get their turn up against the wall when the revolution comes. Well, the anti-violence noises were nice while they lasted.

Come and leech says the EU

2011-08-02T18:52:00.002Z

Daniel Hannan is reporting that the EU now plans to force the UK to let new immigrants arrive without any way of supporting themselves so they can just leech off the welfare state. Part of me thinks great, more immigrants and anything that destroys the welfare state has got to be a good thing. Another part of me wonders if the Eurocrats are deliberately trying to kill their creation? Has the economic horror created by the Euro finally got to them? Or perhaps they just want to make sure that they have a way out after the Euro has turned the whole of continental europe into a riot plagued disaster zone and the value of all of the money that they have defrauded over the years gets reduced to nothing. Not that I would mind the EU committing Sepuku either. The EU is not just shooting itself in the foot by trying to hit as many hot button issues as it can in one go, it is also deliberately breaking its own rules. Not that we should really be surprised about that by now. More likely it is just the Eurocrats flexing their muscles and demonstrating their domination over the member states because they can.

What time is it?

2011-07-30T08:57:00.000Z

Via Maritime Compass a simple diagram for converting the time into a ship's watches and the number of bells.

#OpPayPay

2011-07-27T19:00:00.000Z

Just a quick note on the latest Anonymous protest against PayPal. This one appears to much better than their last attacks as they are simply trying to get out a viral campaign to get people to close their PayPal accounts using the Twitter #OpPayPay hash tag. Which is great, they are exercising their free speech to make their point, without unconvincing anybody that is not persuaded by their arguments. Good on them, and it shows a level of maturity that the likes of UKUncut could never hope to achieve. It has also had some significant short term effects (again more than the lefty boot boys of UKUncut can claim).

So is there anything that I would do related to #OpPayPal? Absolutely, I would buy as much PayPal stock as I could. They haven't really changed the fundamental thing that PayPal is still the most ubiquitous payment system on the web. Those that actually used PayPal will get new accounts eventually oncethey have forgetten the protest. Those that didn't won't, but then from PayPal's point of view that doesn't really matter since they were not getting any money from them anyway. This storm will pass and I doubt it will have any noticeable effect to PayPal's profits. All Anonymous as done is cause a panic which will temporarily depress the stock value, so if I had some spare cash I would grab what I could and wait for the stock to rebound.

So long and thanks for (killing) all the fish

2011-07-14T16:06:00.000Z

The EU finally looks like it will get rid of its idiotic rules that force fishermen to dump perfectly good fish back into the sea dead. Well that only took 30 years for the message to get home. The BBC is of course reporting this in the most fawning terms, rather a more truthful account of how it was the EU's stupid rules and power grabs that created the awful situation that we find ourselves in with the North sea as a text book example of a tragedy of the commons.

There are two ways of dealing with a Tragedy of the Commons, you can either privatise it or you can socialise it. The EU tried to socialise the North Sea fishing grounds when the UK joined, because at the time all the best North Sea fishing grounds belonged to the UK. It has been a disaster. Since socialising the North Sea through the CFP has been so bad those opposed to the CFP often suggest trying out the other option and privatising it, like Iceland sucessfully did.

When this comes up knee jerk EU-philes who cannot bear admitting that there might be something wrong with the EU will whine that fish swim and therefore the sea cannot possibly be drived up into areas that are owned by individuals, obviously never having heard of the term 'fishing ground'.

Fish do swim, but they swim to stay in the same areas: the areas with the best conditions for their particular species. If you are looking for a fish that likes sandy bottoms there is no point looking in an area with rock at the bottom because they will not be there. It is well known that lots of speices love wreaks, so much so that ships have been deliberately scuttled to create interesting drive areas. Recent research shows that Cod, for example, do not just love wreaks, they find a particular wreak that they especially like and stay there. Then you get to the other point that anti-privatisation folk don't seem to get: the sea is really big. When the UK joined the EU it gave away the rights to an area of sea equal to its entire land area. Divided between the few thousand active fishermen left in the country the sea areas that are being talked about are not the size of farmer's fields on land, they are the size of cities. It would take days of swimming for the fish to move between them, if they wanted to, and most of the time they won't want to because were they are provides the enviroment that they need.

Why are some countries rich?

2011-07-12T19:13:00.001Z

Pirates ... Yar!

2011-07-11T18:25:00.002Z

Due to the piracy problem around Somalia the government is floating the idea of advising British shipping companies to put armed guards on their vessels, since the Royal Navy is no longer up to the task of defending the shipping lanes after 60 years of neglect. This is not as far fetched as it may seem as there are armed merchantmen sailing the world's oceans today, when nuclear fuel is shipped from the reprocessing plant at Sellafield it goes on a pair of ships, so that they can help to defend each other, each of which is armed. Perhaps we are about to see a return to the days of the East India Company with armed flotillas of merchant ships duelling pirates out on the high seas, and knee breeches. Or maybe not.

At the moment the piracy business, and it is a business, will be quite an attractive one for any Somali old enough to pick up a Cutlass. The potential rewards are huge, but the risks are little more than that would face a legitament fisherman. Getting a prosecution for piracy in a court is to difficult that what normally happens is that they are taken back to Somali waters and release. If they are picked up by the navy of a particularly soft country, like the UK, there is the danger they could even demand asylum and so get themselves a life in the west sponging off the welfare state.

The targets are generally not the ship's either, what they are after are the crews so that they can be held to ransom. This is a very old business model, and one that was used a lot on the Barbary coasts. The European powers of the time that were the pirate's prey tried many methods of getting rid of them such as simply paying protection money only to find that once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. In the end the solution was to take the battle to the pirates by blockading bombarding their home ports which turned the risk/reward equation decisively against further pirate activities. But a return to that is a even less likely than a return of knee breeches as it would require a political establishment with balls.

The consequences of a Fiat Currency

2011-07-10T09:15:00.000Z

Libertarianism and Somalia

2011-07-08T18:52:00.000Z

One of the more annoying arguments against Libertarianism, or any reduction in government, is that somehow it is a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to no government at all which would mean a lawless society where might is right. So not just the slippery slope fallacy you’ve got the slippery slope and a strawman.

Government is in no danger of withering away, if anything it has a continuous tendency to expand gobbling up more and more of civil society as it does. When fighting as hard as she could all Margret Thatcher could do was hold the state’s size the same. Even back in the victorian period Mikhail Bakunin pointed that out to Marx when he insisted that after the dictatorship of the Proletariat the state would whither away. Marx might not have lived to see it but he got his communist revolution and the state certainly did not whither away, it just got bigger as it tried to continue itself; just as was predicted.

Then there is the strawman that libertarians and those that want a small state actually want no state. Fine, point out the problems with having no state at all and the danger that without the state with its monopoly on violence you will get lots of competing violent factions seeking to tax everybody else. I don’t think that many Libertarians would have a problem with that. This is why they do not want to completely get rid of the state, but want it reduced so that all it does is stop the rise of competing warlords.

Though perhaps it would be good to look at one of the few places in the world that is completely without a government and is always brought up as if it was a model for Libertarians, Somalia. Somalia is a poverty-stricken, war torn, shit hole, but then it was still a poverty-stricken, war torn shit hole when it had a government. However despite having no government they do have the rule of law, they do have property rights, and by many measures life has actually improved for most people since the descent into anarchy when compared to how things were when there was a government. Hardly a slam dunk for the statists, even if it was not an enormous straw man.

Socialism makes people unethical

2011-07-07T16:11:00.001Z

Socialism makes people more unethical - fact.

The Euro deathwish

2011-07-07T16:09:00.000Z

The struggling economies of the Euro Area periphery need an interest rate rise like a hole in the head. So what does the European Central Bank give them? An interest rate rise. Greece will default, and the sooner the better for the Greeks, the question now are the other PIIGS. Portugal's debt has been downgraded to junk, much to the whining annoyance of the Chairman of the ECB, because that is what it is. The ECB has decided to ignore reality and keep on accepting Portuguese debt as collateral and I expect that there will be many banks eager to take up the ECB's offer of taking the junk off their hands. But even junk has some worth, the next stage is for the Portuguese government to be pushed into the same position as Greece and have to default at which point the debt will be worthless. The ECB seems as determined to drive itself into bankruptcy as it is to bankrupt the states that use its currency.

One rule for the ruled, another for the rulers

2011-06-30T17:48:00.002Z

Oh dear it looks like dear Lyn Brown has been caught out. Despite campaigning for an increase in the minimum wage, when other people have to pay, if the money is coming out of her own pocket she prefers not to pay anything at all.

The UK debt problem is between Ireland and Greece

2011-06-30T17:38:00.002Z

One in the eye for deficit deniers. The Economist has a chart showing how many cuts are needed to get government debt under control and back to safe levels, it is not pretty. The UK is way up the chart between Iceland and Greece, both of which are already bankrupt, which tells you how hard it will be to get the country back on an even keel, and so how vital it is to start now.

The EU wants kill the financial industry as well

2011-06-27T21:41:00.002Z

After the member states governments spent billions trying to keep the interbank lending market going the EU is going to kill it. They want to place a tax on all financial transactions which will make a large chunk of all low margin trades, like the millions of daily trades that keep the interbank mark going, unprofitable. The prospect of a profitable industry brought to its knees by government taxation is making the usual suspects on the left mastibate itself into a frenzy.

Of course the EU does not really care about any of the lefty wibble spouted by the Transaction Tax’s usual supporters, they are just after the money. The EU has been desperate to get more taxes under its direct control and so increase its direct income. It wants this to make it less reliant on the member states. They are just jumping on the bandwagon because it is going in a direction they like, the direction of higher taxes. The fact that this tax is not aimed at destroying the EU financial industry won’t mean that that will not be the result. I’m sure that estate agents on Bern will be rubbing their hands with glee, if this law goes into practice a very large chunk of the European financial industry is going to up sticks and move to Switzerland.

How the Cookie law crumbles

2011-06-27T09:18:00.001Z

The EU has an amazing ability to lay waste to anything that it touches. Everything from fisheries to economies; once the EU gets hold of them they die. The next target for the EU's hug of death is the internet. The EU has specified that all websites that have users from the EU (which means basically all of them, no matter where they are based) that use Cookies (which means basically all of them) must get explicit consent from the users before placing the Cookie. Yep, the EU looked at common websites and decided that what they really needed was a blizzard of pop-ups that had to be clicked through before the site became usable. Being an EU directive this gets pushed though the beaurocracies of the members states without the democratic elements of their governments being able to look at the proposal and tell them that they were talking out of their collective arseholes. The directive has been pushed through the British beaurocracy in the normal way and was supposed to have already come into force; however nobody was ready, not even the Information Commisioner who is supposed to enforce the law, so it was delayed by a year.

Information Commissioner's Office is now compliant with the law that they were supposed to enforce and a Freedom of Information request has been issued for their statistics. The result is striking, after getting in line with the EU's directive there was a 90% drop in the apparent usage of their website. Of course we have no idea whether this is because these people opted out, or whether they simply left to go elsewhere because having to click through a blizzard of pop-ups is nobody's idea of good web experience. For web shops this is dangerous as this is potentially a large number of customers going elsewhere. For advertising funded sites this is disasterous as this is 90% of their revenue evapourating overnight. Thank you EU, can we leave yet?

Finally some sense on Greece

2011-06-20T16:38:00.000Z

Finally somebody there is a politican talking sense about the Greek debt crisis, and it is Boris Johnson. Greece is bankrupt, so it should go bankrupt. Greece, like the UK, has no option other than to cut the size of its state because nobody can spend more than they earn year after year. Greece cannot grow its way out of trouble because being shackled inside the Euro it is going to continue to loose competitiveness. It should therefore get out of the Euro so that its currency can float downwards to the level that is appropriate for their economy. Even if it could start growing again it will never pay back the loans that it has, so it should not take on more loans that it will not pay back either. Before this crisis is over there is going to be a lot of pain for those holding Greek debt, but delaying things will only make it worse as the debts will be larger. Therefore it should just hold up its hands and admit that nobody that anybody stuipd enough to lend it money is not going to get that money back before the outstanding debt that it is going to default on gets even larger.

Not that this will happen though for three reasons. If Greece defaults cause huge problems for France and Germany. It will bankrupt the European Central Bank. Plus it will destroy the myth that european integration is inevitable, and without that myth to fall back on Eu-philes don't have many arguments left to support their dreams. The EU elites will not allow such an obvious hole to get blown in the side of their project. Instead of the correct option there is also a second option, the EU (meaning Germany) could keep bailing Greece out for as long as it cannot pay back its loans and since Greece is bankrupt that means throwing money at Greece forever. For this they will expect some say Greek financial policy in return, so that they can claim that Taxpayers money is being not wasted (which it is), and so the wheels of EU integration continue to grind onwards lubricated by blood on the streets of Athens.

Labour wants to give the Army to the EU

2011-06-20T16:36:00.000Z

The Tories might be rather wet when it comes to the EU, but they are still the least worst of the major parties. Don't believe me? Even they would think twice before handing over our armed forces to the EU, which is exactly what Labour want to do. However insane this policy was probably inevitable as it manages to get a hat-trick of lefty ideological prejudices:

Deficit denial, check.

Dislike of the British armed forces, check.

Selling out to the EU, check.

Policy proposals based on blind ideological prejudice are probably what should be expected from an opposition at this part of the electoral cycle, but this really takes this to a level that shows they really don't care about winning the next election.

Spleen venting in progress

2011-06-19T12:05:00.001Z

Ed Balls wants Plan B, but is that plan B for Balls or plan B for Bankruptcy. At least he has admitted now that there will probably not be a double dip recession, though I’m sure that certain lefties are going to continue wibbling on about how it is inevitable. He has also finally learned that if you want to help the economy tax cuts work far better than state spending. Not that he would ever continence less state spending, being a lefty. Unfortunately there is no money left to spend, Labour has already spent it all.

Labour not only spent all the money the state has, they spent all the money that the state could borrow, and then printed more money and spent that. The money has all been spent, its gone, the deficit needs to be cut and the only way to do that is to cut what the state does. Thanks to Labour’s massive overspending the only choices are cutting the bloated state down to size, and cut by more than the fractions of a percent that George Osbourne plans, or the state going bankrupt.

Then there is Jeff Randall of the Telegraph who has woken up to the fact that the Bank of England is trying to stealthily default on the massive debt that Labour created through inflation. Hello! It really took you this long to figure that out? The Bank of England spent the entire last year of Labour’s term of office printing money simply to stop the government going bankrupt. Of course there has been lots of inflation, and of course there will continue to be lots of inflation. Lots of inflation is what always happens when the state starts printing money to sustain itself, and under Labour the state printed a lot. Only once all of that money has worked its way into the system and reduced the value of money until it balances with the amount of value in the system will we go back to more normal inflation rates.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out Bob

2011-06-04T17:43:00.003Z

Some good news from the coalition, which doesn't happen very often. They are going to try and make sure those earning more than £100,000 a year loose their subsidised council houses, so they can be used for people that actually need them. The lefties will squeal, but then lefties always squeal whenever anybody even thinks about the state spending less money no matter how close to bankrupt it is. What I want to know is why it took so long to make such an obviously correct decision? I understand why such fabulously rich people were able to get council housing, it was so that well connected lefties (such as Bob Crow and Ken Livingstone's mate Lee Jasper) could live high on the hog at tax payers expense. That is what always happens when the left get power. What I don't understand is why Cameron's first act as he got through the doors of Number 10 wasn't to throw the sponging scum out and let them pay their way like everybody else.

It is the Left that lives in a parallel world

2011-04-19T07:12:00.003Z

Over at the Illiberal Conspiracy Duncan Weldon is wibbling that right wingers live in a parallel world to the left, and in his long, evidence free, screed that would the only part that might hold any truth. The world that right wingers live in be the parallel world were it is perfectly possible to cut government spending during a recession, like the USA did in the 1919-1920 recession, without generating a depression. A world where Hoover’s massive spending could not get him out of the Great Depression, nor could FDR by spending even more. Just like the massive government spending by the Japanese government could not get them out of their Lost Decade, or the high government spending by British governments could not get the country moving during the 1970s.

This would be the parallel world where higher debt means lower growth, but trying to deal with this debt through tax increases are more likely to cause recessions that spending cuts because tax increases are highly contractionary.

In the lefty world the solution to absolutely everything if for the government to spend more and more money that it does not have. Running a 10% deficit is fine to them, and in their world spending more than you earn forever has no consequences, such as having your debt rating downgraded making this debt more and more expensive.

The right might be a parallel world to the one the lefties imagine themselves to be in, but it is the real world. The world were debts have to be paid back and money does not rain from the skies. The world were actions have consequences.

Another day of lefty violence

2011-03-27T19:20:00.003Z

Another day of lefty protests, so another day of riots. They compare themselves with Libyan rebels or those in Egypt, yet they forget that those fighting against these socialist tyrants do not have any peaceful means of having their say in the running of their country. In this country everybody gets a vote, including these Labour Party boot boys; we recently had an election, and they lost.

Faux-anarchists decided to smash up some banks and Starbucks franchises, ‘cos they’re like capitalist pigs init. The faux-anarchists clearly not seeing the irony in proclaiming anarchy, while smashing things up in protest that the state might not grow quite as quickly as it had been doing.

Then Tarquin and Jocasta decided to occupy Fortnum and Mason, as the only shop that mummy goes to they must have figured that they could bring the entire economy to a stop.

Inflation will get worse

2011-03-22T15:28:00.000Z

Inflation is up, again. Labour spent their entire last year in office using freshly printed money to pay for the bloated public sector that they had created, and when you print money you get inflation. As J M Keynes said when the same thing happened in the 1920s:

"The inflationism of the currency systems of Europe has proceeded to extraordinary lengths. The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance."

This new money is starting to leak out into the economy with obvious results. Luckily it is leaking out slowly, had it all gone in one go the UK would have been like Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Labour had a choice, they could have cut their spending but having spent so much time building up the payroll vote they were not going to ditch it just before an election. So they printed money instead knowing that they would probably loose anyway and so it would be for the next government to clean up the mess. They got to use their payroll vote to cushion the blow at the election knowing the problems would land on somebody else's desk, so you can see why Labour was so keen on it

Keeping the public sector bloated was not the only reason that this was such a good move for Labour because inflation helps debtors (like the state) and hurts those that save to help make themselves self reliant, who Labour hate. However back in the 1920s money printing, and the inflation that it brought, destroyed the middle classes who were the rock of stability to the liberal and democratic Weimar Republic leading to a choice between being thrown into a Fascist tyranny or a Socialist one. Again the attractions to Labour are obvious.

There has been a lot of money printing going on so there will be a lot of inflation to come. This is only the start.

The EU really hates business doesn't it?

2011-03-10T12:20:00.000Z

The EU is an amazing organisation. It manages to turn every single thing that it touches to shit, and yet still manages to retain the devotion of the political elites and the BBC. When the EU does something you expect it be terrible. An EU politician trousering huge sums for very little provokes no outrage, even when they decide that they are litterally above the law. Finding one that isn't corrupt is much more unusual. It takes something that is truely batshit insane to escape the cloak of boredom that it spins around itself and get noticed.

This week they managed it not once, but twice.

The first is that they want to make Cookies opt in. This might seem like a noble thing to do, except that the EU will make EU web applications unusable. Whenever you hit an advertising funded site that originates in the EU you will now be presented with a blizzard of pop ups which you have to OK before being able to use it. Compare this to the same service offered from anywhere else on the planet which would just let you get on and do whatever it was you wanted to do. It does not take a genius to work out which service is going to die on its arse, but then this is the organisation that thinks that if you throw a dead fish into the sea it comes back to life.

Trying to kill an entire emerging market sector and forcing anybody wanting to set up a web business it to move to the US would take a lot to top, but the EU has managed it. The EU Parliament has voted that it wants to destroy the entire financial industry within the borders of the EU. It wants to kill the overnight interbank lending market, you know the thing that the EU member states just spent billions trying to maintain, and make every single loan, insurance policy, or currency transaction much more expensive for everybody in the EU. Luckily this vote isn't binding. The EU parliament is nothing but a talking shop that acts with little more than a rubber stamp to give a vague nod towards democratic accountability no ability to either start or stop legislation.

Inflation is here

2011-02-15T23:15:00.002Z

The government is forced to pay for its massive over spending by printing money, and then the later inflation builds up as the value of money drops when the the new money leaks out. It was always obviously going to happen as it has happened over, and over again before. Unfortunately Gordon Brown decided that the country was in such dire straits that drastic actions, with very obvious consequences, where needed. Without all of that freshly printed cash then terrible things could have happened, like the Labour payroll vote having to accept less of other people's money.

State money for the EDL says Sunny

2011-02-11T16:21:00.003Z

Sunny Hundal thinks that the EDL should get state funding ... oops sorry ... they have the wrong skin colour. Extremist bigots with brown skins however must get as much state money as they can. Presumably those tape recorded sermons about killing gays, comparing women to uncovered meat, and copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are not flying off the shelves as well as they once did so they need a bit of state help make sure that medieval psychopaths are properly represented in our multicultural society.

That weird lefty world view

2011-01-17T20:12:00.001Z

The Illiberal Conspiracy is currently hosting a text book example of the far left’s complete blindness to reality. The author starts off in a rant against the police saying that people protesting against student fees should stop doing organised protests to Parliament or Trafalgar Square.

However then it gets weirder as in the comments he complains about the way that Sunny edited his draft. In the original draft Bard-Rosenberg explicitly said that he is happy for there to be rioting and destruction on protests, which Sunny edited out, before complaining that the police use tactics designed to contain riots when dealing with the student protests. In the original draft he says that the police should be seen as legitimate targets, for fire extinguishers thrown from the rooftops presumably. Sunny’s edited version of advising organisers not to end their marches in one of the usual locations transforms in the original draft to not letting the police know at all where they are off to and simply swarming through London trying to cause the maximum amount of disruption to the maximum number of people. I can really see that winning them the support of ordinary people; that is the people that they want money from in order to make sure that they have an advantage over in the job market … not. As Sunny said in his comment on the editing that he did Bard-Rosenberg seemed to be arguing that the protests weren’t working because they don’t embrace the violence enough!

Those organising the student protests where given a chance to protest peacefully without the use of kettling or any of the other tactics reserved to contain potential riots, and the blew it. They demonstrated that these protests would turn into riots, as they all have, so the police switched tactics to try and contain the riots when they happened. This is very simple cause and effect, something that lefties always have trouble grasping. Perhaps the servants on this particular Tarquin’s daddy’s estate get paid off so as not to complain when the young master tried to drop fire extinguishers on them? However out here in the real world the police are there to stop rioting, the destruction or property, and attempts to kill people; that is everything that the protestors did and feel are completely justified tactics.

If you want to riot you have to face the consequences. So long as the police have reason to believe that the protests will turn into riots they will use the tactics that they have developed for containing riots. That those attending the riots cannot seem to understand this very simple relationship really is a damning inditement of the way that university education has fallen since Labour decided that everybody must go.

A left wing rioter goes to jail

2011-01-11T22:13:00.004Z

Today a lefty was put in jail for trying to kill a policeman, or anybody else that happened to be under him, by dropping a fire extinguisher from the top of tall building. This event, while shocking, does have a striking resemblance to how striking miners murdered a taxi driver for being willing to drive strike breakers by dropping a concrete block on his car while he drove down the motorway after the last time Labour got thrown out of power for ruining the country. Just like then the more moderate left has been full of excuses for their boot-boys violence. Then in the USA another lefty tries to murder a US congresswoman, since left this time thinks they can smear the right by his actions they are full of condemnations this time. That will vanish if the fact of his real political allegiance is brought to the public attention. Just as there is nothing but the sound of tumbleweeds around the Labour politicians that stole money from the tax-payer. The left have a long history of violence when they cannot get their way so one prediction that you can bank on this year is that there will be more rioting lefties.

The Euro break up edges closer

2010-11-30T18:56:00.003Z

Italy was not hit as badly as the rest of the Eurozone by the resent economic troubles. It did not suffer the same huge drop in growth or bursting of a property bubble, but that is because Italy has been bouncing along the bottom in a permanent slump for years. It is one of the countries that needed the low interest rates to keep its economy alive, while those same low interest rates were blowing up enormous property bubbles in Ireland and Spain. What it needed, and still needs, is to get out of the Euro and devalue in order to try and regain some of the competitiveness that it has been loosing against Germany for the last decade. This has been the case for a long time. The last time that it bubbled up to the surface was back in 2005 and some Italian politicians were even willing to say it, something that seems unthinkable to the political class of any other EU country. However if Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph is correct and the debt contagion is starting to effect Italy then this time they might actually get the medicine they need by being forced out of the Euro. There is absolutely no way that the other EU members could raise enough money to bail out the third largest Eurozone without it dragging them down as well. Germany might stand to gain by a little chaos around the edges of the Eurozone keeping the price of the Euro down to aid its manufactures, but it stands to loose everything if Italy sucks it down with it into bankruptcy.

Guess what happened at the lefty protest?

2010-11-30T18:27:00.002Z

Violence which should come as no surprise. Neither should the way that the Labour councillors chose to implement their cuts in the way that would have the most negative impact at the front line, but what are people's lives when you can score a few partisan points?

the lefty bleating goes on and on

2010-11-29T21:11:00.001Z

The lefties are still bleating about how the police stopped them from rioting when they really really wanted to. Oh dear the little dears got bottled up my the police and poor Jocasta hasn’t been so cold since daddy’s driver broke down on the way back from the gymkhana.

Demonstration one: there was no kettle, so the students rioted smashing up a building and attempted to murder police officers and their fellow rioters.

Demonstration two: there was a kettle, and there was no riot or serious injuries.

The police have a set of procedures for dealing with potentially violent crowds. They initially didn’t think that the student protests where going to be violent so they didn’t use them; they where wrong. On the next protest they learned from the first and changed tactics. If the protestors did not want to be treated like they where violent then they should not have been violent, simples.

the illiberal conspiracy of eugenics

2010-11-26T14:06:00.003Z

Oh dear the illiberal conspiracy is getting all hot under the collar with an attempt to claim that one of the left's horrible ideas wasn't actually a left wing idea. The left wing idea is eugenics and the fall guy they are using is Lord Flight. All he did was point out the obvious that fact that people respond to incentives. If you remove a subsidy for something you are going to get less of it. The actual effect of the removal of child benefits for the well off is unlikely to produce much of a change as it does not do much to change the incentives, the level of the subsidy to them was simply too low. However this is absolutely not the same as saying that undesireables should be sterilised, as the left would like to twist his words to mean. Sterlisation of the wrong sort of people is much more of a Left Wing idea, and not something of the right.

During the interwar period Eugenics was highly popular amoungst the intelligentsia, and that did include those from both left and right, but it was mainly a left-wing progressive thing. The leading lights of the eugenics movement included icons of the modern left such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. Proponents also included the Fabians H G Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Amoungst Wells' fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were also strong supporters of Eugenics, when they were not shilling for mass murderers like Stalin. It is not a co-incedence that when a bill to introduce Eugenics in the UK was put before the house it was done so by the Labour Party MP and Fabian, Archibald Church.

Not that left wing support for Eugenics was confined to the UK. In Germany Alfred Ploetz who coined the term racial hygiene, and laid the foundations of the Nazi ideology, was a socialist and had to flee Germany because of Otto von Bismarck's anti-socialist laws. Ploetz himself wasn't actually that anti-semtic in his early life (this changed later) citing Marx as proof as to the quality of the Jewish race, but Marx's own final solution to the Jewish question was "the emancipation of society from Judaism". Polly's social democratic paradice of Sweden had forced sterilisation until 1975. Some countries behind the Iron Curtain, such as Czechoslovakia, also had forced sterlisations, and others, such as Communist Romania, had it as state policy that women should be turned into baby factories. The largest ongoing programme of state enforced sterlisation is in China under the Communist government there, a programme with eugenic elements as it allows for different numbers of births depending on which ethnic group the parents belong to. The left's need to control is insatiable so it comes as no suprise that it extended as much into the bedroom as it did everywhere else.

The reasoning that there might be some kind of right wing connection to eugenics was basically that it is nasty and so inherently right wing, while making sure not to mention how much eugenics is a left wing thing. In so much as a reason was given it was to try and position Lord Flight into some kind of intelectual tradition stemming from Malthus. He couldn't use any more modern proponents of eugenic for the obvious reason that would have quickly ended up showing how deeply eugenics and the left are linked, but if you want to find the real heirs to Malthus then you need to look no futher than the Green movement, which is indesputably part of the modern left. Charles Goethe a leading member of the early enviromentalist movement in the USA and a member of the Eugenics Society. He was not alone as an enviromentalist there, there were plenty of others. The need to reduce the population is still very much a part of the green movement with its strong anti-human undercurrent creating such organisations as Optimum Population Trust. The OTP might be rather blunt in its anti-human message but sentiment that there are too many people can be found in the core green arguments that there are simply too many people wanting requiring too many resources for the planet to sustain.

Labour MEP tells UK to join the Euro

2010-11-25T13:38:00.003Z

The Euro is strangling the countries trapped within it. It was always going to do this as it was always going to be wrong for most of the countries using it. Keeping us out was the one good thing that we must praise Gordon Brown for. Eurosceptics have been predicting that this would happen for years, but now that the crisis is finally here what kind of idiot would advocate that the UK joins? Only the kind of idiot that can become a Labour MEP.

The illiberal conspiracy

2010-11-25T12:08:00.003Z

Another violent protest, another po-faced article supporting it at the illiberal conspiracy.

"On the train on the way home last night, a woman opposite – very prim middle aged and upper middle class – surprised me by expressing her heartfelt support"

Which does not surprise me at all. It is much better for her that her little Tarquin gets his education paid for by those worse off than herself, than for her to have to reach into her own designer handbag in order to support the little darling.

"The truth is that protesters do not need to win sympathy because we are not fighting for the rights of protesters, and we are not politicians. "

Nope, you are fighting because Labour lost the last election so now you are throwing your toys out of the pram in a fit of pique.

"When the issue is as close to home as ‘can my child afford to get A Levels’"

Which just shows that this protest is just about lefties doing what lefties do and smashing stuff up, rather than any actual policies that are being proposed since nobody is proposing that there is any need to pay for A Levels.

"And so it was with the waitress who brought me my post-protest Pizza tonight."

Dinning out in London, an obvious sign of improverisment.

"She was worried about her windows being smashed."

And possibly her head as well, from thrown bricks and fire extinguishers as happened in the previous protest. Luckily the police decided contain them this time so it was only smashed windows and there was no repeat of the attempt at murder.

"She was cross with the protest."

Good thing they don't need any public sympathy then.

"But she had decided that she opposed increases in fees ‘where will people get £9000 from?’."

Here I am sure that this waitress would become even more cross if she knew where that £9000 would be coming from? Under the coalition proposal it would be coming from their pay packets once they have qualified and are earning a sufficient amount of money, far more money than that waitress would have been on. That if they earn £25,000 she will be taking home £1,600 per month out of which she will have to pay £30. My God! That’s a whole SKY-TV package, or two outings to Pizza Hut! For education? What sacrifices are we asking poor little Tarquin to make.

However at the moment that £9000 is still being taken, but it is being taken from everybody including that waitress herself. But then to these lefties it is preferrable for a poor waitress to subsidise those that are already in a privileged position extend their privileged position rather than to change the status quo. I hope that Adam Ramsay tipped well.

faux-anarchists and student protestors

2010-11-25T09:41:00.002Z

Isn't it interesting how when the left does not get its way all of its commitment to democracy evapourates. When the Tarquins and Jemimas of the oh-so-chic radical left see their side loose they petulantly stamp their feet and demand that it be declared the winner anyway. They do not realise that there is no money left and that the state, unlike their daddy dearest, cannot keep on writing big cheaques to buy them whatever toys their heart is set on this week. There is no money left. All but the most fringy parties understood that most people realised this and campaigned to be the ones that would implement the cuts. Labour lost. Get over it.

This does form a pattern that can be seen a lot:

If lots of people want a lefty policy then it is the democratic will of the people, and cannot be denied.
If lots of people want a policy that lefties disagree with then it is evil popularism, and must be stopped at all costs.

If socialist policies get the a party thrown out after one term then they add up the vote share of all of the parties they consider lefty to claim that socialism always had majority support.
If non-lefties combine in a coalition with over 50% of the vote share they say it is illegitiment and they have no mandate.

There was an election to decide the parties that would implement the cuts to stop the UK looking like Ireland, and they lost. The coalition parties gained over 50% of the vote, and the Tories alone gained more individual votes that Labour had in their landslide victories. But as this was not a victory for the left, so lefty thugs and boot-boys start smashing things up in order to get through violence what they cannot get through persuasion. I wonder if the faux-anarchists that were smashing things up yesterday realise the irony of supposed 'anarchists' protesting against reducing the size of the state? Probably not.

Still no sign of that double dip

2010-11-24T14:40:00.002Z

The economy continues to grow nicely, with expectations that this will continue. In fact both of the countries that have the most to commit to subsequent decreases in government spending have plenty of confidence about the future. Not that that will stop the left for banging on about how the only way to growth is spending borrowed money until the country is bankrupt.

More lefty protests ...

2010-11-24T14:33:00.001Z

... more lefty violence.

... because scary stories are fun

2010-11-23T12:11:00.002Z

One of the annoying things about reading lefty websites is the way that they constantly bang on about how a double dip recession is inevitable because of the rather feeble cuts that the government is going to make to state spending. But why should the Left get all the fun making up scare stories which almost certainly won't happen? Here is another scary scenario for a possible future, but one that is much more likely than Britain going the way of Ireland because the government cut the level of government spending back to were it was in 2007.

1. The auditors come in and demand that Ireland keeps on cutting the size of government spending, they can do nothing else to get rid of their debts, in exchange for EU loans. The EU will now scrutinise the Irish budgets for as long as Ireland is reliant on EU money.
2. The state cuts, but with debt-deflation now firmly in place, thanks to the Euro, things just keep getting worse domestically.
3. This causes the next wave of defaults sending Ireland even further up shit creek.
4. As the second crisis flares up the Irish government is forced to go to the EU for even more money, trading in even more of their power over Ireland to get it.
5. The money is provided, but with harsh penalty clauses because the German electorate, who are paying for all of this, don't want their money wasted.
6. Of course with the EU now in charge the chances of the money not being wasted are roughly zero. Those with EU connections get wealthy and everybody else gets screwed.
7. The Sinn Fien expands in the south into a small but real political power. However since it is anti-EU everything is done to keep it, and its supporters, marginalised. The fact that it is made up of former terrorists is not the problem, the fact that they are anti-EU is.
8. As the Irish depression continues people start to blame various 'out groups' with, nasty populist measures being proposed to deal with them which strangely never seem to create any problems for them with the ECHR despite being exactly the kind of thing it was supposed to stop. This scape goating has no positive effect what so ever.
9. Along with this there is a dramatic rise in the far left. This is another aspect of the previous point, since all the far left do is scape goat sucessful people.
10. There is significant civil disobedence against the authorities, getting violent as the far left gets involved.

Here we get to the tipping point either things can get slowly better and Ireland return to a new equilibrium as a poor vassal of Brussels or:

11. The far left switch from civil disobedience turns to outright terrorism.
12. The EU sends in its gendarmrie bolstered by units from the EU Rapid Reaction Force under the extensive powers that the Lisbon Treaty has given the EU for internal security. For political reasons the UK sits this one out, the idea of British troops marching through the streets of Dublin has too many historical resonances.
13. That they were not British does not matter and areas of Southern Ireland become like Northern Ireland.
14. The long Second Irish War of Independence begins.

A clash of symbols

2010-11-23T11:05:00.000Z

I've just read Laurrie Penny's article on Thatcher at the New Statesman, it isn't good but apparently it is OK to do a research free hatchet job because to her Thatcher is a symbol. However one thing that I doubt crossed her mind as she ground out her latest offering was that to other people Atlee is also a symbol, a symbol of decline and failure. He is a symbol of financial and moral bankruptcy. It was his government that formed the post-war socialist consensus. It was that consensus that Britain must inevitably decline, while those that stuck to free market principles speed ahead. It was that consensus that said that left wing violence was fine, and it was OK to use your boot boys to hold people to ransom if you could claim to be a lefty. It was that consensus that rising in crime was unstoppable and inevitable, as the murder rates climbed when those that grew up under the socialist post-war consensus hit their villainous peak in their late teens and early twenties.

Thatcher did not believe in Atlee's post-war consensus. She believed that British industry could actually produce things that people wanted to buy. She believed that people would be better off working rather than being forced to go on strike. Above all she believed in Britain. But that is not the reason that the left hate Thatcher so much, the reason for the hate is that she was right. The British decline was not some inevitable historical process. It was the result of failed policies: Atlee's policies. He took a Britain of reducing crime and increasing wealth, and threw it away in a failed socialist experiment. Thatcher started the, long, slow, painful process of reversing Altee's failure. It was hard going, and is nowhere near finished even now, but it worked, and that is why the left hates her.

Good and Bad ways to protest

2010-11-12T13:37:00.001Z

This is a good protest: peaceful and audatious. This is a fairly good protest: a completely tastless but a non-violent expression of their views. This is a bad protest: it was violent to the point of attempted murder (so obviously left wing). Hopefully next time Tarquins and Jemimas will learn attempting to kill people because Labour could not win a free and fair election is not a good thing.

Violence and the Left

2010-11-11T08:49:00.004Z

Oh dear, the left has shown once again how little respect it has for democracy. The country as a whole is in a hole thanks to years of exessive state spending. We cannot possibly continue spending so much more than we earn like during the Labour years. State spending must be reduced. Everybody knows this, and everybody knew this before the recent elections to choose the government which was going to implement the cuts. But the left does not like the fact that their party was not the one chosen, so they riot. What they cannot get through reasoned debate and gentle persuasion, they demand through violence and threats. This should suprise nobody, the history of the Twentieth century stands as an object leason to the violence constantly bubbling beneath left-wing politics. Violence and left wing politics fit together like an iron fist inside a chain mail glove, but it cannot be given into because the only alternative to cutting the state is that the state goes bankrupt.

The killer Hirst weakens the cause of human rights

2010-11-04T08:13:00.002Z

The remorseless killer John Hirst was been ripped apart on the Jeremy Vine Show. Which is a good thing. He, of course, will think differently about that. Just as he thinks differently about whether normal humans to feel remorse when you blugden an old lady to death, or whether remorse is just a middle class thing.

The recording is a car crash and will be used again and again by people that want to get rid of the whole of the ECHR. He compares killers, like him, not being able to vote is compared to Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. It is not comparable in the slightest degree. The right to life is a true human right, like the right to freedom of speech or freedom of conscience, and other ‘negative rights’. Voting is not a human right, it is a civil privilege, and because the ECHR mixed up these two Hirst’s actions have helped those that want the entire thing, including the real human rights, removed from the statute books.

The killer Hirst gloats over his victory. It is as if he has just won some complicated game in order to stick it to ‘the man’. He has a no idea of what his little victory might cost everybody else, but then he has spent his whole life not thinking of anything but himself. His is a life of taking from society and never giving anything back. He has never held down a job for long and spent most of his life leeching off of others: before he killed his old and infirm landlady as a petty thief, afterwards living at tax payer’s expense.

Maybe to him this is just a game to pass the time, a game that he now thinks he has won. Having won the killer Hirst says that he can now dictate to everybody else what the law is, not parliament, as in the recording the killer Hirst says it is now him that gets to decide who votes, and for somebody that has spent so long fighting to change the law, at our expense, he has very little concept that the law also applies to him.

What brings the ECHR into disrepute

2010-11-02T09:53:00.003Z

This is the kind of thing that brings the ECHR into disrepute. It is also the kind of thing that is inevitable because it contains so many 'positive rights' that are there to be used to try and re-engineer society, rather than true 'negitive rights' which are simply about stopping other people imposing their will on you.

Gay Research

2010-10-13T21:20:00.002Z

Some really interesting research on how people go out to people get together. A few things stood out for me, firstly it should hopefully help to kill that stupid 'gay panic' excuse for homophobic violence. Then there was how many people that identify as strait are at least a 1 on the Kinsey scale4. finally, wow! Can those Lesbians party!

Congratulations Lui Xiaobo

2010-10-08T13:56:00.004Z

Congratulations to Lui Xiaobo on winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize. It is just unfortunate that the prize commitee decided to make the prize worthless by giving to last year to somebody simply for being left wing and getting elected. Oh and how is that hopey changey thing getting on by the way?

The cuts have begun - GOOD

2010-10-04T21:38:00.001Z

I expected that the reactionary left would oppose the reforms. Unthinking opposition is simply what they do. However I am little disappointed that DK opposed this reduction in the Welfare State, even if it is so tiny.

Everybody must realise that there is no magic pony that shits gold secreted in deep in the bowls of Whitehall. There is no money left. The government has to spend less. Running such a huge deficit forever is simply not an option. If you have to cut somewhere it is probably best to take the cost of a couple bottles of nice wine off those earning almost twice the average salary so that you do not have to take so much off those where this is the difference between eating and not.

However that isn’t all, George has placed a cap on the amount that you can take the benefits system for. That means the chav scum that spread their legs for a living are going to find that they now have a limit on the amount they can earn from their chosen career.

In which Polly meets Red Ed

2010-10-01T09:32:00.001Z

Down in the darkness of the castle dungeon the pitiful wretch stirred as she felt the chitinous legs of a creature crawling over her bare thigh. Once she had been a princess with villas in many lands and betrothed to a powerful Viking warrior, but he had been unable to love her in the way she demanded and so had thrown her down into the dungeons. At first she might still catch glimpses of her warrior prince through the bars of her cell. Then one night she had heard sounds of a battle going on above her and after that her mighty Viking was never seen again. She had been alone for a very long time now.

She scooped up the invertebrate and pressed it to her lips for a gentle kiss like you might give to a lover.
"Oh Mr Millipede, your carapace is so smooth, so hard." she crooned "I thought that my Viking warrior would be hard, but he wasn't. He was never hard, but you will be my Mr Millipede. You will be hard all the time."

The arthropod's legs marched over her skin and sent shivers up her spine, but its primitive brain had sensed that there was no sustenance to be found here. The millipede crawled down across her grim smeared wedding dress and then disappeared into a crack in the wall of her cell.

"Don't leave me Mr Millipede. Please don't leave ..." she pleaded, but it was no use so Polly let her head fall back in despair and howled at the moon.

Diseconomies of Scale

2010-09-23T13:45:00.000Z

Yes, diseconomies of scale exist in the public sector just as they do in the private sector.

“Countries with small public sectors report significantly higher PSE [public sector efficiency] indicators than countries with medium-sized or big public sectors. All these findings suggest diminishing marginal products of higher public spending. The results that we get from the production-frontier-related FDH analysis, which uses the PSP indicators, are also in line with the aforementioned conclusions. Small governments tend to show better results. Spending in big governments could be, on average, about 35 per cent lower to attain the same public sector performance. The calculations also point out that EU 15 countries show relatively low public sector efficiency when compared with the US and also the average of the other OECD countries in the sample. EU 15 countries are using 27 per cent more public spending than the “most efficient” countries with similar PSP indicators. Spending for the average of the other OECD countries is “only” 11 percent higher than necessary.”

Better Lives Through Individualism

2010-09-23T13:40:00.001Z

"Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker."

— Paul Krugman

Here is a really interesting peice of economic research about the way that productivity changes in collectivist and individulistic cultures. Their model, which seems to fit the data that they provide, is that more collectivist cultures will be better at working smoothly together to make an existing process efficient. If the world was static then this would mean that more collectivist cultures would be better places to live than more individualistic ones, but the world is not static. The second part of their model is that innovations can make a big difference to productivity by finding radically better ways of doing things, and individualism better encourages innovation than collectivism because it places a greater value on outstanding individuals rather than everybody being the same. Over time this means that more individualistic cultures gain a higher GDP per worker (productivity) because they are more innovative. So over time a more individualistic culture will have better standards of living than a more collectivist one. This conclusion is baked up by the data that they provide showing that more individualistic cultures have better GDP per worker than collectivist ones. This will mean that more individualistic cultures will have better standards of living than collectivist ones.

The Government Spending Mountain

2010-09-23T08:54:00.001Z

A good illustration of the rate that the government spends our money, and so why the we must cut spending.

Classic Murphy

2010-09-22T13:26:00.001Z

Everybody's favourite retired accountant, and hypocritical tax avoider, is spouting off on the Illiberal Conspiracy about how the state must never cut anything and we should just wait for more money to fall out of the sky. Apparently the worst thing that you can do when you are spending over 10% more than you earn is to cut back on how much you spend: his clients must have loved him, and later their bankrupcy lawyers must have loved him even more.

Apparently because financial institutions are required to hold a certain amount of AAA rated assets, like government debt, then if government does not perpetually increase the amount of debt that it owes then the banking system would collapse. In Murphy-world the only assets that hold a AAA rating are UK gilts, and in Murphy-world gilts are such magical instruments that they will always and forever be rated as AAA no matter how much debt the UK accumulates. The actual ratings agencies might have different ideas about that saying:

“Moody's stable outlook... is largely driven by the government's commitment to stabilise and eventually reverse the deterioration in its financial strength.”

but what do they know? After all they only asign the ratings. No! The government must spend, spend, spend! The small fact that debt interest payments are beginning to take off as the debt compounds up should not worry us, but if the government employees have to make do with same average salaries, pensions, and perks as everybody else then the world will fall apart around us. If the massed ranks of outreach workers and five-a-day co-ordinators cannot bugger off on full pay for six months of the year by claiming 'stress' then civilisation will fall. What would we do without Democratic Services Officers (salary £25,515 to £33,306 pa)? And should one single NHS Specialty Doctor in Homeopathy (salary £36,807 to £68,638) loose their job then everybody in the country will die horribly!

Religion is Stupid

2010-09-10T16:11:00.002Z

OKCupid have run statistical tests on their members and found that statistically religious people are more stupid than the non-religious based on their writing abilities, but then declaring that you have an invisible friend when you are more than 6 should have been a bit of a hint as well.

Note that for each of the faith-based belief systems I've listed, the people who are the least serious about them write at the highest level. On the other hand, the people who are most serious about not having faith (i.e. the "very serious" agnostics and atheists) score higher than any religious groups.

The BBC is Biased says BBC head

2010-09-02T11:22:00.001Z

So yet another BBC employee has gone on the record to say that the BBC, like every other media organisation, has editorial biases. Yet the Left will still claim that the BBC, alone in the world, is free of editorial biases. Maybe this is because the biases that BBC shows tend to be the same as the middle class metropolitan Left.

The Budget was Progressive

2010-08-26T15:02:00.003Z

As explained by Andy Cooke @ 168 on Political Betting the Coalition budget is 'progressive' by any reasonable definition, however I guess they needed to please the lefty group that was paying for the report.

I’ve had more of a poke around the IFS report. It’s an impressive example of how to present facts to support whatever case you want to make.
The important data is in Appendix A and Appendix B, as well as note 5 to the main paper.

Appendix A shows the Budget effects without their admittedly uncertain estimates of the effects of renewed DLA testing and the Housing Benefit effects, as well as the Tax Credit changes. Figures A.1 and A.2 (effects to 2012 and 2014) are the key ones.

If you pretend that Osborne had no power to change Darling’s pre-announced changes (that they are binding on him and were the baseline), then the blue bars are what you’ll concentrate on. If you want to see the overall effect of the Budget (assuming that Osborne had the power to implement whatever changes he wanted to, comparing the output of the Budget with what the state was before) then the black line marked “Total” is the overall effect of the Budget. Because that is the effect of the Budget. You’ll note that the poorest deciles are best off (1st 2nd and 3rd deciles are no worse off and in most cases better off), the middle deciles are slightly worse off (gentle downward slope from 4th to 8th deciles), a downward jump for the 9th and a big downward jump for the 10th.

Apparently “progressive” doesn’t mean what I thought it did …

Appendix B contains the details of how they came up with their changes:

Housing Benefit: They use the DWP paper, whose core assumption is “assuming that they would be renting at the same rent level in the same property and with the same household composition. No behavioural changes have been assumed, such as customers moving to a cheaper property or landlords reducing their rents. As a result, when we report ‘losers’ or ‘losing out’, these could be actual losers (seeing their benefit decrease) or notional losers, meaning that they would not see any benefit decrease, but would receive less HB compared to what they would have done under the previous scheme. So, for example, a new LHA customer applying for benefit after measures take effect may ‘notionally lose out’, meaning that they would receive less than under the current arrangements.”

They then (in essence) assign the savings estimated amongst the claimants as if it’s coming out of their pockets.

The other two are done as follows:

Disability Living Allowance
“The Budget policy costings document says that the effect of this reform will be to remove DLA from around 20% of claimants. We randomly remove entitlement to DLA from the appropriate number of claimants in order to match the long run saving from this policy (around £1.4 billion).”

Tax credit reforms
“There is no way to identify those who will be affected by changes to the way in-year awards are calculated so we simply reduce all tax credit awards by the same percentage amount so that the total amount saved from the policy is correct (around £1 billion).”

These aren’t exactly rigorous techniques, so I’d say that the published headlines are not exactly sturdy. Even with all this done, they have to gloss over the fact that the richest decile still bear a far greater share of the impact than the poorer deciles (in table 2.1) and the expenditure tables in Table 3.1 (which they’ve previously argued (when exploraing VAT effects) should be taken as better indicators when indirect taxation is looked at (overcome effects of wealth-rich but income-low students, etc) still have a total effect that’s progressive pretty much throughout.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the extrapolation to 2014 (on a static rather than dynamic basis, and ignoring the fact that we’ll have four more Budgets by then) is not one on which you’d want to hang your hat.

It’s intriguing how they’ve taken an analysis that shows that the Budget is definitely progressive up until 2012 and managed
to present it as “regressive”.

I’m rather disappointed in the IFS. The comments from those sympathetic to the “regressive” argument are understandable - confirmation bias is present in all of us, but the main news outlets (and the Coalition defence especially) is rather disappointing.

Labour financially bankrupt

2010-08-20T15:55:00.003Z

According to John Prescot the Labour Party are on the verge of bankruptcy. Financial bankruptcy that is, they have been morally bankrupt for a very long time. Labour must have run their own finances as badly as they did the country's while they were in power. Hopefully they will apply the same solutions that they want to apply to their own finances as they want to apply to the country, and simply crank up the borrowing and spending in an unthinking spending splurge. That way Labour can erase itself from the political scene and let the more sensible parties try to sort out the problems that they and their socialism have caused.

Homeopathy in the NHS

2010-08-16T14:40:00.003Z

There are many on the left that claim that anybody proposing any cut to the NHS might as well be throwing babies into the barbeque pits. They claim that the NHS is the envy of the world, unlike the French system which is merely the best in the world, and an organisation of unrivalled in efficiency. However while the NHS is paying £36,807 to £68,638 as a Specialty Doctor in Homeopathy for handing out water and a bit of sympathy that is simply not true. While taxpayer's money is being flushed down the toilet on homeopathy then clearly more cuts are needed in the NHS.

Different approaches to the Pakistan flood

2010-08-15T21:03:00.003Z

Today Ban Ki-moon has asked the governments of the world to try and and do more to help with the flood in Pakistan. A fortnight ago Rotary, a voluntary organisation, in had already housed 1000 families through Shelterbox, a charitable organisation based in Helston in Cornwall. Not that you would hear much about that from the national media, hundreds of separate organisations in the voluntary sector simply got down and did their thing as soon as they heard what was happening without any pleading from any centralised organiser.

EU regulations can make life more dangerous

2010-08-10T09:45:00.001Z

Fishing is the most dangerous industy in the UK. Fishermen in Britain have a one in 20 chance of being killed on the job during the course of their working lives, however it used to be a profitable industry that supported 10s of thousands of people. That was before we joined the EU and became involved in the CFP, the EU mysteriously gaining a competence over fishing that it had never held before the UK, with its large fishing grounds, joined. The UK gave away a fishing area equivalent to its entire land surface. This fishing area contains some of the best fishing grounds in Europe, and were far better than what anybody else put in. It used to be teeming with fish, but no longer. The EU's Common Fisheries Policy has transformed it into a wasteland through a text book example of the Tragedy of the Commons.

There are also some other effects on the fishing industry that are less well know. One of them is that the UK is one of the very few countries that actually receives less money from the EU for building boats than for scraping them. Almost every other country in the EU is being paid by the EU to build up its fishing fleet, except the UK. When new boats do get built in the UK people that live near fishing ports will have noticed that a quiet revolution has been happening in the design of fishing boats under 30 feet in length.

Smaller fishing boats used to be mainly scaled down versions of the bigger boats, but their hull plans have radically altered. Instead of being longer than they are broad they are now practically square, and very very tall compared to what went before. If you look at one of these new boats you would think they look less seaworthy than their predecessors, and you would be right: these theings bob around like a cork compared to the old style of design. So why would people in what is already a very dangerous industry spend their own money to have boats built that make it even more dangerous? The answer is simple: the EU regulations on boats under 30 feet in length are different to those above 30 feet so the fishermen have to try and cram as much boat in under that length as they are able in order to try and generate a living, even if it makes their already high chances of injury or death greater.

Gay Marriage and Right Wing judicial activism

2010-08-10T09:37:00.000Z

A good start

2010-08-06T14:24:00.002Z

ID cards are dead, Contact Point is dead, and Labour's extreme porn laws are starting to be tested in court and found wanting. The Coalition definitely seems to be less bad than Labour.

Big State BS

2010-08-05T15:22:00.002Z

There’s so much wrong with the Paul Sagar's nonsense argument against the “Big Society” it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s try anyway. His first point was simply to show that he does not understand that there is something called civil society that this is not the same as the state.

His second point is the only point with an actual argument in it. However it is an argument that rapidly falls apart when confronted with evidence rather than ideological assertion. The RNLI provides a very good example of how wrong the argument is.

Voluntary groups are staffed by volunteers, who are by definition amateurs.

This is completely untrue, as the RNLI proves. Last year, the RNLI spent £53 million on staff salaries, including a dozen people who each earned more than £100,000. The crews are volunteers but they are backed up by professionals were they need it, so obviously voluntary groups do not have to be staffed entirely by volunteers. Nor is it true that volunteers are by definition amateurs as most of the RNLI volunteers will be professional seamen.

Take away the centralised finances allowing these volunteers to organise and how will volunteer amateurs be able to provide anything, lacking as they will the finances required for service-provision?

The RNLI receives nothing from government at all. It raises all of its funds itself, and yet it is able to raise all the funds it needs to provide a 24/7 service proving that without centralised funding even very large and expensive organisations can still get the funding they need. If fact it did try taking the state's shilling at one point but this had such a disasterous effect on their regular funding that they stopped.

The fantasy that services provided by trained professionals can be replaced with spontaneous volunteer groups, and without significant falls in quality or reliability

The RNLI crews who perform the actual rescues are made up of volunteer amateurs, and they deliver their service with complete reliability no matter the extreme conditions that they face. Which is rather more than can be said for many professionals in the public sector.

The RNLI is a very large sucessful voluntary organisation but RNLI does not operate everywhere since it does not consider certain places a good use of its resources. Were it does not and the locals disagree other voluntary groups have sprung up to cover their local area: such as the Sidmouth Lifeboat.

Another example would be the National Coastwatch Institute. This charity is an example of what Cameron is calling the Big Society in action, something that Paul says it is impossible. The state decided that it nolonger wanted to mount a visual watch of the coast for people in distress as it was not cost effective for it to do so. What happened next was a group of people decided to restore this service and have built or restored watch towers along the coast which are manned on a voluntary basis, all funded by charitable donation. The government withdrew, but because it was still felt needed the service was replaced spontaniously by a voluntary group.

Point three has no argument other than attributing bad motives to those that are not statist in their outlook.

His fourth point is so bad that it needs exposing. Apparently gay people should praise the big state for not being persecuted. This is bollocks. It was the state that was persecuting us. Oscar Wilde was not thrown into Pentonville Prison by the Marquess of Queensberry. He was thrown in jail by the state. Alan Turing wasn't forced to take hormone therapy because of a nagging mother. He was forced to take it because otherwise he would have been thrown in jail by the state. All the bad things that have been done to gay people pale into insignificance when compared to the bad things that prejudiced people backed by the power of the state have done. However if you look at small communities from the same period where gay people could be open such as in the merchant navy you will find remarkable tolerance of them. Once the state stopped actively persecuting gay people we could, and did, reveal ourselves as deeply embedded in every aspect of of civil society and were therefore able to start breaking down people's prejudices; something that is happening with remarkable speed.

The Euro's cycle of destruction starts again in France

2010-08-04T09:38:00.002Z

Spain is in great difficulties at the moment. The reason for this is that it is getting over the bursting of an enormous property bubble. The reason for the enormous property bubble was that for years it was forced into running negitive real interest rates while the economy was growing strongly and so everybody with any sense took out huge loans, with the largest loans most people can get being the ones backed by property. Unwinding this mess is going to take years of austerity that makes the UK's problems look like a walk in the park since we have a floating exchange rate to soften the blow and they don't.

France however has whethered its recession relatively well. The economy is growing again, with lending to households picking up strongly thanks to the Euro forcing them to run negative real interest rates. Oh dear.

The ECB will eventually raise rates. The question is whether it will raise them by enough and soon enough to stop what happened in Spain and Ireland happening again in France, because if the French economy goes down like Spain or Ireland then there is simply not enough money anywhere to bail it out. It probably will, the size of the French economy means that they cannot ignore it. However if they raise rates soon enough and by enough to stablise France it could well lead to a second phase of economic crisis in the current problem countries like Spain, Ireland, and Greece as the number of people unable to service their loans shoot up.

Whatever happens is not going to be pretty because fixed exchange rates simply do not work and always cause problems for those trapped within them. The sooner the Euro collapses the better it will be for everybody.

Picking Losers

2010-08-03T15:34:00.002Z

Just a quick example of how good government is at picking losers. After proping up Northern Rock in an attempt to save a few MPs their jobs at huge expense to the tax payer the government decided to split it in two rather than just sell off the assets to however would buy. It was supposed to be split into a 'good bank' that would be profitable bank and eventually sold off as a going concern, plus a 'bad bank' as a storage zone for all the crap. However it turns out that it is the 'bad bank' which is profitable, and the 'good bank' that makes losses. Score another one for the infalibility of the all knowing state.

The Rosette Code

2010-08-03T15:31:00.002Z

Wikipedia is an amazing (if not always accurate) resource. It has articles on practically anything, including one that I stumbled upon which poports to be the code that gay men apparently used to discretely communicate the more interesting aspects of their sex lives in a hope of attracting compatible partners using coloured hankies. What struck looking through the codes was how close the colours chosen match the colours chosen for the less discrete method that politicians use to communicate their particular proclivities.

Medium Blue - Uniform fetish - Police uniforms or uniforms worn by other authority figures

Which seems a reasonably accurate veiw of old fashioned Toryism.

Gold (Golden) - Ménage à trois - Two looking for one (left) or one looking for two (right)
Orange - Few limits - When worn on the left, orange indicates that the wearer will top in relatively any fetish, anytime, anywhere. Conversely, when orange is worn on the right, it can indicate either the wearer will bottom in relatively any fetish, anytime, anywhere
Yellow - Watersports - Urinating on (left), or being urinated upon by (right), another person

Which mirrors what the left wing blogosphere has been saying about the Lib-Dems ever since they decided to go into coalition.

Red - Fisting - Left pocket: Insertive partner. Right pocket: Receptive partner.
Dark red - Two-handed Anal fisting

Which is exactly what a wage earner feels like is being done to them during a period of Labour rule.

Ther Germans want the D-Mark back

2010-06-29T15:59:00.002Z

It looks like Germany is starting to fall out of love with the EU as a majority of Germans want their old currency back. Possibly the fall out from trying to impose a single currency over a collection of different countries is getting to them, especially with the realisation that they are going to be the ones expected to pay for it.

The efficiency of EU regulation

2010-06-27T21:25:00.003Z

More highly useful regulation from the EU which for some reason the country never before found itself needing before. The EU has is in the process of deciding that it will no longer be legal to sell multiple items, for example a dozen eggs. From now on it would need to be sold as a single unit. According to the Telegraph:

The changes would cost the food and retail industries millons of pounds as items would have to be individually weighed to ensure the accuracy of the label.

The Grocer said food industry sources had described the move as "bonkers" and "absolute madness". Its editor, Adam Leyland, said the EU had "created a multi-headed monster".

The Food Standards Agency indicated it opposed the change and that the regulation had yet to be finalised.

I'm sure that those in favour of the EU will claim that this regulation was already needed and the government was going to do it anyway therefore we are actually reducing regulation by taking this to the EU level. Even though currently we do not do this and the national regulator does not want it so I don't see it myself.

Labour minister's porn on expenses

2010-06-11T11:07:00.001Z

Oh dear, another Labour minister has been revealed to have been buyng porn on his expenses. While they were in office Labour never lost an opportunity to create more moralising laws against porn in order to 'send a message', a message that it now turns out to be 'we are all a bunch of smut addicted hypocrits'. Personally I have absolutely no problem with his using porn or porn in general, unlike Labour. What he chose to get up to in the privacy of his bedroom is his business alone (or occationally with his wife). However I do object to being made to pay for his porn. As a minister he was in the top 10% of earners and so would have had plenty of his own money for smut without needing to use any of mine.

The annals of obvious research

2010-06-09T07:02:00.001Z

In a result that surprises nobody, on average lefties are clueless about economics.

Using the EU to ban tobacco

2010-06-08T10:57:00.004Z

Oh dear, a Belgian judge is trying to use the EU to ban tobacco across the whole of the EU. I'm sure our political elites will shed no tears over this latest exercise in using the EU as democracy by-pass mechanism, they have been moving towards banning tobacco for years. I'm equally sure that criminal gangs will be over joyed should it actually work as they are handed a huge market of people that still want to smoke and can no longer get hold of their drug of choice legally. The people that should be worried about this is everybody else.

Afganistan as it was

2010-06-04T15:58:00.002Z

Today Afganistan is like a place cut off from civilisation. A medeaval backwater who's only export is opium. But it wasn't always like that, it used to be civilised. It is amazing how far backwards a combination of war communism and islam can push a country.

The Cumbrian Massacre

2010-06-04T09:29:00.001Z

In their response to the cumbrian massacre the Tories have shown that they really could be less bad than Labour, by giving a measured response that this country already has the strictest gun control rules anywhere in the world other than Japan and further restrictions are simply not needed. Events like this are incredibly rare, which is why it has made the news, and banning stuff in a knee jerk response to staggeringly rare events is simply never a good idea. Had Labur still been in power their response would have been very different. Labour's knee jerk response would have been to ban stuff and double the length of time people can be held without charge, because Labour's response to everything was to ban stuff and lock people up without a trial or even charge.

The EU is at it again, the march of ever closer union continues

2010-05-27T07:59:00.001Z

The EU is in a massive crisis. Just as all those nasty EUsceptics said would happen before the introduction of the Euro. The single currency is not working because it lacks a single financial government capable of transfering money around the zone to try and counter act the simple fact that it never was, and never will be, a good currency area. As all those nasty EUsceptics explained would be needed before the introduction of the Euro. So the solution? Create a transnational financial government with tax raising powers at the EU level and oversight over the national governments. Just as all those nasty EUsceptics warned would be the next step in the EU's quest to become a supranational government over the entire continent.

The first proposed EU tax is one on financial transactions. The EU's response to what started out as a liquidity crisis is a measure that will reduce liquidity. The hedge funds where not major players in the crisis, and if anything their short selling helped to reduce the bubble and so the bust, so the EU takes aim at them because they are the current political bogeymen. Oh, and guess what these measures will affect teh UK in a uniquely bad way due to the size of our financial industry, the only major industry we have left and the only thing that is going to be able to dig the country out from under all of Labour's debt. So the city of London gets screwed, which will please the German and French governments, the EU gets some direct tax raising powers, which will please the Eurocrats, and the hedge funds will head for switzerland and the carrabien, which will probably mean they get a better quality of life. The main looser? The UK, as usual.

Finally we have a new government

2010-05-12T08:28:00.003Z

According to the Gaurdian the Conservatives and Lib-Dems have agreed on a bundle of measures for their government, and it actually looks pretty good. Economically Conservative, socially Lib-Dem: so in the Libertarian quadrant of the Political Compass. Of course it isn't the manefesto that either party was elected on, but then had it been Labour we know that their manefesto is always a pack of lies from start to finish.

Economic measures for an agreement which has deficit reduction "at its heart"

• £6b in year cuts in non frontline services subject to the advice from the treasury and the bank of england (Tory)
• Scrapping of national insurance rises (Tory)
• A substantial increase in the personal tax allowance from April 2011 with a focus on low and middle income earners, with a "long term goal" of a £10,000 personal tax allowance. There is no a timetable for this, but there is a promise to make further real term steps each year towards this objective. This is described as a "funded increase". It will be funded by taking the money the Tories had planned to use to increase the employee threshold for national insurance, and by an increase in capital gains tax for non business assets to bring it closer to the level of income tax.
• Marriage tax allowance. The liberal democrats have agreed to abstain on this, which gives the Tories a "real chance" of getting that through.

All good there. We need to get our economy going again and the way to do that is by tax cuts, plus the reason that the country's finances are in such a state is the way that Labour threw money at the public sector in order to buy votes. The public sector has to shrink.

Lib Dem pledges that have been dropped

• Tax relief for higher rate pensioners will not be pursued
• Mansion tax

Tory pledges that have been dropped

• Raising the threshold on inheritance tax which is described as "unlikely to be achieved in this parliament".

Neither are things that I will be too upset about loosing.

Lib Dems priorities that have been secured

• Referendum to bring in some form of alternative vote system. Coalition members will be subject to three-line whip to force the legislation for a referendum through, but they will be free to campaign against the reforms before referendum.
• New pupil premium to be introduced, steering more funding to schools for every child they take from poor homes. Both parties back this policy, but the Lib Dem version attaches more money to it.
• Reducing the tax burden on low earners. This could go some way towards the Lib Dem aim of lifting tax threshold to £10,000.
• A wholly or mainly elected house of Lords.
• More equal constituency sizes
• Fixed term parliaments, including this one. The next general election will be held on the first Thursday of May 2015. Legislation will mean such agreements can only be broken by an enhanced majority of the House of Commons.

Some form of voting reform was always going to be the Lib-Dems bride price. It is a shame that it was for Alternative Vote, because AV sucks and I personally will be voting against in the referendum. Had it been STV on the other hand things would be rather different. Fixed term parliaments are fine, and changing the constituencies to get rid of the bias to Labour is a must as is getting rid of the wholely appointed House of Lords. Creating something worse than the hereditary chamber was a big ask, but Labour managed it. Increasing the tax threshold is a very very good thing and will hopefully come in as soon as the country can afford it. As is the pupil premium when combined with the Tory's Free Schools.

Tory priorities that have been secured

• A cap on immigration and an end to child detention immigration controls (the latter was a Lib Dem proposal).
• Welfare reform programme to be implemented in full.
• School reform programme providing all schools are held accountable.
• A commitment to maintaining Britain's nuclear deterrent. Renewal of Trident will be scrutinised to ensure value for money. Liberal Democrats will be free to continue the case for alternatives.
• The government will make no proposals to join the euro.
• No proposals to transfer new powers to the European Union.
• A referendum lock will ensure that any proposal to transfer new powers must by law be put to a referendum.

The immigration cap is an unfortunate political necessity, but at lease they have stopped the detention of children. Blocking the transfer of new power to the EU is going to be difficult since it normally simply takes the power then legalises it post facto, for example the way it is setting up a system for financial transfers in the Eurozone even though that was specifically outlawed in the Mastrict Treaty. This should help to temper the Lib-Dems EUphilia. The welfare reform programme is simply a matter that the country is bankrupt and Welfare spongers form a major area of expenditure. Not trying to do something about them is simply not an option. As for the schools programme perhaps Nick opened his copy of On Liberty to the section on education and realised where the Tory proposals come from.

Areas that were already in agreement will see a major programme of civil liberties

• A great repeal or freedom bill to scrap the ID card scheme and the national identity register and the next generation of biometric passports
• Extending the scope of the Freedom of Information bill to provide greater transparency
• Adopt protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database
• Protecting trial by jury
• Reviewing libel laws to protect freedom of speech
• Further regulation of CCTV and other items
• Measures to boost economy in key areas such as low-carbon industries and investment in infrastructure. A green investment bank, a smart grid, retention of energy performance certificates while scrapping home information packs.

All of which is really good, and the opposite of what would have happened under the Authoritarians in the Labour Party. It should help to get rid of the myth that Labour is anything other than the party of mindless crushing of peoples liberties. Hopefully the Great Repeal Bill/Freedom Bill will include a couple of little clauses that I added to Carswell's Wiki relating to the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 and the The Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons)(Amendment) Order 2008. Time for a letter to my MP.

Areas of opt outs for either party

• Lib Dems will be free to maintain their opposition to nuclear power while permitting the government to put forward the national planning statement for ratification by parliament so that new nuclear construction becomes possible.

Labour have also acknowleged the fact that we need new nukes to keep the lights on, so unless they are going to now oppose what they have already said is in the national interest out of tribal political spite, always a possibility, then we should be getting some new nukes. There really isn't another option. If we are going to keep the lights on while dealing with climate change there really is no other option than nukes, so hopefully we will be getting some French engineers over fairly soon to survey the possible sites.

Banking reform

• A banking levy will be introduced.
• Bonuses will be tackled.
• A "more competitive banking industry".
• More credit to flow to businesses. The proposals of the respective parties will be looked at before deciding which is the better one.
• An independent commission will be set up to consider Lib Dem proposals to separate retail and investment banking and the Tories' proposals for a quasi separation. An interim report will be published within a year.
• The Bank of England could be given control of macro prudential regulation and oversight of micro prudential regulation under proposals to be put forward.

That looks good as it unravels Gordon Browns failed reforms by placing everything back in the hands of the Bank of England, who as the people that have to pay up if things go wrong have a good incentive not to let them go wrong; unlike Gordon's unaccountable quango the FSA.

All in all it has the potential of being a far better combination than the appauling authoritarians that have been lording it over the country for the last 13 years.

Labour clings on

2010-05-07T07:57:00.000Z

So it looks like Labour's vote fraud operation was more sucessful than expected and nobody can get a majority of the votes. England voted decisively for the Conservatives, which is why Labour will never allow an English Parliament. At this point Cameron has got to do anything to stay out of a coalition government. The country is bankrupt, the cuts will be made. the only question is who is going to make the cuts? Brown is ideologically incapable, but if he cannot then the IMF will. Welcome to Labour's UK, it's like greece but without the sun and beaches.

The vote factories are humming

2010-04-29T15:06:00.005Z

While it is illegal to publish postal voting figures before the close of the election Labour is doing it anyway, Labour obviously don't have to follow the same legal standards as everybody else it seems. First they were published by the official Labour candidate for the constituency, then repeated by Labour supporters. Another oddity is that the number of votes that they are saying that Labour are getting from this part of our electoral system that would disgrace a banana republic (as the judge investigating Labour's last voting fraud scheme said) is way out of line with what you would expect from the current national polls. I'm not talking out of line by the margin or error either. This is hugely different. It is almost as if Labour has been running vote factories (again) and they have over done it to the levels normally only found in third world dictatorships. Since Labour have put these numbers out there I guess they are in the public domain so this is what I mean by out of line with the polls:

Labour’s tweeted postal results
Lab: 79.57%
Con: 11.97%
LD: 8.45%

This compares to the 2005 results in the same constituency of
Lab: 45.91%
Con: 21.06%
LD: 25.24%

There is no way that kind of massive swing to Labour has occoured. 13 years of Labour and this is what they have reduced the country to: a bankrupt, authoritarian, banana republic, but without the good weather.

The lesser evil

2010-04-09T12:40:00.001Z

The election is now finally upon us, so it is time to make a choice but basically there is no point examining what Labour say they will do. Not just because they have so few actual policies, but that you simply cannot trust them. The Labour manefesto is always stacked full of deliberate lies, so much so that it is worthless. Then on the other side are the conservatives. Some conservative policies I like, such as their proposals to free schools, but then they come out with wanting to get the state into the child slavery business, lovely. As for the rest? Who cares what they say? Thanks to the First Past the Post voting system they are irrelevant.

I will probably still vote for the Tories simply because of what Labour will do based on their record, but the Tories will not do:
They will not sell seats in the legislature for cash.
They will not have opposition politicians arrested.
They will not wage multiple wars of agression.
They will not wage a constant war on the jury trial.
They will not reverse the burden of proof.
They will not implement the ID card scheme and its database.
They will not cause another burst of exponential growth in the length of time you can be detained without trial.
They will not suspend Habeas Corpus, since it has already been suspended (but I'm not holding my breath about it being returned).
They will not trash the legal protections you have if you get to trail.
They will not pile on public sector non-jobs in an effort to buy votes to such an extent that it bankrupts the country.

Its not much but the Tories are the lesser evil.

The EU's peace

2010-02-24T21:31:00.001Z

One of the commonest myths used by EU-philes as an argument is that the EU has kept the peace in Europe. When probed this turns into the more accurate statement that the Americans sometimes used the EU as a way of bribing countries to keep NATO together, which really did keep the peace in Europe. This is the peace the EU has actually created, mass strikes and riots as a direct result of one of the cornerstones of the EU edifice. The strikes and riots will continue to break out, and to spread to countries other than Greece, as long as the EU continues to force them into debt-deflation.

BBC Bias

2010-02-15T10:16:00.001Z

Why is it so difficult for some people to beleive that the BBC has biases, just like every other media organisation?

Labour's immigration policy

2010-02-10T16:07:00.002Z

Oh dear, it turns out that Labour's unlimited immigration policy was to do with social engineering and the fact that recent immigrants tend to vote Labour. Well they appear to have sucessfully engineered the rise of the BNP, we now have two BNP fascists in the EUropean Parliament, plus the Respect fascist in Westminster. Nice one guys. Perhaps if they hadn't gone quite so hell for leather at cramming as many people in as quickly as possible we could have got the benefits of immigration without the fascist backlash.

Markets must avoid UK Gilts, thanks to Labour

2010-01-27T10:05:00.000Z

The government is currently paying its bills by printing money, but eventually it will have to stop that or risk very high inflation rates. When it does it could well find that there is nobody willing to lend to it thanks to the aweful position that Labour have gotten us into. Of course by that time they will have left office and so have the luxury of blaming their mess on the Tories, but it will still be Labour's mess.

Inequality and Crime

2010-01-27T09:52:00.000Z

Inequality is at a 40 year high, yet crime rates still fall.

Crime

2010-01-14T12:21:00.001Z

Crime figures are down, again. This will be the first time ever that living standards have dropped over the length of a parliament, yet crime is down. Just as overall crime has been heading downwards every year since 1995.

According to the normal explanations for why the current levels of crime are so high this should not be happening. We are in the middle of the worst recession since the Second World War, more people are in greater financial difficulty than has been the case for a very long time, and yet crime is still going down as if we were still enjoying the good times. Between 1955 and 1995 crime went up whether the economy was growing or shrinking, now it goes down. Inequality is down slightly, it always goes down during a recession, but there will still be very little difference from when Labour came into power 13 years ago, and far higher than before Thatcher when crime was still increasing. Inequality is relatively high, so by the normal explanations crime should be rising and should have been rising for the past 30 years, but it isn't and hasn't. It has been falling since 1995, but was rising strongly before 1995 when for most of the time inequality was falling. When looking at the general trends from crime rates over the last century the standard lefty explanations for the massive rise in crime that followed the Second World War simply do not work, there must be something else going on. Something so strong that effected the whole of society and was able to overwhelm the effects of inequality and poverty.

One thing that is never mentioned is how the dramatic rise in crime that followed WW2 conincided with the period of the lefty post war concensus, with a 10 year delay as young criminals grew up under the new social arrangement. It was only after Thatcher broke the lefty postwar consensus and started to reverse it that crime peaked and started to decline, with the same 10 year delay as society adapted.

Nothing to hide ... plenty to fear

2009-11-24T16:27:00.000Z

The police are trawling for arrests, and thanks to Labour everything is arrestable, in order to fill up their DNA database. Accoring to the Times 'three quarters of young black men are on the database'! Almost all of whom will have done nothing wrong, but will still not be able to get their DNA off the database and now join the ranks of the 'guilty innocents' who are tainted by getting to close to the police. This can have serious repercussions, like this story of a high flying lawyer forced to work as a stable hand after she was sacked because she was on the database, despite doing nothing wrong.

Another step on the EU's path

2009-11-19T12:13:00.001Z

Just a little something for those that dispute the claim that the EU is steadily marching towards statehood.

The Queen's Speech

2009-11-18T10:55:00.001Z

Today is Gordon Brown's party political broadcast, oops I mean the Queen's Speech. In the past this was kept in such secrecy that leaking it could be a resigning matter. Not today though, and not just because no Labour Minister ever resigns for anything. This Queen's Speech has been so heavily trailed that it is perfectly possible to create a detailed critique of it even before it has been said and The Adam Smith Institute has done just that.

The War on Fish

2009-11-14T12:12:00.000Z

The EU's War on Fish continues. They won't give in until the oceans have been cleared of this flappy menace.

Piracy

2009-11-13T23:10:00.000Z

Posted from my phone, hence no spell check, however this story was rather more interesting than the rest that are circulating as Labour gasps its last autharitarian breaths. It was this rather depressing story about piracy on the high seas.

The crew of a UK military ship watched as a British couple were taken hostage by Somali pirates but were ordered not to open fire, it has emerged.

While an RFA it still had armed men on board (making it more powerful than the 'mighty' HMS Endevour that lefties often claim could scare off the entire Agentine military) and could at least scared them off.

Perhaps it could be something to do with this story from last year about how the Navy has been ordered not engage pirates because of the worries to do with the Human Eights Act.

What really is the point of having a blue water navy if it cannot protect our shipping? The reason that the USA formed it's navy was to protect American merchant ships from pirates, the operating base being Algeria rather than Somalia back then.

The Illiberal Conspiracy

2009-09-09T20:32:00.002Z

A couple bits from the Illiberal Conspiracy.

First: Why don't pensions critics attack the fat-cats? Because how a private business spends its money is its business, but how the public sector spends my money is my business, perhaps?

Second their 10 point plan to save Labour ... from ever winning office again. It shouldn't really be surprising anymore that the ironically titled 'liberal conspiracy' would promote something as illiberal as getting bureaucrats to control peoples wages, and more and higher taxes, plus the mass expropriation of wealth.

In a way that this hodge-podge of higher taxes and more state control is actually being promoted in connection to somebody that is a possibility for next Labour leader is a good thing. It means that they are going to lurch to the left so far that it will be at least a decade before they are in the least bit electable, and that means at more than a decade before the time that people can be held without charge will be increased.

Insanity

2009-08-28T15:15:00.000Z

ID Cards excuse de jour

2009-08-28T06:15:00.000Z

The excuse de jour for ID Cards is changing, again. This time it is to help with with CRB checks, or why won't somebody think of the chiiiiildren! Not that CRB checks are much more than a invasive tax on voluntary work with an alarmingly high false positive rate. If a mind probe existed Labour would probably make thinking about anybody under 18 illegal as well.

RACIST!!!

2009-08-27T17:57:00.001Z

The next election is going to be very very dirty. The left has run out of ideas, and when they run out of ideas they start screaming 'racist'. It is a handy way of shutting down the debate. It happened when Ken Livingstone lost. It is happening in the current froth over Dan Hannan. It is even used against rebels within their own ranks. It will happen at the next election, I can see it now.

His nose twitched, that means he is a secret racist!
He just pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his nose. He must want to wipe out cultural diversity the racist!!
He just put the handkerchief back in his pocket, that can only be code for wanting to lock up brown people without trial, forever!! RACIST!!!
What? Oh ... Labour already tried to lock up brown people forever without trial? Oh no, then that cannot be racist. It must actually have been a good thing ... to improve the cultural diversity of the prison population ... or something. But Cameron is on the right so he must actually be thinking something that really is evil, not something like locking brown people up forever without trial. Which is actually a good thing anyway.

That VAT Cut

2009-08-26T15:28:00.001Z

Colour me unsurprised. Labour's big idea to save the economy by cutting VAT actually had no effect to boast spending, just as was predicted last year. Perhaps if they had cut the Job Tax (National Insurance) instead it would have actually done something by saving marginal jobs and so leading to a few less people on the dole, but then people on the dole have long been a natural source of Labour votes and they are going to need as many as they can get next year.

There is no money left

2009-08-22T12:20:00.003Z

As Michael Ben-Gad, deputy head of economics at City University, so eloquently put it on Friday: "Whoever gets into government next will have to make very large cuts in services and also raise taxes. You'll end up with US levels of services and Scandinavian levels of tax."

When the Tories get in they will be cutting services, they will have to because there is no money left. So when that happens the lefties should remember that it is happening because there will be no money for services is as they had already spent it. They won't of course.

I Am The Law

2009-08-18T09:36:00.001Z

Labout are have a go at the right to a fair trial, again. Labour really don't like trials, especially jury trials, and have spent most of the last decade trying to get rid of them or nobble them to make sure that they give the correct answer. The correct answer being always GUILTY. Now there is at least some resistance to giving the police the power to instantly try and convict people on the streets from another part of the establishment. It only took ten years. Quite frankly why don't they just go the whole hog and change the name of London to Megacity One?

Labour porn

2009-06-16T23:35:00.001Z

Finally some evidence that at least somebody in the Labour Party did at one point have some ideas that were not an authoritarian overreaction about porn, though going too far on the other side to. Of course since then she got on board the Labour band wagon of banding people above the age of consent taking photos of their consensual fun, and with Labour's latest idea of banning fantasy images with no relation to reality at all, or the stupid 'extreme porn' law that they managed to get through and is already being abused.

Only the Lib-Dems can beat the Tories

2009-05-30T20:23:00.003Z

In an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph Labour have fallen to third place. The proportions are Conservative 40%, Labour 22%, Lib-Dem 25%. This could be a rogue, simply the result of random sampling error. It could be a blip, a short term reaction to the expenses scandal. Or it could be that the Lib-Dems have crossed the tipping point.

Under First Past the Post voting there is only space for two parties. Voters tend to be attracted to only one of two parties because even if the party that they vote for does not truly reflect their views it will keep the other lot out. That the Liberals have survived at all (which at times looked doubtful) was probably because they occupied the extremely important strategic ground at the middle of the political spectrum.

While under a uniform national swing this result would mean that the Lib-Dems are still the third party there is a chance that they could becoming the party to keep the other lot out for enough people, with the other lot being both Labour and the Conservatives, that they jump far above what a uniform swing predicts as people try to keep both the other main parties out. If that happens, if the Lib-Dems become the party to keep the other lot out, then suddenly the dynamics of the political environment change. This chaotic environment gets tipped out the equilibrium where people voted Labour to keep the Conservatives out and Conservative to keep Labour out, with the Lib-Dems ignored, to a new equilibrium where people vote Lib-Dem to keep the Conservatives out and vote Conservative to keep the Lib-Dems out. Kind of like how the Lorenz Attractor becomes a Repulsor when the variables are set over a certain threshold.

Labour would be reduced to a rump or hard core true believers on the left, and unlike the Lib-Dems, this would pull them further and further away from the vital centre ground so making them less and less likely to ever be a significant electoral force again. Or this poll might be a rogue.

The cost of a Labour government

2009-05-09T10:14:00.003Z

Of all of the things which came out from the expenses this is the worst. It is not simply damning to the individual involved, since unlike most of them it could be justified as something other than a greedy pig stuffing their pockets with other people's money, it is damning to the government as a whole and the way that they have lead this country. If a government minister has lost so much trust in the protection of the police that she feels it necessary to pay for her own private guards what does that say about how her government has let one of the few really necessary areas of government fall into rack and ruin.

The budget

2009-04-22T14:19:00.000Z

No surprises in the budget really. Taxes have increased, because Labour always increases taxes. The country is borrowing more, because Labour always spends more than it earns. The economy is on its knees, because in the end Labour always bankrupts the country. The only difference that unlike most of Gordon Brown's other budgets they are increasing direct taxes as well as the normal indirect taxes.

They have decided to squeeze the rich, where rich is defined as people earning more than a cabinet minister, with a 50% tax rate. That this will probably loose them money is irrelevant. It isn't about what is best for the exchequer, it is about what is best for the Labour Party and by attacking people that create wealth to try and motivate some its core vote to get off their arses and vote. There is nothing like a bit of envy and spite to motivate a lefty. What is another few of billion lost? It is merely the politics of envy. It isn't the big revenue raiser, nor is it meant to be. The big money is coming from yet further rises in fuel tax, because that is almost unavoidable by normal working people since most people have to drive in order to get to work. The only exceptions are those few that work in central London or have a chauffeur driven car paid for by their work, an MP for example.

There is no money but still there will be no spending cuts. Money is still going to be hosed up the wall in order to keep Labour's payroll vote fat. Even when the economy was growing strongly Labour could not fund their payroll vote from normal tax receipts and had to take the country deep into debt. This year as revenues fall we are going to have to go even deeper, that debt is set to rise to a level not seen since the defeat of Fascism (the last bunch of Third Way authoritarians to threaten this country with destruction).

The proposed tax rises are mere drop in the ocean of debt that has been forced upon us. This is debt that they are assuming that they will be able to raise from the gilts market. This despite there having already been a failed gilts auction this year. Maybe that is the reason why deflation is being touted around? It gives the government an excuse to print extra money to pay for its excesses. Which is absolutely nothing like what a tin pot dictatorship bent on its own destruction through hyper-inflation would do. Oh no, absolutely nothing like that ... really.

It is a good thing Brown managed to get world leaders to commit to putting more money into the IMF at the G20, because we are going to need it.

Personally there is one part of the budget that I will personally be taking advantage of. This is the scrappage payment of £2000. Getting rid of my old banger would be a good thing while my money is still worth anything. It will be a good thing for me to get something more reliable which is more fuel efficient since fuel is going to be taxed even more. I will, of course, be buying Japanese.