The roads ahead

From the Europhile Independent a look at the directions Euroland can go now. I would like a simple Free-trade Europe, like what was sold in the last referendum on the EU in 1977. However the most likely outcome is the continued quest for the United States of Europe, just back into a more stealthy mode of operation.

North Sea Diaries on the French Referendum

Another reason for me not to comment on the French Referendum, North Sea Diaries has a much better analysis than I could produce, including a map of the voting patterns. To summarise, the French voted Yes where the EU gives them loads of money (Brittany, Paris, and Strasbourg), and No where the EU's poor economic performance has cost jobs (the North-East particually but pretty well everywhere that isn't getting EU money thrown at it really).

The Treaty is Dead, Long live the Treaty

Popped over to The Road to Euro Serfdom and what do I find, yep the EU foreign service lives

Solana stressed that the EU diplomatic service - still in its infancy and forseen under the new constitution - will see the light of day in any case. "There is no reason to doubt that sooner or later the EU will have its own diplomatic service and everyone must get used to the idea"

Good to see the Eurolander elite have listened to the voice of the people, then laughed in their faces.

France and the constitution

For anyone wondering why I haven't said anything about the constitution the answer is simple. It isn't over yet. France will either be made to vote again. Or more simply the EU elites will ignore the vote as an abberation and simply continue working wlowly but surely towards the nation of Euroland, they will just stop rubbing the peoples noses in it for a while. To test this lets continue monitoring the growth of the EU foreign service and embassies. This was supposed to be one of the results of the Constitution, to go with the Foreign Minister (or Minister for the Opposition of America), but they jumped the gun a bit and started making it before the Constitution was ratified. Will the nacent EU Foreign service be dismantled as it no longer has any legal reason for existance? My bet is no.

Tax Freedom Day

Happy Tax Freedom Day!

CCTV doesn't work

Remember all the CCTV camera's that have appeared over recent years? How that they where supposed to cut crime and bring safety to the streets, about how the improvement that they would bring to reducing crime far out wieghed the loss of privacy? Turns out that was wrong [hat tip perfect.co.uk]. While the loss of privacy is manifest with goverment funded peeping toms the benefits have been slight. Since 1998 £170 million was made available for 684 installations in public spaces nationwide but:

Assessed on the evidence presented in this report, CCTV cannot be deemed a success. It has cost a lot of money and it has not produced the anticipated benefits.

According to the governments own analysis. Rather like another policy that is currently being put in motion. A policy that will cost vastly more than they claim, probably £300 per card, and require the renewal of your licence to exist every 5 years as the 'infalible' biometrics that it is based on change naturally over time.

Teenager to fight 'anti-yob' laws

Fantastic news about a Teenager trying to fight 'anti-yob' laws which criminalise him for simply being somewhere where other people might want to do something that might cause 'disorder'. In other words, you are guilty and should be punished, even if you haven't done anything. I can only hope that he wins, and that should he win the Tyrant Blair won't just use it as an excuse to push through legislation that is even more draconian.

Maxarchism

Maxarchism, the opposite of Minarchism, the political philosophy that a big state is best. All problems can be solved through government regulation.

'Nanny' Prescott wants to control the temperature of your bath

Prescott wants to get in your bath, not in the normal way of course, he wouldn't fit, but into the controls of how much hot water you can put in it. A typical example our Maxarchistic government. Hat tip Village Hampden

QuizFarm.com :: What is Your World View?

You scored as Modernist. Modernism represents the thought that science and reason are all we need to carry on. Religion is unnecessary and any sort of spirituality halts progress. You believe everything has a rational explanation. 50% of Americans share your world-view. Modernist 100% Materialist 100% Existentialist 75% Postmodernist 69% Romanticist 38% Cultural Creative 31% Fundamentalist 13% Idealist 0% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

The Sharpener » This Misguided Nation

I was reading an essay at The Sharpener by Eddie about the chav culture and possible cures. I may be a raving minarchist but there seems a flaw in the logic.

As he says if people do not respect the laws they will not obey them. But it does not follow that if they obey the laws, most of the time, they will respect them. At one point in the essay he even points this out:

Whoever heard of respecting the puny headmaster who gets his jollies out of thrashing the living daylights out of kids? Why was it that it was always the same people who ended up in front of the headmaster, week after week?

Most pupils in this situation will have obeyed, out of fear, but if they did not respect him then where they in a situation where he wasn't around to enforce the rules the rules would be ignored, or even deliberately flouted as an expression of their lack or respect for the rule maker.

A respected teach can leave his or her class safe in the knowledge that chaos is not going to erupt once their back is turned. There respect for the rule maker, so the rules will also gain respect and therefore obedience. Even without the threat of punishment.

So if the goal is a civil society where most of the people in it respect obey most of the laws most of the time. Perhaps first laws should be changed so that the most of the people respect them as sensible. From there will naturally come the obedience to the law, as to not follow them would not be sensible. Without it most people will continue to obey only when there is the threat of being punished, and will ignore the law at other times.

Who’s Ignorant?

The Road to Euro Serfdom points out some interesting statistics from The Netherlands

85% of the people who claim to know the contents of the Constitution very well, plan to vote No. Of those who say they know the rough outline of the Constitution, 73% will vote against. People who say they are ill informed, or completely unaware of the contents of the Constitution do not tend so much towards a No : respectively 46 and 38 percent.

The more that you know about the facts of the EU the less you like it.

Italy faces 'horrible martyrdom' while in the eurozone

I've found this nice peice in the Telegraph thanks to Tim Worstall that Italy faces 'horrible martyrdom' while in the eurozone thanks to having fixed it's exchange rate at the wrong rate when it entered the Eurozone. This is the same thing that happened when the UK entered the ERM at the wrong rate, but with that we still had our own currency for when we we're blasted out of the ERM, which is one of the reasns why sceptics where so worried about entering the Euro fearing that the same thing would happen again. Well, once again, the sceptics where correct. Luckily this time it is another country that has this problem, and not the UK.

Is Osama right?

An interesting article in The Sharpener about the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the incitement to religious hatred bill that is about to get pushed through parliment so that the Tyrant Blair can win back the Muslim voters that he lost over the Iraq War, whilst of course trampling on freedom of speech but you kind of expect that as par for the course from New Labour don't you?

Stumbling and Mumbling: What's wrong with managerialism?

Stumbling and Mumbling takes a well argued swipe at managerialism, particually as used by the Tyrant BlairStumbling and Mumbling: What's wrong with managerialism?

EU Referendum

The Referendum campaigne has begun in ernest, with the 'No' campiagne starting up today.

Eurealist :: The Ten Commandments

If you want to cut through the 300 pages of incomprehesible legalese Czech President Vaclav Klaus could be of some assistance, via EU Realist.

1. Under the new Constitution European Union, states will lose their current exclusive right to form their own laws and the Czech Republic's weight in the voting procedures will fall compared to the current state.

2. The European Union will become one state, and its members will be mere regions or provinces in this newly-established state of federalistic type.

3. The EU Constitution will be superior to the member countries' constitutions.

4. The very term of the constitutional treaty is imprecise and is only temporary because after the ratification, the document will become a real constitution.

5. The current concept of shared sovereignty will be abandoned and new, pan-European sovereignty will appear in which the EU member countries will lose their exclusive right to form their own laws.

6. Citizens of individual countries will become citizens of the state of the European Union with the rights and obligations directly towards the institutions of this European state.

7. EU member countries will only be able to exercise those powers that the EU constitution will leave them, and not the opposite way as was an original idea of European integration.

8. It will be the EU and not its member states that will conclude international agreements with other countries.

9. In the voting procedures, the weight of small EU member countries, including the Czech Republic, will be decreased.

10.Even those areas of decision- making in which EU members will keep their right of veto in the future, this right could be transferred to the area of a majority voting any moment. It will only be enough for the presidents or prime ministers of the EU member countries to agree on this, without the possibility of the national parliaments to make their own decision on the issue.

Strange isn't it that the only people that claim the EU isn't slowly becoming a State are British Europhile politicians? It is openly acknowleged, by both sides of the debate, on the continent.

Martin Samuel The Times Online Opinion Football

Martin Samuel The Times Online Opinion Football:

"When the West is your pal you are able, quite literally, to get away with murder. And what murder! It is a surprise Karimov has time for governing at all, once he has spent the morning formulating new ways to poach, grill, tenderise, smoke and flamb�his citizens to death. Boiling water, electrocution, chlorine-filled gas masks, drowning, rape, shooting, savage beatings, Karimov’s Uzbekistan is the absolute market leader in torture right now. The CIA would not shop anywhere else, which is why a mysterious Gulfstream 5 executive jet routinely delivers terrorist subjects from Afghanistan there for interrogation and, perhaps, percolation. Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador, drew attention to this last year, and the noted socialist Tony Blair acted immediately. He sacked him."

Europhobia: Religious and political hatred

Nosemonkey is annoyed about the Religious hatred bill.

By showing absolute contempt for religion in using it as a convenient veil for more suspect motives, is the government again in breach of the proposed bill? And what the pissing hell right does Tony fucking Blair have to dictate to anyone about religion in the first place? The smug little God-botherer. He was the one who incited me to religious hatred through his holier-than-though insistence that everything he does is alright because he "believed it to be the right thing to do". This belief stems from his Christian faith, so I hold his faith in contempt.

So whilst it is still legal a little pop quiz.
One of the following is condoned in the Bible, the rest are explicitly rejected, guess which one:
a. Eating shellfish on Fridays
b. Sex Slavery
c. Praying to a statue of Jesus
d. Coitus Interuptus, (favoured birth control technique of the Catholic Church)
e. Wearing mixed fabric shirts, e.g. poly-cotton
The answer is in the comments.

Postal voting fraud

Just when I thought that the massive possiblities for fraud in postal voting where not taken up I find reasons to be suspisious (at the end of the post):

"(An aside: Respect was significantly ahead of Labour during the ward-by-ward count of votes taken at polling stations. It was only after the delivery of the constituency-wide postal votes that the gap between the parties closed. This accounts for the delay in the result. There are numerous reports of voters - including, somewhat bizarrely, Mariella Frostrup - turning up to vote only to be informed they had already voted by post. The suspicion forms that someone attempted to rig the ballot, and that someone miscalculated; this side of a thorough investigation, it can be no more than a suspicion.)"

So in a seat that where New Labour was under serious threat, and where a loss would be blown up in the press beyond any other, there is a flood of postal votes for New Labour which do not match the general trend from the polling booths. The current postal voting system is dangerous, and needs reform, as even the hint of fraud in an election reduces it's legitimacy. But will anything happen, not likely. Not under New Labour anyway.

Queen's speech stresses respect and reform

And of course the destruction of civil liberties, but you wouldn't expect Labour loving Guardian to say thatThe bills set to return are ID cards and religious hatred bills, so the Tyrant Blair continues his quest to destroy liberty, and yet more anti-terrorism bills. There are new powers that allow headmasters to search pupils for knives in school, something that should never have been stopped. If a pupil has a weapon, as I don't think that we are talking about craft knives here, the teachers should be able to take it off of them.

The speach says that the government was committed to "fostering a culture of respect", perhaps that could start with a respect that people actually knw how to lead their lives without being micromanaged from 10 Downing street. Speaking of which there are to be bills to reform the NHS to deal with MRSA. Is that really something for Parliment? Surely it would be better to give back the Nurses some power to enforce hygene, and maybe the hospital managers to deal with shoddy cleaners. But no, despite that being a simple cheap solution that might actually work that gives power back to indiviuals from Government, and so will never be dreamed of under New Labour.

Tim Worstall: New CAP Subsidies.

Tim Worstall is blogging on the new CAP subsidies. And this is a case where I disagree with him. Yes it will destort the market, in fact it will make it more profitable to simply own land and not farm it, but at least it is better than the previous situation. Remember last time farmers where paid once to farm as intensively as possible, and then paid a second time not to far at all. The largest land owners got the most money as they could not farm the most land.

When looking at the system you must also look at the outcome you want. I don't care if the farmers actually farm anything, I can always get my food cheaper if it is grown elsewhere, but I do want the countryside maintained. Remember the UK is a completely artificial landscape, there is nowhere that has not been affected by human activity. If you want to preserve the landscape you have to preserve the activites, both animal and human, that created it.

There are problems even with this revised system. The small tenant farmers that might need money to stay in business, and these are the people that look after the countryside for us (we're not paying them to far after all), don't get it. But the large land owners that don't need any subsidy, and don't directly help maintain the countryside do. My solution, remove the cheaque of simply owning land completely, but maintain the grants for maintaining the unnatural enviroment. That should also be a bit cheaper as well.

EU Referendum links here!

EU Referendum, one of the best sceptic blogs out there, has linked to me! This is about the EU Taxes, after I placed a comment on an article from them about the proposed EU aviation tax. However as much as I would like to bask in glory I only found the document as it had already been drawn to my attention by The Village Hampden.

Games and Interactive Activities

Games and Interactive Activities

Tension Quotient = 20%
Your Moral Parsimony Score is 79%
So I base my personal moral framework on a few priciples, which I do: Utility, and Liberty

This probably leads to a lack of contradictions, as by only having a few basic principles then there will be fewer interactions between them that are contradictory.
Philosophical Health Check Tension Quotient of 20% compared to an average of 29%

The EU bans DIY

No matter how much you may hate the insipid makeover programmes that infest television at the moment this new bit of EU nonsense from Christopher Booker's notebook is a bit excessive:

"What few homeowners have grasped is that Part P applies equally to do-it-yourself electrical work. To carry out any work in a kitchen or bathroom without council permission is an offence punishable by a fine of up to �5,000. And to have it inspected will cost you an average �65. Thank you, Mr Prescott - and of course those diligent civil servants who pointed out directive 98/34 to him."

So DIY is now illegal, I cannot do what I like to the inside of my own home without council permission.

moral testing

I'm a sucker for self tests, and this was a new one on me. Rather than the normal political based test it was a morality quiz to figure out our personal moral system.

My Results:

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.07.
So I'm rather permissive, correct.

Your Universalising Factor is: 0.00.
I'm a moral relativist, correct again. Any review of history shows that moral relativism is emperically correct, there is no universal moral system and there is a society that is an exception to every rule.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.
This stems from being a moral relativist, I don't think I have any right to interfer with how other people live their lives. So long as all the parties are in agreement that that is how they want to live their lives. I am not libertarian due to a lack of a moral system, as authoritarians always claim, but because of my moral system. Liberty, and being allowed to persue what is good for you, is the ultimate meta-good there being to universal good that applies to everyone.

Which according to them means:

Your Moralising Quotient of 0.07 compares to an average Moralising Quotient of 0.32. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are more permissive than average.

Your Interference Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Interference Factor of 0.17. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are less likely to recommend societal interference in matters of moral wrongdoing, in the form of prevention or punishment, than average.

Your Universalising Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Universalising Factor of 0.56. This means you are less likely than average to see moral wrongdoing in universal terms - that is, without regard to prevailing cultural norms and social conventions (at least as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned).

EU tax keep on coming

The Village Hampden found a document about the taxes that the EU was looking at imposing in order to be able to to pay for itself. Now we see that the EU is proposing an aviation tax, not using the climate change excuse as was originally planned but to fund development aid. This casual ignores, of course, that single biggest problem to the development of the third world is the dumping of subsidised food on their markets thanks to the CAP. Agriculture being one of the few areas that the third world can outcompete the west in a free market due to low unskilled labour costs.

1. Modulated VAT
2. CLIMATE CHARGE ON AVIATION
3. EU CORPORATE INCOME TAX
4. ENERGY TAXATION
5. EXCISE DUTIES ON TOBACCO AND ALCOHOL
6. TRANSFER OF SEIGNIORAGE REVENUE
7. COMMUNICATION TAXATION
8. PERSONAL INCOME TAX
9. TAX ON FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS

Looks like they have got 1 and 2, with 3 heading towards harmonisation thanks to the ECJ. How long until the rest? The UN is pushing for 9 in order to pay for it's workings, a bandwagon that the EU will be only to happy to jump on.

The only good thing that I can see from this is if they ever get 6 then that means the EU has entered it's terminal phase and is about to collapse, rather like Romania did at the end of the cold war.

The Guardian misunderstanding

The Guardian seems to have a missunderstanding about the Tyrant Blair's use of the House of Lords to create ministers without them having to face an electorate.

There are so many things wrong with this appointment, it is hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the most obvious one. Was this a spur-of-the-moment appointment, or had it been in Mr Blair's mind for some time that Mr Adonis might have a future in frontline politics? If the latter, did it occur to either man that Mr Adonis might submit himself to the electorate, as is common in most parliamentary democracies? If not, why not?

Because under the Tryant Blair democracy is what he says it is, remember most of the bills that this man pushes through will be because of Scottish votes where education bills do not apply, Labour recived less votes than the concervatives in England, if the laws do not have any democratic legitimacy why should the minister? From the postal voting scandal we already know that in a choice between democratic legitimacy and what Blair wants, what Blair wants goes.

Next question: what does the appointment tell us about Mr Blair's views on the future of the second chamber?

Exactly what we already knew from the appointment of Lord Falconer in the first term and the Tyrant Blair's repeated refusals to allow demcracy into the second chamber when he can simply fill it with cronies.

Scanning further down the list of new ministers, one's eye is caught by the appointment of Lord Smallpox, aka Paul Drayson, whose enoblement last year was swiftly followed by a cheque to party funds of half a million pounds. The noble lord is now a minister at the Ministry of Defence. It may be unkind to Lord Drayson to suggest that he effectively purchased a seat in parliament, but if the same thing happened in an African kleptocracy we might find it altogether less amusing.

Well thanks to the Tyrant Blair we already have an electoral system that would disgrace a banana republic, so why not have ministers of a similar quality.

Then onto the final misunderstanding:

Backwards or forward? When it comes to constitutional niceties, the prime minister seems to have no problem locating his reverse gear.

This is not the use of the reverse gear, he is going forward to his goal, and pushing the accelerator. The fact that his goal has nothing to do with democracy and is instead authoritarian rule is perhaps why the, clueless but well meaning, Guardian is having problems.

Earth to the Guardian, come in please

The Guardian is showing utter cluelessness on ending the opt-out of the working time directive which begins with the classic quote:

The European parliament cannot win. Either it is dismissed as an irrelevant talking shop, or it is accused of representing the Eurocracy throttling the life out of Britain.

well some people complain because this is what it does and we disagree with it. Where the EU standing up for the nation states, or even shock horror their constituents, to do whatever they wanted against ever growing tide of regualtion from Brussels curtailing more and more freedoms then even eurosceptics like me would praise it. However as it is, it is merely a talking shop that rubber stamps the Eurocracy throttling the life out of Britain in order to pretend that said Eurocracy has some kind of democratic legitimacy.

Then on to the meat

The deal on offer in Strasbourg is that the opt-out would be wound down over three years, but the directive would be made more palatable to employers, in a series of amendments being voted on by MEPs. Most important is the one that allows an employee's average hours to be calculated over a full year, so that businesses can cope with erratic ebbs and flows in demand, in return for more reasonable hours the rest of the year.

Note the unwritten assumption that people are allowed to work only at the sufferance of the EU, and that it is only right that the number of hours that we work is controlled from there. The opt out, which is actually the way things have always worked in the thousands of years before the birth of the EU, being a diviation from this normal practice. But isn't our EU master nice giving allowing the number of hours being taken as the average over the entire year, let us praise our benevolent master for this great gift of being allowed to work.

However as always the market has already started to react. There is very high employment in the UK, unlike France and Germany which did not take the opt out, and so employees labour has become more valuable as there is less of it around. Employee's ,having seen the work life balance problem way before it came into the Eurocratic focus groups, have individually decided to use this power to try and get the work life balance that is correct for them, which even the Guardian admits is happening:

The length of the week worked by British employees is subsiding, without Europe's help. The average full-time working week is now a little over 37 hours — compared with 40 hours 10 years ago.

So the invisible hand of the market works it's magic and everybody gets what they want, without regulation. While in highly regulated 'core europe' unemployment hits levels not seen since the Great Depression. And the Guardian seems to think that regulation is a good thing.

EU tax harmonisation

Sending data by email is taxed because of the EU. When VAT was harmonised back in 1977 there where exceptions made for the data contained in books and letters. However Email hadn't been invented then, so there was no exception made. Since there can be no new exceptions (kind of like Aquis Communitaire but instead of racketting poer away from member states it rachets VAT towards harmonisation) when email was invented it ment that it was the data that you had to pay VAT on rather than just the transport mechanism.

"EEC Directive of 1977, subsequently amended (many times), which aims to harmonise VAT on communications, including electronic communications"

nice to see the Tyrant Blair has red line so there will be no tax harmonisation. Oh there already is, silly me.

North Sea Diaries - Hiaku

North Sea Diaries is calling for Hiaku about to summarise the Constitution. Consider this either a set of three or an extended Hiaku.

you are lowly serfs,
so says our great master the
european union

democracy sucks,
so says our great master the
european union

give me more money,
so says our great master the
european union

UPDATE:

I'm quite enjoying this and I think that I've managed to condence that extended Hiaku into a single verse:

you are lowly serfs,
EU is master, so you must
give us more money

I have been aided here with Li Bo's Text Inspector to make sure that I use the correct number of syllables.

Just realised that Li Bo's Text Inspector probably counted EU as one syllable, when it should be two. A little jigging with the punctuation and the corrected version is this:

You are lowly serfs,
EU is master. So you!
Give us more money.

Honourable Fiend: The UK General Election and Politics Blog: Choose Labour.

Choose Labour. Like Honourable Fiend I choose something else.

It’s up to you, shiraz quaffer

A great post (or rather repost) on the new blog The Sharpener about shiraz quaffer voting New Labour becasue it's fashionable to hate the Tories while forgetting what New Labour actually stands for which in the words of a quote from the post:

"Nick Cohen has recently gone mad, poor fellow, but remember this?

Power is New Labour’s first concern: how to hold to hold on to power, how to expand power and how to crush rival centres of power… In his attitude to the judiciary, as much as in his attitude to the BBC and his backbenchers, Blair shows an impatience with fetters on power. Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear the PM cry: ‘Do you know who I am?’"

I always try to use New Labour as the name of our ruling party rather than Labour, because they are not the same, a point that I think that this post has brought up better than I could ever say:

Labour’s origins aren’t in programmatic socialism. The party grew out of the unions – in other words it grew out of a tradition of free assembly and collective bargaining. In other words, it grew out of a tradition of political liberty to which the current government is hostile and seeks to curtail by whatever means possible.

When the government says that political liberties don’t matter to working class people, it’s using the old Cuba apologist trick. Hey man, the poor don’t need freedom of expression. They just want something to eat. Well, a lot of New Labour types are former trots and tankies so that isn’t such a surprise. Remember your Orwell on people who pass through the Communist Party “emerging with nothing but contempt for democracy and democratic methods.” Civil liberties were important to Old Labour because its members believed that working class people should succeed into the full range of their economic and political rights. Civil liberties are unimportant to New Labour because it believes that people are cattle, and that cattle need hay and a barn.

But we know that New Labour has got back in, so 4 more years (and going by their record 2 more wars) of the systematic destruction of Civil Liberties, and the transfer of the power to deside how best to run our lives from me and you, the judicary, parliment, and the rule of law to Number 10 Downing Street.

Eu Serf's election impressions

The Road to Euro Serfdom: First Impressions, the most important one being: Labour has won a very large majority, so we should keep things in perspective.

Election 2005

Well I've got Richard Younger-Ross again, and while I did not vote for him he does have a good record from his first term so I'm not too disapointed. At least it wasn't the kid that New Labour sent down on work experience.

The Tyrant Blair is back, as everybody knew would happen, but with a reducd majority, at this point it looks like a majority of between 60 and 70 according to the BBC (this does not agree with their current tally which says that Labours majority will be about 100). There are more small party and Independent MPs than in any parliament since 1945, unfortuantly one of them is dictator lover George Galloway who managed to slime his way into parliment again, displacing the only black woman MP. Despite Galloway this is probably a good thing for democracy as it means there will be more MP's beyond the Party system. UKIP's national share was up 0.8%

Postal voting is as fraudulent as had been feared with votes known to be stolen, including John Humphrys of the Today programme who "tock his sone along to show him how democracy worked" only to find out how 'democracy' works under New Labour.

EU envoy goes to China

Not wanting to wait for the constitution the EU has sent an envoy to China. Nice to see that they are waiting to see if the democratic will of the peoples of the EU is to have this constitution and therefore the foreign service that it creates. However perhaps it is a good thing, the EU has alot more in common with China than the democratic states that it replaces, lack of democratic legitimacy, large (failed) state owned industries, no respect for press freedom, a willingness to deal with despots. Much in common, except of course growth rates.

Blair: A considered opinion

A considered and thoughtful view of the Tyrant Blair's premiership, fromAn Englishman's Castle:

"1. For being the second most arrogant bastard on the planet (apart from Bush)
2. For taking us into a war that had nothing to do with us.
3. For swamping the country with illegal immigrants and for just hating England in general, you Chianti swilling cunt.
4. For wrecking the pensions system; my husband and I now look forward to poverty in our old age thanks to you - I'd like to knife you in the gut and then cut your non-existent bollocks off.
5. For trying to railroad us into Europe - if you like it so much then please fuck off there and never come back again; you can't even decide what religion you want to be so how can you decide on the future of our country you jug eared loon.
6. For not being dead yet - I wouldn't bother to piss on your grave!"

The Road to Euro Serfdom: Before You Vote......

Euro Serf on voting New Labour, doesn't look like a Eurosceptic or economic liberal should vote Labour either. So that's not socialists, or economic Liberals. Social Liberals cannot go Labour either due to their trashing of Civil Liberties. So what is left? Center-right Authoritarians and that's it.

Modern Britain.

The joys of the Tyrant Blair's police state, not content with simply having cameras everywhere now they want microphones. To pick up on antisocial behaviour, such as perhaps saying that you don't like New Labour out loud?

Reasons for Not Voting Labour

The Sharp Side: 35 Reasons for Not Voting Labour, if you are a left winger. Blair hasn't even pleased thoughs on the left thanks to his, often sensible, economic policies while infuriating classical Liberals with his attacks on civil liberties. Who exactly does he appeal to? Conservatives perhaps?

Gordon Brown writes in the Gaurdian that a
thrid Conservative defeat will reshape Britian ideological map. Why? New Labour occupies the exact same ideological territory as the Conservatives, but more Authoritarian. If he means the general population likes center-right parties such as New Labour, because they like having a job, then that is not exactly a suprise since that change was brought about by Thatcher. If he means that the general public doesn't mind authoritarian government then that is not exactly much of a change either, many people have always been willing to sacrifice (other peoples) liberty for more security. Or perhaps he means nothing at all and is simply using that as the carrot to rally the Labour faithful coupled with the stick of "Micheal Howard will eat your children". That's a bit more like it.

Tim Worstall on How You Should Vote.

Tim Worstall on How You Should Vote. Basically hold your nose and vote Tory to try and reduce the Labour Majority so they get some kind of opposition next time to their attempts to demolish the constitution. However there where three specific voting recomendations:

whichever seat Alfie the OK is standing in. He’s put down his 500 quid, seems a reasonable man and certainly has more brains than any random ten of the usual back bench fodder. Vote Alfie.
...
If you happen to live in the Taunton constituency then you really ought to be voting for Adrian Flook.
...
One slightly more general view of a constituency, that of bath. Please vote for anyone, anyone at all other than Don Foster.

I was thinking of voting Conservative or Liberal (not the LibDems) before reading this as Liberal is generally how I classify myself politically. Some of the Liberal policies look sound: No to the Euro, no to ID cards. But then a bit of a deeper trawl through their website and things got a bit less good with comments about wanting some kind of "world government", sorry but no thanks. So Stanley Johnson it is.

Tutor2u - low voter turnout - a threat to democracy in the uk?

Tutor2u - low voter turnout - a threat to democracy in the uk? Some interesting notes on voter turnout. One way of looking at the graph is that it trends around 70-75%, but then fell off a cliff in 2001. Another is that 2001 fits into a trend from 1950-1970, and that the fights over privertisation in the 1980's where the aboration. Will turnout be ver ylow this time? Yes, simply because whoever you vote for the Tyrant Blair will get another term, and with postal voting fraud probably a very large majority. So what is the point?