More Labour corruption

Peter Risdon on another case of Labour corruption, this time with the security for the giant money munching white elephant Olympics.

Labour Party Corruption

Remember how the postal voting system that Labour brought in lead to vote factories and electoral fraud on a scale that would disgrace a banana republic? Well the Labour Party is at it again. This vote rigging will no dought be helped by the fact that the safeguards put in because of the bad publicity they got last time don't work. Not that this need worry anybody in Scotland where Labour is, according to the polls, set to get hammered by the SNP since it has been decided that they don't need any safe guards against fraud at all! North of the border there is a deliberate campaigne to abuse the system:

Muhammad Shoaib, who left the Labour party to become an independent candidate last year, claimed there was "a deliberate campaign" to abuse the postal vote system.

He said: "Party workers put pressure on people to sign up for a postal vote. They then have a list of addresses which they know are registered for postal votes. They know when the forms arrive and go back saying that 'we can assist you filling in the form'. There's a lot of pressure put on people; they effectively force people to fill in the form and to vote for them."

which mirrors what is happening south of the border as well, this is not an honest mistake from over enthusiam for letting people voice their views. Labour understands what they are doing:

One of the students conspiratorially told the group he believed that what they were doing was “illegal”. Hyde responded: “Yes it is. But we’ve done 25% already, so...”

With another fairly obviously corrupt election coming up thanks to the Labour Party's desisions about postal voting what is Labour's answer? Why to use their own corruption as an excuse for ID Cards by forcing everybody that wants to vote in person to present one, even though voting in person is not where the corruption is happening.

We all know about the Labour Party selling seats in the House of Lords in order to fill its own coffers, but what happens when these newly ennobled Lords get there? In the finest Labour tradition it is nose strait in the trough with the highly paid Quangos stuffed with Labour supporters in order to produce the correct desisions. Which is rather like the way that all the money that Labour has hosed over the NHS (and mainly wasted) is divided up. Labour supporting areas first, everybody else can wait. Or Labour diverting public money into its own coffers via a convient money laundering service offered by the unions.

From the very top the corrpution has spread all the way to the roots. This is not a few bad apples Labour has become corrupt to its core, a black festering pustual on the body politic. It is in desperate need of some time in opposition to purge itself of these poisions. If it can.

Why markets are better than state control

Longrider about why markets are better than state control, but I feel he has not quite explained the really great thing about markets. The amazing thing about free markets is not that they somehow makes wicked men good, it is that it makes their wickedness irrelavent. Free markets are a technology that can convert bad intentions into good actions.

This is because they are based on co-operation rather than coercion. However wicked the heart in order to acheive their aims, say a nice conservatory by the pyrana pool, under free market conditions a person has to pursuade people to deal with him of their own free will. He has to give them something that they want as well, he has to proved that he can be trusted to deliver, in short he has to act honourably despite himself or he will never forfill his evil desires.

When bad people can simply use coercion none of that applies. All he needs is to get his hand on he levers of state power and he can simply force everybody to bend to his will. History shows that psycopaths with all the social concience of an incontinent dog on a cricket pitch are rather good at getting their claws on the levels of state power. These are the people that simply cut a bloody swath through their opponents on the way up because they do not matter all that matters is getting to the top and the power to satisfy their desires that they will then wield.

A bad man in a free market based system will have to try to help other people if they are going to give him what he wants. But bad men in a state controlled system have nothing to stop them racking up a six figure body count, so they did.

A pinch of fusion

Via Peter Risdon another advance along the path to reliable Fusion, this time the Inertial Confinement technique using the Z-Pinch machine. It has already been shown the Z can produced an anomalous heat effect that could well be a Fusion reaction, this new advance is will allow it to be fired more often and more reliably so allowing for a continuous stream of Fusion pulses which can be used for power generation.

Extradition

Score one for the judicial system, two Libyan terror suspects have won an appeal against being deported to Libya. Good, I know that we have a piece of paper that says that the Libyans promise to not subject anybody deported from the UK to the same tortures as anybody detained without our assistance, but does anybody really believe that once they are off the plane they won’t end up on the wrong end of a cattle prod like everybody else? Despite being terrorism suspects they are still only suspects, we do not know if they have actually done anything. No doubt the Libyans will get them to confess to something after a little persuasion but that still does not mean that they actually did anything. Hopefully the judicial system will also get around to doing something about the abomination of an extradition treaty that we have with the USA, even if it wasn’t in time for the NatWest three.

Packaging waste (of time)

The independent is claiming a success in its campaign against excessive packaging, with a banner headline taking up most of the first page and therefore meaning they need to use more paper to deliver their stories. But I wonder what they expect the government to do about it? Packaging is an EU competence, and has been since the 80's, meaning that the UK government has no power over it. They could get all 642 members of parliament to sign up to this and it will still make no difference. Unless they also sign up to Better Off Out and get us out of the EU they simply do not have the powers to actually do something. Not something that was, or would be, mentioned in the Independent.

Of course where we not in the EU there would be no point involving Parliament at all in the minutiae of packaging details. Without centrally imposed requirements we could just use Pigouvian taxation and the market to find the best level of packaging without the need for any specific legislation at all. By adding the costs of the environmental impact of it into the price the market would find the optimum levels of packaging for different goods, taking into account the individual characteristics of that particular product and its packaging needs. You won't find that mentioned in the Independent either.

Education

We always hear that politicians are going to hold a radical rethink of this, or a radical rethink of that. But always it is the same few ideas that come up. This can be seen whenever the shocking state of our education system comes up, not that they are alone in thinking that there is one proposal that will solve everything for everybody. For example you will always always and without fail somebody will claim that somehow bringing back corporal punishment would be a cure all. Equally you will find this ignored by the political establishment as it is not one of their proscribed ideas. Here is an example of what I mean, and for a bit of fun try to guess where the next quote comes from:

we find the astronomer and mathematician, James Inman ... deploring the abolition of the rod. He further remarks that a “black hole” as a place of confinement is needed [for his pupils as a result]!

The Daily Mail perhaps? Unfold to find out.

Nope! The answer is a book written in 1938 by Lt.Commander C. F. Walker R.N. about the training of Royal Navy officers, from a passage describing the results of banning corporal punishment in the Royal Naval college in 1806. But the third of what Winston Churchill considered the naval traditions was restored in 1873, as the book goes on say:

In the end, however, it was found necessary to revert to beating once more, and in the regulations of 1873, there appears the following manuscript note, which is not without significance:

“when reduction to second or third class seems to be non-effective with troublesome cadets, caning over the breech has been tried and found effective.”

Thereafter an official thrashing remained the chief punishment for the more serious offences, and continues to this day, though it is seldom awarded.

Corporal punishment certainly wasn’t, and isn’t, the only method of instilling discipline available, and the Navy would have had many more options than most establishments. But they tried with it and they tried without it, and so found it to be a useful tool at that time. Maybe today in our more enlightened times that it is no longer needed, hopefully this is true, and that more modern methods are more appropriate. As they might well have also though in the heady atmosphere 1806 at the beginning of a new century and the dawn of the industrial age. They where in the 1800s now so modern times required different more modern methods.

Keeping kids in order has always been a problem. How it can be done has always been debated and always will be debated. Methods have been tried, discarded, and tried again. Personally I don’t know the best method that will solve all the problems. I just know that the current state, where discipline is so low as to make education impossible, is unacceptable. What I do know however one guaranteed way of not finding the correct way to better education, which is to keep it as a state regulated state monopoly.

We cannot find out if something is right for todays circumstances if it is never tried. Some people will do well in the anomnymity of a large establishment, others in the one-to-one situation of home schooling. For some probably the Steiner schools should be the model and maybe there are a few that would need a fairly strict system. Ultimately the only way of letting children get the education that suits them is for the people that know them best to find what is best for them, which could well mean trying sevarl systems until the correct one is found. But it is impossible for a parent to find the system that will be best for their children if there is only one available to try since it is the only one sanctioned by the State. So I feel that we have to get rid of the failing one-size-fits-none state monopoly and trust the parents that they will try to do what is best for their children, without any ulterior motives like gaining political capital. Not a radical thought really.

The EU attacking free speech ... again

Via the Pub Philosopher I learn that the EU is following up from its attacks on free speech in wanting to ban the denial of certain genocides the EU is starting to create legislation that will ban insulting religion.

But there may be a way of at least get a chance of fighting this thanks to our being in another international organisation, this one founded six years before the signing of the treaty of Rome with the UK as a founder member and with far more members and fewer pretensions towards itself becoming a State. The Council of Europe's main achievement is the European Convention on Human Rights now incorpated directly into UK law as the Human Rights Act. This enshrines the right to freedom of expression that this new EU proposal seeks to restrict.

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

there is of course a get out clause:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

But I don't think that a way can found to use them without claiming some things that most politicians rather wouldn't. The only two things that could be used to get around the Human Rights convention, these are the clauses about "the prevention of disorder or crime", because when Muslims (and lets face it legislation is about appeasing Muslims) feel that somebody has insulted their religion there are often riots. Or possibly "the protection of the reputation or the rights of others". They are not going to use the prevention of disorder or crime option as that would mean admitting that they are having to appease Muslims by removing the majorities rights because of their tendency to violence. It would be an admission of the Islamic colonisation that is happening, and they are never going to admit to this.

There is no right not to be insulted, so the only way around the ECHR will be to claim that it is needed for the protection of the reputation of Muslims. But a reputation cannot be protected from the truth, Jonathan Aitkin or Jeffrey Archer cannot say that their reputations are being damaged by somebody saying that they are liars because they indisputably are. Likewise for a Muslim they might think that their religion isn't being portrayed in the best light by somebody pointing out that the Islamic prophet Muhammad fucked a nine year old, but it cannot be damaging to his reputation because he did. It would therefore be hard to justify a blanket ban on insulting Islam that goes beyond blatant falsehoods on the scale of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (available in all good Islamic bookshops) without admitting that there are some very unsavory aspects to it and the majority of the population must not be exposed to these facts. Again getting this admission would be unlikely.

This being EU legislation there is the worry that it will simply slip through Whitehall without anybody noticing and never being looked at by Parliament, like most of our laws do nowadays thanks to the EU's democracy by-pass mechanisms. However thanks to the Metric Martyrs that cannot be, in the final judgement to that case a new structure was added to the UK constitution meaning that some Acts cannot be repealed implicitly, but require an explicit act of parliament to do so. To get this though it must go though parliament and here it can be stopped, or at least neutered and the insidious influence of the EU exposed, so long as it is oppossion is willing to try and stop it.

Will the opposition parties be willing to oppose this infringement of our rights? It will have to go through parliament, but will there be anybody there to fight it when it does? The Lords will. But Labour have already decided to 'reform' them out of existence now they are no longer able to use ennoblement as a way of raising funds for their party, so the Lords might not be there when this finally hits parliament.

The Liberal Democrats should want to oppose this gross violation of liberty, but their europhilia and their adherence to the multicult might outweigh the call of liberty.

For the conservatives this provides a great tactical opportunity for David Cameron if he is willing to take it. It is an issue that he could use to renew the alliance between all the sections of his party: the EUsceptics won't like it as it comes from the EU, the libertarians don't want it because it infringes liberty, the social conservatives shouldn't want it because one of the ancient British traditions that they hold dear is the freedom of speech, and the knuckle dragging Monday Club might want to oppose it because it is being proposed in order to favour those nasty 'foreign' people over the majority population. Nor should he have to sacrifice too much of his hard won fluffiness, on this issue he can easily position himself as fighting for the freedom of the majority against a violent and oppressive minority, because he is, and use the media influence of the likes of Rowan Atkinson who was so prominent last time this came up. He might be worried about Labour playing the race card against him, but religion isn't a race and there is already protection of race. That would also involve admitting that this legislation is primarily in aid of Muslims, which would mean admitting to the special treatment they get because of their propensity for violence. This is not something that he can admit as this would encourage others to become violent in order to try and get the same special treatment.

There may even be few left in the Labour party that would be willing to oppose this on the grounds of liberty, or secularism, or simply that they now need to build up a media profile of their own as opposed just relying on their increasingly unpopular party in order to retain their seats.

So it is possible to get this legislation neutered despite it coming through the EU. But it will not be easy as coming from the EU the BBC, the UK's most powerful media group, and the multicultist establishment will be firmly on its side.

Sick Criminals

Is there anybody that the government does not want to tag and control? First they propose imprisoning the mentally ill indefinitely without trial even if they have done nothing (under Labour, if you're paranoid they are out to get you). And yes I do mean imprisoning, there is no treatment going to be offered as this bill is about people for whom there is no treatment available. If there was they could be sectioned under the existing mental health act.

Now Labour also want to tag people elderly people with dementia apparently to give them "freedom to roam around their communities." Rather like sheep free to roam the moors, before they are taken down to be sheared for their fleeces or sent to the abattoir. Not that the elderly get sent to the abattoir (even if the NHS is getting that way) though they certainly get fleeced.

The range of 'crimes' created by Labour just grows and grows, now even illness is becoming a crime. Serious illness will get you in jailed, less serious illness and you get off with a lighter sentence of being electronically tagged and under 24 hour surveillance. And of course all without the nascence of trial or evidence. But I guess the NHS might finally have chance of offering a good service if all the ill people are in prison rather than cluttering up the hospitals.

Lets get naked

Perv-o-vision is coming to a street corner near you. Not just the corners either, but the whole street. This technical innovation will soon mean that CCTV operators will not even have to use their imaginations to find out what innocent passers-by look like naked for their masturbation their fantasies, you didn't think that they where trying to catch criminals did you? With shouty CCTV the passers-by will be able to get the sound effects as well. Not that the constant surveillance has any effect on real criminals at all. With no policemen out there to actually catch them they have really do have no need to fear, unlike everybody else.

A false positive is still a failure

The register as a piece on a company bigging up their facial tracking software but I don't get these numbers, how can they claim to be such a success with 20% to 40% rate of false positives? A false positive is as much as a failure as a false negative. A false positive can actually be even more destructive than a false negative. Just ask the innocent teenager thrown prison for 12 days because his school didn't understand that if they want to match up calls to a call log both have to be set to the same time, not one an hour behind the other. Or the mother shouted at by
big brother CCTV, and then denigrated on national TV (how's that for an example of anti-social behaviour) for doing nothing. But then the government attitude has always been that we are all criminals and guilty of something, and if we are not then they will just keep pumping out new 'crimes' until we are, even dead people.

One form of liberty

Freedom is not a static passive thing, it is a description of a process. You cannot grab a lump of freedom and stick it in a box so that you have it or don’t. You can only either act freely or be stopped from acting freely. Of Isaiah Berlin’s two forms of freedom it is Negative Liberty allows people to act to gain Positive Liberty, but not the other way around.

The reason that positive liberty cannot create negitive is easy. As soon as negative liberty is meddled with it cannot be unmeddled with. It might be good for the people involved, it may well be in their best interests and put them in a position to take control of their lives later and realise their full potential. Perhaps later they will wish they did not have to be coerced. But that can never change that they where.

For negative liberty allowing positive, while negative liberty may stop the state from trying to help people it does not stop people from banding together voluntarily to help themselves. It will even stop anybody trying to stop them. So negative liberty allows people to create whatever structures they themselves need for them to achieve positive liberty.

Take this example from the real world. Socialism is often supported on the grounds of the positive liberty of taking control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes by removing you from the requirements of captialist production, but rarely in terms of negative liberty and being free of coercion. It is all about positive liberty, but history has shown the only way it can be set up with the result actually giving positive liberty is within the framework of negative liberty.

When Socialism was set up in in all the Socialist Republics it was outside of the framework of negative liberty therefore allowing trying to achieve this goal through coercion. The revolutions had swept away the the old orders so now was the time for the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to build Socialism. This dictatorship had no inhibitions about coercing people as it was their intention to build a better world. All that happened was; a destruction of both forms of liberty, the enslavement of the people, and that little matter of mass murder on an unprecedented scale.

However when Socialism is set up on a basis of voluntary co-operation, as is required when within the framework of negative liberty, as happened in the Israeli Kibbutz movement it can actually work for a while. People in these did live following the code of 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs' and because they freely choose to accept the restrictions that this, especially in our resource limited world, will always impose on them and therefore not try to cheat the system (too much). Also since it is all on a voluntary basis the enslavement and mass murder that followed Socialism everywhere else was impossible, should the leaders have tried it everybody else would have simply withdrawn their co-operation and walked away.

EU Phone Home

So the EU’s little bit of feel good regulation has got through the committee stage of the EP, now we just have to wait to see how it will fail. All of the mobile networks, which tend to have a lot of debt at the moment, will seek to maintain their profits by raising the prices elsewhere or cutting back on investment. So there are either going to be less new products, or the current ones that get used now a lot more than international roaming will be marginally more expensive. But most people spend most of their time without having to use his service, which is why the cut throat competition in the domestic markets has driven the prices of everything else so low and not international roaming.

Certainly some people would rather have cheaper international roaming in exchange for more expensive other services, and they are already free to go out and look for anybody offering that service or start one up themselves. If they cannot find them or think starting up the service is unviable (due to the small numbers that are willing to pay for it) then there are a multitude of other options. You could just buy a local sim card, then there are the various pre-paid international call cards and specialist international carriers, the internet either through one of the many text based systems or voice systems such as skype, landlines, even old fashioned snail mail. The only people that this will have a major positive effect on is people that spend a lot of time moving across countries, for example travelling between Brussels and Strasbourg every month with frequent other trips to various countries. Like MEPs. A group of politicians using their power to distort the markets for their own personal interests while selling it as something that will benefit everybody when it will in fact only really benefit a very small number of people like themselves. Plus de change, plus la meme chose.

The religion of peace

A five hour battle outside a mosque, 200 people involved, hooligans bused in to take part. Didn’t hear anything about it? Possibly because both sides where Muslim.

re-education re-education re-education

Labour’s re-education camps (Labour obviously didn't drop all the old Socialist traditions) are still around and moving forward. According to The Register a pilot programme has been completed and come to the shocking conclusion that when people that, thanks to the welfare state, do not need to rely on their interactions with their community to earn a living are forced to be part of a community and view the other members as more than just a source of entertainment when there is nothing on daytime TV become far less anti-social.

Carting these people off to the slopes of the Himalayas for re-education is going to do nothing about the problem. They will still not have to care what people think and will still get paid for doing nothing when, or rather if, they return. So they will simply shift strait back into their old patterns of behaviour as these are the easiest ones for them to get what they want, because the state is willing to give it to them on a plate so long as they make no effort themselves.

Forced relocation is not needed, just a bit of engagement by removing the welfare state that allows these people to disengage from the rest of the society. They would quickly learn that people don't like them acting like dickheads if it is the people that they normally abuse that are the ones deciding whether or not to give the work they need in order to earn a living.

Lock up your paediatricians

Lock up your paediatricians, the screaming mobs roll in five ... four ... three ...

pseudonyms

Jackart has asked why it is that people on the right are more likely to write under a pseudonym than those on the left. Personally I expect a large part of it is that people on the right are held to a much higher standard than those on the left. It is perfectly possible to have been a member of a political party supporting the twentieth century’s number one mass murderer and then laugh it off later as one of the mistakes of youth. So long as the mass murderer in question is part of the left. Likewise it is perennially fashionable to wear the image of another mass murderer, again so long as that mass murderer was on the left. But on the other side to celebrate the image of a murdering bastard like Pinochet is unthinkable (rightly, he was a murdering bastard). Even the reclaiming of the Falklands from the fascist junta of Argentina, despite being just about the closest to a completely justified war you can get, will still cause heated debate because the Lady that ordered it is definitely of the right.

Also people on the right will more often be challenging the current political consensus. For this a pseudonym is useful since it makes it a bit harder for your ideas to affect your personal life and visa versa. Note that the writers of Lenin’s Tomb, which is definitely of the left, also use pseudonyms and they too do not go along with the mainstream. We live in censorious times and Thought Crimes can easily catch up with you if you get noticed offending the wrong people.

I use a thin pseudonym because when I write it is generally about something that has made me angry, this means that I don’t always use the most temperate language. This is a zone for venting spleen. One of my themes is that I don’t like religion, I consider it to be a collection of stupid and frequently dangerous superstitions. In the past I have slagged off all of the worlds major religions, and several of the minor players, however voicing such views is becoming increasingly controversial. Slagging off a religious leader, who happens to be Jewish, that advocates cutting up teddy bears is probably OK. But for some reason slagging off a religious leader, who happens to be Muslim, that advocates cutting up women is probably not. I happen to get angry about both so the level of obstrufication given by a (fairly thin) pseudonym is useful.

The right to be stupid

As much as it pains me to say this, the government has no place trying to dictate the teachings of any stupid superstition religion. The proposals to do so are wrong. Islamism is psychotic, many of regular Islam’s teachings are disgusting and have no place in British society. But you cannot put a policeman into somebody's head and should not try. If people want to believe stupid things then that is a matter for them and them alone. If they want to, non-violently, promote these weird beliefs then that too must be acceptable. Just as it should be acceptable to highlight and ridicule the nonsense they spout. The nonsense would not be able to stand up to the light of reason and be pushed aside.

Unfortunately the politically correct world that we live in has decided that ridiculing nonsense is taboo, so the natural check on the spread of Islamism (that it is obviously violent, repressive and stupid) has been curtailed. Wanting to stop the spread of Islamism, but not allowing the natural social checks on it, government's only option is to regulate. Hence this latest Thought Crime. Not that this government are particularly adverse to creating Thought Crimes at the best of times.

A bit fishy

Together the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy account for the majority of what the EU does. They are a disaster, a fact which even the Pro-EU will acknowledge.

When you have a tragedy of the commons, as has happened with fish, there are two ways out. Privatisation, as the Icelandic people tried and has worked, or Socialisation, as the EU tried and has failed. But it wasn’t just privatisation the did some other things as well, which happen to be the exact opposite of the EU such as banning the practice of throwing away perfectly good fish, a requirement of the CFP.
Discards of usable fish are prohibited and fisheries shall be managed with the aim of decreasing the possibility of such practices.
Also they have set up no catch zones around spawning grounds:
Fishing is prohibited in designated areas or with the use of certain types of fishing gear in order to protect spawning fish and juveniles. Ocean areas are kept under surveillance in order to enable prompt action.
something that the UK might itself try if the new marine bill gets passed and somehow does not fall foul of the fact that fisheries policy is an EU competence and parliament therefore does not have the right to legislate on it. This was in addition to the privatised the fish stocks. This may sound odd as a commenter on Tim Worstalls blog says:
Enclosure is a nice idea, but who is going to tell the fish?
The Icelandic solution to the slippery nature of fish and the difficulty of deep sea fencing was to issue permanent tradable quotas sold at auction rather than the temporary yearly ones of the EU. These quotas are rigerously maintained by both the fishermen themselves, since they are their property, and Icelandic fisheries protection vessels acting as policemen (or rather as how policemen should act but in the UK now don’t).
Should a fisherman own the quota for a certain species in a certain area then he can, if he chooses, let that area go fallow for a year safe in the knowledge that nobody else will have stolen his property or it been allocated to somebody else in the meantime. So when he chooses to exercise it and that because he has allowed the fish population to recover there will be fish enough for him to actually land it.

The path to happiness

I was ruthlessly pillaged Wat Tyler's blog for the natural resources that it contains, as you would expect from a nasty righty, and during my excavations this diagram by Prof Blanchflower blanchflower.jpg (image)

So there it is in diagrammatic form if you want to be happy then you should ensue centralism and socialism, and while you might not be able to buy happiness being able to buy drugs and the services of prostitutes gives you a bloody good start head start to getting it.

Another reason to leave the EU

Mentioning before how the modus operandi of the EU is “furthering the French national interest“ consider the case of the 15 British sailors and Royal Marines kidnapped and held captive by the Iranians from Iraqi waters. These are EU citizens invited by the democratically elected Iraqi government to help with reconstruction, you would therefore expect that the EU would want to help them. Not least to progress the EU foreign policy, and diplomatic service which while it has no legal reason to exist, since it requires the now dead EU Constitution, and the EU is setting up anyway. However the EUs response has been basically nothing? And why would it leave its kidnaped citizens from one of the larger member states to the tender mercies of the Iranians, why it would be nothing to do with the €14 billion trade mainly with France. But because the French government cares more for money than their allies the EU is not going to do anything about Iran at all, and because we are part of the EU we cannot impose our own sanctions either.

Carbon quotas, a (green, glowing) silver lining

In order to combat climate change the UK has offered to cut 20% of its C02 production from electricity generation. However the EU commission are not satisfied with us missing these unnecessacary quotas, they want even stricter quotas to miss which will require restrictions on all aspects of life rather than just how electricity is put onto the grid. If you look hard enough then every cloud can have a silver lining, and even with this there could be one good outcome. This is because of the way the EU normally works, that is in the French national interest.

Currently the case nuclear power is classed with coal and gas as a non-renewable fuel that has to pay the climate change levy despite not producing any greenhouse gases and there being supplies enough to last beyond any sensible planning horizon. France currently creates 75% of all its electricity by nuclear power which is a very popular policy, so under the current classification they are going to have to get rid of a large number of them and replace them with windmills which are considerably more expensive and less reliable than nuclear. However should France be able to get nuclear reclassified along with the renewables as not contributing to climate change then it will already have far suppased its quota and be in a position to make a shed load of money from selling power to other countries not so blessed by the mighty atom. This is not as unlikely as it sounds having both logic (since nuclear power does not contribute to climate change) and more important the French national interest on its side.

Not that quotas or supranational organisation is needed in order to tackle climate change in the optimal way. Pigou taxes and the market can handle searching out the socially optimum levels of CO2 production far more efficiently and precisely than the sledge hammer of bureaucratic guessing.

Better Off Out

Another of those that originally campaigned for joining the EEC has now come
out in favour of leaving the EU.

In a statement, Lord Tebbit said: "From being a supporter of British
membership of the Common Market in 1970 I have come to believe that the
United Kingdom would be Better Off Out of the developing European Republic
of the 21st Century.

"We British have a thousand-year history of self government. We have been
free and democratic longer than any other nation.

"The European Union is too diverse, too bureaucratic, too corporatist and
too centralist to be a functioning democracy," he said.