And now for something jolly

Before I turn my attention to the dire European Arrest Warrant and some of its particularly noxious effects, I shall post a link to a rather jolly site that was called to my attention by one of this blog's readers.

It's called The Neglected Books Page and is just that: a blog that deals with books and writers that have been neglected over the years though they were reasonably well known when they were published. One could (and one often does) argue that most neglected books and authors are that for a good reason: they are simply not good enough to remember for any length of time. But that ignores fashion, laziness, political thinking, ordinary changes in taste. Some neglected books and authors are revived to great acclaim.

I actually do recall the literary periodical that asked various writers and critics which authors they thought had been unjustly forgotten. Two people, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, picked Barbara Pym, who was still around but unpublished and attracting no interest. Barbara Pym, an extremely good writer, immediately became known, published and reprinted. There has been a biography as well and it would be rather difficult to write about the British literature of the second half of the twentieth century without mentioning her and her characters.

Who knows, maybe The Neglected Books Page will revive many more Barbara Pyms.

A Modern Slavery Bill?

Whenever the words new and Bill and Theresa and May come into one sentence I start feeling unwell. If I had a revolver I would reach for it and if I had a bullet proof vest I would put it on.

As it happens, I do not have to write about her proposed Modern Slavery Bill that is going to be, assuming it gets through Parliament, an absolute horror, as Tim Worstall has posted an excellent piece on the Adam Smith Institute blog.

Here is the introductory paragraph, which made me laugh out loud at first but only at first:

I know that I shouldn't giggle over such things but the revelation that the three "slaves" recently found were in fact the remnants of a Maoist commune well known to social services (indeed, housed by the local council) does provide a certain amusement as we see various leftish types suddenly running away from the story. However, now onto something a great deal more important. Theresa May and various campaigners are going to use this to try and pass an extremely bad law about modern slavery. And it's worth our all complaining very loudly about this now, as the bill is being drawn up, not later when it is too late.

It is quite extraordinary that the media is still referring to the case of the brainwashed extreme Maoists (is there any other kind?) as "slaves". Certainly, Communism in all its forms created millions of slaves. These women were not that and the use of this case for general legislation is preposterous but sadly credible. Read Tim Worstall' piece. Well worth it.

Apparently Mr Cameron has a moral obligation to give away our money

A very good blog on the Adam Smith Institute site, which covers rather wearily the same ground about the sheer wrongness of foreign aid both as far as the enforced donors and the enforced recipients are concerned.

They quote the Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati:

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

He may have said it several years ago but the situation has not changed.

In a way the question with aid and with charities is what the purpose of the giving is. After all, we keep giving either voluntarily or, in the case of foreign aid, involuntarily through our taxes and yet nothing is improved and the same pictures of suffering are produced every Christmas and after every disaster, small or large, to wring our hearts. Which presumably means that we are not achieving anything and should start thinking of alternative ways of helping. Ah, but do we want to help or do we just want to feel virtuous, in the case of the government that is shelling out aid money to prop up kleptocracies, at other people's expense?

A moral duty?

So, according to much (though not all) of the media and a supposedly Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer we all have a moral duty to pay "our fair share" of the tax. Oh really? And who exactly decides what a fair share is? Whose fault is it that the level of taxation is so high that people and companies who earn a lot by contributing a great deal to the economy are fleeing the country? Whose fault is it that the whole system is complicated to the point of complete incomprhension with endless additions here and there that allow, nay, encourage tax avoidance?

As for the media and the many vox pop comments on the subject, one begins to despair. No, not begins - one despairs completely and utterly.

It appears that there is no clear distinction in people's minds between tax avoidance (completely legal and one anyone who has an ISA or a complex pension arrangement is taking part in) and tax evasion (illegal but one many people indulge in whenever they pay in cash to avoid VAT). It, furthermore, appears that people have no ability to grasp the similarity between international companies choosing the country with the best tax system in which to pay tax and them choosing the best ISA or pension fund. The words "international" and "company" act as a red rag and all ability to think disappears. Finally, it would appear that having read about arrangements to pay low or no corporation tax, journalists, politicians and others who express opinion, assume that it means no tax at all being paid. No National Insurance, income tax, VAT, business rate. Nothing.

It is such a relief to be able to read a sensible analysis of the issue on the Adam Smith Institution blog. I recommend it to anyone whose blood pressure is going through the ceiling. Happily, I am genetically predisposed towards low blood pressure. Otherwise, I would have had to abandon politics a long time ago.

Statements

I fully intend to do a day's blogging, just as soon as I sorted out some aspects of that difficult concept called life (not all of it, just some). However, here are a couple of preliminary statements:

On UKIP and today's by-elections in Croydon North, Rotherham and Middlesborough (on which I shall write later):

As UKIP's co-founder and the first person to be purged from that party I would be delighted if UKIP could finally achieve the results it ought to achieve in the current political climate, no matter how low the turn-out might be. However, past experience tells one that results rarely live up to predictions and it might, on the whole, be better to wait for those results before celebrating or predicting (yet again) that the political scene is about to change. 

On the forthcoming report from Lord Leveson:

Who didn't know that the purpose of the exercise was to recommend legislation that would introduce state control of the media? Then again, such legislation will  have to pass through two Chambers in Parliament and is likely to get bogged down in both of them, thus ensuring that Parliamentary time is taken up by this preposterous bit of legislation. 

The assumption that this is going to be a spectacularly new departure for the British media, which is, allegedly free to publish what it likes at the moment ignores our still unreformed libel laws that control journalism to a far greater extent than most people realize. Suffice it to say that in the US they had to pass legislation to protect the right of American authors to publish certain information in their country and not be hassled by British courts.

Finally, as a blogger, I find it hard not to laugh at the travails of the MSM and not to hope that any legislation that comes out of the Leveson report might finally encourage the British public to turn to the genuinely free part of the media. 

More later, after I have given the benefit of my opinions to the listeners of the BBC Russian Service.

EU Referendum

Sharp eyed readers of this blog would have noticed that there were technical problems with the RSS feed from the revered EU Referendum blog. I have discussed matters with the Boss and have removed it from the list of Blogs, placing it among Websites for the time being.

Managed to miss this

This is good news, as well. The Synoblog has been back for some time and nobody told me. Boo-hoo! Anyway, I am delighted that the best reporter from Brussels can be read again with ease.

Aren't the media wonderful?

Kevin Myers has an excellent article in the Irish Independent that takes apart an interview with Robert Fisk. Mostly he takes apart Fisk himself but the interviewer, Pat Kenny gets it in the neck, too.

You could argue that taking Robert Fisk apart (or fisking as it is popularly known) is akin to shooting fish in a barrel but, for some incomprehensible reason, the man is still being taken seriously by large swathes of the media.

The whole article is worth reading as there are far too many goodies in it to quote but here is one that made me laugh out loud:

It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

Curiously enough I can think of a large number of Israelis who have brown eyes and are not Christian. (I can also think of some who are Christian and who are not subjected to the sort of horrors Palestinian Christians are, but let that pass.)

While we are on the subject of the media and its curious coverage of events, let us have a quick look at what is going on in the Presidential elections on the other side of the Pond where an extraordinary amount of attention has been paid to a tape of Romney speaking at a private fund-raising event and making some comments about people who live off the state probably not voting for him. To be fair, our media has been going dulalee over that story as well and ignoring various unappetizing matters to do with the sitting President.

Well, you know, it seems that the "unedited" tape has one or two minutes missing. Here is Legal Insurrection pursuing the story. An awful lot can be said in one or two minutes, as I know all too well, having been an interpreter at various times.

Well, what is democracy?

A blog by Dr Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute site raises some very pertinent questions. Is democracy really just mob rule by a majority, however acquired, against any minority it happens to dislike? I seem to recall the question coming up when the Labour government gleefully announced in effect that it had a majority and therefore could go after a minority it disliked, that is people who hunted.

There are other cases, as Dr Butler points out and these tend to be less likely to inspire indignation:

it is possible for quite small majorities to dominate the agenda. That is why we have such absurdly high tax on businesses and on people who earn a lot by creating jobs and prosperity. There are simply fewer of them than the majority, who enjoy the benefits of the taxation.

When it comes to taxation we do have only one chamber and no other control on their activity. The idea of being governed by petitions or referendums (let us not spend any time discussing the Swiss system, which is applicable to one country only, Switzerland) or, in other words, vested interests and very small majorities that are easily swayed by the news of the day is equally difficult. It is representative government we need to mend and a balance of powers we need to introduce.

It goes without saying that none of that can be done while we are inside the European Union and are governed very largely from Brussels through are so-called legislators.

Is it worth the trouble?

People I know and like have told me that I was wasting my time on the 1922 Committee. Who really cares, said they, on the shenanigans within the party formerly known as Conservative? Nobody, of course, except the ever decreasing number of members. However, the structure of British politics, hollowed out by various agents, including the EU, is of importance. One day we shall want to use it again. Building from scratch is never easy as a number of post-Communist states have demonstrated.

On a far more important level, I have been following, together with his many supporters, Cranmer's battle with the ASA. Any reader who is unaware of the ASA's outrageous and dishonest behaviour and of His Grace's capable fight with them, ought to spend a little time catching up.

In his most recent posting Cranmer wrote:

It is a question of impartiality, which matters profoundly in political processes where force and influence compete with manipulation and facts: if an organisation with quasi-judicial authority professes to be objective in its investigations, then its senior staff and officers must not only be impartial, they must also be seen to be impartial. There cannot be even the merest hint of a political agenda subverting that professed neutrality or corrupting the overriding commitment to fairness and justice.

He then goes on to detail why the Chairman of the ASA, Lord Smith of Finsbury, formerly known as Chris Smith MP and Culture Minister, cannot be said to be impartial or objective.

Cranmer is absolutely right. These things are of importance. Some of the discussion on the blog is interesting though, I note the presence, comme d'habitude, of a ninny who advises the blog author to get over it and start writing about something else. He gets short shrift from the others, I am glad to say.

So, for the last time I hope, here is a little more about the 1922 Committee. The "modernisers" by which one means the people who ensured that the Conservatives did not manage to win against the least popular government in living memory, are rejoicing. Graham Brady, the Chairman, is calling on everyone to unite and stop the infighting, which would indicate that things are truly bad and the Committee's meetings may well start resembling those of Tower Hamlets Council.

Modernisers hope the group, which has traditionally acted as a “safety valve” for the party, will now form greater links with Tory HQ and its volunteers around the country.

They also hope meetings can be moved from Wednesday to Monday so MPs can unite around key events in the Parliamentary week, and want the 1922 to become an “umbrella” for other policy groups right across the party.

New executive member George Hollingbery said the election had shown an “appetite for change” but stressed the new MPs wanted to work with colleagues on the changes.

“This stuff will all take time, none of this will happen overnight,” he told the Standard. “The ’22 has been here a lot longer than I have and will be here for a long time after I’ve gone.”

So the plan is to use the Committee, which is supposed to be the voice of the backbenchers separate and, sometimes, against the leadership, to establish complete control of the Parliamentary party and local associations by the leadership. Time for a 2012 Committee, perhaps? After all, the 1922 was created at a time of a creaking coalition.

Not all is smooth sailing, though. It seems that the Treasurer of the "influential 1922 backbench committee" has criticized William Hague for "criticizing British firms", which is hardly the Foreign Secretary's job and neither is addressing the CBI Conference. Instead, Mr Binley thinks, Mr Hague should be doing more to free British business from EU red tape, though he does not actually explain how that can be done. Clearly, the intelligence level of the new Executive Committee is not spectacularly high.

A thought comes to one: does this mean that Conservative MPs will be allowed to attack Mr Hague to show their supposed independence of the leadership?

I really need to sort out a blogroll

And shall do so as soon as I can find the time. Not so easy, considering my usually hapless efforts with techie stuff. However, in the meantime, here is a link to a blog that I have only just discovered, to my shame. Well, actually, not so much discovered as had drawn to my attention. Welcome, Boiling Frog.

Pontification will follow

Every now and then I decide to take time off the internet and, indeed, my computer, fond of it though I am. I try to have a life though some people might say with very little success. This means that I am possibly the only person who has not pontificated on the events in Norway and Amy Winehouse's death. The former will follow as soon as I have read some of the latest comments on the subject (though that might be counter-productive) and on the latter I can only say that the death of a 27 year old is always a tragedy even when it is the outcome of her own behaviour. This was the destruction of a genuine talent by internal demons and the subsequent destruction of a life. However, I have no doubt that the media will manage to turn it into a circus and thus erase the sadness one feels. And that really is all I have to say on the subject.

The latest news from Norway is that the custody hearing is to be conducted in camera. Personally, I think this is a mistake. Anders Behring Breivik, the accused, wants to tell the world why he did what he did and the world ought to know. The world is not likely to sympathize with him, no matter what he says, and silencing him will not serve any purpose. I foresee many conspiracy theories being hatched and many more calls for strict control of the internet. Let the man speak.

Moving away from those two tragedies towards another one that has its own funny moments,

Moody's cut Greece's credit rating further into junk territory on Monday and said it was almost certain to slap a default tag on its debt as a result of a new EU rescue package.

It was the second rating agency to warn of a default after euro zone leaders and banks agreed last week that the private sector would shoulder part of the burden of a rescue deal that offers Greece more cash and easier loan terms to keep it afloat and avoid further contagion.

In the long term, this saga, as most of us know, will be of far greater importance.

We all miss Peter Bauer

This blog's views on international aid are known to all its readers and go back further than two weeks ago when Melanie Phillips, apparently, pronounced very similar opinions on Question Time. All of us who have seen the futility and, indeed, harmfulness, of international aid (formerly known as foreign aid) have been influenced by the pithy and lucid arguments advanced for many years (to no purpose, in his own view) by Peter Bauer, later Lord Bauer.

Here Tim Knox, Acting Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, reminisces about the great man and insists that his arguments are more valid now than ever before. I always found Lord Bauer's heavily accented pronouncements perfectly intelligible but, maybe, I have more experience of accents than Mr Knox does.

It's great to find another useful blog

It is not clear to me why I have not come across European Disunion before, particularly as its author has put Your Freedom and Ours on his blogroll. I apologize profusely but shall now read it regularly.

There are excellent pieces about the mess that most Mediterranean countries are turning into (and don't say we didn't warn you), which means that I don't have to write about either Greek or Spanish riots, demonstrations and other unpleasantness. I particularly like the excellent summary of Commission President Barroso's career. Reminds me of the days I wrote about the man. Perhaps, I should start again.

As a matter of fact, I do not think there is a contradiction between being somebody who thinks power is to be taken in the streets and somebody who then exercises unaccountable power from some office. These two stances are, if I may put it that way, the two sides of the same authoritarian coin.

While we are on the subject, let me express a complete lack of support for these demonstrators who are screaming that nothing is their fault, that they have a right to a future, to jobs, to benefits, to anything and everything they want. They are no more revolutionaries than the people who rioted in London for higher taxes and a bigger state are anarchists. These are people who are terrified of any change, they do not want to face a future that is different and, perhaps, more difficult or, at least, full of the need to work harder. These are spoilt children, stamping their collective feet and demanding that sweets be handed out indefinitely.

So they say they want a revolution in Greece and are, allegedly, arming themselves for one. A revolution to achieve what, precisely?

Not going to happen, children. Sorry, but there it is. The euro with all the bolstering will survive for a while because there is a great political capital invested in that and for a while the bail-outs will continue. But, at some point, Roger Bootle's prediction will come true: "They can try to ‘delay and pray’ but the euro is running out of time". The sooner the better. Let the Greek government deal with their revolutionaries. Why should the rest of us be subsidizing it all?

Celebrities talk utter rot - shock

The celebs are on the warpath again and, as ever, have managed to bamboozle a few people. It's as if a stupid idea becomes less stupid if it is articulated by the likes of Dame Judi Dench (a wonderful actress but hardly a thinker) or Sir Ranulph Fiennes (also not a thinker). And, as far as this blog is concerned, anything that the ArchDruid, Dr Rowan Williams supports is ipso facto suspect. (Ha! Didn't expect that, did you?)

The matter in hand is the government's proposal to sell Britain's forests or, to be quite precise, those that belong and are administered by the ineffable quango the Forestry Commission with a bit of interference from other ministries and regulatory bodies, to private individuals, organizations, companies and, if it is right, voluntary bodies. Shock, horror! Anyone would think that the total devastation of ancient hunting forests has been proposed.

As Eamonn Butler says in today's ASI blog:

From the sound of it, you might think that Britain's forests are going to be sold off to keep Rupert Murdoch in paper, or maybe concreted over for car parking. Hardly. State forestry is a mess, and private ownership will revitalize it, and will actually extend the public amenity that our forests afford us. Private owners are actually more likely to encourage public access than the Commission has been – they can see more commercial potential in doing precisely that.

The Forestry Commission already plans to sell small bits of its forest estate, which will earn taxpayers a useful £100m. The question mooted by the government today is whether it should sell the whole lot. That's actually no really big deal. The Commission owns only a fifth of England's forest land. Most of the rest, about 68%, is already in private hands. (Various government departments, like Defence, own other bits too.) Many of the celebs who are saying how much they love forests could well be thinking about ones that are already private.

And private forestry is already heavily regulated in terms of the owners' obligations to the protection of nature, logging schedules, public access, and development. Thos protections would remain, even if the whole estate were sold. And indeed there would be extra protections for ancient woodlands like the Dean, New, and Sherwood forests. As in New Zealand and other countries, there could be a mixture of commercial, non-profit, community and mixed ownership.

In a previous blog Dr Butler referred to the various celebs who had signed a sobbing letter to the Sunday Telegraph as being "thick as two short planks" an obvious but still accurate description. Furthermore, he gives very good reasons why we should not assume that the celebs in question actually know what they are talking about. In this blog's opinion, a period of silence from all of them starting with His Bloviation, Dr Williams, would be very welcome.

Somebody is saying it

Inevitably it is the Adam Smith Institute that is saying the obvious: cuts do not help until there is some discussion on what the government should or should not do.

Closing quangos or primary care trusts and transferring their work to departments and doctors’ practices respectively will achieve nothing unless the work itself is also eliminated. A dead giveaway is the phrase “working with”. The people being worked with may well be grateful not to be worked with. The Eastern Strategic Health Authority claims to “work with” 46 other NHS bodies.

Rolling back government should be about reducing what government does first and worrying about headcount and savings second.

However, the somewhat laboured metaphor of the three brown envelopes and new management in some private firm or other is too long and not entirely accurate. In fact, one cannot help wondering how much experience Tim Ambler has had in the business part of the private sector.

But I especially disagree with this fatuous comment:

The leaders of the Coalition are exceptionally bright and talented but, Ken Clark aside, have little relevant experience from commerce or government.

Just what evidence is there that they are exceptionally bright and talented if they have no experience in anything of any importance?

Some more good news

I do not intend to blog about Prince William and the future Princess. What can one say after saying one wishes them well and, no doubt, there will be a good deal of frenzy on both sides: among those who think this is the greatest and most important piece of news ever and among those who want grumble in disgust or make really stupid jokes, every one of which has been made on numerous occasions. And that's enough Prince William.

The good news is from Egypt where the blogger Karim, whose fate I have tried to follow, has been released from prison after four years and a good deal of mistreatment. OpenMarket. org reports and suggests we all celebrate and remember how fortunate we are to live in a country where criticism of your government does not get you to prison. Au contraire. (I trust nobody is going to comment darkly on the lines of "just you wait and see".) The Free Kareem website also reports the release.

Hurrah!

TOTUS is back.

Quite like this blog

The idea of a blog devoted to books and book reviewing appeals to me. I have to admit that I am not going to read either of the books reviewed so far (sorry Gregg) but there will be others in future. Plus there is the promise of a book-selling business that will be got off the ground soon.

Birthdays

Yesterday was the 7oth birthday of a very great personality, indeed. Bugs Bunny no less and how many politicians can compete with him in savviness and long-lasting appeal. He is, of course, seriously conservative and politically incorrect as Rand Simberg and other commenters point out.

Here is one delightful film - Bugs Bunny as the Barber of Seville.


And now on to another birthday and planned celebrations thereof. Jim Lindgren on the Volokh Conspiracy has a slightly creepy tale. Apparently he has received an e-mail from First Lady Michelle Obama who is asking all and sundry to sign a birthday card for the President. Millions of signatures are being collected from all Americans. Ahem, isn't that what they do in North Korea?

At another level, asking millions of Americans to sign a birthday card for the President suggests a tone-deafness about the cult of personality. If we lived in a dictatorship, getting millions of subjects to celebrate the Dear Leader’s birthday would be routine, but in a free republic this appeal to get millions of citizens to celebrate a current president’s birthday strikes a discordant note to my ear.

No, I am not saying we are in a dictatorship; I am saying that because we are not, we should not be emulating the trappings characteristic of that fundamentally different sort of regime. Nor do I think this is particularly ominous, just a very small step in the wrong direction.

Last, it seems strange for Michelle Obama to be trying to get us to sign Barack’s birthday card when she is scheduled to be in Spain with [at least one of] her daughters during the President’s birthday.

Now if this were a card for Bugs Bunny!!!