End Nato?

I see Ron Paul is running away with the Fun Online Poll.

Since most voters are British and the most significant aspect of a Ron Paul presidency for Britain would be the end of NATO and similar alliances- does this mean that people think NATO should be disbanded.

Non Scandal Of The Day

Personally the evacuation of British citizens from Libya seems to have been both fairly complete, fairly safe and fairly prompt. I honestly can't understand what the whinging is all about. I'm not just defending the government for partisan reasons, I really can't see what all the fuss is about.

Pope On A Rope?

The publicity seekers who are trying to get the Pope arrested seem to be making a very strange argument:

Geoffrey Robertson, a UK barrister, and solicitor Mark Stephens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because although his tour is a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

Surely the relevent point is whether the Vatican is recognised as a state by the UK, not the United Nations. Britain has full diplomatic relations with the Vatican, so in order to make the case that the Pope isn't a head of state you also have to argue that the United Kingdom has no say in who it recognises as another sovereign state.

Also the Pope's supposed offences were committed abroad, so whilst simultaneously losing the right to choose who to recognise as a nation we also gain the right to run the legal systems of every other country on the planet, if we follow the internal logic of the likes of Geoffrey Robertson.

Operation Cloth Cap

I'm not Northern but don't the BBC's plans to counter accusations of a Southern, anti-Northern bias seem to exacerbate the issue?:

The BBC is to counter claims that it is biased towards the South with a series of programmes about pies and rugby league.

Not to mention a new 16 part series on ferrets.

Blaming Alcohol.

I see both the government and the next government are presenting plans to deal with the evil of alcohol. While there are health issues associated with alcohol and drunks can put themselves into risky situations these dangers by and large are by and large borne by the drinkers themselves, there are exceptions to this, such as drink driving but they can be dealt with separately. The reason that it is a problem for society at large is because of the antisocial behaviour of people getting drunk in public and becoming aggressive and obnoxious towards other people.

However most people don't behave like that whilst intoxicated, in most countries the scenes observed in British town centres every Friday night are not the norm. Alcohol itself does not make someone violent. Studies* have in fact shown that people become violent and agressive whilst drunk have very particular personality traits whilst sober- they tend to be those who blame their misfortunes on external forces rather than taking responsibility themselves, thus being drunk becomes an excuse to behave badly.

If anti-drinking campaigns emphasise the role of alcohol in turning people into antisocial yobs it could actually reinforce that behaviour by encouraging them to attribute the harm they to to the drink rather than to their own decisions.

* I'll dig up a reference later.

Identity Trumps Ideology In Politics.

Apologies in advance if this post is badly written and meandering, but that's because I'm trying to express an idea that is half formed in my head.

One of the things that has always struck me about Scottish and Welsh politics is that despite the respective nationalist parties being firmly on the left of the political spectrum and in the case of Plaid Cymru usually well to the left of Labour, they seem to pick up seats in the rural and suburban constituencies rather than in Labour's core inner city and post industrial heartlands. In other words voting is more tribal than ideological.

This can't simply be party loyalism because minor non-Nationalist parties have done well in Wales in the past, with the Communist party even picking up a couple of seats in the immediate post war era and rebel Labour candidate Peter Law defeating the official Labour choice back in 2005. It is as though voting choice reflects something beyond straightforward political positioning. I'm struggling to articulate precisely what I mean but it is as though the parties have a cultural heartland that no amount of positioning can allow them to transcend.

Maybe it's just the pecularities of Scotalnd & Wales. Karl Rove supposedly viewed the US electoral groups as a series of magnets which either repel or attract other groups, perhaps the Welsh speaking heartlands of Plaid repel the votes of English speaking former mining communities of South Wales. Maybe the sectarian legacy of urban Scotland means that working class protestants identify too strongly with the UK to be attracted to a Nationalist party and working class catholics don't fancy living in a country dominated by a Presbyterian majority.

However it looks to me as though there are always matters of identity that transcend ideology when it comes to political allegiance and therefore parties can only make a certain amount of headway by realigning their policies.

The Decline/Triumph Of The West.

Something I heard yesterday, in relation to Rio De Janeiro winning the 2016 Olympics, is that the World Bank predicts that by 2016 Brazil will be the 5th largest economy in the world, presumably over taking France, the UK and Italy.

It surprised me that it is being predicted to happen so soon but even if the prediction is delayed by a few years it will happen at some point. India will also overtake us at some point and maybe Mexico and Indonesia too by the end of the century.

In one sense this could be seen as the relative decline of the West but it is also the triumph of Western values that the emerging countries in the world are largely those which have embraced democracy and pluralism. Of the world's 30 largest economies only China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are not democratic and 3 of those are dependent on natural resources rather than human capital for their wealth. By way of comparison in a list of the countries with the largest populations 13 out of 30 are not stable democracies (some of them hold elections though).

The West is not going to be supplanted by banana republics and alliances between tinpot tyrants.

Where Would We Be Without Surveys?

English turn to booze on holiday

Who Knew?

Britishier Than Thou.

I've just taken the British Citizenship test online. On the plus side I passed with 19/25 which they say is 79% although it clearly isn't.

The downside is that it is a completely idiotic test, for example one of the questions is "How many children under 19 are there in the UK?":

a) 13 Million
b) 14 million
c) 15 million
d) 16 million

To which the only sensible answer is "What the hell does this have to do with being British?".

{via}

How Insane Is The Iranian Government?

Well they believe that the British government is competent to organise something:

Addressing crowds at Friday prayers at Tehran University, Khamenei said that an 11 million-vote margin proved no fraud had taken place.

He blamed Great Britain and Iran's external enemies for the unrest, calling the British government the 'most treacherous'.

Quite utterly bonkers. If Gordon Brown could organise millions of people to turn out on to the streets then Labour would have done rather better in the most recent set of elections.

Unfortunately I now think the Iranian protesters are going to be crushed quite brutally.

Shock! Rewarding Vermin Doesn't Make Them Nicer.

The government this week decided not to allow Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Moussawi into Britain, which is a good thing even if it was done belatedly and under public pressure. Even so we have re-established links with Hezbollah's 'political wing'. So how's that going?

The leader of Lebanon's Islamist Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, has said his group will never recognise Israel's right to exist.

He was responding to a US suggestion that both Hezbollah and the Palestinian faction Hamas should recognise Israel before expecting any US engagement.

From Hezbollah's point of view why should they recognise Israel when they can get Arab support and Western acceptance without making any pretence of moderation?

Hezbollah's hostility towards Israel isn't Britain's responsibility in particular. However their hatred isn't confined towards Israel, but to all Jews- Nasrallah* has made plain his wish to kill all Jews & Hezbollah's bombing of an Argentinian Jewish centre cannot be explained by anti-Zionism- and that includes British citizens. We should not have contacts with a group that wants to murder a small proportion of our population, it really is that simple.


* The same Nasrallah whom George Galloway 'glorifies'.

A Shameful Decision.

Britain is re-establishing links with Hezbollah and organisation whose leader as made it clear that he wishes to exterminate all Jews (not simply 'Zionists' although that would be despicable enough) , which includes many British citizens. An organisation that has carried out mass murder to accomplish this goal as far afield as Argentina.

Morally it is shameful to treat this organisation as anything other than pariahs, in some cases there may be a pragmatic reason to talk to bastards- say with Stalin during WW2- but Hezbollah isn't an all powerful organisation that we simply have to talk to. To open contacts with them is a choice and it is a shameful one.

Labour Now Officially Pro-Ignorance.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas has accused the Office for National Statistics of "playing politics" with population figures.

He said he was "appalled" at the release of figures showing one in nine British residents was born abroad.

Huh?

Surely the problem with the immigration debate is that it largely takes place in the absence of sufficient factual evidence to support the assertions of either side. If even a dry statistic like this- which doesn't really tell us much in terms of the costs and benefits of immigration - is considered too appalling to reveal then you have to wonder whether more controversial topics surrounding immigration can even be researched, let alone be made public so they can be considered when it comes to setting government policy.

{via Mark Wadsworth}

Voters Reward The Perps.

Every so often there is a story about a firefighter or wannabe fire fighter getting caught committing arson so that he can be the hero putting it out. This is much like giving Gordon Brown credit for trying to resolve the financial crisis that he caused, but that is seemingly what voters are doing.

The effect shouldn't be exageratted, Labour's standing in the polls has merely been upgraded from "catestrophic" to "dire", but even so this crisis does appear to be helping the left, both here and abroad as Daniel Hannan notes:

No one said politics was fair. Strikes always hurt Labour, however much Labour condemns them. City bonuses always hurt the Tories, even when the Tories are in Opposition. In the current climate, what people see are fat-cat bankers being bailed out by hard-pressed taxpayers. And, instead of objecting to the bail-out, they object to the bankers and, by extension, to the free market culture they are thought to embody. The world over, Left-of-Centre parties are benefiting: Obama in the US, Brown here.

The paradox is that what Britain most needs at the moment is to cut spending and cut taxes. In retrospect, we can see that the massive extension of the federal government during the Great Depression served to prolong the slump. (Why the court-packing, four-term Roosevelt is so kindly treated by history remains a mystery to me.) Sadly, we seem about to repeat FDR's errors, engorging the state and mortgaging its citizens in order to socialise the financial system.

Similar effects are occuring in Canada and New Zealand, where right of centre parties that were heading for big wins now look like having to settle for just getting across the line in first place.

The crisis has made Obama the big favourite in the US election and there is a danger that a combination of an left wing President Obama, a Democratic congress, a sycophantic media and a financial crisis could enact legislation that will harm the US and world economies for decades to come as any disasters that they inflict on the world economy will be blamed on the legacy of the current crisis.

Persecution Fantasies.

In the group letter to the Guardian warning London's Oirish community about the sinister plans of the BNP to recruit them it states:

Only a generation ago, signs in British pubs and boarding houses reading: "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" - were not an uncommon sight.

Now by my reckoning generation is about 20-30 years and I very much doubt that these signs were around in the 1980s. In fact I doubt whether the signs were ever a common sight. Think about it, in a country with a large ethnically Irish population like Britain putting a sign like that in your window would be like painting a target an saying "Throw brick here". The sign has about as much basis in reality as the "No Irish Need Apply" signs that supposedly existed in the United States.

It's also rather strange to see that whenever someone shows an example of these all too common signs it's always the same sign, in other words one sign was put up once some time in the 1950s and the left uses that to propagate a myth of racial oppression. Actually the letter writers don't even go so far as linking to the solitary genuine example and instead link to a book by the Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon. In a world where the fictional incarceration of two make believe stoners is evidence of the inherent racism of the USA this is actually a relatively high standard of proof.

The paternal side of my family came over from Ireland yet they appear not to have endless tales of oppression, it turns out that the oppressors chose to target only those whose children and grandchildren would find it quite useful to identify to a persecuted group. Whether this is because left wing politicians and their groupies are bare faced liars or because parents with a strong disposition towards cultural self pity are likely to produce little race hustlers I do not know. The ironic thing is the creation of a narrative of racial victimisation is almost exactly the same as what the BNP do gain recruits.

Micromanaging Britain.

The government has changed its policy once again on the issue of casinos. Having first announced a massive launch of Super Casinos, then reversed that idea and they have now announced that there will be 16 regional casinos. This seems like the worst of all worlds to me as the casinos won't be large or concentrated enough to attract tourism but will be readily available to encourage gambling.

The actual decision though is less important than how it was made, the Department of Culture decides that a fixed number of casinos will be built and then local authorities beg for the rights to host one in the deluded belief that they will endow their god forsaken towns with a Las Vegas stlye glamour. The decision making reeks of 1940s style central planning:

Casinos with up to 150 slot machines and prizes of up to £4,000 are expected for Leeds, Southampton, Great Yarmouth, Middlesbrough, Solihull, Hull, Milton Keynes and Newham in London.

Smaller sites are also expected for Somerset, Dumfries and Galloway, Scarborough, Wolverhampton, Swansea, Luton, Torbay and East Lidsey.

It is noticeable that none of the current world famous resorts which have used casinos to transform themselves into entertainment centres (Las Vegas, Sun City, Atlantic City, Macao or Aruba for instance) have followed the UK approach of government allocated regional gambling monopolies almost designed to stifle innovation and instead have come about by local governments introducing more relaxed entertainment laws than the rest of the country or region that they are and allowing a wide range of venues to compete for business. Is it likely that Andy Burnham, the culture secretary is a better judge of what is suitable for a community than those communities themselves?

This approach of Westminster taking decisions that simply should not be in the purview of National Government can also be seen in the fiasco over licensing laws, which has followed a similar pattern of the government's position changing on an annual basis. It seems quite obvious to me that there are some places where 24 hour drinking will cause a large increase in public disorder (Scotland for example) but equally there are other areas where a more relaxed approach is beneficial. Instead the government implements a one size fits all approach that doesn't account for local differences.

Most of the wealthiest countries on the planet that don't rely on oil revenues are either very small or highly decentralised which ensures that most decisions are taken taken by people close enough to see what the results are. It's fair to say that Mr Burnham or his successors won't be losing sleep if the casino in say Luton doesn't have the desired result a local council would be bothered. The over centralised nature of Britain isn't just a result of Labour policies, it is the path that governments of both parties have pursued at least since the end of World War II and neither party seems willing to change that path.

More 2008 Predictions.

I was realy planning on making some New Year's predictions about British politics for 2008, but with no major events due I find it difficult to see what will change much in the next 12 months. The polls will fluctuate but the basic fact of a Tory lead over Labour will remain. Other predictions:

• The Lib Dems will do mildly better but won't be back to the standing they had when the drunk led them.
  
• If the government does continue to flatline then there will probably be a panicky reshuffle this year with Alastair Darling either sacked or demoted.
• Boris Johnson will win despite Livingstone running an exceptionally vicious campaign.
  

Apathy, Who Cares?

First of all an announcement-My computer is playing up and I can only log on sporadically so posting may be scarce for the next few days (or my computer may completely recover).

Looking at the interest the US election has provoked over here has led many people to suggest that it puts the apathy and disinterest in Britain's own elections to shame. To some extent this is correct but there are two things to consider. Firstly is apathy really such a terrible thing, after all if you are asking 15 million people to accept that none of the people they voted for will run anything simply because 15 million and one people voted for the other lot then sure a certain degree of apathy is a good thing! I'm guessing that voters in Pakistan and Kenya aren't apathetic either.

Secondly to the extent that voters in the UK are apathetic it is because of the vast concentration of power in a few hands. Local elections don't matter much as most local services are run by Quangos or central Government. European Elections are a travesty with a grossly unrepresentitive electoral system that protects party insiders. In Europe power resides with the unelected commission anyway and there are no steps that I as a voter could take to attempt to change the President of the European Commission. This leaves Westminster elections, where I can influence the process with my vote (I live in a swing constituency). Even then the candidates are selected by a small group of activists whose decisions may be overruled on a whim from the headquarters.

Of course this process isn't going to engage voters as it is designed not to, because if voters actually got involved in making decisions then the party elites would lose the stranglehold they currently have on the democratic process.

NHS Worship.

Mark Steyn highlights this piece of idiocy:

Gordon Brown should mark the 60th anniversary of the NHS this year by turning its birthday on July 5 into an extra annual bank holiday, a leading Labour thinktank will urge today.

The Fabian Society will say the prime minister has long dreamed of establishing a "British day" to celebrate nationhood. The most appropriate date would be on the anniversary of the health service - an institution which appeals equally to people in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Turning our mode of health delivery into some sort of secular religion is to make it impossible to argue for reform. It says something that the Fabians can't think of any more appropriate day to celebrate this country, the Act of Union for example would be a far more worthy event to celebrate but I suspect that the authors of this report would regard celebrating the actual nation state to be rather jingoistic, so therefore we should all celebrate an act of socialism instead. The 1970s Labour government did a similar thing by making May Day a bank holiday.

The NHS is no longer a British institution anyway, with essentially different organisations existing in each of the four parts of the country, with the health service in Scotland run by Scots, in Wales by the Welsh, in Northern Ireland by the Northern Irish and in England by the ..... Scots again. Although we do have the privilege of paying for all four services. This situation has given cause for concern by patients groups:

Joyce Robins of Patient Concern said the differences were "breeding envy".

"Patients are increasingly looking across national borders and wondering why they are not getting the care others are getting.

"I am not sure that is good for the NHS."

This is that blind NHS worship again, her role is supposed to be looking out for what is best for patients instead she appears to view patients as something that exist to serve the NHS.

If the government do decide to designate July 5th as a national day then they can, I suppose, but why not consider a different rationale for the date:

• The birthday of Cecil Rhodes, I don't think much of Rhodes, but this would enrage the race baiters.
• The signing of the Auld Alliance where the Scots and French plotted to shaft the English, this would also resonate with Gordon Brown's recent signing of the EU not-a-constitution.
• My birthday, a truly momentous event worthy of celebration.

Update: Harry Haddock at the Nation of Shopkeepers blog has also go a post up about this story.

Dynasties & Feminism.

Rona Huq looks at the electoral success of female politicians in the sub-continent and asks why asian women aren't as successful in politics in Britain. The'Asian' part of the equation is pretty straightforward, it's because er we aren't in Asia. Next week I'll solve the enduring mystery of why Slovakian politics is dominated by Slovakians.

The reason for the success of women in rising to the top in the political systems of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka is not because women are held in such high regard compared to over here but because their politics is highly dynastic and being part of a famous family is more important than being male or female, this also applies to South East Asia. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries for the various female members of the front benches of the three main parties reveals that almost none of them can really be said to have inherited their status from their fathers or husbands, although god only knows how Harriet Harman has managed to get promoted. If women rose to the top in the same way that they do in south Asia then we would currently be led by Cherie Blair.