Legitimate & Illegitimate Criticism

The (usually sensible) Tim Montgomerie's enemies list at Conservative Home lambasting the "ill discipline" and "destructive criticism" of various right wing pundits towards David Cameron is ill advised.

There is constructive criticism and there is destructive criticism. There is a time for debate on the Right and a time to either be silent or gun for Labour. At the moment there's too much ill-discipline on our side of the fence.

This close to a General Election is a time for people on the right to weigh their words carefully. Do they really want to help re-elect a government that has taken state spending to more than 50% of GDP? The Cameron-led Conservative Party isn't perfect but this election isn't a choice between a perfect and an imperfect Toryism but between Brown's big state interventionism and David Cameron's alternative.

No one has a duty to represent a political party that just happens to be broadly on the same side of the political spectrum, in fact newspaper columnists have an obligation to give their honest opinion and not simply to wave pom poms in support the blues. What does he think would happen to the credibility of someone like Peter Hitchens if after 5 years of criticising Cameron he then applauds him for 5 weeks? One of the reasons for the success of Conservative Home website is surely its independence from the party it supports, it is no different for pundits.

One of the worst aspects of US punditry is the extent to which they align with political movements, this is not something to be emulated.

As it happens I think that a David Cameron led government will be a vast improvement on one led by Gordon Brown and my vote will reflect that, but if someone doesn't believe this then it is perfectly "legitimate" to say so.

Guilt Tripping The Germans

For the last 65 years the Germans have been easy to guilt trip into paying for Europe by invoking WWII and the Holocaust. Sadly this appears to be changing and they are acting like a normal country again as shown by their reluctance to bail out Greece, so other countries will now have to start paying their own way.

It is for the best though, it has always seemed absurd that generations of Germans born after the war were treated as being somehow responsible for it.

German demilitarisation is probably the next thing to go unless they realise what a good deal they have going on with not having pay for their own defence. The rationale behind demilitarising Germany was that given its size it would inevitably dominate Europe, but since the USA took up it+s role as a world power in 1941 Germany have not been able to dominate Europe even if the Germans still wanted to (which they don't seem to).

Over Sharing

Please shut up:

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, has denied he is too "knackered" to enjoy a satisfying sex life with his wife, Margaret.

Please, I beg you, be quiet. It gets worse though, there is actually an Alistair Darling sex tape:

He's actually something of a stud.

Tony Blair's Botox

I can't be the only person to have noticed his wrinkle and expression free forehead on the news today.

I Blame Racism

Well if it's racism when particular ethnic groups score below the white average then using the same line of reasoning it must be racism when other ethnic groups get better results.

He's Back

Tony Blair will make a dramatic return to the centre stage of British politics to boost Labour's election hopes.

By backing the Tories presumably.

With Labour so short of money I wonder if they can afford to pay Blair's fee anyway.

Paedo-Fingers

Me, sarcastically, earlier this month:

according to Home Secretary Alan Johnson the British and American governments are thinking of "ways to flag up when a convicted sex offender goes online", because computers can be made to detect Paedo-fingers when they start tapping at a keyboard.

In the news today:

New research from Newcastle University has claimed paedophiles could be identified on internet sites by the way they type.

With just ten keystrokes, American Professor Roy Maxion claimed to be able to establish the sex, age and cultural background of a user, which could help in the fight against paedophiles grooming youngsters on the internet.

I suppose paedophiles on Facebook usually type one handed but beyond that I am sceptical as to whether this will work.

Icelandic Strippers- Cold & Banned

This is almost a mirror image of the "ban the Burqa" debate:

Iceland has banned striptease shows, making it an offence for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.

.....

"They are closing striptease (clubs) because they think there is prostitution there," said Asgeir Davidsson, owner of Iceland's largest strip club, Goldfinger.

"They think there is organised crime. They have been thinking this for 12 years. They have had the police running around, and they have not found anything."

As in the burqa debate, professional busy bodies want to control what women wear ostensibly on the grounds that the women are being coerced into it, even though such coercion would already be illegal. In both cases it seems more like a pretext to prohibit something that they want to ban for reasons of personal distaste than the true motivating factor.

I have never set foot in a strip club and wouldn't want one to be open next door to my home or outside a local school, so I'm hardly an enthusiast for lap dancing clubs, however unlike the Icelandic parliament I don't consider my personal tastes to be a grounds for ordering other people about.

MP's Son Does Something Legal!!!!

How terrible:

The son of an MP was today exposed as a dealer in the latest designer drug mephedrone, which is believed to have been responsible for a string of recent deaths.

The revelation will prove to be a huge embarrassment to MP Louise Ellman, Labour's representative for the Riverside area of Liverpool.

A "huge embarrassment", he is selling a legal product that his mother happens to disagree with, I don't see how that even qualifies as mild embarrassment. I also like the use of the term "dealer". What makes it all the more ridiculous is that her son is not a minor under her control, but a grown man of 37 as they point out in this tortuously constructed sentence:

Her 37-year-old son Sean, 37, sells the legal drug - known as meow meow - from a chain of shops across the North of England.

Is she supposed to send him to his room to think about what he's done or withhold his pocket money?

The only thing shocking about this is that the child of a Labour MP has a proper job and hasn't been given a sinecure with a quango or lined up for a seat at Westminster.

What Is It With Canada?

In most senses Canada is a model country- healthy economy, high standard of living and decent education standards etc. Which is why it's so depressing when Canadians reject the notion of free speech and try to silence mildly provocative pundits like Mark Steyn or recently Ann Coulter. I say they are provocative but to be honest I can't think of any specific bad thing that someone has been provoked to do by them.

Whilst there is always a totalitarian element on the left, and to be honest on the right as well, in Canada they can become mainstream by playing on that nation's big weakness- an obsession with defining themselves against the United States, so totalitarians can justify their intolerance by presenting at a moderate alternative to the USA's "religion of Free speech".

Take for example this Canadian pundit, Susan G Cole (Susan seems like an odd name for a man) denouncing the concept of free speech:

Better Not Be Paying For This.

My local MP has had a complaint made against him to the police for raising the issue of whether to ban the burqa*:

An MP was investigated by police for inciting racial hatred over controversial comments about the burkha following complaints from a human rights association.
........

Now it has emerged police received a complaint about the Kettering MP a few days after his comments from the Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council (NREC).

So does anyone know who the NREC are? They appear to be registered as a company rather than a charity and were formerly the Northamptonshire Racial Equality Council, as I cannot find any reference to them on the Charity Commission website. However they have a bunch of local councillors on their committee and a name that implies Quangodom or Fake-Charityness.

Basically I want to know whether they are receiving public money, because their behaviour is not something I wish to subsidise. So if anyone knows how to go about finding out then please leave a comment.

* As I have said before I don't approve of banning items of clothing like the burqa.

Update: Mark Wadsworth points to their accounts which do indeed reveal that NREC is in receipt of lots of money from various local authorities in Northamptonshire. As Julia says it should make it easy for them to work out where they can find cuts.

Electorate Off Message

Labour have launched a campaign to save Sure Start centres from Tory cuts. Labour have no more idea as to whether this will happen than I do as the Conservatives have not specified whether they will or not. I can see the logic in Labour's strategy:

There can be no better way of winning over the electorate than by focusing on beneficiaries who are still crawling – this at a time when a new baby boom is under way and fertility rates are the highest since 1973.

However something I heard today indicates what I believe is a flaw in the strategy, a youngish mother explained to her colleagues that she was going to vote against the government because she had heard that they would close the Sure Start centres where her child went, no one demurred from that position. When a campaign is aimed at people with very little interest in politics, then the message that actually gets through often bears little resemblance to what was intended and can just as easily be the precise opposite of what is supposed to be conveyed.

Best Campaign Prop Ever.

Whilst I would prefer a Conservative victory in the next election I really hope that no voters are going to be swayed to vote Tory on the grounds that Samantha Cameron is pregnant. Are the public really that shallow? Yes, probably.

Can the Browns respond? If Sarah Brown isn't already pregnant it will be difficult for her to be sufficiently visibly pregnant by May 6th to counteract Samantha Cameron, so perhaps Gordon should divorce her and marry someone who can get pregnant on demand and has the gestation period of a hamster- yes he should wed Kerry Katona.

Claim To Lame

I was in a pub today and the person I was drinking with pointed out someone at another table who is apparently member of Showaddywaddy. It's all glamour with me.

WTF?

Bernard Manning does the Smiths.

Keeping It In The Family

Inbreeding is not a good idea, no matter how pretty your cousins are. The health risks make it a public issue that should be spoken about regardless of the potential for offence:

The dangers of marriage between first cousins are to be highlighted by a leading professor, with a warning that their children are at risk of genetic defects.

Baroness Deech, a family law professor and crossbencher, will call next week for a “vigorous” public campaign to deter the practice, which is prevalent in Muslim and immigrant communities and on the rise.

The Times notes that they are more common in wider society than is widely believed:

Famous first-cousin marriages include that of Charles Darwin who wed his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, of the china manufacturing family. They had ten children with a poor record of survival and health: three died in childhood or at birth and five were ill or disabled.

He was not exceptional: Albert Einstein married his cousin, Elsa Lowenthal; Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert. Of their nine children, one had haemophilia and died at 31; two more were carriers and passed it on to their children.

However this misses the point, the danger with a one off cousin marriage is not actually that severe, however when they occur repeatedly over many generations all sorts of defects appear, it goes without saying that the communities that practice it in the UK did so long before they came here. Repeated cousin marriages can lead to children being born who are more inbred than the offspring of brothers and sisters, a famous example of this was Charles II of Spain, whose Hapsburg lineage was so entangled that he was born mentally and physically incapable and arguably led to Spain's fall from great power status. His family tree looked like this:



The level of inbreeding rose with each generation and that is where the problem lies.

The Times article also makes basic factual errors, as Mark points out here.

The Misfortunes Of Bloggers

Two things:

• George Galloway is suing Harry's Place over some ridiculous thing or other. Rumours that he demanded that they pay him in barrels of oil are wholly unfounded. The statement that his lawyers object to was clearly made in jest plus it was after all no more than a direct quote from the constitution of an organisation Galloway respects. David Toube doesn't appear to be intimidated although given that he is aware of the insane rulings of certain libel judges he probably won't be complacent.
  
• Elsewhere I see that Julia M has broken her hand and reading of the diffficulties of going through the week with one hand makes all the more impressed with the courage of Abu Hamza.
  

Religious Exemptions

When the government decided to allow children to be adopted by gay couples, I thought it was a good idea. Almost anything that increases the number of adoptions is good given the outcomes that children in care have.

However Labour being Labour decided that anything that wasn't banned must be compulsory, so adoption agencies were banned from not allowing gay couples to adopt. Forcing adoption agencies to close demonstrated that the interests of the children were far from the minds of whoever drafted the legislation.

So I should welcome the outcome of this court case which has decided that they can choose who they allow to adopt. However I would be interested in seeing the reasoning behind the decision, which none of the newspapers seem to be going into. If it were made on freedom of association and civil liberties grounds then fine, I support it.

However that isn't the impression I am getting from how the reports are worded. If they have been granted an exemption from the law purely because of their religion then this is not a good thing, making different laws for different people depending on their religious beliefs is a dangerous precedent.