Say No To An EU Referendum

In referendums the status quo option tends to do better that the initial polls suggest- this was seen in the referendum on electoral reform last year.

Currently a majority (or maybe a mere plurality at worse) of people favour leaving the European Union, but in a referendum the Europhile campaign will be free to scaremonger about the prospect of being "isolated in Europe" and taking a leap into the unknown. The worst the Eurosceptic camp can do is point at the present which cannot be made to seem unrealistically terrifying as an imagined future with less constraints of reality. Politically Ted Heath was quite clever to make the UK join the EEC and then let his successor have a referendum on whether to remain in- so the Europhile case became the status quo.

In a campaign the Europhiles will certainly close the gap on the Eurosceptics and may even overtake them to win the campaign. If that happens there will no constraint on UK governments who wish to surrender more power to Brussels as the issue would be "settled" for a generation.

Unless the support for withdrawing remains comfortably above 50% for a few years it would an enormous gamble to hold a referendum on the matter now.

Told You So

I said at the time that it was unlikely that the nurse who killed herself after receiving a prank call from idiotic Australian DJs did so because of the call.

It has since emerged that she had attempted suicide twice previously- long before the Duchess of Cambridge's hospitalisation.

The Australian radio presenters are still responsible for something unpleasant- posing as a concerned relative in order to find out about someone's medical condition- but they do not have blood on their hands.

The Right To Other People's Money

Why the outrage over plans to restrict what benefit claimants can spend those benefits on?

If it is authoritarian to ring fence what people can spend welfare payments on then surely existing benefits such as housing benefits should also spark outrage- forcing the claimants to use the money for accomodation rather than fags even if they prefer the latter. Instead, most people accept that it is a good thing that money given over to provide housing is spent on housing.

The same is true of money provided for food and clothing.

Taxes are collected by force with the moral justification that they are redistributed for essential services, such as providing food and clothing to those in need, it is hardly excessive to ensure that this money is not spent down the bookies and off license.

Plebgate

It looks like the evidence for Andrew Mitchell's supposed tirade against the police was made up. A major injustice has been done to him but there is another aspect to consider.

If the police are willing to frame a cabinet minister and make up witnesses, even when it is a 100% certainty that there will be CCTV footage that contradicts them then what do you think they do with people without the resources to fight back, who com into contact with the police in areas not covered with cameras?

What Causes Massacres?

You can divide the causes into two categories- what motivates the inadequate to commit the crime and what factors enable him to actually do it.

The availability of guns does provide a partial answer to the second part of the question. The day before the killings in Connecticut a Chinese primary school had been attacked in a similar way but in this case the weapon was a knife rather than a gun. A lot of children were injured, some severely, but no one was killed.

That said the more important aspect is surely what makes someone want to commit a massacre- it isn't simply the case that someone out there will always want to do something like this. After all gun ownership has been widespread for generations in the USA and some other countries yet these kind of spectacular rampages are a relatively recent phenomenon. There seems to be a desire for notoriety and a perverse kind of fame as well as a kind of narcissism in which only their anger and hurt feelings matter.

Update: Just realised that I wrote a similar but better written post a couple of years ago.

Dead Terrorist Still Dead.

I see that an investigation into the murder of Pat Finucane has found that he was murdered on the encouragement of someone within the security forces.

If so that is terribly wrong but it does not change the facts that Pat Finucane was not a "human rights lawyer", he was a member of the IRA and was therefore a supporter of murdering people. If he was killed by the flames he fanned that is not a tragedy.

Most of his family seem to have been in the IRA as well, so it is hard to take the portrayal of them as brave fighters for justice very seriously.

What You See Is Not All There Is

Daniel Kahneman- the psychologist who won an Nobel Prize for Economics- has uses a concept of "What You See Is All There Is"- which states that humans tend to form impressions based purely on the information available to us, even when that information is very minimal. We do not stop to consider what important information may be missing.

I think the reaction to the nurse who killed herself after receiving a prank phone call from an Australian radio station is an example of this. All the public "know" about her are that she received the call and she killed herself therefore the assumption is that the phone call led to her death.

This may be right but given that it seems such an odd reaction to the prank call and that people have all sorts of relationships and ambitions that are far more likely to affect their well being that a two minute radio call, it seems unwise to assume that her apparent suicide was related to the prank without knowing more about her life.

Technical Help Please

Sorry been busy lately.

Could anyone help me with the following pieces of technology.

Printer:

I want a new printer as I currently have a crappy Epsom Stylus that breaks down frequently, especially when it has generic non-Epsom ink and the ink costs a fortune. So what printers are reliable and aren't rip offs in terms of ink costs? It cannot be an Epsom as they are shit and make cheap printers with the intention of ripping off customers with extortionate ink costs.

Mobile Phone:

I have an HTC phone and the memory has been playing up for months, so most of the Apps have had to be removed. How do I change this, does it happen with all phones and get the phone working properly again?

Sat Navs:

Need a new one. Any recommendations on what is good. I need it before Monday so any comments before Sunday afternoon will be appreciated.

Fat Man & Little Boy

Some say that Fat Man and Little Boy were crimes but I say we have to remember that at this stage nothing has been proved about Cyril Smith's sexual proclivities.

Toynbeeising Soaps

Polly Toynbee's call for soap opera's to become more politically engaged has inspired me to have a go at writing a Polly approved script for Coronation Street:

Betty: Pint of your usual Ken?

Ken: How can I drink when child poverty is increasing by 13% a month according to an Institute of Studies report and the Tory government are determined to throw the poor onto the bonfire?

Betty: Oh I know luv, I've tried getting a grant to turn the Rovers into a Sure Start Centre but it was impossible thanks to vicious Tory Cuts.

Ken: I don't have time to drink anyway, as I've got to get home to watch Ed Miliband's speech to the TUC now.

If anyone has any other ideas for Toynbeeising the soaps please feel free to offer your contributions.

Tom Watson- Crusader Or Sleaze Monger?

The retracted Newsnight allegations about a paedophile ring involving senor Tories followed on from allegation made by the MP Tom Watson in Parliament.

During the Damian McBride affair- in which Gordon Brown's aide was outed plotting to smear various Conservatives, usually by making up sexual rumours- some attention was paid to the role of Tom Watson.

Watson shared an office with McBride and was on good terms with the other man involved in the scandal- Derek Draper- but no emails emerged to prove Watson's involvement and he got a bit litigious when it was suggested that he was part of the scheme.

Yet it has to be said, his "exposure" of a paedophile ring linked to the Thatcher government does seem to have had a very similar effect to that which was intended by the McBride plot. A number of senior Conservatives have had false rumours spread about them online as a result of dark hints dropped by Watson (with the help of Newsnight) without any actual evidence.

It does make you wonder whether Tom Watson actually believed that there was substance to the paedophile ring which he referred to or whether he was using the Jimmy Savile scandal and parliamentary privilege as an opportunity to slime those on his enemies list.

The Guardian & Paedophiles

A few stories from the Guardian over the years:

Sun shame after paedophile mix-up

 

Tabloid's naming of paedophiles condemned by police chief

 

After the vigilantes

 

The paper's decision to drop its drive to "name and shame", announced last night, gives us all a chance to reflect on what can be done to reconcile these conflicting emotions. Clearly, random vigilante publishing was not the answer. If its objective was the protection of children, then it simply failed. In fact it served the opposite purpose, driving paedophiles underground, where neither police nor probation services could keep track of them. Already the relevant agencies have told of convicted sex offenders, once under their watch, who have now moved off-radar. That has increased the risk to children, not reduced it. It is only a pity the News of the World took so long to realise it.

Well that was then and back when the terribly vulgar red tops were doing it. When a progressive hero like George Monbiot smears an innocent man as a child rapist that's fine and dandy.

 

That Critical Endorsement.

With the American election looking like it is on a knife edge, it is clear that the voters are waiting on the thoughtful utterances of some random foreigner before making a final decision.

The candidate I am probably closest to is the Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson, but would only vote for him if I lived in a state where my vote doesn't matter. So on balance I want Romney to win.

He's not perfect and my endorsement depends largely on the assumption that some of his worse policies are merely campaign fodder not to be taken seriously- like his rhetoric on trade with China.

But he does have a track record of competence and that is the most important aspect of the job.

Also the Obama administration is not one that deserves reelection- the vast increase in spending even above the levels of the profligate Bush administration is dangerous for the world economy and although it's not my primary concern as a foreigner his domestic policies on things like education and welfare reform are rather destructive.

HA Ha ha ha...... OK More about Macshane.

After 12 solid hours of manic laughing, I thought I should write something else about Denis Macshane.

• Firstly, as has been pointed out, his apology wasn't to the tax payers who he ripped off but to the Labour Party.
• He also claims that he was doing it in the line of combating fascism- an cause he deploys in the same way Jimmy Savile used his charity work. It is hard to believe that someone who genuinely cared about fighting fascism would throw smears at legitimate political opponents with as much glee as Macshameless did.
• He still has apologists, like the Telegraph's Blairite Dan Hodges who argues that he did it because MPs are underpaid. I mean if you're earning less than £100 000, then you are bound to lie and steal. However it ignores the fact that Macshane's history of being a mendacious shit did not always involve monetary gain and long predates him becoming an MP. He was sacked by the BBC in the 1970s for pretending to be a caller to a phone in show for political gain, he put out an article "The Five Myths Muslims Must Deny" under the name of a Muslim colleague, he regularly invented links to neo-nazis among his political opponents, he used bogus statistics to denounce people traficking then slandered those who called him out on it,

He was a cancer on public life.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA....

....... HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!

Quote Of The Day- Polly Toynbee Edition

Polly Toynbee writes about the effects that child care policies of successive governments have had:

all these sent the number of Sure Start places soaring, even though child poverty was falling.

I may have changed a couple of details.

Speaking Truth To Power.

Nick Griffin has been kicked off of Twitter for publishing the addresses of two men who sued a B&B owner for not allowing them to share a room. There certainly seems to be an implied threat in that action so this is appropriate.

Or at least so I thought, because it turns out that criminally violating other people's rights, is actually the purest form of protest. According to some people anyway.

The home of misunderstanding things, the Guardian, has had a couple of examples of this. Mona Eltahawy's believes that the right to protest means the right to vandalise and deface posters legally put up by people she disagree with. Because as she says she supports free speech, but free speech includes the right to be free of opposing speech.

Or something.

Today Nina Power writes about the twit who disrupted the University Boat Race this year, and who has just been sentenced to six months in prison:

Trenton Oldfield, who disrupted the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race in April this year to protest against inequality, was sentenced to six months in jail for the offence of "public nuisance". Although the race was restarted 25 minutes later, Judge Molyneux made it clear that Trenton had disrupted the smooth running of things, and for that he must go to jail: "Thousands of people had lined the banks of the river to enjoy a sporting competition. Many more were watching at home on live television." The message is blunt: if it's on TV and aristocrats are involved, then the state can deprive you of your liberty for as long as it likes.

 In a period where many people have died following benefit cuts, Oldfield's protest against elitism and inequality is timely and symbolic.

The working class hero who making the protest against elitism is a privately educated Australian called Trenton who used a grant from the Arts Council to buy himself a flat and has as his lawyer the socialist son of privilege Matt Foot* (son of Paul Foot).

Power continues:

Oldfield's sentence is clearly designed to deter others from protesting, and there is evidence that the use of the charge of public nuisance (which carries a maximum sentence of life) was upgraded under government pressure and precisely because of the varied spectacles of 2012. 

Public nuisance is of course what the idiot who threw a coin on the track at the Olympic 100m final was charged with. It seems to be used when someone is being a nuisance, to the general public. I don't recall Guardian editorials in support of the defrocked Irish priest who disrupted the British Grand Prix in 2003 when he was jailed, even though he was also protesting against something or other.

Nina Power continues:

So who, in the end, is the public on behalf of whom Oldfield is being punished? 

In this particular case it is the spectators and viewers who wanted to see the boat race rather than the Trenton Show. And the rowers whose event was disrupted.

Is it the public sector workers who will march in their thousands tomorrow against austerity, or is it the "public" represented by the judge

Er neither, it is the public who wanted to watch an event, this may include people from different political persuasions.

What the likes of Mona Eltahawy and especially Nina Power represent is narcissism- what they believe is so important that the rights of others are simply pale before them. In the case of Power it doesn't even matter if the lesser beings being attacked have only the most tenuous connection to whatever is being protested against, they should still have their apolitical event disrupted for some spoiled brat's gratification.

* Matt Foot specialises in defending people who use aggressive protests to violate others' rights. He defended the idiot who threw the fire extinguisher off the top of Millbank Tower and other idiots who who went to Italy to riot against something or other.

Quote Of The Day

I had wondered why guardianistas and assorted poverty pimps complained so vocally about the benefit cap- this government's best policy so far- considering that by definition it won't affect anyone who isn't already well provided for.

I think Julia explains it here:

Yes, this is all about the effect on low-income families of the benefit cap, which numerous charities and pressure groups fear will remove their client base from comfortable walking distance from their cosy London offices…

It would be  unthinkable to have to commute all the way to Luton when doing one's bit to help the (high income) poor.