The UK is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s?

"If all that’s holding the United Kingdom back is the country’s mood, then the arrival of Andy Burnham as prime minister might improve its prospects. Briefly. If the remedy also requires some particle of coherence and clarity about what the government needs to do, the prognosis is grim. The contradictions and absurdities that he’s ventured so far are remarkable even by the standards of modern British politics.

"To start with the most bewildering, Burnham is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s? He was alive in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power — but nine years old at the time, perhaps not paying close attention. A slightly older cohort recalls the immediate pre-Thatcher years as an unparalleled disaster, which helps explain why her party won that election and the three that followed.

"The nadir was the 'winter of discontent': strikes in response to the Labour government’s efforts to curb inflation, shortages of food and fuel, trash piled 10 feet deep in London’s squares (Leicester Square was known as Fester Square; you could smell it from Downing Street), more strikes, pickets blockading hospitals, corpses stored here and there while gravediggers pressed for better terms, more strikes. Returning from a little downtime in Barbados, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan sealed his party’s fate by saying he was puzzled by all the talk of crisis.

"This was apparently the golden time that preceded the unforced errors of the 1980s and the following decades, when a global plague of market fundamentalism brought the country low and destroyed the dreams of working families.

"Admittedly, despising Thatcher and her works will always be an article of faith for the British left. Burnham is hardly unusual in this respect. What’s more surprising, especially for a leader who says he means to unite the country and overcome factionalism in his party, is to extend much the same contempt to the pragmatic centre-leftists led by Tony Blair, who resuscitated Labour after two decades of humiliating defeat and set the country on a more moderate, popular, social-democratic course. It isn’t just Thatcherism that Burnham aims to reverse, but 'four decades of neoliberalism.'

"Bring back council estates, cheap buses and organised labor. Nationalise a few industries. Maybe reopen some mines (though, obviously, people wouldn’t be allowed to burn the coal)."

~ Clive Crook from his column 'Andy Burnham’s ’70s Show Will Need a Little Work' [hat tip Samizdata]

"Since you [also] mentioned the 1980s, @andyburnham, here’s a reminder of what was achieved: 

• Top rate of income tax: 83% → 40% 

• Savings income taxed at up to 98% in 1979 — surcharge abolished 

• Basic rate: 33% → 25% 

• Inflation: 21.9% peak (1980) → 2.4% (1986) 

• Days lost to strikes: 29.5 million (1979) → 1.9 million (1990) 

• Real take-home pay for the average earner: up by a third 

• Right to Buy: over a million council tenants became homeowners 

• Home ownership: 55% → 67% 

• Individual shareholders: 3 million → 11 million — one in four adults 

• Foreign holidays: roughly doubled 

• Homes with a telephone: two-thirds → nearly nine in ten 

• Pensioners’ average incomes: up around 30% in real terms 

• Infant mortality: down almost 40% 

• Real GDP: up by almost a third 

• GDP per head outgrew France, Germany and Italy in the 1980s 

• Manufacturing productivity: slowest growth in the G7 in the 1970s → fastest in the 1980s 

• Self-employed: 1.9 million → 3.5 million 

• Nissan to Sunderland, Toyota to Derby, Honda to Swindon 

• Britain became a net oil exporter 

• London restored as the world’s financial capital in 1986 

• Budget surpluses three years running — Britain repaid debt, 1987–90 

• National debt: 47% of GDP → 28% 

• State spending: ~45% of GDP → ~39% 

• The civil service: 732,000 → 565,000 

• Corporation tax: 52% → 35%; the small firms’ rate: 42% → 25% 

• Personal tax allowances: up more than 25% in real terms 

• Higher rates of income tax: nine → one 

• Death duties: fourteen rates → one 

• Exchange controls scrapped after 40 years 

• 40+ nationalised businesses privatised — 600,000 employees moved to the private sector 

• The 33 big state industries: took ~£500m from taxpayers in 1980 → paid £8.4bn to the Exchequer by 1987 

• British Steel: world-record loss-maker (1980/81) → £733m profit (1989/90) 

• BT, 1984: the largest share offer the world had ever seen 

• “Tell Sid” broke the record again in 1986 

• British Airways: nationalised loss-maker → profitable, private, “the world’s favourite airline” 

• The Channel Tunnel launched and entirely privately financed.

"Over to you."

~ Eamonn Butler, Adam Smith Institute

"[L]iving standards stalled not because of neoliberalism but because Britain stopped being a free market economy, drifting into a more heavily controlled and interventionist system well before the pandemic accelerated the trend."

~ Is Britain Actually Neoliberal? The Spectator's Michael Simmons - INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS

RELATED: "... the worst year in modern British political history..."

... and ...

"Yes, Labour has won a landslide, but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon."

Britain's 'leaders' mourn the death of the Uniparty

"Yes, [UK] Labour has won a landslide [in the British election overnight], but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon. According to the exit poll, his landslide, predicted to be the largest since 1832 in one eve-of-election poll, is in fact smaller than Tony Blair’s in 1997, although not by much (170 v 179). 

    "More encouraging, if the exit poll is to be believed, is that Labour only managed a vote share of 36%, significantly lower than in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn (40%). 

    "By contrast, the Tories and Reform won a combined share of 43%. [Labour leader] Keir Starmer has won a landslide but not a mandate – his own majority is down by 16,000 – although I doubt he’ll be constrained by that.
    "The Left of the Labour Party will point to the fact that Starmer polled fewer votes than Corbyn – we don’t know that for sure yet, but it looks likely – and dispute that Labour only won this election by tacking to the centre, just as the Right of the Conservative Party will argue the Party didn’t lose by abandoning the centre ground (which is the prevailing orthodoxy among ‘One Nation’ Tories, believe it or not). And they’d both be right, in my view. In spite of Starmer’s victory, technocratic managerialism – or 'stakeholder capitalism,' as Klaus Schwab calls it – hasn’t exactly triumphed in this election. 

    "The Uniparty – that is, the Conservative Party under Sunak and the Labour Party under Starmer – got a bloody nose in the sense that the two main parties received an even lower share of the vote – 62% – than they did in 2010 (66%). That’s a lower share than in 1983 at the height of the SDP‘s popularity (70%) and worse than in either of the 1974 elections. Indeed, lower than in 1923, when the two main parties won 68.7%. You have to go all the way back to 1918, when the Liberal Party hadn’t yet collapsed, to find find Labour and the Conservatives collectively polling a lower vote share (59.2%).

"The superficial take on the result is that the U.K. is bucking the anti-technocratic trend sweeping the rest of the globe, particularly France where we may be witnessing the death throes of the Fifth Republic. But look beyond Labour’s landslide and the real story of the last six weeks is the rise of Reform and the lack of enthusiasm for the two centrist parties. 

    "Indeed, if we had PR in the U.K., as they do in the EU, we might now be looking at a Right-of-centre coalition with a populist leader at the helm and a move away from the Uniparty’s position on immigration and Net Zero, as well as its uncritical embrace of sectarian identity politics. We may have to wait another five years before that happens, but it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Starmer’s premiership will breathe new life into this calcified ideology. Much more likely is that a succession of policy failures, leading to a financial crisis, civil unrest and rolling black-outs, will be the death knell of technocratic managerialism. 

    "In 2029, the British electoral may finally vote for real change."

~ Toby Young from his post 'End of the Uniparty'

ACT needs its own “Clause Four Moment”

With the ACT Party’s vote numbers now almost down to Libertarianz levels, the obvious questions are being asked about whether the party any longer has a purpose, other than simple being a reliable coalition appendage for what the party’s luminaries call “the centre-right.” (In other places, they would probably call it the “conservative” side of the tent.)

Digging out old files over the weekend, I came across the very first copy of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter from 1962, which throws some light on the woes of the ACT Party 2017.

Politics, she explains, is not a primary. Political goals cannot be achieved “without a wider ideological context."

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics — on a theory of man’s nature and man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base thart one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as ‘conservatism’ [aka the ‘centre-right’].

Does that describe what folk here have seen of the ACT Party people this year? I fear so. Nice people, most of them, but having rushed into politics with little more than a naive and muddled utilitarianism they now see their party backed into the ghetto, every election, of explaining MMP to voters (three MPs for the price of one!) instead of being able to proudly and articulately promote their principles.

They might be reminded that, as Rand continued:

A half battle is worse than none: it does not end in mere defeat — it helps and hastens the victory of your enemies.

Is that not what we’ve seen?

A full battle might begin with tightening up those principles, and a programme of education so their candidates can articulate them.

They also desperately need troops on the ground. But both candidates and troops — and voters — may be more forthcoming if the other long overdue prescription for the party’s woes be undertaken. By which I mean dragging out the toxic carcasses of the former leaders still stinking up the political room, and very publicly euthanasing them.

How they do that is up to them, but if they wanted a model for how such a fumigation is done they could do worse than look at how and why Tony Blair dragged out the carcass of the Militant Tendency and undertook the battle over Clause 4 to make New Labour.

In short, they need their own “Clause Four Moment."

Without that they will just be rearranging deckchairs while the ship goes down. Neither voters nor spear carriers will be attracted unless those earlier sins be explunged. Whatever else may or may not be done, without that the party will guarantee its doom as a vital political force.

Chilcot, Blair and the rights of invasion

 

“Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses."
~ Ayn Rand on ‘Self-Determination of Nations’

Any decision to take men and women into war must be made with the utmost seriousness and sincerity.  Trying to peer beneath all the invective over the last decade about the decision taken to invade Iraq makes it almost impossible to see whether that was so in this case. “This rage over the Iraq war and inchoate desire for revenge has driven the collective political psyche in Britain and the West off the rails,” says Melanie Phillips in The Times.

I supported the war against Saddam and still do. I also think, though, that in many crucial respects it was misconceived from the start and subsequently managed with astounding incompetence, ignorance and cowardice.
    The Bush and Blair administrations failed to understand they were entering a tribal minefield. They failed to acknowledge the need to stop Iran fomenting sectarian strife in Iraq. They also failed to commit themselves to the long haul in order to defeat Islamist terror.

It was a job half-done, its reasons poorly explained; the plan for the end-game, tragically, was dismal – barely conceived, if it ever was.

So … “Blair lied, people died.” “No blood for oil.” “Bush’s lapdog.” “Where was the WMD?” Too much commentary has been little more than bumper-sticker lite, not the thoughtful analysis the subject demands. Seven years in the making, the 12-volumes-worth of Chilcot report, issued overnight, should be that document.

Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”
    On the other hand, the inquiry explicitly says that it is not “questioning Mr. Blair’s belief” in the case for war — i.e., it is not accusing him of conscious misrepresentations.

And after all those years being written, Julie Lenarz among others can still identify crucial omissions:

1) It's quite remarkable that Sir John failed to mention the attempt by the US and UK to resolve the conflict with Saddam peacefully by pushing new sanctions through the UNSCR, as the old sanctions regime was violated on a daily basis. That attempt was vetoed by Russia.
2) It's even more remarkable that Sir John made such bold statements about bad judgement on behalf of TB without acknowledging once the evidence he received from Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector and by no means a supporter of the war.
    a) “It seemed plausible to me at the time, and I also felt — I, like most people at the time, felt that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction. I did not say so publicly. I said it perhaps to Mr Blair in September 2002 privately… I talked to Prime Minister Blair on 20 February 2002 and then I said I still thought that there were prohibited items in Iraq.”
    b) “I have never questioned the good faith of Mr Blair or Bush or anyone else. On some occasions when I talked to Blair on the telephone, 20 February, I certainly felt that he was absolutely sincere in his belief.”

It’s too easy now to forget that there was a case for war – a “legitimate case to be made for the removal of a genocidal regime.” Phillips reminds us of some of the selfish reasons for ending the regime, arguing that without the Iraq War Saddam would now be riding the tiger of .Islamist terror.

Saddam was a highly significant threat to the West. He was a godfather of international terrorism.
   He was behind the plot to murder George HW Bush. Audiotapes of his conversations with key officials revealed that al-Qa’ida had been in contact with Iraqi intelligence for sanctuary, training and planning acts of terrorism against the US.
    Saddam’s refusal to show that he had stopped developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as he was required to do by the UN, reinforced the belief among western intelligence services that he was still engaged in these programs.
   In 1998, the threat Saddam posed to the West had caused Bill Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for Saddam’s removal and a forced end to his WMD programs. Clinton didn’t follow through.
    The events of 9/11, however, changed the calibration of risk, overnight. It wasn’t that Saddam was generally thought to be responsible for those attacks. It was rather that, with the new realisation Islamic terrorism breached all previously understood constraints of warfare, Saddam’s regional ambitions, sponsorship of terrorism and pursuit of WMD made the threat he posed no longer tolerable.

These reasons were made at the time, poorly heard, and now only dimly remembered, but they were made and understood. “The case for overthrowing Saddam,” argued Christopher Hitchens in 2005, “was unimpeachable”—and Blair “the only statesman from the nineties to emerge from the decade with any credit on this front.”

The man he helped depose, unquestionably, was a monster:

 

All known and understood at the time. But then suddenly, once the Coalition went to war, as Phillips recognises: “Saddam was said never to have been a threat at all, and logic, reason and proportion went out of the window.”

The apparent over-egging of questionable intelligence about Saddam’s WMD programs was held to prove that they had long been junked altogether. The failure to find any stocks of WMD was held to prove that Saddam was no longer trying to produce the stuff. Absence of evidence was held to be evidence of absence.
    The Iraq Survey Group’s interim report saying Saddam was pursuing biological weapons programs up to the start of the war was brushed aside. The Israelis who said WMD stocks may have been moved to Syria were brusquely dismissed. Former US general James Clapper, the present director of national intelligence, and ex-general Thomas McInerney, who said the same thing in 2003 and 2006, were ignored.
    In 2004, an American defence official, John Shaw, claimed that Saddam’s WMD stockpiles had been moved to Syria by the Russians. In 2006, I interviewed Georges Sada, Saddam’s former air vice-marshal. He told me Saddam had transported chemical and biological stockpiles by air and road to Syria in late 2002.
    The legacy of the Iraq war has been toxic. The British people now seem reluctant to believe warnings by politicians or intelligence officials about threats from the Islamic world and even less willing to countenance any military action to counter any such threat.
    If Saddam were still around today, he would be riding the tiger of Islamist terror, as he always did, and the threat to us all would be even greater.

Chilcot is supposed to suggest lessons we must learn from the Iraq war. This is the main one: the core reason the war was botched was the West’s failure to acknowledge the nature, scale and complexity of the threat from the Arab and Islamic world.
    The persecution of Tony Blair shows that this failure remains just as true today.

Perhaps that makes Chilcot’s Report the worst kind of whitewash.

The important, humane task of understanding the history and politics of that calamity in 2003 has been sacrificed at the altar of allowing a needy elite the space in which to say: ‘Blair is evil, and I am good.’

.

Postmodern politics: It’s all about the narrative

 

Commentators have called it the single most important story of the Obama years.” It is the story of the thoroughgoing ignorance of the Obama regime bolstered by the all-but complete incompetence of the American media.—on whose ignorance and stupididy the Obama White House relied.

Across the US, wherever people gather to talk national security, the hot topic for days now has been the New York Times Magazine’s big interview with Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign policy guru-cum-salesman. Especially inside the Beltway, Mr. Rhodes’ pointed comments about his work—particularly his admissions about manipulation of the media to sell Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran—have caused a stir that’s unlikely to die down soon.

What Rhodes admitted is essentially what every clear-eyed critic of the Iran deal has been saying al along: that it does nothing to tie that regimes’s hands in acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the Obama administration knew this, but didnt care..

But the greater revelation even that that, which on its own should be the story of the Obama years, is

1. to the White House, the domestic politics of having a deal was of far greater importance than anything the deal said; and
2. they could rely upon an incompetent press gallery to sell the deal to the American public.

These last two points were made simply as frank admissions, as if they should be thoroughly uncontroversial. It’s not just that the press gallery is chockful of left-wing zombies --- although they are --

Mr. Rhodes made it plain that the reporters he deals with every day—that’s the essence of his job—are idiots.
    “They literally know nothing,” he explained. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” It’s difficult to deny the truth of that statement, and any journalist who’s being honest won’t try. With the decline of foreign bureaus, a distressing number of those reporting on national security and foreign affairs are pretty much as Mr. Rhodes described them.

And it’s not just the press gallery. Rhodes himself, Obama;s senior foreign-policy advisor, has no apparent quilfications for the job either – a failed novelist, a lecturer in creative writing, and precisely zero background in international relations.

As one commentator decribes it, this is idiots led by idiots.

But it really should be no surprise that a 'creative writer' is essentially in charge of advice to a seniot department of state, because today policy it's not about reality, it's all about crafting “the narrative.'

If you control the narrative, you don't just control what gets reported. You control what people see and hear.

This is the era of postmodern in political policy: not how it is, but how it appears. So why wouldn’t policymakers be taking advice from a writer of fiction?

This bullshit is all-pervasive.

The fuss about John Campbell leaving TV3 was totally predicated along these lines.It wasn’t because he rated his fine diction that Martyn Bradbury et al were all so incensed at his departure. It as because he saw him as an ideological brother. The line about him being NZ’s finest boradcaster? That was just “narrative,” spun for

John Key’s failed tax cut promises? Don’t worry, just control “the narrative” about taking off “the sharp edges of the recession” and then dangle them again next election.

Central bankers and their economists implicated in global financial meltdown? No worries, just write a narraitve about how it was the markets that failed, not their models.

British voters eventually threw up their hands at the lashings of spin that Tony Blairs ultimately-failed administration brought into office. But all he was doing was applying postmodernism to politics: that it’s not about controlling reality, it’s all about controlling appearances.

It is what the astute Ayn Rand used to call The Primancy of Consciousness in Action.

The Obama team knew this all from day one. They were the boy heroes of “crafting the narrative.” What else are “ Hope and Change” if not a triumph of story over reality.

Asked in his early days as president

'What's the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?'
[Obama] answers: 'What the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people' about where we are as a nation and should be."

As an incredulous Peggy Noonan commented at the time:

"Tell a story to the American people? That's your job? Not adopting good policies? Not defending the nation? Storytelling?!" [Emphasis her’s]

After Ben Rhodes’s revelations about the reality behind the ‘narrative’ woven by fiction writers around the Iran deal, we now know that is quite literally true.

.

How Corbyn might encourage the Conservatives to make a case for capitalism

 
 Incredible scenes from the Labour Party leadership election announcement

Margaret Thatcher’s electoral hegemony during the eighties was almost certainly helped by by the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition across that whole period being completely unelectable.

Neither shambolic Marxist Michael Foot nor the Welsh Windbag who followed him were ever seen as seriously electable by the British public, giving Thatcher more space that she otherwise might have enjoyed to pursue her programme.

Current Conservatives are now crowing that British Labour’s election of aging Trot Jeremy Corbyn will give them the same chance at an electoral dynasty. Trouble is, the decidedly damp David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher.

In July 2014 Michael James reviewed Peter Mair’s book, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-out of Western Democracy, in which Mair lamented that

. . . the parties are no longer significant venues of citizen participation in public life; their consequent loss of membership fees has forced them to become dependent on large donations from wealthy sponsors, with the attendant suspicion that their policies are effectively being bought. . . . [T]he parties typically attract youngish career politicians whose ambition is to become members of the executive. Parties are nowadays little more than machines for winning elections . . .

As he now says this morning: “Be careful what you wish for.” It was the “grass-roots” Labour supporters that got Corbyn over the line–just like they got Foot and Kinnock over the line before him.

The consensus among British commentators [reports Michael James] holds that a Corbyn-led Labour Party cannot win an election (but then, a few weeks ago they agreed that Corbyn could not win the leadership contest). It’s true that Corbyn’s socialism moves Labour even further away from its working-class roots; at the May 2015 election working-class voters largely abstained or drifted towards the UK Independence Party (or even the Conservative Party). Indeed, the Corbynistas seem uninterested in representing anyone but themselves and their quintessentially middle-class, ‘progressive’ and anti-capitalist sentiments.
    Their ascendancy is best interpreted as an attempt by the Labour Party to redeem itself for cynically trading off its principles back in the 1990s for the prospect of power held out by the now despised Tony Blair. Yet one of the momentous lessons of the twentieth century is that unexpected events can interact disastrously with ideological movements. In the late 1920s German commentators wrote off the Nazis as a lunatic fringe that could be safely ignored. A few years later the Great Depression gave Hitler an electoral base from which to seize power.
    In fact, it’s frighteningly easy to see how Corbyn might come to power in Britain. For a start, under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system a party can form a government with little more than a third of the vote . . .

James pointes out several reasons Corbyn’s destructive policies may nonetheless prove politically popular, but offers another reason for some hope which is a good one:

Corbyn’s victory will force the Conservatives, too, to talk about principles, something they’ve been thankful to be able to avoid since Margaret Thatcher left the scene, and the demise of the Soviet Union appeared to discredit socialism for ever. Who knows, some of them might even find their voice and be able to argue a persuasive case for capitalism.

Wouldn’t that be a change.

[Pic hat tip David Wyllie]

When the answer is Bryan Gould…

Bryan Gould has been selected to run the post-election review of Labour’s failure.

He is a man fully qualified for the job.

What he doesn’t know about failing Labour parties isn’t worth knowing. After all, that’s where he spent a whole lifetime.

Gould was a senior part of the British Labour Party that made themselves unelectable for virtually a generation.

Tony Blair on Terrorism

A good conversation, here, over the weekend, on fighting an ideology.

Meet the Press Sunday, host David Gregory suggested to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US, Britain and others made a mistake when they went after Saddam Hussein, which Gregory said only led to more terrorism.

Watch Blair’s response.

It makes you wonder whether his incredible unpopularity might just be because he still has the ability to concisely state uncomfortable truths.

The one fact about 9/11 you still need to know

Nearly one decade on from that day when an organised gang of barbarians hijacked civilian airliners and flew themselves and scores of innocents into two of the world’s most famous symbols of capitalism, one wonders what could be said about that outrage that hasn’t already?

Midst all the words of pseudo-sophistication and “complexity,”  Christopher Hitchens repeats boldly the one point that still bears repeating:

Simply evil. A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida … a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.
    To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce "complexity" into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.)
    Underlying these and other attempts to change the subject there was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy… That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist "targets," was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some "intellectual," however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the "root cause" of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.
   … Al-Qaida demands the impossible—worldwide application of the most fanatical interpretation of sharia—and to forward the demand employs the most hysterically irrational means…
    Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred [however], the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat…
    Against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Liars at large

This election year, individuals have been severely restricted in the amounts they can spend opposing government policies -- meanwhile, the Clark Government has spent record amounts of your money fitting out government departments with spin doctors to trumpet its own lies.  [Story here.]While individuals are confined to spending $120,000 over the whole year in a national campaign (or just $10,000 in a local campaign), government departments now boast a whopping 448 spin doctors -- 210 more than just five years ago, and nearly ten times the number of the mid-eighties -- who cost us the sum of $47 million, not including the cost of campaigns these lying arseholes dream up. 

This is where your tax dollars go to, while the sound of protest is muzzled.

Remember last year when a huge taxpayer-funded advertising splurge trumpeted the government's  Kiwisaver, Student Loans and Welfare for Working Families election bribes? You and I paid for that.  Remember all the lies and spin fed to you by the Clark Government-- lies and spin about smacking your children, about the Electoral Finance Bill, about their pledge card ... You and I paid for all that too, and they plan for you to keep right on paying, election after election, while being muzzled in how much we can pay to protest.

The explosion of spin under the Clark regime and of the liars who are paid to do it mirrors a similar explosion in lying and spin in Tony Blair's New Labour.  The pledge card wasn't the only thing NZ Labour borrowed from UK New Labour.  They've also borrowed their mendacity.  As Peter Oborne notes in writing of the rise and rise of political lying in Britain, the reliance on spin and the volume of its is a new phenomenon in politics.

All governments have contained liars, and most politicians deceive each other as well as the public from time to time.  But in recent years [under New Labour] mendacity and deception have ceased to be abnormal and become an entrenched feature of the British [political] system.

The institutionalisation of spin is almost complete, here as it is in Britain.

Records Ruth Laugesen in yesterday's Sunday Star Times, the number of spin doctors is at a record high.  "Government agencies have hired more new communications staff in five years than all the journalists working at Television New Zealand, Radio New Zealand, the Sunday Star-Times and the Dominion Post newspapers put together."  As Gerry Brownlee points out, this leaves them ideally placed to use the machinery of government as its personal campaign for re-election.

In the last election the Clark Government thought they could use taxpayer's money intended to run the Prime Minister's office in order to run for the Prime Minister's Office.  This was what paid for their pledge card.  This election they clearly intend to use every "communications" resource  in every government department they can lay their hands on to run for re-election.  This is the reason the Madeleine Setchell/Clair Curran employment saga was so important (the only reason): it's important to the Clark Government that the have loyal "communications staff" are in place in every department.  With the numbers Laugesen quotes, it's clear that the capture of the public service is all but complete.

• "The Ministry of Social Development topped the list with 54 communications staff and contractors, making it bigger than Radio New Zealand's entire workforce of journalists."
• "The biggest spender on communication contractors and staff was the Ministry of Education, with 70% of the $6.6m it spent going on contractors."
• "There are 10 times as many government "communications staff" as there were 25 years ago, despite a smaller public service."

Not included in this number is the cost of bloggers such as the hacks at the Sub-Standard, who spin this news by arguing that it's not that there are too many spin doctors but too few journalists -- echoing a line used by Helen Clark at a journalism conference last December, and doing it on Labour's ticket.  (As Paul M. points out in the comments at Kiwiblog, the Sub-Standard is hosted on the Labour Party's server, but without the parliamentary crest that's supposed to appear on taxpayer-funded pieces of puffery such as this is, leaving a few questions for the Sub-Standard boys and girls to answer, including who exactly pays their wages, and for what purpose.)

Watch out people.  There are liars out there, and you're paying for them.

The Rise of Political Lying by Peter Oborne Read more about this book...

Whatever happened to the "smokestack socialist"?

I asked yesterday if readers could identify the author of this remarkably vigorous piece of prose in praise of human production:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all the preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents or cultivation, canalisation or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even an inkling that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

These words, as I said, were written in the mid-nineteenth century - its author achieved worldwide popularity in the twentieth. How rare to hear such a hymn to human industry in the twenty-first.

I'm delighted that several knowledgeable readers identified the author as one Karl Marx -- a surprise perhaps to some who know the bearded apostle of "scientific socialism" only as the god of today's braindead man-haters. How come, you might ask, we so rarely hear such hairy-chested sentiments from socialists these days? The answer is quite simple: the abject failure of socialism to live up to the promise implied in the old fool's wee hymn to human production.

The old style hairy-chested, smokestack socialist was a fan of production -- of colossal productive forces, of the steam-driven subjection of nature by productive forces, forces that in earlier centuries had "slumbered in the lap of social labour" and had now erupted out of the feudal past in the promise of a glorious socialist future! Communism, said Lenin, is "socialism plus electricity"! Communism, Nikita Kruschev told Richard Nixon, will "bury the west." For many a socialist, the optimistic voice of socialism did sounded like the voice of the sunlit future.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of every socialist experiment ever tried, however, put paid to that dream.

The revelation when the Berlin Wall fell that socialist Eastern Europe was an economic, environmental and humanitarian basket case brought on a crisis for socialists worldwide that made it clear for all time that it was impossible to be an honest socialist. Socialism could not produce. Capitalism does. At this revelation, the smokestack socialist had three fundamental choices: either abandon support for socialism, or production, or of reason.

• He could continue to revere production and human fecundity by abandoning socialism altogether (Christopher Hitchens is one of this honest breed), or he could try and shackle capitalist producers to his own socialist ends (Tony Blair, Jim Anderton and most of the Third Way 'social democrat' types adopted this approach).
• Or: he could retain his socialism but abandon instead his praise of production and wealth. The environmental movement beckoned. In damning production he could continue the promotion of socialism as if nothing ever happened. If you've ever wondered at the take-over of the environmental movement worldwide by assorted Trotskyites, Maoists and Leninists, or by the number of Jim Anderton's former colleagues now at home in the 'Watermelon Party,' then this is your explanation.
  
• Or: as Stephen Hicks so eloquently explains, he could abandon reason, science, and optimism altogether, and embrace instead the postmodern promotion of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism. As Hicks says in the thesis of his superb book Explaining Postmodernism, "the failure of [philosophy] made postmodernism possible; the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary."

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the crisis that created this mostly misbegotten diaspora, and it's the reason now that to be an honest socialist is no less impossible than it is to find an honest lawyer.

Tony

Tony Blair has gone.

British Labour will be happy -- with Blair gone they can now have less Bush, less Cherie, less Iraq, more government, more spending and more Brussells (which means much more government and much more spending). UK Tories will be happy -- Brown is not a patch on Blair for either presentation or principle (although they are faced with the problems that with Blair gone, Cameron will now have no one to emulate). There's no doubt that the legacy of Blair will cast a long shadow over both of them, though less so perhaps than Thatcher's still does.

Liberty Scott has a fair summary of the positives and negatives of the Blair years with which I largely concur. Here's some snippets from a few months back giving my own assessment , one from the archives, beginning with this observation:

Tony Blair is an odd combination of two characters from Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead: principled bu pragmatic Gail Wynand and Peter Keating, the man with a second-hand soul. Like Keating (and like Clinton), Blair sought to be all things to all people, pursuing a compromising "Third Way" policy. Like Wynand, however, what brought him down was his one semi-principled act: his support for the Iraq War, an act that could not be made consistent with his overall character and history.

And:

Blair stole what once made the Tories worth anything at all, and it's clear they still don't want it back.

And:

Blair is unashamedly willing to confront those who oppose him and argue out of principle.

And:

"Mr Blair said the struggle facing the world today was not just about security. It was also "a struggle about values and modernity, whether to be at ease with it or enraged at it." It certainly is. Remarkable to hear that from a politician.

In the end, he reformed the British Labour Party, expelling (hopefully for good) the Trotskyites and Bolsheviks with which it was then infested, making it once again electable. For Britain, he largely preserved the results of the Thatcher Revolution -- something the Tories were not going to do. And as he said last night, he did as Prime Minister "what he thought was right" rather than just what was expedient -- something few politicians can say.

But after ten years in power? He first came to prominence as shadow Home Secretary with his promise to be "tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime." He wasn't. Instead he was tough on gun control (leading to an explosion of armed crime) and tough on Big Brother intrusions such as email invasion and the proposed introduction of ID cards. And he leaves power with the 'cash for honours' scandal ringing in his ears -- a scandal mirroring in many respects Labour's pledge card scandal here at home -- and with his egregious Stern Report and the ignominious capitulation of himself and 15 marines in the Gulf still ringing in some of ours.

So his legacy is mixed -- both Gail Wynand and Peter Keating. Sadly, it was the principled part of the Wynand half for which he became least popular, not the second-handedness of the Peter Keating. But fear not fans of second-handers, Peter Keating is still alive and well in British politics: he's now leading the Tories.

Cartoon by Cox and Forkum.

Vote Blue and ....

From Samizdata comes this fine epigram from Sean Gabb, as applicable here as it is to Britain:

"Vote Blue" the Tories say, "Go Green"
You think the promise unforeseen?
Have you forgotten when instead.
We voted Blue and still went Red?
- Sean Gabb.

To see Gabb on 18 Doughty Street discussing the Resignation of Tony Blair, go here.

Tony

Reflecting this morning on Tony Blair's time in power, I realised I could simply post a tribute from the archives, beginning with this observation:

Tony Blair is an odd combination of Peter Keating and Gail Wynand [two characters from Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. (OK, that's somewhat of a stretch, but bear with me.) Like Keating (and like Clinton), Blair sought to be all things to all people, pursuing a compromising "Third Way" policy. Like Wynand, however, what brought him down was his one semi-principled act: his support for the Iraq War, an act that could not be made consistent with his overall character and history.

And:

Blair stole what once made the Tories worth anything at all, and it's clear they still don't want it back.

And:

Blair is unashamedly willing to confront those who oppose him and argue out of principle.

And:

"Mr Blair said the struggle facing the world today was not just about security. It was also "a struggle about values and modernity, whether to be at ease with it or enraged at it." It certainly is. Remarkable to hear that from a politician.

In the end, he reformed the British Labour Party, expelling (hopefully for good) the Trotskyites and Bolsheviks with which it was then infested, making it once again electable. For Britain, he largely preserved the results of the Thatcher Revolution -- something the Tories were not going to do. And as he said last night, he did as Prime Minister "what he thought was right" rather than just what was expedient -- something few politicians can say.

But after ten years in power? He first came to prominence as shadow Home Secretary with his promise to be "tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime." He wasn't. Instead he was tough on gun control (leading to an explosion of armed crime) and tough on Big Brother intrusions such as email invasion and the proposed introduction of ID cards. And he leaves power with the 'cash for honours' scandal still ringing in his ears, a scandal that mirrors in many respects Labour's pledge card scandal here at home.

So his legacy is mixed -- Gail Wynand and Paul Keating -- but that's still much better than most.

"...the arrogance of a cream puff and a 'has been' paper lion"

In his recent "Desert Sands" commentary author Ed Cline highlighted "the West's polices of vacillation, conciliation and accommodation when dealing with Islamists and virtually every other brand of totalitarianism, including Vladimir Putin's Russia, Kim Jong Il 's North Korea, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran," and he did it with reference the creator of Sherlock Homes, Arthur Conan Doyle. It's quite some read, and throws quite some light on all the Jimmy Carter-like hand wringing over the captured British marines (including Faye Turney, left).

Following on from that, today he asks,

What can account for the difference in Western policies concerning Islam between the 19th century and the present? Is there some integral relationship between a blind toleration of Islamic fundamentalism and the West's own drift toward statism and totalitarianism? Even in the 19th century, which was governed, as Ayn Rand observed, by an "Aristotelian spirit," the moral sanction men repaired to was Christianity and a derivative form of secular moral altruism that spawned the elements of statism. This was evident in Doyle's novel; it is a phenomenon that occurs in most 19th century literature. . .

[Now, in the present day,] Iran has seized fifteen British sailors and marines. What has been Prime Minister Tony Blair's response to it other than a faint baring of teeth? In a recent TV interview, he stated that he doesn't understand why Iran keeps doing these things, because such actions are only making Iran unpopular. The only "justice" he can think of in the way of an ultimatum or retaliatory response is to apply economic sanctions against Iran - with the approval of the U.N. and the European Union, of course. That, and "quiet," behind-the-scenes "diplomacy" or compromise to "tone down the rhetoric."

God forbid that he propose unilateral action, such as ordering the British Navy in the Gulf to defend itself and remove a few Iranian ships or other military targets by way of persuasion.

God forbids? Or "world opinion"? With Blair's urging, Britain has progressively surrendered its sovereignty to the bureaucrats and parasites of the European Union, which explains Blair's tepid and arguably impotent "anger."

Ahmadinejad has called "arrogant" Britain's refusal to "apologize" for the alleged violation of Iran's waters. He knows, however, that it is the arrogance of a cream puff and a "has been" paper lion.

Both Blair and Bush have been disarmed, argues Cline, and disarmed specifically by bad philosophy.

Both Bush and Blair have refused to acknowledge irrational nature of Iran, of Iraq, of Saudi Arabia - of virtually everything that imperils Western civilization, because they refuse to acknowledge the irrationality of their own policies. They have closed their minds to correction. Witness Bush's willingness to "stay the course" in Iraq, as though loyalty to an irrational, fruitless policy will somehow transform a quagmire into victory. This is how they jeopardize the existence of the West and allow Frankenstein monsters to exist, and be sustained, and set the terms of our existence.

It is not Ahmadinejad and Putin and Mugabe who are dangerous. It is the premise of Western leaders that the best morality is to be non-judgmental, to "love" (or tolerate as a difference in opinion or culture) totalitarians and sanction every brand of irrationality, including religious doctrines, and to surrender pro-life values in exchange for non- or anti-life values, such as "peace at any price," or environmentalism, or wealth -consuming foreign aid.

Surrender is not a winning strategy. Never has been.

UPDATE 1: The Times mentions that "Tehran bloggers see through the smoke and mirrors," saying this is all about Ahmadinejad.

Iran analysts believe that President Ahmadinejad is relishing the crisis because it deflects attention from his political setbacks at home and criticism that he has failed to make good pledges of a better lot for Iran’s poor.

UPDATE 2: In an hour long press conference, Ahmadinejad has said he will set the servicemen and women free. No timetable for their release was announced, but is this his way of appearing to be a statesman? To appear to take the moral high ground?

LINKS: The spreading desert sands of Islam - Ed Cline, The Rule of Reason
The fatal art of turning the other cheek - Ed Cline, The Rule of Reason

RELATED: World Politics, US Politics, UK Politics, War, Philosophy, Religion, Objectivism, Ethics

The new Iranian hostage crisis

There are several instructive points to take from Iran's hostage-taking of British naval personnel, but perhaps the first is a simple suggestion that would take some pressure of the captives. Having watched several statements purportedly made by British prisoner Faye Turney, the Blair Government and senior media organisations should announce that they will encourage the hostages to say whatever they need to say to appease their captors, and that anything they do say that is issued by the Iranian Government will be discounted and ignored as the forced statements of those subject to unreasonable pressure -- pressure we can't even begin to imagine.

Such a coordinated statement would at a stroke remove needless pressure on the captives to stay silent, remove any point in Tehran applying any such pressure, and would instantly discount any propaganda value to be gained from forcing such statements to be made. That would be one simple thing that could be done, and more effective than all the dithering to date.

The reactions from Washington and London to Tehran's capture of these hostages has been revealing. What it has revealed has been summarised by Elan Journo at the Ayn Rand Institute.

The U.K. government and Washington are widely regarded as aggressive defenders of their interests in the face of Islamist aggression. But the present Iranian hostage crisis shows, again, how these would-be defenders of our life and freedom are pathetically timid--while our enemy is shameless and ever more confident.

"Iran is a leading world sponsor of Islamic totalitarianism and has long been waging a terrorist proxy war against the West, through groups such as Hezbollah. In Iraq, Iran's proxies have been slaughtering U.S. and British troops. Iran initiates all of this aggression--to say nothing of its nuclear weapons program--with the confidence that it has an Allah-given right to murder. No surprise, then, that when 15 British naval personnel came near Iranian waters, Teheran took them hostage--and unabashedly demanded an apology from Britain, its victim.

"What has been the British, and American, response to Iran's outrage? What has the West done in the face of such a confidently evil regime?

The response has been universal hand wringing, and an invitation to even more agression.

Remember Jimmy Carter's weak-kneed and ineffective response to the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis, a response that reinforced for an insane and aggressive Iranian regime that they had nothing to fear from a United States unwilling to stand up and defend its own people. It's only early days in the current hostage crisis, but it seems that pathetic response is now being repeated by the Blair Government in the face of an equally insane promoter of Middle East terrorism.

The world looks to Tony, and what it finds is hardly the warmonger of myth, but instead a figure of timid deference. As Elan Journo concludes, "While the British may hope that their timid, deferential approach will avoid inflaming the crisis and antagonizing Iran, they are accomplishing the opposite. The spectacle of Western nations bowing in submission is an encouragement to Iran and Islamic totalitarians worldwide."

UPDATE 1: The Neo-Jacobin takes a similar line: 'It's War, Jim, But Not As We Know It.'

Britain’s precautionary approach to Iran has only succeeded in slowly dragging this whole affair along, rather than settling it - none of this has been lost on the Iranian authorities who have used the past few days to ratchet up the political and military stakes. With a government like ours, there is one thing we can be certain of, their increasing obsession with risk, and aversion to risk, will only succeed in inviting even more ambushes, and other such 'gestures of defiance' in the not so distant future.

UPDATE 2: Marcus notes with unerring accuracy that the Iranian regime "continues as it began, with intimidation and violence." Read the litany.

UPDATE 3: The Iranian regime is like a hard-boiled egg with a thin sell, argues Victor Davis Hanson. We should tap it lightly wherever we can - until tiny fissures join and shatter the shell." See Victor Davis Hanson - Given Enough Small Taps, Iran Regime will Crack. [Hat tip, Regime Change Iran]

RELATED: WarWorld Politics, UK Politics, Cartoons

A historic ceremony for Saturday's Six Nations game in Dublin

News just in from RTE Ireland about an historic joint ceremony to be held before Ireland's crunch Six Nations game against England in Croke Park on Saturday. The Croke Park venue -- normally a Hurling and Gaelic Football (GAA) venue -- is being used since Lansdowne Rd is under renovation, but as history minded readers will be aware, the ground has some history that first needs to be laid to rest:

The significance of the game is not lost on GAA followers and republicans who remember the infamous shooting of 14 players and supporters by the British Army on the 21st November 1921.
However according to GAA spokesman Ulick Magee a plan being devised by the GAA and the Northern Ireland office, will attempt to draw a line under the incident.

"We've spoken to the British government and they understand the significance of the event back in 1921. Back then 14 people were killed by British forces so in the spirit of the peace process and friendship we're proposing that we shoot 14 of their lot before the match. Then maybe have fireworks afterwards or something."

The plan has had a mixed reaction from Downing Street. Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks the idea has merit but said that it needs to be done properly and with dignity. "Frankly I think its a small price to pay for progression in Anglo-Irish affairs, but I think the idea of getting Ray Houghton to do the shooting would be too much for many English fans to take particularly after his goal against us back in 1988. And he's Scottish which is worse."

Candidates for the shooting include "moaney-hole singer James Blunt, foul mouth idiot Jade Goody, Trinny & Suzannah, Man Utd donkey Rio Ferdinand, cream cake expert Vanessa Feltz, "comedian" Russell Brand and any of the blokes who do outside broadcasts for Sky News.

But discussions took an ironic twist when both sides agreed on shooting Belfast singer Brian Kennedy, but neither side agreed on what nationality he was.

News that Bono was to offer himself up for martyrdom as a gesture of inter-nation amity were, unfortunately, denied by band manager Paul McGuiness.

LINK: British & Irish Governments plan ceremony in Croke Park: Controversial game will be started with compromise gesture - Indymedia Ireland

RELATED: Humour, Sport

The guns of Brixton & elsewhere: A thought experiment

Three solutions to gun crime in the UK. Would you like to rank them from most ineffectual (but headline grabbing) up to most effective?

Blair announces new gun-crime measures after fourth murder
Monsters and Critics.com - 18 hours ago
London - Following the deaths by shooting of four young men in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced harsher penalties for possessing firearms.

In an alternate universe, suggests Pacific Empire:

Following the deaths by shooting of four young men in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced harsher penalties for shooting people.

And in another universe, in which the UK followed the advice of Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance:

We believe the best action would be to relegalise guns and let ordinary people fight back with lethal force against the violent criminals who presently rule the streets of our cities...

To help you in your decision, Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance points out on behalf of beleaguered Britons: "We have the most restrictive laws in Europe on gun ownership. These have plainly not worked. In 1968, in 1988, and twice in 1997, we were promised a safer country if only we gave up our guns. We were cheated. In fact, the only people who have no guns are the respectable."

So which is it? Which solution would be the most effective? And which the least?

LINKS: Crime and punishment - Pacific Empire
Relegalise guns: Power to the People! - Dr Sean Gabb, Libertarian Alliance, UK

RELATED: Politics-UK, Self-Defence

Cameron-Lite

It's becoming a common theme here at Not PC ... bagging the gross National product of John Key. But not today -- at least, not directly.

Here instead is an interview with British Tory leader David Cameron, whom Key has been aping. (What's hilarious is that Cameron's 'strategy' is to simply me-too Tony Blair, so with Key we get a cheap knock-off of Cameron, who is little more than a poor knock-off of Blair but without the conviction; and the policies of both Key and Cameron -- what few are discernible through the mush -- are nothing more than Labour-lite. To a conservative, is known as "strategy.")

Anyway, back to the interview [a hat tip for which goes to Andrew Falloon], in which Cameron lays out his stall for the next political year. At least, he's invited to lay out his stall -- and if you relax and turn your brain off he does sounds very good -- but when you watch with full focus and then try and summarise once he's finished where exactly he stands on anything, you're left with nothing more than froth and a handful of air. Hot air.

Comedian Peter Sellers once famously delivered a five-minute Party Political Broadcast with a semantic content of exactly zero. Cameron can do the same for twenty minutes -- and you would swear he could keep going in the same vein for ever. If you want to watch twenty minutes of a polished politician saying nothing while sounding like he's saying a lot, a foretaste of things to come in New Zealand, then click here and then watch and learn. The Cameron emptiness starts around 37:30.

LINKS: Sunday AM - BBC News
Key on crack - Andrew Falloon

RELATED: Politics-UK, Politics-NZ, Politics-National, Hollow_Men

Drinkers fingerprinted. Landlords threatened.

I hesitate to post this for fear it may give a local bureaucrat ideas. From Metro UK:

Drinkers could be asked to leave their fingerprints at the bar every time they buy a pint in a pub or club. They may also need to show a passport or a driving licence and their details will be held on a database available to police...

Some landlords were reluctant to sign up until they were told they faced having their licences revoked...

Guy Herbert, of privacy campaign group No2ID, said : 'People are having to post bail in the form of their fingerprints merely to have a drink.' Liberty's Doug Jewell added: 'The money for these schemes could be better spent on police services.'

Meanwhile, Tony Blair insisted there should be 'no limits' on expansion of a national police DNA database, saying it was vital for catching criminals.

Big Brother, bullying and threats to small businessmen. Just another day in the UK then.

LINKS: Drinkers to leave prints for pints - Metro UK

RELATED: Politics-UK, Beer & Elsewhere