A worrying sort of sense
Just read a rather disturbing article by Mr Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday (hat tip to The Salted Slug). Disturbing because it makes an awful lot of sense in suggesting that if we want rid of Labour and a real change in politics then the best thing could be if the Tory’s lose and Labour get in. As many others comment I’m not sure I could face voting Labour but Mr Hitchens reasoning is sound. Here’s a taster but go read the whole thing.
I give myself a great deal of trouble by attacking the Tories, the party most of my readers want to support. Why do I do this, condemning myself to many angry and often personally rude messages from affronted people? I could easily make everyone happy by quietly dropping this campaign. It would save me hours spent writing letters and e-mails to Tory loyalists who absurdly accuse me, of all people, of wanting to keep Labour in power.
But I cannot, because I think we now have a unique opportunity to remake British politics and recapture Britain from the people who have messed it up and trashed it for so long. The next election cannot change the government. But it can change the opposition – from an ineffectual, useless, compromised one, into an effective one genuinely opposed to what New Labour is doing.
And such an opposition, no longer weighed down by the awful record of the Tories and their miserable reputation, could throw New Labour into the sea, perhaps within five years of coming into being.
The destruction of the Tory Party, which is now both possible and desirable, is the essential first step to this. In our two-party system, new parties arise out of the collapse and splitting of those they seek to replace. They cannot be created until that collapse, and that split, have begun. A serious, undoubted and decisive defeat for the Tory Party at the next election would make this possible and likely. Such a defeat is possible, despite the events of the past few weeks, and can be aided by voters simply refusing to waste their votes on a party that is both likely to lose, and certain to betray them if it wins.
Snippet of Blair
Having made the long and weary trek from the basement to the fifth floor in search of coffee and a fleeting glimpse of what the weather might be doing, I happened to catch a bit of our discredited glorious leader Mr T. Blair chatting to some inquiry that seems to be happening. The gist of what he seemed to be saying, and to be fair I wasn’t paying much attention as I was in need of coffee, was that a certain Mr Hussein had done lots of nasty things to people that weren’t us and Mr Blair thought that Mr Hussein probably had weapons which he could use to hurt other people who still weren’t us quite badly. Because of this Mr Blair espoused that it was not only reasonable but in fact quite sensible to go and do something really nasty to Mr Hussein before Mr Hussein did anything else nasty to people who probably still wouldn’t be us.
I’ll admit I may be over simplifying here, but that seemed to be the basic thrust of his defence of why beating up Mr Hussein was not only right but also legal. Now I’m not actually interested in if he was right or not, but I can’t help but think that sounds an awful lot like vigilantism, after all Mr Hussein already had an ASBO and had been told that if he was naughty again the UN would think about doing something else. But if this defence of Mr Blairs is accepted how does that mesh with people being told off for merely engaging in sabre rattling (well waving kitchen knives) at people that have also done nasty things to other people and will probably do so again and that are known for being nasty people. After all if our politicians are arguing that knowing someone is a wrong ‘un and will be naughty again is a perfectly fine reason for taking pre-emptive action against them before they’ve done a thing to you, surely the case for us taking action against wrong ‘uns closer to home must be much stronger?
(I know it’s one rule for them and another for us and that it doesn’t work that way – but the parallels are I feel rather interesting).
UK Threat level RSS
Given the recent change to our required fear level, I was some what surprised to discover that there’s no easy way to be notified as to when we should increase, or even decrease, our level of fear and underlying anxiety. It seems that by some terrible over sight our glorious Government and security forces haven’t made it easy to get notified of when the “current terrorism threat level” changes. As , and I was surprised at this, no one seems to have done so already I put together a little script that monitors the Home Office web site and publishes changes to the “current terrorism threat level” to an RSS feed. Which can then be pulled into all sorts of useful things, such as a blog side bar or anything else for that matter. The feed is deliberately very simple to make it more useful for feeding into other things.
I’ve just discovered the official historical record so I’ll back fill that data, and for future changes I’ll also grab the RSS feed from the BBC news site so we can know at least what was in the headlines at the time.
Anyway for more details either click on the link in the side bar or go here:
http://www.anonymong.org/alert/
or just subscribe to the feed here:
http://www.anonymong.org/alert/alert.rss
e-petitions what are they good for?
Yesterday I received notification that the Government had responded to an e-petition I’d signed. It happened to be the one regarding their limiting cost recovery if you’re found innocent (response here). Now other than suspecting they’ll not limit the costs they can award if you’re found guilty, and wondering why they now just send a link rather than e-mailing a response as they did back in 2007 (I suspect this is due to it being easier to change a website than an e-mail you’ve sent to people – but I’m cynical like that) – the main thing I found myself wondering is has any petition submitted via the Number 10 website ever caused any change in behaviour?
Every petition I’ve signed the response has basically boiled down to:
“Thanks for getting in touch, but you’re wrong”
now that could be due to the types of petition I sign so I checked some others and found two different types of response:
“Thanks for getting in touch, we’re already doing that”
and
“Thanks for getting in touch, that’s got nothing to do with us”
Has anyone seen a response which involves them making the slightest change in action or anything, even a bit of further thought of another fake consultation? Has any of the numerous petitions submitted resulted in even the tiniest change on the governments part?
I’m tempted to offer a prize for the first person to find a response where they actually say they’ll do something different.
Just in – arrest Blair
Just been pointed at a shiny new website from Cyberium/George Monbiot (hat tip : Her Ladyship at Tora Towers).
The stated aim of the site is:
“This site offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against peace. Anyone attempting an arrest which meets the rules laid down here will be entitled to one quarter of the money collected at the time of his or her application.
Money donated to this site will be used for no other purpose than to pay bounties for attempts to arrest Tony Blair. All administration and other costs, apart from any charges added to your donations by Paypal, will be paid by the site’s founder.”
A site well worth giivng a high profile to – though if Wikileaks is anything to judge by PayPal will no doubt pull the plug fairly quickly.
Just spreading the word
Via Captain Ranty comes this rather excellent post by Corrugated Soundbite
“Now I’m glad Brits don’t riot
No, really.
We live in a nation with a State that assumes every adult to be a paedophile unless proven otherwise. They can take your kids away by simply deeming you “not bright enough”, whilst knowingly leaving children in the hands of parents who abuse them until they die.
No riot. “
Go read the whole thing, it rather echo’s and sums up a lot of stuff that’s been said by Leg Iron in the past, and they’ve got a damn good point.
Update: LegIron counsels patience even though there are even more reasons to be a tad miffed.
Authoritarian sheep killers
It’s quite odd what you can find when looking for something else, such as a site which sells sheepskin parchment and happens to mention:
“It is a legal requirement that all Acts of Parliament are still recorded on this material.“
Which seemed unlikely to me what with this being the twentfirst century and all, so I did a bit of searching, and what do you know it’s true:
Now at a new law a day everyday since they came into power that’s an awful lot of laws, and thus an awful lot of sheep, and that parchment isn’t cheap. Which makes me wonder several things:
- Given the state they’ve reduced British sheep farming to where are they getting all those sheep skins from?
- Has anyone told the greens and if so why aren’t they objecting, especially the vegans?
- Does this explain the real reason for the various sheep culls that have occurred under New Labour?
I think I may have to find out how to make a suitable FOI request.
Monday morning papers
Having foolishly made the mistake of reading the metro today, there were a few articles that tie in rather too well with my last post.
There’s a half page article about Megan Ward who’s invented a “smoking kills” key ring which is being ordered by “anti-smoking consultancy”* GASP, and she’s also produced possibly more useful strong sun indicators. In smaller news the Scots it seems are drinking a shocking one and a half pints a day (Of course these numbers will get increasingly inaccurate as people home brew or buy abroad) . The really impressive article though is the call from Dr Shyam Kolvekar to ban butter it seems just advising people to use less is no longer enough. Once he’s done with butter though he’s already got a few other foods in his sights:
To round off the mornings madness the Independent is reporting on a man arrested for a twitter post threatening to blow up Robin Hood airport. Yes it probably warranted someone going round for a quiet chat, but the arrest and life time ban from the airport? I hope that he wasn’t reported by someone following his tweets.
* What on earth is an “anti-smoking consultancy” anyway?
The new puritanism
I’ve been meaning to write this for quite a while and never quite getting round to it, but the recent post over at Devils Kitchen has prompted to actually do something. If you read Devils Kitchen and Leg Iron already you can probably just skip this as I’m not going to say anything new and will be linking to them extensively, as I’m just trying to pull a load of stuff together for my own benefit.
This thread goes back quite a long way especially over on Leg Irons, who seems to have predicted events rather well – though we’ve not yet travelled all of that road . But today Devils kitchen brought to my attention that the powers that be have taken a leaf from the SNP’s book and are in favour of minimum pricing per unit for alcohol. Setting the minimum price at around 40 or 50 pence a unit. It’s worth at this point stopping to recall that “a unit” is a measurement invented by the government, and so subject to redefinition if the minimum pricing isn’t raising enough money, sorry doing enough to prevent binge drinking. So perhaps in that regard the Tory proposal to change from units to centilitres works in our favour, though no doubt it’ll be dropped as soon as they notice that it makes things more transparent. Also notice that the minimum price also covers spirits, now what’s the betting that this will turn out to be rigged in some way to apply before excise duty? Given that excise duty already accounts for a fair chunk of the price of spirits? As this government doesn’t seem to have any qualms about banning things, and is probably stupid enough to try prohibition, one has to conclude that this is as much about getting more taxes as it is a matter of control and probably very little to do with the stated goals..
Of course it is being sold as being to protect precious NHS resources, so presumably we can soon start to see taxes on ski-ing holidays and other activities which increase the risk of injury and thus costs to the NSH. Public backing is wanted for the scheme and will no doubt be provided by the various fake charities that exist for just such a purpose.
Taxes though aren’t the only weapon they hope to deploy against drinkers bar staff have a role to play as well no longer asking “same again” but offering water instead and so “slowly” drinking will be denormalised.
There are laws already in place that would address the alleged problems if they were enforced. They could even charge fixed penalties for bars serving people when drunk or for being drunk and disorderly which would help the revenue issue. But using existing laws has never been popular with this government much better to penalise everyone even though alcohol consumption hasn’t actually risen. All of which makes me wonder, as many times before, if either the government is really that incompetent, is just addicted to making laws or if as others suggest the aim is greater control of the population.
Greater control of the population seems more likely as booze seems to be following the same path taken with smoking. Once booze is nicely unerway they seem to already have lightbulbs, batteries and food lined up to be tackled next. Not to mention driving, taking photographs and a host of other things all subject to increasing controls and heading towards being banned. Every time it’s for the sake of the children/environment/NHS and every time nothings banned out right as people would notice that, instead costs are pushed up (got to keep that tax revenue), choices are curtailed and the individual singled out for opprobrium. None of it achieves the stated objectives, it isn’t meant to, it just makes us all guilty of something, all at risk of summary punishment, all part of the “other” and thus all controlled. Fear and control really do seem to be the only aims that make any sort of sense. Not breaking the law won’t even be sufficient as they’ll just arrest you until you prove you haven’t broken the law. An obvious up shot of this would be the rise in home brewing and other untaxed activities in the home, but they’ve got that covered by encouraging children to spy on their parents (and look out for terrorists for now) and a shiny new database to track it all.
Obviously as we’re so often told, it would be nonsense to even suggest that we might be heading towards being a totalitarian sate – but there does seem to be a hell of a pattern emerging. Though perhaps it is actually just a new puritanism, a medievalist revival where it’s ok to “sin” as long as you act suitably penitent and buy your indulgence.
UKIP a correction
I really must apologise, my previous article UKIP losing the plot I’d rather presumed that UKIP wanted a blanket ban on the burqa. However as Dick Puddlecote points out over at Old Holborns this isn’t actually the case. They just want to ban it in public buildings and allow for it to be banned in private buildings as well and they actually want to ban “anything which conceals a woman’s face“. Which is marginally more reasonable, except why just women’s faces? Surely experience tells us that men with covered faces are far more likely to be a problem? And what does it matter if you’ve got your face covered in a library say? Or if they word it really well in a council run community centre attending a group for Islamic women? Also surgical masks? I’m very sure that you can’t over estimate how badly a law can be worded, and how stupidly it will subsequently be enforced.
So given that they single out both women and Islamic garb, I’m going to stick by my previous conclusions even though I did misread the report and think they were after a blanket ban on just one type of garment.
If they proposed that it all face coverings could be requested to be removed when security concerns or the establishment of identity required it, that’d be far more reasonable – but one would hope that was the law already? And as for private buildings given that hoodies, crash helmets and even hats are banned from all sorts of places wouldn’t it just make more sense to allow private venues to ban whatever clothing they like? what with them being private property and all?
So my final question stands failing a LPUK candidate, as UKIP seem to be trying to join the rest of the authoritarian part who’s left to vote for?
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UK terror threat status
- Severe 2010/01/25