Sense of direction

The event of a new Government in the UK reawakened my interest in politics there. It seemed only sensible to hibernate (even emigrate) during NuLabour's nuclear winter of toxic bubbles and exponential increases (in housing, immigration, debt, spending, incompetence etc). NuLabour had decided so many questions ideologically that all you heard about was the presentational detail, particularly as the State's mouthpiece, the BBC, was given lavish auhority to set the news agendas.

Now I guarantee you will bear much more detail about politics, much more about dissent, and more about failure. After all, with a Libservative approach mistakes will be bugs rather than features (ooh ahh, views rather than scenery), with the exception of a few policy areas like energy and the environment, where lights going out may well be seen as a successful implementation of a policy of making everyone's personal energy needs fail to be met. When the policy objective is reducing standards of living it may well be easy to meet that objective, especially for those in prime positions like that of MPs and Ministers, or Prime and Deputy Prime Ministers.

To look on the really positive side of the Libservatives, one has to see that, amidst all their delighted abandon in slicing unwonted chunks out of each other's manifestos, they have determined at least to reform the National Health Service (a Tory election pledge notwithstanding, natch). This is the counter-argument to the one which says that Cameron is a closet commie. There could be no greater boon for Britain, and no greater boost for Conservatism, than reforming the Stalinist NHS. Doing so would be a fulfillment not of recent Conservative policy but of Liberal Democrat Orange Book philosophy- and Clegg himself is one of the major Orange Libservatives.

One more thought- Cameron may have a few deep games afoot in his posturing, on many fronts. Not least this might include the alienation of the so-called Tory Right. It's expedient now to do so in order to lash the Liberals to the mast of the coalition. Wait and see the fiscal Conservatism this enables... and meantime ditch any conceivable baggage that no-one has claimed for a decade or two.

Self-preservational cynicism

I read with interest the latest UK crime figures, and noticed that gun crime was up by four percent, while overall crime fell by nine percent.

I am aware of the existence of the British Crime Survey of public opinion, which acts as a counterweight to the statistical approach, but all things considered I find myself still sceptical.

It's interesting to me that the crime figures would go down when the "enforcement" mechanism of serious crime and organised crime, guns, should be on the rise.

I also wonder, because in the UK I had some experience with crime (on many occasions). There was especially one occasion when, living in York, my car was broken into- nothing was stolen, but many hundred of pounds of damage was caused. All I received was a written invitation to visit the local station and report the details along with parts of the car that had been the focus of the attack and were possibly forensically interesting. No police officer came out, and as I couldn't use my car I would have been forced to walk three miles to the station- if I could have been bothered- with a plastic bag full of bits I had no knowledge of how to treat to enable their effective use in the investigation (ha!). Being young I was supposed to be able to take, you know, whatever. I don't think the crime was ever recorded. Or maybe it was- I don't remember, know or care. It was just a very bad dream to be carless in that location for about six weeks as complex repairs took place.

Well, that wasn't my only experience, but it had a deadening effect on my perceptions. You see, crime tends to intimidate- one is so preoccupied with the most serious that others almost go unnoticed. Crime committed to property, for instance, or crime you witness. You're only bothered about the minor disaster that effects you. I don't think the authorities ever face up to that kind of reality- it's frankly far too much work. And so it goes, always worse, unheralded except in spasms of taboid righteousness.

And this brings me to the point about gun crime. It's so serious it has to be noticed; it's so intimidating it's all absorbing, but the thing is that it swallows up in its maw such a miserable array of crime- that's the point; guns shield crime. It's what they're for- at least when guns themselves are criminal.

That UK Janus face again

Complicated country, Britain.

As we enter a new year, Mark Steyn picks up two stories which show the two sides of Britain:

The NHS worshipping side, and the martially soaring spirit.

See, what we need is to divert a little of the latter to rip into the former, and then we'd be kicking, so to speak.

Still freely mocking politicians....


Mark Steyn's stocking filler is a corker.

Best read in accompaniment to this video 'enhancement' of Hillary's latest campaign video.



As the US election cycle begins to hot up, I was struck with the contrast between that and the incredibly depressing spectacle of another generation of Lib Dems girding their loins to rally behind the miserable, vapid and vacuous Nick Clegg, whose acceptance speech was empty as hell and inept even at that. The BBC tried to find an interesting angle on Clegg and as the Beeb were trying to be interesting in the written word, something they have limited understanding of, the result was typically grotesque:

"The male clegg drinks nectar, and sucks blood.

It's is an old word for a gadfly - an insect which hops from one thing to another, irritating livestock and rarely settling in one place.

Nick Clegg, its namesake, will hope there is more political sweetness than bleeding ahead."

I think I'd be a little irritated by that, were I a Lib-Dem, if I didn't know that it was probably just BBC "creativity" gone wrong- which is rather different from their groupthink leftism as that tends to follow predictable lines.

Tony Blair is cleverer than Gordon Brown...

It's the answer to a question I've thought about a bit over the years. It's not something I take great joy in finding out for sure, and neither does it prove that Tony Blair was actually a "good thing" (really I don't think that at all). But the hamminess of that clunking fist is apparent in the chain of events that have unfolded, leading up to Brown's big anti-climax non-election announcement, while TB has pranced on, viralesque, into the Middle East.

As Boulton says "whatever else, it will call into question the judgement of Team Brown and also their sincerity when they talk about the national interest because of the political calculation which they have clearly now been caught by the headlights".

Something to be ashamed of...

Whilst I am often sceptical of the need for national apologies, especially those that go back over the centuries and involve the latest fashionable racial groupings, I do think that if this story transpires it will be time to hang the head in shame.

Britain's coming home, they're coming home.

This brings it home. There has become a depressing regularity about UK casualties in Basra.

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months."

Article here.

Obviously I am not a military person, but I would say a few things about this.

1)It's not primarily been a military problem, but a political one. From instilling the rule of law, to suppressing harmful political forces such as Moctada al Sadr, to being modest when times were quiet, to protesting and acting against Iranian interference, we've made the wrong decisions.

2)Both our politicians and our military top brass are arrogant and unrealistic- the politicians in thinking that our military must be expert diplomats just because they're British; our top brass because they thought that, being British, we would have the nouse not to stick our noses where they were not wanted and would be automatically secure and respected through technical prowess and military discipline. The politicians because they thought they could just make assumptions based on favourable metrics and bring troops out of the area before anything had truly been secured; the military because they took every setback as evidence of unrealistic political aims rather than as military problems which they had a responsibility to solve.

Overall it's been a big cock up, which had everything to do with the contempt the British establishment by and large has had for the Iraq expedition, and little or nothing to do with historical inevitability. We haven't seemed to understand that sometimes it's better not to do things rather than to do them badly and unwillingly, while to do them willingly and positively would be the only actually good option. I don't blame the soldiers specifically, but the military culture hasn't exactly vindicated itself.

Of course I have no "overwhelming moral authority" to talk about this, but I feel things could have been so much better.

When to break the law...


When the law tells you to turn your back on your responsibilities, ignore your instincts, countermand your judgement... leave your children in the hands of a madwoman.

Step one, forget the idea that the State knows best.

Piccie of Britain. Canadian-American conservative Steyn writes:


"the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of "pavement pizza", the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet - is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities."

How much of the first three lines do you imagine the US readership would understand without effort? Classic stuff. Personally, I've always felt that the type of characters outlined above were always subliminally aiming for the Hogarthian effect. I preferred to keep it to cartoons.

Christopher Hitchens comes home, and finds it another country (well he has settled in America, but that's not quite what I mean...)

Beeb-based observations

Ordinarily I ignore local elections. There seems to be a pretty good case for ignoring the most recent ones. That, one can imagine, is what the attuned folks at the Beeb concluded when they analysed the Conservative performance primarily through the prism of a notional national voting percentage barely increased on the previous year's less comprehensive local elections results (40ish percent versus 40ish percent). Yet there I was on Thursday night poring over the results at 3 in the morning. True, it was really just the consequence of insomnia- but somehow I had begun to care.

I wonder if others are beginning to feel that way? The Beeb are probably shuddering at the thought. A litmus test though of whether Cameron is really a statist or is actually a pretty good conservative liar would be whether (assuming- big assumption- his election in three years' time) the BBC was permitted to continue as the state sponsored global broadcasting monster which it has evolved into, or whether Cameron would engage in some conservative-minded natural selection of BBC functions, with the aim of stimulating the free media market.

Also in my mind during the coverage was the Beeb's very own Lothian question- where they gave primacy to the decision making processes of less than an eighth of the British population by headlining the elections to the assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

I wonder if that would have happened had Labour enjoyed a relatively relaxed Thursday night south of the border? It must be a comfort to lefty Beebites that they can always retreat to covering a truly leftist country when they need to get their breath back. Something similar has usually been true of conservatives in England- there was always the South East. Though we never had a giant broadcaster to cater for such escapism, news tends to follow the money, so...

I very much like Scotland, actually. The main reason, aside from motive, that I can't imagine ever locating there is the suffocating essentialness of the state to people's existences there. The same for me would apply to Sweden, probably Norway too. Where I currently reside, in the Czech Republic, the state has a bit of an image problem, having had a forty year term of office statifying (stultifying?) everything. The roll back from that is therefore instinctive and there's an instinct to leave alone; as well as the imperative of not actually being a very rich state to begin with.

I fear for Scotland though, or rather for its people. A retreat from the Union would be a fundamentally unserious step, a step towards EUification and away paradoxically from national identity. The fact that the deciding factor would be the opposition of the Lib Dems to such a move says it all really.

Cat. Bag. Open. Heh.

Rather an interesting snippet from Birmingistan

Via Mel as it happens, author of Londonistan, here is a richly realistic view of a neighbourhood in Birmingham.

Too much to quote, but a perspective encompassing radicalised mosques, burkhas, self-segregation, coercive and exploitative arranged marriages, and polygamy- not to mention terrorism and jihad; all in Enoch Powell's backyard.

“They say we’re being victimised. We’re not. The truth is coming out at last, but it’s 20 years too late.”

Journalist Mary-Anne Sieghart seems to have sat down with the Pakistani- or rather, British- lady interviewed and listened long and hard over a coffee or two. That's the stuff.

Cameron: Not a good thing

I haven't completely decided what my view of Conservative leader David Cameron is, but I don't think he's a good thing.

I was struck by a quote made by his spokesman in response to critics from the Cornerstone grouping of MPs:

"ultimately, the party has got to change and be relevant to modern Britain. Edward Leigh is completely wrong".

I have little doubt Cameron knows how to ride the beast of modern Britain, for a while, but I think the Conservatives need to think not just of "modern Britain", but of Britain in the world. "modern Britain" in any case is an abstraction and as such a luxury. Leigh cannot by any means be said to be "completely wrong". Blinkered and myopic from the Con. leadership: that's not a good thing.