The British people are deeply conservative…

…BBC blames bin Laden.

Having bigged up the Yes To AV campaign with all its might, our national broadcaster is explaining why this simple, liberal measure to make democracy fairer was overwhelmingly rejected by the supposedly ‘progressive majority’ of Polly Toynbee’s imagination this Thursday.

Curiously, it’s nothing to do with Julia’s perfect summary of conservative skepticism when dealing with anatomically modern liberals over there at OoL :

I’m voting No, simply because all the other changes the progressives have pushed for have turned (o)ut for the worst, and I’m not betting on their luck changing anytime soon!

Say it first thing every morning and last thing at night.

Repeat until our streets are safe day and night and until the overwhelming majority of our nations’ children are taught to read and write properly.

A debate that was often about the complexity of electoral systems ended in the simplest of results.

The No campaign won, overwhelmingly.

Nice of him to state a right-wing fact as a fact when it’s inescapable.

Next week, perhaps, JFK assassinated by Left-Wing nut job with a pro-Communist record as long as your arm and not a shadowy Right-wing conspiracy after all, perhaps?

The rush to attribute blame, or grab the credit for that result, begins here.

Nice ordering there. Blame first, because it’s bad to oppose AV.

Many Lib Dems will attribute the outcome to David Cameron who they say campaigned hard for a No vote despite agreeing not to take a leading role.

Presses ‘Despicable Tory’ speed dial button.

As early as February the prime minister had no qualms about reminding people Nick Clegg had once called the alternative vote a "miserable little compromise".

Relations between the coalition partners deteriorated from there, until Energy Secretary Chris Huhne confronted the prime minister in cabinet in what became a very well publicised spat.

Both Mr Huhne and the former Lib Dem leader Lord Ashdown accused the No campaign of personally targeting Nick Clegg and telling lies, something which was denied.

While some suspected the tension was carefully staged to boost Lib Dem election hopes, Mr Huhne insisted, as the results came in, relationships had grown frayed.

These moments of melodrama won the attention of journalists.

Ooh, it’s all about us; the political and media class!

Gripping the wider public, would prove to be more difficult.

In the event much of debate was characterised by two things that tend to bore voters - bickering politicians and ferocious, sometimes obscure, battles between political campaigners.

Actually, of two dear colleagues here in Castle City’s Bloated Bureaucracy who were recently discussing why they voted No this week, one offered a concise explanation of how historian David Starkey’s argument about AV threatening a further drift to pre-Industrial Revolution style patronage persuaded her, and another that she feared not that the Far Right would win seats (AV is a “centre” party’s dream), but that it would lead the Conservative Party to head hard a-starboard on race and immigration to try to win BNP transfers.

Clever people both; educated but not at all Right-wing. But conservative? In the sense of skepticism of change alone: yes.

Even committed Westminster watchers may soon struggle to recall the details of a row about a poster featuring a soldier's body armour, or the intricacies of the campaign donations.

There were moments of novelty when political opponents shared one stage.

Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable and Labour leader Ed Miliband appeared together at a press conference arguing for a Yes vote. David Cameron and the former Labour home secretary Lord Reid stood side by side to make the case for a no vote.

But even these unusual alliances were unlikely to win too much attention from those not naturally drawn to politics.

So what went so wrong that ‘blame’ had to be apportioned, and when David Cameron (hawk, spit, make the sign of the Evil Eye) had no qualms about opposing AV.

All this was played out against a backdrop of huge news stories such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the death of Osama bin Laden and the royal wedding.

Why, Doris, I’m just too busy worrying about Princess Beatrice’s egregious hat, rising radiation rates in Tokyo, and wondering exactly where that military helicopter pilot the Duke of Cambridge spent that particular Bank Holiday Monday to concern myself with hi-fallutin changes to the constitution that they might ask my opinion about any time soon.

Despite all this, millions of people voted and even in areas where no other elections were taking place, like London, the turnout was comparable to that seen at local elections.

Those who favoured the Yes campaign will argue they were defeated by the prime minister's campaigning power, (who’s obviously at the all-time pinnacle of his personal popularity what with the ‘cuts’ and all – say what happened to the Thatcher-style hatred the British people are supposed to have for him then?)  a largely hostile press (but where was our national broadcaster in the debate? – Silly me – impartial to the core!) and a tough opposing campaign.

They will also wonder whether people who voted against the Lib Dems in the elections might have been keen to oppose Nick Clegg's favoured electoral system at the referendum.

Nay, our Keith, I’d love to change our ancient first past the post system to something a little more representative, but I just can’t stand the thought of voting for the system proposed by the man who sides with the Evil Tory Cuts. Instead, I’m going to vote for the system preferred by ...the man who thought up the Evil Tory Cuts.

Those who backed a No vote will say they won the argument for the merits of the status quo, and persuaded people the alternative vote was complex and unnecessary.

Nah. Can’t be. But that’s just what They would say, innit?

The voters, of course, needed only to mark crosses on ballot papers. They did not have to explain their reasoning. So campaigners who devoted months of their lives to this argument will never know what difference, if any, they made to the result.

My point here is not that this is all about the left-wing bias and ‘progressive influence’ that the BBC hoses out as standard (that’s just one of those every-minute-of-every-single-day-coincidence things, and not germane here.)

I think what this piece of something shows the Political Class’s blindness to any notion that conservatism, in its core position of skepticism about change, can have any place in the hearts and minds of the people of this or any other country.

They can’t oppose AV just because it looks a bit dodgy and Political Class pipe –dream; they just can’t.

The People just aren’t like that.

They’re just like us, but dirtier and in need of our kindly guidance.

Say it first thing every morning and last thing at night.

I’m voting No, simply because all the other changes the progressives have pushed for have turned out for the worst, and I’m not betting on their luck changing anytime soon!

Sometimes, thank God, it seems that The People are their own Leviathan.

Gotcha

Now that the soul of Osama bin Laden has been despatched to his eternal day job in Odin’s pigsty where he will labour mightily until he goes on to work his night shift fellating Richard the Lionheart in return for cheap beers and bacon sandwiches, I wonder how long it will be before the BBC interviews someone of the opinion that assassinating an unconvicted and presumed innocent person violates not only his human rights but also international law?

Just wondering...

Atlas catches the bouquet

Gotta do this fast before Dumb Jon beats me to it and kicks a man when he’s down.

In fact, to use a fashionable phrase in the struggle for, well, actual freedom here on Earth 1.0, I’d better be fast as lightning…

Over at Orphans of Liberty: a new collegiate, freedom-loving blog which I recommend you to read for all kinds of reasons, Julia has expressed the opinion that perhaps it’s not the Beginning Of The End for Britain if anti-royal wedding, Islamist ‘protesters’ were prevented from getting into central London to disrupt ( read ’righteously protest against’) the Royal Wedding.

Here’s my reply to what?’s egregious comment.

"Your attitude to protesters being rounded up and censored for the crime of thinking about spoiling your solipsist fun has no place in a libertarian society."

“Well, what?, I'm glad to see that, (just like round about everyone else in politics), at least some of the libertarians are happy to draw the line beyond which free thought must not go and which attitudes in particular will have no place when The Glorious Day comes.

Phew! For a minute there, I was afraid that there were going to be no limits to what an individual person might think or what values she might pursue in a libertarian society.”

Actually, I’m sure that he/she only meant that Julia probably wouldn’t fit into the pure, golden age of self-sufficient sovereign individuals; protected solely by the non-aggression rule, (and also possibly by personal weapons) and by strictly-enforced property rights; and needing the approval of no-one to pursue the shining goal of complete personal choice and self-determination unconstrained by any sort of moralising, sense of tradition or wishy-washy give-and-take.

Absolutism is all.  

I particularly look forward to the happy days when, unconstrained by the slightest considerations for the feelings of others, every mixed-sex wedding in the land is disrupted by gay supremacists and by the purely educational and electronically-amplified anti-monogamy chanting of polymorous evangelists; bathed in the sure and certain knowledge that, provided they don’t initiate aggression or fraud or otherwise directly violate equally sacrosanct property rights, there are no limits at all to the places and occasions when and where honestly-held opinions should be expressed provided that Individual Liberty is not trampled even in the teeny-weeniest degree.

It’ll surely be an earthly paradise (or at least a much nicer country to live in that this present statist, tax-funded one) when christenings are regularly disrupted by the righteous protest songs of atheists and the birthday parties of children of the rich are enjoyed to the boom-box and didgeridoo beat of socialists protesting against economic inequality.

I’m assuming that there will be both economic inequality and socialists in a libertarian society…

But anyway, nothing says sacrosanct moral sovereignty quite like promising a world where children’s birthday parties can be legitimately ruined in the name of freedom.

Surely, therefore, no reasonable-minded purist libertarian can imagine any occasion in which the mere enjoyment of Freedom #A can fail to be trumped by the obviously superior Freedom to Protest/express/think/speak # B. 

As bnzss goes on: “No, sorry, but I can’t go along with this. The state has no business interfering in freedom of thought, speech and association, *no matter what bloody day it is*. As soon as you start adding exceptions, you’re on a slippery slope.”

If you assume that you could draw bnzss into a polite argument about specifics, he/she might probably qualify his abolutism that – well -, the exceptions which don’t exist and should never exist to freedom of thought, speech and association might include the free enjoyment of private events such as weddings to be attended only by willing participants and to exclude outsiders who might spoil events paid for privately and by legitimately raised funds, on land and perhaps streets whose exclusive and undisrupted use were rented or purchased according to property rights, the laws of contract, etc.

(Obviously, tax-supported streets and state-subsidized public transport were involved in the passage of the royal couple and denied in the prevention of those lovely Islamists from getting to Westminster Abbey, so as we’re not in the Libertarian Paradise yet and since we’re all taxpayers, it’s no problem to sod up someone’s wedding day and national and international enjoyment thereof. Liberty is everything).

Back to bnzss and others’ absolutist arguments.

The point is, which most purist, absolutist libertarians rarely answer is that everyone - and I do mean everyone – draws lines beyond which freedom should not go.

There are even some things that no libertarian I’ve ever heard of will contemplate doing themselves – often involving children or the mentally ill. And if libertarians themselves wouldn’t do them then why should we automatically assume that it’s okay for anyone else to do them? 
If a moral is good enough for a libertarian to follow it, why isn’t it good enough to enforce on the malign and the dangerously insane? I mean, paranoid schizophrenics will be allowed right up to the point their breadknife touches a bystander’s throat, right? or presses the button on hisd belt? No pre-emption allowed because that would be Precrime, yeah? Or do the libertarian police wrestle a raving madman to the ground? Issue him with a warning? Invite him to therapy? Ask his blood group in case he follows his freely expressed sovereign threats through?

I am actually getting a headache here…

It’s not “a slippery slope” to tyranny when someone limits certain freedoms. 
It’s a series of steps, and you don’t have to take them all the way to the basement.

Everyone draws lines around freedom.

Either that or they have to accept that what might possibly happen is an impeccably libertarianly-assured war of all again all via protesting and freedom of expression or, more likely, by extremists’ war of freedom of expression of some sort : first against weak and unpopular targets, and then, once those targets are suitably intimidated, the next weakest target (are we avoiding visiting corner shops whose proprietors once tried to publish certain cartoons of The Prophet in the newsstands but whose customers once faced a barrage of non-violent abuse when popping by for a bottle of milk and at tin of cat food yet?), and who then move on to expressing in a free and unconstrained fashion their opinions of the whores who wear makeup on their naked faces and also miniskirts which just proves how whorish they are…

Absolute freedom of thought, speech and association don’t look so good in a future Britain when imagined that way. But why let the way things actually are and the things that some people actually believe spoil a beautiful theory of abstract freedom?

My Big Finish point is that every noninsane person draws lines and sets limits to liberty. The only real argument is where to draw the lines.

I think the chief difference between absolutist libertarians and merely freedom-loving conservatives such as me is that conservatives like to stand on the opposite side of the line labelled Here Be Lunatics.

We have absolutely everything we need

…apart from an oxygen supply.

In the English language there are certain phrases and sentences which begin impressively enough but at the end of which their whole initial impact meaning and intent are utterly negated.

Examples include:

Cyberdyne Systems for Windows:

The Glory That Was Belgium;

Buy one, get one free vasectomy.

Here, however, is this week’s winner:

Tories welcome Cameron's tough talk on immigration

Tory MPs and activists were delighted today after David Cameron hardened his image with calls for curbs on immigration and "tough punishment" for criminals.

Wow! Really? I mean, really?

You have to wonder what it’s like, psychologically, to be a Tory ‘right-winger’ just now.

Is it easy for them to forget iDave’s sacking of a Shadow spokesman who merely mentioned the idea that coloured Army recruits might play the race card to get softer treatment from instructors during basic training?

When The Greatest Tory Leader Of All Time is bruited about as actually addressing the appalling issues of multiculturalism and the failure of some immigrants to integrate and then he says stuff like: "I do think that people have a very real concern about levels of immigration and not because of different cultures or the colour of their skin," he said. "Concern is about services. It's the pressure on schools, pressure on hospitals, pressure on housing. It's important to understand that if your child is going into a reception class and suddenly 20 new kids turn up because lots more families have arrived, then that is a big pressure." then Right-wing Tories have got to realize, surely, that we’re at another of those Camerooniac Once Upon A Time In The Wirral moments.

See? It’s all about numbers and accounting and just plain old-fashioned money which all good Right-wing Tories believe in their heart of heart the Conservatives still do so well, just as Britain still does pomp and circumstance and royal weddings with the streets lined with an honour guard consisting of the entire Platoon of Guards, and for example see how brilliantly they’re balancing cutting public expenditure on British subjects whilst spending the ‘savings’ and more on our beloved European neighbours’ bankers.

“Shut up, Eric, it’s just four umbrella stands and a rather attractive set of piano keys all gathered together in the corner of the room and nothing more.”

Curiously, certain sections of the diverse Left think it’s about economics, too.

At Salam immigration solicitors on Chorlton Road, Sheikh Asif Salam accuses Cameron of "stirring things up".

"What about the people from Poland and the Czechs from the EU? They don't speak English and there are no issues with them. Why are there issues with people from outside Europe? It is not in the interests of the nation, it is just political … The UK is an international hub but you can't survive on your own. If you don't let people in, then don't let people out. It will become so difficult that people won't want to invest in the UK. If tourists are told we are not friendly they will stop coming."

He adds: "If we stop the migrants coming in to the NHS then this leads to problems with a lack of doctors and nurses. It gives rise to hatred; it is all a political stand."

Now, that’s from the Guardian and of course no-one over there is ever going to point out that nobody at all (with the possible exception of one Right-wing nano-blogger they’ve never even heard of) that nobody has ever had much to fear about Poles getting onto underground trains with accordions on their backs or Czechs driving into Glasgow Airport in a car full of Budweiser bottles.

It’s in cases like this that it all comes together.

The culture wars are, to the Spongebob Blues, actually quite impressive and important and something you could mention but you shouldn’t do so in polite company - like Great Aunt Vera's hairy facial mole or statistics about male elephants.

When the clever-clogs of the Tory invertebrate establishment assure their actual really real truly conservative colleagues that: it’s all about money; it’s not about culture; the EU is a helpful alliance; defence funding can be dealt with separately and safely cut; the welfare state safety net just needs pruning; debt can be lived with as it’s just like a Christmas club where we invest in our future; we must avoid anything smacking of racism because it impacts on the children; and most immigrants are assimilating, then they’ve got us out her in the world plus our beloved Tory Right-wingers divided and ruled and the citizenry suffering violence locally and internationally, paying for a variety of harms against themselves and forbidden to speak their minds.

You can’t have mere fiscal conservatism when British money is exported to help the foreign banks and while the bloated, immigrant-enriched National Health Service is cut (a bit, maybe) to pay British layabouts to spawn a series of illegitimate children headed for a childhood of disrupting everyone else’s educations and the violence-preaching anti-assimilators of Islam intimidating anyone who discusses the subject and our shrinking forces are fighting the wrong Muslim lunatics, because it’s about services. It's the pressure on schools, pressure on hospitals, pressure on housing.

We have to have it all; culture warriors upholding our culture; actual wars, if any, against our true, violent enemies, freedom of expression for the natives of our country; actual spending cuts to pay for actual law and order and real education and defence that works; national independence; an economy based on producing value for sale and laws built on values you never even try to sell; enforcement of British-made laws that reflect the morality of the British people; education that does not denigrate our country’s good achievements so children might just grow into adults who can cherish our country and actually thrive in it as free and safe citizens.

Cutting conservatism, like our United Kingdom, into optional dishes you can pick or choose amongst from some kind of policy buffet table is negating any chance of what conservatives hold to be good happening at all.

So I hope the Tory Right would stop allowing the divide and conquer of the anti-conservative Tories.

Make that ‘wish’, rather than hope.

I don’t see much sign of them realizing that, like the red white and blue bunting they and their beliefs are being taken out by the leadership and displayed on special occasions such as the royal wedding…only to be put away once the local elections are finished.

As far as I can see, Cameron’s speech is another example of Tory Party let-down. Here we go for the one.

What’s next: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Irwell?


Picture from here

No, your other left, Max Payne

Dumb Jon’s crosshairs intersect on a ‘police officer’ acting like a cross between a vigilante and an old maid, tut-tutting the yoof of today.  

Back in the day, before political correctness stole the cultural treasure we had invested the Establishment Bank instead of trying to look after it ourselves, I remember the teenage me as a policeman-wannabe: imagining what I’d have done, or would like to have done, in a copper’s place…when facing the likes of bank robbers or hostage takers: hunting down the abductor of Lesley Whittle perhaps. Later when I was an undergraduate I imagined arresting the Yorkshire Ripper to the gratitude of an admiring world.

In the Boy’s Own fantasy world of daydreaming, a chap might see himself standing alone against an angry mob or spending his waking hours and considerable detective skills to protect the weak and helpless against the evil stalking the land.

Quite what it says about an actual policeman when he fantasizes publicly about what he’d have done if he’d faced the fully-loaded foul mouth of a short, bald Shrek lookalike and world-leading bonobo pinup swearing in person, I don’t know.

Perhaps Jon’s commenter Rob nails him with this:

I'd hazard a wee bet that if his force's performance was analysed a little more closely it would show that instead of them nicking people for cussing, they are smiling and laughing with pissed yobs instead, just for an easy life.

Adolescence and the beta male imagination often enough dream of courage, glory, and the admiring stares of  the female of the species, but quite how Superintendent Payne’s behaviour fits in with well-policed streets lined with never-burgled shops and safe homes whose occupants are never threatened by the rowdiness of drunken brawlers or one-punch manslaughter, I don’t know. It’s not as if today’s up-to-date, state of the art police service can’t integrate a little actual illegal violence into their daily routine and cutting-edge online presence (or at least refer to it really graphically). This is the way it’s done, Superintendent.

Well.

Perhaps it’s a cry for help?

You know: not the old fashioned kind of cry for help as in ‘He’s breaking in through the back door right now officer, please send someone quickly. I have children in here with me…. No please don’t put me on hold again,’ but a big, old heartfelt Nu British ‘Another fifteen years of hard, honest public service like this and I’m really going to need that OBE.’

But what do Sir Alex’s comments say about the broader world of the amazing new post-democratic way we are ruled by moral giants such as Superintendent Payne?

'Everyone has an opinion today,' said the Manchester United manager.

'There is an issue in the modern world of a need to be noticed.

'There is a wee guy, sitting down there in the Midlands, probably never been recognised in his life, managed to elevate himself to whatever it is in the police force.

'Have you ever seen Wolverhampton on a Saturday night? Do police ever arrest anyone for swearing on a Saturday night? Dearie me. That is a good one.'

'Everyone has an opinion today,'

Footballers and their bosses aren’t really a part of the ruling class and its horde of ideological enforcers.

Apart from the obligatory anti-racism campaigns against the Banana Terror, (and let’s face it, football crowd members insulting players for their race is quite a nasty thing and the terraces are one of the few places outside of Liberal Wonderland where you will find actual, vocal, white-against-black racial abuse these days), football is actually a pretty much PC-free zone.

That’s probably because football is real. Kind of.

Now there are two sets of opinions about Sir Alex and Manchester United: either that he and they have stolen, cheated, robbed and bribed their ways to undeserved tournament glory and world fame and have done so for decades and therefore you can ignore such dubious evidence for their success such as the goals scored versus goal conceded statistics which are frankly anecdotal and say nothing about which Bolgia Sir Alex and his villainous thugs will someday inhabit… or that Sir Alec is just a big, fluffy old teddy-bear who’s led his team of charming,  mop-topped ragamuffins to glory in England and around the world and the only way he walked away unconvicted for a traffic offence instead of losing his driving licence was because he’s rich and powerful.

Rich, yes; able to afford top lawyers, yes. But powerful? Not really.

Because football is real. Kind of.

Football is part of the real world of hard work and achievement and facing up to failure and which shows visible results and follows obvious rules of what constitutes the right thing to do and the wrong thing, and where hard work and applied alone talent can bring riches and success.

Football is the kind of place where wealth is actually created.

I know, I know – there are and long have been crooked and unsporting behaviour amongst managers and players like, including Sir Alex and the Red Devils themselves quite recently, and there are enough bribery stories in football to fill a book, let alone the, ahem, oily nature of some of the Premiership’s investors, but still and all professional football represents freedom and wealth creation and excellence and much that our rulers have spent their lifetimes trying to destroy.

Social mobility. A career open to one’s talents. Rules which may be broken but whose violation can not always be justified and is often broadcast and rebroadcast in the full view of the public.

How unlike our state schools, our state-controlled broadcaster and our members of Parliament.

Most of football’s revenue consists of people voluntarily spending their own money attending or viewing games and on merchandising - which they can take or leave alone. Even on the big corporate side, it’s the advertisers and venture capitalists that put their own money up to buy and sell teams and players.

Football magnates rarely came knocking on your bank account asking you to finance London’s bid to emulate ancient Greece…by acting like modern day Greece.

And so, okay, Sire Alex is a Labour supporter. There’s a lot of it about amongst the rich and powerful, so some of the mess we’re in is down to him spending his own personal money to fund the Blair and Brown dog and pony show. He got the money from ticket sales and advertising revenues and television rights. No prison sentences involved for those who didn’t want to enrich the man.

Whatever: that’s democracy for you.

But here, by and large, is where football isn’t part of the true elite who own us, or think that they should. It’s what he doesn’t do next that tells us he and professional footballers aren’t political-class insiders. He doesn’t become a celebrity fascist by going after our cash against our wills and being determined on running our lives.

He didn’t go on to suggest that playing football or walking in the countryside should be made compulsory, or tell us what we should or should not eat at a cost to us mere taxpayers of £372,000,000 that might otherwise be squandered on dreary old thief-taking or left up to parents to decide how to fed their own families, or to driving the sale of tobacco underground into the back streets.

No, he surely wants to get to our money the old-fashioned way, and his players and his Board work hard to earn it the old-fashioned way, as do the rest of them most of the time.

But Six Alex and his grubby ilk in The Beautiful Game don’t seem to want to own our bodies and souls rather than earning our admiration.

Unlike the politicians and their bagmen, football money is freely given. The disconnect between the greedy, sometimes corrupt leaders of private enterprise and our clueless, worthless masters is the practice of voluntarism. Compare how football tries to entice money and our Saturday afternoons from us with the offer of fun and service and sporting glory with the way many of those who extort it through the tax man behave when the rest of the nation discovers they can’t afford the gold-plated pensions and untouchable job security of the public sector.

Football’s customer base don’t tend to have gold-plated pensions and their hands deep in taxpayers’ pockets and are, amongst others, from trades and professions based upon voluntary payments and who are non-monopoly providers.

It took me ten minutes’ worth of thought to think of and list the following:

Farmers, farm labourers, builders, building labourers, hairdressers, osteopaths, retail chemists, research chemists (private sector ones anyway), shopkeepers, shop assistants, trawler men, trawler owners, tailors, weavers, foresters, car makers, car salesmen, taxi drivers, lorry drivers, fork-lift drivers, non-conformist ministers, rabbis, market gardeners, architects (again, the private sector ones), glaziers, carpet fitters, carpet makers, window cleaners, publicans, bar cellar men, bar men and barmaids, photographers, wedding planners, plant hire employees, graphic designers, investment brokers and financial advisers, veterinary surgeons, novelists (unless insisting on their books being given away ‘free’ at the public expense,)  Roman Catholic clerics, haberdashers, shoe menders and key cutters, tobacconists, brewers and distillers and their employees, newspaper proprietors and their print and journalism workers (except those heavily subsidized by state job advertising), private broadcasters, everyone in the unsubsidized film industry making films people want to watch in numbers, computer coders, systems administrators and allied weird trades, makers of cash registers, medical equipment, surgical supplies, petrol station attendants, car mechanics and body workers, carpenters, builders, plumbers, electricians, tarmac-layers and motorway sign manufacturers, hoteliers and hotel staff, service station staff and their suppliers, roofers, dry stone wall builders and non-BBC disc-jockeys.

Don’t tell me you don’t need some of those services as much as you need Police and Community Support Officers and secondary school HR managers?

Who knows what another ten minutes or ten thousand minutes of thought might add to the list of people whose taxes pay those happy, self-indulgent rioters and the political class and the State’s direct employees (including me) and who keep them relatively cosy and well off via taxation and the growth of the state?  

All of which shows that the post-modern rebranding of idiocy thus:

In an interview with the Socialist mouthpiece El País, for example, Zapatero famously asserted that the idea that Spain was actually in trouble was “opinionable” and said that “it all depends upon what we mean by crisis.” He said that those warning about an impending economic crisis were being “unpatriotic” and that such talk was a “fallacy, pure catastrophism.” Zapatero also warned: “Let’s not turn economic forecasting into a fetish.” Think positive, he said: “To be optimistic is something more than a rational act. It is a moral requirement, an act of decency and, if I may say so, elegance.”

…and something-and-nothing gimmicks such as The Big Society, come down in the end to the political goons who fouled up the planetary economy in the first place having no idea what’s wrong or understanding how markets, wealth-creation, voluntarism and freedom work and who just won’t ever do anything to fix it because they just don’t want to.

To finish with Mark Steyn’s best for a long while:

America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.

So what? Your fault. Should have gone to Columbia and Harvard and become a community organizer.

Still, if Superintendent Payne gets his way, we’ll be able to watch the Beautiful Game free of foul language.

If power cuts or home invasions don’t end the flipping transmission.

One small step...

Via Julia a link to Anna Raccoon, the top-secret, kill-all-UK-subjects-before-reading, report of right honourable Members of Parliament actually doing their job, and doing it well, of trying to bring the Cultural Marxist state's corrupt and tyrannical power to account.

As Julia said, if you only read 2 blog posts today, make Anna's the second and make this the link you send to all your friends and comrades.

Our ancient constitution, fighting back for once, and on our side.

Wish I’d had these MPs looking after when someone dear to me was being hurt by official incompetence and judicial secrecy.

God Save the Queen.

Watch the Skies

SHADO 2011-stlye: from an Ed Straker for the Third Millennium

Via the estimable Albion Alliance and first noticed at Julia's place, we can now see how we are kept safe from the nameless but deadly extraterrestrial menace that is attacking our planet, stealing our women and despoiling our crops.

Your tax pounds at work: fearlessly naming names and protecting the Earth from the Alien Menace.
 

Picture from here.