Coeliac disease is a recognised medical condition that requires treatment in the form of gluten free food. So how dare they?
Unacceptable, simply: Academic boycott of Israelis
I’ve been getting off track lately. I worry that I am talking so much ideology that I am losing, not only my ability to communicate what I believe, but also to connect with people. I would, therefore, like to make a brief post about my core beliefs and avoid getting ideological about them:
- I believe in an English Parliament. The UK is currently made up of four countries, three of whom have devolution. This means that MPs elected by Scottish or Welsh constituents are in positions of power in areas that affect England only and it also means that Scottish MPs can vote on matters that affect England only. English Votes on English Matters, the Conservative Party policy, just won’t work and there’ll shortly be a Critique available to buy from the CEP’s website explaining in great detail, why.
- I believe in privatisation. Competition means lower prices for customers and more efficient operation of the services they provide.
- I believe that immigration has eroded the cultural uniformity of the UK — this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, this is just an observation. I believe that a moratorium on immigration for a short period to allow the immigration that has been recently to “bed-in”. I know just one conscientious, hard-working patriot who wishes to remain in this country — most of us can see that a better life can be had in Japan, the US, Canada, Australia or Jamaica. Allowing emmigration in reasonably large numbers is reducing the quality of Britain’s brain-pool and is, sadly, the ultimate expression of democratic failure.
- Following on from the last point, the cost of living in England is too high. I believe this can be resolved with some radical amendments to the provision of public services. Council houses, for example, should be there, not to provide cheap rent to those who are underpaid by their private-sector employers — they should be there as a safety net for those who, through no fault of their own, lose their homes. Why, for example, are asylum seekers and those who get themselves pregnant (when unable to support a family) given a home while those who lose their home to a fire are made to live in a dirty, noisy Bed and Breakfast? Some friends of friends of mine have recently had to start bringing up a child in a B&B following a house fire — where’s the sense in that? The market in private rentals is currently skewed by the cheap (read: taxpayer subsidised) rentals paid for by Council Tax payers.
- Following on from the last point, the cost of food is too high due to the Common Agricultural Policy. We live next to a region of Earth capable of feeding us with ease. The US creates more than its fair share of food prduce, but aside from them, we should be at the fore-front. New Zealand has shown us how it should be done.
- I believe that there is such a thing as global warming, but I don’t believe that humans are as much to blame as state-control socialists would like us to believe. Tell a lie often enough and it is likely to stick. At the risk of sounding like an ‘Intelligent Design’ advocate in a different argument, there is too little understood about the planet’s climate to extrapolate meaningful information from the heating of the climate. The reason, for example, for ice ages is poorly understood. That we are currently in an uncharacterically cool period in Earth’s history and that we are due for a radical heating should make us pause to think.
- Further, on the environment, there are some really important things we should be worrying about more. Recycling of metal and plastic should be our number one concern — there’s only so much of either and if we start to run out, particularly of oil, we’re in for some major upheaval. Global warming is, if avoidable, very expensive to avoid — surely we’re better off trying to provide sanitation, security and food and water to the Third World than trying to ensure that a desert doesn’t expand a few hundred miles? If the cost of keeping the desert small is so exceedingly high that we could have fed the Third World, is it irresponsible to waste the money?
- Among us pramatists, the future of the UK is one of an Islamic country (ONS). If we had a constitution, the country may still be unrecognisable within a short period. If the constituents of George Galloway re-elect him at the next election, we must question (a) their wisdom and, (b) their belief in the rule of law. I am strongly in favour of free speech but that relies on the majority of people sharing my belief in freedom. If the comments Galloway made about murdering Tony Blair go electorally unpunished, what hope of that? The solution is a limit on further immigration until the local populace has managed to distance itself from the actions of those Islamists in the Middle East and east to Pakistan who believe that a woman is there to make more men (hat-tip to CJ Cregg) and any attempts to rise above their station should result in a beating.
- I believe in the right to free protest and freedom from protestor harrasment. The animal rights protestors have a valid point, but their methods are ruining people’s lives and livelihoods. We must protect people from violent protest…
- At the same time, peaceful protest must be allowed. Walter Wolfgang, Brian Haw and Charlotte Denis are the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge.
- I can see the benefits of a database that lists all the country’s people, but that should not be a new database, it should be a concatenating checking mechanism attached to the government’s existing databases. The government, currently, has no meaningful way of linking that chap who paid for road tax, with the same man who is claiming he cannot provide CSA payments to his ex-wife and children; the government is incapable, currently, of linking that person who requested a disabled parking permit with that person who should be receiving disability-related tax-relief but who isn’t currently claiming it. Yes, there is a need. But an ID card database is not the answer — this is a further expression of a government who, through their own incompetence, shifts the burden of effort away from the state and toward the individual in an ironic and exact mirror of its simultaneous power-grab as it takes more and more free choices away from people (pension compulsion as a key example).
- I believe that the NHS has a place to play in a humane country — nobody should be made to pay for a bandage if they honestly cannot afford it. This, of course, should be provided by charity, but in the 1950s the whole mechanism for providing this was dismantled. Now that we have the NHS we must work to improve it. A key to this is to encourage people to invest in private health provision. There needs to some sort of incentive to going private.
- Anyone who declines a job they are physically capable of performing while claiming unemployment benefit should not lose a proportion, as is currently the case, they should, after a reasonable time, lose all their benefits. Unemployment benefit should be there to provide for those who cannot find a job, not as an alternative lifestyle choice. Some people, I have spoken to, say “I’ve paid tax for XX years, they owe me some time off.” I do not owe you that.
- Children born outside of a permanent relationship (one where both parents are living together at the time of conception) should be supported by the payment of vouchers — having a child must not be an alternative way of getting independence from your parents.
- Tax should be cut. And cut hard. Paying, as we do currently, approximately 50% of our wages in tax is not the way to make a successful country.
- Infrastructure must be expanded urgently. If I were a US business looking to start a European branch, I would seriously consider locating in Germany or the Netherlands just because the infrastructure there is up to scrutiny. If you want to have a meeting with people around the country, you don’t want to have to budget for excruciating fuel costs (which are, sadly, in place across the EU), as well as congestion, Congestion charging, water restrictions and crowded trains. A business that wishes to start in Brighton (as I live nearby) has to contend with a crowded A23 (road) to London, a railway network which is unable to provide seats to even two stations-worth of passengers and which costs a small fortune; it has to contend with sky-high land and property costs, sky-high costs, basically. It also has to contend with an increasingly uneducated populace…
- Education is not being provided to our young people. Universities, apparently, are now so expensive that graduates must pay for them all the while Chemistry, Engineering and Physics departments close and tax does not reduce. Children are being stabbed in schools. There are very few cases, so far, but that ubiquity of knives is bizarre and must be stopped. Educate children.
- Finally, for now, state-funding of political parties must never be allowed. What is wrong, for example, with saying to the parties that there is an absolute maximum that any single person/organisation can donate to a party — a level playing field without my taxes going to fund the SNP and Labour Party (let alone Respect and BNP, which are in their own class of vile)?
If Daniel Hannan is ever wrong in one of these briefings, I’ll stop posting them.
An occasional euro-briefing from Daniel Hannan MEP
I have always had a sneaking regard for the new Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi — a feeling which, as far as I can tell, is wholly unreciprocated. Shortly after he was appointed President of the European Commission in 1999, I conducted an interview with him, during which I asked about the curious episode of Aldo Moro. Aldo Moro, you may recall, was the former Italian Prime Minister who, in 1978, was kidnapped and later murdered by the Red Brigades. While he was being held, Prodi, then an academic, went to the police and told them (correctly) that Aldo Moro could be found at a place called Gradoli. Asked how he knew, he replied that he had been playing with a Ouija board when the spirits of dead Christian Democrats had moved the glass to spell out G-R-A-D-O-L-I.
Prodi became more than a little testy when I raised the subject. Later, when the interview was published, his press officer falsely claimed that he thought he had been speaking off the record. But the episode did nothing to diminish my admiration for the old boy. Don’t be fooled by the grey bureaucrat act. Prodi is a man who speaks his mind with admirable clarity. When other Commissioners were denying that EU armed forces were under construction, he cheerfully told a British newspaper: “If you don’t want to call it a European army, fine — you can call it Margaret, you can call it Mary-Ann”.
Now, evidently still under the influence of those dead Christian Democrats, he says he wants an advance guard of EU states to push ahead with much deeper integration, leaving the sceptics to stew in their indecision. To which I say: bravo! Most of the acrimony among EU members these past 30 years has been caused by differences over political union. Whatever compromise is reached, it is always a step too far for the British, but never enough for the founding, federalist states. The result is that no one is happy. The British — and, to a lesser extent, the Swedes and Danes — feel they are being dragged à contre coeur into a union that they do not want, while the Belgians and Germans and Italians feel that they are being impeded by constant British whingeing and vetoing. In consequence, a project that was meant to be all about friendship among Europe’s nations ends up causing friction.
If the core, Carolingian countries want to merge themselves into a single polity, if they want an EU army, a European police force, a President of Europe, a Continent-wide tax system, good luck to them. Britain should look on as a friend and sponsor, an external flying buttress. It is no part of our business to tell other sovereign countries how to relate one to another — even if they want to abolish their separate sovereignties.
By the same token, though, Britain should be allowed to opt out of a number of policies currently under EU jurisdiction. Although it is reasonable to accept a degree of harmonisation of cross-border questions, Brussels is currently administering a number of policy areas of essentially domestic concern: farming, fishing, employment law, industrial relations, the status of local government, the interpretation of human rights, transport policy, immigration, defence, energy policy. In return for allowing the Euro-enthusiast states to use the EU’s mechanisms and procedures to forge ahead on their own, Britain should seek to recuperate its autonomy in these areas — and to allow other states to do the same.
I suspect, although I have no way of knowing, that if Britain were to set the precedent in this way, others among the EU’s more free-trading, maritime members would seek a similar status. They may even team up with the EFTA states, so that Europe would divide into two amicable associations: an inner core, with most of the attributes and trappings of a federal state, and a peripheral aureole of free trading nations, looking as much to the open main as to their Continental neighbours. These two blocs would be bound together through the constant nexus of a free market, and also by frequent collaboration on other matters. They would support each other diplomatically, commercially and, in extremis, militarily. Indeed, they ought to get on far better than they do now, when every budget negotiation and every EU summit ends up pitting them against each other.
So go for it, Prodi. We’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines. After all, Churchill always envisaged a European federation with Britain outside it — a compromise that, had it been adopted at the time, would have spared us all a great deal of anguish. You’ll be better off without us and, in your heart, you know it. You’ll lose a bad tenant, but you’ll gain a good neighbour.
He’s as right as you like. We should allow ever closer union among those who want it so that there is less acrimony. This is, again, in the spirit of the Union and something that europhiles and eurosceptics alike should applaud.
I’ve been playing with Office 2007 (free download until February 2007) and it’s really good. The new ribbons make things more intuitive… It’s just a shame that the new design is only present in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access and the e-mail window of Outlook.
The ribbon and live preview works so much more effectively than the standard File, Edit etc. menus that it feels awkward returning to the old design in Publisher, Visio, SharePoint Designer (previously FrontPage) and Outlook.
Give it a go, it’s interesting to see how user-interfaces will improve in the future and it works on my PC on which I still have Office 2003
Now I’m off to install Office OneNote 2007 to see what that’s like and whether I should add it to my Samsung Q1 when it arrives next week.
According to Iain Dale:
“…there are more DEFRA civil servants… than there are farms in the country.”
This is the sort of statistic we should be shouting from the rooftops.
John Prescott is the most apalling man. I just cannot get my head around how obscenely stupid he is. Do we really want our money spent for us?
So, you may ask, what specifically has brought on this expression of the obvious truth? The answer is this Posted In: Political, Blog, News and Politics, Socialist, Labour, Environment
In response to my What is Right post, John King made this comment.
I don’t agree entirely with John, as you can imagine!
No-one in this country has no money and many people are being taxed while they live below the poverty line. Each year £6,623 is spent by the government per person in England (more in Scotland and Wales and £8,898 in Northern Ireland). Imagine what you could do with that money — there is absolutely no doubt that a proportion of that could be returned to people (or not taken in the first place ideally) and no-one would be worse off because of it either financially or because of missing services.
Labour’s record on job creation is misleading. They’ve failed to break things as seriously as previous Labour administrations, I’ll grant you, but the whole world’s been experiencing an unprecedented boom and they were lucky that their illogical policies didn’t break the UK in that period. See Mark Adams’ and Dave’s excellent deconstruction of the arguments for a minimum wage.
It should be noted that during Thatcher and Major’s tenure, the number of people in poverty reduced. Also, during that time, the gap between rich and poor reduced. And since 1997 both those things have increased.
It’s also vehemently not a smoke screen — lower taxes are proven to create more and better-paid jobs. It’s not an ‘opinion’ I hold, it’s an internationally accepted fact outside of the confines of Europe.
On Council Tax, it is, in my humble opinion, a tax on those conscientious enough to save for a larger home. If you save to afford a larger home, you are taxed more as a punishment. There has to be a better solution, but I don’t have the answer, I must say.
One final point on “assuming that everybody has money in the first place”, no-one is required to be poor. Until Labour introduced tuition fees, there was no economic barrier to improving your lot and doing better than your parents. The wealth of each individual is, cruel as it may seem, a combination of merit, luck and determination. Saying to people that if they’re poor they should expect the same quality of life is actually a poke in the eye for all those people who work twelve hour days or two jobs to make ends meet.
This is a contributor to another problem that I was discussing with Miss Anon this evening: Quality of life in England is poor. If you work for an average wage you cannot afford to buy a small one-bedroom flat, you cannot run a car and you cannot afford to take international holidays (or certainly not all three of these). If you were on the average wage in many other parts of the world outside of Africa and the Middle East, you would find yourself living in relative luxury.
Now the question of why that is, is something that people can debate forever. I would suggest, though, that we in the UK assume that our healthcare provision should be as good as private healthcare provision in Greece or Mauritius — it’s not comparing like-with-like. The Government is singularly incapable of spending our taxes on healthcare in a way that provides value for money. Blair’s half-hearted attempts at introducing private providers to the health care provision available in the UK are a step in the right direction but there should be a more concerted effort.
The privatisation of dentistry which was done by sleight of hand, was not managed and so has resulted in a two-tier dentistry provision. If you have a reasonable wage your teeth will be acceptable and, if you’re on a below-average wage, your teeth will likely rot. This could have been avoided if all dentistry was privatised so that there was an incentive to make provision for the less well-off. If there was no NHS to fall back on, people would pay some of the money they are no longer paying into taxes, into an insurance scheme and have more left to save for retirement or spend — who can argue with that?
Some of you will have already seen Sayeeda on Newsnight a while ago arguing with extremists over the cartoons. And many of you were impressed.
Last night she made a similarly impassioned, reasonable and strong case on Question Time.
The Conservative Party is, when represented by people like her, a much better organisation. It can be seen to be reasonable, inclusive and right. Cameron is not the cause of this, either, in fact the Conservative Party has been getting more reasonable and less “nasty” since some time during Howard’s leadership.
It’s sad, then, that there are still candidates and prominent party members who represent the old, biggoted, religious zealot stereotype. People who would deny evolution, people who would espouse the superiority of one race or caste and people who would equate homosexuality with paedophilia.
In the main, and particularly in Parliament, the Conservative Party does not suit this stereotype, but it is time anyone who does is purged. The party can, and likely will, win the next election and its front-line workers will contribute as much as Cameron’s team to any success we have. But the potential for damage done locally should not be underestimated.
Anyone reading this who has doubts about the niceness of the Conservative Party or the belief in individual freedom should rest assured, the party (overall) has reached that ideal destination. Those on the fringes who breach levels of acceptability should be voted out by the public and should not be reselected by the Party. Those people should not concern the lay voter — we’ll have our house in order!
About Sayeeda:
- Conservative Party Profile
- Wikipedia entry
I wrote the following in response to another of my posts about Google Calendar. I thought it was worth promoting to a post:
Wherever you record your information, in the modern world, corporations and governments have privacy-busting access to it.
Even if our government pretends to care modestly about human rights, they wouldn’t be averse to collecting information from you by using the CIA or China as an intermediary.
Ultimately if you use Outlook, Windows Calendar (in Vista), Google Calendar or Yahoo Mail’s built-in calendar then your information is accessible. My suggestion:
Use a filofax to plan that murder!
Aside from that rather flippant comment, though, there are serious privacy concerns. I use SearchHistory in Google so:
- They know what I search for and when
- They know where I travel when I use Google Maps to garner a route
- They know where I log on to the internet because wherever I log on, I use Google’s customised homepage and they can obtain my IP
- They know my politics (from this page and every other that their pages crawl and find information on me from)
- They know who I know from my contacts list in Google Mail (previously known as Gmail).
But, and this isn’t anything more than a pragmatic lament, there’s nothing that can be done about that in today’s world. I don’t have to use any of these Google tools — they’re just convenient. What I do have to do, though, is use the software that my employer provides for e-mail and calendar functions at work; I do have to have a bank account and no matter how I withdraw my money, corporations have to know where I am (CCTV in branches or location data from cash-machine withdrawals or cash-back collections).
Privacy is something that should be guaranteed by the state, but ultimately we’re all vulnerable to a less-than-scrupulous government.
Via MatGB (his post) I have found this Samizdata article on the Home Office and what should happen to it.
I agree, simply.
I just want to make a quick prediction before Evans Davies comes onto BBC Breakfast:
“Evan Davies will say that compulsion in pensions makes sense and that it is necessary.”
I will, therefore, take this opportunity to remind him that the state serves us and that individuals should have responsibility for their own actions. What the government should do is announce that there will be no state aid for today’s young people who fail to save. They won’t say that and all today’s young people will, instead, assume that the state will protect them from old-age-poverty.
A lot of people are confused about euroscepticism. They think, variously, that it is a dislike of foreigners, a belief that thatched cottages and the rag and bone man are things that should be reintroduced; they think it’s a dislike of the idea of Europe or a failure to face up to the problems that globalisation presents.
It is, in the main, none of these things. The notion of European nations working together to reduce costs by working to similar standards and with only one set of bureaucrats in specific areas of policy are laudable aims.
But sadly that’s not what today’s EU gives us. It gives us more bureaucrats; it gives us a less competitive edge against the Chinas, Indias and USAs of this world; and it just does not work.
A case in point is the location of the European Parliament. It is, according to the Amsterdam Treaty, to be based in Strasbourg. As one of the South East’s MEPs said recently, Strasbourg is not the ideal place for the Parliament and so, except for four days each month, the Parliament meets in Brussels. Everyone knows that Brussels is the home of the European apparatus.
So what about those four days I mentioned? Each month the whole shebang travels to Strasbourg including a whole fleet of lorries and chartered planes. This is a 240 mile trip to nowhere which, if it wasn’t so illogical, would still be awful for the environment. So why isn’t it changed?
Because one of the EU’s biggest problems is its structure. It has several parts to its government including the Parliament but the Parliament is very, very weak. Turnout for the EU Parliament elections is low, and people blame this on a lack of knowledge about the EU and its institutions, but if the institution’s relative weakness was known by all, I suspect turnouts would not increase!
The structure causes a very particular problem — The EU Parliament cannot make a decision about the monthly trip to Strasbourg because it is in the Amsterdam Treaty which must be amended by the European Council. The European Council (note: not the Council of Europe which is something else entirely and not even an EU institution) consists of the leaders of the nations of the EU. So all the leaders (Prime Ministers, Presidents etc) must agree to this change.
Apparently, and this surprises me as you can imagine, the French President is against this change!
So while the Parliament (which is the only directly democratic part of the EU) is powerless, so are we. But we can sign the petition here!
The Conservatives are gaining ground and are, indeed, leading Labour according to a recent Guardian poll, because of their excellent communication of key facts and tempering of the language used so that it doesn’t sound nasty but effectively conveys what is right about the Right.
So I am pleased to pass on this golden nugget of logic from Cameron’s leading team member:
We need to increase the supply of new housing – and that means increasing the supply of land available for development. Labour Ministers say the same thing.“But their approach is almost tailor-made to ensure that it does not happen, because it sets out to antagonize local communities instead of working with them.
“The whole process starts with huge regional housing targets announced by Ministers. These targets are then handed down to unelected, unaccountable and unwanted regional assemblies and regional housing boards to impose on local authorities.
“I propose a totally different approach. Instead of working against local communities, let us work with them. Instead of trying unsuccessfully to use sticks, let us use carrots.
“In urban areas we need to show how new housing does not just mean yuppie flats in the city centre, but can also provide the key to much needed regeneration to our neglected suburbs.
Of course.
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