They're all at it.

But of course they are! Anyone who fills in a tax return is at it. We all claim the maximum we can get away with under 'The Rules'. This wouldn't happen in the private sector... oh no? Any salesman will submit an expenses return, which will only be checked in detail if he's taking the piss, or his sales numbers aren't up to scratch, in which case, whatever reason he is actually given, he won't have been fired for petty fraudulent expenses, but for missing his target. That blind eye turned to a pack of fags on his petrol receipt, becomes a major issue when he's not making money for his company.

We don't hate politicians therefore because their snouts are in the trough, though they are, but because they are doing a bad job. They are selling our freedoms, strangling our business and profiting while they do so - and because of what they have done, we are not profiting. We hate them because of envy: our snouts are no longer in the trough of a booming economy, whilst theirs remain firmly in the swill.

The problem is not immoral, avaricious politicians, who are subject to incentives, just like us, but the rules which allow them to claim that their sister's spare room is a primary home, thereby claiming the second homes allowance for their first home. I would certainly make the same call, were I allowed to. And so would you. Yes. You would.

The problem with the rules is that they free politicians to say "I didn't break the rules" and thereby get away with what is essentially corruption. And the same is true of regulation of business. If banks can get immoral, borderline fraudulent off-balance sheet financing past the regulator, or stretch their finances to the max, and risk depositors' money in order to make empire-building acquisitions of more glamorous businesses, they will do so. Whereas such behaviour would have raised an eyebrow in the past, because it is within the rules, anything goes.

In this, New Labour's corruption of the body politic has the same underlying cause as the collapse in productivity in the public sector and the failure of the banking sector. Rules. Rules. Rules. Everywhere, with principles nowhere to be seen. New Labour's lasting contribution to British public life is the elevation of rules above principles. This is allied to the idea that central government targets are the route to improve service, and Gordon Brown's pathological believe that because he announces something, it magically happens.

So it is not the reform or strengthening of the rules which is needed, it is their removal. The system needs to be massively simplified, and many ideas are good ones - the central employment of researchers for example, and allowances based on the distance between London and the Constituency. Making expenses dependent on receipts will bring Politicians in line with the private sector. But don't imagine a big expenses claim is going to be fraudulent. Scottish MPs are going to rack up massive travel costs, because it costs to get up to civilisation London from Tartanistan. They should not be excoriated for this. John Thurso for example, whose constituency includes John O'Groats does deserve a London Pad. Were he to travel by public transport weekly from London to his constituency (and I do not think it excessive to allow first-class travel) he would easily rack up an annual £11,440 bill for rail travel alone. The journey takes 13 hours. Is it unreasonable therefore for him to fly this distance? Eric Pickles' 37 miles, on the other hand should not qualify him for a big allowance - enough for some of the cost of a small pied-a-terre in pimlico, as the journey is impossible by car during the day, and public transport cannot be relied upon late at night. The taxi fares alone between there and Westminster would start to look like John Thurso's rail fare. On this basis, a bit of mortgage interest is cheap by comparison.

Some idiots are calling for politicians to be housed in some luxury barracks in central London to prevent them profiting from a second home. This is exactly the same as the anti capitalists demanding banker's blood at the G20. There are calls for retrospective legislation for every fiddle and fudge to be paid back, just as the 'court of public opinion' is calling for the mythical bankers' bonuses to be retrospectively taxed. Neither is a good idea, and says more about the speaker's class envy than it sheds light on what we should do.

You may argue that many people commute into London. The crucial thing is choice. MPs need to divide their time between 2 locations whereas few other people do. Your commute is a choice between quality of life outside the smoke and time spent getting twixt the twain. MPs cannot make that choice and should be compensated for it.

The solution is politically unpalatable: Pay Politicians a bit more, to compensate the removal of some of the tax-payer funded perks of office: allow official transport, and (or some of, depending on distance) mortgage interest and that's it. These should be subject to maximums but should not be niggardly, as is the case in the private sector, where generous allowances for relocation or time away from home are the norm (yes they are - have any of you stayed in a hotel on business?)

Make politicians' affairs accountable to the 'market', rather than the 'court', of public opinion. They submit themselves to election every 5 years, and you will know whether they are taking the piss, if you take the trouble to think about it. Don't let them get away with fleecing us - vote them out and keep an eye their spending, but don't, for goodness sakes force them to cheesepair their travel, or the amount of the time they spend in their constituencies, or indeed the chamber, because of some mean-spirited penny-pinching. Do you think a 13 hour train ride, or crossing London in rush-hour or late at night is fun? You, as the electorate, are the arbiter of this principle. It worked in the past, and it can work again. We just need to get rid of 'The Rules' - because it is these the politicians are hiding behind.

Oh... And we need some new politicians. And that too, is in your power, or will be in 435 days...

Is up over at the fragrant Trixy's. Contrary to my explicit instructions there were no Pro EU nominations this time. Shame on you, my vast army of trolls and myrmidons.

Anyway. Next week we're over at Charles Crawford's place and I think he'd appreciate lots of stuff in favour of Central Asian despots to get his gander up.

Meanwhile, to entertain you and completely off topic, here is what further regulation of the banking sector will look like to you and me....

This is the most popular video in Britain. How long can he take these kickings? Surely Brenda and Merve the Swerve can collude to demand Brown call an election?

Because the country cannot take 442 more days of this hopeless Government.

For those of us who occasionally debate Labour "people", the mantra that this is economic crisis is Global, and therefore not the fault of New Labour's policies over the last 12 years, will be heard. Now certainly there is a global ill wind whistling through the economy, which makes life difficult for everyone. Certainly manufacturing, export-led economies are doing just as badly as the Anglo-Saxons, but the UK is not in a good position.

I am not convinced that doing more than bailing out the banking system to prevent its collapse, and allowing the automatic stabilizers to do their thing is going to do any good, (and in this I agree with, for example the admirably restrained German Government) but if you're a Labour "person", the you probably believe that a "fiscal stimulus" is in order, whilst you may like to think that this is economic in motivation, but actually it represents a power-grab by your beloved state. St. Barack of Obama agrees, mainly because he's a socialist too, and is urging governments at the G20 to borrow of their electorate's grandchildren in order to ensure that the recession is over slightly quicker. There is certainly a political imperative to be seen to be doing something, whatever the economic merits.

Such stimuli may indeed hasten a recovery, but belief that this is the case is hard to prove - would the economy have recovered anyway, or will the electorate eschew spending in order to save against the inevitable future tax-rises? What is more certain than the stimulus working as intended is that the kind of deficit currently being racked up both in the USA and even more egregiously in the UK, will ensure high tax rates for a decade or more. This will certainly hamper the recovery from the recession. So Gordon's stimulus must be seen in the context of borrowing from future growth, even if we could afford it.

The UK, however cannot afford another fiscal stimulus, because we went into this crisis with a budget deficit - that is we (or more precisely the Labour Government) was spending more than it took in taxes, even at the top of the cycle. Then tax receipts collapsed, especially from the financial services industry who have made such losses that it will be decades before some companies pay any corporation tax again, and the Government's Profit and Loss account started to look a bit Enron. In a highly unusual move, the Governor of the Bank of England (who, incidentally lost control of bank regulation under Gordon Brown) suggested that the Government has to stop spending. He also agreed that time was needed in order to allow the stimulus packages already enacted, to work. To put it simply, because of Gordon Brown's stewardship of the economy over the last 12 years, Britain simply cannot afford any more initiatives from Gordon Brown, however much he needs them to sure up his client state vote.

The charge that we on the Anti-Labour wing of the British People have been making for years: that our Ex Chancellor is a useless, incompetent, reckless spendthrift, entirely devoid of any sort of financial responsibility, whose endless initiatives are political rather than economic in motivation and who is beholden entirely to his political movement over the good of the country, appears proven.

Put simply, Gordon Brown is so incompetent that his continued Prime Ministership is an act of Treason on the part of the Labour party, and if he actually wanted to help the country get out of recession, he should do the honourable thing and lock himself in his office with a bottle of Whiskey and a revolver.

Britblog roundup #214 is up over at Suz Blog. Next week we are at the fragrant Trixy's place. I want you to overload her with posts of questionable merit, all lauding the EU, by sending them to the usual address britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Chris, over at stumbling and mumbling makes a good point in his review of the 'Rotten State of Britain' by Eamonn Butler.

Butler complains:

Everyone is expected to fit in, to conform, and to rejoice in their conformity. Those who do not conform are thought immoral, scorned and vilified.

But government on its own does not have the power to do this. Pressures to conform come also from HR departments and from the media. It’s here too that we find the ideology of hierarchy, centralism and distrust of true diversity.

Butler clearly blames New Labour, but Chris sees it more subtly as...

...rather the natural result of that vulgar libertarianism which sees only government as the enemy of freedom, whilst failing to see that its enemies can also exist in the private sector

I agree. Though I think the pro-corporation, anti-state vulgar libertarian is a figment of left-wing imagination. I, for example am self employed precisely because I'm the kind of Bolshy twat who cannot take orders from righteous drones, and would almost certainly get fired for what I write here. Indeed I have a string of "this is what I said to my boss when he fired me" stories. I agree therefore the company for which you work often has more totalitarian power over you than the state, and it is something I have been railing against for a while.

The first crucial difference between company and state totalitarianism is that employment is voluntary. Either you accept the kind of conformist, 'safety first' bullshit or you can leave, as I did. You cannot, in contrast opt out of the police state. The second is the ultimate cause of a company's savage assaults on individualism: The Rules. Failure to comply with rules - particularly the ones concerning discrimination - can lead to the ruin of a company as disgruntled women, or members of ethnic or sexual minorities can sue for harassment, or wrongful dismissal. If you ever want to fire members of these groups (white, middle class males, cannot of course be discriminated against and can be fired at will) then you must obey The Rules or be described as a 'racist company'. Institutional racism is defined for example as an organisation 'not having a sufficiently complete thought police'. Therefore there is a 'safety first' attitude towards the expression of political opinion, and an almost total criminalisation of what a biologist would describe as 'normal male mating display'. So yes. Companies are complicit in enforcing sterile conformity because 'The Rules' make them so.

Who is responsible for The Rules, though? The state, of course.

So companies are evil to you because the state makes them be so. I don't know whether Dr. Butler explains this, but Chris Dillow is intelligent enough to see it. No doubt, as a Marxist, Chris will suggest that companies have an incentive to have a compliant, and obedient workforce without too many troublesome opinions, and he's probably right. But in giving 'The Rules' such complete backing, the State is making it far too easy for them to oppress.

The fact is what Chris describes as "vulgar libertarianism" is pretty rare. Many libertarians are opponents of the corporation as well as the state, it's just that the state has the power to change the rules, and the corporation merely operates in them. So in terms of who's to blame, I and most libertarians are with Dr Butler. New Labour made the rules, and they've made life horrible for everyone with a job. It is (as always) Gordon Brown's fault.

Still, only 443 days till they're gone.

Make your own here

Is up, over at Mick Fealty's Telegraph Blog. Next week, we're over at Suz Blog. Submissions to Britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

So... Within minutes of my publishing, Gordon Brown stomped on his own "expert's" opinion about what to do in the face of the now catastrophic* binge-drinking crisis, It now appears that the Scottish Government's proposals are illegal under European law, and it is Westminster who would face the responsibility as the competent authority. Oh... the irony. Labour having to lay down the law to an uppity and (if at all possible) even more hectoring and nannyish Scottish parliament about what is and what is an acceptable competence of a Government. They even had the Chutzpah to describe the draft legislation from Holyrood "Ill thought out" and unworkable because a "change of culture" was needed instead.... No mention was made of previous Westminster Government schemes to raise the duty levels to control smoking and drinking. Nevertheless, it is an admission that price is a blunt tool to control behaviour, and risks penalising the law-abiding along with the problem abusers of legal drugs. It's also nice to see the first constitutional clash between Westminster and Holyrood being on a "why can't they both lose, the bastards" basis.

It's rare you see two decade-old policies collapse under the weight of their architect's hypocrisy in a single day.

*as measured by 'Today' programe minutes

The Scottish "Government" is going to do it. And it seems New Labour also thinks it is a good idea: To set a legally mandated minimum price per unit of alcohol. This is in order to tackle the "crisis" of "binge drinking" which has cropped up daily on the today programme as a scourge of life in Modern Britain. I am against the Government interfering in the price of goods in the market - no good ever comes from it. But I think the Government's attempts to control people's private drinking habits are not only wrong on a philosophical level - what business is it of theirs what I drink - but also on a practical level.

I believe the British pub to be one of the finest institutions in the country. At its best, it is a place to meet people from all walks of life, exchange views and engage in light-hearted banter with people you would otherwise not meet. It roots you into your community, and is a place to meet your neighbours. At its worst, the Gastro-pub for example, it is a tribal watering hole, threatening to outsiders as the denizens retreat into class-based prejudice. "No workwear or football strips" may be different in target to "No Blacks, Dogs or Irish", but the sentiment is the same. The Hampstead 'Liberals' of New Labour are demonstrating their contempt for this institution, and the people who go to them, by explicitly targeting the drinking habits of those whom they are supposed to represent. Repellent, patronising and totalitarian. I say again: What business of Government is it how much people drink?

Puritanism is defined as the nagging fear that someone, somewhere might be having fun, and such people frown on pubs and people who go to them. Earlier attempts to police people having a few drinks have included ever greater duty on beer so that now a third of the price of a pint goes to the Government. A further precedent was set with the smoking ban. People who didn't go to pubs thought that banning people smoking in them was a good idea. That "might" encourage them to go to the pub too, and the revenue effect would be negligible, as a new class of people would go to the pub, drink sensibly and Britain would overnight become a Mediterranean cafe culture. This, of course did not happen. The people who thought they "might" go to the pub, realised that if they went to the pub, they might have to mix with the working class, which is ghastly. Working class people, who smoke, started drinking at home and the result is that the entire pub industry collapsed.

Now those working class people, chased out of pubs by the smoking ban, whose local has closed as a result, have nowhere to go, even if they wanted to get out of the house for a drink. To what end? So that the town centre was no longer a "no go area" at night, for people who had no intention of going there anyway, and whose perception of it was based entirely on TV shows called "Police! Stop! Kill!" or something? Well there are still pissed-up people getting nicked for D&D on a friday night. Though the problem anywhere near as bad as our elected leaders would like you to believe, life has got a bit worse with the death of the community pub: Now that local pubs have closed down, all that is left is the kind of Leisure park barn, pumping out loud music, cramming thousands of boozers in on a weekend, and pouring watery lager into them. The extended licensing hours law, of course is interpreted so that only venues with "entertainment" could stay open after 1am, meaning that you can go and get your ear-drums perforated in a club piping canned music, but you cannot continue the discussion with your friends in your local over a few more pints beyond 1am.

Fuck it, people say. Let's just get a slab in and go home.

Now the Government has decided that people who drink at home must also pay pub prices, in case they "binge" - defined according to entirely arbritary criteria. Certainly increasing the price of a good reduces its consumption. But addictive substances tend to have very inelastic demand curves, especially amongst problem users. That is those addicted tend to prioritise their drug over other spending. So in using price to tackle "problem" drinkers, you will end up reducing their consumption of food, or heating and making their already miserable lives that bit more grim. Everyone else, it's true buys less booze, which means less profit for the retailers, pubs and brewers, and less revenue for the exchequer, but no diminution of the problem.

Of course the Government is openly saying that this would only affect the kind of cheap alcohol that ghastly working class people buy, not nice peoples' bottles of wine. This is bollocks. First, because of the glories of the Market economy, it is perfectly possible to buy a drinkable plonk for £4.50 a bottle. This is around the minimum price for wine being suggested. Now alcohol is a positional good - and this is especially true of wine. So, by hitting the price point, everything else must rise in relation. If Tesco's own brand red Corbieres at £3 a bottle (surprisingly good, actually) must rise by 50%, then a bottle of Napa Valley Merlot, must likewise rise to £5.50 or more in order to maintain "premium" status.

Everyone is going to have their pockets picked pointlessly in order to salve a Government target about something over which it has no control. Of course the same is true for Beer and spirits. There will be no more cheap Gin to pour over sloes, for example. No more cheap slabs of stella for a 6-nations weekend with the boys. And alchies will still sit in pools of cheap lager piss begging for small change. It's just they will have to beg a little harder and forgo their trip to the chippy in the evening. And everyone else's life is just a bit greyer and more miserable.

Of course, like any Government proposal, there is a Fake charity, Alcohol Concern in this instance, on hand to say that though these plans to kick you in the bollocks are a step in the right direction, because you are not to be also pelted with turds, they do not go nearly far enough. Who'd have thunk it: A "charity" which recieves 99% of its funding from the Government, supports government policy.

You may complain that prices for booze have "not kept up with earnings", as pravda the BBC did this morning, when talking to the former boss of Majestic wine. Neither have the prices for Cars, washing machines, televisions, computers, bread, meat, oranges or anything except housing, the supply of which the Government controls. Complaining about prices not rising with wages is complaining about the chief virtue of the market economy. It frees resources from alcohol to other goods and services, and makes life better for people. The Government should not step in to control prices. It is being tried elsewhere - to control inflation and it doesn't work in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Why think it will control deflation here? Anyone fancy a booze cruise?

This illiberal, nannying proposal is even being spun as support for the pub industry, which is like an anal rapist saying that at least he didn't wipe his huge, shit and blood covered cock on your curtains, after ripping your rectal sphincter asunder when he went in without the common decency to spit first. And just for the avoidance of doubt, he's already taken the dry cleaning bill for his trousers from your wallet.

I loathe the way this Government does business. They are truly beneath contempt.

Update: Gordon Brown has Squashed Liam Donaldson's proposals, for now. I am sure that these proposals will resurface, just like every other illiberal suggestion which has ever come out of the Labour party, as the pressure from their client state of prodnoses gets overwhelming

The next person to argue to me that this recession is happening because of "deregulated" banks is going to get a carefully gift-wrapped punch in the face.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of shouting "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT" at the top of your voice. Anyone with sufficient wit to avoid voting for the Labour party can see that banks and financial institutions were extremely tightly regulated - what they could sell to their customers, how much they could charge, and everything would have to be correctly documented, on paper with signatures. Heaven forbid a financial advisor would be caught offering an opinion to someone who hasn't signed the right form, and every single transaction came with an eight-page "key features" document as laid out in some detail in regulations designed to deal with 'misselling'. So day-to-day activities of the banks were, and are extremely tightly regulated. What about their balance sheets? Well there was the Basel II standards, which when combined with mark-to-market accounting and the fact that everyone was using the same, regulator-approved models, basically ensured that in a financial crisis, all banks' assets would collapse together (because no-one would be in a position to buy them), preventing a market recovery and guaranteeing widespread contagion. So their balance sheets were tightly regulated too. All the Banks did is obey the incentive to take a bit of risk, and empire-build; for in this regulator-guaranteed world, scale was everything.

So.... The regulators were ensuring boxes were correctly ticked at great cost, I may add, the cost of compliance tripled since the FSA took over from the bank of England, but despite (or probably because of) the vast explosion in bureaucracy, no-one appeared to have any view of Systemic risk, apart from.. um... the bank of England, who lost responsibility for it.

Gordon Brown's lovely shiny modern system failed at the first test. But it is merely the most prominent failure of the last decade. The banking regulatory system, just like everything designed by New Labour is an expensive, divisive failure. Tax Credits, The New Deal, Sure Start, The NHS, state education. All of these have had taxpayers' money shovelled at them for very little improvement. Schools have even gone backwards. New Labour are only interested in their client state of compliance apparatchiks and local council diversity prodnoses - not for any good they might do, you understand, but because state spending is morally better than evil selfish business who must be checked that they are employing enough labour voters minorities. So long as the state is doing the spending investment, in Labour's world-view, that can be measured and reported for party-political advantage against the charge of Tory "cuts".

If this crisis is a demonstration of the failure of anything, it certainly is not "deregulation". Indeed I argue that this crisis is a failure of big-state, deficit financed economics. It is a failure of tightly-regulated quasi-state oligopolies who operate as an undiversified government guaranteed cartel. It is a failure of economies which are nearly half state-run. If the people were not taxed so much, savings ratios would be higher. People would have reserves to fall back on, and would not have need of 125% negative-amortisation mortgages.

John Maynard Keynes, of whom much is made in this crisis thought that any state expenditure over about 25-30% of GDP was excessive. We are now at 40%. Secondly, if you are to boost the economy by state spending, you have to be running surpluses in the good times, otherwise people will assume higher taxes later and save any "stimulus". Oh dear, Gordon; Ricardian equivalence bites you on the bum. By appealing to Keynes to "rescue" the world economy, you are selectively using the theories of a great economist in order to make a massive state power-grab. For mark my words, the Labour party and the Democrats in the USA and the EU leviathan are not interested in you, dear voter. They see this as an opportunity to increase the scale, power and reach of the state into your lives. The system failed; their prescription: more of the system.

McDoom is the architect of a whole failed philosophy of Government who's been sitting for a decade like baron Greenback* at the centre of the organisation which has been reaching its counterproductive tendrils into every aspect of national life, during which we haven't got much richer, and we have become a lot more stressed, put upon, fined and taxed. Now we're broke and he still doesn't think he needs to say "sorry". Fuck me, but the man's a useless, fat one-eyed joy-vacuum, intent only on keeping Labour in power with no regard to the huge damage his reverse-Midas touch has on the country. If he loved the country, which the treasonous toad clearly doesn't, he would do the honourable thing and go and have a word with Brenda, call an election, then shoot himself. But I doubt he'd even manage that. The useless cunt.

*Doesn't Alastair Darling look like Nero too?

Barack Obama has not got his foreign policy off to a flying start. Whether or not you think there is a special relationship between the UK and the USA depends upon your politics. The Atlantic alliance is just a marriage of convenience to the Left wing though it is rather more axiomatic in military circles. Whatever bien-pensents think, it is the English-speaking world which is bearing the brunt of the fighting in Afghanistan alongside American troops - is that special enough for you? Thus many conservative commentators in the USA have deplored Obama's gift of a DVD box set in return for The HMS Gannet pen holder which Brown brought with him to Washington. Most Britons were not offended on the simple grounds that Brown is a political dead-man-walking and rather enjoyed the snub. Fucking snot-gobbler off with a pool spray and lunch may be reasonable, but unforgivable was the misspelling on the Reset button, which Hillary Clinton brought with her on a recent visit to Russia, another key strategic country.

Misspelling the word Perezagruzka? Overcharge not Reset? On what was already an naff gift, even by American standards.

This is straightforward incompetence and if these thoughtless gaffes are a foretaste of what's to come, I am not optimistic. I'm not wildly keen on Obama's policy to spend his way out of the recession anyway, but I think he will disappoint mainly because he lacks attention to detail. He even appears to be struggling to fill his treasury roles. He's coasting on a wave of goodwill that will run dry when people realise that he does not have all the answers. He will not be able to use rhetoric to get Wall St. to rise anymore than he can charm German troops into southern Afghanistan. He will not be able to goodwill Hamas and Israel into co-existence. He will do well to remember the friends of America who stand by her when the going gets tough, and eschew 'friends' who are merely glad he's not Bush. Whatever Obama thinks now, he will come to trust the 5-eyes alliance in this dangerous world, just as he may need some small-government thinkers in to help him deal with the economy.

Maybe he will learn the lessons and become a great President. Probably he won't. He is a left-wing leader, like JFK, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara and Mahatma Gandhi. What to these Gentlemen have in common? None lived long enough to disappoint with the grubby compromises of Government, which is fatal to the idealism of their supporters. These leaders therefore all owe some of their iconic status to the assassin's bullet. Obama is a socialist in a crisis crying out for conservative* policies of spending restraint and sound money. He is an internationalist leader in a world of deeply entrenched and irreconcilable conflicts, crying out for an America to show leadership, not beg for forgiveness. Obama will probably disappoint, and be as loathed as Blair at the end. It will be worse because of the pathetically inflated expectations with which he entered office.

Unless... He is in a job with a mortality rate of a street drug dealer. Between 4 and 6 (depending on whether you think numbers 12 and 29 copped it due to foul play) of the 44 presidents of the USA have been killed in office, and there have been a further 19 attempts. Assassination before they make a mess of things is, for all left-wing leaders, the only way to immortality.

*Please note: 'conservative' not 'Conservative', or indeed 'Republican'

One of the more frustrating things about the "hang them all" approach to politicians is best summed up by a question: what else is there? And if you're damning them all, what incentive is there for one lot to improve behaviour?

Let's ignore the economy for a minute. I think we can all take it as read that the Labour party has been a disaster for the civil liberties of this country. They have systematically removed most of the freedoms previously enjoyed by a Briton, and comprehensively expanded the state's ability to intrude on our lives. I think most sane people, capable of walking and chewing gum simultaneously can see this, and disapproves. Furthermore, they've extended the powers to tax, fine and otherwise interfere with members of the public to include, it seems almost anyone with a high-viz vest. So the average law-abiding subject gets hassled, whilst the police do almost nothing to deal with the crime and disorder which blights our lives. We do not have the usual trade off with a police-state. It is not safe to be out, nor do the trains run on time.

They're all the same... I hear you cry! But I think most people will be pleasantly surprised by the Conservatives in office, but you have to be realistic. They're not the Labour party, and they're not a Revolution, which just sucks for most people. They're somewhere inbetween.

We are about a year from an election campaign. Which means we have a choice in who gets to make the rules. You may have a distaste for the Conservatives. You may think them "europhile" because they do not advocate withdrawal from the EU as party policy. You may think them "statist" because of some illiberal utterances from a backbencher. You may think them stupid, for some of them are religious nutters. You may think they have been ineffectual for failing to oppose many of Labours more savage assaults on our Freedom. You may be right, but at least they're not the Labour party.

Whilst we are all merrily excoriating the political class, have any of you written to your Local Conservative MP or candidate and asked him what his view is of a particular bill? Have you suggested courses of action which will lead to a freer UK. And I don't mean courses of action as clearly absurd as Reg in the Life of Brian suggests to the Commandos of the People's Front of Judea, when discussing the plan to break into Pilate's villa and kidnap his wife.

We're giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State, and if he doesn't agree immediately, we execute her...

So demanding the immediate repeal of all acts of Parliament enacted since 1997 would be nice, but puts you in the political equivalent of a Monty Python sketch. It is up to forensically-minded bloggers to come up with a list of acts or sections of acts which need repealing, like, yesterday.

Things Like Regulation of Investigatory Powers act, and the powers it formalises need to go. We need to repeal the civil contingencies act 2004 and get some proper checks and balances in. We need to get the concept of "an arrestable offence" back into the police's thinking so they have to concentrate on serious crime, by repealing Serious and Organised Crime act 2005. We need to allow people to film the police, by repealing the Counter Terrorism act 2008. That's just a start. Come up with some more.

When you've done that, write to your Local Conservative, and offer your services delivering for him or her. You may not like the Tories, but they're better than Labour, and they are the best we've got for the Time being. Get out there, hold your nose, influence policy while it is still being written and offer your door-knocking skills as an incentive. You may be whoring your political principles to the highest bidder, but at least there is some hope that they may listen.

And they are not the Labour Party. Get writing people. If you haven't even written a sternly-worded letter to your elected representatives perhaps I can suggest a suitable letter here, then you've no right to spear them on a pitch-fork. It may come to that, but surely isn't it better to try the constitutional approach first?

Is up over at Liberal England. Next week it's at Mick Fealty's Telegraph Blog. Any posts you want to nominate, send them to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

I've often pointed to the Shibboleth of the left which believes that uniquely in human experience, procreation is immune from economic incentives. It is obvious to me that the reason that we have such a huge number of teenage single mothers, is because the incentives in the system are to get pregnant as soon as possible.

It is simple. You're a 16 year-old girl living at home and going to a crap school. Neither you home life or education has equipped you for anything other than the most mundane employment. Home is a cramped, state-owned property which you share with a number of siblings and unfortunately a series of your mother's boyfriends, some of whom are abusive.

By getting pregnant, you will have access to

1. Your own flat
2. Independence (of a sort)
3. The unconditional love of another human, over whom you have complete control.
4. An independent, secure income for life, albeit a small one.
5. If you're lucky in the source of sperm, access to his income too.
   
6. A sense of meaning for your life

The problem, morally with this, is that the state, and the unfortunate sperm-donor picks up the tab. That is a 16-year old makes a decision and the tax-payer (which is unlikely ever to include her) and a man are forced to pay for her decision under the full violence of the Law. Secondly it's a trap, which condemns the young woman to a lifetime of benefit dependency, a lifestyle which she will hand on to her offspring. The right have been saying this for ages: we need to change the incentives in the system, in order to make

1. The prospect of waiting a few years before procreating more attractive
   
2. Doing so whilst in a stable loving relationship less financially punished
3. The financial outcome for early single parenthood a little worse.

Tom Harris, a Labour MP makes a half-hearted stab at making these points in a post entitled "the Return of Morality"

They become pregnant because they have absolutely no ambition for themselves. They have been indoctrinated with the lie that they’ll never amount to anything, and have fulfilled that prophesy by making no effort to achieve any qualification. Very often they live with parents (or a parent) who have no jobs themselves, who are setting the example of benefit dependency for all their offspring.

Such young women see parenthood as one way of achieving a level of independence and self-worth. And they’re right, because that’s more or less what they get: a flat and therefore some privacy, an income for the first time in their lives

Naturally this has provoked widespread applause from the right, and a great wail of betrayal from lefties, who accuse him of pandering to right-wing "Bullying". Donpaskini, for example says

There are several words for powerful, middle-aged men who choose to pick on teenage girls, but the one which best sums up Tom Harris is bully. You will never, ever read him use this kind of language about anyone who has any kind of power or influence, it's always those who can't answer back who he chooses to pick on

But this fails to address the salient point. How is it moral for us to have a system which encourages a caste (for it is determined by birth) of people for whom a state-dependent lifestyle is taken, quite literally, with their mother's milk? That is other people are forced, by law, to pay for the lifestyle of this caste. The left, however do not see it this way.

[Tom Harris] doesn't seem to know that a majority of lone parents work, that 60% of young women felt more positive about education after they became pregnant than before or that 79% said that motherhood had increased their determination to get a good job....

40% of lone mothers did not "feel more positive about education on getting pregnant, Meanwhile 79% of young women told a researcher they "wanted a good job". This is hardly hard evidence that single parenthood is brilliant for society, or indeed the young women in question. Donpaskini is really scraping the barrel, and retreats into a vindictive orgy of play-ground name-calling, and describes the Labour MP, effectively as a class-enemy, because he's white, rich and middle-aged. This is the ultimate insult on the left, because it is an a-priori fact that wealthy white people cannot know anything about anything.

Even Unity is usually forensic in demolishing arguments - he takes issue with the idea that number of teenage births has risen - He says they haven't much, but I would counter that they've been very high for a long time, and fertility rates amongst non-working sections have gone up, as those hard-pressed tax-payers have gone down (pdf). Consistently poor statistics does not absolve a system from blame. But in the issue of choice he merely states that single parenthood on benefits is not voluntary, no evidence: he merely states his opinion. He challenges...

...the myth than suggests that people actively choose to live on welfare benefits - which the vast majority of them don’t. Living on the pitiful sums that we pay out to individuals and families in order to keep the wolf from the door is NOT an active choice, its something that people resort to when they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have no other viable choices open to them, or at least nothing by way of an alternative that would improve their lives sufficiently to make it worth their while.

Whether or not it's voluntary is mere semantics: It's a trap, which young women walk into willingly for the reasons I outlined at the start of this essay. Whether walking into a clear trap against advice of teachers, government etc... is 'voluntary' depends on whether you think a 16 year-old girl is a rational, free person. Unity clearly thinks not.

We are not talking about beating up single parents, or removing their right to a family life. We on "the right" are talking about improving the opportunities for young women so their options include waiting for a better time to give birth. We are talking about removing the huge incentives to get pregnant as soon as possible, perhaps by not putting single parents at the head of the queue for social housing. We are talking about improving the incentives in the tax and benefit system for couples to stay together. That is changing the economic and social incentives in favour of later childbirth, within, where possible, a stable relationship. In truth this encompases a complete redesign of the Tax and Benefits system and a comprehensive overhaul of education. And that's just the start. To address these issues will be a project which will require Thatcheresque doggedness in dealing with the entrenched self-interest of the Labour client state, which will be all too willing to rally together under the banner of "fight Tory cuts".

The left hates the nuclear family, because it turns out healthy, well balanced, self-reliant people who have little need of social services, state benefits or the work of other Labour-voting professions. Whilst all evidence points to the nuclear family being the best place to bring up a child, socialists would rather create a caste of ballot-fodder serfs without employment or hopes, in order to rot society from within. That is the real reason for the reaction Tom Harris has provoked. It certainly is not concern for the poor, benighted single, teenage mum: Marxist cant and crocodile tears.

Chris Dillow, never afraid of unfashionable causes, gives us a defence of Gordon Brown's speech to Congress. Now he's normally good at demolishing arguments of convenience from wherever they come, but I think his arguments here against Brown's critics are weak in the extreme.

1) “Brown put the wrong regulatory regime in place in 1997.”

But if we’d had a different regime we’d probably be asking now why that one failed. Banking crises are common around the world and over time. They are an “equal opportunity menace (pdf)”. That they happen so often, despite so many different regulatory regimes (including freeish markets) suggests that regulatory failure is common.
Banks would have circumvented regulators, by offshore or off-balance sheet vehicles.
What’s more, there are two groups of people who have overseen banks over the last 10 years who could have but didn’t see the crisis coming - equity investors and non-executive directors. If they failed, why should we assume that regulators could have done better?
There’s something paradoxical about Brown’s critics, who are usually so (rightly) sceptical about the competence of the state believing that, in this instance, the state might have had sufficient competence.

But in this instance, he's shooting down a straw man. Yes, we think that the Bank of England would do a better job, but many of us (loony) libertarians think that the tight regulation and deposit guarantees are the problem. That is the very principle of tight Government oversight of financial institutions is the systemic problem. Here's why: Onerous regulation ensures an oligopoly of tightly regulated institutions, perceived by depositors as so safe, there's no need to consider deposit safety when choosing your bank. Banks therefore compete on returns only, which increases the risk, and have short-term incentives to take risks, like buying ABN Amro. These oligopolies are so big, the Government cannot afford to let them fail - and we're where we are now. Better instead to have many smaller institutions, none of whom have any explicit guarantees and let the market keep 'em safe (imagine advertising "we've got the best balance sheet, with nothing but AAA Government debt and 10% capital adequacy"), with the bank of England standing by to provide emergency liquidity only, and a regulator stepping in to break up any company which gets "too big to fail". Then Governments have no need to step in to "save" the system just because one bank gets itself into trouble. True this is not a criticism of Brown per se, but Can you concive of him Deregulating? Neither can I.

2) “Brown’s lax fiscal policy in the good years means we can’t afford a sufficient stimulus now.”

But it’s not obvious that fiscal policy would work even if it were bigger and starting from a smaller deficit; Ricardian equivalence would not be much less powerful then than it is now.
What’s more, any stimulus now can only ameliorate the recession. To have prevented the recession, we’d have needed a stimulus a year ago. But no-one was calling for one then. A big problem with fiscal policy - getting the timing of the stimulus right - would apply, whatever position the public finances had been in.

Fiscal policy doesn't work in itself, but lower taxes do, over the long-run. This is because private spending is directed more efficiently than public, and leads to higher productivity. Fiscal stimuli doesn't work because of ricardian equivalence, as Chris says, but it could if people could see taxes going down over the long term - meaning people's expectations were not for that spending to be paid back, and that requires balanced budgets. No-one believed Gordon's "end to boon 'n bust" story and knew his spending was unsustainable. People will save any "stimulus" now to pay for the inevitable taxes later. If we had had balanced budgets prior to 2007, then people might have been in a position to spend a stimulus if they believed that taxes would not go up immediately to pay for it. That is if borrowing was under control, which it isn't.

3) “In pursuing inflation targeting without asset price targeting, Brown put in place a policy framework in which low interest rates allowed a house price bubble to emerge.”

But let’s say interest rates had been used to limit house price rises. Manufacturers would then have been screaming about their pain, and those people fretting now about the perils of deflation would have been doing so back in 2003-04. And if house prices are not net wealth - and have little impact on consumer spending - what would have been the offsetting gain? Macroeconomic policy should not be organized so as to protect a particular industry (banks) from its own stupidity.

No-one is seriously suggesting that asset price targeting is a good idea. Having a measure of inflation which takes into account housing costs like mortgage interest, like RPI rather than the CPI, chosen for european political reasons, would be. The upshot would have been to limit the boom, and therefore lead to a softer bust. Macroeconomic policy should reflect the economy the way it is, not the way euromaniac politicians think it should be.

4) “The macroeconomic stability Brown crowed about so much when Chancellor led, in Minskyan fashion, to banks becoming too risk-tolerant.”

But Brown didn’t create that stability - he just took credit for what was just luck (pdf). And, surely, no-one thinks any Chancellor should destabilize the economy merely to rein in future animal spirits.

Yes. I don't think beating up grannies is a good thing either. He concludes that

It’s not obvious, then, what charge against Brown can stick...

Which isn't true if even you accept the premise - tight regulation is a good thing - on which Brown was working; as Chris Dillow does. All Chris's post has done is set up a number of straw men. Many of Brown's critics say do in fact say "most regulation is pointless", because regulators are rarely more competent than the people they're regulating. If you're going to regulate, don't take regulatory responsibility away from an institution which has done a good job for hundreds of years and give it to untested tyros. Second, if you're inflation targeting, don't pick a measure of inflation which leaves out housing costs in the economy with the greatest exposure to housing costs in the world. Third, don't run a perpetual budget deficit during a long and sustained boom because you will be fucked when the music stops.

The charges against Gordon Brown do stick. He's a hubristic, incompetent fool. An embarrassment to the country and the only reason I can think for Chris to let him off the hook is that Chris is a Marxist - ever ready to absolve Gordon Brown of personal failings out of a misplaced sense of tribal loyalty, though he'd call it a "Bayesian Prior".

Women think they're in control of their emotions, but their 'emotional intelligence' really means that they say whatever they feel without a thought to the consequences. It's not 'emotional intelligence', it's 'emotional incontinence'. Men think 'honesty' is a considered opinion to which he sticks. Women think 'honesty' is changing her opinion as frequently her knickers because it is how she 'feels' at that second.

Which is why we fellas don't think women are actually capable of understanding 'principles' such as the rule of law. So, when we say women are 'equal', it's because we're forced to by law and society. Very few men actually believe it.

"Women. They're just not like proper chaps".

It is with this in mind, that I look upon Harridan Harperson-Dromey. Just what does she think her "court of public-opinion" would do to her?