Airport fun

Your humble Devil is sitting in Gatwick, waiting for a plane to
Edinburgh. I'm back in the 'Burgh for a wedding, a long weekend and a
catch-up with old friends and pubs.

Since I no longer have a laptop, posting is likely to be infrequent
despite the number of things that I want to comment on.

But, on the other hand, I finding that the new landscape keyboard in
the iPhone 3.0 software does make typing an awful lot easier, so maybe
I shall post occasionally. When I'm not drunk that is.

In the meantime, I would like to point out that the UK Border Agency
are absolute fucking cunts of the first water and I hope that everyone
responsible for making and administering immigration policy dies of
cancer during a severe morphine shortage.

Bunch of fuckers...

Sent from my iPhone

Dodgy ground

Beth Stratford: a complete and utter watermelon moron. Oh, and violent criminal...

This article by a fucking eco-loon called Beth Stratford—who, with her buddies, held up a coal-train bound for a powerstation—is a massive load whining, self-righteous, ignorant, self-justifying crap. No change there then.

Luckily, I don't have to delve into the guts of this awful, mewling pap as Longrider has effectively disembowelled the bloody thing, at length.

Just a couple of questions though: first, why—when the Greenpeace fucknuts who caused £30,000 of damage at a powerstation were found not guilty because of the justification of the damage from climate change—was this argument not accepted in the case of the Drax train defendants?

(Don't get me wrong: I think that it is a shit defence that should not be accepted in any way, but why the inconsistency?)

The second question that I like to ask is this: the going rate for a CiF article is £75—was this paid to Stratford? Because—and feel free to say I'm wrong here—I was under the impression that criminals were not allowed to profit from their crimes.

Given that Stratford has been convicted, and the article has only been written because she committed a crime, were she to accept payment, Stratford is quite obviously profiting from crime—as is Comment Is Free.

I think we should be told.

And, if Stratford has been paid, then the money should be confiscated; and then both she and CiF should be prosecuted for breaking the law.

Now, that would be funny...

Mad Mahdi Bunting and the Grand Narrative of Death

Last week, the reliably Mad Mahdi Bunting wrote a particularly silly article in The Grauniad, one sentence of which was rightfully mocked by many.

But the whole article was not merely mad, but actively terrifying. At its center was the loathesome idea of the "grand narrative"—a controlling meme through which the unconditional support of the population could be enforced through ignorance and power.

Naturally, this is a repugnant idea to any libertarian—as is Mahdi's contention that "individualism" is somehow synonymous with buying more shiny shit—and it was just ripe for a truly detailed fisking in the grand tradition.

And so, in what is quite simply one of the best posts that I have ever read, Bella Gerens has not only ripped the Mad Mahdi a new arsehole and laid out why forced collectivism is so evil, she has also articulated the virtues of true individualism—rather than the fake, corporatist idea that Bunting and her evil ilk are peddling.

Do go and read it—if only to arm yourself. Because, believe me, we have already seen altogether too many "opinion-formers" cleaving to Bunting's "grand narrative", and we are going to see a lot more.

And it needs to be resisted—else it will be the last nail in the coffin of our liberty.

Five myths about alcohol

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)

No. 1 - We are drinking more than ever and 1 in 4 people are drinking at hazardous levels

This claim has been made regularly since May of this year, based on data from the Office of National Statistics. The Telegraph's report was entirely typical: 

One in four drink too much, official figures show.

Ten million people in England – one in four adults – are putting their health at risk by drinking too much, official figures have shown.

'Too much' is more than 21 units a week for men and 14 units for women. The highly questionable nature of these 'daily limits' has been discussed by my gracious host before; he has also recently touched on the changing way in which these units are counted, all of which reinforce the myth that there is a mounting epidemic of binge-drinking.

Since 2007, the Office of National Statistics has assumed larger glasses are being used and stronger alcohol is being consumed. They now assume that a glass of wine contains 2 units, rather than 1, as it did before. With beer, what used be counted as 1 unit is now counted as 1.5, what used to be 1.5 units is now assumed to be 2 units and what used to be 2.3 units (a large can) is now counted as 3 units.

As you might expect, this has made a dramatic difference to the statistics. The graph below shows the percentage of men and women drinking more than their 21/14 unit weekly 'limit' under the old system*:

Nothing to see here, is there? A downward trend since 2000 is evident for both sexes.

But this is how the same statistics look using the new system:

Wa-hay! Booze Britain! Exactly the same data but very different results.

So which is the correct estimate? The ONS is, in my view, a basically honest institution and it seems fair to estimate 2 units are in the average glass of wine. It is less fair to assume stronger beer at a time when two of the biggest selling lagers - Stella and Becks - have introduced weaker brands. 

But wherever the truth may lie, the fact remains that even if the ONS had changed its system 10 years ago, the overall trend would remain downwards. 

That consumption has actually been falling recently - albeit slightly - is confirmed by figures for pure alcohol consumption. These show that per capita consumption peaked in 2004 and has since dropped off: 

Litres of alcohol per person aged over 14 (PDF)

2002: 11.13

2003: 11.34

2004: 11.59

2005: 11.4

2006: 11.0

2007: 11.2

This data is significant because per capita consumption effectively measures the amount of ethanol consumed by a person, which is what the system of units is supposed to do. But while units have to be clumsily estimated, the per capita system measures what has actually been bought and therefore, one has to assume, been drunk.

According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies - no friends of the booze - total alcohol sales have fallen by 13% since 2001/02**. According to the ONS, the number of teetotallers has risen from 9.5% to 14% since 1992. And pubs are closing at the rate of 53 a week. And per capita consumption of pure alcohol currently stands at 11.2 litres, much less than Luxembourg (15.6 litres) and, indeed, less than 14 other European countries. That's your ‘Booze Britain’ for you.

*These figures are shown in table 2.5 of Statistics on Alcohol, England 2009

** Page 8 of Drinking in Great Britain (PDF)

No.2 - Alcohol is cheaper than it was 20 years ago

This forms the cornerstone of efforts to introduce a minimum price for alcoholic drinks by, amongst others, Fatboy Donaldson:

In his report, Sir Liam noted that over the preceding 20 years, the country’s disposable income had risen faster than alcohol taxation, and alcohol had become ever more affordable.

It is true that alcohol has become more affordable. Everything has become more affordable as a result of rising prosperity. Most people would consider this to be a good thing. But relative to other products alcohol has become less affordable.

When inflation is factored in, British households' disposable income increased from 100 to 208.8 between 1980 and 2008. In other words, people can afford to buy more than twice as much as they could in 1980. 

In the same period the affordability of alcohol - thanks to above-inflation tax rises - has only risen from 100 to 175. To imply that alcohol is actually "cheaper" is disingenuous in the extreme.

In fact, as the Office of National Statistics concludes, it is plain wrong:

Between 1980 and 2008, the price of alcohol increased by 283.3%. After considering inflation (at 21.3%), alcohol prices increased by 19.3% over the period.

In real terms, as well as in monetary terms, alcohol is more expensive that it was 20 years ago.

No. 3 - There is a worsening epidemic of underage drinking

Here's The Telegraph again:

Teenage drinking epidemic 'causing misery'

Britain needs to wake up to the epidemic of binge-drinking among teenagers and the misery it is causing thousands of families, one of the country's most senior policemen has warned.

He criticised the drinks industry for targeting the young and exporting its "negative costs on to the streets, hospitals and into the criminal justice system".

But only last week the Trading Standards Institute reported:

A survey of 13,000 young people by the Trading Standards Institute found the number of teenagers who drank weekly fell from 50% in 2005 to 38% this year.

Which backs up what they said in 2007:

Fewer teenagers are drinking regularly - partly because it is becoming harder for youngsters to get hold of alcohol, a Trading Standards survey suggests.

And this is supported by figures from the Office of National Statistics (May 2009):

One in five pupils (20%) [11-15 years] had drunk alcohol in the last seven days, a proportion which has declined from 26% in 2001.

Furthermore:

The proportion of pupils who have never drunk alcohol has risen since 2003, from 39% to 46% in 2007.

Underage drinking - at whatever level - is clearly an issue for parents and the police, and yet, Trading Standards exhibited the same attitude of buck-passing as the copper above:

Trading Standards North West, which carried out the poll, said it intended to write to the firms behind these drinks to "seek clarification of the plans for action to reduce their appeal to young people".

That's right. It's "the firms". Not the police, not the parents, not the shopkeepers and not - heaven forfend - Trading Standards. It's down to the manufacturers to stop people buying their products illegally.

No. 4 - Alcohol-related hospital admissions have risen by 69%

Responsible journalists usually follow this little nugget of information with an important proviso:

The number of people admitted to hospital in England with alcohol-related problems has risen by 69 per cent in five years, to 863,000 in 2007-08, although changes to data collection — which now include secondary diagnoses, such as alcohol-related injuries — have contributed to the surge in cases.

These "changes to data collection" do more than merely "contribute" to the "surge in cases" -they are the overwhelming explanation. The redefinition is sweeping and appears to include anybody who turns up in hospital with a trace of alcohol in their blood, as the ONS explains:

“These figures use a new methodology reflecting a substantial change in the way the impact of alcohol on hospital admissions is calculated. The new calculation includes a proportion of the admissions for reasons that are not always related to alcohol, but can be in some instances (such as accidental injury).”

This covers a multitude of sins. As a helpful commentator recently pointed out, alcohol can be linked to virtually any disease, usually very tenuously. Sure enough, the largest proportion of "alcohol-related" admissions involve people with geriatric diseases:

Overall, the number of alcohol-related admissions increased with age in 2007/08, rising from 49,300 admissions among 16 to 24 year olds to 195,300 admissions of people aged 75 and over.

Only a quarter of the 863,000 admissions are directly attributable to alcohol. Not that any of this was deemed worthy of mention by, for example, The Daily Mail:

Alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in England have soared by more than 50 per cent over the last five years, latest figures revealed last night.

Startling data from the Department of Health showed there were 863,257 drink-related admissions in 2007-08, up sharply from 569,418 in 2003-04 - the year Labour's reforms ushered in round-the-clock drinking.

No. 5 - Lager is cheaper than water

This doozy is a favourite of pretend charity Alcohol Concern and has been repeated many times, particularly by the The Daily Mail:

Drunk for £1: Anger as leading supermarkets sell lager for 22p a can

Supermarkets are selling beer at a cheaper price than water, fuelling concern over their role in Britain's binge-drinking crisis.

Despite repeated public health warnings, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda now offer lager at just 22p a can - less per litre than their own brand-mineral water and cola, and cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1.

Let's ignore for a moment the obvious point that someone wanting to buy water is hardly likely to buy lager on an impulse instead. Let's even ignore the fact that water comes out of the tap for 0.02p per glass.

Instead, let's look at Tesco's own brand lager. Here it is.

It costs 91p for a 4-pack, or 5.2p per 100ml.

And here's Tesco's own brand mineral water. 

It costs 13p, or 0.7p per 100ml.

So please can we put this one to bed now?

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted something about the own-brand lager - it is piss-weak (2% ABV). Frankly, you might as well drink the water. 4 cans of this stuff equates to about a can and a half of Stella. Hardly enough to get "drunk for £1", although that didn't stop the Mail from printing a hilarious account of someone pretending to do just that.

Away from media hysteria and the medical lobby's hyperbole, the facts are plain: we are drinking less than we did 100 years ago, more than we did 50 years ago and less than we did 5 years ago. We are middle-weights in the European drinking league and the fact that we have a lot of knob-heads causing problems in our towns and cities at the weekend is because there a lot of knob-heads in the UK. The reasons for that is a whole other story, but it has nothing to do with advertising, happy hours or the price of lager. 

It is doubtful that even the British Medical Association really believes that charging 50p a unit or banning Guiness adverts will make the slightest difference to rates of consumption, but that is not really the objective. The objective is to officially identify drinking as 'bad' in the same way that smoking is 'bad'. From that starting point, all else follows.

Smoking, drinking and obesity: a recent history of attacks

THIS IS TURNING INTO A MAMMOTH POST, SO I'M GOING TO SPLIT IT OR I'LL LOSE THE THREAD...

PART 1: SMOKING
FoREST have launched a new campaign called Save Our Pubs and Clubs—launched at the Buckingham Arms last week—which aims to amend the smoking ban to allow smoking areas in pubs and clubs (do go and sign up). You know, allowing landlords a modicum of freedom in deciding what should be allowed on their own, private, premises.

As some of you may know, your humble Devil is vaguely involved with FoREST's 30^th Anniversary celebrations and, whilst we were being wined and dined—courtesy of FoREST—in Boisdale in March, I decided to ask our host, "we all know that you are funded largely by the tobacco companies, so I feel I have to ask—what is your sponsors' objective?"

Our host replied that his sponsors wanted to stop the denormalisation of smoking. Recently, The Free Society carried an article recently, explaining what "denormalisation" means.

The government has added a terrifying new word to its lexicon. The word is ‘denormalise’ and we should be very, very afraid of it.

It is trotted out by the Government’s chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson when he’s having a pop at smokers. In fact, this verb is entirely directed at them.

But he doesn’t say that, of course. Sir Liam simply wants to ‘denormalise’ smoking. But smoking can’t be denormalised, only smokers, which means that for the first time in our history it is government policy to cast opprobrium upon a sizeable minority of the people it is paid to govern.
...

By denormalisation, he is setting up smokers to be scorned, frowned upon and suffer all the nasty bits of discrimination. This, among our politicians, is the ultimate evil when it comes to racism and sexism but is now perfectly acceptable, indeed desirable, when used against a minority of, ooh, 10 million or so.

A national health service for all – except for smokers. The right to work – except for smokers. Doesn’t sit well, does it? Replace the word smoker with black, or Jew, or woman, and for those people contributing billions of extra pounds to government coffers, it truly sticks in the craw.

This is the nature of modern government, though. Doctors are now talking of refusing to treat fat people. Perhaps they should be denormalised, too? Or how about drivers who decide to spend their hard-earned cash on a sturdy Range Rover instead of a nice Toyota Prius? Denormalisation is the least they can expect.

And another article points out the tactics by which the government and fake charities aim to achieve this.

Government ministers across the UK have often used the term ‘denormalise’ to describe the motivation behind their anti-smoking policies. They say their intention is to denormalise smoking as an activity, but the inevitable result, and arguably the real agenda, is the denormalisation of smokers as individuals.

It is difficult to ignore the Orwellian nature of ‘denormalisation’. It could have come straight from the pages of 1984, where a totalitarian authority seeks to control not only the actions, but the thoughts and feelings of its oppressed citizens. With the invention of ‘newspeak’ Orwell showed us how language and propaganda can be used to achieve conformity and obedience, whether through the creation of phantom threats, or the relentless drive to make everyone think and act the same way, lest they be guilty of a ‘thoughtcrime’.

Of course, if you want chapter and verse on all of these tactics, then I highly recommend that you buy Chris Snowden's excellent Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (use that link and earn cash for your humble Devil!)—Chris covers everything in fine detail.

Back in April 2007, your humble Devil covered a story about how the EU wanted to ban smoking outdoors.

The EU is now considering a proposal signalling the first move to limit smokers' right to puff away outdoors. It states that, as well as a ban on lighting up in all workplaces and public buildings across Europe: 'Restrictions could also be extended to outdoor areas around entrances to buildings and possibly to other outdoor public places where people sit or stand in immediate proximity to each other, such as open air stadiums and entertainment venues, bus shelters, train platforms etc.'

I can't help thinking that the EU really should put its own fucking house in order before ordering everyone else about, the stinking bunch of whore-cunt, fuck-stick arse-wipes.

Remember the ban on smoking in the European Parliament? And how they backtracked after only 6 weeks?

UKIP MEPs and staffers were fairly instrumental in having that ban lifted, quite simply by refusing to stop smoking. And UKIP are now urging civil disobedience because—yes, you guessed it—the proposed outside smoking ban has raised its ugly, totalitarian head again.

SMOKING outside pubs and offices could be banned under plans to be announced by the European Union tomorrow.

Brussels bureaucrats want to outlaw it in areas like beer gardens and covered patios – and even extend it to concerts such as last weekend’s Glastonbury Festival.

The European Commission says the current ban in enclosed public places doesn’t go far enough and non-smokers are still in danger.

Are they? Are they really? This large study on the effects of passive smoking—published in the British Medical Journal—would seem to disagree.

No significant associations were found for current or former exposure to environmental tobacco smoke before or after adjusting for seven confounders and before or after excluding participants with pre-existing disease. No significant associations were found during the shorter follow up periods of 1960-5, 1966-72, 1973-85, and 1973-98.

Conclusions The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.

Well, what a fucking surprise. Well, actually it isn't, because there are no studies showing significant health risks from second-hand smoke—and Roy Castle can go fuck himself.

But who would have thought that governments and fake charities would whip up hysteria on the very flimsiest of pretexts in order to gain control? Who'da fucking thunk it?

So, the EU ban has no medical evidence to support it whatsoever—and I know I have cited only one report, but there are many others—but the EU wishes to press ahead regardless. Indeed, as my peripatetic Greek friend highlights, the EU has even induced the Greeks to introduce a ban—although the Greeks have instituted it in a typically Greek way.

By the way, it is very much worth considering that, whilst one arm of the EU is trying to stamp out tobacco smoking, another is very much encouraging tobacco: the EU subsidised tobacco growing to the tune of €920 million (£620 million) in 2007 alone. Can anyone say, "hypocrisy"?

Meanwhile, back in Britain in 2007, we introduced our ban and did so in what has become a typically English way—over-budget by £100 million for a total, in 2007, of £1.6 billion—and with copious use of undercover spies to ensure its enforcement.

The project of denormalisation was started with a specially high fine for littering, i.e. dropping a cigarette butt, of £80.

With the war on smokers well on the way, the next undesirable thing to be hit must be drinking...

PART 2: DRINKING
Of course, your humble Devil has been tracking the progress of the denormalisation of drinking for a good long while now; many of the major stories were sumarised in this post in which I... er... commented on the proposed cigarette packet-style warning labels to appear on booze.

But it is because these fuckers always need to find something to ban in order to justify their own existence. So, fox-hunting and fags are nearly conquored, so it's time to move strongly against alcohol. We can hardly pretend to be surprised; the attacks have come fast and furious over the last few years: we had surgeon John Smith trying to limit people to three drinks a night, the EU Commission report on "passive drinking", health "experts" setting ludicrous "binge-drinking" definitions, the Preston police trying to ban "vertical drinking", the bloody EU (again) trying to curb alcohol advertising, the move to ensure that all drinks in pubs are served in plastic recepticles, and Patsy cocking Hewitt begging the Chancellor for some of that hot Polly-style lovin' much higher alcohol taxes.

This last was one of my more vitriolic posts and this one paragraph basically sums up my attitude towards all of these attempts to infringe on my freedom to get absolutely stoshus.

Go fuck youself, you stinking apology for a cunt of a human being; did I say human being? I meant hideous chicken-brained whore of a monkey's arse dipped in aubergine surprise—the surprise being that it is made of aubergines and shit, shit, shitty-shit-shit-shit—and mashed up with the pus-filled discharge of a diseased, eighty-year-old whore's raddled, smelly and very badly-packed kebab. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you cunting cunt cuntitty cunt cunt. Tit.

So there.

Where do we find these bloody parasitic busybodies, eh? We are crying out for more scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, doctors, nurses, anyone competent and all we seem to end up with is these fucking killjoy scum.

Needless to say, the war on drinkers has escalated over the last few years: my colleague, The Filthy Smoker, covered some of the egregious lies and distortions being pushed by the government and its satellite fake charities only a few days ago. One of the things that he covered was the obviously faked "deaths from alcohol" figures...

According to the ONS, there were 509,090 deaths in England and Wales in 2008 and there were 6,541 deaths related to alcohol in England. That last figure doesn't include Wales so let's be generous and add a further 500 deaths for the sheep-worriers.

Which gives us a total number of about 7,000, or 1.38% of all deaths.

Of course, that doesn't give us the percentage for the whole of Europe, but seeing as we're supposedly some of the worst drinkers in Europe (another fucking lie), that should be considered a conservative estimate. Still nowhere near 10% though, is it? It's not even close to the 1 in 25—or 4%—claimed for the whole world, and for that global total you need to factor in a billion muslims who don't drink at all, plus God knows how many people who haven't got a pot to piss in, let alone a pub to get pissed in.

The thing is, as Costigan Quist pointed out (a tip of the horns to Dick Puddlecote and his rather good post around this subject), the British are not drinking significantly more than we used to.

Are we drinking more now than a decade ago?
No. You can look at all the data and see that pretty much everyone, men and women, all age groups, are drinking about the same as we were in 1992 and in 1996.

The only significant change I can see is that drinking amongst young people rose from 1994 to 2000, but has been falling since and is now back to where it started. Indeed, Conservatives might like to bear in mind that by far the biggest increase in young people drinking was from 1994-1997, in the second half of the Major administration.

The figures are confused because of the new alcohol units measurement. Remember that the number of units in drinks was recently revised upwards (there was a big advertising campaign, with the new unit value in foam on the beer glass and things like that). Some of the so-called increase seems to be down to this revision - the rises disappear in the like-for-like figures.

As an example, suppose you drink a glass of wine a day, which used to be one unit. The reality is that your alcohol consumption hasn't changed. If we jump onto the new figures, it looks like you're suddenly drinking more units (last year you drank 1 unit a day, this year you drink 1.5 units a day).

The Rowntree report shows both. Unless I've totally misunderstood the figures, it makes sense to compare like with like for trends. On the like-for-like figures, we're all drinking about the same - some a tiny bit more, some a bit less.

Has binge drinking for women doubled?
The shock headline is that twice as many women are binge drinking, but that appears to be utter rubbish.

It relies on this new units system. Funnily enough, if you count a glass of wine as 1.5 units instead of 1, the number of women drinking more that six units in any day suddenly rises. What a shock!

When you compare like with like, the proportion of men and women binge drinking is lower in 2006 (the latest year given in the study) than for any year in the last decade.

But, of course, we bloggers point all of this out in vain. For, as a few email correspondents pointed out to me, only a couple of days later some similar lies were wheeled out, by the state's mouthpiece, regarding alcohol mortality in the Scots.

Alcohol may have caused the death of twice as many Scots as previously thought, an NHS study has found.

Researchers used a new method of calculating alcohol-related deaths which is said to more accurately reflect the damage done by drinking.

By "more accurately", what they actually mean is that the study used a new method of lying—by chucking in all of the diseases, such as stomach cancer, that might possibly be caused by drinking (but for which there is little to no evidence, and which might be caused by many other things as well)—in order to provide some shock figures.

But why? Well, we'll come onto that.

The parallels with the attacks on smoking are alarming; indeed, the strategy is spelt out very clearly by the author of the Lancet study cited by the Filthy Smoker, above.

"The big message is treat alcohol like tobacco..."

The sequence is fairly simple really. The first thing that you do is to regulate the substance, e.g. through licensing, age restrictions, etc.; you need to concentrate on the health risks associated with the substance; you need to exaggerate the figures, by lying if necessary; then you need to appeal to those who don't like said substance and try to imply that they are suffering even if they do not indulge (e.g. second-hand smoke, third-hand smoke, passive drinking) to get them on board (after all, get a big enough minority and they'll be able to force their prejudice on others through the ballot box). All of these get the denormalisation ball rolling, and now you have enough support to start the legislative bans, and more subtle bans.

I have complained before about those signs in shops that insist that say things like...

If you look under 21, we will need ID of proof of age when purchasing alcohol.

My local Sainsbury's has changed it to 23 recently. Why? The drinking age is 18: why 21, or 23, or 25? And why would a shop try to restrict people from purchasing items? Because the state has insisted on it, through subtle or overt pressure. The state is denormalising the buying of alcohol.

And the bans? Well, they have started already.

More than 700 “controlled drinking zones” have been set up across England, giving police sweeping powers to confiscate beer and wine from anyone enjoying a quiet outdoor tipple.

Local authorities are introducing the zones at a rate of 100 a year, The Times has learnt. Some cover whole cities, a radical departure from what the law intended.

Yup, that's right: the law never intended that, eh? Don't fucking make me laugh: this is precisely what the law intended.

The signs all around the shops—much like the ones pertaining to tobacco, and the moves to push cigarettes under the counter—are to denormalise the buying of these substances.

These public bans are about denormalising the drinking of alcohol—in precisely the way in which they are attempting to stamp out smoking in films (or even to edit or erase cartoons that show it).

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."—1984, George Orwell.

The thinking is that if people are not seen to be drinking or smoking, then these activities do not exist—or, rather, they are not normal.

Yes, at present people can smoke and drink in their homes and private cars but, as has been spelt out by the director of ASH Scotland, the state is moving to stop this too. Indeed, they have made a start, as far as alcohol is concerned, by advocating higher and higher age limits—with more dire and unrealistic warnings—for any kind of exposure to alcohol.

Once a control zone is in place, police can seize alcohol from anyone who is not on licensed premises, even if the bottles or cans are unopened. Although drinking is not banned in the zones, police can ask anyone to stop drinking and it is an offence to refuse, punishable by a maximum £500 fine. No explanation or suspicion that the person could be a public nuisance is required. The highest fine will soon rise to £2,500.
...

Laws giving local authorities the power to set up the zones, or “designated public place orders”, were introduced in 2001 at the height of government concern over public drunkenness.

Note that they were introduced because of "government concern"—with the stress firmly on the word "government". Generally, the people were not—and are not—screaming for bans on drinking in public.

The law made clear that the zones should cover only streets or city centre areas with a record of alcohol-related disorder or nuisance.

There are now 712 zones, some covering vast areas where there is no record of disorder. There are city-wide bans in Coventry and Brighton, which cover even the quietest suburban streets. Birmingham tried to introduce a city-wide ban but had to back down in the face of public opposition.

And has Birmingham respected the wishes of the public?

Instead it is introducing the drinking zones gradually across the city.

No. It is sneaking the ban through piecemeal, deliberately ignoring the wishes of the people of the city.

Camden in North London has a borough-wide ban, apart from Hampstead Heath, Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. The Times has learnt that Lambeth in South London is planning to make the whole borough a controlled zone, with no exemptions, even in Brockwell Park, a local beauty spot that is popular with picnickers.

What? Fuck. Fucking Lambeth bastards...

Research on the zones has been conducted by The Manifesto Club, a campaign group that challenges what it sees as excessive regulation.

Note the careful use of the passive tense there—the media are on the government's side, make no mistake. An excellent example of this fawning can be seen on the BBC website where—despite a poll showing that the percentage of teenagers drinking weekly has dropped from 50% to 38%—the headline screams "Youngsters 'drinking dangerously'". OMG! Teh horrors!

It found that police are routinely ignoring Home Office guidelines and confiscating bottles of wine and beer from peaceful picnickers and other adults having a quiet drink outdoors. In some cases, drinks have allegedly been seized by police from adults who have just bought them from an off licence and are on their way home.

So, what have we got here?

Well, we have the police making up the laws as they go along, and with no comeback at all; the police are now a law unto themselves. We are, quite literally, living in a police state.

Most terrifyingly of all, to my mind, we have state agencies, like Birmingham, that have given up any kind of pretense of governing in the name of the people that they are supposed to serve.

The political classes are now so sure that the British people are too cowed to resist any of these hideous restrictions in their traditional freedoms that they feel able to do precisely what they want to do: and it is the sheer, terrifying confidence in the security of their tenure that really scares me.

We do not live in a democracy, or anything approaching one: we live in an elected dictatorship in which we live our lives by permission of—and only as far as—the oligarchy wish us to.

And they are about to deprive us of yet more of our rights and freedoms, as well as the services that we have paid for...

PART 3: OBESITY

It's been slightly delayed, I'm afraid, and I have lost a lot of the fire with which I started—as such, this is going to be a quick wrap-up (although I shall return to this theme often).

So now we need to consider "fat people". The recent attacks on food consumption have been almost as unrelenting as those on booze—although not yet as dangerous for the companies involved.

People like Amanda Platell in the Daily Hate have long been railing against the overweight—asking why they should be treated on the NHS (um... because, like everyone else, they are forced to pay for it, Amanda?)—and, recently, one fucking cunt of a doctor whinged on about how "fat celebrities" were making being overweight seem "normal".

As usual, things are not so black and white: after all, some studies have shown that overweight people can actually live longer.

Much as the scares about salt and water were, to be frank, bollocks. But that hasn't stopped the goverment and fake charities attacking the likes of MacDonalds or Sainsbury's or other food retailers.

In fact, via The Englishman (again), it is salt and fat that make food tasty.

...fat and salt makes food taste good. There is no point taking all the fat and salt out of your food because people won't like it and they will eat with someone else.

Fife-based nutritionist Carina Norris said : "Ideally, we would like people to start weaning themselves off these tastes and on to healthier options."

I think that they call this "choice editing"...

"But failing that, it would be great if restaurants and manufacturers did their own bit by taking salt and fat out of foods."
Ms Norris added: "The problem from a business point of view is that no-one wants to be the first one to take fat and salt out of their foods and make them less tasty. People would go somewhere else."

But, once again, this isn't actually about the science at all—this is about conforming with the authorities' agenda. As the Free Society article said...

What Sir Liam Donaldson and his ilk are saying, in other words, is that in order to be a part of society, we have to be like them. That is to say we should be slim, non-smoking cyclists who like rambling and other wholesome pursuits. Our aspirations should be nothing less that aiming to live for ever.

Of course, the concept that I should be like that fat, ginger cunt Sir Liam Donaldson fills me with horror, but it is entirely in line with these bastards' agenda—we proles should all be forced to live under one set of rules, but the ruling apparatchiks need not conform at all. It's very Stalinist, is it not?

CONCLUSION

There are common threads running through all of these campaigns—as has been pointed out numerous times. Even the drinks industry responses utilise exactly the same doomed methods that the smoking industry used before it.

And whatever happens, it is you and I who are going to suffer. Why? Well, because we might like the occasional smoke, or a drink. Because every now and then, nothing hits the spot like a Stinky Mac's. And the aim of the state is to stamp out these things—to "denormalise" them.

Eventually, they will go. And the state has learned the lesson of the American Prohibition—the problem was that people didn't want to give up drink, and no one thought that drinking was inherently wrong.

That is what denormalisation aims to achieve—a society in which drinking, smoking or eating fatty foods is actively wrong, frowned upon. A society in which these things are regarded as morally wrong, not merely illegal.

In fact, the establishment is moving further towards the idea of "choice-editing" as advocated last year by a piece of crap called Tim Lang. Readers might recall the bloated and unhealthy look of Sir Liam Donaldson as I quote the relevant paragraphs from the above-linked post...

Tim Lang is a dangerous cunt who should be ignored and, if he insists on pushing his worthless opinions forward, he should be actively removed. For he conforms to the Devil's first rule of those who advocate totalitarianism...

Those who advocate restrictions in people's choices always assume that they will be the ones who decide what those choices are to be. Those who advocate totalitarianism, of however mild or serious a flavour, always see themselves as the ones in power.

People like Tim Lang are taking over and—most insultingly—they are using our money to constrain our lives. And, so they claim, for our own good.

One day, quite soon (in historical terms), these cunts will win: we won't smoke, and we won't drink, and we will eat our tasteless food in front of the idiot-box with one eye on the door—waiting for the police or other inspectors to visit. We will all be equal in misery, apart from the people who rule us—they will be in expensive dachas, eating tasty food, feeling worthy (in that they have helped us all be more equal) but not uncomfortable (for the rules won't apply to them).

And fuck me—that's going to be a miserable world...

Madoff: another perspective...

... that's precisely the same as mine.

From everything I've read on the subject, his client base incorporated all strata of society. The mega rich. The super rich. The very rich. And the good old-fashioned just plain rich.
...

So I can't really empathise with Madoff's client list of distraught millionaires, multi-millionaires and billionaires. Anyone in that league should be smart enough to know that you don't put all your financial eggs in one basket. Hell, I'm no Wall Street wizard - but even I've heard of the old saying 'if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.'

Well, quite. And the thing that absolutely gripped my shit was the judge—who, judging by the way that he played to the gallery on this, obviously fancies being a Hollywood star—described Madoff's crimes as "extraordinarily evil".

What. The. Fuck?

I think that I shall let Juliette explain why that is such a fucking stupid thing to say...

Furthermore, anyone who says Madoff''s pure evil and deserves his absurd 150-year sentence frankly needs to get a grip.

Because there's no shortage of real pure evil in this world of ours.

Here's an obscure story to think about. This is pure evil. Not a single person involved got more than eight years.

Here's a rather less obscure story to think about. This is also pure evil. And everyone involved could be out in ten years.

If you genuinely believe that ripping off some spoilt, rich, greedy fuckers who should have known a hell of a lot better is more evil than torturing a five-year-old child to death, you seriously need to sort out your fucking priorities.

But it's awfully reassuring that Madoff's down for the full 150 years, and he'll never be free in his lifetime. Because, let's face it, this man is one hell of a scary figure. And now, when you're next in bed on your own and hear shattering glass downstairs, you can rest assured that - whoever just broke your kitchen window—it's not a frail 71-year-old con merchant with too many houses.

If you're lucky, maybe it'll just be these guys.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Don't get me wrong: what Madoff did was bad, but "extraordinarily evil"? Fuck off, Judge Denny Chin: fuck off to Hollywood and get yourself a part in a fucking shit melodrama, you twat.

Or, at the very least, why don't you go out and buy yourself a Fucking Sense of Proportion? Apparently they are giving them away absolutely free when you buy yourself a Fucking Cluebat...

Another turd in the offing (update)

Newly-minted Labour Whip Kerry McCarthy is positively salivating over Gordo's doomed 5 Year Tractor Production Plan plan for Building Britain's Future.

We're finally going to move towards an elected House of Lords, or a Senate as it might be called. The current life peers will be replaced in tranches, or so I understand it, by elected members.

Oh, goody-goody gum-drops—another House stuffed with corrupt, self-serving party apparatchiks and venal, mindless lobby-fodder.

I can hardly contain my joy.

It seems that, far from realising that they have utterly fucked up the country and buggering off both quickly and quietly, NuLabour are intending to entrench themselves in at least one House for as long as possible—because you can bet that it'll be bloody socialists stuffing the red benches.

Fucking hellski.

UPDATE: I left a comment similar to the above over at Kerry's place. Her response was as follows:

DK—your alternative to democratic elections is what, precisely?

To which I have replied thusly...

Kerry,


As The Bloke's Cookbook said [in that he maintained that I objected to "the travesty of democracy that sits in the House of Commons", rather than democracy per se].

But I do not value democracy, in that I don't think that it is a good system (and certainly not the "representative" democracy that we have)—to cite the old canard, it's just the least worst.

Democracy delivers the tyranny of the majority, and not even a very big majority at that. What this means is that democracy delivers a system whereby a majority can vote, for instance, to steal as much of my money—or the money of the minority—as they like, and I cannot object. Nor can I opt out.

That is morally wrong. But at least, some will say, democracy allows the majority to vote out a bad government.

Except that it doesn't—or not in our "democracy".

This government, Kerry, was elected by 21.6% of the electorate: that is tyranny of the minority.

For me, the virtue of the Lords was that they were not elected, and they did not have to curry favour with either the political parties or the electorate.

As such, they have tended to uphold the basic rights and freedoms—as defined by our constitution—of the minority: they have been the only defenders of those who are effectively disenfranchised by our "democracy".

DK

I have written a number of times about my dislike of democracy—especially the version that we practise—and I don't intend to rehearse my arguments right now (although I have another post on democracy and the lack of choice in the political parties in the offing).

I am always surprised at the fact that so many on the Left are fans of democracy: they seem constantly to back laws against the oppression of, say, homosexuals or ethnic communities, whilst being more than happy to oppress libertarians, etc. in order to achieve their aims. But then I am well aware that the Left has no moral consistency—it's just thoroughly annoying when they paint themselves as the moral arbiters of society.

Anyway, if you'd like a similar, but better-argued, perspective on democracy, may I recommend Doctor Vee's rather good post on the subject.

And we're back. Sort of.

Your humble Devil is most gratified by the messages of support that he received when comtemplating retirement, and is pleased to assure his readers that he is back.

It is as though taking the hiatus—the very act of actively taking a few days off—has allowed me to take stock and find pleasure in writing again. I'm sure that it won't be the last occasion that I take some time off—I'm pretty sure that it isn't the first—but your humble Devil is back in the driving seat.

Having said that, I had intended to spend this evening doing a sweary round-up of the latest vicious assaults by the Righteous on the pleasurable activity known as "drinking"; however, I am afraid that it will have to wait.

I decided, for 'tis the season, to watch Wimbledon: I do love films in which the self-effacing, rather posh Englishman comes out on top. I can't imagine why. Hem-hem.

This therapy—for therapy it is—was induced by reading this A List Apart article on "burnout" last night: after ticking five of the six signs that one may be "flirting with burnout" without hesitation, I have realised that I have been working, almost non-stop (including most evenings and weekends), since April last year.

As the article points out, it is all too easy to let work consume your life—especially as a web designer and when one is always attached to one's email, IM, phone, or whatever. Bouts of severe insomnia combined a constant background feeling of anxiety, are just two of the symptoms—I was so tired this morning that I fell over twice through dizziness before I'd got out of the flat. In short, I'm making myself ill.

So, I have decided that it's time to "stop, decompress, communicate, and focus": the blogging hiatus was a part of that process that I had unwittingly started. I have a little more work on my work-life balance to sort out, but part of that readjustment will be making more room for that weird "life" bit—and blogging is very much more "life" than "work".

Anyway, this has turned from the intended short apology notice into a small, confessional novella but the single point with which I started remains: you'll just have to wait until tomorrow for your humble Devil's attack on the Righteous of the Temperance Movement—but I shall endeavour to make it worth the wait...

Regards,

DK

Madoff gets silly prison sentence

This cartoon comes from the December 2008 issue of the US magazine, Liberty. It might just as well have appeared in a British publication—had any of our MSM the balls to publish the truth.

The aptly-named Bernie Madoff has been sentenced.

Bernard Madoff has been given the maximum prison sentence of 150 years for masterminding a massive fraud that robbed investors of $65bn (£40bn).
...

Madoff's firm was investigated eight times by the US Securities and Exchange Commission over the past 16 years, because it made exceptional returns.

The greedy buggers investors who piled into Madoff's firm seem not to have heard of the maxim "if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is". Although, to be fair to said investors, it is obvious that Madoff was, in fact, an exceptional con-man and that the US Securities and Exchange Commission was, in fact, quite spectacularly useless.

Madoff's crime, you will remember, was to run a Ponzi Scheme—in effect, a fraud in which investors' returns are paid purely from the money flowing in from new investors, rather than from any profit earned.

£40 billion pounds is, of course, an awful lot of money to have swindled over the course of nearly twenty years.

However, as I have consistently pointed out, Madoff's fraud is nowhere near the scale of the British governments' National Insurance—which has been running since 1911 and will defraud "investors" of some £104 billion this year alone [PDF].

The only major difference between NICs and Madoff's scam is that the latter's investors could choose whether or not they wished to invest in Madoff's scheme, and at what level.

Under NICs, not only must we pay 11% of our salary—under threat of fines and prison (whether we recognise that the wholescheme is a big, fat fraud or not)—but our employers must pay another 12.8% too.

And whilst Madoff—when faced with the prospect of being unable to repay the money—gave himself up, what is the response of our government? It is to press the gun to our heads once again, and insist that we not only up our investment into the scam but also that we make up the shortfall in delivery with yet more of our money—even though anyone on the median wage could source the services elsewhere for about half the money.

Yes, Madoff has committed a massive fraud. But it is absolutely fucking nothing compared to the colossal—and compulsory—Ponzi Scheme forced on the British people for nearly a century.

And whilst a weekend at Bernie's* will not be nearly so fun from now on, our politicians continue to live high on the hog (on money extorted from us) and suffer no legal consequences whatsoever.

Justice is a funny thing, eh?

* I couldn't resist it.

Norwich North by-election

So, the anticipated date for the Norwich North by-election—triggered by the deselection and subsequent resignation of unrepentant, troughing Labour bastard Dr Ian Gibson—has been announced, and it is expected to be on the 23^rd July.

On the day that ConHome announce that 18 year old Oliver Johnstone has become the youngest Conservative Association Chairman in history (a tip of the horns to Iain Dale), the Libertarian Party has announced that it is fielding the youngest candidate ever to stand for Parliament—18 year old Thomas Burridge.

Brown and Cameron and Clegg have all given their support to the involvement of younger people in the parliamentary system, now let's see what the voters think.

Thomas agrees and has this to say:

"Most sensible people will be saying 'what the hell does he know about anything?' Well this is what I do know: the last twelve years of Labour has left my generation in massive debt; my generation will be paying off the excesses of the last twelve years for the rest of our lives; not only my generation, but our as yet unborn children.

"Did we have any say in spending the rest of our lives in debt? No we did not.

"I am from the Debt Generation, and only LPUK has fresh answers from a new Generation."

At 18 Thomas is very mature, despite his very youthful looks, so don't be fooled, and don't be put off by the already mounting voices who are saying that he cannot know anything at 18.

Thomas recognises the debts, knows where the faults lie, and has answers and policies that can make a real difference to the way in which we are governed.

This is LPUK's first Parliamentary election and we are likely to be out-gunned and out-spent. However, we intend to adopt the same tactic that gained us 7% of the vote in the recent council election—we intend to go knocking on doors.

If you would like to help out—either financially or, just as importantly, on the ground—then we would love to have your support: I shall let you know in a wee bit how you can most effectively do that.

In the meantime, and via the Daily (Maybe), Ladbrokes' odds on LPUK winning in Norwich North are 500/1. Perhaps I'll shove a few quid on, just for a bit of a giggle...

Gordon Brown + Ed Balls = bankruptcy

Ed Balls: "I'm gonna get mediaeval on yo' ass. Oh no, wait.. That's wrong. What I meant to say was: 'by the time that we've finished with the economy, you'll know what it was like to live in mediaeval times'."

Seriously, is Gordon Brown living in some kind of fucking fantasy world?

Gordon Brown is to reject warnings about the scale of the public debt and press on with high levels of spending through the recession, according to the Prime Minister's closest [surely that should be "only"?—Ed.] ally Ed Balls.

What the hell? For fuck's sake, can't some Civil Servant go over there with a bloody abacus and do some simple sums for the Gobblin' King? Y'know, and illustrate that we cannot fucking afford this!

Mr Brown's determination to boost spending on frontline services will be underlined with the launch of his much vaunted national plan for public services on Monday.

His Building Britain's Future document includes a number of proposals which will require significant Government spending.

Fucking hellski...

This will include the announcements of new funding for social housing and the recruitment of 100,000 personal tutors as part of an education White Paper.

Personal fucking tutors? I though that the education system under NuLabour was the best in the known world—what the hell do you need personal tutors for? Unless, of course, you have bollocksed up the education system which then begs the question—why the bloody hell do you think you'll be able to run a system of personal tutors, using yet more money that we don't have?

Mr Balls, the Children's Secretary, has defied suggestions from Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, that immediate action was required to check the levels of public borrowing.

Because, obviously, journo-turned-wonk Ed Balls—a creepy and undistinguished minister in the most financially profligate government in British history—is in a far better position to judge economic policy than the Governor of the Bank of England, eh?

He indicated increased spending on front line services such as schools and hospitals, and hinted for the first time that the police may also be protected from the cuts.

Yeah, well, once the people of this country wake up to the enormity of the fuck-up that you have delivered to them and their children (and probably their grandchildren), you are going to need the police on your side, aren't you?

The disclosure that ministers have little intention of reigning back on spending in the short term came as the Centre for Economics and Business Research warned that public spending was set to rise to 50 per cent of gross domestic product by the end of the next financial year.

How many different ways can I possibly say this: we cannot sustain this level of spending! No country can operate for any length of time when the government is spending more than half of the economic output!

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck fuck-fuck.

Alistair Darling, who narrowly avoided being replaced as Chancellor by Mr Balls in this month's reshuffle, was said to be planning to shield the true condition of the economy from the public in the run-up to the election by cancelling the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Treasury's biennial economic report card.

The last CSR was in 2007, but Mr Darling is said to feel that detailed forward-planning on the economy was impossible while the full impact and extent of the recession remained unclear. It is expected this will be after the next general election.

Oh. My. God. I... I... Just what the bloody hell is going on? How can these people possibly carry on spending at this rate when they know that they—we—don't have the money to pay for it?

Fucking hellski: we really are totally bastard screwed. Because Gordon Brown is living in a fucking fantasy world where al of this is somehow possible.

Fuck.

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist—earn your favourite sweary bloggers some cash

Buy Velvet Glove, Iron Fist through The Kitchen and help pay for your favourite sweary bloggers...

As some will know, I attended the launch of Christopher Snowdon's new book—Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History Of Anti-Smoking—last week. The event was very kindly sponsored by FoREST (which was also celebrating its 30th Anniversary) and hosted at Boisdales: a very good time was had by all. Well, as far as I remember, anyway...

Anyway, as I have also said before, I have read the book and it is thoroughly excellent—not bee-in-your-bonnet preachy, just a very interesting history of the anti-smoking movements, the sometimes eccentrically charismatic or just plain barking people leading some of them, and a good deal of the research carried out on both sides.

Here are a selection of reviews:

• "Magnificent...I can't speak highly enough of this extraordinary labour of love. I've read many books on smoking and this is best by far. It's a superb read."—Taking Liberties


• "Really very good...a damn good read"—Devil's Kitchen


• "Solidly researched, interesting and only occasionally strident"—The Economist


• "The book is a feast. Prepare to learn a lot, and much in the nature of revelations, from a dedicated researcher and lucid prose stylist."—Forces


• "I am proud to go on record in giving this book a fully deserved five stars."—Michael J. McFadden


• "Fascinating. Extensive research, and extremely well-written...Excellent, excellent book. Would recommend it to anyone because it's such an eye-opener from a number of angles."—Amazon reviwer


• "This is a great example of what history should be. It's thoroughly researched but doesn't get bogged down in the details, and it's so well written that it keeps your interest to the end."—Amazon reviewer

Now you can buy Velvet Glove, Iron Fist through The Kitchen and not only get free postage and packing but also earn money for both your humble Devil and the Filthy Smoker—for both of us contributed to Chris's book in our own small ways.

What more could you ask for...?

Not content with bringing our Parliament into disrepute, now—through ignorance—they would destroy it

So, the dust has settled on the expenses affair and our elected representatives have been found sorely lacking. MPs have raped and pillaged the expenses system, using our money not only to fund their lavish lifestyles but also to exempt themselves from the laws that they impose on us—most notably ensuring that they need pay no tax on benefits-in-kind (for many of these claims were not expenses at all, but benefits that, for anyone else, would have been taxable).

However, with truly astonishing stupidity, these venal idiots have come up with a set of solutions that are worse than the original problem. After all, fixing the expenses system would not have been difficult: forcing the annual publishing of all (unredacted) receipts, removing the benefits-in-kind tax exemption and allowing the recall of any MP by his or her constituents would have gone a long way to sort out even the perception of wrong-doing—let alone the ability to get away with it.

But no: the government has decided that they need yet another stupid, expensive and unaccountable QUANGO to ensure that our lords and masters can keep their pudgy, grasping little hands out of the cookie jar.

Your humble Devil opposed this from the outset—if only because it would potentially stop us being able to obtain the details of the expenses under FoI. Besides, if our 646 MPs are unable to manage themselves, then what possible moral (or practical) justification can they put forward for attempting to manage 60 million of us?

None.

However, it gets worse, as Raedwald pointed out, having examined the text of the proposed Bill.

Make no mistake. This is an anti-democratic, pernicious and malign little Bill. Consider this provision;

• An order under this section may provide .. for specified property, rights and liabilities which subsist wholly or mainly for the purposes of the House of Commons to be transferred to the IPSA by a scheme

You see, Brown's new Quango doesn't merely check MPs' claims—it pays them. Rather than Parliament owning its own pay chest and being its own master, MPs will now be employed by the government. Brown has taken Parliament's resources from them. And who decides just how much of Parliament's property, rights and liabilities are to be transferred to the government? Why, a government minister, of course! With the complicity of Brown's Speaker, Mr Bercow;

• A scheme made by virtue of subsection (8) is to be made by a Minister of the Crown with the consent of the person who chairs the House of Commons Commission.

The last thing this nation needs is an Act that would pack the chamber with vile apparatchiks and 'professional' politicians, rob the Commons of its authority, turn our parliament into just a department of government and treat our MPs—returned by us to Parliament to exercise the thunderous powers and sovereignty of that body—as mere hirelings, irrelevant juniors.

As distasteful as we may find the corrupt and venal behaviour of the 646 bastards within the House of Commons, we should not confuse or conflate these odious people with Parliament itself. And what this Bill proposes to do is to make Parliament the servant of the government—to make the entirety of Parliament subservient to the Executive.

This is incredibly dangerous; part of the problem with governments over the last few decades is that they have increasingly come to see themselves as the masters of this country—the supreme power over you and I.

What many bloggers have campaigned for is a return to the situation wherein we, the people, wield the power in this country, and wherein MPs acknowledge that we only lend them our power for a short term. And, yes, we were gleeful at the expenses scandals because we thought that the power of the people might be reasserted over a chastened Parliament.

This Bill proposes the very opposite.

Ineffective though the House has been at holding the Executive to account, it was at least able to do it in small respects—especially as the power of this government has waned.

This Bill would remove even that check on an over-weaning Executive, and it most certainly returns no power to us. Indeed, as EUReferendum notes in a comment on Raedwald's post, it does the very opposite.

Such is the sagging morale of our MPs, and their slender grasp of constitutional and democratic principles, that they look to approving this with minimal debate and scrutiny, intent only on "restoring public confidence" in Parliament. Not for them the lesson of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the classic illustration of the principle that rushed law is always bad law.

As to The Telegraph's concerns about inhibiting high-quality people from standing for Parliament, the main deterrent is the singular fact that, progressively, this institution has been robbed of its powers (with the willing assent of its incumbents). Yet this Bill seeks to neuter Parliament even further, continuing its march towards irrelevance.

What is lost here is the very rationale for having Parliament in the first place. It does not belong to the MPs, or government. It is—or should be—our Parliament, there as a bastion against an over-powerful and oppressive executive. Anything that diminishes Parliament diminishes us.

Having lost the plot so long ago, however, our MPs are now conspiring in destroying what little authority they have left. But while they act in haste, we will be the ones to repent at leisure.

I have argued for sometime that Parliament has been giving away powers—to the European Union—that it has no entitlement to: the power is, I repeated many times, lent to them for a period no longer than five years—at the end of which, it must be returned.

Once again, it seems that MPs simply do not get it: yes, they have behaved disgracefully, and they should feel suitably ashamed. Yes, many of them should resign—and some already have.

However, this Bill will not make amends—this Bill will not fix the system. Indeed, it is more akin to them—having been found with their hands in the till—murdering the shopkeeper and burning down the store.

All is not lost, however: as The Sunday Times reports, some MPs seem to have realised the enormity of this desecration and strapped on some testicles.

GORDON BROWN’S plans to create a legally enforceable “code of conduct” for MPs are in turmoil as MPs and peers prepare to reject the scheme.

At least four senior MPs are to table amendments to water down or remove the proposals from the Parliamentary Standards Bill, which is going through the Commons this week.

They include Sir Stuart Bell, the Labour MP on the Commons Commission; Sir George Young, who chairs the committee on standards and privileges; and Alan Duncan, the shadow leader of the Commons. The House of Lords has also threatened to throw out the scheme.

It has emerged that neither Jack Straw, the justice secretary, who is charged with pushing through the legislation, nor Harriet Harman, the leader of the Commons,who unveiled the bill last week, knew about the plans for a code of conduct until they were announced by No 10 in The Sunday Times. Whitehall officials drew up new clauses to “fit the press release”.

The wording of the proposed law leaves it open to individuals to take parliament, or MPs, to court. Malcolm Jack, the most senior Commons official, has warned of “litigants trying to make a point”.

Another key section of the bill raises the prospect that the words of MPs, evidence given by witnesses to select committees and other Commons business, could be used as evidence in criminal proceedings, which would undermine the tradition of free speech under “parliamentary privilege”.

Again, via EUReferendum, it seems that the danger is so severe that Mystic Mogg has been coaxed out of his box to bend his great mind to producing a stern warning.

The House of Commons is in danger of cutting its own constitutional throat, but the Clerk of the House is trying to stop them. The clerk is Malcolm Jack, a man of scholarship and courage who is the ultimate referee on all constitutional questions which affect the Commons. His core duty is to advise the House, its Speaker, the committees and MPs on the practice and procedure of the House, and its rights.

Last Friday Dr Jack sent a memorandum to the Standards Committee on the “Privilege Aspects of the Parliamentary Standards Bill”. He gives a serious warning about particular aspects of the Bill, which is expected to be rushed through both Houses of Parliament before the summer recess. The Lords is due to rise on July 21, so time would be very limited. Rushed legislation is usually a disaster, and this would be legislation in a panic.

No shit. The article is well worth reading in full, as Mystic outlines the main concerns with the Bill, and Dr Jack's pedigree and position. But his conclusion is spot on.

The morale of the Commons has of course been shaken by the expenses scandal. I have never seen a comparable loss of confidence. Any healthy institution wants to extend its own authority. The Parliamentary Standards Bill is seeking to deal with a problem which is only too real. Yet the remedy which has been proposed is to reduce the existing rights and functions of the House of Commons, including self-regulation. This is a move in the wrong direction. If the Commons cannot restore its reputation by doing its job better, it will certainly not do so by demonstrating its lack of confidence in its own authority.

The new Bill proposes to create a regulator — the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority — to be called “Ipsa”, which will act as an independent authority for disciplining Parliament. No one in his or her right mind would contemplate joining such a preposterous body, which will start with no authority and is likely to be abolished as soon as anyone finds out that it has been built on sand. Quangos are always vulnerable: they have too many enemies and hardly any friends. They are appointed by politicians to suit their self-interest.

The Clerk of the House should be trusted, partly because he is the 50th in his line, of whom the first was appointed in 1363. If Ipsa is now appointed by Gordon Brown in 2009, it will be lucky to survive through 2010. Britain needs a strong and independent and new House of Commons, which would mean an early election; no one needs an ipsy-dipsy quango.

Quite so. Not only are QUANGOs subject to cronyism and manipulation by higher powers—in this case, the government—but they are democratically unaccountable and that is precisely what is not required in this case.

We need more information published on the internet—with scrutiny being driven by bloggers, if necessary. And, crucially, we need a channel to be able to do something about any abuses that we find—such as the ability to recall MPs.

After all, have politicians not bemoaned the lack of public engagement? This apathy is caused—I, and others like me, believe—by the sense that we can never find out what these bastards are up to and, even if we could, there is nothing that we can do about it.

The publication of documents—such as department spending and MPs' expenses—would give people the opportunity to find out precisely where their money is going; the ability to recall MPs would give the people of this country the sense that they are able to ensure that our politicians are made accountable for their actions.

With a few simple strokes, we can go some way to making our politicians more honest, less proligate and less wasteful and we can re-engage the voters in the politics of this country.

Instead what they have presented us with is something that Raedwald quite rightly terms a Bill that...

... treats us all like fools and is as insulting as a gob of spittle in the face for the voters of Britain.

Well, seriously: what did you expect from the Cyclopean Gobblin' King?

The man has got to go, and so has this government; most of the rest of the MPs have proven themselves untrustworthy and stupid—at best. The only solution is an immediate General Election.

And how shall we force that...?

Hate and anonymity

Via Dizzy, I see that NuLabour is resorting to the desperate tactics of hatred, as reported by The Sunday Times.

“We don’t care if the commentators or the economists turn against us,” said one minister. “This is all about shoring up the base in the northern heart-lands, which we lost in the European elections. We don’t want or need them to understand the nuance of the argument. We just want them to hate the Tories again.”

Nice.

It strikes me that the Left always talk about "community" and "social justice" but, strangely, don't seem to apply it to their own. After all, if their supporters in the north really thought about these cuts then they might say to themselves, "do you know what? Maybe it is wrong that we keep voting in a government that steals the bread from the table of those in the south, to pay us feckless fuckers in the north."

No such fucking luck—because humans are fundamentally selfish creatures, and Lefties more than most.

But, on a tangential point, I can't actually judge the truth of this quote, because it is anonymous: what if this "one minister" isn't actually a minister? Or is actually Sir Ian Blair or something. Eh?

Come on, Fink, you cunt—give us a name. Where's the fucking name, Fink, you shitbag. Go on, give us the name. It's your duty to expose people, isn't it? You know, so that we can all judge whether they are who they say they are?

Come on, Fink, pull your finger out of your arsehole and go off, on your big white charger, to bring us the name of this so-called "minister". Ain't that what you do, Fink?

Or is it that you are just a hypocritical shitbag, Fink, still spending your weekends attempting to wash the oily taste of Rupert Murdoch's cock out of your filthy, fink mouth?

Come on, Fink: give us an answer—do...

LVT is not a good tax

There are a good number of people wandering about this here blogosphere who advocate a Land Value Tax (LVT): often citing Adam Smith, they claim that it is the "least worst" tax.

Over at Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce delivers a pretty comprehensive smack-down of LVT—inspired by regular commenter (here and there) Ian B.

However, I wanted to post this by the regular commentator, IanB, as it was too good to leave at the bottom of a very long thread about the flawed idea that land, qua land, is special, and must be singled out for tax because of its supposed uniqueness, as distinct from say, income or consumption:

"Liberty is based on a different presumption which has the virtue of making sense, which is that people should own property and do with it as they wish, because it is their property. And, honestly, if I save up and buy some land and plant a big garden on it for my retirement, I don't care whether you think it would be better used for a glue factory because that would return you some externality that you can double charge for via your tax."

"This is why liberty and georgism are incompatible; you keep making claims on behalf of the community. Screw this "community" of yours. It has no rights or claims on me beyond the right to freely interact with me. The LVT is a crude social engineering plan. It attempts to maximise productivity of land. Liberty is not about maximising any statistical value- it is simply the principle that the person may do with themself and what is theirs what they wish. So long as they produce enough by whatever means to survive, there are no other demands upon their economic activity."

Exactly. Suffice to say, I doubt the LVT enthusiasts will give up (they are persistent, a bit like cockroaches that can apparently survive a nuclear blast). Question: why does this issue come up a lot on this site? Are we masochists? Well, libertarians obviously are against taxation, period, but there are grounds for debate on the least-worst form of tax; for what it is worth, some form of consumption tax is probably best in my view, not least because they tend to be fairly easy to collect, although there are still issues here.

Indeed, it is consumption taxes (preferably on luxuries) that I favour since they are as close to a voluntary tax as you can get—you don't have to buy things and thus you don't have to pay the tax.

And, of course, if the levels of tax are set, and the tax collected, locally, e.g. a Local Sales Tax, you can keep the levels of tax low through competition between different areas.

Further, consumption taxes, quite obviously, do take account of ability to pay: if you cannot afford to buy lots of nice shiny things, then you do not pay tax. If you are a multi-millionaire and you love nice shiny things, then you pay lots of tax. Very progressive, you see, but it doesn't disproportionately penalise people for the amount of money they earn.

Anyway, Johnathan continues to explain why LVT doesn't even work on its own terms, the first being the idea that LVT somehow stops property bubbles.

I don't know why Georgists should, for some reason, not give more weight to foolish central bank policy in causing asset price bubbles, or assume that property bubbles are bad, but other bubbles - like say, the dotcom one of the 1990s, are less so. One Georgist likes to raise the example of Hong Kong, which has a LVT. But that example won't fly as there have been big gyrations in the price of accomodation, which hardly suggests LVT did much to alleviate the situation, or by much. In fact I would say that proves pretty conclusively that LVT, on its own, cannot fix this sort of problem if monetary policy is deranged by Keynesian demand-management or other economic quackery.

Ah, yes, but at least land is fixed, is it not? Um...

There is another, even more fundamental problem with the Georgist position about land. The problem is that it does not distinguish between the fact that while land is, by definition, fixed, available land is not. This is why the likes of John Bates Clark, an economist of the late 19th Century, demolished the land value tax movement's arguments as did Murray Rothbard half a century later. Both men pointed out that the LVT argument ignores the fact that the price of land is driven by its marginal productivity, and in that sense is no different from labour or physical or human capital. To single out land for special tax treatment will lead to a misallocation of resources, encouraging more building density than is rational, etc. The total amount of land is fixed—obviously–but the total amount of sellable land is determined by the amount of marginal buyers and sellers, a very different thing. If demand is heavy enough, new land comes onstream. Just ask the Dutch.

Quite. Do go and read the rest of the post which, amongst other things, lays out Rothbard's case against Georgist taxes.

Big fucking numbers

There's an illuminating article in The Telegraph today, pointing out that... well... pointing out that the government is spending our future at an alarming rate.

Treasury figures show that welfare payments will exceed income tax receipts by almost £25 billion. Normally, income tax receipts comfortably cover the benefits bill.

In 2008/09, gross income tax receipts were £152.5 billion. In the same year, social security benefits cost the Exchequer £150.1 billion.

In 2009/10, the Treasury is expecting to take in £140.5 billion in gross income tax receipts. Social security benefits are projected to be £164.7 billion.

The disparity between tax revenue and welfare costs was identified by Andrew Brough, a fund manager at Schroder Investment Management, who suggested that the amount of money spent on social protection could soon exceed that raised from both income tax and national insurance.

According to an official Treasury forecast, benefits will cost £170.9 billion in 2010/11. That is equal to what the Government will spend on the NHS, schools and universities combined.

Fucking hell. Seriously, what the fuck is going on? Oh, hang on: let Charlotte Gore tell you...

It’s this ignorance of the ‘opportunity cost’ of money taken from the private sector and individuals by the Government that continues to baffle and amaze me. I’ve said before myself, the Government now spends more in a year than the entire wage earners of Britain earn combined. If you think about it, that sort of figure—over 700 billion—is the equivalent of 28 million private sector jobs. That’s 700,000,000,000 divided into the average wage of £25k. 28 million jobs. More new jobs than there’s people in the country to do them.

Yet it actually buys us a mere 5 million public sector jobs. And the biggest reason given for protecting Government spending? It’ll cost jobs. Ha. Good one. What… wait? You’re serious? This is really happening?

Yes, I am afraid so. And I'm afraid, my dear Charlotte, that your lovely LibDemmy type people are not going to curtail this madness by even one iota. But that is another (fairly fucking short) discussion.

Anyway, it isn't jobs that we are generating here: it is free money for poor people. Oh, and people who decide to have children that they can't afford to pay for, and people who can't be arsed to work, and piss-poor plays that no one wants to watch, and crappy artists that no one wants to fund, and the fucking rest.

Your humble Devil pays just under £600 per month in income tax and NICs and gets... what? Oh yes, I get to be dictated to by a bunch of morons and party lapdogs. Thank fuck: I thought that I was being milked into penury for no good fucking reason whatso-fucking-ever.

I pay over £200 a month in petrol, of which about £160 is tax. Fan-fucking-tastic!

I pay another £138 a year—£11.50 per month—in car tax. Bonus!

I pay another £80 per month in Council Tax. I love it!

I pay 15% on just about everything that I buy. Whoopee!

Not including VAT, tax on cigarettes and tax on booze, I am being taxed at 35.5%: seriously, which is a fair old chunk. And I am not a high earner—I am only just above the median wage level.

This year, motorists will pay £26.6 billion in fuel duty. At the same time, the Government will pay out £27.2 billion debt interest to the investors who hold Treasury bonds.

Debt interest payments are growing rapidly. Grant Thornton, an accountancy firm has estimated that by 2013, debt interest will cost £58 billion, exceeding Government spending on education in England and almost as much as the Treasury raises from VAT.

The rising cost of welfare payments and debt interest represent a political embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who has described such spending as the "costs of failure."

Delivering his 2000 Budget speech, Mr Brown made clear that money spent on debt and welfare was money lost to the public services. He said: "Our promise was to reduce the costs of failure - the bills for unemployment and debt interest - in order to reallocate money to the key public services."

Well, it is the cost of failure, yes—except that it is not money lost to public services, it is money lost to the people who have earned it. It is a lost opportunity cost—what might those people have done with their money had they kept it?

They might have invested it, they might have spent it, they might have started businesses with it; they might not have got into so much debt, they might have been able to put down a decent deposit for a house, they might have sailed round the world. They might have used it to build wells in African shitholes, or donated it to those less fortunate in their own country. All of these things—and more—might have been done, and will now not be.

Some will, of course, say, "well, the government might have done these things too"—but that is to miss the point. The point is not simply that the government would have done these things inefficiently, but also that it is not the government's money—the government has no money except what it extorts from us at the barrel of a gun.

To return to the example of my own finances, once you throw in VAT and everything else, I am probably handing over half of everything that I earn to the government so that they can piss it away on people who decide that they want to have children, or decide that they want to get so fucked up on booze that they end up bothering A&E Charge Nurse on a Friday night.

The state is spending some £150 billion on benefits: if we accept the face figure of about 2.2 million unemployed, then each one of those people should be receiving about £68,000 per year.

Except that there are another 2.5 million on incapacity benefit. OK, well, even so, each one of those people should be receiving some £31,900 per year.

What's that? Of course they don't because there are other benefits? Well, yes: but why? Benefits should provide a safety net for when someone is out of work—or absolutely cannot work. Now, I'm pretty sure that they are not receiving £32k a year, so where the fuck is the rest of my money going?

Actually, most of the money is probably going to pay Civil Servants £40k a year in order to administer a system that doles out £3k a year to those who are out of work.

This really has to stop. And no, I am not in any way impressed by the main parties' squabbling over a billion here or a billion there—it is small change frankly. After all, the Tories aren't even proposing to cut government spending in real terms: they are only proposing to cut the rate of spending.

We simply cannot afford such footling crap from our politicians, and most people in this country understand that. As Eamonn Butler wrote at the ASI some time ago...

If the government sector had grown only in line with inflation, rather than far above it, taxpayers would be £200 billion better off—enough to abolish income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax.

Eamonn reiterated this in the Telegraph this week...

If spending since 1997 had risen no faster than inflation, we would be spending a third less than we do now, and could abolish income tax, VAT, and council tax entirely.

The entire article makes depressing reading, laying out the full scale of the government's plofligacy—and the terrifying way in which NuLabour seem unable to grasp that they cannot simply carry on spending more than they take in tax: it's utterly unsustainable.

Eamonn does have a few sugestions as to how we can stop this insane spending spree, and try to bring the state books back into some semblance of order.

The task is to reduce public expenditure without it showing. A freeze on spending and recruitment for a couple of years, then pegging it to inflation, would be surprisingly effective at re-balancing the books. (If spending since 1997 had risen no faster than inflation, we would be spending a third less than we do now, and could abolish income tax, VAT, and council tax entirely.)

Another useful move would be to publish online every cheque the Government signs, so we can see what it is spending and where. Private firms would be able to show what they could do more cheaply. And citizens could point out where they think their money is being scandalously wasted, as with the £300 million on departments’ service contracts, wasted through bad management, or the £200 million lost through bad procurement of hospital buildings.

Then there are the IT projects, such as the NHS records system, that are billions over budget and months or years late (the Department of Employment alone spent £59 million on a computer system that did not work). Exposing such wasteful incompetence would help eliminate it. And do we really need to spend tens of billions on ID cards?

Along with the Royal Mail, we can privatise the Tote, Channel 4, BBC Worldwide, air traffic control and various utilities, which would bring in a handy £20 billion. And we can get rid of central bureaucracy by measures like simply handing head teachers their bit of the budget and telling them to get on and spend it as they see fit, rather than as Whitehall bureaucrats think they should. The same could go for health – give the budget to patients or their doctors, not to layers of bureaucracy such as the strategic health authorities. And the quangos need to be culled again: they have grown in number, cost and power under Brown. For what gain?

Meanwhile, dozens of local government officers are now paid more than £100,000 and retire on generous index-linked pensions – something now almost unknown among the private-sector employees that work to support them. As this newspaper reported yesterday, PricewaterhouseCoopers claims that 96 per cent of companies regard final salary schemes as unsustainable.

About a third of Child Benefit is little more than pin-money for the middle classes. It should be given to the poorest. By taking everyone on the minimum wage out of tax entirely, we would see a stampede into work by those who we presently make better off on benefits.

Another huge saving would be to speed up the plans to raise the pension age, reflecting improvements in health and longevity. This is by far the largest spending change one could make. Yes, many people would not like it – though others would be delighted to avoid forced retirement at 65. But it would be hugely symbolic – a return to honesty in the public finances, and an end of the idea that we can all live at someone else’s expense. If this recession has taught us anything, it should have taught the politicians that.

But this is only trying to fix the economic damage that NuLabour has wrought—the damage to Civil Liberties has been almost as egregious and just a frightening.

Make no mistake: this country is in a very fragile state, and I do not see any of the main three parties advocating the tough measures needed to right it.

The best that my Tory supporting friends can say about Cameron and his merry men is that the country will (probably) be slightly less fucked if the Tories get in. It's not an assertion that fills me with confidence.

When will the politicians wake up and smell the bankruptcy?

Statement of the fucking obvious

In terms of quotes, this one from the trap-mouthed Vince Cable has to rank as one of those moments in which an MP seems to get it.

"We have to be much more honest with people than we have been in the past."

Oh really, Vince—ya think?

Still, it's nice to see a politician admitting that he and his colleagues have been lying through their teeth for the last god-knows-how-many years...