Death Of A Prime Minister

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

“After the storm, of a life lived in the heat of political controversy, there is a great calm”.

The excellent sermon given at the funeral yesterday of Baroness Thatcher, given by the Bishop of London at St. Paul’s Cathedral:

 

I was particularly pleased to hear the misinterpretation of Thatcher’s famous “there’s no such thing as society” quotation being so publicly corrected and presented in its fuller, Christian context by such a respected authority.

But indeed the whole sermon stands out as one of the best in recent memory, struck exactly the right note and was the high point of an exceptionally well-choreographed and well-executed ceremonial funeral.

The Foolishness of Nick Clegg

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Nick Clegg

 

He’s done it again. The latest, desperate Sun-approval-seeking initiative from our restless Deputy Prime Minister and his fellow Liberal Democrats is this – let’s make “drunk louts” pay for their A&E and jail costs.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

Mr Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said he supported the idea of imposing levies on people who get “blind drunk” and end up in hospital or at a police station…

“I’ve actually got quite a lot of sympathy with the basic principle that says why should someone that goes out and gets completely blind drunk, behaves appallingly, gets themselves into trouble and a scrap – why should other people always have to pick up the tab to help them out?” Mr Clegg said.

He said it was unacceptable for the taxpayer to continue to pick up the bill for the National Health Service to treat patients whose injuries were caused as a result of excess alcohol.

Oh dear. If you are going to discuss the implementation of new policy, shouldn’t you at least make it sound as though the idea had not been concocted a mere 30 seconds before you gave it voice on national radio?

At least Nick Clegg still has that minimal level of self-awareness which allowed him to make the disclaimer (not a tremendously encouraging one for a deputy prime minister to make, though) that he hadn’t really thought the policy through very well, and that it might be quite hard to implement:

Speaking during his weekly Call Clegg programme on LBC Radio the Deputy Prime Minister admitted it would be “tricky” to implement the fines but that he has “quite a lot of sympathy with the basic principle”.

Shall we count the ways in which his latest policy idea is particularly stupid? Okay, let’s.

1. It’s quite clear – Clegg admits as much himself – that his policy is focused on what he calls “drunken louts”. But how to classify who and who is not a drunken lout without resorting to the type of class assumptions or profiling that a man of Clegg’s liberal credentials would surely abhor? I’m guessing that if I was a young man wearing a hoodie who tripped on the kerb after a few too many pints of beer of an evening, I might be a prime target for this fine. But what about a smartly dressed young barrister who tripped on her heels after a few too many glasses of port at a company dinner? Still a lout? What does one have to do, or be, to get whacked with the fine?

2. While consuming excessive levels of alcohol is clearly irresponsible, so are many other actions that humans take all the time. Extreme sports. Smoking. We all pay our taxes (well…) so who is to decide which activities will cause us to forfeit the right to the treatments and services that our taxes have paid for?

3. Some people have jobs or participate in activities that have mostly or only positive externalities. Fitness instructors, gardeners, marriage counsellors, drug caseworkers, physical therapy workers. By performing these activities they actually serve to lower the costs that the government would otherwise have to pay in a myriad of ways. Should these people get a small bonus cheque if they find themselves in the hospital? Or are we just going to punish the bad behaviour but not reward the good? Can taxes only ever go up, and not down?

4. If you engage in violent behaviour and end up in a jail cell, should it not be the case that the criminal justice system works effectively enough that if you are found guilty, you are liable for the legal and policing costs that your actions incurred? We all know that the criminal justice system  in our country is laughably broken, but is creating a separate mechanism outside of the criminal justice system to recoup costs from offenders really the way to go, Nick?

In other words, does our deputy prime minister really have nothing better to do, no more pressing matters to fill his day, than sitting in an LBC radio studio and making up demonstrably bad policy on the fly? He gets paid his ministerial salary to do this?

The next election is still two years away. I was hoping that we might be able to squeeze maybe one more year of at least aspirationally real, serious policymaking and governance into this parliament before we had to start listening to nonsense ideas like this one.

Music For The Day

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Prelude Op. 23 No. 10 in B minor by Sergei Rachmaninov, performed by Lazar Berman.

 

More wintery than springlike, but those glacial chords are amazing.

“Margaret: Death Of A Revolutionary”

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A documentary is just starting on UK’s Channel 4 TV (Saturday 13th April, 7PM), entitled “Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary”.

My interest was piqued when I saw that Channel 4 was showing a documentary about Baroness Thatcher – their news channel is skewed so far to the left that it defies belief, so I was curious to see what they would have to say about Britain’s post-war saviour.

But it was the description of the programme in my Sky TV guide that really affronted me:

“Martin Durkin presents his radical thesis: that Margaret Thatcher was a working class revolutionary, and that she believed capitalism was in the interests of ordinary people, not the toffs.”

Everything wrong with the British left-wing encapsulated in one sentence.

Where to start?

Why is this a “radical thesis”? I think that we are supposed to take this line of nonsense as a piece of magnanimity from the left – that the holier-than-thou leftists among us are willing to grant that maybe Thatcher was (albeit misguidedly) trying to help the less fortunate in society, and not just the “toffs” (don’t get me started on that word) that we all assume were the only people she really cared about.

What nonsense.

Of course Thatcher believed that capitalism was in the interests of the ordinary people. Because it is. This isn’t a “radical thesis”. The ignorant left may have accepted the nonsensical trope that capitalism benefits only the wealthy Monopoly-men style captains of industry and the “toffs”, but the rest of us sure haven’t.

We of sound mind know that capitalism (as opposed to corporatism, which is entirely different, and which Thatcher promoted no more than any other British politician) inevitably helps the “ordinary people”.

And did the person who wrote the programme description lose their mind? Who does he think the Right-to-Buy scheme benefited? The “toffs” weren’t the ones living in state-owned council housing, who were suddenly given the opportunity to buy their houses and move into the ranks of the middle class. Who did the deregulation and privatisation of failing state-owned industries benefit? Yes, wealthy people who had money sloshing around and could afford to snap up shares did well, but so did many middle-class people, as did the whole population who no longer had to deal with fuel crises and substandard products.

Yes, of course Margaret Thatcher believed that capitalism benefits “ordinary people”. Because it does. Nationalised, state-owned industries sure didn’t benefit us. Three day working weeks didn’t benefit us. Power cuts, garbage piling up, dead bodies laying unburied, industrial unrest, the country being run by the unions, none of these things benefited us.

And Channel 4 has the nerve to present their quirky notion that maybe Thatcher had the interests of “ordinary people” at heart as a radical thesis. That in fact perhaps Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, wasn’t actually in the pocket of the landed gentry and the “toffs” after all.

I despair of the left sometimes.

The Sheer Unimportance of North Korea

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The press coverage lavished on the every theatrical ranting of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and his propaganda machine is rapidly becoming ridiculous.

Reports The Telegraph:

That American pledge to defend South Korea and Japan is crucial to deterring the North from full-scale war. “Kim Jong-un has to understand, as I think he probably does, what the outcome of conflict would be,” said Mr Kerry.

“I think we have lowered our rhetoric significantly and we are attempting to find a way for reasonableness to prevail here,” he added. “The rhetoric that we are hearing from North Korea is simply unacceptable by any standards.”

The North voiced yet more belligerence on Friday, turning its venom on Japan, saying: “If Japan makes a slightest move, the spark of war will touch Japan first.” The statement added that “Japan must come to its senses” or else Tokyo would be “consumed in nuclear flames”.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kim Jong-Un is a pudgy, spoiled little tinpot dictator, presiding over a desperately poor nation and an army which, while large in size, is comically antiquated and under-equipped, and not at all prepared for significant combat.

Like most rational people, Kim and the senior officials around him who pull the strings, do not have a death wish, and are not about to launch a nuclear strike against anyone, with very low chance of success but the certainty of total destruction in retaliation.

It should be obvious to a small child that Kim Jong-Un is sabre-rattling (if I hear the term “bellicose rhetoric” one more time on the news, or read it in print, I think I will go mad) purely to shore up his authority and support at home. Given the fact that none of the poor enslaved citizens of North Korea will ever see the stern-faced responses that our own leaders somehow feel compelled to give every time their babyfaced dictator throws one of his tantrums, we have to ask ourselves why do John Kerry and William Hague (and countless other military and diplomatic officials) feel the need to respond publicly when those responses will be seen only by their domestic audiences?

And incidentally the people at Fox News, who have been covering the latest tensions with great glee as another “Obama foreign policy crisis” would do well to discover some humility and remember that it was their beloved president, George W. Bush, who allowed North Korea to go nuclear in the first place.

That is all.