The Rule of Law and Other Things

While generally wishing to join in the near-ubiquitous and almost ritualistic praise of David Davis from the rest of the libertarian blogosphere, Rachel and the ukcrypto list (but with Trixy providing some balance?), I would like to make the following points:

• Important though Magna Carta and habeas corpus are, constitutionally, historically and in demonstrating the utter disregard nu-Lab have for anything that doesn't fit in with their micro-managerial accretion of power to the central state, they are probably less relevant in terms of its constitutional impact on modern Britain than the Lisbon treaty.
• For a politician to make a stand on a matter of principle is rare. For a high-flyer with, I suspect, a guaranteed seat in the Cabinet if (when, please, when) the Tories win the next election, is amazing.
• But, you would also have to say and although I disagree with her violently on this, Anne Widdecombe also made a principled stand for 42 days. This is much the same as respecting the Dennises (Canavan and Skinner, not Denis MacShane - Ed notes: interesting google cache of his wikipedia entry: "Denis MacShane (born 21 May 1948) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is Labour Race Traitor for Rotherham, and was the Minister of State for Europe ...") for standing by their principles whilst disagreeing wholeheartedly with them for being blithering socialist prats.
  
• I don't think Davis is taking too much of a risk - a 5000 majority at the last election and the stunning unpopularity of Gordon's cronies?
• It has let the spin machine distract the press from dumping on Gordon and Jacqui.
  
• UKIP need to do something about Bob Spink.

This (h/t Harry Haddock) really makes me think:

Prosecutor Alex Mann said the police went to ensure everything was all right and spoke to Cocker who was 'co-operative and relaxed' and he assured the officers everything was fine.

'He only became worked up when the police asked for his details,' said Mrs Mann.

'The police tried to explain they just needed the name for the report but he became aggressive and started swearing at the officer.'

After the hearing Joan Codling, 57, who lives in the flat below and made the call to police, said she contacted officers after being concerned that he may have fallen ill.

She said: 'I was worried in case he was having an epileptic fit. There was a lot of noise and I didn't know what to do so I called the police.'

A police spokesman said Cocker became 'aggressive' towards the officers who feared for their own safety.

The spokesman said: 'Parva spray was used to stop any confrontation and was necessary to protect the officers and any members of the public who were around at the time.

'Within the circumstances, we feel we used reasonable force.'

So many things to say, although this is the Daily Hate report not a list of facts but as I don't actually have access to those ...

• It is a sad reflection on the isolation of our communities that when a neighbour thinks that somebody may be in medical difficulties, they call the police rather than going and knocking on their door.
• I suspect that Cocker was technically wrong in refusing to give his name (and that this is why he was convicted). Even PCSOs, I believe, can require you to identify yourself (one of their few statutory powers.)
• If the guy was trying to shut his door, how on earth could the police fear for their safety? Surely they are safer on other side of a door from somebody they have unnecessarily pissed off than with no barrier between them.
• Pelargonic Acid Vanillylamide - "primarily affects the eyes causing closure and severe pain." Lovely stuff.
  

And, finally, this. One of the problems we have in the UK is that we generally assume that rules have been put there for a sensible reason so, unlike the Italians or the French, will normally comply (hence our usual polite queuing - unless you live in Merton). Companies are scared to disobey the rules of the nanny state because the punishments are arbitrarily severe (and fighting them legally costs so much more than just avoiding the problem.) But, it has to be said, Tescos (corporately) are, as has been said here before, a bunch of prats.

They call on the Celts: "Rise Up and Vote Labour!"

Annabel Goldie and her merry band of inadequates are under attack from all sides. From Labour for voting for the Government (SNP) budget and from the SNP for claiming some credit for supporting the popular work for what used to be the Scottish Executive.

The latter is reasonable if somewhat cheeky (Ed notes: sorry, pay for link). The Tories had no part in the SNP manifesto and the main policy of the SNP remains independence for Scotland - this is opposed (although hardly the main policy) of the Tories. However, in a minority administration, it is the role of the smaller parties or blocs to support those bits of the main work of the government they do not fundamentally disagree with, in return for government support for bits of their manifesto or more recent commitments. This is politics as normal - somewhat different from the craven submission of the Lib-Dems to the previous nu-Lab brawl.

However, why the attacks from the Labour?

Labour, never mind reeling from the blast at Crewe, can do electoral maths. If they wish to keep their rotting pseudopods on power at Westminster, they need MPs from the Celtic fringe. The threat here isn't really the Tories (although they are doing much, much better) - it is the Nationalists and, especially, in Scotland where wee Alec has not made fools of himself or his team (unlike Wendy, and her uncertain relationship with the GCF). If the SNP can convince the red-rosette sheeple that they have successfully run those parts of Scotland they control, then Labour could be wiped out as a force in Scottish politics. There are Tories here - anti-European, governmental minimalists, social conservatives, economically prudent - there are (what call themselves but aren't) Liberals under rocks everywhere - pro-Europe, bansturbationary, a paler shade of green; but the fight for the heartland, the socialist and wedded-to-it (as well as paid by it) vote is between the SNP and the peculiarly Lanarkshire flavour of nu-Labour.

Just look at the venom put out by those epitomes of Jock-Lab bloggery, the Kellys - attack, after attack, on the SNP (and Kezia is, although obviously less grotesquely obnoxious, really^* not much better!) Whether this is organised (or just encouraged) corporately, it is clear that Scottish Labour are running scared. Really scared of being cornered into irrelevance by a properly left-wing, competent and populist SNP, with no monocular cretin in Number 10 to drag them down.

It may well be fun to watch, in a rather sick way, from a libertarian and unionist distance.

* At time of writing, she has 6 posts on her front page - one is pro-Obama, one is pro-choice, the other four are, or contain, attacks on the SNP.

Regionalised Aid

Martin Jacques (h/t Mr E), writing on "Cretinous & Feeble", has produced considerable dissent with his "Hands Off Independent Myanmar, You Evil Imperialist Swine" diatribe. Not surprisingly, given his communist politics and work profile, he hasn't exactly made many friends.

More surprisingly, once you dig under the "I hate the West, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and all it stands for¹" nonsense, there are actually some limited but valid points there.

I believe that aid should, where possible, be provided from within the local region. Immediately neighbouring countries may not be entirely practical - regional enmities may make a wider focus more appealing but, as Martin states, there is ASEAN². There are clear advantages with local culture, local food (remember American maize flour, from yellow maize, being rejected in Africa because it was so different from the local white maize - never mind US rejection of British emergency rations in the aftermath of Katrina, due to BSE concerns³ and, to localise it - the inappropriateness of possibly meat-based European rations in a largely Buddhist community) or merely not being white (let's be honest, the colonial record, whether we are British, Spanish, French, American or, especially, Belgian, is quite reasonably held against us in many parts of the world.)

He, among others, also has a point regarding the "invade and distribute" idiots. Burma is a military dictatorship - their Army may not be doing much on the disaster relief front but they seem to be doing a reasonable job at catching journalists and, I'm sure, could make any invasion quite a difficult proposition. And, given the success we are having at 'Military Aid to the Civil Power' in Iraq and Afghanistan (as opposed to simple military success against conventional or near-conventional opposition), recent history suggests that we would make such a great job of it.

Except, there is one important factor, for local aid to work, the local organisations or countries need to be able to provide it. Often, although it wasn't too bad in the specific case of Burma and Cyclone Nargis, they have suffered from the same disaster as the poster-child country. Very often, they also are poor and need the food, equipment and skilled people for their own projects and issues. And when they can deploy, they don't come up to standard. African (OAS) troops for African conflicts hasn't worked well. Third World troops on UN deployments have done the remarkable and worsened the reputation of the light blue beret / helmet.

The ICRC was founded in Geneva, Oxfam in Oxford, Médecins Sans Frontières in France. Aid, at the moment, means either the UN or the West. And the UN has all the problems of any large bureaucracy. The people of Burma need aid. The West should and should be both allowed and encouraged to provide it. And if that offends a Burmese General or two? Fuck them with a schiltron full of 15 foot pikes (either the not-quite-a-spear or the fish, I don't care!)


1. Except Marx and Stalin, of course, and, even then Mao and 'Brother No 1' did it better.

2. Go on, why .org? This sort of organisation is exactly what the .int domain is for. And it's even free!

3. Not fit for starving Yanks, therefore foisted on to the developing world - the mind-boggling (lack of) ethics of aid!

1 Down, 350 to Go.*

I suspect there will be an awful lot of very nervous Nu-Lab politicians conspiring over their lattes this morning. This was a result entirely deserved by the Great Clunking Fist and his troupe of barely-trained media baboons. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to see the 17.6% swing reflected in a General Election but this is giving formal notice that the normal people of the UK are now completely sick of them, their spin, their taxes and their horridly statist mismanagement of this country, its economy and our freedom.

The Tories threw it away in 1997, by in-fighting, corruption and the arrogance of being in office for so long. Gordon is throwing it away now because that is all he is capable of doing.

What a lovely morning!

* And, it should go without saying, all 78 UK MEPs (or the 72 we'll have to appoint to their sinecure next time round.)

Oh, what a glorious morning!

Well done Boris, well done James, well done all 3154 (ish - Sky has it at 3156) of the councillors, new and old. Well done everybody who voted for them (actually, well done everybody who voted.)

Matthew Parris, constrained by the politesse of the "Times of London", considers voters telling the monocular spiv and his cronies to "push off". I don't think so.

There is some vaguely appalling film^* being advertised on the Underground at the moment with a picture of a large club with rusty iron spikes driven through it - a common man's mace (no, this not this). What voters have told the bunch of statist control freaks is to fuck off, right now, or we will anally rape you with as close as we can make to such a device before the (new-traditional) candiru fish, spectacular group bondingage exercises, quick trips to France, or, bluff old traditionalist that I am, the piano wire comes out.

* Updated to add: "Doomsday" - apparently made with £300k of public money. Nice 'work' if you can get it.

Grovelling Apology

In recompense for my recent appalling behaviour on Our Hero's blog, as chronicled on TerryWatch, may I direct you to a beautifully civilised rant in today's Torygraph, by Andrew Roberts on the egregious Vera Baird:

It is also worth contemplating Mrs Baird's typical New Labour arrogance in dismissing the Royal Family for not already being part of "the human race".

She obviously considers herself to be a functioning member of it, despite having been a lawyer for 33 years and a Labour MP for seven, two professions that the public regards as about as cut off from reality as it is possible to be in modern Britain.

I would be prepared to wager that every single member of the Royal Family in receipt of the Civil List - even those in their eighties - has in the past year visited more hospitals, met more ordinary people, travelled the country more and generally proved their membership of the human race far better than Mrs Vera Baird QC, MP.

The point about the Kaiser, as well as many others, is also beautifully made. My day would have seemed less damp if I had got to page 21 at breakfast rather than before bed.

For the Want of a Nail

It seems that the downfall of Lee Jasper, the world guru of PC and yet another example of the encouraging truism that the only qualification for seeking political office (even his pre-fall un-elected status) in London is excessive and extra-marital shagging, was brought about by one of the axiomatic failures of personal information security - the password on the post-it note.

If you had wondered how the Evening Standard got hold of the emails, the answer is in today's Indefensible.

Bigwigs at City Hall, paranoid about the leak that led to Jasper's messages reaching the journalist Andrew Gilligan, held an inquiry to find the culprit. The police would have been called had illegal hacking activity been unearthed. The inquiry was short. It soon established that Jasper kept his email log-in password on a Post-it note near his computer, so a temp could check his mail.

More fool him.

Sacreligious Publishing

Okay, I guess that unlike the 25,000¹ ravening bigots whipped into a fury of "peace and tolerance for their fellow man"^(TM), I have watched 'Fitna' and read 'Infidel'. There is some utter crap² around concerning these.

Now, it has to be said that all religions have their utter wackos. Ask any family planning clinic in the US 'Bible Belt'. Or somebody after a drink (or a game of golf) on the Western Isles on a Sunday. However, modern Islam does have its nutters more than a wee bit closer both to the mainstream and to the hairy edge than, for example, Tibetan Buddhists. (Ed notes: And a happy non-violent continuing anti-Olympic protest beating to you in the gulag near Lhasa! And best of British for your protest in SanFran - you ought to have a more favourable policing atmosphere than you did in the Euro-statist capitals of Paris or London.)

Well, Infidel was not a nice story. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has not had a quiet and easy life. An impoverished upbringing of tribal brutality in exile. A violent mother out of place in modern³ society. Endless misogyny and female circumcision⁴. Much of this seemed to be post hoc justified in Islam - but like just the burka, these are tribal customs enforced through female acquiescence to patriarchal stupidity. I was cured of this by reading Germaine at a suitably impressionable age. Islam didn't come out of her childhood too badly - her adults came out appallingly - mother, grandmother (especially) father, brother - a fairly uniform bunch of oxygen thieves. Now, once she was a free adult in the Netherlands, then the 'Religion of Peace' showed its real (ugly) form. It is a good, albeit fundamentally disturbing (especially, I suspect, if you are a sexually active female) book - buy it or borrow it, but read it. If it doesn't make you think then you are probably a nu-Lab PPS.

'Fitna' was a damp squib. Nothing new, nothing particularly interesting. A simple documentary on fundamentalist extremism in Europe would have done the trick, without the political kudos. No mention of Saudi (although I did spot at least one Saudi sheik amongst the rabid), Salafism or Wahabbi. 15 minutes of the best of the Quran, the successful amongst Islamist terrorists and crowds incited to foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semitism. We get that on the news - even al-Beeb carries that sort of hysteria. Watch it - just because people want to ban it and that is, of itself, a bad thing⁵. Many thanks to Liveleak for carrying it - I appreciate the sheer aggro you went through with all the mindless nut-jobs and the intimidation.

The last word.



1. It's nice to see there are some commonalities in modern policing - 100,000 according to the organisers.

2. Exodus, Samuel, Psalms. And this is an angry response about Christians. Well educated in the 'good book', then. New covenant, anybody? 'Sermon on the Mount', going cheap?

3. Geek moment. Mine is /was an AS400 Sysadmin. Zero cool points for the Tux generation!

4. This is the wrong word. Male 'circumcision' involves removing a small bit of skin on the end of your knob that, frankly (and I speak as one with one) doesn't seem to serve that much of a purpose. And I get the hygiene point. As opposed to removing the clitoris, the labia (various) and whatever else gets in the way of the knife. 'Castration' isn't the right word either. But it's closer.

5. I've read 'Mein Kampf'. It's a terrible book - huge, turgid and vile. The 'John Prescott' of literature. But it is an important book - it shaped a large part of the last century and is still significant now. Which is why it should be available to be read. Along with "Animal Farm', 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'. Both of which are (much) shorter and (vastly) better written.

Crisis? What crisis?

I thought Belgium seemed to be operating perfectly ably without their masters intervention but, according to the BBC, the crisis is over:

Yves Leterme has been appointed Belgium's new prime minister, ending nine months of political deadlock which threatened the unity of the country.

Ah, buried at the bottom of the nu-Beeb verbiage:

In December, thousands of trade unionists took to the streets in Brussels, complaining about the political stalemate and rising food and fuel prices.

The European Commission had warned that the political paralysis was beginning to affect Belgium's economy.

There we have it. If the trade unions say it is a crisis (and, of course, high oil and food prices are something a Belgian government is ideally situated to fix - and the country seems not to have descended into Chaos in the last three months) and the eurocrats agree, then it must be true.

Divided By A Common Tongue

Why does the civilised world

Stand for election,

Yet the "Land of the Free"

Run for Office?

I know that, in both cases "Pimp^* for votes" would be more honest.

* Yes, 'pimp', rather than 'prostitute'. If it was their own money they were promising to spend rather than your taxes, they might raise themselves to the dignity of a harlot.

Oh Dear, Gail

Mrs Sheridan appears to have been suspended from her job for being in the possession of (allegedly) and potentially purloining some airline miniature booze^*, to add to her perjury charge woes.

Well, what would you expect? She is, without question, a good Socialist and "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", is a damn good Socialist principle. British Airways has plenty of miniatures and, if I were married to Tommy, current troubles especially, I'd sodding well need a stiff drink.

As all reasonable people will be automatically aware, this is, of course, a Thatcherite plot using the vicious Nu-Lab police to derail the paths both of the people's revolution and of true (according to good Marxist dogma) love.

* Just to declare an interest, I think I have a couple of BA Gordon's miniatures in my drinks cabinet - just for emergency gin famines, of course. And obtained as a passenger, rather than as an employee.

Divine Compass

Our good friend at law, the Reactionary Snob, has recently had a pop at the Political Compass. In his brief account, and with his astonishment at the clustering of the American Presidential candidates, he wonders about how religion might affect this.

So, having done the test for myself some time ago, I went back and answered the questions as I think the biblical Jesus might have done. Armed with my trusty King James, Mrs S-E's New International Version and the Rector's favourite, the Revised Standard Version and, for giggles, the wonderful "The Year of Living Biblically", I got this:

Christ's political compass

Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.15

I had to skirt the Samaritan / Jewish issues; the money changers being thrown out of the Temple yet "Render unto Caesar"; the whole Biblical abhorrence of (male) homosexuality; the exposure as hypocrites those who followed the letter of the Jewish law but not its spirit - and many of the other issues that bedevil the Churches various in this modern era.

Feel free to quibble about my results - some of the questions were difficult to translate to biblical example but, as any honest Christian probably would have guessed, Christ is, by example at least, some sort of evil commie pinko and worse, if he ran for office^* while waiting for the Second Coming, a liberal!

* Note that buy using the phrase "ran for office", I am loosely implying "in the Land of the Free".