Dragon Boat Racing

Fiona Mactaggart...

...was, according to her biography on Wikipedia, the General Secretary of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants from 1982-87.

Good job then, since over a hundred have just landed on her constituency doorstep in Slough.

Even Channel 4 news this evening had an "interview" with one of them who was being put on at council tax payers' expense in a local B&B. When asked where the money was coming from she replied, "Social"!

Mactaggart polled over 17,000 votes at the 2005 General Election, with the second-placed Conservative candidate falling well short with under 10,000.

Wonder how many this little event will cost her?

Quote of the Day (May 2007 edition)

“[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience”

So said Alan McMurdo, headteacher of the Thomas Deacon city academy school to be opened in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in Autumn 2007...the school for 2,200 pupils that does not have a playground.

Central planning, management speak, New Labour.

Doncha just love it?

Local election rubbish

Tim Hames makes a good point in today's Times:-

"this wheelie bin revolt helped to boost Tory numbers. It does, nonetheless, raise the question as to whether the theme of “vote blue, go green” will be a winner for David Cameron in the longer term."

An even bigger problem is that, as Richard North on the EU Referendum blog repeatedly points out, the moves towards fortnightly collections are in direct response to the ever-increasing cost of such collections, thanks to the EU's Waste Framework Directive. This is estimated to cost the UK around £10-£12 billion extra in terms of landfill taxes, the building of recycling facilities, and EU fines for failing to comply in time with the EU's recycling targets.

The Conservatives now taking control of more and more councils will be virtually powerless to negate the effects of these bigger systemic problems. The only hope is that they will be able to find effeciency gains elsewhere that can offset the costs of the effects of the Waste Framework Directive. In some places, they may be able to. But in many they probably won't. Which means that the more the Conservatives win now, the bigger the likely future loss will be when "local Conservative goverment" is unable to deal with this problem effectively.

Since this Directive was inspired by waste management solutions in countries very different from the UK, it is a clear example of how local government has now been all but emasculated not only by Westminster but by Brussels, itself beyond the control of Westminster and the British electorate of any description or configuration.

That is why for the moment, whilst the local election results may be a harbinger of forthcoming Conservative victory in the next General Election, the practical consequences that will flow from a change of administration at the local level will be much less than any main political party will care to admit.

Postal vote fraud in Birmingham

The BBC is reporting that the request for postal vote in two Birmingham city wards have dropped since the last election by up to 80%.

The wards mentioned are Bordsley Green and Aston.

The councillors who won the seats in those wards are:-

Bordsley Green
CHOUDHRY, ZAKER [Lib Dem]
KHAN, SHAUKAT ALI [Lib Dem]
SHAH, SHAFIQUE [Lab]

Aston
AZIZ, ABDUL [Independent]
ISLAM MBE, ZIAUL [Lab]
KHAN, AYOUB [Lib Dem]

Yet from listening to Radio 4's Today programme this morning you would never have known it was largely Labour and Lib Dem councillors who benefitted.

Draw your own conclusions.

Lesley White interviews Cameron

"He can scratch a pig’s back so effectively that the creature sighs (this I saw with my own eyes); he can castrate a ram with a pair of pliers (I didn’t see this, thank God)".

Watch out, errant backbenchers.

source

Some Members of the Crewe Transport Police...

...would appear, from Richard Brunstrom's blog, to be a bit slow...

Brunstrom, Chief Police Officer of the North Wales force, writes:-

"Back up north on the 1549hrs train from Euston. Got to Crewe but had a thirty minute wait for a connection, during which time a foul-mouthed argument broke out amongst a family group (including a young baby) waiting for a Liverpool train on the same platform. The group split up, but one (drunken) youth in particular continued to hurl abuse from a distance of thirty metres or so, across the heads of the passengers waiting for the train. An intervention was needed, with me in my business suit and carry a briefcase.

Luckily I had spotted that the British Transport police were nearby so I went and fetched them, much to the surprise of everyone, including them, and the youth. He was temporarily arrested and led away to be dealt with by fixed penalty ticket; and was I think quite properly prevented from travelling."

Asia's richest woman leaves clairvoyant £2bn

From today's Telegraph.

Bet she didn't see that coming.

Newman Offers "Galloway" Defence

(click to enlarge)

Covered on his blog yesterday, the Islington Tribune today reports N's joke at the expense of Chris S and myself and the fiasco over the council election voting forms last year.

Basically, without a local campaign agent in Islington North, all the work of verifying nominators' signatures in a number of wards was left to our overworked Chairman, Chris S, now redeeming himself as the extremely hard working, intelligent and no doubt underpaid researcher to Conservative shadow education secretary, David Willetts.

As for the story of the candidacy that was not to be, the situation (rather prosaicly) was that a number of nominators who swore that they were on the electoral register in Mildmay turned out on closer examination not to be. That closer examination took place only about one hour before the close of nominations. Although there was a last-ditch attempt to replace the vital invalid signatures, we still fell one short. Incredibly, Islington Council had managed to put one crucial nominator on the electoral register of an adjacent ward, despite her having resided in Mildmay for years before the date in question.

Anyway, the Lib Dems turned out to be the principal beneficiaries of the signature collection cock-up, retaining crucial votes that otherwise may have gone to the Conservatives and which may have meant Labour narrowly taking the ward, and thus the Council.

Whereas Galloway later protested that his tribute to the Butcher of Baghdad ("Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, and your indefatigability") was in fact addressed to the Iraqi people as a whole, Newmania protests that his words ("the denizens of Mildmay are almost bestially stupid") were in fact meant about me alone.

Still, after this Boris-like escapade it will sadden readers to learn that Newmania will shortly be pursuing alternative career options in another local Conservative association, hoping that the burning building he's fleeing will have engulfed in flames all of its residents (denizens), preventing news about this petite affaire from ever escaping!

Corporate Social Responsibility

I think I know what Jim Royle from the Royle Family would probably say about that.

In a recent speech, the Boy Dave has lauded a project by a guy called Tim Campbell to get 4000 businesses to donate collectively £1m to enable 365 businesses to be started up over the next year.

Apparently, this is something that companies should be doing to help teenagers and people in their twenties to become entrepreneurs.

DC said "There is a new spirit of creativity in our country. We politicians need to match this with a new spirit of our own - tearing down the barriers which stop people founding businesses of their own. But only when people themselves - as businesses and neighbours - take responsibility for their own communities, will we build the Britain we all want to see: prosperous, safe and socially just."

There's quite a bit to pick apart here.

First, if there's a new spirit of creativity around, why doesn't this extend to creativity about getting money for a new business?

And aren't you a little bit suspicious of politicians claiming to know what the spirit of the age is up to in a way that conveniently fits with their own interests: remember Gordon Brown saying people are moving away from the cult of celebrity (towards appreciating the merits of boring old gits) just as the Sun was splashing news of the Will 'n Kate split across its front page?

And why would a business want to give cash to a potential new competitor?

And how does the creation of new businesses in and of itself help Britain to be more "safe"?

And talk of it being "socially just" seems ripe for the Royle raspberry, "My arse!"

What to do with a problem like Iran?

Well, now that the hostages are on their way home, perhaps this idea from a Samizdata contributor can be put into cold storage.

"Blair should offer an apology through the UN to secure their release.

As soon as the servicemen are free he should issue another statement revoking his apology.

The Royal Navy should then mine all Iranian ports and destroy Iran's major cities through the use of the Royal Navy's cruise missiles. The British government should order the immediate construction of 5 Nimitz aircraft carriers and make all Royal Air Force Typhoons flight-deck compatible.

The Typhoons should then systematically reduce the rest of Iran to rubble."

For now.


Arthurian Legend is off to Barcelona for Easter.

Up Himself

The Independent today carries an interview that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger gave to Piers Morgan.

This quote is bound to get one or two people riled:

Rusbridger:

"The Guardian is a liberal, progressive, intelligent, internationalist paper which operates to certain ethical standards. And that's what I have to do. So if you betray that edict by backing UKIP in an election, for example, you would have to leave."

Arrogant little twerp.

Gabb gets Medieval on Kruger's Ass

The Director of the Libertarian Alliance, Sean Gabb, takes Danny Kruger to task in this article here.

Kruger is a one-time leader writer in the Telegraph, a fellow old Etonian of David Cameron and now one of Cameron's two leading speechwriters.

Kruger has, though the think tank Civitas, published a short book which seeks to provide the intellectual underpinning of the Cameron project. As I pretty much worked out one and a half years ago, there is not much of an intellectual underpinning to the project.

Gabb's article is well worth reading, not least because he (as a secondary school-educated lad like me) picked up on several errors of attribution Kruger makes concerning quotations from the ancients. I also sympathise a lot with Gabb's exasperation of much of the long-windedness and obtuseness in Kruger's book, since I had to wade through massives of similar verbiage when studying theology and philosophy at Nottingham.

There is much to commend Gabb's dissection of Kruger, although I do take exception to the way in which Gabb expresses a couple of points.

Kruger talks about "a return to market liberty under Margaret Thatcher". However, Gabb on the other hand simply refers to those same economic policies as "big business privilege".

Well, there may have been some privilege accorded to big business, but what about the liberalisation of the telecom market? In the late 1970s, phone lines were installed by the post office 3-6 months after being ordered. In the early 21st century it can take simply a matter of days, with 20-30 competing providers of the service (and 2-3 competitors on the infrastructure side, depending on where you live).

And many other areas of the economy, such as credit and City trading, were also opened up.

Gabb also says: "Government under Tony Blair became more politically correct than it would have been under the Conservatives. But this was balanced by a greater caution in matters of European harmonisation."

Excuse me? Blair has been just as eager to indulge in Euro harmonisation. Defence acquistion with Chirac at St. Malo in 1998? Surrender of the social chapter provisions? Surrender of part of the UK rebate? Come off it, Blair and his crew have been far more eager about EU-harmonisation than most of the Tories were in the 1990s.

Finally, I would highlight this sentence of Gabb's:

"The project common to both Labour and Conservative Parties is the transformation of this country into a place where the upper reaches of the ruling class can enjoy a status and relative wealth not known since early Stuart times - and in which there can be no challenge from below."
Well, I seem to recall recently that the head of the largest UK private equity company was revealed to be a black guy from South East London who grew up on a council estate; a former constituent of Diane Abbott, if I recall correctly. Worth more financially now than the entire Blair cabinet combined, I should imagine.

Still, I shall end with one enjoyable flick of Gabb's devilish tail:

"German philosophy is notoriously a learned gibberish. For nearly two centuries, it has been used to justify every imaginable lapse from humanity and common sense."

Hat tip: Samizdata.

Nott for Broadcast

"If you're dealing with the French, you have to realise they are devious: that's how they are."

Former Conservative Government Defence Secretary Sir John Nott gives two splendid interviews to Iain Dale on the re-capture of the Falkland Islands, the British in Afghanistan in the ninetheenth and twenty-first centuries, his wife's charity to help the Slovenians, and other things, here and here.

Update: Under the heading "EU refuses to back Britain over call to threaten exports freeze", The Times reports, "France, Iran’s second-largest EU trading partner, cautioned that further confrontation should be avoided."

Thanks.

More on the Marines

Melanie Philips writes about the unfolding story here.

"We just don’t seem able to grasp the true nature and scale of the Iranian threat. Indeed, there is a distinct air of irrationality about a Britain which tells opinion pollsters that it believes President Bush is a greater threat to world peace than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What terrible moral confusion.

We have consistently shown we are not prepared to defend ourselves. In 2004, the British servicemen who were kidnapped by Iran were spirited to Tehran and paraded blindfold on television, which broadcast their apprehensive apologies for a ‘big mistake’.

It was an act of war against us. We let them get away with it."

On one level, Britain's membership of the EU is not related to this story, but at another I wonder whether it has helped to bring the political class in this country to a position where it seems so weak and devoid of resolve.

"We have consistently shown we are not prepared to defend ourselves", Philips writes in relation to the kidnapping issue.

But in the councils of the EU our economic and political interests have been given a pretty remorseless kicking for the past 35 years. Indeed, whilst we brought it on ourselves, others learnt from our early weakeness and have exploited it for all it's worth.

Have we acted as such a doormat at home that when challenged abroad we also roll over and let the stronger side walk all over us?