They're Gone

Let me give a big thankyou to the 71% of the electorate that did not vote Labour. To the other 29%, I have to ask, how could you be so dumb?

Death, Taxes & Spam

I’m afraid I’ve had to give up and disable comments on this blog. This is a shame because I’d had a few good ones - both negative and positive - over the last couple of years but the overwhelming volume of spam makes it impractical for me to do otherwise. I woke up on May 7th not to a new government, but to somewhere over 300 emails alerting me to new blog comments, of which around 98% were spam.

The problem seems to be that there are people in 3rd world countries being paid to post comments like this:

05/05/10 @ 22:15 ·
Url: http://www.spamsite.com/
Ban ·
Email: hosting@spamsite.com ·
In response to: Depressing Election Result
Comment from: hosting [Visitor]
good article, the article is very inspiring for me … I wait for the next updete …

This one comes from Indonesia, but a few others I checked came from Russia, China, India and elsewhere. Some, like this example, are immediately obvious but others are harder to spot as they make some superficially reasonable comment and are only identifiable as spam once you notice they’ve submitted the exact same comment against more than one post or that the submitted URL is also linked from a thousand other blogs out there.

I’m sorry if your comment got lost somewhere in the deluge but nothing is certain in life but death, taxes and spam as far as I can see.

Two Portillo Moments

Someone has kindly put Jackboot Smith’s ejection onto youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1-hqMcr2z4

Charles Clarke only merits a BBC link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/england/8661962.stm

That’s two nasty authoritarian ex-home secretaries shown the door. Sadly a third - John Reid - stepped down but there’s at least couple more for the next election which I have to think won’t be far away.

Why I Hate the Labour Party

I receive quite a few emails at my andrew@dontvotelabour.org.uk address. The largest proportion is spam, followed by the email equivalent of green ink letters about conspiracies of one sort or another (the most popular right now being Common Purpose), next is letters of encouragement, after that is hate mail from socialists and, finally, I also receive a small number that ask genuine questions about my politics. Yesterday, I received this one:

From: xxxx@yyyyy.com
To: andrew@dontvotelabour.org.uk
Subject: why do you hate the labour party so much?

As per the subject line.

It occurred to me that, whilst I’ve written blog posts about all sorts of Labour party evils, I’ve not written a piece which describes in one place why I detest them so much. So, here goes with my last post before the election:

Why I Hate the Labour Party

On succession to the throne, Henry 1 of England issued a written proclamation called the Charter of Liberties in which he guaranteed certain rights and privileges for the church and the nobility. For the serfs (that’s you and me) it didn’t mean very much but, here, for the first time, the head of state had agreed that, under certain limited circumstances, the law applied to him as well as to his subjects.

The charter was, fairly typically, mostly ignored until, one hundred and fifteen years later, it was followed by the single greatest event in English legal history: King John (one of the bad guys from the Robin Hood story) was forced by the nobility into signing the Magna Carta or Great Charter. The Great Charter included everything from the Charter of Liberties along with many new provisions and, more importantly, applied to all freemen, not just the nobility and the church. The charter went through several subsequent updates and the final 1297 version, is still, in part, on the statute books of England and Wales today.

The most important legal guarantee that the charter provides is that of the writ of habeas corpus. Broadly speaking, this is method through which an individual can challenge the lawfulness of their detention by the state. It has long been the case that tyrannies control their subjects by detaining the difficult ones without trial and without access to the outside world (‘the disappeared’ in Pinochet’s Chile for example). The writ of habeas corpus, whereby the state is forced to produce the person in court and justify their detention, backed by the force of law independent of that state, is the guarantee that this method of control won’t work. If the state can’t lock up people it doesn’t like, it’s only choice is to try and win the argument by force of reason and, as someone once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Ultimately, a government that can’t arbitrarily lock up its subjects will fall if it can’t win the argument.

So, where does Labour come into this you might wonder? Well, when Blair and company came to power, anyone arrested by the police had to be charged or released within 48 hours. After various changes in the law, it is now the case anyone can be held for 96 hours (that’s four days remember) and someone suspected of terrorist offences can be held for 28 days. What’s more, certain categories of terrorist suspect can be placed under what’s called a Control Order whereby their movements are severely limited (effective house arrest) indefinitely without them being allowed to know what they are suspected of.

By comparison, in the United States, people can be held for no more than 2 days for any reason and, in Canada, for only 1 day. Both of these countries have recently managed to handle terrorist plots without any apparent problem or the need to hold suspects for longer than their existing laws permit. What is so different about the UK? Is it that our police are 14 times slower than the FBI or 28 times slower than the Mounties or is it, maybe, that the Labour party just likes to feel big and important around the sorts of people in the security services who no doubt think we’d all be safer if we were all locked up all of the time?

So, that’s nearly 800 years of bloody battle and sometimes equally bloody legal history during which the citizenry gained freedom from the tyranny of the state thrown away to make a few puffed up government ministers feel good about themselves. That is the first reason I hate the Labour party.

The mention of battle brings me nicely to my next point. Well over 100,000 Iraqis (possibly as many as 500,000 depending on whose figures you believe) and 179 British armed services personnel died in the Iraq war. Of course, we went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction – which most people took to mean nuclear or biological weapons – which he could deploy in 45 minutes and, also, because Iraq was a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Except that it didn’t and it wasn’t.

There was no evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction beyond what Blair imagined there to be. He’d decided months ago that, if the US went in, we’d go with them and he just needed something to use to attempt to rationalise that choice. When the intelligence didn’t provide the post hoc rationalisation he wanted, he simply had his press office dig up a few magazine articles and plagiarise them for the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’. There were never any WMDs and Blair knew it.

As for the claim about terrorism, as Senator John Kerry said to George W Bush, ‘there weren’t any terrorists there until you bombed them!’ The Islamic terrorists hated Saddam Hussein more than they hated the US. Don’t forget, whatever Iraq was, it was not a theocracy.

Why then did we go in? Again, as with the destruction of habeas corpus, it was to make Labour ministers, particularly GW’s poodle in chief Blair, feel important. “Look at us, we’re playing with the big boys”, they could shout, whilst our Thin Red Line of Heroes, the Iraqi armed forces and Iraqi civilians got to take the bullets. Don’t get me wrong, Saddam Hussein was an evil man and I’m glad he’s gone but, if we are to justify invading countries that present no danger to anyone other than themselves, then there were and still are many, many places that should have been further up the list to be saved from themselves.

100,000 dead only to satisfy the messianic urges of one man: that is the second reason I hate the Labour party.

Back now to 1997 - on coming to power, Labour inherited a growing economy. Not only that, the national debt was falling, unemployment too was falling and inflation was low. After taking power, Labour stuck to Tory spending plans and things continued to go well economically although some people might have noticed that, due to the rules by which the newly independent Bank of England had to set interest rates, house prices had started to climb alarmingly. Don’t forget that Brown was the chancellor who said ‘I will not allow house prices to get out of control and put at risk the sustainability of the recovery.’

Over the following 10 years house prices continued to climb and climb and climb. At the same time as making the BoE independent, Brown had taken away its supervisory powers over banks and given them to the newly formed FSA, an organisation created from a collection of smaller regulators, none of them with any great experience in banking regulation. The result was that the country’s banks and building societies were pretty much left to their own devices. As house prices boomed, they lent people larger and larger sums of money to buy them and invented all sorts of new ways of selling on the debts thus created (the CDO, sometimes called a financial weapon of mass destruction, being prime amongst them). This culminated in the now infamous Northern Rock Together Mortgage, whereby people were lent 125% of the value of the property they were buying.

Inevitably the bubble burst in the end – as all credit bubbles do – and the result has been financially devastating for the UK. In the good years, rather than paying down the existing national debt, Brown borrowed more meaning that, when trouble came, the coffers were empty. The only choice was to borrow even more to plug the gap. Our budget deficit is now running at 13% of GDP and our national debt, excluding all the items hidden off the public balance sheet by the PFI initiative, is quite likely to reach 100% of GDP before it starts to fall (that’s if anyone will lend us the money of course). Whoever wins the election, there are quite horrendous cuts in public spending that will have to be made. And be made they will: if we don’t make them voluntarily, the bond markets will force it upon us, just look to the example of Greece or, in fact, the UK in 1976 when we also had a Labour government to see why that is true.

One last point on this one: please don’t believe Brown’s idiot parroting of his ‘it all started in America’ mantra. It may well have done, but what does that matter? Other countries with equally close financial ties to the US have not suffered from anything like the same problems that we have. Not a single bank in Canada, Australia or New Zealand has needed to be bailed out by anyone for example. This is a financial catastrophe of Brown’s making that our children and grandchildren will end up paying for and it is one that could easily have been avoided.

Utter financial incompetence combined with overbearing hubris (‘I have abolished boom and bust’ no less) then is the third reason I hate the Labour party.

All those in favour of identity cards should be banned from having curtains in their houses. This was a suggestion for a new law made by a member of the audience on a Mark Thomas show. It refers of course to the Labour party’s ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ slogan.

The problem is, everyone has something to hide. Maybe it’s something as simple as a flabby gut or maybe it’s more complex: a shoplifting conviction during a long-past wayward childhood for example. We all have things we don’t want other people to know about, mostly for entirely harmless or, at least, legal reasons.

The Labour party though wants to know everything about its subjects. And when I say everything, I mean absolutely everything. What’s worse, they want to give access to that data to junior civil servants – including employees of local councils – without the need for a court order. 30 years ago, the government knew relatively little about the private lives of the people of the UK and, if it wanted to get access to that limited information, it had to ask a judge. No more, now there are databases of every conceivable type held by central government with, for the most party, very little right of challenge by the individuals on there. The evil uber-database is the one that accompanies the identity card scheme upon which, in due course, will be held a record of every interaction you have with the state. This data will be linked to other government databases – including the new NHS medical records database – allowing everything about you to be viewed by people with access.

You might not mind the idea of some grubby civil servant on a wet Friday afternoon having a dig through your records to see if he or she can spot any amusing medical conditions or past indiscretions, but you should. If your data can be accessed that easily and, like just about everyone on this earth, there’s information about you that you don’t want made public, just think about the consequences. If you feel intimidated when making a complaint about a public body now, imagine how you’ll feel when you get that anonymous phone call from whoever it is you complained about telling you to withdraw it or have that picture of your genital warts broadcast on Facebook.

The Labour party have stolen your civil liberties and they’re in the process of stealing your privacy too. Maybe in this case they genuinely think they’re doing it for good reasons – rather than solely to make themselves feel important – but, if they do, it’s just another example of how they are so conceited that they can’t possibly imagine that there might be negative consequences to yet another of their plans to spend your money on things that you don’t need.

Their contempt for personal privacy then is the fourth reason I hate the Labour party. There are other reasons, for example the curtailment of the right to protest, the politicisation of the police and the turning upside down of the criminal law by the method of implementation of the human rights act, but these are the main four.

Please don’t vote for Labour on Thursday, they really are not nice people.

Gordon Brown Is A Thief

This man has stolen you liberties, your pensions and your children’s livelihoods, don’t let him steal the election.

Don't Vote Labour

They're Gone

Death, Taxes & Spam

Two Portillo Moments

Why I Hate the Labour Party

Gordon Brown Is A Thief