And that ladies and gentlement is part of the reason why many people - me among them - want nothing more to do with national elected politics.
Even worse, the Bloggers I read, be they Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Libertarian or even B & D...
There are actors such as Michael Caine who occasionally do the most frightful crap, but are charming enough to be funny about it. "I have never seen it," explained Sir Michael of his outing in Jaws IV: the Revenge. "However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
Now let's have some consistency from the libertarian wing, please, before everyone cottons on to how deluded and weird you all are.
Unlike idealists, this old cynic looks at outcomes. I would far rather someone got richer, healthier, lived longer and ultimately became freer through my callous heartlessness, than that they starved because of some idealistic bell-end.
I'm telling you, folks, this is another Tony Blair we've got here. A thieving bastard hypocrite of the very highest order.
But one fact about Brian Haw which few people remember is this: he started his protest not against the Iraq war but against the UN's 'blunt' sanctions against Iraq.
Believe it or not, this is one thing on which he and Tony Blair and George Bush were in agreement (although Brian may not have known that). Even before 9/11, Britain and the US could see that the UN sanctions regime wasn't working. Saddam was screwing the system so that funds intended for medicines for sick children were actually diverted to line the pockets of the regime.
Regardless of the subsequent WMD fiasco and the rights and wrongs of the war itself, it's just worth perhaps having this heretical thought: way back in early 2001 when he first pitched his tent, the man who has come to symbolise opposition to 'Blair's war' was himself on the same page as the Foreign Office.
May of us are fed up with the way in which philosophy, the humanities and higher education more generally is treated by university managers and administrators...What ever [subject] cannot account for its measurable success and whatever does not bring in money has no longer a place in the university, we are told.
In 2007, he won a legal battle to remain in place due to a drafting error in a new law banning unauthorised protests in Westminster.
If Clegg really wants to be a leader, he must at some point stop uttering the banal and populist platitudes so beloved of the PPFKATLD and get on with the job of leading. It would be absurd if he believed a particular law should be repealed but chose not to argue for that in Cabinet just because it hadn’t come top in a vote by the public. Similarly, if he wants to retain a law, make the case, don’t hide behind a superficial popularity vote.
George Osborne and David Laws (Osborne and Little as they’ve reportedly been tagged by their officials) have announced that Sarah Teather and other very important persons will no longer be entitled to ministerial cars to ferry them to and fro at the expense of hard-pressed taxpayers. Only those in the four great offices of state — the prime minister and his deputy, foreign secretary, chancellor and home secretary — will get their own car and chauffeur.
The news comes on the back of confusion about what last week's ballot actually meant, making a curious affair even curiouser. But, whatever the case, this outcome should take much of the sting and urgency out of the situation – even if it still leaves some backbenchers aggrieved at how David Cameron went about things in the first place. And as for the Tory leadership, the question now is whether any of this was really worth it.
‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
I doubt if Cameron himself buys into any of that stuff, which exposes his support for this policy as no more than headline-grabbing. But it’s dangerous headline grabbing. The British Prime Minister should not be indulging this nonsense, should not be jumping on the anti-politics bandwagon.
Gosh Tom, good thing Labour never stooped to a cheap headline, or a dangerous policy. Like, say “British jobs for British workers.”
Otherwise you’d look like a hypocritical prick.
Sorry, but if you decide to have kids, you pay for them yourself. Why should I subsidise your lifestyle choices?
-- sfj1642 on twitter
* HIPS abolished
* Government Office for London abolished
* Standards Board for England abolished
* Norwich unitary abolished
Where this plan is very clever is that some people out there still go to pubs. However, if minimum pricing is introduced that will stop, simply because it is more expensive to go to the pub before you have even bought a drink. Taxi's and babysitters can put between £20 and £40 on a night out before you have even left the house. Ramp up the price of a pint or a glass of vino and it just won't be worth the cost. So even more people will flock to Tesco. Bingo. Huge profits and and increase in customers, almost a captive audience in fact. Tesco will have achieved where the smoking ban failed.
Taxis home can only be claimed after 11pm. One woman MP says:What happens on a January night in London? I suppose I will have to take the tube, then a bus and then a long walk home. That is not safe.
Listen. You're going to be successful and rich. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.
Indeed, Murray Rothbard, who, despite him appearing in the "gallery" of heros along the top of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left site, most people would not usually regard as being left-libertarian, goes into great detail in his "Ethics of Liberty" in exploring ways in which such "unjust" property might be released to be re-homesteaded and so achieve an initial "just" distribution of property at the start of an anarchist society.
This is particularly important in a UK context. Obo, I believe, glosses over this too easily when he says that redistributing unjustly acquired property would be too difficult to bother with. Rothbard believes that, aside from actually state-owned property and that owned by privileged clients of the state, such as industries who rely predominantly or solely on state distributed largesse, there would not be much need for such redistribution of private property in the US, but acknowledges that the situation is different in countries with a long history of feudalistic ownership, which would, in my opinion, include the UK.
So, yes, I do believe in some redistribution, at least at the point we begin an anarchist society, in order to redress historical inequities that have resulted in a great deal of unjustly acquired property, but I don't believe that that necessarily makes me a "left-libertarian". I do believe that unreproduceable goods that can be monopolised pose a problem in any system of social order (if anarchism can be described as a "system"!) but that in a genuinely freed market ways will be found through economic incentives to address these problems.
not at all. Nothing is coercive. More like post-revolution "free for all" as people assert their claim w/o land rgy
David Cameron’s move to neuter the 1922 has been pulled off with great tactical skill. He sprung the move on the party and then called an instant ballot, denying any rebellion time to gather strength.
Leftwing Labour MP John McDonnell is set to launch his Labour leadership bid at the PCS Union conference in Brighton.
I've had a chat with him and he's hopping made about the way the NEC rules give just four days (next Monday to next Thursday) for candidates to collect the crucial 33 nominations from fellow MPs.
Left-libertarianism, as defended by contemporary theorists such as Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, is a doctrine that has a strong commitment to personal liberty and has an egalitarian view concerning natural resources, believing that it is illegitimate for anyone to claim private ownership of resources to the detriment of others. Some left-libertarians of this type support some form of income redistribution on the grounds of a claim by each individual to be entitled to an equal share of natural resources.
some anarchists who support private ownership of resources and a free market call themselves left libertarian and also use a different definition for right libertarianism
Others, such as scholar David DeLeon, do not consider free-market private property anarchism to be on the left.
For over ten years the new Secretary of State, along with her husband, lobbied the very department she now runs. Caroline resigned as a director less than a year ago and conveniently transferred her share of the company to her husband. The company address was also changed from her constituency home, for which Spelman claimed around £40,000 on expenses for cleaning and bills, to their million pound London flat. According to the company accounts last year, no rent was paid on this “office” subsidised by the taxpayers.
“Mark Spelman is a managing director at Accenture, the firm that developed the online system that delivers subsidy payments to farmers. The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) awarded Accenture a £35m seven-year contract to develop new and more efficient systems in 2003. Accenture was appointed to develop and deliver the new system over two years and then provide ongoing support for the remaining five years.”
The disastrous Accenture deal that ended up costing £350 million is due to expire this year. Guess who is in charge of deciding if it is renewed?
Last night a source close to Ed Miliband insisted his brother would also make a brilliant Labour leader as long as everyone was okay with the fact that he spent most of 1983 in the downstairs toilet with a tube sock and a picture of David Hasselhoff.
Business practices which killed workers were declining before there were bureaucrats to insist upon business practices which didn't kill workers.Business practices which did kill workers declined just as fast after we had bureaucrats to stop business practices which kill workers as before. Business practices which kill workers declined just as fast before we had bureaucrats to stop practices which kill workers as afterwards.
The value of bureaucrats making rules so that business doesn't kill workers therefore seems to be zero.
If you have PR and a parliament full of social democrats, then you are stuck with both, because the social democrats no longer need to win local support within each constituency. They just need the broad support of the population, and with their iron control of mass media this is never hard to arrange.
A month ago we loudly bemoaned the presence of a Labour Prime Minister whose party had 35% of the vote. Today, we have a Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister with 23% of the vote.
Pathos. Lembit Opik bumps into media scrum outside Clegg meeting. "Oh, is that my lot meeting there? Well, they used to be my lot"
-- Paul Waugh on Twitter
Boris Johnson, I can reveal, has just collapsed the controversial PPP for the Underground, the public-private deal hatched by Gordon Brown with the able assistance of Baroness Vadera.
This radical move was set to occur two weeks ago but was barred by purdah. Only now, after polling day, can it go ahead.
In a nutshell, Boris is paying £310 million to buy out Tubelines, the umbrella group for Bechtel and Ferrovial that was charged with upgrading the Tube.
As a result, Transport for London will now directly control the works with no middle man and no punishing management fees. With TfL having an excellent debt rating, it also means lower debt repayments over the long term.
More importantly for passengers, it means that Tube line closures can be slashed to fit with TfL's wishes rather than the convenience of the private sector contractors. I'm told it will mean 84 closures for works will now be reduced to just 12.
With Metronet also collapsed, it means that Boris has done something that Red Ken never managed to do (but dearly wanted) - scrap one of the worst value PFI-style schemes in history.
He was hailed by Alastair Campbell as the "megastar" who would boost Gordon Brown's flagging election campaign, but an Elvis impersonator has left Labour feeling all shook up.
Corby borough council is investigating whether the performance at the weekend breached the Licensing Act.
Our view has been one of idealism, we do not deny that, and a hope that harming the economic might that underpins the removal of liberty in the third world can help to bring about the end of that system. The critique often levelled is mixed: on one hand there is the fair point that these people may earn very little, but what they do earn feeds their families and such a boycott would harm them; the second a far more insidious ultra-capitalist position of they should be grateful for whatever they can get and the bosses have the right to do what they want.
The latter, let's not delude ourselves, is the ultimate propertarian position. The boss owns the land and the factory and he pays the wages, therefore the workers may be practically slaves and live in grinding filth and poverty with zero liberty or rights, but it is the bosses right. If they don't like it, they can quit - presumably to starve to death somewhere - or they can rise up.
