"Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we've become"

The great Professor Walter Williams, he of the amnesty for whites, on the way we were and the way we live now :

"During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn't lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the '60s and '70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and '50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today's pathology on poverty and discrimination. Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we've become."

(quoted at Booker Rising)

Roots of Politics

From Steven Pinker's excellent nature-vs-nurture book The Blank Slate :

The Right-Left axis aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first glance seem to have nothing in common. If you learn that someone is in favor of a strong military, for example, it is a good bet that the person is also in favor of judicial restraint rather than judicial activism. If someone believes in the importance of religion, chances are she will be tough on crime and in favor of lower taxes. Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patriotism and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young, pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business rather than a university or government agency. The opposing positions cluster just as reliably: if someone is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, or to affirmative action, or to generous welfare programs, or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good that he will also be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a secularist, and a professor or student.

Why on earth should people's beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military? What does religion have to do with taxes? Whence the linkage between strict construction of the Constitution and disdain for shocking art? Before we can understand why beliefs about an innate human nature might cluster with liberal beliefs or with conservative beliefs, we have to understand why liberal beliefs cluster with other liberal beliefs and conservative beliefs cluster with other conservative beliefs...

The most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension is Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Not every ideological struggle fits his scheme, but as we say in social science, he has identified a factor that can account for a large proportion of the variance. Sowell explains two "visions" of the nature of human beings that were expressed in their purest forms by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the patron of secular conservatism, and William Godwin (1756-1836), the British counterpart to Rousseau. In earlier times they might have been referred to as different visions of the perfectibility of man. Sowell calls them the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision; I will refer to them as the Tragic Vision (a term he uses in a later book) and the Utopian Vision.

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,' wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask `why?'; I dream things that never were and ask `why not?"' The quotation is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough")." The Utopian Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.

In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it...

In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institutions are a distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain their rationale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human na﷓ture always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism. And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted according to feedback about the sum of their good and bad consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss. The best we can do is trade off one cost against another...

In the Utopian Vision, human nature changes with social circumstances, so traditional institutions have no inherent value. That was then, this is now. Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to rule from the grave. They must be stated explicitly so their rationale can be scrutinized and their moral status evaluated. And by that test, many traditions fail: the confinement of women to the home, the stigma against homosexuality and premarital sex, the superstitions of religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the dangers of patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan "My country, right or wrong. " Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy once seemed inevitable but have disappeared or faded from many parts of the world through changes in institutions that were once thought to be rooted in human nature. Moreover, the existence of suffering and injustice presents us with an undeniable moral imperative. We don't know what we can achieve until we try, and the alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of the world, is unconscionable...

Those with the Tragic Vision are unmoved by ringing declarations attributed to the first-person plural we, our, and us. They are more likely to use the pronouns as the cartoon possum Pogo did: We have met the enemy, and he is us. We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when that power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. As the conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, "To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise."

The two kinds of visionaries thereby line up on opposite sides of many issues that would seem to have little in common. The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies—namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms—and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests. Thus, say the Tragic Visionaries, the Utopians fail to anticipate that welfare might encourage dependency, or that a restriction on one pollutant might force people to use another.

Instead, the Tragic Vision looks to systems that produce desirable outcomes even when no member of the system is particularly wise or virtuous. Market economies, in this vision, accomplish that goal: remember Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker providing us with dinner out of self-interest rather than benevolence. No mastermind has to understand the intricate flow of goods and services that make up an economy in order to anticipate who needs what, and when and where. Property rights give people an incentive to work and produce; contracts allow them to enjoy gains in trade. Prices convey information about scarcity and demand to producers and consumers, so they can react by following a few simple rules—make more of what is profitable, buy less of what is expensive—and the "invisible hand" will do the rest. The intelligence of the system is distributed across millions of not-necessarily-intelligent producers and consumers, and cannot be articulated by anyone in particular.

People with the Utopian Vision point to market failures that can result from having a blind faith in free markets. They also call attention to the unjust distribution of wealth that tends to be produced by free markets. Opponents with the Tragic Vision argue that the notion of justice makes sense only when applied to human decisions within a framework of laws, not when applied to an abstraction called "society." ...

Some of today's battles between left and right fall directly out of these different philosophies: big versus small government, high versus low taxes, protectionism versus free trade, measures that aim to reduce undesirable outcomes (poverty, inequality, racial imbalance) versus measures that merely level the playing field and enforce the rules. Other battles follow in a less obvious way from the opposing visions of human potential. The Tragic Vision stresses fiduciary duties, even when the person executing them cannot see their immediate value, because they allow imperfect beings who cannot be sure of their virtue or foresight to participate in a tested system. The Utopian Vision stresses social responsibility, where people hold their actions to a higher ethical standard...

Radical political reform, like radical judicial reform, will be more or less appealing depending on one's confidence in human intelligence and wisdom. In the Utopian Vision, solutions to social problems are readily available. Speaking in 1967 about the conditions that breed violence, Lyndon Johnson said, "All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs:'" If we already know the solutions, all we have to do is choose to implement them, and that requires only sincerity and dedication. By the same logic, anyone opposing the solutions must be motivated by blindness, dishonesty, and callousness. Those with the Tragic Vision say instead that solutions to social problems are elusive. The inherent conflicts of interest among people leave us with few options, all of them imperfect. Opponents of radical reform are showing a wise distrust of human hubris...

Those with the Utopian Vision see crime as inherently irrational and seek to prevent it by identifying the root causes. Those with the Tragic Vision see crime as inherently rational and believe that the root cause is all too obvious: people rob banks because that's where the money is. The most effective crime-prevention programs, they say, strike directly at the rational incentives. A high probability of unpleasant punishment raises the anticipated cost of crime. A public emphasis on personal responsibility helps enforce the incentives by closing any loopholes left open by the law. And strict parenting practices allow children to internalize these contingencies early in life.

The Utopian Vision is of course the Pelagian Heresy. And the finest exposition of the Tragic Vision is IMHO that of Rudyard Kipling.

Tautology Alert

This chap calls himself the Leftwing Criminologist. Don't find many of those, do you now ?

Too Naive To Make A Good Politician ...

'I am shocked and upset that a member of the Labour Party in this day and age could even think something like that, let alone say it.

'People should not be allowed to make racist comments like that. If someone in the party feels I cannot represent them because of my colour or religion, that's ridiculous.

'I felt particularly aggrieved because I have worked across all sections of the community, particularly with the Muslim section, and have been on official visits to Pakistan.'

Elaina Cohen may well be a terrific Labour candidate for the East Handsworth and Lozells ward. But she does strike me as somewhat unworldly. The fates of Lorna Fitzsymons and Oona King seem to have passsed her by. In Mr Blair's immortal words 'the rules of the game have changed'.

Hmm ...

We've all had words with the missus and felt a bit cross ... but all the same.

A Moscow police chief went on a killing spree early today after arguing with his wife at a celebration for his 32nd birthday.

While the whole thing is terribly sad and he should be shot or locked away for life, it's this bit that struck me :

The gun Mr Yevsyukov used had been recorded as missing from a criminal inquiry in Chechnya since 2000, a spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor-General's Office said.

Hmm. A gun goes missing from an enquiry in Chechnya in 2000 - and ends up in a senior officer's house in Moscow in 2009. The guy had only been in the force since 2005. That's what Moscow police are telling us. What is the story, I wonder ?

"a major step forward for pirates "

I don't know what's more striking - management-speak of the pirates :

Separately, wire service AFP quoted Mohamed Muse, reportedly the head of the pirate group, as lamenting their failure to take the vessel due to “technical reasons.”

“The capture of such a large vessel would have represented a major step forward for pirates off the Somalian coast, but unfortunately their tactics were good and we could not board.

“It was not the first time we have attacked this kind of boat and we were very close to capturing it,” Mr Muse told AFP. “We really showered it with bullets.”

How long before they're talking about "a new parrot-digm" or "a raft of new initiatives" to "take piracy into the twenty-first century" ?

or the general floppiness of :

Mr Vago insisted that the company only carried arms onboard under exceptional circumstances, attributing the storage of “just a few pistols” aboard the MSC Melody to the recent escalation of pirate attacks off the horn of Africa.

He also claimed that, contrary to some press reports, security guards aboard the vessel had no independent access to the weapons. The pistols were kept in a safe on the bridge and released only at the discretion of the master.

At the same time, he admitted that the controversial issue of deploying firearms on passenger ships, which some believe will only lead to an escalation of pirate violence, must be debated.

Words fail me (that's a figure of speech - they don't really). Thus have we progressed from the days when captured pirates would soon be decorating the yardarm.

We're that near the gibbet that my neck's stiff with thinking on it. You've seen 'em, maybe, hanged in chains, birds about 'em, seamen p'inting 'em out as they go down with the tide. 'Who's that?' says one. 'That! Why, that's John Silver. I knowed him well,' says another. And you can hear the chains a- jangle as you go about and reach for the other buoy.

The late Captain Coulston would have known what to do with them. A cruise with him would have been something to talk about when you got back.

"The battle it commenced, brave boys, and blood in streams did flow
While undaunted did our passengers the pirate overthrow
The cries of women and children lying in the hull below
While the captain and his passengers the pirate did overthrow"

I'm all for merchant vessels mounting a few Oerlikons or Bofors - preferably hidden in Q-ship style (via which, the Baralong incident. Bad form and not something to be proud of. If they'd been pirates it would have been different).

Poor Old Russia

It's losing the one thing it always had in quantity - people.

Some people worry about authoritarian Russia, but others (Mark Steyn comes to mind) think it's only a matter of time before the empty Far East returns to its previous owners, who have people to spare. China lost it to Russia in the Treaty of Aigun 150 years ago.

Their demography makes the UKs look good - although the country is emptying rather than being kept topped up by mass immigration.

A spectre is haunting Russia today. It is not the spectre of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing.

Since 1992, Russia’s human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in Russia, to diminish the prospects for Russian economic development, and to affect Russia’s potential influence on the world stage in the years ahead.

The current Russian depopulation—which began in 1992 and shows no signs of abating—was, like the previous episodes, also precipitated by events of momentous political significance: the final dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of Communist Party rule. But it differs in three important respects. First, it is by far the longest period of population decline in modern Russian history, having persisted for over twice as long as the decline that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, and well over three times as long as the terrifying depopulation Russia experienced during and immediately after World War II.

Second, unlike all the previous depopulations in Russia, this one has been taking place under what are, within the Russian context, basically orderly social and political circumstances. Terror and war are not the engines for the depopulation Russia is experiencing today, as they have been in the past.

And finally, whereas Russia’s previous depopulations resulted from wild and terrible social paroxysms, they were also clearly temporary in nature. The current crisis, on the other hand, is proceeding gradually and routinely, and thus it is impossible to predict when, or whether, it will finally come to an end.

It's a post-Soviet thing. Lots of abortions, which was characteristic of the old SU, but now lots of cohabitation and lower fertility.

In 1990, the end of the Gorbachev era, marriage was still the norm, and while divorce was very common, a distinct majority of Russian Federation women (60 percent) could expect to have entered into a first marriage and still remain in that marriage by age 50. A few years later, in 1996, the picture was already radically different: barely a third of Russia’s women (34 percent) were getting married and staying in that same marriage until age 50.

Since the end of the Soviet era, young women in Russia are opting for cohabitation before and, to a striking extent, instead of marriage. In the early 1980s, about 15 percent of women had been in consensual unions by age 25; twenty years later, the proportion was 45 percent. Many fewer of those once-cohabiting young women, moreover, seem to be moving into marital unions nowadays. Whereas roughly a generation earlier, fully half of cohabiters were married within a year, today less than a third are.

Is Russia’s post-Communist plunge in births the consequence of a “demographic shock,” or the result of what some Russian experts call a “quiet revolution” in patterns of family formation? At the moment, it is possible to see elements of both in the Russian Federation’s unfolding fertility trends. Demographic shocks tend by nature to be transient; demographic transitions or “revolutions,” considerably less so. But this much is clear: to date, no European society that has embarked upon the same demographic transition as Russia’s—declining marriage rates with rising divorce; the spread of cohabitation as alternative to marriage; delayed age at marriage and sub-replacement fertility regimens—has reverted to more “traditional” family patterns and higher levels of completed family size. There is no reason to think that in Russia it will be any different.

Don't even get him started on Russia's public health disasters.

By 2005, male life expectancy at birth was fully fifteen years lower in the Russian Federation than in Western Europe. It was also five years below the global average for male life expectancy, and three years below the average for the less developed regions (whose levels it had exceeded, in the early 1950s, by fully two decades).

And the people who ARE having the babies tend not to be "the indigenous ethnic groups of the country". That at least is familiar.

First, along with the overall decline, differences in birthrates and survival rates among the indigenous ethnic groups of the country and among immigrant populations mean that depopulation will be accompanied by “a change in the nationality composition of Russia,” with the titular nationality forming an ever smaller share.

Second, depopulation will threaten the foundations of the preservation of the titular nationality's “self-consciousness” and entail “the loss of national traditions,” especially if, as seems likely, the majority nationality by the middle of this century will be a nation other than the Russians.

Third, she writes, depopulation will threaten the ability of the country to maintain its territorial integrity and the well-being of the population. Russia is already one of the least densely populated countries on earth, and it will soon lack the numbers of people needed to hold its current borders if they are challenged within or without.

Fourth, the country will face an increasing shortage of workers, a trend that will make it ever more difficult for the population to maintain its standard of living and force the government to withdraw support from the kinds of projects that could reverse this and other dangerous demographic developments.

Don't get her started on the other six !

Sounds Of The Sixties

(not for those who dislike jangly semi-accoustic guitars. If you right-click on the links you can open the music in a new window or tab).


Once upon a time there was an successful accoustic Australian pop group called the Seekers, who featured a sweet-faced, pure-voiced girl called Judith Durham, at the time every Dad's favourite. They played mainstream music - love songs and the like - the cultural revolution had yet to kick in.

When my all-time fave folkie Sandy Denny stopped doing solo spots in folk clubs and joined an obscure band called the Strawbs, they didn't half sound like the Seekers. Listen to "All I need Is You" or "On My Way". Those jangly guitars are so Sixties.

A little later and across the pond, a bunch of proto-hippies called Jefferson Airplane were doing drugs and singing stuff like "It's no secret", although their pretty female singer was no Judith Durham (in among the drug stuff and political posturing, they also produced one of the most beautiful love songs ever). Back in England, a thirteen year old Laban was inscribing their name on school desks.

The cultural revolution was kicking off, and by strange chance the next band that Sandy Denny joined (here doing 'Time Will Show The Wiser' with the lovely Judy Dyble singing) didn't half sound like Jefferson Airplane.

We're Not Having Kids Part 503 - Liz Forgan

Times interview with the current Arts Council chairman :

There are, she thinks, two reasons for her becoming such a successful woman. During her single-sex education it never crossed her mind that women could not run things. “And I don't have children. It is unquestionably much more difficult for women with children to have a long-term career. I am in awe of women with children juggling 18 balls but the superwoman myth went too far. In your life if you are a daughter, mate, parent and have a career you cannot give 100 per cent of time to all of them.”

Laban thinks single-sex education is a Good Thing, too - particularly for girls.

But it's funny. She doesn't seem in awe of this successful woman with kids :

I have been a card-carrying feminist for 40 years and this woman has found somewhere in me a little kernel of sexism. She causes me to make a failure of sisterhood. Sorry Charlie but I cannot stand her candy coated philistinism, I hate her crass creationism, I loath her parading of her family about the place, God forgive me I even hate her teenage hair ...

Hmmm ...

Not noticed this chap (parental advisory - foul language) before, but ...

"Griffin - I will not grace you with the honorific 'Mister', which applies to members of the human race - YOU, and your cabal of ***** are the ones who are not British. You have no concept of what the word means, no sense of responsibility to this country. Your deluded, vile, racist leaflets harken back to the awful days of the Reich's 'Nuremberg Laws'.

You and your ilk are the ones who don't deserve the right to exist in this country. One day, I fervently wish you get your own Nuremberg moment. I'll even pull the lever myself."

Er ... are you wishing that he actually carries out a genocide and starts a war that kills 50-odd million people ?

Or do you want the trial and punishment without the bother of finding any evidence ?

Just asking.




(and will people stop using the female pudendum as a term of abuse ? Just asking.)

Selfish, blind or both ?

I linked the other day to leftie blogger Dave Osler's remarkable post-budget post, in which he opined :

I’m not as gloomy as he appears to be about issues of demographics, if only because further mass immigration obviously has the potential to rejuvenate the population of this island once the politicians can get their head round the idea.

He was referring to Hamish McRae's Indie piece :

A second way of looking at these deficits is to see them in terms of intergenerational equity. To what extent should people now load the cost of our pensions and public services on to the next generation of taxpayers, our children? Demographic arithmetic makes this choice much starker. There will of course be fewer children relative to the number of workers and the workforce is already starting to shrink. Meanwhile the number of pensioners is correspondingly rising. The combination of fewer workers, more pensioners and a bigger national debt is a toxic one, all the more so since it is known and predictable, unlike the toxic debts accumulated by our banking system.

Whatever we do now, it is inevitable that our children will pay much more in tax than they receive in social benefits. For the present generation of retirees, thanks to favourable demography, the position is reversed. In the past, when governments ran up huge deficits it was to fight wars and I think most of us would accept that defending the country in the Second World War was worth the price. But now the deficits are to spend more on social benefits than people are prepared to pay in taxes and our children will have a right to feel cheated.

Hamish will keep going on about "our" children, and whether they will feel cheated or not. As I've been pointing out for what feels like forever, there just aren't enough of 'our' children to go round - thanks in no small way to the cultural revolution of which Dave would no doubt heartily approve. But Osler's hope is in 'their' children - the children of those who have yet to come here. In a couple of comments aimed at sceptical posters he says :

"they better embrace it (further mass immigration - LT) if they want to have anybody to wipe their ****s for them by the time they end up in the nursing home. Or if they want an economy that supports pension payments."

"Either immigrants keep this country going, or it folds."

He's presumably actually read the McRae piece, as he's posting on it. McRae says that those supporting geriatric baby-boomers are likely (en masse) to pay more in tax than they receive. Even supposing they're 'our' children, that's a big ask which would raise questions of intergenerational solidarity - questions McRae passes by. What if the youth don't want to be taxed to pay for their parents and grandparents - indeed, given the coming numbers of childless geriatrics, to pay for people who are nobody's parents or grandparents ? Another leftie (and presumably childless) blogger says, when asked what he worries about :

"Loneliness in old age"

But the poor chap doesn't seem to realise that there's more to being old than 'just' having your friends die off or becoming too immobile to see you. There is, as Mr Osler so delicately puts it, the potential question of wiping the bottom.

Do I digress ? I think not, but - intergenerational solidarity is a phrase being bandied about quite a bit in the economic press at present. Here's a little excerpt from Sam Jones' FT Alphaville post on the UK's triple-A rating - or why financial markets are willing to lend money to the UK more than they are to many other countries.

Pierre Cailleteau, Team MD of Moody’s sovereign risk group, and Mares’ boss, says, safe havens’ triple-A status, “depends on two potentially unstable notions: continued public trust in government institutions, including the currency, and sustained inter-generational solidarity mechanisms.” It is the latter of these that gives the US, Germany, Japan and the UK such huge room for manoeuvre (my emboldening - LT). Sovereign credit risks are predicated on a whole series of qualitative as well as quantitative judgements about the strength, age, and “institutionalisation” of a country’s financial practices. That we have an age-old central banking system, a set of (mostly) sound checks and balances and a very secure financial infrastructure means that, in the top rating agencies’ views, the UK, like Germany or Japan, is well positioned relative to more politically and economically fragile peers. As Moody’s says in its overview of sovereign ratings:

"The probability of default for a government depends on both the ability and willingness to pay".

What they're talking about in the end is a stable political culture plus intergenerational solidarity, which means the UK can run up debts now and be confident that future taxpayers will pay them off.

But think about it. "Continued public trust in government institutions". How's that going, eh ? While I don't want to get too apocalyptic, I think it's reasonable to say that trust is falling, and indeed I'd be hard put to think of when it was lower - Peterloo ? 1926 ?

As for "sustained inter-generational solidarity mechanisms" - well that phrase tends to imply that we're talking different generations of the same group of people. This will be less and less the case. On the one hand, you'll have a rapidly rising number of oldies who won't have any descendants, and a rapidly rising number of ethnic minority youngies who'll be heavily taxed to pay for a load of hideous old whities, who they'll have been taught at school are responsible for all the ills of the world.

Right now 23% of the children in primary schools (England and Wales figures) are 'ethnic minority' and the proportion rises every year, with natives forecast to be a minority by 2073. How will these 'sustained mechanisms' pan out in such a scenario ?

Isn't there a possibility that the overtaxed young, even those whose parents he so kindly invited in, will decide that they'd rather kick Old Father Osler's butt than wipe it ?

Or a possibility that they should mete out a bit of righteous justice for the sins of Mr Osler's racist forebears, obtaining reparation by beatings, racist abuse or force-feeding talcum powder ?

These are only a couple of many competing possibilities, of course. It may be that Dave will live out his declining years tended by happy rainbow people, in a lovely building with pretty garden views - something rather like the images of God's kingdom you see on the cover of the Watchtower. But it is rational to look at and evaluate all the possible outcomes of any course of action. Not at all sure he's done this.

Mr Osler's big mistake IMHO is that he doesn't see these incomers as rational actors on their own account, but as tax-generating units on his account. He doesn't seem so very distant from the capitalists he affects to despise - where they see profits and cheap labour, he sees taxes and cheap labour. Mass immigration also has the happy side-effect of annoying those he considers his political enemies. What's not to like ?

"Hi. Welcome to England. Your numbers give you considerable political clout. Please use that clout on my behalf, not yours. Pay your taxes - to pay people to wipe my backside".

Let's hope he doesn't have to get too much talc up his nose before he discovers that immigrants are people like him, with good and bad, a culture and their own ideas of right, wrong, and what should be done. Which may not be what Mr Osler wants or expects.



(a much shortened version of this post was dropped in Mr Osler's comments, which he hastily switched to moderation having received traffic from here. He hasn't published it. I brand him poltroon. UPDATE - see below. He's not a poltroon after all. )

UPDATE - to be fair to him, Dave Osler looks like a hard-headed realist compared to one Edmund Conway, Telegraph scribbler. I do hope he's no relation to David Conway of Civitas. His solution to the crisis ? We need more people like Karen Matthews.



UPDATE 2 - Mr Osler drops in to say that he doesn't censor comments, and that the non-published and much-truncated version of this post which I dropped on his site may have been snaffled by his anti-spamming system. Fair do's. I hereby drop all charges of poltroonery against said blogger and apologise for branding him such.


UPDATE 3 - Of course, given increasingly crumbly social cohesion and the need to borrow billions for years to come, it may well be that triple-A status vanishes long before Dave Osler gets that first taste of talc. Willem Buiter :

Under the best possible scenario, taxes will have to be raised and/or public spending cut on a permanent basis by between 5 and 6 per cent of GDP to regain fiscal sustainability. The necessary permanent fiscal tightening could easily be larger. The pain will be widely felt. The ambition to bring British infrastructure back up to the level it achieved at the end of the 19th century has been postponed by another quarter-century. Education and health will suffer.

The long-term pain of higher taxes and lower public spending is not the result of public debt and deficits incurred because of a war fought by a united nation against a hated external enemy. It is the result of an economic civil war, a massive systemic peacetime economic failure, with a large domestic component. It is therefore not clear that the necessary social and political cohesion - readiness to accept joint fiscal burden-sharing - will be present. If the necessary fiscal tightening is not forthcoming because different groups and vested interests are engaged in a war of attrition aimed at shifting the fiscal burden to the other guy, markets could easily panic and Britain could face an emerging market-style “sudden stop”, with the rest of the world withholding financing from its public and private sectors.

Well done indeed ...

Police blogger Nightjack has won the first Orwell blog prize. I'm impressed - I thought the traditional lefty panellists might get the vapours reading posts like this. Fair play to 'em.

I hope you've read some of his stuff - if not, get over there and do so.

"I have seen the rest of my life"

It's deja vu all over again for Peter Briffa.

England Arise

England, arise! The long long night is over,
Faint in the east behold the dawn appear;
Out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
From your fields and hills
Hark! the answer swells:
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
Long, long have been the anguish and the labour,
Dark, dark the clouds of unbelief unrolled,
Dreadful the night when no man trusted neighbour,
Shameful the nightmare-greed of gain and gold;
Yet from fields and hills
Hark! the song now swells:
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
By your young children's eyes so red with weeping,
By their white faces aged with want and fear,
By the dark cities where your babes are creeping
Naked of joy and all that makes life dear;
From your wretched slums
A voice of pity comes:
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
By all your workshops where men sweat and sicken,
Foredone to death, in toil and hope deferred,
Where cheeks are flushed and pulses start and quicken,
Not with glad life but by dark hatred stirred;
From each bench and forge
A sound comes like a surge:
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
By your high homes of wealth and wasteful living,
By your rich tables piled, without good cheer,
By the ennui, ill-health, and sickly striving --
Not great to be, but only to appear;
O'er the weary throng
Strangely floats the song:
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
By your rich orchards, lands of corn and pasture,
Where all day long the voice of joy should ring,
Now mute and desert, by land-grabbers wasted,
Robbed of the love the peasant longs to bring;
From the stricken land
Hark! the words ascend:
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
People of England, all your valleys call you,
High in the rising sun the lark sings clear;
Will you dream on, let shameful slumber thrall you?
Will you disown your native land so dear?
Shall it die unheard --
That sweet pleading word?
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
Over your face a web of lies is woven,
Law that are falsehoods pin you to the ground;
Labour is mocked, its just reward is stolen,
On its bent back sits Idleness encrowned;
How long, while you sleep,
Your harvest shall it reap?
Arise, O England, for the day is here.
Out of your ruin rich men thrive and fatten,
Your merchants rub their hands when food is dear,
Capital says your claims are not forgotten
If wages keep you just starvation-clear;
People of England, when
Will ye rise like men?
Rise and be freemen, for the day is here!
Hear, England, hear! Deliverance is within you;
Though like a man whom death is very near,
Though sick the head, the whole heart faint within you,
Dare to be true! -- and even from the bier
Where your body lies
A new life shall arise,
England shall rise again to life sincere.
Yet thus I warn you: long shall be the struggle,
Not one but many men in it shall die;
This cancerous disease and devil's juggle
Shall not pass in the twinkling of an eye;
To undo their wrong
The people shall strive long:
O that they fail not! for the day is here.
Forth then, ye heroes, patriots and lovers!
Comrades of danger, poverty and scorn!
Mighty in faith of Freedom, your great Mother,
Giants refreshed in joy's new-rising morn!
Come and swell the song
Silent now so long --
England is risen and the Day is here!

Thus one Edward Carpenter, writing at a time when the condition of the English poor was improving as fast as at any time in its history. Carpenter, another public-school socialist, was the archetype sandalista (he introduced them to the UK) and pointy-head, criticised by Hyndman (home tutor, Cambridge, MCC and Sussex) for attempting to turn the Social Democratic Federation into "depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, and anti-vaccinationists" and by George Orwell (Eton) who attacked "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" in the socialist movement. Sometimes (often ?) debate in the workers movement seemed awfully short on input from actual workers. Carpenter was one of those 'back to the land' drippy hopouts who could only live the dream with Daddy's dosh :

"When his father Charles Carpenter died in 1882, he left his son a considerable fortune. This enabled Carpenter to quit his lectureship to start a simpler life of market gardening."

Well, long indeed has been the anguish and the Labour - nearly 12 years now. But I don't see quite as many white faces among the young children these days - certainly not in the dark cities. Obviously Sure Start has removed want and fear from the young. More excellent news is that the sweated workshops - indeed pretty much any workshops - appear to be a thing of the past. We are all free to wear sandals, start our own little market gardens, and sleep with whom we wish. Enough. The seminal work 'The Breaking of the English Working Class' remains to be written - and Mr Carpenter's spiritual descendants will have played their parts in that breaking.


Remember today - and remember the great English genius - perhaps the greatest - whose birthday it is.

"Naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true"

A big 'if'. There lies the task. Not a small one, is it ?

Norm Has Been To Venice ...

and he writes about it here.


But don't forget I've been there too.


I've also been to Amsterdam.

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens"

Dave Osler pronounces on the budget :

I’m not as gloomy as he appears to be about issues of demographics, if only because further mass immigration obviously has the potential to rejuvenate the population of this island once the politicians can get their head round the idea.

There's enough material there for a whole conference.

Where's Jack Jones When We Need Him ?

Alice Cook

Back in the 1970s, workers had a voice and it served as a bulwark against the more virulent forms of rapacious capitalism. When industrial unions were destroyed, that voice was gone and our democracy suffered enormously.

With the unions weakened, this country was comprehensively deindustrialized. Finance became the only industry that mattered. Today, trade unions only represent the public sector. Private sector workers have been disenfranchised and silenced by anti trade union legislation...

I would happy put up with a few extra days of industrial action to regain a degree of balance in our political discourse.

Discuss.

It's Still All About Me

Seventies feminist icon Rosie Boycott is developing a nice little sideline in mea culpas for the Daily Mail. Only a few months back she was telling us that biology is destiny, now she's telling their readers yet again what a bad girl she's been.

Well, not quite. She's got a confessional to publicise - first issued in 1985, now to be republished - and the DM do like a good 'middle-class girl gone wrong' story. They don't come any more middle-class or go any wronger than our Rosie. Bring them together and let toxic synergy do the rest.

I suppose it's possible that the DM have tweaked the interview to make her seem like a self-centred airhead. What can you make of this, describing her father, an upright military type who didn't speak to her for a couple of years after the original washing of the dirty linen in public :

"His rejection of my book was very painful to me. I think now it was partly his British stiff upper lip, but he probably also thought: "Gosh, maybe I didn't take care of her enough,"' she says.

'My life got very out of control and maybe he felt there was more he could have done. He probably felt, as a parent, that he had failed me.' "

But enough of him, let's talk more about me, eh ? The poor chap was probably regretting all those times he left the belt on the back of the bedroom door.

I also notice that the most influential of Ms Boycotts years - the feminist, Spare Rib years - seem to be airbrushed out. Ms Boycott has one child.

Another Seventies alternative icon with one child and a past of drug abuse and sexual liberation wasn't quite as middle class as Ms Boycott, and never found peace on a Somerset chicken farm. Her parents didn't speak to her for a couple of years, either.

If you were casting a pornographic blockbuster now I'm not sure you'd cast a Karen Carpenter lookalike as your star, but Marylin Chambers, who was found dead in her California trailer last week, was a Seventies hit in Behind The Green Door, which cost less than a hundred thousand but reportedly grossed 25 million dollars. Along with the late Linda Lovelace, she - or more accurately the men who filmed her - helped make pornography more mainstream - almost chic - in fashionable America, a trend which ain't stopped yet.

She leaves one child.

The People Have Spoken

Harrow Times

A Harrow MP who claimed public money for a house his parents live in has fallen victim to a graffiti vandal.

The door of Tony McNulty's office, in Byron Road, was daubed with the words “that's £60,000 you owe me Tony” last week.

The vandal is apparently angry at the conduct of the Harrow East MP, who claimed £60,000 from the public purse in allowances for a second home in Harrow, which turned out to be his parents' home.

Perhaps he can claim compensation as a victim of crime ?

Euro Election Campaigning Starts In Earnest

Sack them.

Vote for anyone but them.

Residents' fury at them (aka one Lib Dem councillor. Do they do fury, the Lib Dems ?)

"peddling their own brand of snake-oil"

Don't ignore them - confront them.

"the last thing Cumbria needs"

"outcasts in the north" - oops, sorry - that appears to be the Tories.

Listen to the BBC next Thursday where will be revealed their campaigning secrets.

Which include "dress smartly" and "do not express extreme views or advocate violence of any description. Your e-mails are probably less secure than you think". I wonder what gave them that idea ?






I think the last - re expressing extreme views - is a bit of a forlorn hope from a BNP perspective. If we cross the Atlantic to Canada, we find "anti-racist activists" who specialise in joining nasty websites, posting nasty stuff on said websites, waiting for an equally nasty response, then suing under hate-crime legislation. I'm sure there'll be a few such lurking under some dank BNP stone - and they're all pretty dank, aren't they, children ?

Take the interesting debate at Conservative Home, which I linked to above and which features a number of commenters addressing what IMHO is and has been for the last seven or eight years the key driver behind increasing BNP support - namely the demographic changes which are likely to see my children members of the British ethnic minority in their old age*. They point out the poor old elephant in the drawing room that dare not speak its name.

"If things are allowed to continue, within about 30 years the indigenous population will be a minority"

"In real life, people want a strict immigration policy. Both major parties have failed to do what Britons want."

"Cultural existence is whether you like it or not - a very important matter to most Brits."

"do you want to become an ethnic minority?" - this issue has to be addressed, if we ignore it the BNP will score yet another propaganda victory.

"Creating a firm, common sense immigration policy that British people really want is the way forward. The fact that that would smash the BNP to bits is just a bonus"

On the whole a reasonable debate with points being scored on several sides. Lots of people (Tories, mind) pointing out neo-Nazi BNP roots, lots of obviously non-Nazi reponses. Then towards the end, in comes commenter 'Jack' ...

"There's absolutely nothing wrote with advocating an all-white Britain ... I would not feel the slightest bit guilty about loading them all onto boats and shipping them back ... I have not met a single decent non-white yet! ... As for the BNP been Nazis (sic), while he had his faults, Hitler did have some good ideas regarding the fact that a nation is based on its race, and that the white race should be put first in Europe. I for one would rather someone like Hitler was in power ... Hitler would look after the interests of white people ..."

followed by this delightful touch :

"I'm not saying the man was a saint- his attitude towards our fellow white Slavic people was insanity."

Obviously a chap who can see both sides of an argument. While I know there are some nutters in the world, he seems too good to be true, doesn't he ?








* yes, I know my father was an immigrant, but he walked out when I was three so didn't have a major impact on my cultural upbringing - which was Welsh Baptist ... the children are rooted enough that they support England against Wales at rugby, to my eternal sorrow. There's zero cultural input from my father's native land, "an accursed place which God will one day hold to the reckoning", as the worthy Zahar put it.