The Once and Future Margaret Thatcher

As a Yorkshireman whose ancestors were Derbyshire coalminers, who grew up on a council estate and whose entire extended family were rock-solid Labour supporters, I weep at the extinction of our mining communities – the salt of the earth as Harold MacMillan said. But I scream abuse at my TV set as it brings me one ex-miner after another, one leftish politician after another, and one historian, sociologist, journalist or commentator after another telling me that Margaret Thatcher caused that extinction. For that to be the truth it has to be the case that if Margaret Thatcher had never existed we would still have a thriving coalmining industry. And the leftists who appear to believe this are the same leftists who are now forcing one power station after another to be closed down because, they say, the nasty coal they burn produces so much CO2 it is frying our planet. So who exactly do they think would be burning all the coal produced by these still thriving communities if Margaret Thatcher had never existed?

And who exactly do they think would still be buying the cars of a still-thriving British Leyland if Margaret Thatcher had not privatised it? By what miraculous process would a nationalised, tax-payer-subsidised, incentiveless BL have produced cars of a quality the world wanted and at prices the world was prepared to pay. And if the left believed that it could indeed have done so, why did they not re-nationalise our motor industry on coming to power. And the same goes for every other ‘manufacturing industry’ that the entire left-leaning commentariat accuses Margaret Thatcher of having destroyed.

The left is now broadly divided into two halves: the establishment left majority who recognise that nationalisation, far from being the solution to the weakness of our industrial sector, was actually the cause of it; and the anti-establishment left minority who still believe that state control and state funding is the answer to everything – in short who have still not grown up from the Marxist or quasi-Marxist idealism of their youth and would indeed like to see everything nationalised again – as long of course as we do not actually burn any of the coal our glorious reincarnated miners produce.

 If the problem ended there things would not look too bad for us, since there is zero chance that the anti-establishment left minority will ever again be a significant political force in this country. But the trouble is, it doesn’t end there. The establishment left now recognises that the red flag cannot lead it to victory, so it marches instead behind the green flag of environmentalism, human rights, women’s rights, poor rights, squeezed middle rights, disabled rights, gay rights, youth rights, old rights, employee rights, unemployed rights, public sector workers’ rights, and any other rights it can think of. They may have abandoned nationalisation, but they have not abandoned the application by other means of state objectives to business activity. As James Delingpole says in Watermelons, scratch the green away and you see the red bleeding hearts underneath: fundamentally these people are still motivated by feelings of guilt about their own country’s relative wealth and its imperial, class-ridden past. For them its still a war against every surviving vestige of that past. We built our wealth by polluting the world’s atmosphere with CO2, their reasoning goes, so it is we who must pay the price of stopping polluting it so that the poor parts of the world we exploited in our imperial days can build their own wealth by polluting it like we used to do. The extraordinary thing is that the very same people who think like this accuse Margaret Thatcher of having destroyed our manufacturing industry and call for policies to revive it – provided they only use wind power presumably.

Margaret Thatcher was our first female Prime Minister but devoted her entire energy to doing what she believed was right for the country as a whole, not to fighting the feminist cause. To me this was just part of a consistent thread to her character: she believed in individual action, not words. It is no coincidence that she was a scientist. Matthew Parris made a deeply revealing comment on her: “Her political philosophy was entirely uninteresting”. In other words, while the rest of the political class with its PPE and legal training debated endlessly about the meaning of political life; the analysis of opinion polls and the development of policies to sway them, she simply saw through all the verbiage to the root problems stopping people building better lives for themselves and concentrated on fixing them. She would have seen very clearly that much of the feminist agenda was an exercise in slogan-shouting about misogyny and obsession with statistics, and that she herself was living proof that only by believing in themselves individually and fighting and winning in their own walks of life would women advance. How great it would be for our womenfolk if our political world was full of Margaret Thatchers and not, as it sadly is, of Harriet Harmans.

In fact, how great it would be for all of us if our political world had just one Margaret Thatcher. Just as she destroyed the choking post-war statist, corporatist consensus that was destroying our economy, we now suffer an equally choking post-Thatcher consensus that is destroying it again. This is the consensus of political correctness, of which the destruction of our international competitiveness and of our household budgets by deluded green energy policies is just one facet. You see signs of it everywhere you go – preoccupation not with getting on in life by making yourself as valuable to your fellow men as possible, but with demanding recognition of your own status, stroking your own ego, and demanding public concern for your own interests and needs.

You hear it every time that irritating public address voice in Sainsbury’s makes a “Colleague Announcement” – it clearly never occurred to the managers who designed it that stroking their employees’ egos by calling them “colleagues” rather than “staff” risked irritating the customers without whom they wouldn’t have a job at all. Countless hours are spent in offices everywhere dreaming up fancy sounding titles for secretaries, filing clerks and receptionists and other ways of making them feel that they are rather special. Maybe that is why so many nurses and so many teachers seem to be in danger of thinking that their status, conditions, views and interests are far more important than those of their patients, pupils or parents.

This is part of a wider pattern of chronic misapplication of management time on buzz words and trendy ideas that just don’t matter. Our very language has become permeated by idiot management-speak and sales-talk as a result. The word “problem” has almost disappeared from our language because a generation of management trainees has had it bashed into its head that the more positive-sounding “issue” is to be used instead. Ditto the ridiculous “going forward” for “in future”. Somehow these and countless other instances of the emaciation of our language have crossed from the management training course into our schools, universities and media, in all of which the pollution is now rampant. We seem to be beginning to use language not as a way of communicating clearly, but as a way of displaying our fashionable political correctness and sales patter ability.

Indeed, fuzziness now seems to be preferred to clarity. In my youth I heard the expression “In terms of” only occasionally, and always used in its correct sense – e.g. to denote a measure of value. Now I hear it hundreds of times every day, used, usually utterly redundantly, as a conjunctive, introductory or linking phrase when the speaker can’t be bothered to think of the right words to use so resorts to it in a sort of “You know what I mean” kind of way. As often as not he ends up sounding as though he doesn’t really know what he means at all, and probably often doesn’t. Some BBC announcers cannot get through even the shortest piece without using it repeatedly.

Another similarly rampant trend in the BBC (and politicians too are guilty of all these sins) is the deliberate attempt to speak in the way they, in their patronising way, imagine northerners or southern chavs speak, in order to butter them up and keep them happy to shell out the licence fee. Thus no BBC announcer ever says he is sitting or standing any more; he is always sat or stood. They drop T’s and H’s for the same toe-curlingly patronising reason. And of course a generation has been taught to say “Haitch” not “Aitch” because their teachers thought it would stretch their brain muscles to breaking point to have to learn that H has to be sounded in words but not in the name of the letter. Hilariously, I heard the other day a man drop every H in every word beginning with that letter in his speech but then say “Haitch”. The common factor in all this is fuzzy-minded political correctness throwing an inconsequential haze over real meaning and over what really matters.

You see it also in the fact that even our most distinguished writers – Times Leader writers no exception – now routinely write the most appallingly bad grammar in their desperate attempts to avoid male personal pronouns. My use of them in these paragraphs would have been massively edited to get rid of them, mixing plural verbs with singular subjects to avoid saying “him”, “his”, “he” or “man”. This is obsession with politically correct form, not with substance – anyone with half a brain knows that they are shorthand for “him/her”, “hers/his”, “she/he” or “woman/man”, written this way for reasons of brevity, not acts of discrimination or misogyny. In fact it is the crude mangling of grammar to avoid it that smacks of misandry. I wouldn’t mind betting that if a journalist chose habitually to use female rather than male pronouns on the same basis (as she would be perfectly entitled to do) no female editor would mangle her grammar to remove them.

You see it in the demands of gay people to be allowed to “marry” when in fact there is not one jot of difference, other than in the name, between what civil partnership and marriage give them if both are carried out in a registrar’s office (and if there is it could be put right very quickly and easily and without controversy). And whether they can marry in church is a matter only for the church, not for government. It is pure symbolism. Pure ego. Obsession with form rather than substance.

I could go on with many other examples of rampant political correctness. You see it by the truck load in all the arguments about taxes, benefits, immigration, European Union, defence, aid, education, health and safety, banking etc. Margaret Thatcher saw it and cut through it. The classic case was over apartheid in South Africa. While others marched in the streets, waved their banners and demanded sanctions, she quietly worked with de Klerk to make it politically possible for him to release Mandela and bring it to an end. I am surprised not to have heard the defeat of apartheid listed along with the defeat of Soviet Communism in her list of achievements. de Klerk was her South African Gorbachev.

We need a complete political revolution to decontaminate our society of this choking miasma of political correctness. Where is the Margaret Thatcher who will lead it? UKIP’s Farage makes many of the right noises, but while he might well have her courage and determination, he does not give confidence that he has her clarity of mind or purpose. He also shows signs of being too willing to indulge in opportunism and political bandwagon-jumping. But maybe he will perform a kind of John the Baptist role, destroying the Tory vote to shock the Tories into realising that they must bring forth within their own ranks a new Thatcher to rid them and us of this stultifying virus.

What Will the Islamo-Fascists Use for a Ladder if they Realise Their Dream

Interesting isn't it how the Islamo-Fascists find it essential to use Western democratic freedoms as a stepping stone to pursue their dream of re-building the Caliphate and - ultimately - destroying Western democracy. What will they use for a ladder if they ever achieve their dreams? Or do they seriously believe that the world will then be so perfect that they will then never need to fight for or run from anything again? Do they seriously believe that the non-Islamo-Fascist part of the world is just too dim to see what they can see - that life can be made just perfect by killing anyone who can't see it?

It's Not as Simple as That Vincent

Vincent Cooper writes today for The Commentator asking, essentially, whether Enoch Powell was right, and whether we should be outraged that a European bien pensant elite is showing contempt for democracy by inflicting mass immigration on national electorates who do not want it. This is a bit too simplistic for two reasons.

The first is that electorates are free to vote for parties that promise to stop immigration, but consistently fail to do so, presumably because they sense either that the ones who do offer it are dangerous people or that they lack the ability to govern well across the spectrum.

The second reason is related to the first one. One European electorate once did vote in a party that promised to protect the national ethnic culture from alien incursions - Hitler's Nazis - and look what that resulted in. If Vincent Cooper is right that the policies of Europe's political elite reflect distrust of national democracies, they might well say that it is not without good reason.

Vincent is also wrong in his assumption that there is anything new in the distrust of electorates by political elites. It is surely precisely because unrestrained democracy can be extremely dangerous that it is accepted throughout the western world that the will of the majority has to be subject to constitutional restraints. The US founding fathers recognised that and went to great lengths to build the necessary checks and balances into their constitution. The really tough questions therefore are not whether the democratic national will should be constrained, but exactly how, in what way, and by whom should it be constrained.

It's not just about immigration - massive though I agree that issue is and urgent thought the need to address it is; it's just as important, surely, to find some way of forcing politicians to stop shamelessly buying votes by handing out cash not on the basis of need or of objective justification but on the basis of voting power - e.g. Cameron's refusal to stop giving handouts to people just because they are old regardless of how wealthy they are. I agree with Vincent that democracy is in grave danger, but not only because voters are often ignored; it's just as often because they are too much pandered to against the national interest.

Working out a system which gets only the juice out of the democratic orange without squeezing out the blood too is the greatest challenge of our age.

I do agree with Vincent though that handing the power over to the tossers in Europe is not the answer.

2DayFM: Morons Broadcasting to Morons

When radio stations target morons as their audience and employ morons to provide them with the kind of moronic crap that appeals to morons, sooner or later intelligent, sensitive people get destroyed by it.

Hindsight Shows that Monet was Wrong Even in His Premis

We hear a lot now about how the attempt to achieve European Union has ended up being more likely to cause another European war rather than prevent one as it was designed to do, but surely the very idea that the nations of Europe are intrinsically likely to go to war unless they unite is itself completely without foundation.  It might have looked that way to Jean Monet and co in the immediate aftermath of WWII, but what they failed to take account of was the fact that WWI and WWII were basically the result of imperialism: of European nations each determined to have their share of the global imperial cake.  European imperialism is now stone dead, and nothing is going to bring it back.  The Cold War could of course have become another hot European war, but Soviet communism is also now stone dead and it was NATO, not European Union, that killed it (indeed, given that the Cold War was always at its heart Russian imperialist ambition with a communist mask, its end too was the spluttering out of the last ember of European imperialism).

The threat in Europe now is not of general war but of localised ethnic conflict caused by cross-boarder racial and cultural admixtures resulting from earlier imperial episodes going all the way back to ancient times, the Balkan wars being the latest and nastiest examples.  European Union does nothing at all to reduce that threat - indeed, by opening boarders and making the admixtures even more widespread, it ramps it up considerably.  Yes, it can be argued that ambition to board the EU gravy train might persuade some states with ethnic-bashing tendencies to behave themselves and improve their democratic and human rights credentials to gain admission, but events in Greece suggest that in the absence of German willingness to keep pouring them vast amounts of free gravy for eternity the lid is likely to be blown off the pot with even greater violence and should never have been put on in the first place.

In short, the very idea of an intrinsic European tendency to war requiring elaborate supra-national structures to suppress it is itself surely plain wrong.  Had Monet lived to see the end of the Cold War he might well have come to recognise that himself and abandon his crazy idea of European Union.

Can somebody please explain to me why Angela Merkel

..... thinks German taxpayers will suddenly become happy to fund the PIIGS eternally AFTER Eurozone fiscal and political union? Like, it's not OK if their own elected politicians decide to give their cash to the Greeks, but it will be OK if an unelected Eurozone quasi-government decides to do it?  Am I missing something here?

Bank Bonus Culture the most God-Awful Corruption on a Massive Scale

It’s a pity that Ed Miliband is seen as the leader of the campaign against the bankers’ bonus culture, because that gets it presented in the media as a battle between left and right, with David Cameron portrayed as just indulging in a bit of tactical banker bashing to avoid losing too many  votes to Labour or the LibDems rather than as having any genuine problem with the bonus culture.

But he should have a problem with it shouldn’t he?  A big problem.  And so should we all.  There is something profoundly troubling about it, regardless of your politics.

Just look at the facts.  The top brass of any big bank are paid huge basic salaries at the end of every year regardless of how well or badly the bank has performed in that year.  Those salaries are so great that after just a few short years they could easily retire with pension pots big enough to allow them to live in total luxury wanting for nothing that any normal person in their wildest dreams would crave for for the rest of their lives.  Jobs paying salaries like that should surely be something that their occupants hug themselves in disbelief at their good fortune in having been able to land, and in which they work like crazy to demonstrate that they are worth every penny of the money and should most definitely never be sacked for less than first-rate performance.

But is that what they do?  No, what they do is persuade their boards to write them quite staggeringly large bonus cheques on top of those mammoth salaries because, it seems, it should not be they who should be worrying about being sacked and losing their huge salaries if they don’t perform, but their boards and shareholders who should be worrying that if they don’t give them surreal bonuses as well they will walk, and the bank will immediately implode for lack of anyone with the right skills to run it.  The board members are only too ready to approve the bonuses because they are all on the same bonus gravy trains and look forward to ever-more obscene amounts of bonus money themselves as they climb up the ladder.  God knows why the shareholders don’t put a stop to it.  Maybe a lot of them, being big institutions, are controlled by people on similar huge bonuses themselves.  And maybe the rest either just can’t get organised about it or have been brainwashed into believing that their investments really are best served by the bonus culture.

The whole thing just stinks of the most God-awful corruption on a massive scale.  What is truly scary about it is the implication that the ability to run big banks successfully is only to be found in people who will not do it unless they are allowed regularly to stuff their fists in their multi-million pound tills and pretty much take from them as much as they like, on top of what are already quite staggeringly generous basic salaries.  In other words, if that is true, it means that our financial services sector on which we have allowed the health of our economy to depend so critically is in the grip of people of extremely dubious morality. 

But of course it cannot be true.  It is a self-evident con.  The people can only carry out their threat and ‘walk’ to other banks if there are out there banks willing to give in to their threats and pay them.  It should be a relatively simple matter for shareholders of the world’s top banks to get organised and call their bluff, leading either to their backing down or to there being one hell of a lot of unemployed former bank top brass forming queues outside head-hunter offices.  In truth, there must surely be no shortage of first-rate people who are both fully competent and prepared to work their socks of as big bank top brass for an extremely generous salary alone, standing ready to be sacked if they do not deliver value for money.  If there aren’t, we are all in deep trouble, for it means we cannot survive without tugging the forelock to a bunch of amoral, ruthless bastards.

If the shareholders can’t or won’t get organised to do anything about it, then governments will have to do the job for them.  Sooner or later, if things go on as they are, the Tory party’s resistance to attempts by Merkel, Sarkozy and others in the EU to do battle with the financial services sector is going to be seen not as defending the UK’s interests but as conspiring to help a bunch of spivs to keep shafting us all.

Today's Sunday Times Leader on HS2 is total bollocks:

Could not agree more with this on-line comment below today's Sunday Times leader on HS2:
The Sunday Times should be ashamed of writing such drivel as a leader. The argument that it only saves 23 minutes to Birmingham is facile; the line has to go through the Midlands to get to the North, where the savings will be far greater. You can't seriously believe the government intends going only to Birmingham.  You say trains are better than cars because you can work on them, then argue that the money should be spent on improving motorways not railways.  You say the money should be spent on a new Thames airport not on HS2, when the two serve utterly different needs for our economy - BOTH essential.  You completely ignore the government's argument that it is IMPOSSIBLE to meet future rail capacity needs by improvements to the existing lines; that only a new line can achieve that.  Does the writer of this tosh possibly live in the Chilterns and is he or she a member of the anti HS2 campaign?

In Terms of Bollocks 9

A BBC World News presenter interviewing someone about the death of Joe Frazier: 

"A lot of people talk about the difficulty in terms of beating him".

It really does defy belief.

In Terms of Bollocks 8

The judge to the jury in the Michael Jackson trial: You have been remarkable throughout this trial in terms of your patience and dedication  =  You have been remarkably patient and dedicated throughout this trial  or Your patience and dedication throughout this trial have been remarkable.  

Why are even the greatest among us so determined to make their sentences unnecessarily complex in order to find ways of using the words "In terms of"?

Merkozy Greek Euro Bollocks

Don't you just love all the total euro bollocks coming out of Greece and Merkozyland?  Papandreou announces a referendum to ask the Greek people if thay are willing to accept the deal struck with Merkozy.  Merkozy jump up and down and, we are told, 'summon' Papandreou to Cannes. (Who the hell do they think they are 'summoning' the head of government of a sovereign state?  Papandreou should have told them to get lost). Then Merkozy announce that the Greek referendum question will be 'in or out of the euro'?   (Who the hell do they think they are telling another sovereign state what its referendum question will be?). The Greek media then scream the message that the Greek people just love the euro and are determined to stay in it so there is no need for a referendum, and every Greek vox pop face the TV broadcasters can find confirms that this is the case.  They love the euro they say for all the wonderful economic benefits it has brought to Greece.  Then they go back to rioting in the streets in protest at all the austerity measures they have to accept as a result of the massive destruction the euro has inflicted on them - massive destruction that all resulted from the Greeks falsifying their national accounts on a mega scale in order to qualify for entry to the euro, then spending billions they didn't have when the banks were conned by those falsified accounts into lending them the money to do it.  So they want to be in the euro but don't want to have to stop spending billions they don't have or to repay even half of the money they've borrowed let alone all of it.  They don't want to leave the euro because they know it will be financial ruin for them, and they don't want to stay in the euro becasue they know it will be financial ruin for them.  So they want someone to wave a magic wand so they can stay in the euro and carry on spending bllions they don't have for evermore.  Simple, as the meerkats say.

Only the French could have dug europe into such a deep pit of shit as this.

In Terms of Bollocks 7: The Greatest Yet

Jane Hill on BBC World News reporting today on the findings so far of the Met's internal review into the Tottenham riots:

 

"Unprecedented in terms of anything they had seen before".   

Not clear if these were her own words or those of a BBC news editor or of the Met itself, but either way they are an absolute classic; just about the greatest example of "In terms of" bollocks I have seen yet - which is saying something. Delete all but the first word and you have absolutely no change in meaning and perfect clarity.

Not content with that, a little later reporting on the Turkish earthquake, the BBC told us that "Time is running out in terms of finding people alive" = "time is running out for finding people alive"

Any EU referendum should follow re-negotiation, not precede it

Negotiating to see what changes in the terms of the UK's membership of the EU can be secured is surely not something that needs a referendum. It is not a change in our constitutional position; it is simply an exercise to see what change to our constitutional position could be negotiated.  A referendum would be needed only if the Government then decided  to go ahead and implement the changes negotiated.  The only point in having a referendum now would be to ask the single question: should the UK leave the EU now regardless of what changes in the terms of our membership it might theoretically be possible to negotiate?

The Tory backbenchers getting their knickers in a twist about this should change their motion to that end - if in fact getting out is really what they want.  There is no point even in changing the motion just to one calling on the Government to start negotiating now without a referendum, because it is crystal clear that changes to the treaties are going to have to be negotiated anyway to pave the way for the federalisation of the Eurozone.  The time for an in-out referendum will be after those negotiations are concluded.  The Tory leadership is absolutely committed to holding a referendum then anyway, so the backbenchers should just be keeping their powder dry and waiting to demand then that the referendum question includes the get-out option.

Why is it only euro-sceptic Tories who can't see this? 

Theresa May Right about the cat; Ken Clarke past his use-by date

Read the judge's judgement in the case concerned and it's clear that Theresa May was absolutely justified in what she said about the cat.  Of course the judge did not say the illegal immigrant could stay because he had a cat; but he did say that he could stay because he had a family relationship with a woman and that he was reinforced in that view by the fact that they had a cat.  The implication is quite clear: if they had not had a cat their claim to be in a family relationship would have been weakened in the eyes of the law.  Whether fatally weakened or not we cannot know, but it is undeniably theoretically possible that in the absence of a cat the judge might have come to a different view. So the message to illegal immigrants from that judgement is clear; if you want to avoid being deported, shack-up with a woman and buy a cat.

The case vividly illustrates just how crazy judicial interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights has become, and how urgent is the need to put things right.  Regardless of whether repeal of the Human Rights Act and the introduction of a new Bill of Rights is the right way to do that, or whether saner interpretation of the Convention by judges can be achieved while retaining the Human Rights Act, Theresa May was absolutely right to use the cat case to try to get Ken Clarke off his backside.  Ken looks to me less and less like a serious politician and more and more like an old duffer past his use-by date.

LibFem Grammar

Just listen to these words of Tim Farron, President of the LibDems: Your average Tory minister, bless them, works hard in their department and is rarely seen anywhere near their constituency. 

The statement itself is of course utter bollocks - a black lie - but the words are grammatical bollocks too.  Your average Tory minister - singular - bless them - plural - works hard - singular - in their department - plural - and is rarely seen - singular - anywhere near their - plural - constituency - singular.

Now, whatever you may think of Tim Farron's politics or intellect, like me you probably do not believe that he is this ignorant of the rules of grammar.   So why does he do it?  He does it in a desperate attempt to avoid upsetting the women's lib fraternity by saying  his or him, saying them and their instead even though the singular subjects at that point require singular personal pronouns and possessive adjectives.  He could of course have avoided the problem by saying his or her or, much better, by starting and staying in the plural thus: Average Tory ministers, bless them, work hard in their departments and are ... etc. But getting your words right takes time and effort and for him it was clearly far more important to use that time and effort to get right the LibFem Speak grammar rather than the English grammar.

Farron is not the only one who routinely mangles our grammar for this reason; the habit has become rampant at all levels of society and in all walks of life. But nowhere is it more rampant than on the centre-left of politics, which is particularly worrying because it indicates an obsession with form rather than substance and with dogma and political correctness rather than clarity, practicality and intellectual honesty.  In short, it is a symptom of the disease that is eating away at the governance of Britain.

What Kind of Psychopath Wants to Own a Savage Dog?

My lovely, sweet, affectionate, harmless Cocker Spaniel was savaged yesterday by a bull terrier-type dog let off its lead without a muzzle in a public park.  Fortunately my young, strong, brave and fit son was the one walking him at the time and managed to wrestle with the beast and prize open its jaws. Had its walker been anyone less strong and brave our Cocker would almost certainly have been killed; all its owner did was stand and watch, and his beast had already inflicted multiple deep wounds with blood gushing out of them in the minute or two it took my son to drag it off.   Three visits to the vet for treatment so far, and many more to come at horrendous expense before he is finally signed off I should think.

Browsing the internet we discover that other harmless little dogs suffer similar attacks on a daily basis and nothing much can be done about it because no criminal offence has been committed so the police won't be interested. 

Only someone who actually admires and enjoys savagery could possibly want to own such a breed. If we can manage as a society virtually to criminalise smokers, why for God's sake can't we make the owners of savage dogs suffer for wanting to inflict them on the rest of us?  Why not add an element to Council Tax for all households with dogs, on a sliding scale from modest for harmless little breeds to punitive for the breeds that most frequently attack? Unlike the old dog licence this would be cheap and easy to administer and would bring in some badly needed revenues as well.

Anti-Democratic Europhobia

I am no great lover of the ever-closer-union ambitions of the Europhiles myself, but I do have trouble sometimes understanding the logic of the Europhobes.  To a man and a woman they seem to take the line that having the fiscal and budgetary policies of Eurozone states fixed by Eurocrats controlled by Berlin and Paris would be anti-democratic and bad, and so it would; but then they go on to shout even louder that total political union with the fiscal and budgetary polices of all states controlled by a federal government elected by universal suffrage throughout the Eurozone would be far worse, the ultimate total-loss-of-sovereignty nightmare.  

Er, hang on a minute;  the reason why there isn't a cat-in-hell's chance of the Germans and the French agreeing to such a political union full-Monte anyway is because, far from robbing the people of their sovereignty, it would actually go some way to restoring it, making it harder for Berlin and Paris to run Europe as a duopoly as they more or less do now, and giving every European voter a direct vote for or against everything that any Eurocrat does.

Now, before you shout that the trouble with that idea is that it would be hard for voters in the smaller peripheral states to have the influence on central policies that the big boys would have, stop once and ask yourself whether that isn't a fundamental problem with democracy anyway - dictatorship of the majority; and then stop again and ask yourself whether you are for or against the union of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with the United Kingdom. If you think it is right for the Scots to vote to elect the Westminster Parliament and Government within the full political, fiscal and budgetary union of the UK with certain powers devolved to them, why not ditto the whole UK relative to the parliament and government of a European Union?

The paradox demonstrates to me that the issue for most Europhobes is at heart nothing at all to do with democracy or sovereignty, it's just history and tribalism.  They are just proud Brits and full European political union would be just too much of a blow to their pride.  I have some sympathy with that sentiment, especially after another magnificent Last Night of the Proms last night; but when Scots say they are proud Scots and the Union is too much of a blow to their pride, we have to remember that what's sauce for the goose...

What is it with all this Man United Bollocks?

Am I the only one who is sick to the back teeth of hearing just about everyone in the media world refer to Manchester United and Manchester City as Man United and Man City?  It gets right up my nose.  

It can't be because they just can't be bothered saying long words or because they think it's a clever idea to use the abbreviations of team names that appear in the score boxes at the top of our TV screens when we watch games, because if it was we should also expect to hear them saying things like Bir City, Liv,Tot Spur, Hud Town, Arse etc, but we don't.

And it can't be because they think it's such a clever, neat, trendy thing to do.  I mean even they can't be thick enough to see it that way now that it's been going on for years and just about every two-bit hack and his dog is doing it.

So it must be that they do it as an affectionate abbreviation - a pet name displaying their personal admiration and loyalty.  But look here you half-wits; we are not ALL fans of Manchester or of either of its Premiership clubs. In fact millions of us are either bored to death by them or hate the very sight of them.  So will you please stop it.  Let us hear the word Manchester in full every time so we don't constantly have to groan and say what prats you are.

What Happened to the Continuous Tense?

Why is it that just about no one says I am sitting or I am standing, or I was sitting or I was standing any more? Or just about any other continuous tense of any verb you can think of for that matter?  It's all I am sat, or I was sat, or I am stood, or I was stood, etc. etc. Even people who otherwise sound quite educated do it. In fact just about everyone seems to be doing it, both orally and in print, including in many of our finest organs.  

Why for God's sake?  If they had been George Formby would they have sung: I'm Leant on a Lampost at the Corner of the Street in Case a Certain Little Lady Comes By ?  Doesn't scan quite so well does it, quite apart from displaying ignorance of English grammar?  The only explanation I can think of for this and the countless other ways in which the depressing impoverishment of our language continues to accelerate is that grammar and style are no longer taught to our kids in school.  The notion  seems to be abroad that as long as what kids say or write is understandable, that's OK.  Don't correct the poor little dears in case you upset them or damage their confidence.  And anyway good grammar is really just posh middle class talk so it's discriminatory and offensive to suggest it is superior to chav talk.  In fact some seem to think its not only socially desirable but linguistically desirable to let kids make up their own grammar and style because that enriches our language.  

No it doesn't you clods.  It just makes them sound ignorant, not least to the millions of foreigners who speak and write far better English than they do, and it makes for prose and speech that are devoid of elegance and style and painful to listen to (the thousands of varied and interesting words and phrases that have been replaced in the speech of just about everyone in public life, especially at the BBC, by the words in terms of is another example of the same depressing trend).  

I suspect we are now well into stage two of the nuclear chain reaction, with most of the so-called English teachers in our schools being incapable of teaching good grammar or style because they haven't a clue what constitutes it themselves as a result of having been taught the same ideological junk in their own school days.

If you can get us out of this fine mess Mr Gove, you'll go down in history as one of our great political heroes . 

Seeing Through the Planning Fogs

There is so much fog in the great greenfield planning controls row that it makes your head ache trying to see through it all. 

Yesterday morning the front-page headline story in The Times was Planning Revolt Fuels Fears Over Economy, giving massive prominence to (and, by implication one would have thought, thereby seeking to reinforce): (1) the argument of David Frost of the British Chambers of Commerce that ministers must defy opposition to their plans to ease restrictions on greenfield development otherwise economic growth will be imperilled; and (2) Vince Cable's statement that groups opposing those plans are "semi-hysterical". 

So we know where The Times stands on that I thought, but then I turn to its leading article on page 2 with the sub-heading: The Government is Ignoring Some Genuine Concerns in the Countryside.  It needs to Balance the Demands of the wider Economy and the Local Landscape.

This reminds me that the previous day The Times had devoted an entire page to an Opinion piece by Alice Thomson with the headline The Looting Continues - in the Countryside in which Alice ridiculed the Government's planning proposals and accused Greg Clarke, Eric Pickles, Chris Huhne, David Cameron et al of being a bunch of  economically illiterate vandals.

Today The Times devotes the same Opinion page to a piece by Phillip Collins: Want a Home? Lose a Hedgerow.  That's Progress in which he basically argues precisely the opposite case to Alice Thomson's.

I am left wondering whether The Times is having difficulty distinguishing its arse from its elbow; whether it is simply genuinely trying to give equal space to all sides of the argument, or whether there is some kind of internal power struggle going on with different editorial staff having control over different pages at different times and using that power to further their sharply differing views.

Whichever it is, a great deal of wisdom and a great deal of bollocks is all getting hopelessly jumbled together.  Alice Thomson is absolutely right to argue that the housing problem is not caused by lack of space for houses but lack of money to buy them; and that housebuilders are hoarding hundreds of thousands of plots of land assuming that the new rules will lead to a free-for-all.  She is right also to attack the Government for its insane green energy policies which achieve nothing but hugely increased energy costs and the hideous scarring of landscapes.  But she is wrong to throw opposition to HS2 into the pot.  If HS2 is needed in the national economic interest the countryside has to be sacrificed for it to be built.  Unavoidably.  So the argument is just an economic one: is HS2 really needed or not?  It is not an argument about the Planning System.  Housing is undoubtedly needed but it is far from clear that a flawed planning system is the cause of any of the problems we have, so that IS an argument about the planning system. (The green energy row is basically a religious one: only those believing they are doing God's work could possibly think there is a case of ANY kind for Huhne's lunacies).

By conflating the housing and HS2 arguments Alice Thomson is doing the building lobby's dirty work for it, because it too is only too happy to conflate them to support its spurious line that relaxation of greenfield planning controls is necessary to correct a housing shortage. Have you noticed in fact that they are usually careful not to blame the controls themselves but planning "red tape", the implication being that it is not the criteria used to decide cases but the slowness of the decision-making that causes the housing shortage. Just speed things up, they imply, and all will be OK. Third rate journalists taking their text from the press releases of the developer lobby repeat the same bollocks.  If speed of decision-making were the problem, it wouldn't be a problem would it?  Because any given volume of applications meeting the criteria for approval would produce exactly the same volume of approvals at any given moment regardless of the length of time taken; speeding it up just reduces the time from application to approval in each case, not the volume of approvals coming out on any given day.  Yes it might reduce builders' costs, but only if you assume that the delay is caused by needess "red tape" rather than by builders failing to comply with criteria for approval, being refused, then appealing, then having central government planning inspectors second-guess the decisions of local planning committees etc.  Can you think of a single major infrastructure project where the time getting it through the planning system has been more than a tiny fraction of the total time taken for the Government or quango concerned to make up its mind to do it and get the budget in place for it?

Phillip Collins shrouds it all in even more mist by arguing that the shortage of housing is causing people to rent rather than to buy, leading to a sharp increase in the percentage of renters over buyers and driving up rents.  Er, hello?.. whether people live in owned or rented houses they are still houses so the demand and supply of houses is just the same.  Yes rents are rising but not because the supply of houses is falling; if it were, house prices would be rising too, but they are not, they are falling. That's becasue there is no shortage of supply of houses, just a shortage of savings, income and mortgages to buy them.
 

In fact I'm far from clear that a national swing back from buying to renting is such a bad thing.  It could be argued to be an essential and unavoidable part of the correction of a bubble process that left many bankrupt with negative equity, placed home ownership beyond reach even for middle-income families, wrecked the banking system and plunged the economy into deep recession.  Listening to the building lobby it is very interesting to hear them crying one day about falling house prices as though they are a national disaster and screaming the next day for more greenfields to build on because it will .... er, bring house prices down.

The central but pretty much unspoken idea on which the developers' campaign and the Government's proposals appear to be based is (1) that, yes, while it may be the case that ample housing could in theory be built on brownfield land, it cannnot be in practice because available brownfield sites are too expensive for the housing built on them to be affordable and/or are not located where the housing is needed; and (2) houses built on a greatly expanded supply of greenfield sites will bring down house prices not so much by increasing supply (since that could be done on brownfield anyway) as by reducing costs. But if you believe that you might as well go and mine the moon for green cheese.  Have you noticed any difference between the prices builders charge for homes on their greenfield sites and their brownfield ones in the same areas?  And if you believe that builders are sitting on hundreds of thousands of brownfield sites waiting for prices to rise before they build (and if you don't you're living on another planet), why do you believe that they won't do the same thing on greenfield sites?

And even if that's an unjust accusation - even if the real truth is that the builders bought the brownfield sites at the height of the bubble and have no choice but to hang on for prices to recover because they'll go bust if they build and sell at current market-clearing prices - so what?  That's what market's are for isn't it?  Let them go bust; let the land then be auctioned of to the highest bidder and let them build at the new market price.  I haven't noticed the Government riding to the rescue of any of the tens of thousands of poor sods who went bust with negative equity in their own homes when the housing bubble burst. Why should builders be immune?  Slap a tax on greenfield developments tomorrow to make greenfield no more profitable than brownfield and stand back to watch the deluge of brownfield housing development that will then happen (and use the revenues to help people get mortgages).

I am in fact basically sympathetic to the idea that building houses on nondescript isolated greenfields will often be less of a loss and cause less real distress to existing communities than cramming more houses into suburban gardens or suburban extensions.  I therefore have some sympathy with the central idea in the Government's proposals that local councils should have the power to decide which greenfields should be used for housing rather than be driven by the ludicrous Soviet-style regional planning system Labour introduced.  But the essential corollaries of that are: (1) that power should be held by local authorities alone: responsibility for every decision should be seen to rest squarely and solely with them so that local electors can punish them on polling day if they do not reflect local wishes, which means that (2) there should be NO right of appeal to central government planning inspectors against local decisions to refuse.

The trouble with even this scenario however is that in many constituencies overwhelming majorities vote even for a monkey wearing the right colour rosette, leaving councillors confident they can get away with murder.  The incentives for them to try therefore need to be minimised, which leads me to the conclusion that the current system under which developers make planning gain payments to local councils should be scrapped and replaced by one in which any revenues flow not direct to local councils but to central government and are used to fund national programmes to help people get the mortgages they need, not funnelled back to local authorities.