CPC '09 - 05/10

All in all it looked like a good day for the Conservatives at the Manchester party conference. Tomorrow bears watching, though, after Alastair Darling pulled a fast one announcing a Government demand for public sector pay cuts (top earners only, of course) the very night before George Osborne was expected to speak on *exactly* that topic. Funny that.

What undermines this move is that this conflicts with the pay deal that Labour had agreed with the Civil Service pay review boards (such as the First Division Association). Best move George could make tomorrow is to make that very point. Labour are so desperate for ideas that they steal from the Conservatives at every opportunity, even when it means reneging on the deals they had already struck. They are a Government which cannot be trusted to uphold their agreements (Lisbon referendum, anyone?) and resort to cheap tricks to attempt to undercut their opponents. They fight without honour.

Let's see how George fights back against this breach of political trust.

Up to my eyeballs...

I'm steeped deeply in contract law at the moment. Blogging services are on the back burner.

Watching the Jacqui Smith car-crash and expenses fiasco that seems to be spreading like a bush-fire in the dry season is quite amusing, though...

Might I humbly suggest the application of an expenses litmus test for MPs: if you think you might get fired for doing it in the private sector, don't bloody claim it. Stop giving Parliament a bad name, you'll destroy all credibility in the system.

The Thought Police score again

This is a disgrace.

If you need to ask why, then there really is no hope left...

Free speech includes the right to criticise, to offend, to question, to debate... for heaven's sake, this is stifling. Incitement to hatred? That may not be desirable, but it is a *right*. Do I just believe too much in innate human decency?

One by one, new Labour's thought police are taking away our freedom to express ourselves, whatever our views. It's unacceptable, undemocratic, and it scares the hell out of me.

Very good question...

Why is nobody asking questions about this?

This could be a chance for the Tories to give Brown both barrels, yet they seem remarkably quiet on the issue. Load up your shotguns, boys, because there's a hell of a lot of ammunition to spare and a great fat target to hit.

As much as it galls me...

While I normally have very little patience for the Daily Mail and its offensive school of journalism, for once (and perhaps this is because I'm severely peeved at some jobsworthian witch for reasons that I have tweeted elsewhere), yes, for once I agree with Littlejohn.

If Harriet is so keen on the 'court of public opinion' all of a sudden, let her and her cohorts be hoisted by their own petard.

Nanny stating my booze

Via the Scotland on Sunday (the Hootsmon's sabbath-day edition), it transpires that the SNPs are planning on engaging in a little bit more nanny-statism, clearly taking the lead from their ZaNu Lab counterparts in England. As if the Smoking Ban wasn't enough, apparently we have a drinking problem - and they think that the problem is that booze is too cheap.

'MINISTERS are to press ahead with a crackdown on sales of cheap alcohol in a move that could be fast-tracked through Parliament in as little as six months, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.'

Hold up a second, why? We already pay a daft amount of tax on a bottle of wine (as I have blogged before) - now you want to make it even *more* expensive?

'The measures are set to spark a furious legal battle with the retail trade and alcohol industry, which claims the laws will hit customers' pockets, damage the industry, and do little to stop problem drinking.

If minimum pricing is introduced and promotional offers are banned, many of the offers at supermarkets and off-licences would be outlawed immediately.

A minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol, as advocated by health campaigners, would result in rocketing prices. A two-litre bottle of cider, currently priced at around £3, would cost £7.50. Wine would also increase in price, with a £3 bottle of wine possibly rising to a minimum of £5. Multi-packs of beer – which are regularly discounted – would also rise in price.

The moves are being pushed through despite concerns within the SNP that the Government should not seek to increase the financial burden on consumers and retailers during an economic downturn.'

Oh holy mother of Dorothy. Where to begin? Now, I can’t remember the last time I spent less than £5 on a bottle of wine anyway, but if a two litre bottle of cider is suddenly going to cost £7.50, how much is a bottle of vodka going to jump up to? Well if Smirnoff is your poison, at 37.5% that equates to just shy of 30 units, therefore about £15, so at worst that’s going to cost you two or three quid more.

Scotland on Sunday neglect to mention who these health campaigners are, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they were Alcohol Concern, which DK has identified as a fake charity - funded primarily by the Government (and therefore, indirectly, you and me). If it is indeed Alcohol Concern (or one if their ilk), we’re talking about a ‘charitable’ lobbying group funded by the Government to lobby the Government. Everyone see the problem there? Yes? Good.

‘...Scotland on Sunday understands that ministers may seek to place some of the measures – such as the ban on "Buy One Get One Free" deals – in the existing 2005 Licensing Act, which is due to come into force in September.

The Act enshrines "protecting and improving public health" as a key objective of all licensing decisions, so the Government may argue that it gives the power to ban cheap drink offers. The same logic could also be applied to plans to impose minimum pricing.

Such a tactic would enable SNP ministers to push the reforms through more quickly, but it would also prompt accusations that they were deliberately dodging debate. One retail source said last night: "If they use the Licensing Act, it would be simply about rail-roading these plans in a bid to avoid proper parliamentary scrutiny. It suggests that Kenny MacAskill knows how unpopular it is to push up prices in this economic environment."’

Actually I’d say that’s exactly what it means. Worse yet, it’s enacting a Nanny-state agenda avoiding the parliamentary process along the way. Hardly democratic. Besides, pushing up the price of alcohol is not going to help solve the problem. It’s going to hurt people financially, but again, root causes people! Why do Scots have a drinking ‘problem’? Is it because booze is cheaper here than anywhere else in the country? I think you’ll find the answer is no, it isn’t. It’s no less expensive here than anywhere else. Is making it more expensive going to fix what is clearly a cultural issue? Again, clearly not.

In the meantime, as our Southern cousins do the booze cruise to Calais, we'll just have to start a cruise to the Tescos in Berwick-Upon-Tweed.

I won't, of course, since I long ago worked out that given the daft amount of duty on a bottle of wine, if I spent less than about £6 on the bottle, after costs I would be getting the cheapest quality of wine the producer could crank out, but that's another matter entirely...

Brown Gobbles his Degook

Over on Iain Dale...

"We set up the Financial Services Authority to, you know before we came into power there was a sort of self regulatory system so you know they more or less regulated themselves. We brought in a statutory regulatory system, supervisory system, but of course we couldn't know exactly what was going on in every individual bank and it's only in the last few days to be honest that what has happened over this pension has come to light."
Gordon Brown on Radio Oxford today.

Seriously, WTF? I mean, aside from the blatant buck-passing deluded lies... Before the FSA, the banks did not 'self-regulate' (and if they did, they did a better job than the FSA), they were regulated by that age-old establishment, the Bank of England. And, newsflash, it did a good job of it too. Brown decided more layers of Government were needed (whee! more taxpayer's money up the spout!), and so split the responsibilites without telling anyone what their responsibilities really were.

Bored now. Go fuck someone else's economy up, you authoritarian, illiberal, lying and devious fool.

Nailed. On. The. Head.

Daily Mash is teh pwnz0r.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Hypocritical, lying, arrogant, devious son-of-a...

C U L8r, am in jail.

Justice.

Lord Ahmed is to be thrown in the clanger after being convicted of dangerous driving, texting while travelling at speeds in excess of 60mph shortly before a fatal road crash.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

UPDATE: To my irritation, I note that he has been jailed for a mere 12 weeks, half of the 24 sentance. While he may not have been texting at the time of the crash, it is still manslaughter. Derisory.

There are times for a dignified silence

You would have thought Jacqui Smith would be a little bit too busy preparing her excuses - sorry, reasons - for her expenses fiddle, but yesterday she still found time to comment on Professor Nutt's comments that ecstasy was no more dangerous than an addiction to equestrianism.

Now, far be it from me to make a scientific comment, but having had the numbers of deaths caused by ecstasy rammed down my throat (what was it, 30 last year?), compared to deaths involving horses (ah, wait, something like 100, yes?), I wonder if he might have a point.

Unity has made this point before over on the Ministry of Truth. The Drugs policy in this country is a shambles, despite all the evidence suggesting that prohibition doesn't work, the government continues to pursue it. I think most people fail to realise is that doctors prescribe drugs daily which have side-effects and can be fatal or damaging if taken in large doses. Paracetamol is available over the counter, for heaven's sake, knock back enough of them and you'll be getting your stomach pumped in no short order.

Would regulation and legalisation allow for the purity of a substance to be defined? Probably, yes. Would that make it safer? Undoubtedly. A big problem for heroin users, for example, is when the quality changes and suddenly they've taken twice as much as they're expecting. Make it legal and you can bloody tax it. Since cigarettes and alcohol are already such an earner, why not diversify?

So, I have to ask, why are drugs like tobacco and alcohol legal, substances such as oxycodone and diazepam available on prescription, yet a drug that literally does as it says on the tin - ecstasy - is illegal? The argument that it is dangerous doesn't hold any water, and when new studies keep suggesting that it is no more dangerous than alcohol (which is proven to cause long-term damage, unlike ecstasy), you start to wonder why the establishment is so keen to ban it. Don't they like people having a good time? When people have died, it's been as a result of dehydration or in some instances over-hydration. Most happy clubbers I've seen are smart enough to have a bottle of water in hand.

In the case of disco biscuits, the same counter-argument as for marajuana applies - we don't know the long-term implication because it hasn't been around for that long. Well, newsflash, we prescribe drugs daily where we *do* know there are long-term risks, some are pretty serious, yet we prescribe them anyway.

Fact is (oh, how I hate myself for saying that), there is a huge culture of drug-taking in Britain. There are kids out at the weekend on coke, speed, ecstasy, ketamine, a good few cooking up GHB (which *is* filthy fucking stuff), and there are a lot of them. I wouldn't even dare to put a finger in the wind guess on the real numbers, but how many of the clubbers at Fire in London do you think aren't on something? Ever been to The Arches in Glasgow on a Saturday night? And how many deaths are we hearing of every week?

Just because it wouldn't be a drugs-prohibition-related-rant without at least a mention of Holland. Hash legal. Are there hundreds of stoned Dutchmen on the streets? Err... no, actually. Plenty of stoned Brits over for the weekend, but it's pretty harmless. Back over this side of the stream, as Unity pointed out in his article, the police actually quite like (relatively speaking) dealing with people on pills, as for the most part they're too loved up with the world to be any hassle. It's the drunk ones that cause the issue.

Trying to crowbar myself back on track here, there was something Freebee Smith spewed in her denunciation of Professor Nutt that just irritated me:

"For me that makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs."

Seriously. She erodes her own moral authority and thinks she can take the high ground? The serious problem in her eyes is that people take drugs. The serious problem as I see it is that we spend so much time telling people what not to do that we don't think that maybe, just maybe, the majority of people are smart enough to make their own decisions. It's just like tobacco, or the codeine your doctor is prescribing you. If you know the risks you can make an informed decision.

At the end it all boils down to one question. Why do people take drugs? To enhance the way they feel. But you don't like people feeling good, do you, Jacqui.

Educate and inform, don't command and control. Let us choose for ourselves.

Smoke and mirrors. And Sat-Navs, nannies, mortgages...

Mr Eugenides has cross-posted on DK about a little smoke-and-mirrors at Westminster - namely, that the much awaited 'review' of MPs expenses, in a severely watered down format, was conveniently announced (without much ado) on the same day as the Heathrow runway debacle. John McDonnell's little performance served as a nice little headline grabber to draw attention to the fact that very little has changed.

The Times has the run-down here.

ZanuLab strikes again?

Guido has unearthed something lurking in the Banking Bill that ought to raise a few concerned eyebrows.

You have to ask, why would you suddenly stop requiring the Bank of England to publish weekly reports?