They're all centrists now: and we are but piggy-banks

Stephen Pollard's article in the Daily Mail is not the first to sound the death knell for the Labour Party—but it is one of the more scary ones for those of us who are libertarians.

One by one, Labour's leadership candidates are rapidly disowning every element of Miliband's manifesto, and pretending that they never really had anything to do with it. 

They realise – and you'd have to be spectacularly blinkered not to see it – that Labour's programme was comprehensively trounced on May 7.

True enough—and good news for those of us who despise socialism as a mechanism of destruction, powered by spite. But are the alternatives better?

It was, after all, the new deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Robert Halfon, who suggested immediately after the Election that his party's name should be changed to the Workers' Party. The suggestion was entirely serious and shows Labour's fundamental problem. 

With the Queen's Speech promoting a series of measures designed to help people who work hard – such as removing tax for anyone working 30 hours a week on the minimum wage, and doubling childcare – and David Cameron talking all the time about working people and One Nation Conservatism, it's clear the Tories are fully focused on keeping control of that space. 

It's the Tories who speak for Mr and Ms Average Brit, who know what they want and offer it to them.

And what are these centrist parties offering? They are offering to increase the size of the state, to take more money from those people who are not part of their favoured cliques, and to continue the expansion of welfare for "hard-working families".

And what of those of us who are not "families"—merely hardworking? What of those of us who don't believe that the state is the answer to every question?

The answer is clear: we are to knuckle down, to submit, and to fucking well thank the centrist parties for the opportunity to fund their ambitions.

In other words, the Conservative Party has simply reinforced the idea that only those whom they favour—whether that be economically or socially—should be rewarded. Those of us who do not subscribe to their ideology should be ignored and brutalised—our dreams treated as nothing, our work nothing more than an income stream, and our aspirations to be harnessed to the ambitions of their voters.

Fuck me, but the Labour Party were a terrible bunch of bastards—but what are we now left with?

• Conservatives—believe in increasing state power by rewarding "better" behaviour;
• Labour—believe in increasing state power by rewarding "better" behaviour;
• LibDems—believe in increasing state power by rewarding "better" behaviour;
• UKIP—believe in increasing state power by rewarding "better" behaviour;
• Greens—believe in increasing state power by rewarding "better" behaviour.

Not one of these parties believes that people should be able to live their lives as they themselves wish; and not one of them really believes that people should have to stand by their own decisions.

This is why, for instance, small business-people are so turned off by their politics. Those of us who run businesses are responsible for our mistakes—because our mistakes might lead to penury for others.

Politicians have no such qualms—their mistakes punish people they don't know and, fundamentally, don't care about. If they need more money, they need only pass another law.

Truly, we are faced with a stark choice, my libertarian friends. We cannot now pretend that any mainstream party—despite the proliferation in recent years—might represent our views.

We are now nothing more than milch cows for our political and social masters. Despite, in many cases, being the brightest thinkers and the most profitable risk-takers in society, our voice does not matter anymore.

And libertarians? We are piggy-banks to pay for mistakes that are not our own.

The battle-lines are drawn: it is libertarians vs. everyone else. And I fear that we have lost even before we have begun.

Satire is dead

The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, a non-democratic institution that has lasted for about twenty years—not 60—and led to riots and appointed heads of state is...

No. Do you know what—this is why I've quit. The world is beyond comment or satire.

How soon can I get off this fucking planet...?

Watching your fall

This is the massively-foreheaded face of our enemy. And—look!—isn't it a stupid face, a weak face, a detestable face? But don't be deceived—this man holds you all in utter contempt. Mark him: he is the enemy of all free-born British people everywhere.

Oh look—here is proof positive that no matter who you vote for, the cunt politicians always get in.

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.

Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.

The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it.

As The Mail points out, this kind of monitoring was thrown out when Labour proposed it—not least because the Tories and LibDims thought it was absolutely beyond the pale.

In 2006, Labour was forced to abandon similar plans in the face of fierce opposition from Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and privacy groups.

Well, how the tide has turned, eh?

Does anyone remember this interview from 2011—a mere year ago?

Early in our interview, he says disarmingly, "I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

He hasn't changed his views since we met five years ago when he was home affairs spokesman for his party and I was beginning to get to grips with the attack on liberty and privacy by the Blair government. We were both astonished then at the range, depth and stealth of the campaign and the surprising truth that few people seemed to notice or care about Blair's authoritarian project, which did so much to reduce the citizen's standing in relation to the state. Clegg is passionate on this: "It was the outright derision towards the criminal justice system… and extreme disdain for due process. For Blair the criminal justice system was an impediment to keeping people safe."

Five years after that meeting it seems extraordinary that he now occupies such a pivotal role in government and is in a position to lead the restoration of civil liberties. Were it not for his performance in the TV debates during the election campaign, which put the Lib Dems in the game, and the need for the coalition partners to find areas in which they could bond, it is certain that this Protection of Freedoms Bill would not exist. Although I have some concerns about what has not been included in the bill, it is true that the conditions that brought it into existence are near miraculous.

Yes, that is Henry Porter's interview with Nick Clegg, from February 2011. It is entitled—ironically, it now seems—Why we should believe Nick Clegg when he promises to restore liberties stolen by Labour.

Predictably, the BBC have interviewed David Davis and he is not in favour—although he does not condemn Cameron and his merry band of twats as "a collective sack of shit".

As a reminder—because memories are short—David Davis resigned his seat in protest against the 42-day detention law. At the time, he gave a speech outside Parliament, announcing his intention and the reasons for his action. Please, go and listen to it: everything that he said then applies now.

Despite David Cameron's pontifications and Nick Clegg's protestations, this government is leading our country down precisely the same dictatorial route that NuLabour did.

In a couple of decades, when people asked what went wrong with Britain, they will identify David Cameron's victory over David Davis as the decisive factor—when the man of spin won over the man of principle.

And, given the Coalition's activities over the last few months—on booze, and smoking, and surveillance—then I issue this edict: if you are a member of Labour, LibDems or Conservative then you are a traitor and an enemy of the British people.

You have marked yourselves as fit for nothing but a public hanging—and one day we, the people, will ensure that is what you will get.

UPDATE: Norman Tebbit asks why the vote for all of the Big Three collapsed in Bradford...

More than ever before the mainstream party leaders need to be asking themselves why their one time voters have joined the ranks of the 'None of The Above' moment...

Well, Norm: I think that this latest news answers your question—does it not? It is because the Big Three are all the same: they are the enemy class, united in a conspiracy against the ordinary people of Britain.

So why on earth would those same people connive at their own destruction by voting for their executioners—do you think we are stupid...?

UPDATE 2: is anyone else surprised that EU Referendum can point to an EU motive behind this travesty?

Now this may be a coincidence, but don't we have a Data Retention Directive, otherwise known as Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006?

Isn't this the directive which requires member states to oblige providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks to retain traffic and location data for between six months and two years for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime?

And didn't the EU commission last year start a review of the rules, with a view to proposing an improved legal framework? Wasn't that then followed by a proposal for a comprehensive reform of the system?

Then, a few months later, up pops the UK government with some proposals of its own. Are we supposed to believe that this is a complete coincidence? Does anyone believe that, with data retention being an occupied field, the British government is working entirely independently, and has not consulted with the commission on this?

Yup: it seems our Mother of All Parliaments EU regional government is simply obeying the instructions of its puppet-masters. Well, what a surprise.

Can we leave yet?

Good question, Mr Potato Head

The story about the bar owners in Michigan banning politicians reminded me of the Ban Darling campaign that did the rounds a couple of years ago—so I went and looked up some old posts. This piece included a video of Cameron mentioning the campaign at PMQs and attacking Brown for... Well, just watch...



Did you catch the pertinent line? No? Well, here it is...

Can he [Brown] name one other major country that is responding to the down-turn by putting up taxes? Name one.

I do not know if the Gobblin' King could name one (I didn't preserve that part of the debate), but I bet good ol' David "20% VAT & Oodles of Green Taxes" Cameron can, eh?

But, given the intervening events, I think that the question needs some modification...

So, Davey-boy: can you name one other major country that has successfully got themselves out of the down-turn by raising taxes? Name one.

Dave? Dave? Bueller...?

Beyond a joke

Via Strange Stuff, I find Dan Hannan highlighting the EU's latest intrusion into our pockets sovereignty.

As the law stands, people wishing to settle in Britain must demonstrate that they have the means to support themselves, either through work or through an alternative source of income such as a pension. The European Commission claims that this amounts to discrimination against EU citizens, who are supposed to enjoy the same rights as British nationals.

In fact, as so often happens, Eurocrats are disregarding the plain text of their own rules. Article 7(1) of the Free Movement Directive gives EU citizens the right to reside in another member state only if they have “sufficient resources for themselves and their family members not to become a burden on the social assistance system of the host Member State”.

In order to get around this clause, the European Commission is deploying a piece of sheer sophistry. It argues that, if immigrants were able to top up their income with British benefits, they would have “sufficient resources”.

In May, the Supreme Court ruled on the claim of a Latvian pensioner, who had just moved to Britain and had demanded Pension Credit on grounds that her Latvian pension was too small. Although our courts like to rule in favour of immigrants, the law here was so clear-cut that, by 4-1, judges turned her down. If the European Commission were to get its way, she would not only be able to claim Pension Credit, but also council tax and housing subsidies—despite not having paid a penny into the system.

There are several issues to be addressed here, and they touch on a number of issues.

1. The idea of National Insurance was that it was an insurance (or, practically, assurance) scheme: if you paid in, then you could get a pay out in the correct circumstances. But the point is that yo only get a pay-out if you pay in.
   
   If you die, your family cannot apply to insurance company for a pay-out of you haven't been paying any life insurance.


2. Yes, we all know that National Insurance is a colossal Ponzi Scheme so there is no insurance fund (which Obama's administration recently confessed). It is only a matter of time before one EU country or another tries to absolve themselves from legislation like this by pointing out they they don't have the money to pay.


3. At that point, I'd put even money on the EU suggesting that all social security taxes should go into a central EU fund which will ensure the payment of social security. At which point, of course, the EU will harmonise the level of payment across all member states in order to ensure the fair distribution of funds.
   
   At which point, of course, we can all kiss goodbye to whatever semblance of independence or sovereignty remains to us.


4. This is an especially important point: THERE IS NO FUCKING MONEY LEFT.

The low-grade panic and the pathetic desperation inherent in Obama's recent sham negotiations—coupled with our own government's pathetically-failed attempts to curb state spending have only confirmed the act that the Western economies are effectively bankrupt.

In fact, let us be more precise about this: every single soft socialist democracy is bankrupt—with the possible exception of Germany (which is, instead, being bankrupted by the other economies to which it is bound).

In fact, as Detlev Schlichter has so eloquently put it, we can, at last, welcome the death of politics.

Should we feel sorry? Worried? Desperate? – Well, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, but one has to have a heart of stone to read about the struggling political class without laughing.

The modern state is in terminal decline. Good riddance.

While I do not want to belittle the upcoming upheaval and the pain it will cause to many, all of us who love liberty should rejoice. The state is bust. Game over.

Hoorah, the state is dead!

We libertarians have been treated as slightly eccentric for years, no, for decades. Our plans to convince our fellow men and women of the benefits of small or no government, of the power of voluntary cooperation on free markets, of the global division of labor and of personal liberty – they were greeted with the pitiful smile reserved for the hopelessly naive. No political party would ever win on such a platform, we were told. If given the choice, the public votes not for freedom with all its uncertainty but for the caring, paternalistic state with free health service at point of delivery – and while we are at it, why not all sorts of other freebies, too? And, let’s face it, our critics were right. The chances of Ron Paul becoming the next American president are – well, zero. The political process – in particular modern mass democracy in which every vote counts the same whether from a taxpayer or tax-consumer – is designed to increase state power, not to limit it. As Mark Steyn has observed so pointedly, government is like coffee at Starbucks: It only comes in three sizes: tall, grande and venti.

But as good libertarians we should not rely on politics like our enemies, the statists, do. That is their game. Let’s not play it. We should rely – as befits proper anarchists – on our fellow man’s self-interest. Not more, not less. Most people prefer more goods to fewer goods. For that they need markets, not politics. Politics just gets in the way. Just as the market is working and delivering the goodies every day even if most people don’t understand why and how, so the state is collapsing under the weight of its own inconsistencies whether the people still want to believe in it or not.

“Events, dear boy, events.” All we have to do is sit back and let the state collapse. We know that in the long run, the state is dead. And the long run may be sooner than we think.

And he is right: in between the planted distractions of phone-hacking and assorted media wank, we have all witnessed the scrabblings of our Lords and Masters as they attempt to rescue their doomed political projects—do they realise that it's all in vain?

With all of the highly paid advisers at their beck and call, they surely must? But then I realise that most advisers to the (mostly) terminally stupid, ignorant and venal MPs are recently ex-students—not exactly the cleverest people on the planet in the first place—and civil servants desperate to preserve the illusion of business-as-usual in order to preserve their cushy jobs and platinum-plated pensions.

So perhaps they do not realise. Perhaps they don't understand.

The state is bust: there is no more money for any more bail-outs. The biggest bond-buyers are the banks (why do you think the world's governments agreed to bail them out?) and even they are shying away this stupidest of stupid investments.

As Detlev points out, the state is bust and all libertarians have to do is sit back and watch it happen.

Quote of the Day...

Andrew Lansley: no Ellsworth Toohey, but still a disgusting illiberal bastard.

... is from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, used by the Adam Smith Institute in a discussion about the new anti-smoking proposals put forward by that utter cunt, Andrew Lansley.

Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy—and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace—lie on a bed of nails—go into the desert to mortify the flesh—don't dance—don't go to the movies on Sunday—don't try to get rich—don't smoke—don't drink. It's all the same line… Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically.

This advice on how to rule the world is given by Ellsworth Toohey—one of the most brilliantly repulsive characters in English literature—to one of the protagonists, Peter Keating (a man who compromises his talent and ability in order to gain success and is thus damned).

Andrew Lansley is not like Toohey or Keating—he is neither magnificent nor corrupt enough to resemble either character. But he is the Coalition minister who has done the most to swell the contents of the massive coffer that is my swearbox, by being an utter bastard.

Lansley is now continuing to be a total and utter bastard through these new proposals concerning the sale of cigarettes.

Tobacco displays in shops will be banned in England as part of a package of measures to discourage smoking.

Instead, cigarettes and other products will have to be kept under-the-counter from 2012 for large stores and 2015 for small shops, ministers have announced.

A consultation will also be launched on whether manufacturers should be forced to put cigarettes into plain packets.

I could rant and rage about this, but why would I bother when spiked! has already done the job for me...?

As Patrick Basham and John Luik have pointed out elsewhere on spiked, the evidence that banning tobacco displays will cut smoking rates is pretty much non-existent. In fact, smoking rates have often gone up after such measures were introduced.

Indeed, the belief that making something more mysterious and more illicit is going to discourage young people from trying it demonstrates remarkable ignorance. Smoking is one of those rite-of-passage activities that allows an older child to demonstrate that they are, in fact, a grown-up. Moreover, having spent the past few years treating adults more and more like children, the government has inspired an adolescent-like ‘fuck you’ attitude to health campaigns from many people, where smoking becomes a tiny show of passive resistance to being constantly lectured about what to do.
...

In reality, the major parties are slugging it out over who can be the most illiberal. While both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats made some positive noises about rolling back the state prior to last year’s General Election, in office they have been an absolute match for New Labour in terms of interfering in our private lives. You couldn’t call it unexpected. When the ever-so libertarian-sounding Boris Johnson became London mayor, his first act was to ban the drinking of alcohol on London transport.

Your humble Devil was absolutely incensed about this at the time, and wrote a couple of pieces: one excoriating Boris and the other slamming the commenters who agreed with him. As I said at the time...

Boris, as The Nameless One points out, is now the most powerful Tory in the country and his policies are going to give some indication of what a Tory government might be like.

And Boris's very first act is to implement a policy that is more authoritarian than that of NuLabour's representative. It is a policy that involves more government interference in our daily lives (and if you think that this is the end of such policies then you are even more stupid than I thought).

Regretfully, I have been proved right again; it gives me little comfort.

It seems that spiked! also have no illusions on this score...

While there have been some small, but welcome, shifts in policy on the vetting of those who work with children and on some specific civil liberties issues, the reality is that personal autonomy and freedom are all but disregarded in British politics today. Instead, we are all seen as ‘vulnerable’ in one way or another, with the state stepping in to watch over us. The effect is to exaggerate fears and to undermine constantly our sense of having the capacity to cope with problems as they arise or make decisions for ourselves.

This creates a situation where the authorities will step in to regulate and restrict everyday life on the flimsiest of pretexts. So, as Sally Davies suggests, our children need to be protected from evil tobacco manufacturers luring the young and vulnerable into a life of addiction through, err… a neatly laid-out tobacco display case.

Defending the right to sell tobacco in a particular manner is not going to send the masses to the barricades. But the implication that we are so feeble that we cannot be trusted to protect our health in the face of some coloured boxes is a very good reason to oppose this ban. It also shows that any Lib-Con pretence to being defenders of personal freedom has long since gone up in smoke.

Indeed. Or, as the Daily Mash so eloquently put it...

Tories to treat you like children too

IT is not just the Labour Party who wants to treat you like a three year-old child, it has emerged.

Indeed not. And whilst this modern Coalition government are too stupid and vapid to try to stamp out individualism—to "kill a man's soul"—in order to rule the world, they feel entirely justified in doing so simply because they are dreary hypocritical Puritans who cannot resist their authoritarian desires.

As Pater so succinctly put it in an email to your humble Devil...

I am a non-smoker but the government's announcement that it is to force tobacco under the counter is a most dispiriting development. After years of meddlesome interference by New Labour in the private lives of British citizens, it would appear that the Coalition's only wish is to continue down the same dreary and self-righteous road.

It makes a mockery of Cameron's recent pronouncements about the value of small government and of his pre-election promises to get government off the backs of ordinary people.

If this is the direction of travel, I for one am heading off towards the Libertarians. I hope that this profoundly wrong-headed and illiberal piece of legislation is thrown out by the Commons.

They are all tediously evil bastards: isn't it time that we hanged them all...?

Andrew Lansley is an utter bastard

Andrew Lansley: an utter bastard, authoritarian thug and all round scumbag.

Do you remember how NuLabour used to talk about "voluntary" rules for certain industries? And yes, if the industry did not comply voluntarily, these vermin would then say, with a deep note of fake regret in their voices, that they had no choice but to legislate because evil businesses would not ruin their markets themselves?

Usually it was over some perceived vice—such as drinks companies advertising their wares—or some non-existent scare, such as that over salt.

Well, it seems that the Coalition in general, and Andrew Lansley in particular, is doing exactly the same thing.

Restaurants and work canteens will put calorie counts on menus and food manufacturers will promise to cut down on salt and artificial fats under a set of agreements to be announced today.

The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis.

Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.

What, in the name of fuck, is an “obesogenic environment”? And why the bastarding hell should I—a 6' tall, 10 and a half stone man—be lectured at by Lansley and his fat fucking fellows?

Might I remind everyone that salt—in this case, sodium chloride—is absolutely essential for nerve function? If you do not get enough salt, you will die: if you eat rather more salt than you need then... Well, it does nothing much at all.

Furthermore, you need to have fats too, although I don't know what Lansley would class as "artificial fats".

But I bet that he also means to include that evil steroid, cholesterol—the great demon of the "fatty food" world. Like salt, cholesterol is absolutely vital to life, being...

... an essential structural component of mammalian cell membranes, where it is required to establish proper membrane permeability and fluidity. In addition, cholesterol is an important component for the manufacture of bile acids, steroid hormones, and Vitamin D.

This is what so annoys me about this bollocks: politicians legislate on the basis of rent-seeking obsessives waving false fucking information in their faces—such as the five myths about alcohol—and then they do active damage to people's lives because the average MP is so screamingly pig-ignorant about anything other than being a total cunt.

And quite apart from the rightness—or otherwise—of Lansley's policy, why the fuck should the food industry be forced to build the altar on which they are to be sacrificed? Because that is what is going to happen...

If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.

Ah, yes, of course. The food firms totally understand that these are voluntary agreements. Unless, of course, they don't agree—in which case they will be compulsory.

Is anyone else ashamed at the fact that Lansley and his ilk claim to represent us?

And just in case Lansley's approach is not clear to you, here is a nice little illustration from Perry at Samizdata.

Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel...

"Excuse me," he says, "I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood."

"Er, no," you reply, "I am happy dressed the way I am."

"I see," the man replies, "well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie."

"But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!" you point out.

"No," he says, "I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don't do what I want voluntarily."

And some people thought that the Coalition might bring more freedom...

The shorter Christopher Booker...

"We're fucked."

But, do go and read the whole, barn-storming column—though I suggest that you have some high-quality happy pills next to you whilst you do so. But as a taster, here are Booker's definitions of the four salient points—the "shadows"—that hang over this election.

Four huge shadows hang over this claustrophobic election, about which the three main parties will be trying to say as little as possible. The first, obviously, as part of the catastrophic legacy of 13 years of Labour misrule, is the barely imaginable scale of the deficit in public spending.

This is now growing so fast that it is difficult to find ways of bringing home how stupendous it has become. The Taxpayers' Alliance has tried to do it by pointing out that public debt is rising by £447,575,342— virtually half a billion pounds—every day. With the Government's own projections showing that within four years the National Debt will have doubled to £1.4 trillion, I recently used figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to show that by 2014, in only four years' time, it will be costing us the equivalent of £60 a week for every household in the land just to pay the interest on the debt—let alone paying off the debt itself.
...


The second shadow over this election is the unprecedented damage done to our politics by the expenses scandal, which has degraded the standing of Parliament to its lowest point in history. More than anything, these revelations have reinforced the realisation that we are ruled by a political class in which the three main parties are blurred indistinguishably together, almost wholly divorced from the concerns of the rest of us. Never have MPs or peers been so diminished in stature, at the very time when the bloated apparatus of the state has been intruding on our lives more obviously than at any time before.

A third, closely related shadow which the political class has been only too keen to hide away has been the still barely understood extent to which it has handed over the running of our country and the making of our laws to that vast and mysterious new system of government centred on Brussels and Strasbourg. Nothing better exemplified how our politicians are caught by this system, like flies in a spider's web, than the shifty means whereby each of the three main parties weaselled its way out of keeping the manifesto promises of the last election that it would give us a referendum on the EU constitution, otherwise known as the Lisbon "reform treaty". Here was another great surrender of Parliament's power to decide how our country is run, and the MPs of all parties were not only happy to agree to it, but treated us all with contempt as they lied about it.
...


A final huge shadow which will barely be discussed at this election, because the main parties are all but unanimous on it, is the way our politics has become permeated by everything which can be related to global warming, from soaring taxes to the propaganda dished out in our schools, from the wishful thinking that we can spend £100 billion on building thousands more useless wind turbines, to the disastrous distortion of our national energy policy by the "green" obsessions of both the EU and our own political class, which threaten within a few years to turn Britain's lights out. (Although next week I hope to reveal an unexpected way in which this might be averted.)

This flight from reality was never better exemplified than by the 2008 Climate Change Act, committing Britain, uniquely in the world, to reducing its carbon emissions by more than four fifths. Even the Government admits that this will cost us up to £18 billion every year for four decades, making it by far the most costly law in our history. Though its target could only be met by virtually closing down our economy, such is the bubble of unreality in which our political class lives that our MPs voted for this insane law almost unanimously, without having any idea of its practical implications.

It seems to me that, very soon, we will not be worrying about immigration—but emigration, as vast numbers of people flee the wreckage of what was, not so very long ago, a vast economic power, a liberal beacon and a great country.

After 13 years, Labour realises that slavery is wrong

Now, your humble Devil had thought that Britain abolished slavery 177 years ago but, quite obviously, I was mistaken—because Labour are now claiming that they have abolished slavery with (guess what?) yet more new laws.

New laws which make it easier to prosecute those who exploit some of the most vulnerable people in society are about to come in to effect.

The new offence of holding another person in slavery or servitude, or requiring another person to perform forced or compulsory labour, is set out in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Those found guilty face a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

Riiiiiight. So, let's think about this for a moment, because there are a number of points—both mildly facetious and entirely serious—to consider here.

• If Labour believe that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did not, in fact, abolish slavery, then why has it taken them 13 years to make illegal one of the most fundamental of crimes?


• If the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did, in fact, abolish slavery then why the living fuck are Labour passing yet more laws duplicating the currently existing ones?

This is symptomatic of all governments these days—but especially NuLabour—and the answer is always the same: don't pass more laws, you stupid cunts, simply enforce the laws that we already have. If you cannot enforce the laws that we already have, then passing yet more unenforceable laws will not solve the fucking problem.

Of course, NuLabour like passing as many laws as possible—many, many thousands over the last 13 years, creating nearly 4,000 new criminal offences—for two main reasons.

1. The first is that the government can embed mini-Enabling Acts into the statutes, thus ensuring that more and more of our rights can be circumscribed through Ministerial fiat, rather than having to go through the tedious business of having a vote in Parliament.


2. The second is even more sinister than the above—although they are linked—and was articulated by the character of Dr Floyd Ferris in Ayn Rand's dystopian nightmare, Atlas Shrugged. I first quoted it almost exactly a year ago, in March 2009.
   

   However, it was a particular passage that I wished to quote; in it, one of the looters is threatening one of the "selfish" industrialists.
   

   "Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against—then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.

   
   Please discuss this quote, with special reference to NuLabour's creation of an unprecendented number of new laws and criminal offences, and especially focusing on the particularly badly-drafted laws that make it almost impossible for said legislation to be codified—or "objectively interpreted", if you will.

   
   It is all about control, as any authoritarian tyranny always is. But NuLabour have gone about it softly, softly so as not to scare the horses voters. Just as people are not really that concerned about this recession because most have not felt the pain—that is being reserved for their children and their grandchildren in the form of colossal debt—most people have not yet felt the state's jackboot upon their throat.
   
   It's just here and there, and only very occasionally, that the media dare to report an isolated case of disgusting injustice—of the laws being used to punish people entirely unjustly, to bankrupt them and destroy their lives out of all proportion to their offence—and the general populace can afford to ignore such incidents. For the moment.

And it is only "for the moment": whilst Labour may be kicked out at the next election—and that is looking far from being a certainty—neither of the other two big parties have promised to repeal these assaults on our civil liberties. And it would be so easy for the Tories, for one, to pledge to do so: a cry for freedom would galvanise the people of this country in a way that Cameron's message of "more of the same" simply isn't doing.

So why are they not pledging to repeal all of these disgustingly authoritarian laws? Because they have absolutely no intention of doing so—they will use them as Labour has done. The last thing that the Tories are going to do is to remove the fenceposts of Absolute Government that Labour have put in place. The Tories are just the same as Labour, which is why the Tories are only 2% ahead in the polls.

Cartoon courtesy of Hoby. Click image for bigger version.

Returning, however, to Labour's "abolition" of slavery, Leg-Iron has come up with a rather splendid extrapolation.

Pub landlord Nick Hogan was prosecuted, fined more than the average baby-thumper and then sent to jail for far longer than a Labour peer who flattened someone with his car. For what exactly? Because he refused to act as an unpaid enforcement officer for a law he disagreed with. Note that he was not prosecuted for smoking - he was prosecuted for not stopping other people smoking.
...

Fresh from the unwiped bottom of MiniJust comes another dry clinker of wisdom. The same people who demand that all owners of private premises act as unpaid police and put themselves at risk so the Righteous don't have to, have come up with a new law to stop people forcing other people to do work they don't want to do... no, don't try to make sense of it, it will make your head hurt.

The new offence of holding another person in slavery or servitude, or requiring another person to perform forced or compulsory labour, is set out in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Those found guilty face a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

So, when the police charge you with 'allowing others to smoke', you can now immediately countercharge with 'requiring another person to perform forced labour' because that is exactly what they are doing. Act as an unpaid enforcer or face the wrath of the Righteous. Forcing landlords and other business premises operators to work for free as frontline law enforcers, at personal risk, is a direct violation of this new law.

You might get six months. They'll get 14 years.

Now, I am not sure that this will hold water—and certainly could not if we lived in a country that still acknowledged the Peelian Principles of policing. Said principles state the following...

7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

As such, it is incumbent on every citizen to uphold the law, regardless of whether they are being paid to do so or not: the police are simply people who happen to be paid to uphold the law full-time.

However, this new law might apply, in theory at least, to taxation. The text of the law appears here but, because it needs to be considerably cross-referenced with other parts of the Bill, it is easier to refer to the notes at the bottom of the MoJ press release.

2. Forced or compulsory labour will require a level of coercion or deception between the employer and the victim, beyond that which might be expected in a normal employment arrangement.

Well, that would certainly apply to the government—except, of course, the government is not my employer. It might apply if I were any one of the 6 million or so people who are employed by the state though...

The employer must know that the arrangement was oppressive and not truly voluntary, or must have turned a blind eye to that fact.

A number of factors may point to forced or compulsory labour. The kind of behaviour that might, of itself, amount to forced labour includes (but is not limited to):

• violence or threats of violence by the employer or the employer’s representative

Hmmm. So, were I employed by government, it is possible that this could apply to taxation—it's a little tenuous, but a case could be made. Oh, wait... [Emphasis mine.]

4. In line with the European Convention on Human Rights, the offence contains exceptions for labour that may be necessary to ensure public safety and the rights of others. Those exceptions are: work done in the course of lawful detention; military service; emergencies or life threatening situations; and work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.

And—boom!—there's the get-out clause. Essentially, "normal civic obligations" is whatever the government say it is—and you can bet your last Rolo pound that "normal civic obligations" not only includes paying tax, but also upholding the smoking ban in a pub.

So, it's the same old story: slavery is wrong unless it is the state to whom you are indentured. And that compulsion is with you for all of your life and the amount that you must work is unlimited. We are slaves to the state forever, and we shall never, ever be free (not even after our deaths).

Truly, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

UPDATE: Timmy concludes that the Act does make compulsory recycling illegal though.

These people aren’t entirely stupid of course. Normal civic obligations includes the unpaid time we must use to fill in tax forms, the unpaid time we must use to fill in the Census, the unpaid time ….well, you get the picture.

However, the requirement to sort your rubbish is not a normal civic obligation. It’s an attempt to create a new civic obligation. It’s also labour and it’s also performed under duress….don’t do it and they’ll arrest you, resist arrest and they’ll use violence.

And this would hold true for any new service which the government would force us to provide unpaid and with the threat of punishment if we don’t.

As Timmy says, isn’t that fascinating?

I'm a Lefty too

No, really: it's true—your humble Devil is a Lefty. Shocked? OK, I'll let Tim Worstall explain...

I’m a lefty. No, really, I am. I’m a liberal, a progressive and a radical. Liberals are, as the word itself suggests, concerned with liberty, as I am. Progressives are those who believe in the power of the State to make things better and I most certainly agree with that. Radicals are those who think that we cannot simply tinker at the edges, we need some fairly major changes. About the only way in which I disagree with the basic propositions as usually understood is that in terms of progressivism I think that one of the ways the State can make things better is to stop doing some of the damn fool things it’s already doing.

Yes, the state (almost certainly) can do some things better than even the most harmonious collective, e.g. defence and, possibly, criminal justice. Maybe, in some far off time, individuals will have learnt how to eliminate the state entirely and live in a state of good-natured anarchism, but I do not believe that that time is now. So, whilst I believe that the state is bad and should do as little as possible, it is—at this stage of our evolution—a necessary evil.

Which is why I describe myself as a minarchist from an anarchist stance.

But how can I think that and be a Lefty? How can I be a Lefty and support free markets, free trade, capitalism and so on?

So, as such a lefty, why am I so in favour of things like markets, free trade, capitalism and so on? Those things which are generally thought of as the preserve of the “right”? (Let us leave aside that “the right” ain’t been a friend of free trade shall we?)

Because they work.

If what you want is that the poor get richer, if what you want is an improvement in general living standards, if what you want is that the absolutely poor become only the relatively poor, then capitalism, markets and free trade are the only games in town.

Quite. Timmy offers up his exposition as a justification for his continuing, and most enjoyable, critiquing of Richard Murphy. But I'm afraid that I must take issue with Timmy on one aspect of said justification. [Emphasis mine.]

Which is why I Rag on Ritchie quite so much. To the possible point of obsession. I do him the courtesy of assuming that he wants just what I do. A better and richer world for those currently stuck in the absolute poverty that has been humanity’s historical lot. Certainly he works with a lot of organisations who claim that this is their aim (Action Aid, Oxfam I think, Christian Aid and so on). It’s just that his actual suggestions of how to get from here to our jointly desired goal strike me as entirely wrong.

And as such, as suggestions which are entirely wrong, they should be critiqued in the hope that by doing so his suggestions can be improved. For we do both desire exactly the same thing. That those in Africa, indeed those anywhere, should become just as fat, rich and happy as we pinkish people who by historical happenstance were the first to leave the Malthusian world behind.

I'm afraid that Tim Worstall—by virtue of being a nice man—gives Ritchie far too much credit: I don't think that Ritchie gives two fucking shits about whether poor people become any richer. You see, Timmy assumes that Richard Murphy is, at heart, a decent human being: I don't.

I think that Richard Murphy is a deeply evil man: the kind of man who cares more about his reputation, his own bank account, his personal bugbears and his disgusting personal morality than he does about the poor or their progression towards being "fat, rich and happy".

How else can a man who claims to know anything about economics possibly support more taxation, more stifling of trade and more state intervention? All of the evidence shows that these things make people poorer—and yet all of these are things that Richard Murphy advocates.

Therefore, Richard Murphy does not care about the poor, and therefore Richard Murphy is a deeply evil human being.

After all, if Richard Murphy doesn't believe Timmy—or any of those others with economic training and experience—then he might, perhaps, believe the IPCC's SRES reports. These are supposed to be the pinnacle of economic modelling, and what measures do they recommend—in their A1 family of scenarios—that we adopt for maximum wealth?

The A1 storyline is a case of rapid and successful economic development, in which regional average income per capita converge - current distinctions between "poor" and "rich" countries eventually dissolve. The primary dynamics are:

• Strong commitment to market-based solutions.


• High savings and commitment to education at the household level.


• High rates of investment and innovation in education, technology, and institutions at the national and international levels.


• International mobility of people, ideas, and technology.

The transition to economic convergence results from advances in transport and communication technology, shifts in national policies on immigration and education, and international cooperation in the development of national and international institutions that enhance productivity growth and technology diffusion.

This may be the type of scenario best represented in recent literature (e.g., Shinn, 1985; UN, 1990; Schwartz, 1991; Peterson, 1994; Gallopin et al., 1997; Glenn and Gordon, 1997, 1999; Lawrence et al., 1997; Hammond, 1998; Raskin et al., 1998). Such scenarios are dominated by an American or European entrepreneurial, progress-oriented perspective in which technology, especially communication technology, plays a central role. Wilkerson (1995) designed various scenarios that share features with A1. They emphasize market-oriented solutions, high consumption of both tangible and intangible commodities, advanced technology, and intensive mobility and communication.

Ritchie denies the weight of respected economists in theory and the plethora of evidence in actuality and—for the benefit of his own prejudices and his own fat wallet—actively lobbies people to pursue a selection of courses which he must know will keep people around the world in grinding poverty, suffering lives of privation, preventable disease and premature death.

In short, in the face of all the evidence, Richard Murphy not only supports but actively encourages measures that will lead to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people. In my book, that makes Richard Murphy a deeply evil man.

I did not always think this way: when I first encountered his particular brand of lunacy—back in June 2006—I thought that maybe he was simply stupid. As I have read more of his insane burblings—creating my own Murphy's Law series as well as following Timmy's " ragging on Ritchie" series—I have swung around to the idea that he is not (totally) moronic and that he is not ignorant. And if he is not completely stupid and he is not uninformed but he still advocates measures that will kill people, then Richard Murphy must, therefore, be evil.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Big Carbon

Over at EU Referendum, Richard North started off by examining the multiplicity of connections enjoyed by the head of the IPCC—an Indian millionaire businessman (not a scientist) named Rajenda Kumar Pauchauri. And he really does have an awful lot of fingers in an awful lot of pies.

See All Roads Lead To Pauchauri, A Busy Man and Global Warming: An Economic War...

Then Richard started to detail the huge market created by the Kyoto Treaty—the trade in Carbon Credits. And as Richard has pointed out, this market is now pretty huge and Copenhagen was not about saving the planet—it was about saving the carbon market.

In 2012 the Kyoto treaty falls, and with it the mechanisms which underpin carbon trading. Unless the protocols are renewed, a multi-billion dollar industry falls apart – the money tree is under threat.

And, as Open Europe reports today, we are talking about seriously big money. The volume of carbon trading across the globe has increased dramatically in recent years. According to the World Bank, the value of the ETS market increased from $49 billion to $91 billion between 2007 and 2008.

Just in European terms, the European Climate Exchange (ECX) and Bluenext accounted for 92 percent of exchange-traded EU carbon permits and so far in 2009, the value of the carbon permits traded through both exchanges is €85,304,050,227—or €364,547,223 a day.

This, however, pales into insignificance when the global market is estimated to be worth anything from $1-2 trillion by 2020. With such huge sums at risk—trading in the ultimate non-product—it is easy to see why such enormous effort is being expended to elevate the global warming hype. Without the support of the belief system which fuels the whole racket, this vast ponzi scheme will come crashing down.

The irony of it all is that, as James Hansen himself agrees, this money-making racket will have no overall effect on emission levels. But then, it is not intended to. This is a money-making scam on a colossal scale, a confidence trick perpetrated in plain sight, giving endless opportunities to rip-off the public.

For more on Big Carbon, see Big Carbon, A Vast Nexus of Influence, Controlling the Money, Protecting Big Carbon and How To Get Rich…

As Bishop Hill points out, Richard also has two articles in the MSM today.

In the Telegraph, he and Christopher Booker look at how IPCC boss Rajendra Pachauri has reaped vast sums of money from his involvement in the trade in carbon credits:

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

The Mail meanwhile, has completely messed up, attributing the story to a completely different Richard North, and printing the wrong photo alongside the article to boot. The story though is a good one, looking at the big picture of how Copenhagen was a victory for the money-men, retaining the lucrative trade in carbon credits.

Forget 'Big Oil'—this is 'Big Carbon' making the most of a 'business opportunity' that was created by the first climate treaty at Kyoto in 1997.

The frenzied negotiations we have just seen were never about 'saving the planet'. They were always about money. At stake was this new 'climate change industry' which last year ripped off £129billion from the global economy and is heading for that trillion-pound bonanza by 2020—but only if the key parts of the Kyoto treaty could be renewed.

There are colossal amounts of money at stake here—and the big corporates (including the oil companies) have gleefully piled in. This is not about the science—and, indeed, it has not been about the science for some years now: the anthropogenic climate change myth is big business.

Even had Richard not done some sterling research into this, it would anyway have become obvious once Tony Blair—the ultimate corporate shill—came out with this gem:

“It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be..."

No, because it is about the money, not the science. We're all about to be fucked by the hellish combination of big government and big corporations: prepare to be shafted.

At this point, it would be well to remind ourselves of another part of the Jackart post referenced earlier. [Emphasis mine.]

Nor is libertarianism mere shilling for big business. Tight regulation of businesses favour only big corporations whose bureaucracies can cope with the slew of bumf needed to comply with regulations. This prevents competition from smaller, nimbler businesses, and turns big business into an arm of the state. Entrepreneurs are discouraged or bought out. The worker is crushed by an oppressive force less violent but less tolerant of dissent than the state. The corporation is a creature of the big state.

And the state is getting bigger—big enough to fill the world. Indeed, I have expressed my disquiet over the increasing collaboration between governments before.

You see, what I saw—reading between the lines of the manufactured disagreements and media-interpreted problems—was a bunch of people with the same hideous agenda: reform of economies in a model of their choosing.

And I saw a bunch of politicians, all of whom were representatives of socialism—whether that be the soft Communism of the Chinese or the "social democracy" of Brown—coming together with the conversation starting with "a conspiracy against the public". All were advocating the same basic ideas, the same consensus—and you know how keen I am on consensus.
...

We who are libertarians, who want to be left alone, are being conspired against and soon, no matter how rich you are, there will be no place of escape for the G20 socialist monsters will control all the civilised world.

Even the other countries will be off-limits, for the democratic socialists of the West have already bought their loyalty and obedience with bribes masquerading as "aid".

Such favours, direct funding and tax breaks have already bought the Third Sector and the mainstream media. The blogs remain, but will soon be regulated out of existence.

Meetings such as Copenhagen simply illustrate how big government and big business are conspiring against us, the general public, to ensure that there is no place of escape—to make sure that World Government comes about.

Thankfully, our politicians are so inept and so corrupt that they have made a fuck-up of Copenhagen—saving only their precious carbon credits so far. But there will be more to come.

And as the noose tightens, there will be fewer and fewer places to go. And, right now, the only way to ensure a relatively comfortable life is to carry a big bottle of lube, to mitigate the pain of the inevitable arse-rapings you are about to receive with increasing frequency.

Quote of the day...

... comes from the evidently eminently quotable Charlotte Gore and her post (which is well worth reading in full) inspired by Hayek's Road To Serfdom.

It may be that the socialists are the most vocal anti-racists, but it is they who’ve created the economic conditions in which racism thrives. It’s they who’ve created a country with a growing obsession with stopping “foreigners” taking advantage of our welfare state, and it’s they who’ve spent the last 100 years telling everyone that Free Trade (which includes free movement of people) is a bad and terrible thing, it’s they who’ve told everyone that the job of the state is to pick sides and pick winners…. and they’re acting surprised, shocked and outraged when people who see themselves as losers in the current system want to use the state for their own purposes?

What exactly did they think would happen? I mean, really? The only way to stop National Socialism in the UK is to stop socialism.

This is a point that I have made many times myself—although less eloquently—over the years. It is not only that socialism is a creed based on violence and extortion but also, as Charlotte points out, it creates a "them" and "us" mentality amongst the population, and leads to misery.

Further, I have often written about how the Welfare State is the reason why we have a "broken society" and the more that I talk about it, the more I realise just how right I am. It creates a them and us mentality even amongst the "indigenous" population because some are state losers—those who pay for it—and some are state winners—those who contribute nothing and who are encouraged to continue contributing nothing by the state's largesse.

Until people start to realise all of this and stop worshipping this "social democracy" as some sort of quasi-religion, our society is going to continue going down the fucking panhole.

Farewell freedom—it was nice knowing you

Those of us who like to extol the virtues of freedom and who are, simultaneously, political anoraks, have been dismayed—to put it mildly—at the wholesale destruction of our ancient freedoms. And things have only got worse...

Some months ago, whilst discussing the latest measures discouraging the sale of cigarettes, I noted that a huge number of the law passed by NuLabour had terrifying implications concerning what they did not say.

What they then do is to pass a law that allows them to go far, far further because, unlike the previous incarnation, this new clause doesn't define what the law actually is.

Each one of these clauses is, in effect, an Enabling Act in that it enables any designated minister to change the law without having to argue the case through Parliament—and thus ensuring that has no right to vote on it.
...

This is the really terrifying thing about NuLabour: they have pushed though thousands—tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands—of new laws, many of which contain these mini-Enabling Acts. And the Civil Contingencies Act is only the most egregious of these; there are others which allow ministers to remove our liberties on a whim.

Sure, they are far smaller matters, but taken together they all add up to an Executive wielding power with no brakes upon it: statutory instruments are bad enough and would, were your humble Devil in charge, be rendered illegal—these Enabling Clauses are, quite simply, the fence-posts for a totalitarian regime.

And, indeed, it is exactly this type of instrument that is being used to nod through one of the most terrifying, totalitarian laws that I have ever seen.

Draconian police powers designed to deprive crime barons of luxury lifestyles are being extended to councils, quangos and agencies to use against the public, The Times has learnt.

The right to search homes, seize cash, freeze bank accounts and confiscate property will be given to town hall officials and civilian investigators employed by organisations as diverse as Royal Mail, the Rural Payments Agency and Transport for London.

The measure, being pushed through by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, comes into force next week and will deploy some of the most powerful tools available to detectives against fare dodgers, families in arrears with council tax and other minor offenders.

The radical extension of the Proceeds of Crime Act, through a Statutory Instrument which is not debated by parliament, has been condemned by the chairman of the Police Federation.

And, again, your humble Devil predicted this, in a post entitled divide et impera—or "divide and rule".

And so it is that the government have been able to put through some disgusting laws, by aiming them at groups that the other groups dislike. 42 days detention without trial?—well, it'll only apply to terrorists, and they're all Muslims or at the very least darkies, eh?

The scrapping of double jeopardy, habeas corpus and trial by jury?—well, that'll only apply to the eeevil criminals (no matter that they have yet to be proven such). Oh, and the darkies, of course. And the poor.

The confiscation of your assets before you are even found guilty, or reversing the burden of proof for the confiscation of assets? Well, that'll only apply to drugdealers and the like.

And none of these people are really human, are they? Not like me.

And that's how they get us; that's how they pass those laws. And, they say that they won't use them except in the most exceptional circumstances, and only against those people who aren't really human.

Except that, by the time that the laws have passed and everyone has forgotten about them, suddenly you find that they are not quite so exclusive as you might have thought—that they might, in fact, be used against you and not just against those nasty, inhuman drug-dealers.

In the case above, the Proceeds of Crime law had been used to bankrupt some fishermen—now it is going to be used to bankrupt you.

There is very little that I can say about this disgusting move, except to echo Timmy's comment.

Bye bye liberty, it was nice knowing you.

There is only one question that can possibly be asked now...

Are there enough trees in England to hang these people from, and enough rope to do it?

Burying culture

Could Nick Griffin be right, that there has been a deliberate attempt by political elites to destroy the prevailing culture of Britain?

If this article is to be believed, then the answer is, shockingly, "yes".

Labour threw open Britain's borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a more multicultural country, a former Government adviser has revealed.

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

This policy might alienate the "working class vote"? Oh, y'think?

Mind you, this would explain why NuLabour seem to be so keen to expel skilled migrants who want to work—they are likely to be too far right, far too conservative, far too hard-working, to achieve the change that the NuLabour scum apparently wanted.

No: import the unskilled, the radical, the lazy and the stupid. And don't forget to import their families too. Fuck me, what's next—Labour paid for their fucking flights over here?

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the "major shift" in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

What this actually reminds me of is Sean Gabb's recent speech (which I commented on). In that, Sean revealed what he thought the NuLabour government's real aim was.

The purpose of the Government that took power in 1997 was to bring about a revolutionary transformation of this country—a transformation from which there could be no return to what had been before.

That summation is beginning to look more and more plausible.

Fucking hellski.

The Enemy Class will maintain control

The latest post at the Libertarian Alliance blog is the rough minutes of a speech by Sean Gabb to a Conservative Association: it is excellent and worth reading in full. Of most interest is Sean's contention that the Constitution of this country has been deliberately and irrevocably destroyed.

I disagree [that this has been a bad government]. Oh, if you want a government that defends the country and provides common services while keeping so far as possible out of your way, the Labour Government elected in 1997 has been a disappointment. This does not mean, however, that the Blair and Brown Governments have been a failure in their own terms. They have, on the contrary, been very successful.

The purpose of the Government that took power in 1997 was to bring about a revolutionary transformation of this country – a transformation from which there could be no return to what had been before. The English Constitution has never been set down in a written document, and there has never been any statement of fundamental rights and liberties that was protected from change by ordinary legislation. Instead, these rights and liberties were protected by a set of customs and institutions that, being legitimised by antiquity, served the same purpose as formal entrenchment. It can be hard, in every specific case, to justify trial by jury, or the rule against double jeopardy, or the idea that imprisonment should be for a specified time and no longer, or the right to speak freely on matters in the public domain. There are principled arguments that satisfy in the absence of strong passions. But, strong passions being granted, the best argument has always so far been that these things have always been in England, and that to change them would be to break the threads that tie us to the past.

It would be childish to argue that the Ancient Constitution was in good health until 1997, when it was suddenly overturned. Unless there is an catastrophic foreign invasion, constitutions are not destroyed in this way. Ours had been sapped long before 1997. To say when the tipping point was reached, and by what means, would take me far beyond my stated theme. However, what remained of the Constitution has, since 1997, been dismissed as a set of “outmoded” relics, and large parts of it have been swept away. Those that remain have been transformed beyond recognition.
...

On any normal assumptions, the country has been governed very badly since 1997. On the assumptions of the Government, things have gone very well indeed.

The rest of it is in the same excellent vein, and very much worth cogitating on—I am even being swayed by the republican argument.

On Friday the 16th October 2009, I spoke to a Conservative Association in the South East of England. Though I did not video the event, and though – on account of the heated and not always good natured debate the followed my speech – I was asked not to identify the particular Association to which I spoke, I think what I said is worth recording.

Yes, I can imagine that many Conservatives would find this speech unpalatable—but then they are concerned only with power and not with the rights and liberties of the people of this country.

We shall probably have a Conservative Government within the next nine months. But this will not be a government of conservatives. If we want a preview of the Cameron Government, we need only look at what Boris Johnson has achieved during the past year as Mayor of London. He has not closed down one of the bureaucracies set up by Ken Livingstone and his Trotskyite friends. The race equality enforcers are still collecting their salaries. The war on the private motorist continues. Rather than cut the number of New and Old Labour apparatchiks, he is currently putting up taxes. David Cameron will be no better. He may be forced to make some changes and to slow the speed of the transformation. The transformation will continue nevertheless.

Indeed it will: if you believe in freedom and so place your hope in Cameron then you are a fool. To refuse to see that makes you a knave.

I understand that many people will vote Conservative on the Barbary Ape principle. Fine: go ahead. I may even have some sympathy for that position—it is difficult to imagine that Cameron and his merry men could be quite as bad as NuLabour. But as Sean points out, he will be—essentially—no better.

Over the last few decades, we have seen a steady and gradually acceleration of our serfdom; increasingly, we are no longer free individuals, but slaves living under sufference—we are grudgingly allowed to retain a small proportion of our liberty and our possessions only as long as we continue to accept the jackboot of the statist upon our necks.

This is a war, and it's time to pick the side that you fight on: are you a totalitarian or a libertarian?

DfID and NGOs: corruption a-go-go

I'm a little late to the party on this one—though I received the report some days ago—but the International Policy Network released a report that reveals the extent to which the Department for International Development (DfID) has been funding NGOs to lobby both itself and various other entities [PDF].

The Department for International Development (DfID) claims to be “leading the UK government’s fight against world poverty”. However, by 2011 it will have spent over £1bn of taxpayers’ money on propaganda, according to “Fake Aid”, a new report from International Policy Network.

Recipients of this money include trade unions and other partisan political organisations in the UK. Examples include:

£1.2 million given to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) since 2003 for activities including: lobbying, hiring new staff and an “international buffet and wine” event to celebrate “International Women’s Day” in the UK. DfID also paid the TUC to hold lessons in how to apply for DfID funds.

£300,000 to the National Union of Teachers (NUT) to “enable them [teachers] to become global agents of change”.

The creation of fake NGOs such as “Connections for Development” (CfD), supposedly a forum for black and ethnic minorities to engage “on issues relating to international development.” DfID created and is the only donor to CfD, providing it with £600,000 in its first two years, yet an independent review questioned “the purpose of the organisation.”

£10 million spent flying poor Brits to poor countries to work for free.

IPN’s Julian Harris, one of the report’s authors, said “DfID often hand-picks the largest recipients, such as trade unions, behind closed doors. This smacks of cronyism.”

The report highlights the waste of DfID funds on political campaigning while a child dies every 30 seconds from malaria in poor countries.

“The money DfID is wasting in this year alone could in principle treat 230 million people suffering from malaria,” concluded Harris.

This is a welcome extension to the work that your humble Devil and his colleagues have been doing at fakecharities.org. Indeed, we seem to have kicked off something of a fad or investigating the provenance of non-profit organisations amongst think-tanks [TPA PDF].

More details can be found at the LPUK blog, here is an LPUK press release.

It is utterly unacceptable for the government to use our money to pay organisations to lobby itself—especially as these organisations almost always lobby for more restrictions on our freedoms.

The idea that my money is being stolen so that the fruits of my labour can be turned against me is, personally, extremely rage-inducing. Not to mention that fact that it emphasises the veracity of Ayn Rand's vision of how government works in Atlas Shrugs.

Our own skills and hard work are being used against us but, alas, it simply isn't practical for us to withdraw our labour—for how would we live? At the behest of these same fake charities?

No thanks.

Globally fucked

Your humble Devil is a suspicious type but not, generally, given to conspiracy theories. However, as report after report came out around and about the G20, I became increasingly worried.

You see, the reports were all about how Gordo agreed with his pal Obama and, in turn, The Boy Blunder was thrilled with the Europeans, and how the Europeans were making overtures to the Chinese, and how everyone agreed that there needed to be a sea-change in the world economy.

You see, your humble Devil is, in these situations, very mindful of that old Adam Smith quote about tradesmen. No, not the one describing the "invisible hand"; this one:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

You see, what I saw—reading between the lines of the manufactured disagreements and media-interpreted problems—was a bunch of people with the same hideous agenda: reform of economies in a model of their choosing.

And I saw a bunch of politicians, all of whom were representatives of socialism—whether that be the soft Communism of the Chinese or the "social democracy" of Brown—coming together with the conversation starting with "a conspiracy against the public". All were advocating the same basic ideas, the same consensus—and you know how keen I am on consensus.

It seems that I was far from being the only one to consider this somewhat worrying, for EUReferendum has picked it up too.

We could not be bothered to do a forensic analysis of the G20 summit. We said it was soap opera and that indeed it was.

However, Burning Our Money has done a dissection, confirming that which we knew from past experience and intuition. Yet there were over 2,000 hacks covering the summit—including a phalanx of fashion editors—most simply lapping it up, filling the pages and the airwaves with their meaningless garbage.

The real agenda, of course, is global governance, an aspect of which Ambrose highlights. But we are not supposed to talk about that—only conspiracy theory nutters talk about that, while the rest of the media claque sleeps, and the politicos work out their next tranche of taxpayer-funded expenses.

"Conspiracy theorists will love it," writes Ambrose. But it ain't theory—it's happening in front of our very eyes, in broad daylight. The genius is that, by lumping critics in with 9/11 deniers and all the rest, the global governance crowd do not even need to hide their agenda. No one is going to blow the whistle … especially as Brown and the rest of his ghastly mob are part of it.

It is this, more than anything else, that has led to my depression today: it looks like those of us who espouse freedom have not only lost the battle, but also the war. All around us and ranged against us are not only the politicians, but the massed ranks of the pig-ignorant and the willfully uninformed idiots who vote for them.

We who are libertarians, who want to be left alone, are being conspired against and soon, no matter how rich you are, there will be no place of escape for the G20 socialist monsters will control all the civilised world.

Even the other countries will be off-limits, for the democratic socialists of the West have already bought their loyalty and obedience with bribes masquerading as "aid".

Such favours, direct funding and tax breaks have already bought the Third Sector and the mainstream media. The blogs remain, but will soon be regulated out of existence.

Everywhere the socialists have won. Can it be true that libertarianism has no place? Can it be that the people of our countries have no desire to be free?

Possibly. But it is also true that they are not content with the current system and are turning elsewhere as a protest.

The 20 percent plus vote is firm, right across the country—with a few dead spots—and BNP are routinely thrashing UKIP, consigning it to the dustbin of history. Currently, the estimates are that the BNP will take between ten and twelve seats at the euro elections, and they will take votes from all three main parties—plus UKIP.

The politicos also know that this is not a vote for the BNP. It is an anti-politician vote, reflecting that the major Westminster parties—all of them—no longer offer any real choice, or any choice at all. And that is what scares them. The votes are coming not just from Labour but from across the board—the Tories and Lib-Dems are just as much threatened as Labour.

This is the real reason why we're getting Jury Team and NO2EU, and why we're seeing last-minute attempts by the political fellow-travellers to talk up UKIP. Vote for us or you get BNP is the hidden message of these groupuscules.

The silence of the politicos about BNP is testament to how scared they are running. But, because—as [Jeff] Randall writes—there are disgracefully few legitimate outlets for redress, people are increasingly taking advantage of the one which sends a clear message to Westminster, expressing their "festering resentment" and their contempt for a system that has betrayed them.

Indeed. And surely this is the time for the UK Libertarian Party to stand up and be counted—to take hundreds of thousands of votes...?

It won't happen. When I speak to those who are not libertarians, there is no real appetite for change. These people are not voting BNP because they want change; they are voting against the current system, yes, but they don't actually want to consider anything other than the current cozy set-up. Not really.

Yes, they want less sleaze in their politicos—but they don't want a smaller government.

Yes, they want less prying into their personal lives—but they still want to stop others doing naughty things, like taking drugs.

Yes, they want to pay less tax—but they are unwilling even to countenance real public service reform.

Until people are willing to think about these things and decide what they actually want, there will be no change. And please do not think that Cameron and his merry men will change anything of any significance—with 70% of our law coming from the EU, they are able to change nothing very much anyway.

As for "global governance"—when people finally wake up to what is really going on, there will be more than a howl of rage. Then there really will be blood in the streets.

I sincerely hope that this is the case. But I also sincerely doubt that it will ever happen. The British people are cowed and beaten; they are acquiescent in their own destruction.

I wouldn't mind, but they are dragging me—and all of those others who do not wish to follow their path—down into the depths of their hell with them.

And that is why seasteading so appeals: it is the only hope—and a terribly slim hope it is—to escape those involved in the vast global conspiracy levelled against liberty, egged on by those who have a learned dependency on the state.

We are all fucked.