Moral courage in Alternative Iraq
Nigel Biggar, professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, has written an article in the Financial Times arguing that the Iraq war was necessary to stop or prevent a sufficiently great evil.
This is a good opportunity to test out a piece of the liberal-left infrastructure that Sunny talks about trying to build. In the past, we have had to go through particularly bad articles, such as this one, and take the arguments to pieces line-by-line. This can be time consuming and after a while gets kind of tedious.
Wouldn’t it be useful if there were a website which had already anticipated terrible arguments like this, and mocked and rebutted them for us?
To test this out, I used the Decentpedia, which has an extensive catalogue of arguments made by supporters of the Iraq war. continue reading… »
Write a blog, kill your career?
I’ve spotted a couple of references recently to the ‘perfect memory’ of the Internet and how it can come back to haunt you in later life. It breeds a peculiar form of self-censorship. First, the now-outed Girl With A One Track Mind says:
I wish my blog wouldn’t continue to bite me on the arse (not in the good way); I’ve held my finger over “Delete Blog?” button so many times.
I can understand why Zoe might want to start afresh, but this sentiment feels wrong and offensive – like book burning.
The other worry is for those who might want to start a political career. James Joyner at the Outside the Beltway blog discusses Philosopher Kings and the potential for a blogger-turned politician. continue reading… »
A woman porn director wants to be an MP? Good for her
God, politics can be a bit depressing sometimes. Someone comes along with an unusual background wanting to be an MP, and what happens? All of us in the club smirk and nudge each other and roll out a series of pathetic double entendres, her party leader has to declaim her career, and an assembled phalanx of politicians and journalists act as if they’ve never so much seen a naked ankle. Bunch of hypocrites, the lot of us.
So a woman porn director wants to be an MP? Good for her. I’m sure the voters will be much more sensible about it than the political classes.
Anyway, from her wiki entry (I suspect parliamentary computers will prevent going much beyond wiki) she seems like someone with a real belief in personal freedom and choice rather than some sorry mens mag sleazoid, like, well, the owner of the Daily Express.
The Familiarity of Core Conservative Values
For some, relativism has always been the turf of the left, particularly on the subject of poverty. Emerging ideas from within the Tory right are now trying to claim relativitism as more important to Conservatism than it currently is. One such development is the Progressive Conservative project at Demos. Their latest essay, entitled Everyday Equality, deals exclusively with trying to demonstrate the importance of inequality and the wealth gap and how this can be important to the future of Conservatism.
According to the document, Thatcher in her last Question Time of her period in office said to one of her Labour questioners that she didn’t care about the gap between the rich and poor, but simply cared about the wealth of the latter. Acording to the authors, this is not true to the real values of Conservatism at all, but rather neo-liberalism without an evidence base. continue reading… »
Beware the deflation lobby
As a liberal it came as quite a shock to read this from John Stuart Mill, railing against the devaluation of money:
There are at this day numerous persons who can read and write, and some who think themselves oracles of wisdom, who see no harm in emancipating a paper currency from the restraint of convertibility … there are writers of pretension … who think it the duty of the legislature periodically to degrade the standard (or to authorize an increase of inconvertible paper exactly equivalent) in proportion as the progress of industry creates an increase of productions and a multiplication of pecuniary transactions.
He goes on to say “a pound (precisely as stated by Sir Robert Peel) should mean a fixed quantity of gold of a given fineness”.
Given the havoc that had been wrought by proliferating paper currency, from the time of Sung China through the Mississippi Bubble and beyond, one might understand Mill’s concern. Inflation disorders commerce, and transfers wealth from the saver to the debtor, something that must have appalled any right-thinking Victorian. More pragmatically, it raises the cost of capital, which ultimately hurts us all.
But an overly fond adherence to the solidity of currency has cost society dear in the past, and threatens to again. In the 1930s, it was the countries that left gold first that recovered first. The really stubborn ones like France had worse Depressions. With the ascendance of Keynes, more people began to understand that what matters in economics is how much is produced and consumed, and not just how much ‘gold of a given fineness’ a unit of currency can get you.
When last year the economy tumbled ever further, and the Bank of England introduced ‘quantitative easing’, some Victorian ghosts arose from the grave, in the form of various hysterics shouting about Zimbabwe, the Weimar republic and the threat of hyperinflation.
They were wrong in two ways continue reading… »
Boris breaks another promise
Boris Johnson will break his promise to keep all ticket offices manned on the London Underground it was announced yesterday.
Up to 800 jobs will go across the network including 450 ticket office positions and 200 other station posts.
TfL admit that this will mean many more unmanned ticket offices across the network, although none will close permanently.
In Boris Johnson’s Transport manifesto he promised to ensure that “there is always a manned ticket office at every station.”
However, the recession, losses from the PPP, and Boris’s own spending commitments means that he will now break that promise.
The Liberal Democrat’s London Transport spokesperson Caroline Pidgeon said today:
“Boris Johnson was elected promising to defend ticket offices and stop any planned closures that the previous Mayor was proposing across the London Underground network. Today’s announcement is a breathtaking breach of that key commitment he made to Londoners. It’s a complete u-turn.”
Labour’s London Transport spokesperson Val Shawcross said:
“This is the latest in a long line of broken Boris Johnson promises. He was elected on a pledge of protecting ticket offices and the staff who keep our stations safe but cuts, especially at outer London stations, will make them less safe and passengers feel less secure.”
Union bosses have also pledged to fight the decision. RMT General Secretary Bob Crow said this afternoon:
“If these cuts to jobs are bulldozed through by TfL it will turn London’s tube stations into a muggers paradise. RMT will fight to protect passenger and staff security on London Underground and in the event of compulsory redundancies and the undermining of tube safety we will have no hesitation in balloting for action.”
London Underground insist that there will be no compulsory redundancies, and point out that more and more people now use pre-paid Oyster Cards.
And with Boris already raising fares year on year, this is a painful but probably necessary pill for us to swallow.
There ain’t nuthin’ more powerful than the smell of Tory mendacity!
Is Alan Johnson right to accuse the Tories of deceit over their recent claim that violent crime has risen by 44% since 1998?
Of course he is, in fact he doesn’t go anything like far enough in his accusations. Not only are the Tories wilfully misrepresenting the evidence provided by the police recorded crime statistics, but they are also pursuing a deliberate and wholly mendacious strategy of seeking to undermine public confidence in the British Crime Survey, a point that Johnson has, as yet, failed to put over forcefully enough.
As evidence, let’s refer back to an article by the Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, which was published by the Telegraph in January 2009 under the title ‘Fiddling statistics is no way to restore public confidence”. In the article, Grieve makes the following claims about the British Crime Survey.
The BCS is an obviously poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicide offences, rape and multiple assaults. It also excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including: the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and – until this year – all children. In fact, we know that police recorded violent crime has nearly doubled since 1997.
Grieve’s suggestion that the BCS is an ‘obviously poor measure of violent crime’ because it does not count homicide offences is as risible as it is boneheaded. The clue here is in the name, British Crime Survey, which explains precisely why it doesn’t count homicide offences – you need to be alive in order to complete the survey form. In any case, homicides accounted for only 662 of the 2.1 million violent offences that the BCS estimated as having taken place in 2008/9, a mere 0.03 percent of the total number of offences. continue reading… »
The Fear Factory
The “Fear Factory” is a new film about the criminal justice system. Watch the trailer or find out more here. This is a guest post by Joanna Natasegara.
On releasing “The Fear Factory” at a closed screening in Central London last week, the Bulger case was history – the hair-trigger cause of the youth justice crisis which the film shows unfolding over the past two decades. This weeks events have shown it’s more real, more relevant than ever – and more worryingly, that we’ve learnt little from the past.
Despite knowing full well that a punitive climate, stoked by a distorted fear of crime has lead to a doubling of our prison population and rates of re-offending as high as 90%, our educated friends in Westminster have done nothing to change this. So why not? Could it be because fear actually helps them… ? continue reading… »
Labour: lurching towards where it always has been
Lurch, according to my dictionary, is an archaic or dialect intransitive verb, which means ‘to prowl or steal about suspiciously’. Seemingly its sole use in twenty-first century English is to provide Tories with an all-purpose pejorative designation for any identifiable outbreak of milquetoast social democracy inside the Labour Party.
Labour, you see, never moves to the left in a cautious and considered manner after a period of due ideological reflection and deliberation. Nor does it ever hop, skip and jump in a general westerly direction, or veer to port in the wake of demonstrable justification for setting just such a course. Oh no. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, Labour is perpetually ‘lurching towards the left’, even when it is idling in neutral.
You can find a classic example of the genre on conservativehome.com, which warns its readership that Labour is lurching leftwards after … get this … selecting trade union officials for winnable seats. The piece is based on an article in The Times, headlined ‘Safe seats for union backers prompt fears that Labour will turn Left after election’. Seduce my aged footwear.
Watch: Cameron video hit on YouTube
Thanks to our friends at Political Scrapbook for this:
With more than 39,000 views, David Cameron’s airbrush hairbrush moment is the 3rd most viewed clip on YouTube. And that’s internationally – not just in Europe or the UK.
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