Whose policy is this?

They argue for a society where power is vested in people and always devolved to the level at which it is most effective. Three core principles animate the liberal republic:

• People have the freedom to live in the manner of their choosing and the power to determine their own version of a good life.
• Institutions exist to serve individuals, not the other way around.
• Equality is measured not by what you have, but by what you can do.

Sounds like something of Hannan and Carswell's, doesn't it? Well, believe it or not, it could well be post-Brown Labour's. I'm trying to get sight of the new pamphlet launched today by Demos, but Ben Brogan has the full story in the Telegraph.

(H/T The Speccie)

Just a reminder, Gordon

Just a reminder, Gordon, that if you can't face another year of taunts in the House and the media, or ministerial resignations in July when expenses are uncovered, of further failures of your economic 'recovery', or members of your government being exposed weekly for sleaze and corruption, you've still got a couple of days to go to the Palace and ask for a dissolution in time for an election on 4th June.

Just saying.

Multiculturalism makes UK's Muslims unhappiest in Europe

I've said many times before that multiculturalism is nothing more than apartheid in a pretty frock. The victims of 'multicultural' apartheid will quite rightly feel more alien, more unhappy, and with a greater dissociation from society. Multiculturalism is wrong, cruel, destructive and dangerous, and should be eradicated from British society as if it were smallpox. I've said all this before.

However, Gallup have just carried out a poll that confirms all of the above for Muslims in the UK. If you have time, please listen here to Mark Easton's report for 'Today' this morning. The brief discussion afterwards by two Muslim experts doesn't add anything of particular value. When will we realise that 'separate development' is as illiberal and wrong-headed a policy now in the UK as it ever was in South Africa?

Woman's foot run over by bus - Murdoch fights for revenue

The Guardian this morning carries a piece predicting the end of the 'free' internet as Murdoch flags up his intention to start charging for online content, including the Times and Sunday Times.

Certainly, this is a model that is proving successful for both the FT and the WSJ, now owned by Murdoch. The FT currently has around 110,000 digital subscribers paying about £150 a year each, and has defied the dire state of the rest of the dead tree press by raising the cover price of the print edition from £1 to £1.80, producing a 16% increase in circulation revenue.

Murdoch has increased the cover price of the WSJ from $1.50 to $2.00, and now charges $181 a year for both online and print versions, and this is producing results.

However, both the FT and WSJ are not volume competitors; the Times and ST are. I'm extremely doubtful that charging for online content will result in a revenue increase. So long as the BBC and some other broadsheet titles remain free online they will substitute for Murdoch's titles. And for those such as me whose first online task of the day is to whizz through all the online editions, well, I'll look further afield.

I'm aware I've been neglecting that excellent organ, the East Anglian Daily Times. Today's edition carries the following story:

Woman's foot run over by bus

Last updated: 5/6/2009 4:30:00 PM

A WOMAN has been taken to hospital for an x-ray after her foot was run over by a bus.

The 38-year-old woman was injured outside Sexton's Manor Primary School in Greene Road, Bury St Edmunds, at about 2.50pm this afternoon.

She was taken by ambulance to West Suffolk Hospital for precautionary x-rays.

Which is about as interesting as anything in the Times this morning.

Medway's muddle

Medway councillors imagine that erecting the name of the local government district on the hills above Chatham will bring to mind the glamour of Hollywood. They had already tried the 'E' before perhaps realising this was free advertising for a certain milieu of Chatham entrepreneurs.

Most people I imagine will be reminded not of Hollywood but of a range of personal jewellery offered by Elizabeth Duke of the Argos chain.

A federal Britain and the end of the Labour Party

It is perhaps ironic that Labour's introduction of devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales has decimated their support in both. Labour is at heart an ideological party, but the politics of devolution are the politics of people and place, not of ideology. And having had a taste of local self-determination, both the Scots and the Welsh want more - including control over taxation. As the pressures increase, Labour will become ever more irrelevant in both Cardiff and Edinburgh. It is the realisation of this effect that causes Labour to oppose Localism so fiercely - there's no room in a Localist nation for the Labour Party.

As much as I loathe and protest the idea of a federal Europe, I'm wholly in favour of a federal United Kingdom. Our national Parliament can then concentrate on national issues, including defence, foreign relations, and a framework of law and leave most else to the federal authorities. It is absurd that MPs in Westminster should waste our time debating the exact number of pieces of litter permissible on a suburban street in Sunderland or how long someone in Taunton should wait to have their ingrowing toenails cut.

Labour's devolution has let the genie out of the bottle and this June we will see how their vote holds up in Scotland and Wales for the European elections.

Government DNA plan insults the people of England

I can't describe the immediate anger I felt this morning on reading the details of the Government's barely-complying proposals to meet the ECHR's requirements to remove the data on innocent English and Welsh people from the DNA database. The people of Scotland, of course, are already protected by a much more reasonable policy on DNA retention.

The cretins at ACPO, the NPIA and the Home Office have learned nothing and know nothing about the importance of our fundamental freedoms - the presumption of innocence being amongst the foremost.

Parity with the practice in Scotland is the very minimum that the people of England should expect.

Update
=======
If you have any doubt that Labour ministers have lost all contact with the presumptions of the criminal justice system, please listen to the thuggish Vernon Coaker here on 'Today' being repeatedly unable to tell the difference between guilt and innocence, between arrest, charge and conviction. His ignorance is truly chilling.

Gordongrin - opera in three acts (apols to Kobbe's Guide)

The prelude is based on a single theme: an expressive one on the sanctity of Socialism. It opens with long drawn-out screams on violins and flutes, then violins alone and works up through a crescendo on nokias and printers before dying to ethereal harmonies.

ACT 1 - A plain near the River Forth. King Prescott (bass) has summoned the Blairites to join forces to defeat the threatened Compass invasion of Socialism. Gould (baritone) tells the King how the late leader placed his children Tessa (soprano) and Alan in his care. Alan has disappeared, and Gould accuses Tessa of murdering him in order to claim the title. Gould says he was so horrified by this that he rejected his right to support Tessa for the NEC and voted instead for Hazel (mezzo-soprano), daughter of the Prince of Darkness. He leads her forward, and she bows to the King.

So far the music has been harsh and vigourous, reflecting Gould's excitement, but with Hazel's appearance the music becomes soft, gentle and plaintive and not without hope.

As violins whisper the Socialism motif, Tessa, enraptured, tells of her dream of a knight in white, sent by the Guardian to defend her cause. After a triple summons by the Scottish Herald (baritone), a ministerial Jag is spied in the distance pulling a rocking horse. In the saddle sits a knight in silver armour. Tessa, not daring to trust her senses, gazes Gaurdianward, while Hazel and Gould look at eachother in amazement and alarm.

The Knight, Gordongrin (tenor) bids f***off to the Jag, grunts to the King and betrothes himself to Tessa, offering to punch anyone's lights out for her. But he warns her never to ask his true name or where he comes from. The Warning Motif is one of the significant themes of the opera. Tessa agrees.

Before the combat begins, the King intones the Internationale. Gould and Gordongrin then begin to fight. Gordongrin fells Gould but bids him rise and spares him on condition of a generous donation to party funds. The King leads Tessa to Gordongrin, whilst all praise him as her champion and bethrothed

...... continued page 76
(Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown eschewed the commons last night in favour of Lohengrin)

Sorry, Jacqui: I'll choose who to listen to

Until yesterday, I'd never heard of Michael Savage. But since Jacqui Smith saw fit to ban him from the UK, I thought I'd take the opportunity to make up my own mind.

Savage's take on his ban from the UK is available HERE.

Of course, I've probably just broken some draconian anti-terrorist law by posting this link. I'll listen for Smith's Stasi thugs at the door.

The 'housing demand' myth

In every call for an increase in social rented housing, the need is justified by quoting that some 4.5m people or 1.8 million households are now on waiting lists. Have you ever asked yourselves where these millions of people are living now? Are there great tented camps in Hyde Park? Are they sleeping in your High Street? Well, since the latest figures for 'rough sleepers' are astonishingly low, I guess almost all of these 4.5 million people are already living somewhere with a roof over their heads and a bed to sleep in.

If I were to offer X-Box 360s at a sixth of the retail price to whoever joined a waiting list, I've no doubt that the waiting list would reach into the millions within weeks. So why couldn't I then press the taxpayer for more money to buy more subsidised X-Boxes on the basis of the scale of demand? The answer from most sane people would be that the taxpayer shouldn't pay for something that the private sector is capable of providing, that State economic intervention was only justified in cases of market failure or in the provision of public goods such as roads. So why should housing be any different?

When the Parker-Morris standards for Council housing were introduced, the committee realised that they were specifying homes of superlative constructional quality. Being pragmatists, they realised that offering homes equal or better than private sector ones would create huge and unsatisfied demands, so they sought some way to make council houses just a bit less attractive than private homes. What they did was to reduce room sizes. If you've ever been inside a pre-1970s council house you'll know what I mean. Room dimensions were calculated to be just big enough for their purpose, with even the pram measurements of the day used to calculate hallway widths.

Now of course there's little difference between a Barrett starter home and a council house in terms of room size, and planning conditions for social housing often mean there's no constructional difference at all between HA flats and private flats in the same block. So hardly a surprise, is it, that 4.5m people want to move into a heavily subsidised new-built home with laminate flooring, galvanised balconette and halogen down-lighters straight out of the DFS catalogue.

No, before we invest further in social housing we should look at bedspaces in existing social housing. Buried in the census information this usefully reveals overcrowding at the SOA level - at the level of each 'clump' of about 1,500 subjects across the nation. It also reveals chronic under-occupancy on some council estates. Of course, many are now RTB but nevertheless I'll bet there is no overall shortage of social housing bedspaces in many LA areas.

The 'needs' based priorities are hugely discredited and every prospective tenant knows how to fiddle the criteria. Even 'Baroness' Uddin, a deeply corrupt Labour peer, knows how to fiddle herself an HA flat. There is no market failure in house construction. There are few reasons in the 21st century to continue to provide State subsidised social housing. The Hills Report reveals that each social housing tenant will enjoy a rent subsidy at the taxpayer's cost of £65,000 at NPV over an average tenancy, and the cost to the economy of subsidised rents is £6.6bn a year.

And more importantly, the value of 'our' social housing stock before the crash was some £400bn. Imagine if this was privatised, as Thatcher privatised British Gas, with preference given to small-scale and local investors, and in lots small enough to be 'owned' but large enough to be economically managed. With a phased shift to market rents and returns. George Osborne please take note. This is the one route you have to reverse Brown's scorched earth destruction of the national economy, and at the same time create massive positive externalities and social 'good'. Privatising the nation's social housing stock is an idea whose time has come.

Post Office is the Gurkhas all over again

The British public are not overly sophisticated in drawing policy comparisons. Thus they couldn't see why the government wouldn't let in a few tens of thousands of Gurkhas, whom they liked, when it had opened the door to a million alien spongers, whom they didn't.

And so they will ask why Brown can't lend a few billion to the Post Office, which they like, when he's ready to hand over several hundred billions to the banks, which they don't.

I reckon Brown's intransigence will lose him a another couple of percentage points in the next poll.

There's just no telling some people. Sigh.

It just gets worse for Brown

Aiming for a post bank holiday relaunch today with a visit to a Lewisham school, Her Majesty's Press were witness to a protester trying to block Gordon Brown's car and a large group of protesting parents outside the school, angry at the Labour council's education policy. The pics in tomorrow's papers should be good.

Meanwhile David Cameron urged the nation to vote on 4th June anyway they liked so long as it was a vote against Gordon Brown. "They cannot go on forever. Change in our country will come. And we can make that glorious day of change arrive all the sooner, if on June 4 you give this weak, useless and spineless government a message it won't forget". Thus rather neatly sidestepping what a vote for Cameron's MEPs on 4th June would actually be for.

And Brown's reputation as a petulant bully was confirmed when Blears contrived to look demure and frightened as she was escorted into today's cabinet meeting by fraudster James Purnell and contrite and bollocked as Andy Burnham held her hand on the way out. Coupled with leaked comments about Brown's 'hairdryer treatment' of Iain Dale's diminutive chipmunk, I score it Blears 2 Brown 0.

Is it any wonder they're voting BNP?

The latest useful political issues poll was the February ICM one published in the Guardian. Not surprisingly, the economy dominated as by far the most important issue of the day - several months of relentless news coverage have placed it at the front of the public's mind. However, looking at how the issues would have ranked excluding the economy is interesting, not least for the divergence between the overall ranking and the ranking by the DEs;

All respondents
Taxation and public services - 13%
Health service - 11%
Law and Order - 10%
Asylum and immigration - 9%
Education - 9%

DE respondents
Health service - 15%
Law and Order - 14%
Asylum and immigration - 12%
Education - 9%
Taxation and public services - 5%

So, with Labour seeing a significant proportion of their vote bleeding away to the BNP, you'd think they'd shift some policies to meet their concerns. The C2s and DEs are also the most disillusioned with the ability of existing parties to tackle some of these issues, with the highest disillusionment scores for Europe, asylum and immigration and terrorism;

Party with best policies on
Europe - None of them - C2 30% DE 23%
Asylum and Immigration - None of them - C2 32% DE 30%
Terrorism - None of them - C2 32% DE 30%

Now, when around a third of your traditional voters are telling you they don't trust your policies on key issues, again you'd think the response would be to shift some key policies, wouldn't you?

This thread on Labourhome discusses the key policies the comrades think Labour should adopt to secure a fourth term. Amongst the serious suggestions are, er, nationalising the railways, free dentistry for all, more equality (as in positive discrimination), more council houses, increased pensions, and income tax starting at the national minimum wage.

I don't know what they're smoking, but it's not Virginia tobacco.

Polly asks ....

Toynbee asks in her column this morning:

Is Labour looking for more humiliation? When even Hazel Blears turns sarcastic, does Gordon Brown want to stand up in the Commons and punch himself flat to the ground again?

Uhm, yes, I suspect that's exactly what the ignorant, third-rate, bone-headed, intellectually challenged, petulant, dysfunctional and unpopular blockhead will do.

Unravelling Thatcher

The stand-off in Erith and Thamesmead between the 279 constituency Labour Party members and the powerful grandees of the central party over their attempt to instruct the locals to accept the 22 year-old Honourable Georgina Gould (for such we must call her, as the daughter of a life peer) as their candidate for the next election is a distant ripple from the Thatcher era.

The year 1979 was indeed a watershed in British politics. Thatcher began a process of ruthless centralisation that lost the Conservative Party over a million members and robbed local government of everything they had fought for since the mid nineteenth century. The disempowering of local party associations and control by central office has made the parachuting-in of apparatchik blow-ins such as Ms Gould by both main parties the norm rather than the exception. Thatcher's centralism also provided the perfect platform for the growth of Labour's Leviathan State; had local government retained the powers it had before 1979, the effects of Brown's mismanagement of the public sector would now be much reduced.

Whether the good of her economic and labour reforms outweighs the bad of her central Statism remains to be seen; and don't forget that needs-based letting and the duty-to-house which has created ghettoes of squalor, crime, idleness, ignorance and illness in our large council estates was a Thatcher creation. Against all the advice and urging of Conservative councils at the time.

As Thatcherphile readers now retreat with a box of tissues in dismay to watch à la Richard Timney their endless replays of the 1979 election, unravelling the effects of Thatcher's and later Brown's neutering of local government is quietly being undertaken both inside and outside Parliament.

The Communities and Local Government select committee have since July last year been looking at the relationship between central and local government. Now at oral evidence stage, Hazel Blears' recent transcript proves the truth of previous expert evidence; that Brown's government is deeply committed to ruthless central control whilst mendaciously throwing meaningless sops to localists within their own party. As the LSE's Prof. George Jones said in diplomatic language to the committee:

It depends on what view you have of the proper role of central government and its relationship with local government. What has been happening for the last 30 or so years is that increasingly the central government has seen local authorities as their executive agents, no different from other parts of the central government departments. They are there to carry out the wishes of central government departments in particular services. They are very service oriented whereas local government must be valued as providing opportunities for local people to govern themselves, to shape the development of their own local communities and not just to be executive agents of central government. This is the choice that has to be made: do you want to go in the centralist direction or the localist direction? The government has been fudging, in its rhetoric, by speaking out for decentralisation to local government and to communities and people, but the reality, despite the reduction in certain targets and indicators, is that it is still dominated by the desire to control what local authorities are doing.

These arguments are no mere ideological nit-picking; the future of core services such as health and education are utterly dependent on the outcome of this debate. The excesses of Labour's Leviathan State have failed to secure meaningful service improvements and the whole country knows it. The State must be shrunk, and the nation realises this also. The failure of central Statism is manifest. Only a root and branch devolution of control to the lowest level at which services can be designed and managed has a hope of squaring this circle.

Harman joins Johnson as leadership contender

Given the aphorism that he or she who wields the knife never wears the crown, it's almost comical watching the two Labourites most ambitious for the leadership lying through their teeth in professing their undying loyalty to Brown in an effort to distance themselves from the assassins.

In contrast Blears, Clarke and the rest who have wielded their stilettos (if you believe the aphorism) are ruling themselves out as contenders.

If Brown goes after June, will he be the first Prime Minister to have taken and left office without ever having faced the electorate?

These days I look at the comments on Labourhome as a source of deep comfort and amusement. I can't remember when I've enjoyed myself more.

Whilst politicians trough ....

Whilst politicians trough and the metropolitan political class continue a lunatic refusal to acknowledge there's any kind of problem with our broken democracy, voices from the coalface that politicians simply don't want to hear are pleading for an audience. If you have fifteen minutes, please watch both of these vids; ignore the grammar, the sentiment is as articulate as anything I've seen.

The Moston Martyr was a Labour voter who denies any sympathy for the BNP. Nevertheless, these vids have earned that party much support in Manchester. For what it's worth, I don't think he's being racist - I wouldn't link if I did - his words and language are the same as I hear from the inarticulate working class here in London, unused to those careful euphemisms we all employ.

For goodness sakes let's listen to these people before we go down a path as a nation that no responsible person wants.

Laming, like Rousseau, is a malignant canker

Rousseau's belief that children should be separated from their fathers and brought up by the State was the first thing that came to my mind when I read Lord Laming's belief that

.. the state should become a responsible and effective parent to more children

Rousseau it was who wanted to destroy all intermediate institutions between the individual and the Leviathan State so that

Each citizen would then be completely independent of his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state . . . for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured

The mere notion that the State can be a parent of any kind is anathema, still less that the State can be either responsible or effective. Many of the failings that have put so many children at risk in the first place are the failings of Statism and Welfarism; the encouragement of bastardy as government policy, the inner-city ghettoes where ignorance, disease, squalor, idleness and poverty thrive in a Welfarist glasshouse, and the destruction by a centralist State of horizontal ties and the primacy of intermediate institutions in our lives. It is Burke's little platoons that offer us the only long-term solution;

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage

Without the little platoons, the English underclass will continue in a downward spiral of degradation, self-hurt and lives of brutal anomie. Laming and his kind are the enemy of those he professes to care for, and his relentless drive to Statist intervention wounds them as greviously as any knife or gun or beating.

This man represents all the evil of Labour's Leviathan State, clothed in shallow care and false concern. He is a malignant canker growing at the heart of our nation, and he must be cut out and removed if the patient is to recover.

Sunday Sleaze: Another Labour thief

Today's Labour thief is 'Baroness' Uddin. Living in London, she didn't think that the £86.50 a day allowance that London Lords get paid in lieu of a salary was quite enough, so she bought a flat in Maidstone, kept it empty and claimed it as her main residence in order to qualify for a higher rate allowance of £174 a day.

The Times reports that this weekend Uddin and her family have been desperately 'dressing' the empty flat to give it the appearance of having been lived in. Too late.

This is the Labour peer who has evinced a public concern over housing shortages for Bangladeshis in the UK, but such hypocrisy is just meat and drink to Labour's sleazebuckets like Uddin.

Labour have not just corrupted the Commons, but their ignorant fiddling has opened the Lords to a horde of Labour thieves and liars who disgrace the peerage of the United Kingdom. Enough is enough. We must clear this foul and corrupt spawn from our political system.

Polly finally gets it!

The penny's dropped, and the scales have fallen from Polly's eyes as she writes in today's Grauniad:

This week a survey on the ConservativeHome website of likely new Tory MPs was an eye-opener. They are socially conservative, anti-environment, anti-Europe, anti-abortion, anti-gay adoption, pro-hunting and strongly in favour of the married couples' allowance that redistributes tax to the middle class. Only 15% see the climate as ­important: terrorism matters much more. Most want to cut money for Scotland.

Uhm, that would be 'conservative', then, Polly.

She's missed the other growing impetus on the right; Localism.

Netherlands Beserkers

Over thirty years I've come to develop a real affection for the Netherlands that lies behind the coffee shops and the Walletjes. The Dutch are a deeply bourgeois people at heart, and the virtues of family, social respect, betterment and cultural identity are engrained in the national psyche. There are more art galleries in Amsterdam than there are in London. Culture is not a dirty word in the Netherlands, not to be sneered at and not an excuse for drawing a revolver. It is easy to belittle the Dutch cultural scene as parochial and insular, but I've always found it refreshingly alive and eager to open itself to places that make our curatorial groove appear stodgy. I prefer the Stedelijk to Tate modern. I adore Pierre Cuypers use of brick. And that Netherlands black-green preference for the public face of timber doors and windows (RAL 6012 - it's simple) is excellent good taste.

Dutch liberalism is essentially bourgeois tolerance. It says 'We don't do that, but that's no good reason for stopping them from doing it'. Enlightened. And I suppose it worked quite well right up until maybe thirty years ago - when I first came to get to know the country. The Moluccans, Turks and Moroccans were once just the pimps and kofte sellers adding colour and spice, but I've seen the Netherlands change from a nation at ease with itself to one in which national identity and that cultural certainty in which the Dutch need so much to be rooted is itself uncertain on its foundations.

The Netherlands has around 1m Muslims as citizens, many of them living wholly separate lives from the Netherlanders who have hosted them, many proclaiming rights and seizing suzerainity that the bourgeois Dutch have found hard to resist. In comparison, our UK Muslims are well integrated and models of reticence. The stresses in Dutch society are manifest.

Now I'm not offering an instant diagnosis on the beserker who drove his car into the holiday crowds yesterday. The reports are that he's Dutch, and that he'd lost his job and risked losing his home. But from my own experience I'd expect that the importance of protestant virtues of work and home in Holland that are challenged anyway during a recession are exacerbated by the levels of immigration and un-Dutchness that have caused tension already.

And that there is a capacity for rage within the people of the Netherlands that we will see more of.