Time to invest in Tilley lamps

Capitalists@work have done sterling service over the past years in warning of our impending energy crisis. Whilst Labour have spent twelve years throwing a trillion at lunatic social engineering experiments and Harmanesque economic inefficieny measures, they have utterly neglected our energy security. An indictably irresponsible away-with-the-fairies belief that wind power or solar panels will magically replace multi-megawatt coal fired power stations pervades Labour thinking; when the lights start to go out all over Britain, I want to see Labour ministers facing criminal prosecution for malfeasance in public office.

And the Economist today suggests the lights may start going out soomer rather than later. Just study the three simple graphs they print, and ask yourself if we can afford this corrupt cabal of lunatics and zealots in power for a single day longer.

New sex hearing for Jamaican 'lesbian'

Nothing sensational to see here. Move along please. Just the decision of the Court of Appeal in the case of NR -v- Home Secretary. NR came to the UK from Jamaica in 1999, aged 14, and within no time at all was dealing heroin and crack. Some time early in the new millennium she was caught, and eventually tried and sentenced in 2005, aged around 20. She was ordered to be sent back to Jamaica once she'd finished her sentence. She appealed on the basis that she was a lesbian. The Immigration Tribunal said she was only a lesbian-of-convenience, and had manipulated a real lesbian whilst in prison. They disallowed her appeal. She appealed to the Court of Appeal, which has now ruled that the Immigration Tribunal erred on the grounds it disbelieved her lesbianism, and has ordered it to re-hear her case for her sexuality.

So when is a lesbian not a lesbian? The original tribunal said:-

The Appellant was just under 19 when the index offence was committed: see page 1 of the PSR. Until April 2008 she was in custody. Since then we accept she has been in some sort of relationship with Angela but we find she has not reciprocated Angela's passion and we conclude on the evidence before us that the Appellant's relationship with Angela is part and parcel of her campaign to be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom. We do not say the Appellant has not had homosexual relationships but we do say the evidence we have seen does not support her claim that her sexual identity is that of a lesbian.

Makes you feel almost sorry for Angela, doesn't it?

No doubt the new hearing will be studied carefully by any other female Jamaican crack dealers who fancy a permanent billet at the taxpayer's expense.

Decline and Fall

A fascinating and erudite essay on Brussels Journal by Takuan Seiyo will tell you, amongst other things, why bits of historic Poland look like Antwerp, the whereabouts of Sobieski's heart and other things. I highly recommend it. Seiyo looks to Gibbon for his introduction:

These are not happy days for Americans, particularly if raised on traditional American values of Northern European provenance. Conscientious work as redemptive virtue, thrift, self-reliance, self-restraint, Biblical ethical principles, modesty, high-minded civic culture, love of liberty, distrust of centralized power,

America’s ruling elite – once the embodiment of such values and now a putrid trench running from Wall Street to Madison Avenue to Washington DC to Hollywood -- has debauched and upended them as thoroughly as though it has been teleported directly from 3rd century Rome. It has deployed the full arsenal of Roman degeneration: unsustainable spending, shaving the coins of the realm, excessive taxation, disincentives to work and saving, wanton waste, corruption on an enormous scale, opulent narcissism at the top, lax borders, importing foreign populations, degrading the value of citizenship, promotion of sexual deviations and excesses, undermining the family unit, trampling on traditions, inuring the populace to “free” handouts and soul-corroding entertainment.

More decline and fall

Many of you will be as confused as me by the apparent economic upturn. What happened to all those trillions of derivatives in world markets that had to be devalued or written-off? What happened to our housing stock, which everyone agreed was over-valued by at least 30%? And since the government's bail-outs aren't even a fraction of our outstanding debt, isn't the risk of unsustainable debt secured on overvalued assets still as bad as it was last Autumn? Total debt hasn't shrunk at all - all we've done is swap private debt for government debt. It hasn't been deflated away, and we haven't defaulted to any great extent. And debt is debt.

Niall Ferguson has become something of a Vanity fair favourite since his 2006 piece drawing parallels between the US and Gibbon's description of the fall of Rome. More recently, in relation to debt, he suggests that there are only two ways of getting rid of it - inflation, or writing it off. And seriously suggests we consider the latter. A great global debt write-off? Maybe it's time to sell those bank shares ...

Signs in the wind for the political class?

Just when the widely-loathed political class started to imagine they'd got away with it come signs that the public mood is cementing. Firstly in Totnes, where voters soundly rejected two established politician candidates in favour of a local GP - who is surely now facing a reduction in income. Secondly, the heartfelt piece in the Mail by retiring Tory MP Paul Goodman, in which he excoriates the malign influence of the political class on our democracy.

One swallow doth not a Summer make, but I'm getting the feeling that the tide is at the slack and may turn before very long.

Harman's foul and illiberal skewing of justice

When buggery was a capital offence there came a time when juries became reluctant to convict; if the ratepayers in the jury box didn't actually approve of it, they didn't think it deserved hanging for either. Eventually the law fell into desuetude in the 1800s, and buggery ceased to be a criminal offence altogether in 2005. I'm quite sure there were plenty of bigots and zealots about in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who excoriated the juries for their refusals to convict, and who wanted to see buggers hanging from Tyburn gallows in their scores. We've usually managed to keep such lunatics away from power, and so does the law evolve.

Magistrates have done much the same thing for petty laws. Riding a bicycle without lights, or a bell, continues to be an offence - yet the fines imposed are so derisory that the police have simply given up bringing cases. Fifteen hours of a constable's time, and five grand's worth of CPS lawyer for a £5 fine just isn't worth it. And so does the law evolve.

Now Harman is upset at the low conviction rate in rape cases - the suggestion being that guilty men are walking free - and wants to change the law to convict more men. Well, if men are walking free, it's generally because juries find them not guilty. And what Harman wants to do is to overide juries, who hear the actual evidence and watch both accused and defendant in person. Perhaps she wants to set up special Rape Tribunals, with a single female judge hearing cases without a jury. Whatever, it's an illiberal and foul interference with justice.

If we accept (and it's not hard to do) that juries will be more representative of the view of the public than Harriet Harman on this issue, then perhaps it's not the conviction rate that's the problem, but the offence.

And just as our forebears didn't reckon it just to hang a man for buggery, so juries now may not reckon it just to bang a man up in prison and put him on the sex offenders register for having what he may have imagined at the time was consensual sex with a drunken ladette wearing six ounces of clothes.

So perhaps a new offence, a lesser offence to rape, is needed. Careless Intercourse, perhaps. Non-indictable and triable only in a magistrates court. And let's save the rape charge and its consequences for the offence that juries recognise as rape.

4th August 1914

Those interested may wish to explore Hansard over those days, or the London Gazette. Both free and don't require registration.

One nugget I didn't know was that the 4th, 5th and 6th were immediately proclaimed as bank holidays; intended, I suspect, to facilitate mobilisation, it must have led to a boom for the pubs.

Despite the recognition, witnessed by the business in Parliament, that this was to be a great European war, it is clear that few had much idea of the scale of the conflict to come.

Immigration - the sore that won't heal

The Devil rightly points out that not all immigration is bad. Nor all all immigrants crowding out social housing and services, or sponging benefits. Channel 4 commissioned a study from the ippr back in 2007 that quantified the economic contribution from immigrants to the UK. Not surprisingly, French architects were not filling social housing, Indian IT specialists were not languishing on benefits and American bankers were not filling the maternity wards. Immigrants from western Europe, the US, Canada, India, Australia, Poland and South Africa were net contributors on all counts. Immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Portugal and Somalia were net takers on almost all counts, and add to these the eastern Europeans from Romania and Albania and the many Afghanis who have been recently arriving and were not picked up in the historic stats used by the ippr. In the middle somewhere are west Africans, Cypriots, Chinese and a few others.

Migration watch have shown that neither Alan Johnson's measures not the Conservatives' plans on managing immigration will cut the numbers by very many, and we're still on course for a population of 70m in a few years. The official immigrant figure of about a quarter of a million a year ignores the millions already here and uncounted, but having a major impact at local level on services.

The GLA economics unit produced a useful demographic projection of the London boroughs to 2026. What is depressing is that the greatest population growth is not amongst the groups who contribute most to the economy, but those who from the ippr's research take the most.

Alan Johnson may be intensely relaxed about the UK reaching a 70m population, but the people are not. A Yougov survey for Migration Watch found that 81% of us are worried about a 70m population; that 78% of us think Alan Johnson is out of touch with reality, and that 76% want to see immigration cut from around a quarter of a million a year to 50,000 a year or fewer.

The Devil's suggested measures to discourage immigration may appear harsh, totalitarian even. But I believe measures with this sort of boldness are called for. Our compassion will not diminish; we will donate our old clothes and shoes to workless immigrants, and soup kichens will see them fed. Switching government grants from the fake charities to the churches will see the revival of Christian missions in Newham and Tower Hamlets to provide health and medical services. And I would suggest a voluntary deportation grant of £5,000 a head with no return ever will provide an attractive alternative for many thousands.

But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater; remember all those valuable and essential migrants from France, Germany, India, Italy, the US and the Old Commonwealth, and let's acknowledge exactly who we want and who we don't.

Harriet's war on testosterone

Harriet Harman blames men and testosterone for the global banking crisis. Before Gordon comes back from the lakes, I expect she will have blamed men for war, swine flu, road deaths, binge drinking, drug addiction, overpopulation, desertification, the fatality rate in the construction industry, global poverty, the depletion of the ozone layer, HIV and overcrowded trains. Harriet is at war with testosterone.

Whilst misogyny is rightly condemned in society as a stance no one would defend, not so misandry. So rather than greeting Harman's lunatic ravings as misandric bigotry, many will nod and smile and see nothing wrong in her demonisation of men. Well, I won't. Harman's misandry is as pernicious and as unacceptable as the worst northern wife-beater's.

If she's incapable of working constructively with half the world's population, she has no place in government.

Wrong answers, Eric

The Conservative Party is a private club of which I'm not a member, but as they'll be asking me to vote for their Parliamentary candidate at the next election, I'm naturally interested into how that candidate is selected.

As a Localist, I support a system that picks candidates with links to the local area, and candidates confident enough of their local political roots and support to be if not wholly independent then at least not in the pocket of a central Statist party. Open primaries, introduced by the Conservatives, are a good thing. Or they would be if local voters were being asked to pick between half a dozen local and independentish candidates. If all six are central party blow-ins and unknown even to their local parties, there's not a lot of point to a open primary. And not much point in having a local party association. Tory localists are not happy with Eric Pickles - see the comments on Con Home - and Eric's explanation doesn't convince.

Then there's Eric's comments in the Indie about making overpaid council chief executives redundant.

I could have supported this if Eric had said that local voters should have the option of making their overpaid chief executives redundant. He didn't. He announced it as a potential centralist Whitehall management measure - and it's one that could easily rob councils of the little power they retain. I'd much rather make the entire top three echelons at the department for communities and local government redundant, along with their ministers, SpAds and expensive Victoria offices.

With wrong answers such as these, the Conservatives still have a way to go before they've secured my vote.

Chippy Midget or Stubbly Little Haemorrhoid - you decide

Well, Guido called him a chippy midget today; Adrian Gill prefers stubbly little haemorrhoid. Whichever, Alan Sugar isn't happy.

A man too stupid to know what the Labour whip is (perhaps he thought he'd call Max Mosley and ask) is perhaps the perfect addition to Brown's government. And perhaps he can persuade Harman to include shouty short-arses in her lists of minorities to favour.

Our sense of fairness vs. septic retribution

Alan Johnson writes a well-reasoned apologia in the Times this morning on why he can't halt Garry McKinnon's extradition. No doubt he believes every word of it - and demonstrates that he really doesn't get it.

No-one disputes that McKinnon did something illegal. No one disputes that the septics are truly pissed about it (to use their term). However, and whisper it softly, there's a certain quiet pride that an English lad faddling about in his bedroom was able to penetrate the most sensitive military computers of the world's most arrogant nation. A fair resolution may be for us to try and convict McKinnon, and if the court imposed a six month custodial sentence then I suspect many people would think twelve weeks in an open prison would be a fair punishment for Garry. He wouldn't do it again.

The objection to McKinnon's extradition I suspect comes from our knowledge of the septics' desire for harsh retribution, not for any damage caused, but for laughing at them. They want the opportunity to humiliate him, to terrify him, to subject him to appalling indignities and place him at real risk of physical and mental harm for years on end. And that's what we object to.

Johnson is part of a government that prattles about 'fairness' whilst not understanding a thing about it. They should learn that the British people already have a finely honed sense of what's fair and what isn't, and they ignore it at their peril.

Saturday curiosity - Lorraine Wilson

You won't have heard of Lorraine Wilson, but her family holds 1/80th of the hereditary office of Lord Great Chamberlain of England, and on the accession of the next Sovereign, it will be Lorraine's turn to exercise the office during his reign. After that, it reverts to the Marquis of Cholmondeley, whose family has a half share in the job and therefore gets it every other reign. It's a sort of dynastic job-share, split between a score of families, with shares as minor as 1/100th of the office. One of England's old curiosities that has slipped under the Socialist radar.

To exercise the office, Lorraine will need to become a life peer; only Lords of Parliament can actually do the job. Alternatively, she can appoint a deputy who is a life peer or hereditary peer to exercise the function; if a hereditary peer, they are guaranteed a place in the Lords under Labour's last Act that sought to reduce the hereditaries, and no doubt will be under the new Act. One hopes.

The office is a good example of the difficulties created when one starts poking about with our ancient constitutional offices and duties. You can't do constitional reform on the back of a fag-packet or slurping coffee on a sofa. The thing is, our unwritten constitution works, and one cannot guage the extent of the repurcussions when government foolishly fiddles. If it ain't broke ...