A few things struck me on my trip to Rome a couple of weekends ago. There seemed to be a promotion on of the period when Jack Meadows out of The Bill was emperor…

Also found sculptures of Robin Cook…

Mrs Doyle out of Father Ted…

And even the Ood out of Doctor Who, wearing a shower cap.

On New Year’s Day, a man attempted to kill Kurt Westergaard with an axe, because four years ago he drew a picture.  The man was a Muslim, and he was so upset that Westergaard’s drawing linked his religion with violence that he attempted to commit an act of violence in the name of his religion.

Today, an auction in aid of the victims of the Haitian earthquake rejected another cartoon, with no religious connotations, that Westergaard had donated.  His hairdresser has told him she will no longer cut his hair for fear of reprisals.

Freedom speech benefits everyone. I’m an atheist, and I’m glad I live in an age when I have the freedom to reject and criticise religion without reprisal from the state or the faithful. Not everyone thinks like me. Lots of people value their religion, and are upset when people like me don’t treat it with what they consider due reverence. But think: if you are offended by Westergaard’s cartoon, or The Satanic Verses, or the Life of Brian, or Jerry Springer the Musical, or Bezhti — freedom of speech means you can criticise it as volubly and vociferously as you like, and disseminate that criticism as widely as you can manage. Freedom of speech is as much yours as it is mine.  We must not allow fanatics the power to bully us into sacrificing that freedom. A fanatic with power is a tyrant, and tyrants don’t value the freedom of anyone but themselves.

I live in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK and currently ruled by New Labour, who over the last twelve years have been eroding civil liberties and coming up with endless wheezes to put us all on databases. 

It’s not just ID cards – the grand plan to fingerprint the nation.  There’s also the Independent Vetting and Barring Authority.  You’ll have to register with them if you work or volunteer with children or vulnerable adults.  If you so much as drive your son’s mates to football practice on a regular basis without the permission of the authorities, they can fine you £5,000.  And when they’re weighing up whether or not you’re safe to work with children or vulnerable adults, they can take hearsay, gossip, their own judgements about your lifestyle and personality, even things you’ve been found not guilty of, into account.  Then there’s the ContactPoint database of all children, and the national DNA database.

This is a government that passed laws to deal with terrorism which it then used against hecklers at party conferences, student sit-in protesters and Icelandic banks.  It’s a government on its last legs, but it’s bringing all these schemes in before it gets booted out of office, signing contracts with private contractors that’ll make it expensive to scrap any of them.

If you’re as alarmed about this as I am, go and sign the LibDems’ petition for a Freedom Bill to abolish all New Labour’s authoritarian control-freakery.

We interrupt our normal service of Iron Age war comics to say something a bit political.

The Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella aid organisation comprising Action Aid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, CARE International UK, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision, are running an appeal for Gaza. This was to be accompanied by a televised appeal on all the British TV networks – which it appears the BBC have torpedoed it, claiming that, although it is a humanitarian and avowedly apolitical appeal, to show it would violate their impartiality (and Sky and ITV are hiding behind the BBC’s decision as an excuse not to show it themselves).

I would urge my readers to consider visiting the DEC website and making a donation to their Gaza appeal (they also have an appeal for the Democratic Republic of Congo which is also a worthy cause).  You might also like to consider leaving a complaint with the BBC urging them to reconsider their decision.

In the midst of all the euphoria, Britain’s premier satire site sums it up as “America Buys All That Change Bullshit“.

I salute the creators of The Daily Mash for their commitment to cynicism in the face of overwhelming public optimism.

Like most of us, the characters of The Cattle Raid of Cooley don’t have a vote in tonight’s US Presidential election, being as how they live in Ireland two thousand years ago and all.  But, inspired by this blog post by Rick Marshall, I decided to do a quick straw poll.

Medb is tempted to vote McCain on PUMA grounds (she was backing Hillary), but ultimately thinks Obama and Biden would be more likely to do what she tells them.

Fergus, as an old soldier, is McCain all the way.  Plus, that Palin woman has a lovely arse on her.

Cú Chulainn’s only sixteen, so he doesn’t have a vote, and doesn’t much care either way.  Láeg isn’t sure about Obama – too smooth by half – but definitely thinks McCain’s an eejit.  He’ll probably go for Nader, or not bother.

Lug Longhand, god of youth and glory, is quite taken by Obama’s charisma.

The Morrígan, goddess of carnage, hasn’t stopped singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” since she heard McCain on the radio that time.

Listening to the radio this evening about the banking crisis and the big government bailouts. The presenter asks the expert guest if this means that house prices will start to “recover”. After all that’s happened, the universal assumption that hyperinflation in the housing market is good for the economy remains unchallenged.

I’m no economist, but it seems to be that all economists do, in the media at least, is mislead people about the nature of money.  The fact is, economic growth that isn’t fuelled by increased production is a mirage and will always be wiped out by inflation.  That’s what a recession is – the economy borrowed from the future, and now it’s left with the debt.  And if you raise the price of a commodity so high that nobody can afford to buy it, nobody will buy it until you drop the price.  Basic supply and demand.  House prices need to fall, or everybody but a handful of very rich people will be priced out of the market.

A house’s increase in value is nothing more than the increased willingness of buyers to spend money on it – a house that’s gone up in value by 50% is not a 50% better house – it’s exactly the same house it was before.  It’s imaginary value.  A mirage.  House price hyperinflation will always lead to economic recession.  The only people to benefit from house price hyperinflation are people who own multiple houses, and the rest of us suffer the consequences.  It needs to stop.

The A-level results came out this week, and apparently the gap between boys’ and girls’ results has narrowed slightly. Good news, I think. But a few things have occurred to me.

Whenever boys’ lack of achievement in school is discussed, the same thing is usually blamed: boys’ “laddish” and anti-learning culture.¹ Boys’ failure is entirely their own fault and their own responsibility.

But when the gender pay gap is brought up – women working full time earning 17% less on average than men working full time – something must be done, preferably by legislation.²

So adult women are less responsible for the consequences of their own choices than male children? That can’t be right, surely.

The gender pay gap is usually used to demonstrate discrimination against women. I believe that, looked at in context, it actually shows the opposite. Bear with me.

Women working full time, on average, apparently earn 17.2% less than men working full time.³ This is because working mothers, for good practical reasons, tend to choose jobs they can combine with their duties as a parent, which means jobs that are less demanding of their time – no unexpected late nights, flexible enough to take time off at short notice – therefore less responsible, and lower paid.

They do this because they have the option to, and because they can afford to.

Men simply do not have the same options or choices in the workplace as women. That’s partly law, and partly social attitudes. An employer will cut a female employee plenty of slack if she has to take plenty of time off to take care of her children. He will not do so for a male employee. Any man judged to lack ambition will be quickly sidelined, and probably made redundant, with no risk of a discrimination lawsuit. Social pressure also comes from women, who rarely choose to start a family with a man without earning potential. Those men who want to be house-husbands or secondary earners/primary carers are therefore less likely to have children. And bringing up a family costs money, so if mum reduces her earning potential, guess who’s going to have to work harder?

Meanwhile, women are responsible for something like 80% of all consumer spending.⁴ If they can earn a fifth less than men but spend four times as much, then the shortfall in earnings is obviously not causing women to suffer financially.

In fact, using 17.2% as the pay gap and 77% (as per the Euromonitor link) as the spending gap, women spend 100% of the money they earn, and 53.49% – more than half – of the money men earn! And while women get flexible working hours, men are chained to their jobs. Which sex gets the better of this deal again?

Footnotes

1. See, for example, Andrew Cunningham in the Independent.

2. For example, Jackie Ashley in the Guardian.

3. That’s the mean, according to the government’s Equalities department. The median is 12.6%.

4. That’s the figure normally given for the USA. Visa say “Women control £400 million more expenditure than men every week” in the UK. I can’t find that expressed as a percentage, but Euromonitor says that “women are the primary spenders in 77% of consumer markets” in the 35 countries they surveyed.

How are laws passed? The government proposes them, parliament votes on them, the queen signs them – right?

But what if parliament votes through a law that says government ministers can make or amend future laws by order, without a vote in parliament? Can they do that?

Yes, they can, and they have. It’s called “delegated legislation”. As the House of Commons website explains, “Delegated legislation allows the Government to make changes to a law without needing to push through a completely new Act of Parliament.”¹ They’ve been doing it for years – at least since the 1940s.

Normally, parliament has delegated the power to pass laws to non-parliamentary bodies or individuals only in narrow, technical areas where parliament is not considered to have the necessary expertise. And until 2006, power was only delegated to amend existing laws, not to create new ones.

In 2006, New Labour passed the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act. This act gives government ministers to amend, repeal or replace any primary or secondary legislation – primary being laws passed by a vote in parliament, secondary being laws passed by delegated powers – including itself.

There are a few exceptions. The LRRA can’t be used to pass laws that are the province of the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament. Ministers can’t use it to raise taxes or impose a new tax – those laws still have to go through parliament, as do laws creating new criminal offences punishable by two years or more in prison, authorising forcible entry, search or seizure, or complelling the giving of evidence. Oh, and a minister who passes a new law using this Act has to satisfy himself he’s doing the right thing.²

That’s right. The law says a minister can make laws by decree, so long as he believes what he’s doing is right. Only New Labour could put a clause like that into law.

And the exceptions included in the Act can be removed by ministers using the powers granted to ministers by the Act itself!

Those proposals Harriet Harman announced the other week to reform the law on murder? There’s nothing in those proposals that would preclude them being passed into law on her say-so under the LRRA.

New Labour has given ministers arbitrary power. Our supine and spineless parliament allowed this act to be passed. Will David Cameron repeal it, or enjoy the power it gives him?

1. “UK Parliament – Delegated legislation”
2. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) on Wikipedia

Welcome to my new blog. My other blog, at paddybrown.co.uk, is where I serialise my webcomics, including my adaptation of the ancient Irish epic The Cattle Raid of Cooley, which starts on Wednesday. But there are other things I want to write about – particularly my political concerns – and to include them in the same blog as illustrated tales of Iron Age adventure would only confuse.

I would describe myself as a liberal, which may also cause some confusion. Most of the Anglophone web is American, and in America “liberal” seems to mean “free-spending authoritarian statist”. Here in the UK the stereotype of a liberal is someone well-meaning but a bit vague. My own stance is anti-authoritarian, pro civil liberties, due process and the freedom of the individual, but I’m not a US-style ideological libertarian: I’m in favour of collective provision of essential services where that does the job better than private provision.

For example, the UK’s National Health Service, by employing doctors on salaries rather than paying them fees per procedure, costs the taxpayer less than private health insurance costs the premium-payer in the US, delivers more reliable and universal healthcare, and doesn’t exclude the chronically ill as a bad risk. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better value for money, and I’d like to see something similar done for the legal system.

This is the sort of perspective I’ll be blogging from. My first post follows.

Everybody agrees, Gordon Brown is a disaster, and David Cameron looks a virtual certainty to be the next Prime Minister. As a lifelong liberal lefty who grew up under Thatcher, sang “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” when she was deposed, and could never imagine myself voting Tory,¹ I find myself actually looking forward to the prospect. Not out of any enthusiasm for Cameron and his lot – they look just like another bunch of smarmy shysters – but out of utter disgust with New Labour and their crimes.

The left promises to use the power of the state to improve society, protect the vulnerable and provide for the needy. The right promises to reduce the power of the state and let people live their lives without interference. In practice, both left and right use the power of the state to impose their will, line their pockets and featherbed their friends.

Strangely enough, many of the reasons the Labour Party deserves a decade or two out of power have nothing to do with why they’re going to get one. The Tories in general² don’t actually oppose them on these issues, and will probably continue the same policies once they’re in power. The press don’t go after them either. We know about the Iraq War, and the deception of the public that accompanied it. We know about David Kelly’s death. We know that Blair used the power of the state to intimidate opposition in the aftermath.

What is more mysterious is why nobody but Private Eye is prepared to talk about PFI.

PFI. The “Private Finance Initiative”. Also known as PPP, or “Public-Private Partnerships”. That’s when the government pays private companies to deliver public services. It invariably costs the taxpayer more, delivers less, increases the risk of data loss and fraud, and makes a handful of favoured companies very rich.

As an example., hen New Labour came to power in 1997, Coventry’s Walsgrave Hospital needed renovating, and the work had been costed at about £30 million. Gordon Brown, then chancellor, was not prepared to pay it. Here’s what they did instead.

Both of Coventry’s Hospitals – the Walsgrave and the Coventry and Warwick – were demolished, and the land given to a private consortium. The consortium built a brand new hospital on the Walsgrave site, that would have 25% fewer beds and 20% fewer staff than the old hospitals. The government signed a contract to pay the consortium £36 million a year for 25 years so the NHS could use this hospital. At the end of the contract the hospital would remain the private property of the consortium. The former site of the Coventry and Warwick hospital was also their private property, to be developed as the consortium saw fit.

Think about that. To avoid paying £30 million in one go, at the end of which it would own two good hospitals, the government committed itself to paying £36 million every year for 25 years, plus the land those hospitals were built on for development, in exchange for less hospital, and after 25 years, no hospital. It paid someone to rip it off.

There are hundreds of these schemes. In Belfast, the government is committed to keep paying a private consortium for 20 years for a high school that, being situated in an area already well served withs schools ands with a falling birthrate, has no pupils. That deal also involved handing over land for development.

We all know how inefficient the public sector can be, and how much more efficient the private sector supposedly is, and yet PFI costs orders of magnitude more. Why does this happen? Why would anyone pay so over the odds for something they could easily get for a fraction of the price?

My brother is a logistician for Médecins Sans Frontières in Chad. He has previously worked for other NGOs in various countries. In one of these previous jobs, he discovered that the local staff had contracted a local firm to supply a certain commodity for more than the price they advertised it at. A little digging uncovered the unsurprising fact that the the NGO staff member and the supplier’s salesman who cooked up this deal were splitting the difference between them.

Does it follow that anyone who spends more of someone else’s money than they need to is pocketing the difference? Perhaps not. If it happens once or twice we might put it down to incompetent negotiation of the contracts. But this has been systematic. And Tony Blair is swimming in money now that he’s not Prime Minister any more. Even before Blair left office it was calculated that the Blairs’ could not have afforded to pay their monthly mortgage repayments on their official monthly income. David Blunkett, who as Home Secretary did so much to push through the Identity Cards scheme, is now a paid advisor to Entrust, a company that provides software for ID cards. We’ll see what other lucrative positions New Labour cabinet ministers find themselves in once they’re out of office and it’s safe to reveal them.

PFI is corrupt. It mortgages the taxpayer for decades to come, for the sake of projects that could have been run as public services for a fraction of the cost. And it makes the private companies that run the services, and the politicians that assign those services to them, wealthy. Newspapers who pretend that what’s starving public services of funds is “too many managers” or “civil service bureaucracy” are colluding in this corruption.

The last Tory government lost an election because a handful of its members were individually corrupt. New Labour is corrupt to the core. They need to go. In fact, they need to go to jail. But will the Tories stop it? What’s the emoticon for “laughs hollowly”?

1. Living as I do in Northern Ireland, I don’t actually have the option of voting Tory, or Labour, or even bloody Liberal Democrat. I get the government I’m given. But the point is rhetorical.
2. An honourable mention has to go to David Davies for his brave stance on civil liberties.