New blog

Mrs Bishop has started a blog about our extremely awful Mitsubishi Grandis car, and the jaw-droppingly appalling service of Mitsubishi UK and its franchisee at Fife Mitsubishi.

Localism as a substitute for liberalism?

Eaten by Missionaries asks if the Tories are serious about localism. I don't suppose they are, and I'm sure EbM doesn't think so either, although most of the current Conservative party have no association with the centralism of the eighties and nineties, so I suppose we ought to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Localism is a great concept, but it's one that involves considerable courage from a central government. If you decentralise power then at some point a local executive is going to blow the bank on some half-baked vote buying scheme and is going to demand to be baled out by the centre. Facing them down demands the courage and authority of a Thatcher, and this is a commodity which is in short supply these days. A Blair would cave in at the first sign of trouble and would open the floodgates to years of irresponsible spending.

I can't imagine that the LibDems or the Conservatives are going to pluck up the courage to legislate for balanced budgets or the outlawing of bale-outs, so if it happens, localism will probably be a disaster.

Regardless of this, liberals within the LibDems (of whom EbM is one)  need to remind themselves that localism is not the same as liberalism. Shifting power from one branch of government to another is not liberalism. Leviathan will still be in control, no matter which tentacle has you by the throat. Liberalism demands that the monster lets go. That individuals choose for themselves. When that happens we may get our country back. But not until then.

Blog spats

Please don't.

Liberalising the gun control laws

There's an interesting post at PC Copperfield's which asks if we should liberalise the gun control laws. As the good constable puts it, the police are now just the administrative arm of the insurance industry and there is absolutely no point in calling them. The number of comments from police officers agreeing with this is startling to say the least.

What struck me about the comments thread was that there were very few people who reacted with the traditional exclamations of horror, accompanied by wailings and knashings of teeth and accusations of insanity. Could it be that the state of the criminal justice system has reached rock bottom and the idea of public ownership of guns is acceptable, or even respectable?

We will see. 

(Hat tip: Outside Story) 

Bugs

Last week, Spy Blog speculated about why the government has failed to publish the Annual Report 2005 of the Interception of Communications Commissioner and the Annual Report 2005 of the Security Services Commisioner. Note the dates on both of those reports - these are now a long, long way overdue. Questions asked in Parliament have signally failed to produce anything other than evasions from the Prime Minister.

So what might the government be hiding? Spy Blog wonders whether current events might not be related:

Is this reluctance to answer simple questions, which have no bearing on national security methods or on individual investigations, due to some political embarrassment e.g. the current Cash or Loans for Honours scandal ?

Which seems to be a concern of the police too, according to this report in the Independent on Sunday:

The paranoia has become so feverish that some in the police even fear that the investigators' phones may have been tapped by the security services, to allow the Government to stay one step ahead.

"It's quite easy to tap phones, you know," said one source. "But it's also not too difficult to find out if you have been bugged. I expect the phones are bugged."

Is that another nail I hear, being hammered into the coffin of the Labour party?

Germany

I've got friends in Germany. As a student, I had a German roommate with whom I shared some wonderful times. I like the Germans I've met. Once I understood it, I like their sense of humour too.

But my God, when I read things like DK's report on the German Presidency's plans for a law on holocaust denial I am horrified by what their government is up to:

[I]t requires member states to prosecute violations, as defined in the document, it requires them to do so under the methods of corpus juris; that is the Continental system whereby you must prove your innocence, a concept that goes against one of the most fundamental tenets of the British justice system.

The Framework also deals with what it calls "Legal persons", which includes companies, charities, etc. Under these provisions, if one of your employees, for instance, says something racist that is reported, your company can be banned from "commercial trading", banned from "receiving public funds" or even compulsorily wound-up.

Or this report (HT: Carlotta) about a German girl who was being home educated, a practise which is illegal in Germany.

She has been removed from her parents' custody, and placed in the Child Psychiatry Unit of the Nuremberg clinic, her father, Hubert Busekros, told the homeschool group.

It's surprising, to say the least, to find anywhere that is less liberal than Blair's Banana Republic. It may just be that Germany is it. The Euro-enthusiasts in our three main parties need to explain what it is about our European colleagues way of doing things that they find so attractive.

Regaining control of the news agenda

Blair questioned again, Brown's pretendy charity under investigation, Lord Goldsmith in the doo-doo in the upper house. How's a spin doctor supposed to regain control of the news agenda?

How about a year old story about an assasination attempt on Jack Straw?

Yes that would probably do it. 

Update:

Nobody else seems to have picked up on this story. I can't find it on the Sky site either. Perhaps it's a mistake?