Is Boris thick?

Sunny reckons that Boris Johnson doesn't "know his head from his arse". This is because he was apparently unaware of the whereabouts, or even sure of the existence of, a memorandum of understanding between London and central government. The memo turned out to be available on the Culture Department's website.

This strikes me as a bit odd.  I mean, the mayor's office presumably has civil servants working there. Why couldn't they tell Boris where to find a copy of the memo? Or didn't he ask? 

More to this than meets the eye, I would say.

Basher for Liberty news 4

The campaign

DD was on Question Time - video here. He was somewhat out-liberaled by UKIP's Nigel Farage who demanded to know how DD could support 28 days if he believed in habeas corpus. The liberal left needs to explain why it is that, among elected representatives, it's only the (allegedly) frothing-at-the-mouth right wing extremists who are making the case for civil liberties.

Jonathan Isaby wonders about the rule demanding equal media coverage for the three main parties during elections - what is to be done when two of them aren't standing?

Smears and innuendo

Harriet Harman said that Shami Chakrabarti shouldn't have supported David Davis, so Andy Burnham was quite justified in discussing her private conversations. Presumably she thinks that Liberty should be campaigning for indefinite detention without charge. Guido reckons DD is getting his own back by telling Gordon Brown to "come out" and argue his case. Yes, stop mincing around Gordon!

Meanwhile  Anthony Barnett thinks the BBC despise Davis and what he is trying to do.

Cheering him on

Tribune describes a strong body of "stealth" support for the Davis campaign among Labour MPs.

Sparring partners

Ex-LibDem spin doctor, Olly Kendall, reckons Greg Dyke should run against Davis. 

The debate

Home Office minister, Meg Hillier, says "we'll get to love ID cards".  Commenters say they feel sick.

DD has now got round to updating his blog (2 posts per week - that's almost as bad as me!), with an explanation of why 28 is OK but 42 isn't. I think I preferred the argument he had with Farage. Unity wonders about why Labour and Conservative won't tell us what their plans for a Bill of Rights are before we elect them.

Mark Lynas on economics

So is it time to follow in the steps of the UK environment minister Phil Woolas and reassess the potential of GM? As Woolas says: "There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis. It is a question that we as a nation need to ask ourselves." So is he right?

I doubt it. For starters, the current food price crisis is only partly about supply. Yes, falling harvests have affected the amount of food available, and the recent severe flooding in the US midwest certainly won't help the situation. But, as with oil, rising demand is the biggest factor driving prices towards the stratosphere. As countries such as India and China get richer and adopt more western diets, they consume more meat, sucking grain off the market to feed growing numbers of livestock. The misconceived rush to biofuels has further intensified the problem, gobbling up vast quantities of corn and soya in order to produce the fuel Americans and Europeans need to feed their addiction to the car. Underlying all this, the human population continues to grow, adding another 80 million mouths every single year.

Lynas's article is another candidate for the hotly contested "Dumb Guardian Article of the Year" award. It's just ignorant verbiage to say "it's about demand rather than supply". If demand goes up, then either supply goes up to match it or the price goes up and pushes demand back down again. You can't separate the two. The price is changing because supply and demand are out of kilter. End of.

Basher for Liberty news 3

The campaign

Labour launched another attack on DD, and again managed not to mention the issues - this time it was Andy Burnham who said that DD should pay for the by-election. He also implied a romantic liaison between DD and Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty. Basher said Burnham was using smear tactics. Shami threatened to sue.

More sinisterly, Spy Blog wonders whether Burnham's description of "late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls" between the two shows that the government is eavesdropping on the their phone calls. Burnham has previous form on this kind of thing,  it seems.

Meanwhile DD made a direct appeal to Labour voters with an interview on LabourHome. Report here.

Sparring partners

Donal Blaney reckons that Conservative Home's Tim Montgomerie, a fan of 42 day detention without charge, should stand against David Davis. Sounds like a good idea to me too.

Why did he do it?

Fraser Nelson reckons that there's a lack of mission at Conservative HQ with a number of senior Cameron lieutenants departing. DD may just be part of that trend.

What we're after

Unity at Liberal Conspiracy notes the latest case of left and right trying to outdo each other on tearing up civil liberties.

Another day, another propaganda piece

I do sometimes wonder if Messrs Harrabin and Black, the BBC's prime global warming propagandists, ever get bored of telling one side of the story.

Today's contribution from Mr Black is a story about declining sea ice coverage in the Arctic. 

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.

Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007.

But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.

Why does he keep doing this? Everybody knows he's cherry picking in order to maintain the BBC's  chosen narrative of "We're all going to die!". Simply checking the sea ice chart at Cryosphere Today shows that global sea ice coverage is pretty much normal - the reduction in the Arctic is offset by extra in the Antarctic.

However, the word "Antarctic" appears nowhere in Richard Black's article. This is good, plain, old-fashioned out-and-out dishonesty. Par for the course for the BBC's environment team.

Basher for Liberty news 2

The resignation

DD handed in his resignation and called on Gordon Brown to put up a candidate. Gordon kept his head down. (He always does that doesn't he?) 

The campaign

An unofficial supporters blog called 4 David Davis 4 Freedom was launched.  The by-election has been confirmed for 11th July.

Madman Basher

Rachel North documents the continuing retreat of the mainstream media from its earlier "Davis is a madman" meme, with even the Sun now speaking up in favour of civil liberties.  Another history of the MSM's retreat is provided by media wonk Martin Moore.

Sparring partners

A fruit and veg trader from DD's constituency and a beauty queen are going to run in the by-election, but Labour confirmed that they will not put up a candidate. DD described the Prime Minister as "gutless". (Update: Liberal Conspiracy reckons the New Statesman is going to put up a "more liberal than thou" candidate.

The debate

The Adam Smith Institute is running a series of postings on the liberties we've lost - like the assumption of innocence and double jeopardy. 

Guy Aitchison, writing at Our Kingdom, says that Basher must also examine the Conservatives' record on civil liberties, a demand that one can hardly call unjustified.

Basher for Liberty news

Given the dreadful state of Basher Davis's campaign website, I thought I might do a bit of a roundup of the goings-on of the day on the civil liberties front.

David Davis for Liberty

Basher's campaign website went live. Geeks noticed that it wasn't very interactive. And that it didn't mention the Conservatives or David Cameron. Technology poor, content good then.

The masthead picture attracted attention too. Some people noticed that it didn't include any brown people, although others detected some oriental features among the crowd. I didn't spot any gays/lesbians/transexuals either. The man is clearly a Nazi.

Gay basher Basher

Iain Dale accused Stonewall of briefing against Basher.  Stonewall denied everything. They seem to be of the opinion that gay "rights" should trump civil rights.

Illiberal Basher

Debate continued to rage on the blogs as to DD's credentials as a liberal. Stephen Tall said that anyone who supported the death penalty wasn't a liberal. Yours truly pointed out that Locke and Mill said otherwise.

Final word probably went to James Graham:

I’ve lost count of the number of blog posts and facebook groups I’ve skimmed past denouncing Davis for being a hypocrite on the issue of civil liberties. That may be so, but what is more hypocritical? A hang ‘em, flog ‘em politician standing up for fundamental civil liberties or a smart arse who claims to care about the drip-drip erosion of our rights while sitting on the fence because the one person taking a stand doesn’t pass a “purity” test.

Stuntman basher

Nearly everyone has stopped saying that it's a stunt. Only Steve Richards at the Independent is still singing that particular refrain. The commenters on his piece aren't impressed.

Sparring partners

Somebody with a book to promote announced that he would stand against Basher in the by-election. Brave man. Somewhat less endowed with cojones was Kelvin MacKenzie who indicated that maybe he'd stay at home and write an article or two.  Similarly, the government has still not said if it will put a candidate up against DD. Gordon Brown demonstrated his fearlessness by giving a speech on civil liberties and not mentioning Davis at all. Go Tiger! Gordy's thesis is that security is the most important liberty of all, thus neatly proving that North Korea is a free country.

Cheering him on

Nigel Kennedy, the violinist, outed himself as a Basher supporter. Meanwhile, an opinion poll showed levels of public support for the civil liberties agenda which surprised some commentators. Iraq war hero Colonel Tim Collins and Labour's Bob Marshall-Andrews and Tony Benn are already on board.

Davis said that he had been overwhelmed by the support he is getting. 

What do we want?

Spiked started to outline a programme of restoration of civil liberties: 42 days becomes 24 hours, bring back the right to silence and double jeopardy, get rid of hate speech offences and so on. 

Petition to abandon the Lisbon Treaty

Richard North of EU Referendum fame is calling for people to sign up to a petition, demanding that the government abandon the Lisbon Treaty. They've signed up a very impressive seven thousand people in four hours.

Add your name here. 

David Davis for Freedom

David Davis's campaign website, David Davis for Freedom, is now live. Looks like there's still a few issues to sort out on the RSS feed though.

Update:

It's not the best website, is it? Quite apart from the feed problem, someone seems to have forgotten to create the links for the Speeches and Articles pages. There's no comments facility on the blog and commenters at Guido's are reporting problems subscribing to the email newsletter (although it worked fine for me).

I suppose there's a possibility that it's not actually live yet, but if it is, then Basher needs to start bashing pretty soon. This isn't good enough. 

The media and David Davis

Frank Fisher has a wonderful article up at the Graun.

The Indy now realises that DD has captured the public's imagination, the Times's William Rees Mogg admits his own failure to grasp the strength of public feeling and here at the Guardian, Jackie Ashley figures out what Cif's punters knew within moments of Davis's announcement – that Davis's main goal may well be to entrench Conservative support for civil liberties, directly confronting the kind of focus-group friendly policies favoured by the other Dave.

Four days it took the commentariat to grasp this simple issue that the online community figured out within 14 minutes.

 Read the whole thing.

My human right to an education voucher

The Human Rights Act says of education:

No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Personally, I have a deep philosophical conviction that the state should play no part in the education system - standard liberal stuff, per JS Mill. Unfortunately, because the state takes lots of money from me to pay for the education system that I oppose, I am unable to send my children to private school. So it looks to me as if the state is not only not respecting my right to ensure an education in conformity with my convictions, it is actively preventing me from doing so.

The remedy is simple though. I want my money back. Cash or voucher, I care not.

Jack Frost

According to the weather forecast, there's a slight possibility of frost tonight in my neck of the woods. The summer solstice is a week away.

Global warming eh? 

Great illiberals of the past - Locke and Mill

Stephen Tall has added his name to the list of those who think that David Davis can't possibly be a liberal because of his support for the death penalty.

I was amused to see that a commenter on Stephen's piece points out that one of the prominent supporters of the death penalty was none other than John Locke, who opined:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property - that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. 

Chris Dillow, a man who is never likely to be mistaken for a Tory, has also posted at length on this subject and, rather amusingly for me, calls in his support none other than John Stuart Mill, who apparently said:

I defend this [the death] penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked-on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime…What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards--debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet?

As I've said in an earlier posting, many people seem to mistake "views commonly held by liberals" with liberalism itself. All these Liberals are going to have to explain to me how a the holding of a view that was shared by the two greatest philosophers of the liberal movement can be diagnostic of not being a liberal at all.

Quote of the day

The politicians need to ask themselves why so many of the public seem to regard David Davis as the only sane man in the asylum.

Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer 

Bigger Bishop

There appear to have been enough people who found the font size 'ere a bit on the small side, so I've upped it a bit. I await a rush of new readers....