Presidential Government

Tony Blair (remember him?) was long accused of a “presidential” style of government. His ministers were completely under his authority, and always replaceable. This may be part of Gordon Brown’s problem – he is attempting to govern in Blair’s style, and running out of MPs who can complete his cabinet. The problem is that Blair had three things enabling his presidential government, which Brown doesn’t have:

1. The authority with the party that came from being a proven election winner
2. People skills
3. Gordon Brown

Number 3 is the punchline, of course; but the Blair regime was a double act from beginning to end. No other minister had the power to overrule the prime minister.

The real point was that the sidelining of the cabinet under Blair was not so much part of the general centralising trend as an aspect of Blair’s particular personality and situation.

Demonstrations in Luton

As a change from analysis, here’s a bit of reportage.

This document was distributed in Bury Park, Luton last week (click on it to enlarge to read it, and the full text is below):

It’s printed on A5 paper and came through the door. I didn’t have to transcribe it as text because googling about I found it in this comment from the “islamic awakening” forum. Only the title is changed. The text below therefore exactly corresponds to the leaflet. I added the bold and italics to match.

The document is not dated, but “the demonstration which we saw on Friday” refers to the 29th May (2009). The background situation is described in this Independent article. I can’t add to or validate that account – I always seem to miss the actual aggro, somehow.

NOT ALL DEMONSTRATIONS ARE ALLOWED IN ISLAM…

In response to a demonstration held in Bury Park on Friday, we would like to inform all Muslims in Luton about some important facts:

The demonstration held against the Royal Anglian Regiment on 10th March 2009 was to forbid the evil of the illegal occupation of Iraq, the murder of innocent Muslims in the name of freedom and democracy by the US and UK regimes and a call for Islamic law i.e. the Shari’ah as a solution for all our problems. This was done in response to Allah (SWT) saying: ‘Let there arise from amongst you a group(s) of Muslims, calling to Islam, enjoining good and forbidding evil, these will have success [Quran 3:104]

The response from the Muslin Ummah world-wide was phenomenal, with praise and happiness for the small group of Muslims who had the fortitude to speak the truth in front of the army of Pharaoh. This demonstration also led to many discussions openly and publicly about the illegal and oppressive war waged by the US and British against Muslims in Iraq.

On the other hand the demonstration which we saw on Friday in Bury Park led by Abdul Qadir Baksh and those from the ‘Islamic’ centre was clearly calling for the arrest of Muslims, was co-operating with the same police who routinely raid and arrest innocent Muslims and was intended to forbid the call for the Shari’ah and support the law and agenda of the taghout British government. And Allah (SWT) says concerning people like this: The hypocrites, men and women, are from one another, they enjoin (on the people) evil and forbid (people) from the good, and they close their hands [from spending in Allah’s Cause]. They have forgotten Allah, so He has forgotten them. Verily, the hypocrites are the Fasiqun (rebellious, disobedient to Allah). [Quran 9:67]

They may feel justified in their stance because of the attack against their centre but when did they ever become angry when the masjids in Baghdad were on fire? When did they ever raise their voices when the masjids in Gaza were being bombed? Even worse when did they ever demonstrate when our brothers and sisters were being tortured, raped, killed and murdered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Chechnya, etc..? Especially when the Messenger said: “One drop of Muslim blood is worth more to Allah than the Kaba’ah and its whole surroundings.” It is indeed ironic that the very people who have never lifted a finger to defend Muslims being oppressed around the world have only found the courage to condemn Muslims that have the courage to stand for the Ummah. Verily guidance and knowledge is a blessing from Allah (SWT) granted to those He loves.

We call upon Muslims in Luton to remember that our purpose in life is to please Allah (SWT) and not Gordon Brown, to serve Allah (SWT) and not the Saudi regime [supporters of the disbelievers], that we must stand up against those at war with Islam and Muslims and not against practising Muslims.

The Muslims must remain strong and not give in to the whisperings of Shaytaan to sell their religion for some miserly gain in this life. We are in the strange times, where the Prophet(saw) foretold there will be those who stop commanding good and forbidding evil, who in fact enjoin evil and forbid good and who further call the trustworthy liars and the liars trustworthy. This is the time mentioned in the narration of the Prophet when the ruwaybiddah will be ruling (such as the Saudi regime) who are the worst among the people but in charge over their affairs. May Allah (SWT) protect us from the tawagheet and their alliance, as he protected our brothers Musa (as), Essa (as) and the Messenger Muhammad (saw).

Finally we would like to ensure all Muslims and non-Muslims that Insha’Allah we will never stop calling for Islam, until the Deen of Islaam becomes dominant or we die in the struggle for its domination world-wide, as was the struggle and call of the best man who has ever walked the earth, the Messenger Muhammad (saw).

Peston on Deregulation

Robert Peston, who gets a bad press in some quarters, describes in some detail the “rampant deregulation” which we are told preceded the credit crunch:

As someone who has been a banking journalist at various times since the early 1980s I can speak with weary authority about the many years of intellectual toil invested by an elite financial priesthood of central bankers and regulators in devising complex rules on the capital that banks should hold.

These are known as the Basel Rules. And since the late 1980s, they have been the foundations of how banks operate: they determined how much banks could lend relative to their capital resources.

It’s generally a good post, about subordinated debt.

The Chinese Civil War

My blogroll is full of pictures of the unsuccessful attempt twenty years ago to overthrow the Chinese government.

I have seen little discussion, however, of what the result would have been if it had succeeded. We have the example of Russia to show us that even the peaceful overthrow of a one-party state is not any guarantee of decent government. That’s of limited use as a guide, however, as the USSR had internally failed before it fell, whereas the Communist Party of China was and is still very much in control.

It is not the case that, because I oppose the ideology of democracy, I think the appearance of democracy in China would have been a bad thing. I still hold the position I took here – governments need to stay in power, and the less destruction they have to cause to do it, the better, and in an advanced economy, democracy is the least destructive way of preventing a change in government. I think some time this century China will need to transition to a western-style civil service-based democracy.

That is jumping the more important question, however, which is whether the collapse of the CPC (as would have occurred if it had been showed to be incapable of controlling its own capital) would result in a western-style democracy. These are notoriously difficult to build, not least because those building them appear to have no understanding of what they actually are. (The most important ingredient, of course, being a united media establishment which tells people what to vote for). The chances of one emerging out of China in 1989 would be practically zero. I don’t think there would be much chance today.

My other thoughts on Chinese Democracy are on my other blog

The Hole in the Ceiling

I do wonder how it is that people are able to support democracy, while at the same time having any understanding of the outside world.

A partial explanation has appeared in the comments to my post on Nadine Dorries’ lucid and mostly accurate explanation of the MPs’ expenses issue.

If the voters support a good policy, that’s what you expect.

If the voters support a bad policy, that’s not because voters are incompetent, it’s because of the media brainwashing them.

Therefore, all the policies that the voters actually support are good, and once we stop the media from getting them to support bad policies, everything will be fine.

The thing is that this has already happened. The establishment – the civil service, the BBC, the state education system – tells people what to vote for, and they do. The results are considerably better than would be the case if voters simply made up their minds based on the facts. The most damaging options are not even offered to the voters.

But the control of the establishment is not complete – notably, unlike in America, it does not control the newspapers. Usually, the business interests behind the newspapers stay in line, but on this occasion – and this is precisely Nadine Dorries’ complaint – the Telegraph stepped out of line, and told the voters that MPs had taken effectively twice the pay increase they admitted to since 1991, in the form of allowances.

That is what happened. I say so, Nadine Dorries says so, the commentator who was arguing says so. Why are we arguing?

I am arguing that what this shows is that the system of government in this country is a pretence. The establishment tells the voters what to vote for, the voters do it, and we thereby get a bad but not catastrophically bad government.

I suggest taking the voters out of the loop. Their independent influence is small, as we all agree, since we all agree that one newspaper read by 2% of the electorate is the real decisive factor in this story. Small as it is, I see no reason to assume the influence is beneficial. However, the necessity of keeping up the pretence leads to astonishingly bad policies, such as, in the most extreme case, trying to export the voting part of our system to countries which don’t even have a civil service/media establishment to tell the voters what to vote for! I mean, how is that ever going to work?

I want a ruler, or ruling establishment, that treats this country like an asset. I want them to say “this is my country and I’ll take what I want from it”, whether that be duck islands or third homes or 76 Rolls-Royces. If they did that, they wouldn’t need to lie to us from the cradle to grave to keep us from voting against them. They wouldn’t need to turn half the population into dependents on state handouts to keep them from voting against them. They would only need to run the country efficiently so as to maximise their loot.

Of course, this can’t happen. And the reason it can’t happen is because such a government would have to waste an even larger chunk of the country’s potential in defending itself from the mob, which believes a government is legitimate if and only if it lets them draw a cross on a piece of paper twice a decade.

The hole in the ruling establishment caused by the Telegraph letting the expenses cat out of the bag is not the point. It is a hole that shows us that the ceiling is not the sky.

The Rise of the BNP

Fraser Nelson has an article in the current Spectator on the rise of the BNP.

The story he tells is that “Britain has never been racist”, but that voters are being deceived by the BNP’s “devious ploy: distracting public attention from the racist reality of the BNP by representing itself as ‘the helpful party'”

Nelson’s estimate of the stupidity of the ordinary Briton is impressive, but I suspect it is he that is being deceived. My own impression (not, I confess, based on any very deep connection to the man in the street) is that at the very least a large minority of the British white working class is quite racist, but knows perfectly well that it is not allowed to say so. Previous far-right political movements have failed, not because voters have disagreed with their racism, but because they have perceived accurately that the movements will be crushed by the establishment by any means necessary. The public likes a strong horse.

The BNP’s current softer facade is succeeding, not because voters are fooled by it, but because they see that it makes the BNP harder to exclude (and because the weakened establishment has itself lost authority). They can look an elite political journalist in the eye and tell him that they will vote BNP, but they’re not racist, oh no, that would be wrong, and they can suppress a smirk, and think to themselves, “yes, this time we might actually be going to get away with it”.

Maybe I’m the only one to think of this possibility, but I don’t think so, because it is the only thing that explains the establishment’s terror at what is, by the numbers, still very much a fringe movement. I really don’t know how many people in Britain are racist, and nobody else does either, because those who are are afraid to say so. If the political momentum ever goes to the BNP, then its secret followers will feel free to stand up and say what they believe. I would not rule out the possibility that they are already a majority, but don’t know it. The anti-racist consensus might be blown away like Ceaucescu if they speak up and find that they are strong. That would make the determination of the establishment to clamp down on every racist squeak a necessity rather than an overreaction.

Ah, the dilemma of the left-winger, who believes that the working class is entitled to rule, and yet unfit to do so. I would laugh aloud at their discomfiture, if the stakes were not so high.

Update: BNP Failure

The Welfare State We're In

The Welfare State We’re In

I’ve been aware of this book since it was launched, and have followed the accompanying blog, but only now have I actually got around to buying a copy and reading it.

It’s a book that very much needed to be written. I have been critical of the approach of the IEA and the like, but they have a valuable role to play in supporting work like this.

The book is slightly mistitled. It does indeed describe the welfare state we’re in, but hell-in-a-handbasket tracts are ten a penny, and this is much more. What the book describes is the welfare nation we’re not in – the combination of insurance-based and charitable welfare institutions which, until they were supplanted by state welfare, were not only better than almost anyone today would imagine, but improving very rapidly.

That is what I was looking for, but there was another, unexpected historical perspective – the ebb and flow of welfare provision over the centuries, as suffering of the poor led to more generous provision, which led to abuse and social disruption, producing a backlash against dependency culture and root-and-branch cuts. There are debates from two hundred years ago that could be taken from today’s newspapers.

The first chapter makes the case that our current society is one where violence and what could loosely be called “social decay” is more prevalent than before. This is a difficult subject to handle, and the author recognises the difficulties. On the one hand, statistics are not comparable for a number of reasons, and on the other, anecdotal reminiscences are not only unreliable, but impossible to set into context – how typical are one person’s experiences of a society that was structured quite differently to our own?

In spite of the difficulties, the chapter left me more persuaded than previously that there has been a marked drop in the amount of peace and trust that most people experience in their community. Here the point is not so much that the past few decades are exceptionally bad, but that the century before was exceptionally good.

Other chapters cover education, health, unemployment, housing. There is a very powerful chapter on the family; the sheer magnitude of secondary harm done by broken families is covered shockingly. I personally believe, on principle, that people should be free to adopt whatever domestic arrangements they choose, but I believe on the same principle that they should be free to take whatever food, medicines or jobs they choose. That a government which makes such effort to shape our behaviour in socially insignificant fields at the same time is not able to avoid subsidising family disintegration, with social costs at least an order of magnitude greater, is quite indefensible.

The writer is very cautious about explaining the failure of the welfare state, which is wise. One common theme in the narrative which struck me without having been explicitly drawn out was the destruction of tacit knowledge when existing institutions were replaced or taken over by the state. That is probably worth a chapter of some other book.

This book is readable and informative, and I recommend it strongly. However, it is only a start, the beginning of the debate, not the last word. It is written as polemic, for the interested layman, and while it provides references for its claims it makes occasional jumps that would be seized on in a debate. It needs first to be challenged by defenders of the welfare state, and then to be supported with more academic, more precise work that activists can rely on when facing opponents.

Time to Tax Email

Prospect Magazine is written and edited by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t care:

“A penny charge for every email would stop spam, and fill the empty public purse” – lead article by Edward Gottesman

If he – or the editor, had read my very brief little primer in email for novices and government ministers he would know that

Email is an addressing system and message format by which messages can be sent between users over the internet.

ISPs provide internet service. Sometimes they also provide web or email services over the internet as an add-on, and sometimes they don’t.

It is quite possible to send and receive email messages without one’s ISP even being aware of the fact. Indeed, most people do. If you have a large site, you probably run your own email servers. You emails go over your ISP’s internet service, but do not use your ISP’s email service, even if it has one.

Conversely, if you use webmail, your email does not reach your network in the form of messages – only web pages. Your messages originate or terminate with your webmail provider, who may well not even be in this country.

Only if you use the old-fashioned POP3+SMTP setup, or your ISP’s webmail service, will your ISP see your email as email. In some cases it might be possible for them, by searching your entire network traffic, to identify and extract email from your network flow. That involves a whole lot of processing that they would otherwise not need to do.

If you use an offshore webmail provider, they can’t even do that, because the traffic between you and the webmail provider is encrypted.

If he had done the smallest amount of research he would have known all that. If he had done, say, a day’s research, he would have already seen the check-the-boxes form objection to stupid spam-fighting schemes that inevitably landed on the prospect discussion blog.

There are of course many other reasons why it’s a moronic idea. But it only needs one.

Dear Ms Rantzen

I have just listened to your World at One interview, in which you said that, in spite of Margaret Moran MP’s announcement that she will not contest the next election, you will stand as an independent if the people of Luton South want you to.

I am only one of those people, but speaking for myself, I would prefer that you did not.

It is often the case that a parliamentary election is something of a formality, where everyone knows in advance what the result will be. Unusually, that is not likely to be the case here next time; the indications are that Luton South will be very much in play, and we voters will have an opportunity to have a real say in which party will make up the next government.

I am not likely to avail myself of that opportunity, by voting for a leading party, but that is not because I see the need for a “non-partisan” or “non-political” MP. On the contrary, the major parties are not political enough for me. I will use my vote to express my strongly-held political views.

If the circumstances were different — in particular, if Margaret Moran appeared likely to retain a safe Labour seat — then your candidacy, by providing the option of a very strong and visible protest vote, would be about the best thing that could happen. Fortunately, that is not the case.

It is conceivable that your intervention was decisive in persuading the incumbent to step down, in which case you have already achieved something worthwhile. And of course, you have a perfect right to construct a political platform and stand on it, just as I have, or anybody else.

But as for standing as a non-descript “alternative” or “non-partisan” candidate — thanks but no thanks.