Inspectors All Round Whoever We Vote For

Simon Heffer, writing in the Telegraph, has been talking of freedom and autonomy of the individual.

In the long years of Tory rule, those who reminded the electorate that with a Labour government you also got socialist control were dismissed as scaremongers. However, it is true, and we now see it is true.

Too right it is. The Tories have been mentioning this since the 50s, when a vote for them was a vote to be able to 'call your soul your own'.


It's only the existence of a prolonged Labour administration which has conclusively proven that the Tories were correct. Their doom-laden warnings were justified.

We live in a country where harmless people taking pictures of cathedrals are warned off by police invoking anti-terrorism laws; where the same legislation is used to regulate the positioning of wheelie bins; where smoking is banned even in public places whose owners wish to allow it; where the hunting of vermin is banned even on the land of those who wish to have it hunted. All these invasions of individual autonomy have taken place since 1997.

And then some, Simon. And then some.

It could have been worse. We could have had identity cards, forcing a citizen to prove his or her right to be here, or to admit who he or she is, despite having committed no offence. We could have had a national DNA database. We could have had a law that prevented comedians telling jokes about religion. We could have had the restriction of jury trials. We could have had people locked up without trial for 90 days because the police are incapable of finding any evidence upon which to convict them of something. We could have criminalised people for being nutters, for that is one of the best words to describe those poisonous idiots who claim Auschwitz was just a film set and the genocide of the Jews didn't happen. All these things have been discussed or proposed by Labour in varying degrees of seriousness, but – so far – have not been inflicted on our people. However, they show a certain, and unpleasant, cast of mind.

They do indeed.

But then, considering the Tories have been warning us about the perils of socialist control for decades, isn't it quite astounding that their current crop display exactly the same mindset?

On alcohol, James Brokenshire.

"Conservatives would strengthen controls on licensing, ban below-cost sales of alcohol and use targeted taxes on high strength products"

Chris Grayling agrees.

"Irresponsible" promotions such "all you can drink" or the "dentist's chair" will be subject to a blanket ban as part of a new mandatory code for licencees.

Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "This is the third time the Government has announced this initiative, what we need to do now is get on with tackling the problem."

Hurry up with the bansturbatory legislation, already!

And, of course, David Cameron has made his views on personal responsibility and property rights abundantly clear.

"I’m just not a banner. But you know, I think the country has moved on, and people have accepted the smoking ban.”

Of course we have. That's why this man is still languishing in jail. Err ... isn't he?

We'll leave Tory dictatorial plans on green issues, the public's food preferences, and intrusive surveillance for now. Needless to say that that their policies thus far aren't overly appealing, but what can one expect when Cameron himself has boasted publicly that he abhors libertarianism.

We're still being led to the polling booths on a vague 'nudge nudge, wink wink' basis by Tory supporters with regard to personal freedoms. While their party's public pronouncements signal the exact opposite.

Oh yeah, we'll not mention the Conservatives' reticence to stand up to the EU either. Which, as Ranting Stan points out, is a significant source of authoritarian interference.

That soul the Tories were talking about earlier ... you didn't really need it, did you?

Nothing To Hide, Nothing To Fear. Surely?

What could possibly be the problem here?

MPs' food and drink debts to be published

The move follows a Freedom of Information Act request by the Press Association which sparked six months of wrangling between Commons officials, MPs and lawyers over how to respond.

MPs objected and demanded further legal advice after being told last autumn that the details of their unpaid bills were set to be published.

Six months of stalling? Wriggling wildly to stop details of what they have been eating and drinking being publicised?

Could it, perhaps, expose some jaw-dropping hypocrisy from those who like to righteously dictate lifestyles to we poor proles?

The general election is expected on May 6, less than two months away, and disclosures before then would be unhelpful for MPs campaigning for re-election.

Hmmm. Whaddya think?

Comment Of The Day

[...] when Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (The Absinthe Drinker) is offered to the market in London on June 23, all thoughts in the room will drift towards the world record held by L'Homme Qui Marche I, a stylised figure of a walking man by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

It fetched just over £65 million, from a pre-sale estimate of between £12 million and £18 million, on February 3.

For a potential record-breaking art auction, serious technical questions need to be asked.

Peter Kennedy does just that.

Does [it] come with the Frame??

Appreciation All Round

As you can see from the sidebar, Philip Davies has been invested as this blog's official mascot, as promised. His commons performance last week is now preserved for prosperity and can be viewed by clicking on his amiable fizzog.

Davies has been informed of this prestigious appointment and, judging by his reply, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is much appreciated.

Dear Richard

Thank you very much indeed for your extremely kind email which is much appreciated and for your supportive comments which are much appreciated.

Best wishes

Philip

I think I can say, with confidence, that more MPs like Davies would be much appreciated by readers of this blog, and that if he could find time to kick Kevin Barron in the shins - very hard - at some point in the near future, that would be much appreciated too.

UPDATE: Davies, on being informed of his investiture, was understandably overwhelmed.

Thanks Richard

... he gushed.

And We All Lived Unhappily Ever After

Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he; He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl but he only got his bowl because some bullshit statistics showed that if he smoked his pipe then at least two of his fiddlers would die of cancer.

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
By the way, the chief medical officer says that amount of treacle is really bad for you and that excessive treacle eating is costing this country £14bn a day in lost productivity and exploding children.

There are plenty more updated nursery rhymes at the awesome Daily Mash today.

Yes, it's only satire but ... the annoyance which presumably motivated their piece is widespread, and hatred of petty and intrusive laws pretty much universal. So where (apart from our esteemed blog mascot, of course) are the politicians to stand up for us?

Abso-fucking-lutely no-bastard-where, is the answer.

Dutch Courage

I'm baa-aack!

Conference was illuminating, whilst the company and hospitality before and after, in Amsterdam and The Hague, was a genuine delight.

There is a smoking ban in Holland but, being freedom-loving continental Europeans and not anally-retentive British pussies, choice is offered in spades. It wasn't very difficult to seek out bars which didn't throw you outside to smoke while you enjoyed their beer.

I also noted that there weren't any boarded up ones, either. It appears to be an alien phenomenon to the Dutch.

As our host at last night's hot and pricey Indian restaurant brought out the post-meal ashtrays, I became thoughtful and intrigued as to why this huge difference in fortunes between the Dutch and British hospitality industries exists.

After all, Labour do tell us that the recession was global.

The tough international economic conditions will not leave the Netherlands unscathed. The Dutch economy may have grown by 2% year-on-year in 2008, but the economy was already shrinking in the last three quarters, from a quarter on quarter perspective. In the fourth quarter in particular, economic activity declined drastically. This development will continue to an even stronger degree throughout the first half of 2009. After that the economy will very gradually pick up again, but on balance the Dutch economy will shrink both this year and next. This year the negative growth will reach 3½%, the largest contraction since 1931.

Surely that would have had an effect on Dutch bar owners, considering the price of a pint in The Hague and Amsterdam these past couple of days was between €5 and €6 (£4.50 to £5.50 [conv]). OK, that was in the cities, but the mean price of a beer in other areas is €4 (£3.60), which is on a par with or, in some cases in excess of, prices in Central London.

But bars don't close over there. Why ever not?

Perhaps they haven't got the same evil supermarket companies as we have, eh? Yes. That'll be it.

The Dutch foundation for alcohol prevention, STAP, wants Dutch supermarkets to stop selling crates of beer at bargain prices. The foundation is concerned that the low prices encourage excessive drinking, especially at a time of year when young people are celebrating their exam results.

STAP is calling for a minimum price for beer and wants the market leader to withdraw its product from the supermarkets that choose to sell the beer at excessively low prices.

A crate of Heineken beer contains 24 bottles and normally costs between 11 and 12 euros at Albert Heijn which means one bottle costs about 50 eurocents, with discount only 29 eurocents. In bars in The Netherlands, where the legal drinking age is 16, a glass of beer in a bar costs about two euros, four times as much as in the supermarkets.

Hmm. Perhaps not.

Well, it surely must be those evil pubcos then. It can't be anything else, can it? They may have been around since the Beer Orders (1989) effectively created them, but pubs have been closing for years, I'm constantly told.

UK Pub Closures 2004-2009

Or ...

2004: 478
2005: 102
2006: 216
2007: 1,409
2008: 1,973
2009: 2,365

Oh yeah. So they were! Apart from the 25% increase in pub stocks between 1971 and 2003, of course**.

I'm not sure the pubco tie effect can fully explain the massive leap in closures from 2007 onwards, though.

Why the huge pub failures in the UK but not in Holland? Why are theirs ticking along nicely and ours aren't? What on earth could be the over-riding factor?

As I drank a cool Heineken in the smoking room at Murphy's Bar, situated between gates D15 & D16 inside Amsterdam Schipol airport, I still hadn't worked it out.

Perhaps Gillian Merron may have a decent explanation.

**All sources: BBPA Statistical Handbooks, not available online.

TICAP Live Blog

As if by magic, I find myself in The Hague for the 2nd World TICAP Conference.

There is a live video broadcast this year, but if you are too busy to view that I'll be live blogging it again, WiFi permitting.

If all goes well, coverage will begin on Monday morning from around 8am in English money.

Click HERE for the blog.