Blue nation

Well, I'm sure Cameron must be delighted. Despite containing a certain number of toffs with duck islands, moats, and houses that look like Balmoral which we have no right to ask them how they paid for, the Tories seem to be doing very, very well at the council elections.

Labour are tanking, naturally (deservedly?), but I had hoped the Lib Dems might at least put up a fight. But no.

So it's Tory, Tory, Tory. The rich get richer, the working classes are obsolete. I'd be more depressed if that wasn't what we'd had for 12 years under Labour anyway. Chances of the Tories noticing that laissez-faire free market ideology has caused a major worldwide recession? Not a lot.

Kelvin Hopkins - a labour MP who might keep his seat

Wonder what exactly Kelvin Hopkins is doing in the Labour party. Or government in general. Present him with a gravy train, and what does he do? Ignores it.

Second home allowance? No thanks, says Kelvin, I'll just get the train in. He barely even claims for food expenses.

Deary me. People like this would give politicians a good name if it wasn't for the strenuous efforts of the rest of them.

Throw them out.

Here's a simple test for UK political parties wanting my vote - do they agree to this:

Article 12.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

It appears the Labour party does not.

A gay politician is still a politician

This is the sort of non-joined up thinking that makes me unsurprised that politicians let the economy get in such a mess.

The BBC quotes some Tory that Gays 'have a duty to vote Tory' - because apparently Cameron has stopped the party from selected only straight white men, but also because homosexuals are 'net contributors to the taxes because they don't have children'.

Right. And they all top themselves at 65, do they? While you don't want too many children - this country is currently in an environmentally unsustainable mode, and more people makes that harder to fix - you do want there to be a certain number so they can run the services and earn money that pays your pensions once you've retired.

Banks. Don't you just hate them?

Tried to pay off my credit card online today. I couldn't log in to the server as it was going slow (all the other websites I tried to access today - fine).

Chances of them accepting this if I miss the payment? None whatsoever.

If they expect a penny of taxpayers money to bail them out for their credulous greed in the mortgage markets, I'll be protesting to my MP. Mind you, he's probably given up all hope of lasting past the next election already.

Nationalised mortgages?

Latest news on the mortgage crisis (i.e how can banks that don't have any money lend it to people who can't afford to repay it to allow house prices to continue rocketing up because "there's demand") - the bankers solution appears to be a partial nationalisation of the mortgage market. Blimey. You wouldn't have thought they'd be in favour of nationalising it.

Except... the bit they seem to want to nationalise is the risk. I bet they've still got the potential profits as privatised.

The power of FUD

There are plenty of people out there who like the status quo - largely because their current power relies on it - and who will view those who would change the status quo as their enemies, even if a change is necessary and indeed inevitable.

So it's a shame to see that one group of these people - those who wish to give the impression that scientists are divided over anthropegenic climate change, or that scientists are somehow much less trustworthy than the market and big business *coughsubprimecough* - seem to still be having rather a lot of success.

This is a bad thing because, of course, reality isn't democratic. You can't change the laws of physics, or their complex interplay, just because you don't like them or understand them. And a lack of action now will make things worse later.

Hich released!

Hicham Yezza, the University of Nottingham employee and peace activist ludicrously arrested on anti-terrorism charges, then re-arrested on immigration charges when even the government realised the anti-terrorism charges were so ludicrously stupid that they wouldn't manage to make them stick, is finally out of detention. Granted bail following an immigration hearing, Hich now gets to defend his immigration status by due and proper process, rather than fight against fast-track deportations and paranoid knee-jerk terrorism charges.

Tories in more sleaze accusations

...Except this time, I'm not sure it's fair. Conservative Party chairman Caroline Spelman is on the receiving end of accusations that she was wrong to use her MP's parliamentary allowance to pay her children's former nanny. She says the money was for the secretarial work the nanny carried out, even though the nanny says she didn't do much.

Here's the thing though - why shouldn't a working mother MP get a full allowance for the costs of a nanny in the first place? After all, politicians are meant to represent women as well, so if this was set up perhaps it would help the male-female imbalance in the job.

Hicham Yezza

You would think that the Home Office in the UK would be a little more careful to not act like some Ministry from George Orwell's 1984. But no.

Earlier this month, someone at the University of Nottingham had a panic when they saw a document on Al-Quaeda on the computer of a member of clerical staff, and called the police. The police arrested the staff member, one Hicham Yezza, and the student who had passed on this document to Mr Yezza for printing.

The document came from the US government. Their website. It's apparently available from Amazon as well.

Not that this stopped the police holding them for six days, and repeatedly describing the material as illegal. Then, once they discovered that the legal case didn't have a leg to stand on, they decided to deport Mr Yezza. Quickly - by the 1st June.

Local MP Alan Simpson (showing why he's one of the few Labour MPs who will actually be missed after the next election) has already protested this one, calling it "arbitrary deportation with no right to a proper hearing."

I've seen no explanation from the Home Office why they feel the need to deport this man so quickly, particularly since he was already due to contest immigration charges in a court of law, and had a hearing date set for 16th July. Other than that the Home Office have been made to look like scaremongers, and want a victim in revenge.

Prison Officers

A late comment on the UK Prison Officer's strike: I'm not sure how a union that has had one walkout in 60 years can be viewed as being bolshie. Particularly not when their complaints about being on the receiving end of increasing violence in an increasingly overcrowded system with pay rises of less than inflation appears to be borne out.

If we want rehabilitation of criminals to prevent re-offending, we need more prison officers. If we want to just lock the criminals up and throw away the key to prevent re-offending, we'll need more prisons and lots more prison officers. If we're happy for increasing crime, fine. Carry on. Just stop whinging about it if you get mugged by a drug addict.

Given that the MPs are always whinging about their own pay, it seems a bit off to slag off the POs.

Boris on Universities

Boris Johnson in the Grauniad doing the modern-day touchy-feely hug-a-hoodie Cameroonian Conservative thing regarding Universities and funding - say very nice things about us, hint that they'd like to do very nice things for us, suggest it would be good if other people did nice things for us, but above all don't promise anything (and openly admit as such, since everyone knows that's what he'd do anyway).

Comments on the general thing - a promise to stop carping on about "mickey mouse" courses is a good thing. After all, you can't sit there demanding the universities cater for the free market and then promptly kick up a fuss when they cater to the free market. Besides, the vast majority of mickey mouse courses are from the old polytechnics who shouldn't have been turned into Universities in the first place, and left to do good work in the field of niche training courses (such as surfing studies, golf course management, etc - there's a lot of money in the leisure industry after all)

The top US universities have done quite remarkable things with their endowments. Only Oxford and Cambridge have endowments of any size at all compared to the average US university (indeed, only those two from all of Europe would figure). I rather suspect if the stupendously well rewarded Goldman Sachs brokers did decide to chuck their money at the universities rather than on expensive frivolities (or the retreat in the south of France that they can run away to after their 19th nervous breakdown) then it'll pretty much go to those two anyway.

Smashing the jam jars - well, science is a medium to long term process. If smashing the jam jars then means a bout of politically motivated merry go rounds with the money then it will indeed be a bad thing, as a project could have the cash pulled out from under it part way through. On the other hand, I think one could suggest that there could be better co-operation between certain funding bodies without scaring the horses (or stating anything that wasn't blatantly obvious).

Sale of assets - grief, surely Labour have sold everything that wasn't bolted down, then unbolted things to sell them, then sold the bolts.

And finally:

I still think the main point of a university education is to achieve a personal intellectual transformation

Does this include dressing up in fancy clothes and getting pissed, I wonder?

Number 10 petitions

I've noticed the fuss about the number 10 petitions thing.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the petitions are about people wanting the government to tax them less, or be less restrictive towards them. The next highest number are those people wanting the government to go more after people who are not like them (see the justified persecution of toerags who don't have insurance or selfish people with bullbars*, or the less justified ones against 4x4 drivers, or School Run Mums, or cyclists**)

Petitions are easy, you see. Policy is difficult

Basically, people would like to petition the government to provide them with a congestion free road and lower tax. And not have to pay for it. Throw in the moon on a stick while you're at it.

How do you make everything pay its way? Roads might look like just a chunk of tarmac, but they genuinely are fairly expensive things, and have to be paid for some way or another. If you don't tax car drivers to pay for roads then you either have increased council and income tax to pay for roads, or you have really bad roads (which means all the money you saved goes to the garage instead). So then why should others pay for your driving?

The other reason for having taxation on cars is that it is a case of market failure - the car driver does not pay for all the costs caused by their driving, which include the effects of pollution (local as well as global, noise as well as gases) and time loss caused by congestion. Anyone saying such a thing has no place has morally given up their right to complain if someone wants to build anything in their back yard.

And finally, I'm wealthier than average, so it'll price the paupers out of my way. Oh bliss! O Poop poop!


* They designed crumple zones on the front of a car for a reason - to save lives. They designed bullbars to save your life if you run into a kangaroo in the Australian Outback and need a working car to get you to the next town before you die of thirst. People are unlikely to run into large marsupials and die of thirst in suburban England. You don't need bullbars on well-lit urban roads. Besides, they're on the front - if you're such a bad driver you keep running into things you shouldn't be on the road. The only things likely to jump out on the road suddenly are large mammals, and in suburban UK those tend to be children***.
** One note about cyclists - It's February. It's dark. Get lights. Seriously. I mean, you remember to recharge your mobile phone and mp3 player, how hard is it to recharge something that'll help keep you alive?
*** Or cyclists you can't see because they're dressed like ninjas, I suppose.

Rules of politics

One of the major rules of politics you often hear is "pick your fight" - make the arguments something that your party can succeed on.

This week, David Davis has managed to pick one doozy of a fight - one that can portray them as fiscally responsible, protecting civil liberties and democracy and, most startling of all, not being nasty.

The cartoon bad guys in this one are the IT industry, in the form of the director general of the umbrella body "Intellect", one John Higgins.

The story is this - Davis has reiterated that a campaign policy of the Tories would be to scrap the ID card. Therefore, the IT industry would be sensible to bear in mind that should Labour not win the next election, then contracts for ID cards will not be required.

Mr Higgins comes out with the full evil-business-lobby mode, stating that IT companies could build in extra costs to cover this risk - basically insisting that corporate contracts and profits should come ahead of the democratic process.

One question that springs to mind over this - if the IT business lobby is this blitheringly inept, is it because they don't lobby that much, or because they've previously had everything handed to them on a plate?

Open society

The latest accusations over whether the increasingly authoritarian Labour government are persecuting muslims - regarding the arrest of Abu Izzadeen, reminded me of a quote from Karl Popper

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

Is this Labour government being overly authoritarian? Yes. Are they arresting Muslims on flimsy reasons? I suspect so. Are they doing this for political reasons? I don't think so, but I believe they are taking advantage of the arrests for political reasons.

Does Izzadeen have the right to call for terrorist acts, and expect nothing to be done to stop him?

No.

Why should I fight to the death for someone's right to say something when what they are saying is that I should be killed?

My feeling is this - you have the right to live how you wish to live. You even have the right to say how I live is wrong. But you don't have the right to declare that I should die, and that you call for someone to kill me, because of the way I live.

Don't say the g word

It's a favourite ploy of right wingers like the journalists writing for the Daily Mail to make up stories about liberals. The thing is, it's quite easy to write scare stories about conservatives when you have ones like a number of the Republicans in the US, particularly when it might just be true.

The latest is that political appointees are banning geology, as it disagrees with their fundamentalist point of view. You can't have Creationists going and being told geological facts about the Grand Canyon, such as how old it is can you?