More cynicism required: confronting labour’s creeping totalitarianism

In discussing Labour’s decade of totalitarian legislation, Adam LeBor draws the following comparison in The Times:

“The phrase Big Brother has entered common parlance. But Orwell’s book was published in 1949 as communist regimes in Eastern Europe cemented their control through “salami tactics”. These were invented by Matyas Rakosi, Hungary’s communist leader from 1948-56. He sliced away freedoms sliver by sliver, until he established one of the most feared dictatorships in Eastern Europe.

(…)

In my more cynical moments I imagine Labour ministers following a similar methodology.

Cameron on Personal Freedom

“We’ll start by putting back in place the protections of personal freedom that Labour have taken away.

…

So we will make some important changes. The next Conservative government will revoke the unjustified and unreasonable powers that let people enter your home without your permission.

We will change the law that allows councils to snoop on people for trivial matters.

We will review the use of the Terrorism Act’s Section 44, and the stop and search powers contained within it.

We will change the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to strengthen the right to trial by jury.

And we will review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed and works both ways.” (Source)

Let’s remember that and remind him when the time comes …

R.I.P. Ralf Dahrendorf

“If revolutionaries exist outside a revolutionary situation, they easily become comical figures.” Ralf Dahrendorf, who died yesterday, addressing Rudi Dutschke.

Communitarianism, Obama and The Economist

The Economist’s Lexington column  discusses ‘Obama hatred‘ and turns out to be summarily dismissive of Obama’s critics (see also here). Obama is arguably the USA’s first outspokenly communitarian president, so concern over this new brand of collectivism hardly belongs on the lunatic fringe.
One of the articles The Economist shruggs off is Quin Hillyer’s essay in the American Spectator titled “Il Duce, Redux?“. It makes some points similar to the ones this blog made about New Labour a while ago. Some arguments in this piece are indeed debatable: Obama’s economic interventionism, for example, can just as plausibly be attributed to a desparate attempt at fighting off depression as to an ideologically driven desire to rule the economy. Other points are harder to dismiss:
“Again and again, Obama has called not just for a change of policies, but to “change America” or

Boris Talks Sense on Trade and the G20

“… the near-collapse of the banking system, and the shortage of credit, has encouraged the big Western financial institutions to turn their backs on the developing world. Money is being sluiced back home, to Europe and America, with catastrophic consequences for anyone who wants to get a loan in, say, Nigeria. In these circumstances, it is doubly immoral and disgusting that we continue to restrict the access of the developing world to our markets, and that we continue to use huge sums of taxpayers’ money to dump our products on the Third World.” (source)

Political correctness doesn’t go mad, it is mad

To realise how intellectually inconsistent PC politicians really are, consider this from Hazel Blairs:
„Although warning that people should not set out to “deliberately offend people” or make racist jokes, she believes that there should be more scope for people to express themselves.
“What I don’t want to see happen is because people are frightened of an over-reaction they don’t raise the issue,” she said. “What I don’t want people to say is that Muslims will be offended by Christmas, because they are not. There is this presumption that we don’t do things because people will be offended.““ (Source)
So she doesn’t want people to offend but then doesn’t want the fall-out which a consistent and forced avoidance of offence necessarily entails.

New Labour and the End of Innocence

Philip Johnston has some fitting comments on Labour’s decade of legislative diarrhoea:

“We know there has been a tidal wave of legislation, but it is mind-boggling to discover the size of the tsunami. It is estimated that more than 3,600 new offences have been created. But even more astonishing, as Baroness Stern, a crossbench peer, discovered when she asked, is the number of these that can result in a prison sentence. Believe it or not, there are 1,036 that the official could identify. There may well be more.

It is now an imprisonable offence to allow an unlicensed concert to take place in a church hall. You can go to prison

An End to Censorship in Canada?

If Ezra Levant’s blog is anything to go by, the days of ‘section 13’, which allows Canada’s human rights commissions to act as censors, should be numbered. The only downside is that Levant’s supply of eloquent statements in defence of free speech may dry up. In anticipation of this, here is another gem (from the Michael Coren show):

Middle Eastern Wisdom and a Debate on Islam

According to Ayatolah Khomeini: „The sweat of a camel that eats unclean substances is unclean.“ For more Islamic wisdom, see here.

On a somewhat related note, Robert Spencer has posted the first part of a debate with Daniel Peterson on the subject “Islam threat or not?” The first part looks interesting and, unlike some in the comments section, I am not yet ready to conclude that Peterson is an idoit [sic].

The Economist on the ‘Idealism of the Lynch Mob’

“… it is not always the worst or most culpable people who are targeted for blame or offered up to appease it; it is sometimes the weakest and most expendable instead. And too often the blamers are cynically opportunistic. The Baby P case has instantly been adduced as “proof” that the welfare state, or local councils, or unorthodox family arrangements, are hopelessly delinquent. (Oddly, some of those now crying out for the government to engineer families and emasculate councils have, in the past, demanded that the government be less intrusive and nannying, and that Whitehall give more power away.)