Daniel Hannan and Enoch Powell

To see what exactly Daniel Hannan said about Powell, take ten minutes and watch this. It is a ten minute clip worth watching. As for Powell himself, Hannan did specifically refer to his views on national independence (not surprising for a Eurosceptic) and advocacy of small government, not his views on immigration.Anyway, it is nice to see some room for dissent in a major party.

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.

The more Big brother watches us, the less he seems to see

The title of this post comes straight from Ross Clark’s book on the surveillance society: “The Road to Southend Pier”. In many ways, this is a worthwhile book, showing how the surveillance state –frighteningly omnipresent in theory- is in reality breathtakingly inefficient at takling crime in the conventional sense while creating new, spurious offences.

One passage seems ill thought through though: “For those

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 …

Freedom is slavery: brown is looking for compulsory volunteers

Brown looks set to adopt a bad idea from Obama. He is also doing his worst to underperform Cameron in matters of individual liberty:

“Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to ensure every young person has done 50 hours of voluntary work by the time they are 19-years-old.” (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

Internet Regulation: Think of the Children!

New Labour seems to be serious about starting to regulate the net more generally rather than in specific cases where real or imagined criminal activity is an issue. The latest idea is an enforced age labelling of websites. As usual, a need to protect the children is at the forefront of justifying government interference. For once, I think the welfare of our children is a genuinely relevant issue, though not in the way that the government has in mind.

The age rating proposed may not sound much like an exercise in censorship

Brown, Cameron and Ricardian Equivalence

Are Brown’s German critics and Cameron misguided in criticising the current borrowing binge? Edmund Conway seems to think so. He recently wrote in the telegraph that this is the right time for a fiscal expansion and that the problem of Ricardian equivalence [1] can be counteracted by carefully planned spending cuts in the near future.
This sounds reasonable in general and the present crisis creates exactly the kind of situation where a fiscal stimulus would normally be advocated.

A Clip from No2ID

No news from the Kraut today, just a short anti ID card clip: Take Jane