Political scrapbook gives thumbs-up to private health

I occasionally read the lefty rag-blog Political Scrapbook. Don't get me wrong, it is utter tosh, but wet-behind-the-ear, newbie, don't-know-you're-born bloggers such as myself should keep an eye on what the rest of the blogosphere is up to. Largely, Scrapbook serves up bilge in the form of Tory-bashing tittle-tattle and pro-union sabre-rattling. One of their favourite wheezes is to bicker about non-existent cuts to NHS spending. Nationalised health care is their sacred cow, and privatising healthcare is what satan does to get his mojo back when he's having a bad horn day. As such, I was rather amused to see this:

I'm so glad they're starting to adopt a more open-minded approach.

Diane Abbott and the end of men

Diane Abbott is the epitome of the nannying politician. She recently made a hand-wringing and spectacularly ill-thought-out speech about the "crisis of masculinity". It's utter tosh, here are a few of the many reasons why she is talking rubbish.

The biggest problem with this bunkum is that she talks about Men and Women (deliberately capitalised) as identifiable 'gender groups', rather than as individuals. She then talks about the relationship between those gender groups being adversarial. What Abbott is trying to do here, is to fabricate conflict between groups, where very little really exists. Where it does exist, there is actually just conflict between individuals, who probably dislike each other for many reasons other than their sex.

But that aside, what is astounding is that she claims some deep insight into the minds of young men:

"Fewer men than ever are able to connect the fabric of their lives to those [male] archetypes."

How on earth does she know that? Has she asked lots of young men, "Excuse me. Could you tell me whether or not you are able to connect the fabric of your life to male archetypes?"... to which the traditional response is "You what?!". She then points out that,

More people are employed behind tills than mining coal [and] Machines and not sweating men assemble cars

Good! I don't know a single man who aspires to work his knackers off in a factory or a coal mine, when he could make more money sitting in a comfortable office. Men do not long for 'traditional male employment'. The only people who do are Abbott and her socialist buddies. Once men moved away from manual labour, they also left the clutches of aggressive unions and are hence are no longer Labour voters by default. Boo Hoo eh Diane?

And after that, Abbott contradicts herself almost immediately, by slagging off companies like Tescos for having the temerity to offer young men jobs "where work is unsatisfying". Well guess what Diane? Filling your lungs with coal dust and knackering your body by the age of 40 is even less satisfying than stacking shelves, but that doesn't stop you romanticising it.

She then makes a bunch of generalisations about men based on some dodgy stats, concluding that men are now consumers not providers, as if those roles are mutually exclusive. Needless to say, if a man generalised about women in the way she does about men, he'd have balls chewed off by Germaine Greer before you could say "Nutcracker".

So, all in all, this was a bleating, hand-wringing, shroud-waving guff-ball of a speech, with more holes in it than a tramp's sock collection. It was designed to get us all longing for the good-old days when working class men bundled themselves into awful working conditions for naff all money and dared not ask to do anything else, other than line up to vote Labour once every four years. Those days are gone, and no-one but Abbott misses them.

The EU policy merry-go-round

An organisation which passes itself off as an NGO, but is actually part-funded by the EU, recommends that the EU should exert more control over the private lives of EU citizens. Some people try to oppose this in a court set up by the EU, which dismisses the claim and this is all applauded by a member of the unelected executive branch of the EU. Life imitating art, as I'm sure any Kafka-lovers would agree.

This all surrounds Eurocare, which campaigns for tighter regulations on alcohol sales, including the disastrous minimum pricing wheeze. But frankly, you could fill in the above paragraph with details of any topic which the EU is sinking its decaying teeth into; the tactics are the same. Pump taxpayers' money into quasi-charitable organisations, which then go on to campaign for more taxpayers' cash to go to the EU, whilst trampling on the freedoms of ordinary folk at the same time.

And people wonder why we want out.

Super-charging the anti-debt argument

The real immorality of debt-fuelled government is that we're forcing the voiceless unborn to pay for it.

Right now, the UK is currently in approximately £1.2 trillion of debt. That's £20,000 per Brit; a sickening and growing figure. The most appalling aspect of this gargantuan, gluttonous debt, is that paying it back will largely fall to a generation who has had no say in racking it up. We're taking from the future earnings today's infants and the unborn, and spending it on ourselves. Because of our actions, our children will have less money for defence, healthcare, education, whatever they might want... they will have less money, full stop (that's a 'period' for the Americans reading).

For me, this is the most inhuman and immoral aspect of our national debt, and it is woefully underused. But given this clear immorality, why do we keep hearing such weak, hackneyed and unimaginative  rhetoric from anti-debt campaigners? "We've maxed out the nation's credit card."... (stifles a yawn) "We're borrowing X.... Million.... Pounds.... per day." (yawning overtly) "By the time you've finished reading this sentence the extra debt we've racked up could have paid for a donkey sanctuary on the moon." (rolling eyes and heading for the door).

Pro-debt campaigners are brilliantly effective at setting out their stall in an appealing way. They talk about real-life stories and intuitively understandable quantities of money. It is more difficult to frame the anti-debt argument in this way as most of the people being taken for a ride have not yet been born. But this only bolsters the need to make that argument in an appealing and intuitive manner. Anti-debt campaigners and politicians need to point to this immorality with much stronger and clearer language: "We're stealing from our children", "We're reaching into our kids' pockets", "We're cutting our childrens' wages". Talk about billions and trillions, whilst correct, does not speak to the soul.

The most terrifying EU story you've never read

I found an obscure EU policy document whilst browsing Twitter yesterday. It comes from the EU's Institute for Strategic Studies (EUISS), an agency of the EU. Issued on 6 May 2013 and written in a spectacularly one-sided manner, it argues for a gradual military integration of EU state militaries into a single European military. What I find terrifying about this document is how much power it describes the EU as having currently, never mind the powers it is gradually accruing.

The headline point there might not seem so worrying. The EU is always trying to expand its remit, but there are treaties in place to limit its powers to do so. How does the EUISS think that the various EU treaties will   prevent nation states "integrating their military capabilities".

"the current EU treaties need not necessarily be amended as they are flexible and permissive enough to allow for new dedicated structures for policy coordination in this domain to be set up and tested"

So apparently, setting up a single EU military does not need any new treaties. Even the most swivel-eyed EU-phile would admit that this would be a serious transfer of power from nation states. Yet despite this, according to EUISS, it would not need any new democratic mandate nor even approval from nation state governments. The EU bureaucrats could just start the ball rolling right now. As an aside, this completely scuppers the UK Labour party's argument that any future transfer of power to Brussels would trigger a referendum in the UK.

So having tipped their hand that the EU need not worry itself about petty concerns such as nation-state sovereignty, what does EUISS say on the topic? It does at least recognise that there might be some concerns among nation states, and here is how they allay them:

"the history of European integration – starting notably with the Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) – offers the best possible evidence of how national ‘sovereignty’, rather than being transferred or even given up, can be broadly preserved by being pooled and shared"

Which boils down to "you've already given up some of your sovereignty, which we think went pretty well, so there can't be any reason not to give up any more". There is also some scaremongering. Apparently, EU nations are already losing their sovereignty by not integrating with the EU.

"Europeans are already losing sovereignty by not consolidating, not optimising, not innovating, not regionalising and not integrating their military capabilities."

Whilst this argument is left flapping in the wind like dead chicken tied to a pole, it appears to imply that only large countries with massive militaries can hope to achieve foreign policy goals. This is utterly simplistic, and ignores the immense influence small nations (Switzerland, Norway, the Most Serene Republic of Venice) can wield with focused and well-informed diplomacy.

There are so many more problems with this 70-page harbinger of doom, and I may bring them out in another post soon. My main point in writing this post is this:

States should not have excessive powers, and those powers that they do have should be ruthlessly controlled by democratically accountable representatives of the people. What this document describes is a super-state with enormous and growing powers and next to no democratic accountability and dwindling legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Europeans. Put simply, this document, and what it proposes, is the most grave threat to Europeans' freedom since Fascism.

The only way to prevent this, is to leave the EU, soon.

Dennis Skinner is not funny

Quirky goings-on always accompany the Queen's speech, which we had yesterday. At the slightly bizarre ceremony, where a bloke with a golden club marches through the House of Commons like he has a sprained ankle, one Labour MP has made a habit of 'heckling' every year. I'm sure he's a decent guy, but he just isn't funny (scroll to 35s).
 

MPs chuckling like schoolboys at a joke that isn't funny just makes them look like an self-observing clique. The BBC sucking up to him (at the start of the video) makes them look like they're desperate to be in that clique too. If only they knew how daft they look to the rest of the country.

Booze pricing: The elite shows its ugly side again

I've mentioned before how the push for alcohol minimum pricing is mainly motivated by snobs wanting to control the lives of the poor. This video backs this up.

 

It's from the University of Stirling's 'Alcohol Strategy Report'. At 0:30, Professor Gerard Hastings gives up his underlying motivation, as well as the fact that his strategy is based on a feeble understanding of how people work.

"Drinking in the UK doesn't happen by accident. It is carefully engineered by alcohol companies who make money out of our drinking."

This says that people only drink because alcohol companies want them to. This implies that drinkers are shambling automatons who pay no attention to their own interests when deciding to get drunk. That is utterly ludicrous. The drink that I see the most advertising for is Fosters. By their logic, I should drink Fosters by the barrel. I don't because it tastes like a badger's ballsack; I drink other products, which I never see advertised, instead. I drink them because I like them. That is how people work. They do things because they like doing them.

The obvious counter to this is that people don't know that drinking is bad for them, and so they're making a decision without the full facts. Again, this is nonsense. It is common knowledge that drinking booze is bad for you. No-one needs the entirety of the University of Stirling's 'evidence base' at their fingertips to know that drinking can be a problem. People are nowhere near as ignorant as these academics might think.

All of the recommendations of this strategy are based on an assumption that aspects of ordinary people's lives should be controlled by experts such as those shown in this video. Of course, Prof Hastings here would argue that his sole intention is to improve people's health. Whilst this is a noble aim, improving someone's health by controlling their behaviour, their body and their life is immoral and doesn't really help them at all.