The Last Ditch

Hope's funeral

I promised myself long ago that, just as my grandfather stood in the rainy streets of London to honour Sir Winston Churchill as his funeral procession passed, so I would for Margaret's. He loved Churchill for much the same reason that I loved her. Hope. In dark days, when our country seemed likely to fail, they both persuaded us to buckle down, do our best and look to the future. They promised us that Britain could be great again.

Both promises failed. The Second World War delivered the Poles for whom we declared it to one of only two regimes on Earth worse than Hitler's. It left the Soviet Union stronger. It saved few Jews. It crippled Britain's economy and left us in massive debt to the Americans. Those Americans gave post-war aid to the Germans on such a scale that they rapidly overtook our war-damaged industries. A German who married one of my wife's relatives visited my home town in the 1950's, while rationing and post-war austerity was still in force. "Did you people really win?" she asked. "It doesn't look like it". The war left the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and it left us in, at best, the second division of nations. And in 1946, having delivered ourselves, as we thought, of Germany's National Socialists, we elected British Socialists to run the "commanding heights" of the economy for the nation.

When the post-war consensus between the barons of the landed aristocracy and the labour aristocracy brought us to our economic knees; when the bailiffs' men of the IMF came in to dictate terms; when rubbish swamped the streets and the dead went unburied; when my wife's family burned shoes to keep warm during power cuts and when families everywhere tightened their belts because their supporting wage-earners' working days were cut to three, we lacked hope again. Managed decline seemed our destiny. We told ourselves that our past successes were only to do with the wickedness of Empire and that a slide into poverty was now inevitable - and even deserved. It was a dark hour to be alive even if, like me, you were a young, optimistic graduate setting out promisingly on his life's work.

Thatcher brought hope and promised us a new Britain of opportunity. She promised to liberate the lives and resources tied up in non-jobs and fake industries. She promised us that Britain could be something again; not the old something but a new, vibrant place. And those of us who were not on the take from a corrupt Socialist state or living as parasites on the workers as trade union officials welcomed it. We set about working hard; doing well by doing good.

And for a while it seemed real. If when Neil Kinnock dies, he goes to Hell, the demons need not raise a sweat tormenting him. All they need do is play, on an infinite loop, the moment this week when a TV interviewer asked him if Britain was better or worse after 11 years of Thatcher. His tormented face told the truth even as his twisted lips mouthed the necessary lie. Necessary because without it he would have had to confess that his whole life has been a self-serving fraud. Without that lie, his career can only be explained as duping the working class to raise his talent-free family to undeserved wealth.

Yet Thatcher's promise too was like VE day. It was briefly, gloriously real, but then a sadder reality kicked in. The post-war consensus resumed. The British State moved steadily back to its pre-1979 position as the most important force in the country and the British people resumed their willing dependence. For all practical purposes, democracy is suspended because three out of four families in this still-rich nation are in receipt of money taken by force by that state from their fellow-citizens. David Cameron is far more like Macmillan or Hume than he is like Heath, let alone Thatcher. Ed Milliband, for all the contentious talk, is essentially as in favour of a "mixed economy" (and buttering up corrupt and destructive union leaders) as any post-war leader of his party.

So Margaret's career, in the end, was a waste of her talents and our time. Were it not for her, we might have hit bottom by now and be rebuilding a civilisation on the ruins of our decadence.

Yet I respect her because like Winston, she was sincere. She believed, probably to her death, that she had led us towards a better future. She certainly tried. No Prime Minister ever worked so hard or took so much flak in the process. That she failed is not her fault. It is ours. And that is why I will stand, head bowed, as her gun carriage rolls by tomorrow. She was the best of us and, all-too-briefly, gave us hope. I am grateful for the memory of that.

Compare and contrast

Sir David Nicholson admits failings over Mid Staffs but refuses to resign - Telegraph.

Sir David Nicholson, were our society organised as the defunct British Communist Party to which he once belonged might desire, would now be put up against a wall and shot. In our wet British version of Soviet Healthcare, however, he avoids all responsibility for the NHS's lethal failures. After all, there are plenty more patients where those came from.

Compare and contrast with one Andrew Mason, who wrote to his staff before leaving;

After four-and-a-half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding, I was fired today ... As CEO I'm accountable.

I rather suspect that Mason has put more efficient and vigorous effort into the success of Groupon than Nicholson has to that of the NHS. Yet he was held accountable by his board on behalf of his shareholders and accepted it with grace. Good for him. He failed this time, but with an attitude like that, I am sure he will yet do great things. I would hire him, if I owned a suitable company. I wouldn't employ Nicholson to clean my boots.

So is the success or failure of a company that organises online discounts more important than that of a whole nation's healthcare system? Should the bosses of an internet start-up be stricter with their CEO than Parliament is with the head of the NHS? What other conclusion, exactly, could a man from Mars infer from these two items of news?

Incidentally, Nicholson claimed expenses of over £50,000 a year on top of a basic salary of £200,000 and benefits in kind of £37,600 at a time when he was in charge of health service "cuts". His current wife, twenty years his junior and a former graduate intern in his office, is the £155,000 a year chief executive of Birmingham Children's Hospital. He wrote references for her during her meteoric rise through the NHS management ranks. Ain't life grand in the public service?

The NHS may not have adopted the iron discipline of the Soviet system, but it seems to have all the other elements. Generally, I prefer gentler market systems of accountability, but for aparatchiks like Nicholson, I could make an exception.

The British welfare state has created more invalids than the Great War

 

The video is a little ropey but please persist and view the whole thing. As ever, Dr Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) is both interesting and darkly amusing.

He reports that, under a threat of violence (50% of doctors have been assaulted in the last 12 months) most general practitioners in Britain are routinely filling out fraudulent certificates enabling fit individuals to go "on the sick" where benefits are 60% higher than for unemployment and there is no need to pretend to seek work. More than 2.5 million people have such certificates and he claims that "the great majority of them are fraudulent or at least untruthful." More than a million people have them for "depression and anxiety" alone. He comments wrily that it is an achievement of the British welfare state that it has "created more invalids than the First World War".

Another achievement of the British welfare state is an enormous growth in heroin use. In the 1950s, when heroin addicts were registered with the Home Office, there were known to be about 60 in the whole country. It is now thought that there are about 300,000. He describes an official ideology that heroin addiction is a sickness beyond the addicts' control, which renders them unable to work and drives them to crime. An ideology he says is "completely and obviously wrong."

Every user chose freely to take heroin the first time and most use it intermittently for up to a year before beginning to take it regularly. Most users live in a sub-culture in which the consequences of taking heroin are far better known, as he puts it, than "the dates of the Second World War".

He says it's untrue that medical or other support is necessary to give up heroin. He jokingly calls Mao Zedong "the greatest drug therapist in history" because he told China's heroin addicts that if they didn't give it up he would shoot them. 20 million duly did. Without recommending such a radical approach, he points out that this clearly proves a "conceptual difference between, say, rheumatoid arthritis and drug addiction." Mao's approach, after all, would not have "cured" the former.

For so long as users don't give up heroin he says that's no reason for them not to work. Research shows that in the fifties most American addicts worked normally and indeed most of our own users now lead very active working lives - except that their "work" is burglary.

The growth in heroin use is therefore driven, he seems to suggest, by the needs of the "bureaucracy of care" serving the addicts. Its members need a passive population that takes no personal responsibility in order to secure their jobs. He believes that "at some level" these public employees know full well that they are playing games. In his words;

I would say the addiction services need the addicts more than the addicts need the services.

That's a more shocking critique of welfarism from an insider that I would ever have dared to offer from the outside. To suggest that an army of "carers" has, in effect, steadily built heroin use from 60 to 300,000 to give themselves jobs seems so wicked as to be scarcely believable. But then who would have thought the learned members of our medical profession could be recruited to knowing, if not willing, participation in frauds worth billions of pounds?

For all that its servants justify their jobs by droning on about the supposed immorality and greed of their bogeymen in business, only the state, ladies and gentlemen, can corrupt on such a massive scale.

Doctors out of their boxes

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: The dictatorship of public health.

I am not quite sure how I missed the linked article back in September but I am glad I found it via Chris Snowdon's review of the year at his excellent blog, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. The authoritarians of the medical establishment are in many ways our best hope for liberty. This may seem paradoxical, but bear with me.

The greater the State becomes, the more authoritarians it attracts. Wormtongue types are drawn, as so many of them already have been, by the chance to subvert legitimate authority to their own ends while living on the state's plunder. The more they succeed, the more arrogant they become. They see no legitimate boundaries to their control of their fellow men. Our corrupt political class will offer no defence against these parasites unless and until popular resistance threatens their own power. We cannot count on their principles, if indeed they have any. We can rely entirely, however, on their self-interest.

 Where, however, is this resistance to come from? State education, state broadcasting and the generally emasculating effect of the Welfare State have much weakened the yeoman spirit that made England, for most of its history, delightfully ungovernable. The unthinking majority of voters will never rebel - until it's far too late - against threats to freedom of thought. Attacks on their lifestyle however are another matter. Cromwell fell not because the Monarchy won a rematch of its debate with republicanism, but because, having weakened his appeal by forbidding dancing, aleing and Christmas, his hypocrisy in having his son succeed him (just like a King) tipped the scales of popular feeling.

The state can beat up as many anti-statist intellectuals as it likes and no-one will protest. Let it beat up the smokers, drinkers and pie-fans however and popular resistance can be expected - even from those usually too idle to move further than to the nearest Greggs. Doctors with God complexes may therefore be our best hope. Perhaps as we enter the final phase of end-of-year excess, we should be campaigning for votes to be proportionate to BMI, units of alcohol per week or fags per day?

Please tell me the Left is right...

LISTEN: Jobless Man Who Won't Get Up At 8am | LBC

...in condemning this caller to LBC radio as a Tory plant. That would be far less depressing than it being real as it would suggest there is some guttering flame of entrepreneurship, initiative and political killer instinct in what I had written off as the work shy, policy-thieving ranks of the Blair-imitating "Conservatives."

The redemptive power of labour

What I Learned in the Poverty War by Peter Cove, City Journal Autumn 2012

The linked article is one of the most encouraging I have read for a while. It describes the experience of a former member of the "welfare industrial complex" (the author's splendid coinage) who founded a private company to profit from finding work for the dole-dependent. His work influenced Rudy Guiliani as Mayor of New York who is quoted as saying, sagely;

...all the incentives in the welfare programs run by the city, the state, and the federal government were wrong. All the incentives were to put people on welfare. People put more people on welfare, they got bigger offices, they got bigger titles, they got more money, so in essence, failure in the lives of the people and failure in society became success for the welfare worker...

Please read the whole thing. It's worth it to note how welfarists in the USA opposing his plans sound just like Polly screeching madly against IDS's reforms. Leftists everywhere despise interference with their self-satisfied schemes to exploit the poor.

Hysteria. His or ours?

How do we escape the hysteria that threatens to erode public debate? | Peter Beaumont | Comment is free | The Observer.

The linked article by Peter Beaumont cheered me up immensely. If the control-freaks of the left-wing press, so intent on setting every possible parameter of public debate, fear that;

The blogosphere, increasingly fuelled by toxic language, is hindering honest engagement rather than encouraging it

then we political bloggers are doing well. To quote (as I have not done in such style since my misguided Communist youth) from Chairman Mao:

It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves but have achieved spectacular successes in our work.

The truth is that the elite Beaumont calls "opinion formers" feel threatened by electronic democracy. They had long ago managed to infiltrate and subvert the old media to present a consistent statist view that has been acquiesced to, but never truly accepted, by what Mao would have called "the masses" and I just think of as "us." We express this division of reality by the term "politically correct". If it wasn't different from that which is merely "correct", there would be no need for the qualifying adjective.

Beaumont considers any view that is not politically-correct as "hysterical", but I think the only hysteria here is his. True democrats seek to serve the people, not mould them. They certainly don't despise them, fear them and regard their use of language as "toxic". I only wish I could be as optimistic as he is pessimistic that his game is up.

"Opinion formers" everywhere are seeking to manage the internet. Communist China employs legions of trolls to contradict every anti-government view expressed online in an advanced form of electronic agitprop. The corrupt elites of the world will fight to keep their thieving hands on the levers of power. They will seek every possible way to hinder the resistance of those they regard as their lawful prey.

Pinheads dancing on angles

Rio Ferdinand: I'm not racist, I was calling Ashley Cole a fake | Football | guardian.co.uk.

Is anyone else as amused as me by the confusion of the PC classes over the Ferdinand/Terry kerfuffle? For the masses, the question of whether one can call a black man a f****** black c*** in an ironic or sarcastic way, while remaining a right-on non-racist seems somewhat less-than-pressing. 

For the theologians of the Left however this is not funny. You may giggle with me at the earnest tone of the linked article in English Pravda, but this stuff really matters to them. To the rest of us, their interest in such fiddling with language while New Rome burns merely exposes their lack of substance. They need to set groups of us against each other, the better to build their power. Such is their continued focus on dividing that they fail to notice the nation they thus seek to rule is circling the economic plughole.

A society whose intellectuals agonise over the heated exchanges of the thoughtless going on mindless may truly be said to have failed. Rough young men play football. Rough young sportsmen - black and white - can be uncouth and vulgar. Their speech is not - at times - quite as delicate as your maiden aunt might wish. None of that matters. Least of all the football. If you enjoy the pomposity of the Guardian, you are going to love the self-importance of the F.A. - an organisation whose actual importance is coded into its everyday name. It will speak next on this topic and I promise you the only well-adjusted response will be to giggle.

My favourite manager would disagree of course. He once said. "Football's not a matter of life and death. It's far more important than that." Were he here today, he would give all actors in this farce a tongue-lashing that would make their expletives seem tame. And then he would get back to the game.

Get out of our heads

The Soviets became more clever towards the end of their rule. Rather than continue to have show trials and make the rivers red with the blood of class enemies, they started to lock them up as psychiatric cases. Doctors "took care" of them, rather than executioners and jailers making class enemies of their friends and families. There was a grim logic to it. Faced with total state power, unrestrained by morality, you had to be mad to speak out, right?

So what to make of the (so far) milder modern notion of assuming one's opponents are psychologically predisposed to be wrong? Take this egregious example. Sir Keith Joseph was unsympathetic to the idea of an all-powerful state nannying every aspect of its citizens lives "in their own best interests" and "for their own safety" (two giveaway phrases that should always prepare you to be oppressed and bullshitted in equal measure). So he must have been autistic, right? If the poor guy had been a little less far along that spectrum, he would have voted to take other people's money by force to do "social justice" like everyone else.

 

I met Sir Keith a couple of times when I was a student politician. As a then recent convert from Marxism, I talked to him about my reservations on such issues as inherited wealth. He patiently explained why I was wrong. He was not remotely like the Werthers' Original grandfather. Indeed he had a crisp and measured way of expressing himself that smacked of professors before they decided they need to get down with the kids. But he was a thoughtful chap who had formed an honest view.

There's something disrespectful about attributing opinions to such causes, even when they are used to excuse rather than condemn. When a softist blames psychology, society, upbringing or the system for criminal conduct, that insults not only the poor and vulnerable who don't become criminals, but also the ones who do. We all have our issues and have taken our wrong turns but the least we can expect from each other is to be taken at face value. Isn't it?

We all fall short sometimes but "bad" is still only a criticism, not a diagnosis. Bad is something we can discuss and dispute. Bad is also something we can do something about. Mad just leaves us at your mercy to be cured so we think just like you. Please show us the respect therefore of treating our views as our own. Mistaken, we may be, but please don't insult us by attributing our differences from you to the way we were reared, the class we are from, the state of our mental health or even (perhaps most tempting of all) the arts/sciences/social sciences slant of our education.

Anyway just what, without fear of hypocrisy, are we to make of people so confident in their own world view (and their own sanity) that they consider dissent a psychiatric disorder?

Stefan Molyneux debates the role of the state

 

This is a long discussion, but I found it fascinating. Not, you understand, that it produces any answers. It is hard to persuade people who are only familiar with living under a powerful state that there is a better alternative. They simply can't imagine it and begin to be afraid. The problem is that if we can't persuade them we are all going to get there in the worst possible way, by the uncontrolled collapse of the current system.

h/t The UK Libertarian