Nick Clegg: Reality Cheque has bounced.

Via Tim Worstall "The Beast of Liberty", we hear that Nick the Clegg is suggesting even more "rights" for Fathers.

He wants support for Fathers. Well, there are plenty of other places to assist Fathers, and this is not the first place or even high up the list. Even if it were, it is salami-slicing the population. Special rights for this group, that group and t'othur. Better to stop hampering everyone, stop taxing everyone. That way Fathers, Mothers, Grandparents, sons and daughters will benefit. That is the kind of "equality" one needs - equality before the law and state - no special favours.

Lower taxes, reduce red tape. This helps everyone, makes the UK more productive with less dead weight. More light and less friction. 

To do that you need to get the UK out of the EU, Nicholas. 

We have seen nematode worms stand up for the Referendum more than the LibDems, who slithered out of way when it counted, so I will not hold my breath.

The very fact that Nick comes up with this sort of suggestion shows he has no idea at all what it is like trying to start, run and build a business. An SME can be pole-axed by such "legislation" - I will not call it a law. Imagine having someone go AWOL but demand their old post back. You need to hire a temporary replacement who, apart from the months taken to get up to speed, will be working with the knowledge that both of you know it is unlikely to be permanent - even less likely than if it were replacing a woman, who might reconsider and decide to stay looking after her kids (wise move, if you ask me - as soon as I can earn enough, Mrs Thorny will want to do just that). And when the parent returns there will be further months of reduced productivity as they settle back in.

Making such a suggestion shows the kind of world Nick the Clegg has inhabited - i.e. one far away from the true wealth creating sector of the UK economy!

Daily Politics, Tues 22nd: Clegg talks Bollocks

Go watch it.

Total fluff and wibble on health.

He also says that all three parties have come to a consensus on budget spending and it is all about lobbying allocation. Rancid little creep.

On Europe he wibbled and wormed even more. Slippery and disingenuous. He tries some re-writing of history and tries to project his reality-distortion, entrenched in his head out to the surroundings. He failed.

A Lib Dem leader, he is.


EDIT: Shame there is no transcript, as a good fisking would be in order.

Show us the dagger!

So yelled the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press. Good on them. I was very pleased they did so. The sight of Slime-on Simon Hughes and Vin Sckable was sickening.

The Lib Dem leadership is important not in itself, but as an indication of what bunch of scoundrels will be drained of support, so letting the other group in.

As for Sir Ming Campbell, he is a Gent. Well meaning. Alas, that is not really a total compliment. He is too nice for politics, I feel. I do hope he did not tender his resignation in the hope it would be refused - that would have been too cruel given, I suspect, it was accepted without complaint.

It is a sad day on a personal scale, but not on a national one. The Lib Dems do need a new leader, if only to show to everyone what a bunch of incompetent, do-gooding, faux-Liberals they actually are.

Hamster/Snake/Alien

Right now the three main parties are equally unappealing.

When asked which leader you prefer, right now, Fri 13th July 2007, for me it is Gordon Brown. The term "prefer" is not quite right, as it is really a form of least-worst - who is the least objectionable.

WHAT! You cry, has Roger gone mad?

To answer, I have my hamster/snake/alien argument. If you wanted a PM, which one would YOU choose? I know it is a false dilemma, but bear with me. UPDATE: Note that this does not imply I would ever VOTE for ANY of the three, least of all Brown.

A hamster is naive, trusting, weak and self-centred, if cuddly. Ming, basicially.
A Snake is quick, cold, often aggressive, secretive and dangerous, but a known quantity. Brown.
An Alien is mostly unknown. The veneer looks good and appears smooth, but when in power what on earth (or beyond) will happen? Cameron.

I think if you have any sense you would choose, like I did, the Snake. A hamster is a risk to itself and to us. A Snake is dangerous, but at least you roughly know in what way. It will defend itself though and is not to be taken lightly - and probably views the hamster as its next snack. The Alien is an unknown quantity - the worst kind, in fact. Many suspect, given recent behaviour, that under that mammalian exterior, a reptile lurks, not quite like the Snake, but with similar motives.

Right now, modern British Politics presents itself to us as this false dilemma - Hamster, Snake or Alien. It is an utterly absurd situation. It cannot go on like this. Something needs to give. A Libertarian party is so desperately needed.

If you think so too, then how about writing an essay on the subject and potentially win £1000 from the Libertarian Alliance?

I'm certainly going to give it a go!

FibDumbs on Housing - more irrational dreaming.

Oh dear - The Fibberall Dumboldtwats have come up with another stream of irrational nonsensitude.

Sir Ming is a nice gentleman, but he really should stop listening to his party, as they are a bunch of morons, judging by this latest crop of ideas. I suspect in their impatience for results they did not wait for anything productive to grow, but just harvested the manure they spread shortly beforehand.

Sir Ming is right, sort of, when he says that Labour is ghettoising housing, leaving poor and vulnerable people living on large ‘sink estates’ which offered little hope or opportunity. He also said it was a national disgrace that one million children still lived in overcrowded accommodation and 130,000 children lived in temporary housing.

However, Sir Ming forgot to mention that it was not Labour that ghettoised people or created 'sink estates' per se. In my view it is the very concept of State-built/run/subsidised social housing that creates these problems. Sir Ming also forgets to mention the proportion of all these suffering children that were intentionally born into such conditions by their parent or parents and that the State actively encourages such births due to the prevailing mechanisms of Welfarism.

Sir Ming is, however, bang on when he says VAT should not apply to housing renovations, which are, in effect, necessities in most of the cases or if not they tend to increase Council Taxes. This is more an issue of taxation, not Social Housing, however.

Moving on to the other "ideas", we see they are strangers to reason.

Gerroff Moi Laaan'

He intends to allow local authorities to buy land zoned as farmland at farmland prices, re-zone it and then sell it on for a proft. This is almost jaw-droppingly naive, scandalous, corruptible, totalitarian hogwash. Local councils are bad enough without allowing them to get their greedy hands on land for redevelopment by their squalid golfing partners while taking a slice in to the bargain. On one level you can see that they have a point, for the council does get some form of payback for the increase in value of that land due to re-zoning but the mechanism and mode is so utterly ham-fisted and open to abuse. I have long considered Lib-Dems to be naive fools and this proves it yet again. Now, if the council built a tram line or electric trolleybus infrastructure - cables, transformers etc - to serve the land (note: not some poxy excuse of a bus service that will be withdrawn once the bunting is down) then I could understand more, for they would be seriously increasing the value of that land and integrating it into the community. However, as it stands the "idea" denies the original landowner its true value and tempts local councils to re-zone for fiscal purposes (which is polite) not community benefit. The scope for corruption is immense.

Would it not be better to allow land to be bought by developers of transport - rail, tram or trolley companies, for example - subject to local referendum, who then are the people to sell off the land for housing development once the infrastructure is in place? London grew like this. Surely we want people to live in houses with predictable, non-polluting forms of transport into centres of employment. Better still, build the housing right over certain stretches of the new railway and even over some stations. Hong Kong does this all the time. Each rail station becomes a massive high rise hub of housing, shops, offices. The MTR of Hong Kong works its assets hard and most benefit. Maybe it is indeed TfL that does the expansion into the Thames Gateway. They get the land, build the rail, tram, tube connections and develop the immediate station and air rights, then sell off the land around to fund the project. This might reduce some of the issues that happened around the Jubilee extension. If someone has a better idea, I am all ears!

Rental by Any Other Name

Another concept is equity sharing, but in this case the Lib-Dems want to not only control the price that the original property is sold at, but to also control the RESALE price too. This would mean, in effect, that once people are in such properties it is highly likely they will have to remain in such, limiting their choices in terms of purchaser and next home. They are unlikely to achieve "escape velocity" unless the housing market seriously crashes and then they would probably have achieved it anyway without the risk of a mortgage! Alas, this is a manifestation of do-goodery and patronising infantilisation of the population. It will simultaneously distort the market, imprison people and subject them to risks they would otherwise not encounter. They should be honest about what the true effect would be and just say they want to build Section Houses, Nursing Staff Quarters etc. for key workers and be done with it.

Communism by Any Other Name

The idea of spreading about the problem of sink estates has been bandied about by both NeueArbeit and the Lib-Dumbs. We already suffer from borderline Communism in planning where people are forced to build in "affordable housing" into their schemes which means the State has its dirty, interfering fingernails into each private housing project. This takes it further and seeks to spread out the sink estates like some perverse blend of homeopathic plague. Sink estates are not sinks because they are large, but because of the nature of some of the people in them and the nature of the relationship between the residents and their landlord, the State. Note that private Social housing rarely if at all becomes a sink estate. Spreading them about will not change the nature of the people, nor the landlord. In fact all it will do is make the total impact of the small number of dysfunctional residents more widespread. The State is an appalling landlord. "Social Housing" is by definition antisocial.

To resolve this:

• The Welfare State should be a safety net, not a hammock in which entire lives can be conceived, grow and then reproduce again.
• Housing to be provided mostly by the voluntary and private sectors where there is no "right" to housing, as all that "right" does is result in a hard, unwanted, unavoidable obligation on the taxpayer to provide it. If the obligation were truly desired, i.e. voluntary, then those individuals who wish to gladly pay money towards subsidised housing can fund the voluntary sector (OK?).
• Immigrants should not be provided State housing as they are, by definition, economic migrants and as such should be capable of looking after themselves.
• People who increase the size of their families while living in State housing either via additional children, marriage or the accumulation of "dependents" should not be considered for review of living space.
• Confirmed, granted Asylum seekers should be given time-limited assisted housing (say 6 months) until they are also economically active (which we are told they mostly are, right?) and then market rates should apply.
• We have many people not economically active including vast amounts of the 900,000 of Gordon's paper-pushing "salaried unemployed" whilst importing or at least allowing the inflow of labour. That needs to change.

The Lib Dem solution is like trying to cure dysentery by handing out nappies.

Fix the problem, not the symptom.

How to make your home unsellable, by the Lib-Dems (WTF-UK pt.1)

Latest piece of moonbattery by the Fib-Dumboldtwats is to have an "energy mortgage".

In this scheme, home owners improve the property using some form of loan§ that remains with the property. The loan would pay for double glazing (read: ghastly, inappropriate, architecturally insensitive, potentially environmentally unfriendly* UPVC monstrosities that can often be draughtier than well maintained wooden sash windows), a new boiler or cavity wall insulation.

If there is one thing to put off a buyer is to have a legacy arrangement they have no control over. There is an existing and very simple way to fund improvements and link it to the physical property - that is by an equity-backed loan by one owner and to have that passed on to the next via the increased value of the property at time of sale. So simple. Anything else is likely to be at a higher cost or one that is subsidised by us taxpayers, yet totally out of our control. Ideal for the Liberals, it seems.

Of course this may never come about, as the Lib Dumbs are not going to win, but it might end up in the crazy head of one David Miliband, Environment Czar. First you have people voluntarily doing the work, then you enforce it by not permitting sale of houses not meeting the HIP standard, or, joy-of-joys for a grasping authoritarian goon, fining people heavily. It gets the lenders claws into somewhere or someone for the life of the loan. No escape. No release. No chance for the market to resolve inefficiencies or bad practice, e.g. people fleeing a costly lender. A Statist's and their greedy mates' dream.

The Lib Dems claim their proposals could save 31 million tonnes of CO2. Well, they could save us a few tons of horse-manure and stop dreaming up such nonsensical, over-complicated and basically hat-stand "ideas". They could benefit from cavity insulation, though, starting with that empty space behind the eyeballs.

However, the party's Climate Change Starts at Home package was welcomed by environmental groups including WWF-UK (though what faux wrestling has to do with it, I do not know).

Well, this package has been rejected by Roger's organisation, WTF-UK.



§insert scheme here to make finance companies rich or people lose money and the government bail one or both groups out when it all falls to pieces.

*has someone done a dust-to-dust on these things?

"Reject Labour and Its Mimics"

..., say FibbleDums.

Well, matey, the reasons I reject New and Blue Labour are pretty much the same reasons why I reject the Fibberal Dumboldtwats! You are all a bunch of Statist control freaks.

Reject the lead pipe for the rubber hose, eh? Not blinkin' likely!

Cleaving to the Winner

I'm Sorry, Dave, I can't let you do that...

Something I have observed for a long time is people do like winners and nowhere else more so than in politics

People are hard-wired to cleave to winners. People might agree with somebody's viewpoints, but they want to belong and support the WINNER who has at least some of the viewpoints they agree with, the glossy coat and the impression of backing and access to resources. It might be odd, but it would not surprise me if people filter on winner first, then select amongst the potential winners who they will back. I guess this is primeval, as if you are on the losing side you might just get a Tapir jawbone whumped into your noggin.



Why bring this up now? I saw this extract of a GMTV interview with George Osborne courtesy of Iain Dale on the topic of MP defections:

Ozzy: We’ve got councillors who have switched over to us and there’s a real sense at the moment that the excitement is with us, that people are coming to join us. In my own local area people are coming to join my local party. And you know there are quite a lot of ideological soulmates out there who say ‘Well hold on, actually the Conservative party are the future and actually this lot have had their go and they’re the past.’

I think this is more to do with "they are the losers. Look a our shiny new feathers!"

People want to back winners, but it does not work properly if you keep getting the same MP pond-life floating from one rock-pool to the next each time the tide looks like going out.

This country is hamstrung by floating constituencies as it is. Worse still if it has a nebulous community of self-interested MPs.

Oh, sorry, forgot. We already have one.