Evicting Rioters

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Among the many knee jerks following the riots is the proposal that those convicted of rioting offences may be evicted from council housing.

Cameron backs plans to ensure that council tenants found guilty of taking part in the mayhem will be evicted. Ministers are re-drafting consultation documents to ensure that councils get those powers. The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, was tightening the law to make sure that even if a rioter was convicted of a crime outside their borough they could lose their council home, something that is not possible at the moment. ”Criminal or anti-social behaviour in the local neighbourhood by a tenant or a member of their family can provide grounds for eviction,” he said. ”The government is looking to strengthen those powers and so anyone involved in the unrest should stop and think about the long-term impact that their actions will have on the rest of their lives.”

David Cameron told MPs it “should be possible to evict them and keep them evicted”. He said: “Parents have a responsibility to control the young people living in their home. If young people living in your home have been involved in the violence over the past few days, they are putting your tenancy at risk.”

Some sensibly pointed out that it would mean moving problem social-housing tenants to different areas, but there is a much deeper issue involved here. The whole idea of social housing is wrong and local government certainly should not own or let housing. However much you might try to avoid it, being a council tenant is stigmatising. Being is social housing labels people in a way that depresses expectations and and diminishes the chances of social mobility.

It will be said by some that housing is a fundamental right and it is necessary to subsidise the housing needs of poor people. Well food and clothing are just as essential needs, but not many people would say that the state should produce these needs. The truth is that the state is a very bad landlord and there is no more reason that they should be in that business than that they should be making jeans or baking bread.

There is very strong competition and highly efficient supply of functional clothing and basic food. Contrast that with long housing waiting lists, poor maintenance standards and enormous tax burden in the provision of council housing. What is required is for all housing to be privately owned and available in the same market irrespective of whether you are wealthy or poor. Supply will then meet demand, subject to it not being distorted by stupid planning laws, and people will be able to buy or rent accommodation that is suited to their means and needs.

Another aspect of the eviction proposal is the collective punishment involved. Stalin used to send the families of his political opponents to Siberia after he had shot the main irritant. This was generally regarded in the west as being a bit unfair, but it seems that we are happy with the principle. Is it really right that a woman and children could be put out onto the street because the man of a house is a looter. Not in my view.

We need clarity and to remain rational. It can be no part of a civilised justice system for a person and their family to be thrown out of their home as punishment for a crime unrelated to their use of that home. The state would not get into this muddled thinking if it understood its proper role and left housing to the the citizens who own and live in them.

Related articles

• Councils set to evict rioters (independent.co.uk)
• Evict the Rioters? (redbrickblog.wordpress.com)

OK! I Surrender

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At the age of 63 and a life long non-smoker, I have finally given in to the welter of government and health pressure group hectoring and I have finally taken up smoking.

 

The build up has been a long time coming with many stages, but the final straw came tonight with the local news saying that the local authority in Cumbria was going to ban smoking in public parks.

 

Let’s face it, Cumbria isn’t anything other than a public park is it? A county that depends entirely on tourism wants to tell visitors that they cannot have a fag in the big open spaces of the lake district. Brilliant. Of course it is all dressed up as a campaign to make it socially unacceptable to smoke in the presence of children, but the objective is abundantly clear. The aim is to stop anybody smoking anywhere.

 

Prohibition of alcohol failed catastrophically in the United States. When alcohol was prohibited in 1919 it immediately resulted in illegal brewing and distilling being taken over by organised crime and the law had to be abandoned in 1933. The crime syndicates born out of the ban on alcohol did not die with abandonment of prohibition, they just moved on to protection, prostitution and drugs.

 

The hair shirt fanatics in the UK have learned lessons from history. Instead of trying to get an absolute ban in a single law they have sought to make smoking and drinking gradually more expensive and difficult over a period of time. This has now got to the position where we are being told that we cannot smoke in the open air of the wide open spaces of the lakes and fells.

 

Never being a person to do anything by halves, on hearing the news of the proposed new smoking restriction I set out for the nearest tobacco retailer and bought a pack of cigars. Knowing nothing about them I bought the largest and most expensive ones on the basis that they would be most likely to be particularly offensive to the antis.

 

Such has been my dislike of smoking that in my student years I used to take my cannabis in cakes or by chewing resin rather than puffing on a joint. Well, I am a lot older now and I have sucked on a few spliffs in the intervening years so I thought it would be OK to join the dwindling ranks of the smokers.

 

I settled in to the front terrace of a nice wine bar with a large glass of red, assured myself that the ash trays were an indicator that smoking was permissible and guiltily lit up. It is utterly absurd for a man in his 60′s, but I felt really naughty lighting up this cigar in a public place. I think that my wife was rather pleased that I was showing some signs of being a normal human being, but I am not sure that she is the best person to judge.

 

Anyway, I rather enjoyed it. I am now going to sample some different brands and take my new habit to other parts of town. I may even go to Stony Stratford to ostentatiously smoke in their streets. I doubt whether I will ever take cigar use to the levels enjoyed by Bill Clinton, but thanks to the nanny state I am looking forward to a new area of enjoyment in my retirement.

Related articles

• Councils seek to use new powers to ban smoking in public parks (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)
• Britain to ban smoking in public parks (news.bioscholar.com)
• Stand up to the Stony Stratford smoking ban (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)

Prat of the Week – David Morris MP

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My award for prat of the week goes to Tory MP David Morris for his attempt to have all hairdressers regulated:

 

The Early Day Motion reads:

“It is dangerous to allow unqualified individuals to apply hazardous chemicals to customers’ hair without proper training and, whilst customers can seek recourse through the civil courts for any mistakes, this does not prevent those responsible continuing to practice; and urges the Government to amend the Hairdressers (Registration) Act 1964 to include compulsory registration of all hairdressers and the ability of the National Hairdressing Council to strike off those who do not practise in a professional manner”

 

Before entering Parliament, Morris was a hairdresser and now that he has become a legislator he wants to make his mark on the world by allowing his ‘professional’ body to strike off errant hair trimmers. Thus reducing all the Tanyas with their “’ow wus yer ‘ollidee?” chairside manner to the same position as doctors at the hands of the BMA ethics committee.

 

There is a pub not far from me that advertising a ‘pint and a trim’ service. Would this enterprising landlord be required to register under Morris’s interfering Act of Parliament or would he only have to cough up and face bar side inspection if he gave highlights with the short back and sides? Who knows. I am sure that Morris doesn’t. It will be for the new and expensive bunch of jobsworths created by this nonsense to exercise their undoubted skill and judgement before deciding whether to fine or ban or both the poor sod trying to make a decent living by providing a needed service.

 

As Morris admits in his Early Day Motion, the customers of incompetent hairdressers already have redress through the civil courts if they have suffered loss as a consequence of their poor choice of coiffing, but personal injury lawyers are beside themselves with excitement at the prospect of a new law. If they can show that the boozer barber was unlicenced, they will be able to extract higher compensation and whip up lots more claimants in the accompanying publicity. Everybody’s happy then. More compensation, richer lawyers and a smugly satisfied MP

 

Except that there will be fewer hairdressers, higher prices and more people coming to grief doing their own bleaching and colouring in the kitchen sink.

 

Forget your Early Day Motion David. Stay in bed till late and do us all a favour.

Rising in the charts

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I have had a few days off due to some family commitments so things have been quiet in the world of Malpoetry, but there is cause for small celebration today.

Our ranking among Wikio political blogs has risen from a position in the 400′s to number 271. That doesn’t put us among the political mega stars, but respectable enough for a personal blog.

Thank you very much to everybody who has dropped by to read or make comment. A special thanks too for Daz at http://outspokenrabbit.blogspot.com/who has been a devoted follower, commenter and promoter of this blog. Make sure to pay Daz a visit. You will be rewarded with fascinating and insightful analysis of far higher quality than you can find in most other places.

Demolish Daft Laws

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A lot of fuss was made when France banned the wearing of the burqa in public places. So how many people have been fined for breaking this law? None it seems. Women have continued to wear the burqa and apparently they get more hostility from the public since the law was passed, but they do not get fined.

There have been a number of demonstrations by burqa wearing women hoping to be penalised so that they could go to the European Court of Human Rights or to challenge whether the law was in conflict with the French constitution. The usual kinds of antics that will consume large amounts of public money, but make no difference at all to how people lead their lives.

A man wearing a burqa in the colours of the French flag has been charged. Not with burqa wearing, but with the more serious charge of outraging the flag. It can only be concluded from this that the burqa ban cannot apply to men. That must be a relief for John Simpson who famously liberated Afghanistan while wearing one. It may also be an encouragement to admirers of the failed 21/7 bomber who fled the country in a burqa. Despite being a tall man it seems that nobody thought to peep inside before allowing him to escape our shores in the middle of a major terror alert.

Before the French burqa ban, the Swiss voted to ban minarets. The immediate reaction was for a shopkeeper to knock up a plywood minaret, shin up a ladder and stick it on top of his chimney. What is a minaret? Unfortunately none of the foolish people who wanted to prevent mosques from being built, but didn’t have the balls to say so, had thought that one through. I have got news for them. Even if their stupid law worked, mosques don’t have to have minarets.

Why am I rambling on about this rubbish? In the aftermath of the mass murder in Norway and revelations that the killer had British connections we are likely to be faced with calls for new laws to make sure that it doesn’t happen here. Among the demands to make it illegal to be mad, or whatever other ridiculous proposition they think up perhaps we should pause to consider what we are doing.

The burqa and minaret bans, however they may be dressed up, are expressions of unease at the growing presence of Islam in countries where it is seen as an alien presence. Some will be afraid of jihadi fundamentalism, others will be unhappy about the loss of their cultural identity and some will probably have religious concerns about the threat to primacy of their beliefs.

All of these are reasonable worries. The problem with the laws is that to the deranged mind of a person like Anders Breivik, legal resistance to an Islamic takeover has failed and he needs to start a war to do what the burqa and minaret bans failed to do. Let’s be clear, I am not suggesting that silly laws are the cause of the Norwegian tragedy, spree killers have all kinds of reasons for doing terrible things.

The point I am making is that laws cannot solve social problems. Proscribing organisations results only in them changing their names or going underground. It does not get rid of the reasons why those organisations managed to find followers in the first place. The same applies to bans on the symbols of Islam or any other thing that is bothering people.

Resolving social tensions cannot be done by governments. We have to work out decent and secure arrangements for society among ourselves. If a woman has her face covered in the street it is not a problem for me and it is none of my business whether she made that decision for herself or if she might have been pressured by her family of community to do it. Those things are for her to decide and it is only right for others to be involved if she asks them.

If the same woman wants to teach, be a student in a class, enter a bank, pass through border control, collect a child from school, or engage in any other activity where her identity or eye contact are necessary for that process to be properly and safely undertaken, then she must show her face. That should be dealt with by the woman concerned and whoever she is interacting with. No law could ever cover all situations and the state should not intervene in disputes about whether or not it is necessary for the face to be revealed for a specific purpose.

Similarly with minarets or any other building styles. It is offensive for the state to try to impose centralised building control that stifles cultural, religious or taste preferences at a local level. Land owners should be able to erect safe structures on their property without constraint other than to the extent that it might damage the enjoyment of the property of neighbours. If a place of worship, entertainment or whatever is going to disturb the neighbourhood in which it is proposed, then it is for the residents of that neighbourhood to resolve the matter. If they cannot reach agreement, a town or community council should be able to require conditions on the building, but there is no place for a remote government to dictate how things should be.

Alienation is at the root of social conflict and genuine localism is the only solution.

Where The Spirit Takes Them

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After the dreadful blast in Lincolnshire in which five men lost their lives, we can expect lots of outrage about illegal immigrants, illegal alcohol production, tax evasion, poisonous drinks and much more.

 

One thing that we will not hear anything about is that if you pay twenty quid for a bottle of vodka, about £13.50p of that price is tax. For the manufacture, wholesaling, distribution and retailing of your vodka you have paid £6.50p. That includes all the raw materials, labour, diesel and everybody’s profits. For doing precisely nothing, the government has taken twice as much as the people who were responsible for getting your vodka to you.

 

This is not enough for the anti-drinking lobby. They are lobbying to have minimum prices fixed for booze so that you will have to pay even more for every unit of alcohol that you buy. This is despite the fact that Britain has higher alcohol taxes than most countries.

 

You all know the supposed justification. Excessive drinking is damaging to health and ‘binge’ drinkers are responsible for crime and disorder. Advocates of minimum pricing claim that 3,000 lives each year could be saved if a minimum price of 50 pence per unit were imposed.

 

In my view the people who are trying to tell us how to live our lives are talking complete rubbish as usual. First of all, the people whose lives are substantially shortened by their alcohol consumption are generally very heavy drinkers. This is not a case of going a bit over nanny’s guidelines, but those who consume high alcohol volume drinks for most of their waking time. A significant proportion of these people have actually made a decision to end their lives with the help of alcohol or they suffer from a serious medical condition (not alcoholism, which may be an aspect of personality but it is not a disease) which makes it very difficult or impossible for them to manage their alcohol use. It should be self evident that pricing will have very little effect on these drinkers although it may mean that they are more likely to engage in crime to be able to maintain their alcohol intake.

 

The other effect of excessive taxation of alcohol is that the production or import of untaxed products will increase. This will in turn have several effects. The two most significant ones are that low grade drinks will cause very much more serious health damage than those retailed through reputable outlets and so far as price is significant at all, those who buy the very cheap, untaxed products will be able to drink more. When covert distilling goes wrong, which it is bound to do because of the inadequate skills and materials of those doing it, the health consequences are terrible. Blindness, paralysis and death are outcomes which can occur from a single drinking bout with contaminated products.

 

As we have seen at the industrial unit in Boston, when the state makes it worthwhile to create a black market in distilling there can be other tragic consequences too.

Related articles

• Illegal alcohol clue to death blast (mirror.co.uk)
• Five killed after explosion at suspected illegal vodka factory in Lincolnshire (mirror.co.uk)

Strike At The Heart Of Freedom

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Today most schools are disrupted, some emergency call handlers are not working and many other public sector workers are striking in a struggle with the government over pensions.
LibCon ministers and the London Mayor are muttering darkly about how most trade union members did not vote for the strikes and that it might be necessary to change the law if workers persist in disrupting public and emergency services in this way. But what is the legal position and would it be right to make striking more difficult?
These problems have a long history. The Combination Act 1799, and the Master and Servant Act 1823 stipulated that all workmen were subject to criminal penalties for disobedience, and calling for strikes was punished as an “aggravated” breach of contract. But then the position was slowly liberalised and through the Trade Union Act 1871 and the Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act 1875 trade unions were legitimised. Toward the turn of the century the House of Lords emphasised that businesses should be free to organise into trade associations in the same way that employees organised into unions. However, with growing unrest and industrial action the House of Lords changed its mind. Soon afterwards the Taff Vale judgement made unions liable for the costs of industrial action. Although employers could dismiss employees without notice, employees in a trade union were open to penalties for withdrawing their labour.
This case led trade unions to form a Labour Representation Committee, which then became the Labour Party, to lobby for the reversal of the law. The Trade Disputes Act 1906 prescribed that any strike “in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute” is immune from civil law sanctions. The Trade Boards Act 1909 created industrial panels to fix minimum wages.
Discrimination in employment was prohibited on grounds of race in 1965, gender in 1975, disability in 1995, sexual orientation and religion in 2003 and age in 2006. Starting from the Contracts of Employment Act 1963, workers gained a growing list of statutory rights, such as the right to reasonable notice before a fair dismissal and a redundancy payment.
From 1979, the Conservative government enacted laws reducing the power of trade unions. Reforms to the internal structure of unions required that representatives be elected and a ballot is taken before a strike, that no worker could strike in sympathetic secondary action with workers with a different employer, and that employers could not run a closed shop requiring all workers to join the recognised union. The wage councils were dismantled. In 1997 the new Labour government brought the UK into the European Union Social Chapter, which has served as the source for most reform in UK law since that time. The National Minimum Wage Act 1979 established a country-wide minimum wage. The Employment Relations Act 1999 required employers to compulsorily recognise and bargain with a union.
A ‘repeal of all anti-union laws’ is official TUC policy. A ludicrous objective since it would be impossible to get agreement on what laws are anti-union, but they are on to something. What is needed is for the repeal of all laws relating to the workplace or industrial relations. The common law that applies to all of us for activities outside work is just as adequate for our needs when we are working as it is when we are not.
When a person enters into a contract to work for somebody else they have all the same rights and responsibilities as a person contracting to buy a house, borrow money, go on a holiday or make any other commercial transaction.
It is nonsense to have special laws for picketing when the common law of public order is long established. A workplace dispute which spills onto the public highway is no different from a possibly unruly gathering outside a football match, pop concert or night club.
Just as it was wrong for the state to prevent the formation of unions, it was wrong to protect contact breakers from the consequences of their actions and the huge body of industrial law since then has only confused and worsened the situation.
The reason we need government is to protect the life and property of citizens from crime and external threat. The police have not been on strike because it is illegal for them to do so, and those who have chosen to join the military do not have trade unions. As far as the rest of the public sector is concerned there is only one solution to their pension problems. That is to transfer all of these ‘services’ to the private sector and let the new employers work out the right package of remuneration for their staff as determined by the market in which they operate.

Related articles

• Strikes hit 11,000 schools in England as public sector workers protest pension cuts (mirror.co.uk)
• Hundreds Of Thousands Join Pension Strikes (news.sky.com)
• Britain faces summer of civil service strikes (theglobeandmail.com)

Oxfamine Panic -Everyone Will Starve

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Fake charity Oxfam, 29% of its income comes from the government, has now appointed itself as an expert on agriculture and climate change to give us a prediction of doubled food prices and mass starvation in less than twenty years.

The Oxfam solution to this predicted disaster? Surprise,surprise it is more regulation and a global climate fund. Who do you think would administer this worldwide regulatory system and manage this mighty global fund? It might just be those people who have spent their lives working for the ‘charities, NGOs and quangos which have helped the poorest nations on earth to be even poorer now than they were fifty years ago and their murderous dictators still in place with gigantic Swiss bank accounts.

Two hundred years ago Robert Malthus predicted mass starvation because food production could not keep pace with growing population. At that time the world human population was about 800,000. Now the population is around 7 billion. Malthus was wrong because he did not account for scientific progress and human ingenuity that has increased food production enormously.

Oxfam is wrong because it has not taken account of scientific progress and the stupidity of bureaucratic interference. The rash of well intentioned agencies that has spread all over Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia has created serious dependency in the countries where they are active. The excellent work of African economist Dambisa Moyo has show this devastating effect with great clarity.

There has always been climate change and there always will be. I don’t know whether current changes for the human race and I am certain that Oxfam doesn’t know either. I do have confidence that the pursuit of greater knowledge of climate and energy uses will be much more useful than dipping into taxpayer’s pockets to set up another global fund.

The main reason for insufficient food coming to markets at affordable prices is the existence of import and export tariffs and barriers as well as the distorting and stifling effect of state control in most of the underdeveloped world.

Get the development agencies off the backs of the poorest countries and their populations will be better placed to remove their corrupt governments and get on with producing the food they so badly need.

A message  for Cameron and Clegg. You are encouraging the nonsense predictions of Oxfam and others. The UK foreign aid budget should not be protected in this economic crisis, it should be phased out completely. Britain and other western nations cannot develop the rest of the world, it can only stop preventing them from developing themselves.  Free trade  will be the biggest possible contribution to reducing world poverty.

Related articles

• Food prices ‘will double by 2030′ (bbc.co.uk)
• The Overpopulation Hoax (lewrockwell.com)

The Philosophy of Liberty

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I

Koran Burners, Cranks & Criminals

A BNP candidate for the Welsh Assembly, Sion Owens, was arrested and charged with a public order offence after police viewed a video of a man apparently burning a copy of the koran. It was alleged that Owens burned the book in his back garden.

When he appeared in court, the Crown Prosecution Service withdrew the charge, but said that investigations into his actions were continuing and that “almost certainly other proceedings will ensue.”

Earlier this month Terry Jones a publicity hungry American stepped out of his usual role of running his own weird church and appointed himself a judge to put the koran on trial. Surprise, surprise he found the book guilty and sentenced it to burning. When news of this event reached Afghanistan some more people with weird religious ideas whipped up a riot in which several people were murdered.

Last year, after Jones had first announced his plans to burn korans and backed off from it, the repulsive Westboro Baptist Church decided this was too good publicity to miss so they put an American flag with a koran and burned both.

So who are the criminals, who are not and what should everybody else do?

Whackos like Westboro and Terry Jones should be endured and largely ignored as part of the price of freedom. Publicity seeking people with crazy ideas are only a problem when sensationalist and circulation hungry media want to use them for their own ends. It would obviously be better if we had more responsible information providers, but we don’t and that too is is a necessary part of free expression.

The sadistic butchers who use koran burning, or any other supposed affront, as an excuse for killing people and imposing their deranged dominance over others are criminals. These people are a genuine danger to society and they need to be brought to justice for their crimes.

In contrast to the freedom guaranteed to American cranks by the US constitution, in the UK our equivalent loon, Sion Owens, gets charged with a public order offence for something he is supposed to have done in his own back garden. When that absurdity collapses the CPS bureaucrats do a tactical withdrawal with a warning that they will go away and think up another crime that they can nail him with.

Owens is probably just as much an inadequate as many other people who swallow the nasty and ridiculous policies of the BNP, but that doesn’t make him a criminal. The right response to Owens and his like is to not vote for them and leave them to the obscurity they have earned.

Our judicial system needs to grow up and allow citizens the ability to make their own adult decisions.