Crap: A Guide to Politics - The Blog

The Profits of Doom: Cheeky Crap from The Times

In Chapter 12 (Prolific Crap) of my book I argued that in order to tell the people that the earth is flat, and to perpetuate the myth for as much as a century after it is thoroughly disproved, all you need is a Big Government, State Education, academic tenure rules (by which the current big idea is regularly reinforced through peer-reviewed tosh) and off you go.  Central to all this, of course is government-financed science, usually with a preponderance of government scientists.  Dodgy dossiers will follow by the bucket load.

On 26th October 2007 Mark Henderson, the Science Editor of The Times fell straight into the trap.  Under the title “Prophets of Doom but this time it’s serious” he argued that an “Earth Audit” report on Climate Change commissioned by the UN, funded by Government, carried out by the World Economic Outlook group under the IMF, full of “consensus”, strict peer review and hundreds of government scientists, was “unlikely to adopt an extreme position”!

What a candidate for Cheeky Crap (Chapter 5) that would have been. Where on Earth have you been, Mark?  You only need eyes to have seen time and time again that Spin and Lies are the name of the government game and that the conditions you cite simply maximise the potential. As mentioned in my item on October 11th above, ministers have been advised by the IPPR to peddle Climate Change for all they are worth.  The Profits (not the Prophets) of Doom – ie the Politics of Fear, employed to silence and subjugate the people, are rife. Thus Margaret Beckett has already said that climate change sceptics should have no access to the media, and similar tactics have been used by Chris Huhne, a candidate for the leadership of the LibDems.

Come off it, Mark.  Earth Audit, my foot!  The Fourth Estate must do better.

PS My book also demonstrates the reverse of Mark’s law, namely that whatever the problem (let’s play make-believe and say that Governments are right on the environment) the private sector will find better and faster solutions for far less outlay. In the same vein Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham (the only private university in the UK and top of the National Student Survey) speculates in The Times Science Notebook of October 29th that genetic modification of children may soon be possible. “We must ensure though, that the research is done by free-market geneticists such as Craig Venter, not by the usual socialist geneticists who occupy government-funded university laboratories”, he says.  Or would you be happy to trust the latter with your children, Mark?

MISLEADING CRAP - BIAS AT THE BEEB

In Chapter 6 of the book, David Aaronovitch of The Times tells us that he’s a fan of a powerful BBC, acting as a “gold standard”, but “if its news programmes are going to become glorified scandal sheets then I don’t want to pay for it any more than I want to pay for the Daily Mail”.

Good on yer, David. But you don’t seem to care whether some of us might not want to pay for it in any case. (I think I’d rather our taxes support the Daily Mail myself).

But as the scandal sheets keep coming, the eponymous John Humphrys informs us this week (again in The Times):

“I happen to think that the most important thing it [the BBC] does is news and current affairs.  If a democracy is not well informed, it cannot survive.”

Indeed John, that is one of the conditions of democracy.  But are you saying that the BBC (duly shorn of Crowngate and all the rest of the current crop of Newsgates ) does it better than anybody else, so that if it were abolished we plebs would get lower quality info from the plethora of private media, (which of course include that website called Biased-BBC)?

Yeah, right. Incidentally aren’t you the chap who let Blair off so lightly 10 years ago on the Beeb, over that Bernie Ecclestone/ Tobacco Advertising scam?

One Rule for Them Crap

Chapter 9 of the book (perhaps my favourite) concerns Them and Us – the politicos and the sheeple – and the hugely different standards of behaviour for each.

A good candidate appeared in Parliament on 8th October when Labour MPs in marginal seats called on Gordon Brown to change the law to stop the Conservatives from pumping money into target constituencies before the next election (as reported in The Times of 9th October).

Sounds sensible doesn’t it?  Down with gerrymandering.  Set an example to the sheeple and all that.  It’s a pity that just over a year ago (as the book records) Patricia Hewitt called for “heat maps” linking potential hospital closures to non-Labour constituencies.  And this is the lady who wrote a book called The Abuse of Power.

Talking of heat, at a time when inconvenient chinks are opening up all over the place in Al Gore’s film about global warming “An Inconvenient Truth” it’s worth noting that Chapter 7 of the book (Misleading Crap) refers to a report by The Institute of Public Policy Research.  Entitled “Warm Words”, it advises ministers to “act as if there were no dispute over the causes and rate of climate change”

As I say, they’re all at it.

Crap from the Conservative Party conference

The Taxpayers Alliance is quite right to be thankful for the crumbs (“pledged” only!) by George Osborne at Blackpool – and to point out that they will be recouped elsewhere.  Inheritance Tax should be totally abolished, of course; it turns wealth into consumption and as such harms the poor as well as the payers.  Stamp Duty should be abolished too – indeed how can abolition only for first time buyers work, without the price effects spreading to all properties?

More important to we the sheeple, though, is why the sudden conversion?  We know the answer; they want power – especially the power to tax!

Chapter 2 of my book (Contradictory Crap) quotes Georgie Porgie at last year’s Tory Party Conference:

“We will share the proceeds of growth between the lower taxes this country needs and the increases in spending on public services every government should provide”

What, George, should “every government provide”?  The politicos’ answer is “whatever they provide now and then some more”.  George is no different.  Privatise?  Sell?  No fear.

George has to score over Gordo. So he points out that Gordo “created the system designed to stop a run on a bank – and it failed”.  What did he say before the failure?  Nothing that I can find, but in June last year his boss, Dave the Vague, called Gordo’s new system “an act of genius”!

George also points out that the new economy “works by harnessing the power of billions of individual choices”.  [True] And “we Conservatives instinctively understand it”.

Oh yeah?  So why get in the way?  Why do “we” (i.e. you) “need to build more houses so supply meets demand”?  Supply and demand are specifically market phenomena.   Why not just get rid of the Soviet-style planning laws, a relic of the Attlee era?

Dave the Vague’s speech doesn’t disappoint, either.  In Chapter 5 (Cheeky Crap) of my book he says:

“I’d like to think not about how we give people a tax cut but how we give them a time increase.”

I commented that we could give ourselves a time increase if the pols hadn’t swiped 50 per cent of our money, and that the saddest part is his starting point (in line with all politicos) that the Government owns everything and we have to plead for crumbs.

His 2007 conference repeats the audacity although he trims the sails a tiny bit:

“But I don’t just want to give people a tax cut; I want to give people a time increase.”

Dave the Vague’s speech is full of ideas about changing the way he spends our money – allow new schools into the State monopoly to mimic the private sector, route welfare payments through charities (see Chapter 12, Prolific Crap), replace NHS targets with “measures of outcomes”, and so on.  He’ll try anything that starts with looting us – and nothing that doesn’t.

However, I mustn’t be churlish; credit where credit is due. Thanks for this, Dave:

“But I think that if we have learnt anything over the past five years, it’s that you cannot drop a fully formed democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet”

Indeed no, Dave. If only you had read a little history, like the rest of us. What will you learn over the next five years, I wonder? Perhaps that “measures of outcomes” and anything else you think of other than privatisation cannot save the broken NHS? Read Chapter 8 (Ideological Crap) to find out why.