Puritanism and What it Does to Us

Britain seems to have become a deeply puritanical place. And deeply hypocritical, too, although they usually go together and people prefer not to notice the latter. In fact hypocrisy is more or less general and we try not to notice.

I say that Britain is especially puritanical because anything that can be used to move popular condemnation of anyone, is so used. Politicians know that, rather than looking petty and spiteful, they will be regarded as strong and demotic.

The press follow them partly because they are no different, and partly because they know it sells to the public.

It is much more than the racism industry, much more than the broader 'offence' industry. These have been created deliberately. It is a general thing. Anyone who does or says or thinks anything heterodox or unauthorised or surprising to the hearer will be skimmity-ed, pilloried, publically and gleefully humiliated by spineless creatures filled with loathing, burning envy of those able to think and brave enough to be free, and the act of hounding out of their job, their house or their sanity of people who are not like them will be applauded as something good. It is easy to make people base and foul, and it has become the accepted thing to be. Ghastly. Spain is less horribly putrid in this respect.

In Britain, which is influenced in these matters by the USA, in ways spread only, I think, by the contact most people have with its popular culture, and to some extent by interference between their media and academics, there is a constant shifting of the moral quicksand, and a constant vigilance for the first one to miss a step. It is not surprising that people should take their own values to be, if not universal, at least basically right and accepted by a majority. It isn't even surprising that people should pose as thinkers in newspapers and on television and demonstrate exactly the same ignorance. But that it is rarely challenged by those who should know better is surprising indeed.

I think in the media the desire to be thought orthodox trumps everything else; truth, analysis, information, usefulness, interest, intelligence, are not important. Most articles are opinion, even those claiming to be news, and they are mostly an exercise in saying what they think their readers, or such of them as they consider their judges, want to hear. They contribute very little to real knowledge or understanding.

The moral culture that Britain thinks it lives in is more relaxed about many types of sexuality and the ways it sees other people, and it is proud of this fact. But there is no real goodness in people's position on this, it is just what they have been told they should believe. Even so, it probably makes Britain a better place for homosexuals or blacks to live in. However, in other respects social constraint is much tighter than it was 30 years ago. The important point is that deviation from the norm appears to be policed much more strictly than it was. It is this sense that Britain is more puritanical than it was.

I suppose it is natural to think that 'we' are continuing to discover moral rightness, and are morally superior to the people of a generation ago, but someone who is about to commit that stupidity to print should really think hard enough about it to realize that it is rubbish.

Medals for 15M

The young are revolting. Nothing new there. They want us to know that the electoral process does not deserve the name of democracy and that the economy is in big trouble(and that they don’t much like other people having money and also that they will not eat their greens, so there!)

We know this already. Why do they expect to be treated like heroes simply for telling us something we already know and for living off other people’s money when those of us who are working hard (very hard) to try to actually solve those problems are somehow considered as the enemy?

I respect and defend their right to think for themselves and express their ideas and beliefs freely (this time there has been almost no violence) but until they respect my rights and freedoms, which they don’t, and until they realize that strutting up and down constantly restating the problem in a number of linguistically innovative ways is quite different from providing some kind of solution, I shan’t be respecting them personally.

If it weren't for capitalism and the hard work of others half of them would be dead and most of the others would be literally on the streets, instead of just playing at tramps and hippes. And it's capitalism, or rather, investment and incentives for success, which is what they think capitalism is, which will eventually get us out of the crisis. Nothing else can.

I am getting tired of people telling me things I already know and demanding my money as the answer to all problems. The people who are shouting loudest are, whether they like it or not, through their own fault or not, part of the problem, not the solution.

Artistic Suicide Part 1

Artistic suicide is an interesting idea. Destroying one’s own work, work that has cost time and effort to create, and which involves a, perhaps considerable, investment of one’s creative energy, does not come easily to anyone who has created anything. I’m a writer, not a commercially successful one*, and my artistic success is rather questionable, too, but in a sense I make art, and I understand how hard it is to lose your work and see it destroyed. The assumption, then, is that these Italian artists have a good reason for burning their stuff.

I think it’s a fair bet that their main purpose is to attract the attention of the press by dramatically burning things in public. In which case, they have clearly understood how the media works, and if it’s their own work they’re burning, it’s entirely up to them. I think it’s also a fair bet that much of what they have burnt was specially produced for that purpose, but I could be wrong.

There are two things I want to talk about here: one is the cause they claim to defend, the other is the concept of ‘artistic suicide’ itself.

They are trying to draw attention to the fact that two arts centres they consider to be important are under threat. They refer to these as centres of ‘independent’ art. I believe very deeply in freedom, and the freedom to find ways, means and media to express outwardly what your mind conceives within itself is important to the individual, and the result is often important to others. Art is not beautiful in itself, but it can provide beautiful things for the pleasure of others. Art is not uplifting in itself, but it can help others to learn, understand or explain to themselves things about the world that they would otherwise not have noticed. Most people, without art, would have a very limited mental life, being unable to create with their own understanding and imagination what those with a greater creative gift have made for them. In short, art is good.

It’s also very hard to make a living at. The painting scene around here is very lively, and I know a dozen or so painters whose work is of very high quality. They have all won national or international prizes at some point, exhibited in important galleries, and are generally recognised as being very good at what they do. Only one of them makes his living directly from his work. The rest either teach or have a day job unconnected to art.

If you’re thinking at this point that this is going to be a load of pompous, rent-seeking cobblers, I beg you to bear with me.

Let us explore this concept of ‘independent’ art. The two ‘independent’ arts centres in question are the Tacheles Art House in Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art in Naples. The Naples museum is publicly funded, and is going to lose some of that funding because the Italian government, like so many others, has run out of its people’s money. In other words, the problem in Naples is that the centre is not independent at all. It is entirely dependent on the tax-payer.

The Tacheles, on the other hand, is a squat. I don’t know if their art is any good, perhaps it is, I imagine some of it probably is, but that isn’t the point here. The owners have been trying to kick them out for twenty years. The squatters complain that they are “threatened by a network of investors, banks, lawyers and politicians who are more interested in making money…” than in providing “places where artists and public can be brought together with art that is aimed at people and not markets.” Of course, when you are being paid by those same politicians you’re now complaining about, or you can simply steal other people’s property to live in, you don’t need to worry much about making money. But the people who have to pay for it all, do. And quite what the important difference is between making art that people want to see and making art that people want to buy, I don’t understand either. All a bit confused.

They want the local government to buy the building and pay them to live and work there. More of that ‘independence’ we’ve been hearing so much about.

In other words, more self-indulgent hippies moaning about not getting enough of other people’s money.

*So I work for a living instead of demanding to be housed and fed at the Prytaneum

Our Spiteful Press

One of the ways in which England differs from Spain is the extent to which the English are prepared to be told what to think by the media. Every time I visit England, which is usually for a week or so every summer, I have fun identifying the new groups that the media (in general, including the BBC and the Guardian. It must be general or it wouldn’t work) have given people permission to hate.

The hatred of anyone connected with banks is not part of this, by the way. That is a much bigger hate campaign successfully promoted by politicians around the free world to hide the fact that the recession is largely their fault. (Discuss).

No, I’m talking about minority pursuits, people who have interests which can’t seriously be thought to threaten anyone, but who have some reason have drawn the spiteful venom of the press. You can tell these things are not natural, not based on anything real, because they are usually given a convenient handle, everyone complains about exactly the same things, and they are unique to the UK, the same groups of people in other countries apparently never managing to annoy anyone.

In Spain, you either ride a bike or you don’t. Or you sometimes ride a bike, or you have one but don’t use it anymore, or you intend to buy one as soon as your son is old enough to ride. That sort of thing. In England it appears society is divided into Cyclists on the one hand, and the people who call them lycra louts on the other. (Yes, I know some riders can be inconsiderate to pedestrians but car drivers can be a menace on the roads and they don’t get vilified collectively. It’s an invention of the media. Really it is.)

Hands up anyone who has ever had a problem with a Google Street View car. Yes, as I thought. But mention the subject to an English person and they will immediately splutter about all the trouble they have caused for some indeterminate other people who no one seems to know.

Drivers, or cyclists, who use GPS navigators in their vehicles. Could someone explain to me why possession of a perfectly ordinary, and extremely useful piece of equipment, which has greatly simplified travelling and made it a lot safer at the same time, should come to be a diagnostic tool for finding people to look down your nose at and metaphorically spit upon?  A tough one, isn’t it? But in the land of my birth it was so, at least for a time.

Drinkers of bottled water suffered the same fate a few years ago. Now it is users of electronic cigarettes. I have seen references to ‘vapers’, clearly a code word for ‘someone to whom I am vastly superior’, being used in supposedly respectable newspapers to describe people who use this harmless, odourless, non-polluting device in order to adapt their customs to the convenience of those around them. Why are we being told to hate them? Perhaps the Guardian can tell us.

I am an Englishman, and shall always be rather proud of the chance that got me born there, but a lot of our journalists are petty, ignorant and provincial, and are lucky that in a free country they rarely have to answer for their words.

A Question about Bank Accounts*

*Down the bottom. There's some preamble (rambling) first

Something I forget to comment on in the recent post about some of the measures introduced by Mariano Rajoy: it will also become illegal to pay for a transaction worth more than €1000 in cash.

Modern governments hate cash, and probably have done since the dropping of the gold standard. Ideologues hate cash because they fear people may be purchasing unapproved items. Governments fear that they may be losing opportunities to take a bit of tax. Since they have noticed that the need for a physical medium of exchange has been greatly reduced by modern technology they have been looking for ways to limit its use as much as possible. Money cables, credit cards, bank accounts, the interwebs, etc have made trade at all levels a simpler, quicker, more liquid process, and we are all better off for it. But it leaves a trail. That trail should exist for the convenience of the parties involved in the transaction of course, but its existence is a too tempting for the powers that be to ignore. It is the easiest thing in the world to invoke the spectre of drug cartels and Chinese Mafiosi and demand that the trail be preserved for the convenience of the government.

For a couple of years it has been impossible (over here) to have a mobile phone unless it’s linked to an identified bank account. None of that picking one up at the supermarket with a €50 card already in it. You have to go through a tedious amount of paperwork and give out a lot of personal information before the company is allowed to sell you the product you want.

For rather longer it has been impossible to pay in any large sum to your bank account without having to identify yourself and having your details taken. Now it is illegal to pay cash for anything more expensive than medium-sized television.

It won’t work. There are plenty of ways around it, the simplest of which is just to ignore it completely. For decades companies have traditionally worked a kind of double accounting system with their employees’ salaries, industries with anything involving VAT, property registrars with the values of houses, and so on (err, so I hear). The government knows this very well, and they have always been complicit up to a point, and taken it all into account. It would collapse the economy if they suddenly tried to claim all of the tax that the law says is due.

So this new restriction is just a bit of a nuisance, really. It shouldn’t matter very much. Two points, however:
a) It shows the way the new government is thinking- exactly like the old one, but with more freshness and energy (no surprise there),
*b) If the government is going to effectively force everyone to have bank accounts, is there not a case for them supporting banks that should have gone bankrupt, on the grounds that some banks at least must continue to exist?

The answer is almost certainly no, but I can see them using that line to justify something, somewhere, in the future.

News and Views from Spain

The Castle of Salvatierra, Seen from the Castle of Caltrava la Nueva

Things are happening over here in my adopted homeland. Things of some considerable importance, and not just to the politicians and journalists and professional screamers, but really important, to everyone. There will be a general election on the 20th November, anniversary of both the death of Franco and the execution of Primo de Rivera by the Republicans. Whether there was any symbolism intended in this, an attempt to gather a few votes by association, or it just struck the socialist government as the best date, it is hard to say (because they aren’t going to tell the truth, obviously). The centre-right Popular Party will almost certain win, unless there is some major political upheaval between now and them, and Mariano Rajoy, a moderate man, at ease with normal people, intelligent and an unrepentant smoker (still, I think), will become President of the government. It is possible, but by no means certain, that he will have an absolute majority, giving him some freedom to fight the recession in his own way. What he will do with that freedom, whether it is something that can be solved by politics, is another matter. Cuts in public spending, the encouragement of liquidity, and radical exhortations to work harder, we may take as read. He can’t sack any civil servants, because of the absurd nature of public employment here (a system introduced in the 19thC to try to combat a certain kind of corruption- it’s possible it might be in need of review, but who is going to commit political suicide by telling four million people they don’t have jobs for life any more, and might have to justify their wages like the rest of us?) He will not negotiate with ETA. The PP never has, which is why their local councillors became the target of the terrorists in the 90’s and early 2000’s. He will cut a better figure in the world than Zapatero, but he is not of the clique, as he believes in individual freedom and democracy in a way that many European politicians don’t. Zapatero is not standing. He knew his time was up and left the job of losing to someone else. Typical of the man. Too small in every way. He should never have become President, and he wasn’t meant to be, not even by his own party. It was a fluke. The man who has accepted the job of fighting the election is Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, one of the best and most intelligent of the leaders of the socialist party, a man who is capable of not doing cheap politics when the occasion demands more than slogans and PR. If he takes seriously the job of leader of the opposition we might get some decent government in the next few years. I wonder. The parties are largely financed with public money, and elections are by party lists, meaning that you are not really represented by anybody, not even in the limited way that you are in England. You don’t know who defends your interests and represents your views to the government, who holds it to account in your name. Since MP’s are, because of this system, employed by the party, it is the party that controls their loyalty, their minds and their consciences, and as the party pays them with taxpayers money, the divorce from any real democratic representation is complete. Despite which, it works up to a point. This is a free country. Full of petty bureaucracy, worthless people with little bits of power, prohibitions on all kinds of trivial things, permits for things that should not require permission, and the usual suffocating effects of rampant statism, you can ignore a great deal of it and complain openly and robustly about the rest, you are still allowed to possess, to buy and to sell, to meet and talk to whoever you want, to speak publically and privately and to say and do what you want- up to a point- without having to explain yourself to anyone, and that is probably the closest to freedom it is practically possible to get in this world. In other news, ETA have realised they weren’t getting anywhere by murdering innocent people and have announced a ceasefire. They say it is permanent, but they have said that before. They seem to think that they deserve a prize for this, a prize of their own choosing, which we will have to give them or they will start killing people again. There really does seem to be a mentality among the leaders of ETA that they can make demands about how their defeat and destruction will take place. They are already demanding the release of their prisoners (because Tony Blair let IRA murderers out), and expect to be treated as normal human beings, as though decades of bloodshed could just be forgotten. They have made this announcement because they are weak, and because it is politically expedient. They have not come to realize that random slaughter is intrinsically wrong, that you can’t necessarily kill people just because you haven’t got what you want, that they don’t in fact represent any more than a tiny fraction of the people in whose name they claim to act. They haven’t even realised that they are doomed to continue indefinitely the abject failure of everything they have ever attempted, except for the murders themselves. They have seen that more people voted for their area of the political spectrum when they stopped killing people and formed a coalition with a democratic party. They have dimly perceived that they might do better in the upcoming election if they make a point of not killing anyone between now and then. The new President (anticipating events very slightly) has said he will not negotiate with them, and I hope he means it. There are plenty of democratic organizations and democratically elected politicians who genuinely represent the varied opinions and desires of the Basque people. To treat the terrorists as though they could legitimately speak for others is an insult to them, and to everything they have suffered at the hands of ETA.

Does Anyone Know...?

Why International rugby players put up with having their own bloody slaughter ritually and aggressively enacted in front of them every time they play New Zealand? Not having been able to watch a great deal of rugby the last few years, I'm not sure how they do in fact react, but they obviously haven't found a way to stop this hugely provocative spectacle. It should have been easy enough to laugh at them, ignore them, stroll away and chat among themselves, turn round and drop their trousers, invent their own threatening performance or, best of all, each player could walk slowly up to within three inches of his opposite number and stare him straight in the eyes. Given the way rugby players stare, the urge to continue with the ridiculous contortions would probably dry up very quickly. They might all end up fighting, but that would be a much better way to start the game anyway.

On Buying Plane Tickets

While I'm busy complaining (yes, this is another rant about something which has annoyed me), I mention that I have spent hours this afternoon buying plane tickets. Every time I make a journey by air it gets worse. What with nearly being arrested the last time I'm tempted to give up the whole business but I like to travel and I have family in England so it has to be done.

Some of that time was spent comparing offers. The sites that claim to do it for you compete mostly (I advance the suggestion from my experience) by varying the way they distribute their charges. Those that lower the notional price of the flight per se, will increase the charge for a suitcase, and will charge more for paying by credit card (up to 40 pounds, I have seen, and you can't pay any other way, of course) so in the end there is little difference between them.

What they do do is give you, and the airlines themselves, information about what other airlines are doing, which has the effect of keeping prices down. This is good and if I want to waste an hour in order to save €50 it's because I think it's worth my while. Also, I can fly to England for rather less than I used to pay when I first came to Spain in 1988. In real terms, i pay a third or a quarter of the price I paid then. I love the free market.

But the rest of the time was wasted filling in forms with personal information, including email and phone numbers. The airline wants it, the booking company wants it, and the government wants it. If you don't give it, you don't travel. Some of it you could lie about, but there would still be enough to know exactly who you were and when and where you travelled.

I don't mind too much that companies want and trade with my details. The fact that they can make a living that way is what gives me cheap flights and other goods. I don't have to deal with them, if I choose not to. What i dislike is that governments will use any excuse to control what we do. It has nothing to do with security. My giving those details has not made anybody safer because I have no intention of damaging the aircraft or anyone on it. But if I had been Achmed the Sane, my pockets filled with phials of untraceable but deadly and airborne poisons, and with plastic pistols disguised among my marker pens, they would know that someone of my name was planning to board a plane. It wouldn't be my real name, of course, and it would tell them nothing, and I would plausibly explain away any little discrepancy, and despite all the security, the time-wasting, the ritual humilliation and contempt which we must suffer at airports these days, the plane would come down.

If someone could come up with a way of stopping murderers taking planes I would be delighted to see it in place. In the meantime, I would be grateful if they would just let us get on with our lives.

"Good morning, I wish to fly to London." "Yes, sir. Smoking or non-smoking?"  "Thank you, sir, you will find your plane at the end of that corridor, follow the lady with the red hair and the purple leggings." Does it really have to be any harder than that?

Van Rompuy Again

Politicians and bureaucrats love to spend our money on themselves, for their pleasure, love of luxury, sense of self-importance, or just to show they can. It's in the nature of people who are drawn to that kind of life that they will abuse the money that they are given to control, and that others of their kind, who are also looking to get their hands on some of it, will acquiesce in the sharing of power over it, in legislating or defending the need for such spending, and so making it all nice and legal, or at least make it impossible to find mechanisms to stop it happening.

Thus we have an insignificant bureaucrat from Belgium, a man with the charisma of a used teabag and the appearance of a child molester auditioning for a minor role in the school play, whose job exists not from necessity but as a result of private agreements between other bureaucrats who expect to find it useful at some stage, and who was given that job precisely because he won't be able to do anything with it- he's a placeholder, his very function is to be nobody, he is useful because he isn't Tony Blair, he isn't Felipe González, he is isn't Romano Prodi- we have this non-entity whose life is not in any danger and whose death would pass unnoticed outside his family, provided, at our expense, with a chauffeur driven car full of armed policemen, while countless thousands who really do live under a direct threat- from a violent ex-husband, thuggish neighbours, the local crooks, the drug gang that controls the area they have no option but to carry on living in, the guntoting friends of Adams and McGuinness, for being the wrong colour, the wrong sex, attending the wrong church, having the wrong opinions, doing the wrong thing with their dangly bits, or for no reason whatsoever- are told to go home and lock the door because there are not the resources to protect them properly.

Van Rompuy, like most of the unelected, unaccountable and irrelevant penpushers who use our money to make their bodies rest more comfortably and their egos shine more brightly, is robbing us because he can, because collectively they have the keys to the safe, and they have learnt to work together for the good of all of them.

And even to those who actually do matter in some way, because they have been specifically chosen by the people to represent them in certain matters, because the position they occupy does have a symbolism that would be affected by an attack on them, because their activities are important to a large number of people and could not easily be carried out by someone else, and who are under a real threat, I say this: You went into this for the money and the power, not to improve my life or anyone else's. Any risk attached to that decision is your problem, not the taxpayers.

It may appear to be a small matter to excite my ire in this way, just the use of an official car for a private journey, but it is corruption, and serves as a very clear and concrete example of what is going on everywhere the unaccountable are spending other people's money. Our MP's pay themselves, with our money, a sum that they choose, without asking us what we think they are worth; MEP's claim for expenses which they have never paid out, they claim for attendance when they were not there, they do no real work, as the Parliament has no power and they almost never pay any attention to the people they are supposed to represent. They are mostly glorified lobbyists, representing special interests to the Commission. This corruption is well documented on a massive scale, and is protected by the rules that they make themselves, and by the culture of entitlement which they have spent many years creating and normalising.

Power not only corrupts, it attracts the corrupt. The purpose of government, we fondly think, is to protect the nation and to organise, collectively, such things as are better done that way. This is total bollocks. The purpose of government is to make politicians powerful and their courtiers rich. It has, and never has had, any other purpose, from its earliest days in the tribal group in the savannah. Democracy is a deal by which they let us throw them out every five years in exchange for our promise not to slit their throats in the mean time. Both sides interpret this agreement with a certain amount of freedom, but it can, at times, work quite well. But it should not be confused with government by the people. It isn't, and probably no such thing is possible. Democracy is a way of controlling the state, not of turning the people into the state.

Thank you for your attention. Tomorrow we shall relax by talking about hedgehogs, which I enjoy much more than this depressing stuff.

The Great Repeal Bill and FM Radio

Those of us who have watched with horror as the Labour government, to applause from Brussels, has turned Britain into a land of restricted freedom, where you can be arrested for a large number of non-crimes, and detained without trial for months, where many perfectly normal activities are forbidden as a sop to some whining bunch or other, or simply to make it clear, by the arbitrary exercise of power, who is in charge, where people feel obliged to get someone’s permission before doing anything, where everyone thinks they are entitled, not only to opine about what others choose to do, but to determine whether or not they should be allowed to do it, where neighbours spy on neighbours, and report them to the press if they disapprove of anything they do, in the knowledge that the media can be relied on to make their lives unliveable...

Those of us who have seen this happen were much cheered by the stated intention of the new government to repeal many of these laws in an attempt to make Britain a freer and better place once more, and I, at least was cautiously glad to hear that they intended to ask country- this is a democracy, after all- what laws they wanted them to have a look at, with a view to expunging them from the statute book.

There are little things and big things that need to be reviewed, from smoking bans to 90 day detention and beyond, but top of the list (as reported in the Telegraph, top of more than one list) is delaying the suspension of analogue radio transmissions. This is very depressing, and shows once again that the problem with democracy is the demos; as many politicians and bureaucrats in the EU say quite openly, if we went around listening to the people who pay us to represent them we’d never be able to do what we want. But I’m a democrat, with all the consequences, so if that’s what people are most concerned about, the government should take them seriously.

It’s still depressing, though; we armchair revolutionaries were hoping for something better.

*Down here on the farm blogging is by a stick thingy of very limited speed and volume, so there will be no links and no photos until September.

The Fight Against Knife Crime

We’re back and blogging. The haitus has been occasioned by a few days holiday in the north of Spain (San Vicente de la Barquera. Nice place, more about it later) and a further few days in England (about which also a bit later). Now we’re on the farm, but I almost didn’t get here…

I tend not to read blog entries where the blogger talks about himself in the manner of a self-obsessed newspaper columnist, so this is not really about me, though it uses an incident I was involved in to illustrate a point that is rather more important than I am.

I was stopped at Stansted airport by a security officer who had seen something he didn’t like on the scanner, and searching through my luggage he found, in a forgotten pocket of a bag I was using for some other purpose, and which was buried in a rucksack, a small penknife that I had not known was there. Oh damn, I thought, they’ll confiscate it.* And so they did, but then it got a lot more complicated.

The knife has a blade of about two and a half inches, and I use it in the country for cutting cured meats, slicing tomatoes, picking flowers, cutting string, and a hundred little things for which generations of people, and not just those who enjoy the country, have found it useful to carry a penknife. But not in modern Britain. The colleague of the security officer decided that the blade was lockable, a concept I still haven’t fully understood. All folding knives have some kind of mechanism to stop them closing while in use, and why mine was any different from a Swiss Army knife of the same size, which I was explicitly told was ok, I have no idea. But it seems that Parliament, in response to some thug knifing someone, and at the instigation, one would imagine, of someone who was never a boy scout and has his fruit pre-sliced by the staff, at some point made such things illegal, and they also took the highly illiberal step of removing any possible defence, as I discovered when the police were called.

I had, of course, done nothing wrong. I had neither hurt, nor threatened anybody with the penknife. I had not even known I had it on me and if I had no reason to suspect that such an unremarkable, useful, everyday object was illegal in the land of my birth, which used to be a beacon of freedom and commonsense in a depressingly benighted and totalitarian world. But this is not about me.

None of these facts was disputed by the police, but even so, it’s an ‘offence’. And none of those facts matters in the slightest. They clearly knew I had done nothing wrong; from the way they treated the matter it was quite obvious that to them it was no more than a bit of paperwork, and I was some idiot who’d got himself caught up in the machinery of asinine law. They were more interesting in making sure I didn’t miss the plane than in protecting the world from your humble blogger. They were charming and efficient about it, but they said that they were only letting me go because I didn’t live in the UK. Presumably that’s their letout, even though ignorance of the law isn not supposed to be a defence in this case.

Even though it was made clear that I had no defence, and that there was no point shouting about the despotic stupidity of the law as it stands, it did cross my mind to call a solicitor and see what he said. I could have tried to show that the knife wasn’t ‘lockable’, but in the absence of any clarity of definition, it didn’t look a good bet. I might have been on firmer ground in disputing that I had been in ‘possession’, but I had a plane to catch and a life to lead, so I accepted a caution,** the policeman bade me good-day and called the gate to hold the plane. All very civilized, but stupid and pointless. No purpose has been served by it, everyone involved was well aware of this, and I may yet find that it has consequences at some future time.

*About 15 years ago, on the way to Istanbul from either Gatwick or Heathrow, I forget which, my father had a similar experience, in that he had accidently left a penknife in his hand luggage. Those were more sensible times- it was packaged and checked, and given back to him on arrival.

**Being accused of having an offensive weapon by a man carrying a machine gun is a bit rich, too, but it brings up another point. His machine gun didn’t bother me in the slightest because he didn’t do anything threatening with it and he was clearly a competent and responsible person to be carrying it. As my knife was, in my hands, equally clearly harmless.

Of Trade Unions and the Hairiness of Bongo Players

Last night the CSIF were demonstrating under my window. Not that I've done anything to them, but I happen to live opposite the Civil Governor, who gets a lot of this sort of thing (and so do I, of course, but he buggers off and leaves the rest of us to put up with the loudspeakers and whistles). They also marched around the block a bit, to justify the effort of turning up.

This is the civil service union, and they're a bit miffed that Zapatero has cut 5% off their salaries to try to make ends meet. He won't succeed, he'll just make more enemies, but that's politics.

They're a fairly civilized by the normal standards of trade unions. They didn't scream abuse at anyone, intimidate passers-by, smash anything, or look like they wanted to, and they had brought along a group of bongo players who hadn't been told about shampoo to provide some atmosphere, which the more militant unions never think of doing. Despite all this, I rather doubt they had the sympathy of the public, and for good reasons.

There are about 4m civil servants, quite a lot of them unnecessary and many of them lazy and inefficient, since they are not held to anything like the same standards as those of us in the productive economy, and they can't be sacked. They have lifetime contracts and guaranteed pensions, which it is almost impossible to lose. Certainly, incompetence, inefficiency, laziness or there not being anything forf them to do are not considered reasons for dismissal, so while it's not pleasant to earn 5% less each month, that is the absolute worst that can happen to them. There are 4.5m unemployed, who have no salary at all, and millions more have suffered a drop in income rather greater than 5% or, like me, have had to work much harder just to keep up the income level, and always with the possibility of unemployment in the near future (I make my own work, but it's taken a lot more time and effort this year to generate the same amount of work as before).

In other words, the majority of normal working people in this country would love to have the problems that the civil servants are moaning about, and so they were received with less than perfect sympathy. The unions in general are always willing to throw others out of work as the price of their pretensions and demands, but they don't like it up 'em.

I wish I could offer you a photo of the bongo troupe, but the camera battery was exhausted. So it's an old railway line again.

Blogging will be even lighter than it's been recently for the next couple of weeks, as I'm knocking off work and heading for the north and then for the old homeland. On my return I shall be in the country for the summer, so when blogging is resumed it is likely to be both bucolic and whimsical, for which I shall offer no apologies now or then.

Elections Free and Fair

The pigs have mostly come in to land, the elephants are being washed down to remove the pink dye, the figures are slowly ceasing to spin incoherently and lopsidedly in the heads of those who've tried to pay attention, the snake oil is mostly drying in the grass, the last promises are being swept away with the rest of the junk, the last lies are being told, and the last opportunity for all but a handful of the unctuous, power-crazed mob to get on the telly and be taken vaguely seriously is being franctically sought.

On Thursday the final act of the often fascinating, often immensely dull drama we call a general election will be played out, a climax in which the press finally gets to look even more self-important and tedious than the politicians, and on Friday we will still have a Prime Minister, and a government, but we don't yet know who, nor what form it will take.

We can sure of one thing, though: whatever form the government takes, and whoever leads it, it will keep trying to do things; to control things, to forbid things, to direct every detail of everything we do, and to complicate even the most simple and natural of human acts to the point where life cannot be lived without constant reference to solicitors, accountants and administrative bureaucrats, in case we break the law by getting out of bed.

If there is no immediate winner, which is a distinct possibility, we can be sure of something else, too: some deal will be put together in secret by the leaders of the parties (I mean the real leaders, not the spokesmen they call candidates for PM) involving promises for future positions, payments, actions and laws which we, those who pay for it all, and who they are supposed to represent, will never be told of, but which will affect our lives and our country, perhaps in important ways. Deals will be done, hands will be shaken, pur future will be decided, but those decisions, those deals, will be made purely in the interests of the people who make them. We will not count.

There is a good chance that both PR and the public funding of political parties could be the result of those secret promises, effectively placing the choice of MP's completely in the hands of the party managers. We, the public, will have to pay for it all, and obey their rules, but we will no longer have any real choice as to who represents us. In fact, we will not be represented at all, as MP's will lose any reason to show even the shred of interest and loyalty to their constituents that most of them show now.

The 'leaders' of the three main parties are not leaders at all. I've said this before, but Gordon Brown is not capable of leading anyone anywhere (exactly where would you follow him?). He is not fit to captain his house third team. He's the sort who has to beg to be allowed to carry the drinks so he can feel part of the team. That's the Prime Minister we've had for the last few years.

Cameron and Clegg are quite good at what they do, which is create an image for their party which is inviting and doesn't frighten anyone off, but they are so busy doing that that they can't show any real qualities of leadership. Leaders are divisive, they are strong, decisive, magnetic characters, who hoover up the weak, attract the strong, and are hated by those who want to call themselves leaders but don't know how to do it.

Anyhow, enough rambling.

If I'd got the paperwork sorted out in time, I would almost certainly have voted Conservative. The MP in the constituency where I would have voted is a LibDem, a nice chap, born and bred in the town, a councillor for many years, mayor a couple of times, and a 'pillar of the community'. But as an MP, pretty useless. So I would probably have voted C out of habit, or possibly UKIP, because they are offering something concrete that I happen to agree with, and it might not be a wasted vote in that area.

The other day, on May the first, which is, I think historically, and certainly in practice, a celebration of international communism, I had the anarcho-sindicalists, a Trotskyite bunch (as they define themselves), both hairy and smelly (I don't know why the far left is so averse to personal hygiene) shouting under my window, waving anti-democratic flags and chanting slogans. Someone gave an incomprehensible (fortunately) speech through a megaphone. It's a funny kind of anarchy that demands more laws and regulations, on the other hand the demands for other people's money were rather more predictable.

But they are a bunch of harmless nuts. They weren't violent or threatening, and the fact that they can protest and make such demands in public is a sign of a healthy society. The fact that they will be completely ignored is a good sign, too.

I can vote on Thursday, together we can throw out that incompetent bunch and their mad figurehead, if we wish, and put someone else there. We can put Lord Pearson there, or Nick Griffin if we want, and the EU would cry foul, but that's democracy, and if we wish we have the power to do it.

Others don't. I blogged last week on the Cuban 'elections'. And at Harry's Place (an intelligent and informative, and genuinely free, left wing blog) a short post linking to Yoanni Sánchez, who explains how workers are forced to celebrate Worker's Day in Cuba (complete with spontaneous rejoicing).

So I'm happy to see the anarcho-Trots shouting incoherent and contradictory slogans under my window. It reminds me that the country I have chosen to live in, though far from perfect, is free in many impportant ways. And the fact that I can say what I feel about Gordon Brown, the Labour party and its policies, the EU and its antidemocratic imposition of bureaucratic tyranny, and so on, shows that the country I grew up in is also free in ways that other countries are not.

EDL and UAF

This story, covered briefly in the Independent and the Times, but not really followed up by anyone, in the press or on the blogs, is important because the most dangerous opponents of freedom- that is, those who have a chance of actually succeeding in reducing the freedom of others- are those who do it in the name of fashionable causes. So the following scene is instructive, and needs to be properly analysed (Unity of place and time are observed, unity of action may be assumed for the sake of argument):

The setting: Central Bolton on an overcast Sunday afternoon (not a promising start, I know)

The dramatis personae: The English Defence League (a bunch of thugs cobbled together from odds and ends not bright enough or clean enough to get into the BNP. They don't like militant Islam).

Unite Against Fascism (A bunch of thugs cobbled together from student politics and fringe bits of the extreme left. They like a punch up, don't like anyone who won't parrot their own pieties, don't know what fascism is, or freedom, and respond to provocation with the maturity of a 6 year old who's forgotten to take his Ritalin).

If you need to resort to abuse and threats you may just have lost the argument. If you start by setting out your intention to use violence and threats as your only answer then you are undoubtedly a bigger problem than the one you claim to be addressing. and you certainly don't deserve to be taken seriously.

The BNP, who were the original target of the UAF, are not fascists, and they are not right-wing. They raison d'etre is that they don't like immigrants, blacks, etc (insert term of choice) but as far as they have a coherent set of policies in other areas, which isn't far at all, they are left-wing, statist, and seek the working class vote. I wish they didn't exist, but they do, and we have to live with it.

The EDL, on the other hand, don't even pretend to have any coherent policies about anything, adn can hardly be grouped at all, politically. They claim to be against the supine acceptance of militant Islam, which may or not be an excuse to attack immigrants, but in itself it is at least defensible. They also, despite being mostly a chance for a bunch of thugs to have a little fun, have some intelligent leaders, who have learnt a lot from the BNP. The propaganda value of being the one who are violently attacked while peacefully protesting is high, even though the press tries to pretend it hasn't happened, and so the EDL isues rules for its own demonstrations, provides stewards from its own ranks, bans its supporters from carrying alcohol, and knows it can rely on the UAF to turn up and throw things, break things, and assault people, because that's what they do.

I'm not black and I'm not from Bolton, so I can look at this more in the abstract. The EDL may or may not be a spontaneous response to a genuine problem, but it is certainly not the answer to that problem. Nevertheless, it exists, and it's members are entitled to their views and to express them publicly. To deny that freedom is to make it conditional on orthodoxy or fashion, and it is amply demonstrated in human history that no one can be trusted to determine what people may be permitted to think.

If the EDL are a problem, and they probably are, the UAF, a violent, illiberal gang led by Trots, is certainly not the answer to it.

Don't believe me, go and read what they have to say. Listen to them speak. Let them tell you, through their words and actions, what they are. Unlike them, you see, I do believe in freedom, and not just for people who are like me.

I thought there was a point to this post when I started, but now I'm not so sure. In any case, read what everyone has to say about this. The Independent, you will notice, talks about the police battling right-wingers, but the police spokesman makes it clear that it was the UAF causing all the trouble. The EDL have, as I say, learned a lot very quickly. And don't trust anyone who wants to tell you what you are allowed to hear, and what you are allowed to say. They are not on your side.