Given No Choice

While the Liberal Democrats are highly unlikely to win the next General Election or win more seats than either Labour or the Conservatives, if there is a hung Parliament then they will most likely play a role in helping to form a coalition Government.

The BBC is reporting that the Liberal Democrats are going to drop their pledge to cut the overall level of tax at the next election. This, I think, is significant because it now means that none of three major political parties in Britain will be promising to reduce the increasingly crushing burden of taxation placed upon the British electorate at the election next year.

Our political class from all parties have conspired to remove any semblance of electoral choice over this highly important issue. If you believe that the tax burden should be cut, as millions of British voters do, then you are now left completely unrepresented by any political party that has a chance of forming a Government.

Furthermore, the usual excuses that party spokesman predictably parrot about how cuts in taxation are somehow ‘implausible’ or ‘irrational’ during the current economic climate are left completely uncontested. They never explain why such high levels of taxation are ‘rational’ or why it is right that the Government and state should waste so much of our income on frivolous pursuits and egotistical political projects.

The real reason why none of our political class will advocate any other alternative to what already appears to be the status quo is that they either genuinely support ever higher levels of stifling taxation, or that they have become so intellectually lazy that they have chosen not to make the case for a less expensive state.

When politics has been reduced by the political and media class to being about personalities rather than policies, should we really expect any different? Once again we have been given no choice.

Public Banking Enquiry

David Cameron has today called for a public inquiry and investigation into the problems with the regulatory framework that led, in part, to the recent banking collapse and economic crisis.

An intelligent move by Mr Cameron, though it did take him some considerable time to get around to it seeing as others had been asking for an inquiry months ago.

However, even if Mr Cameron does get the inquiry he wants, the report may not come soon enough. Already, the great and the good in Europe are pressing ahead with plans to pass the regulation of all financial markets and hedge funds onto the European Union’s undemocratic institutions.

Although it was entirely predictable that the EU would use the financial crisis (which they played their part in creating) as a means to further their process of political integration and ever closer union, it would have been helpful if, just for once, they ignored their political project and attempted to understand the causes of the regulatory problem they are supposedly trying to solve before legislating to correct it in the way they are now.

Free Market Football

The Fabian Society has released the results of a survey that they commissioned on what British people considered a ‘reasonable’ wage for certain professions.

The YouGov run poll of three thousand people demonstrated that the public thought footballers’ and company directors’ salaries should be radically curbed while nurses and bus drivers deserved far greater financial rewards.

I think the survey’s findings do ring true. Many people in Britain are indeed resentful of those that earn much more than them – though arguably that is only natural human behaviour. However, I do wonder how many of those questioned in the survey go to watch football matches week-in, week-out and therefore provide the demand and ticket revenue that supply the footballer’s wages? Quite a few I would imagine.

The Fabian Society’s spokesman, Tom Hampson, said ‘Progressive politics should acknowledge that the public want the unfair gap between rich and poor narrowed’. In other words, the Fabian Society believes the Government should directly intervene even further into private sector wages to curb ‘excessive’ earnings.

This is, of course, just the Left-wing socialist equality agenda of old dressed up in the new Progressive agenda clothing – the Progressive agenda being the supposedly forward-looking, always improving doctrine of modern politics rather than anyone not agreeing with that world-view who must instead be a backwards looking ‘regressive’.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Goodbye Global Warming

Only a few weeks ago, the Met Office, an organisation not particularly well known for their ability to accurately predict next week’s weather let alone that of the next decade or century, claimed that temperatures are set to rise by 2014.

Unsurprisingly, for organisations that already firmly believe in the politicised pseudoscience theory of global warming and wish to present evidence to justify their beliefs, it’s not really all that difficult to do.

First you select the outcome you desire – in this case higher mean temperatures in the next couple of decades. Next you take your data (usually carefully hand picked or manipulated in some specific way) and then adjust the output graphs until you obtain your end-goal result – ie. predictions that ‘prove’ temperatures will rise, and thus global warming ‘must’ be happening. Simple.

Gordon Brown in his tenure as Chancellor used similar methods to forecast and present favourable economic growth. The most valued statisticians at the Treasury were those that, regardless of the data, managed to fiddle around with economic models and arrive at the ‘best’ figures – usually 2.5% growth or more.

However, what’s really interesting about the Met Office report is highlighted in an online article by the Guardian. It says the forecast reveals ‘natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009, but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily’.

So, what exactly does that mean? Well, it’s basically saying that the climate will cool slightly due to ‘natural variations’, meaning that any evidence of rises in temperature caused by us humans will be cancelled out – but that despite this, global warming still exists. How convenient.

For the next few years the global warming pseudoscientists will have no basis for their claims and it’ll all be a matter of blind belief – it’s just that they’re getting their excuses in early.