Sunday, August 31

The Sunday Quote

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''The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.''

Eugene McCarthy (1916 - 2005), Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979
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Your Cake .... But Don't Eat It!

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Since optimism is one of the few things which the government has not yet got round to taxing, regulating or banning it is perhaps safe to assume that things can only get better.

Though it is not encouraging to read in The Irish Times (as one does) that the ratchet of big State involvement in every imaginable nook and cranny of people's lives is working again. Those things that national Governments have yet to invade of their own accord, it seems, are increasingly being trampled by the EU instead.

Whilst British Government certainly qualifies as big, invasive, over-regulating, cumbersome, costly and inefficient in its behaviour, this is a stark reminder that it still has a way to go to catch up with the EU. With their tens of thousands of bureaucrats in Brussels slaving over hot keyboards, in their wisdom and zeal they've regulated the highly dangerous extreme sport of...baking competitions at fairs and fetes. That's right, they've banned anyone from consuming the cakes except for the mouthful the judges have to consume in order to assess the baked goods.

After the initial assessment sample has been consumed the cakes must be destroyed, not eaten. What exactly is the point of this regulation? Why must innofensive events be regulated at all? Worse, why did countless bureaucrats and Commission legislators even bother to draw this law up in the first place - and make us pay them for their trouble?
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Some Thing Wrong with our World

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Today sees another penetrating article on the climate change lobby by the excellent Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph. Booker examines the 'evidence' that has been presented to the political class and taken at face value, resulting in a race by politicians to 'out-green' opponents by pledging to dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions.
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Booker goes on to explain why the information being used by politicians to underpin 'green' policy can - putting it politely - be reasonably considered to be wrong. He covers topics that he has visited in the past, but in doing so continues to build a convincing case for not blindly accepting the various claims and scares. Booker goes to town today on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charting the intellectual and political corruption behind what must the biggest (and most expensive) scam in the history of the planet.

Perhaps though the greatest evil perpetrated by the IPCC is the way it has distorted public policy, elevating "climate change" to the top of the political agenda and thus skewing expenditure priorities and the focus of public administration.
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No more so is this apparent than in the energy field where, instead of addressing the complex but technically solvable problems of providing cheap electricity for the masses, policy is totally bogged down by the fantasy of providing for a "carbon-free" future.
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Worse still, if we are entering a period of global cooling – which even the "warmists" admit is on the cards, the policy responses required are entirely different from those needed to deal with the warming scenario postulated by the IPCC.In that sense, the IPCC is directly responsible for a huge diversion of resources, on a global scale, sanctioning policies which have no foundation in reality while diverting attention from the nuts and bolts of good public administration that are needed to keep society functional.
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That this group of self-serving politicians and politico-scientists have been able to get away with it, though, is one of those latter-day marvels which defies explanation. As Booker demonstrates, so transparent is their fraud that it is almost inexplicable that the perpetrators have not been run out of town.Instead, they preen and posture as they collect their Nobel prizes, while the media laud them and perpetuate their propaganda. There is something very wrong with this world, and it ain't global warming.
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Sunday, August 24

The Sunday Quote

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'' The more you read about this Politics thing, you have got to admit that each party is worse than the other.''

Will Rogers (1879-1935) The Illiterate Digest (1924)
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War Games

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Behind the razzmatazz of the Peking Olympics, there is a darker picture, redolent of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where the country was starved of food, fuel and power simply to keep the Games going. This was covered by Christopher Booker in his seminal book called the Games War, to which he referred in one of his recent columns. The issue is further discussed on EU Referendum
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Parking Charges

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The Blog site The Purple Scorpion highlights Local Government minister John Healey, who says that local councils should charge more for basic services such as off-street parking: "Only one in five councils are using charging to the full potential. Not just to cover costs but to shape their area." Never mind that local voters elect local authorities and this may not be what they voted for, click The Purple Scorpion.
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Sunday, August 17

Mitigation From The Editor of VBS

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One of the problems of running an expanding business is that there is very little time for the very consuming past-time of blogging - hence the serious lack of postings on this blog in recent months.
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I promise not to neglect VBS so badly in the future. After all this Blog has a reputation of disturbing to maintain. So a very big sorry to all our readers, especially those who have sent emails expressing a very British concern.
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In mitigation I offer my business website for viewing, http://www.the-publicist.co.uk/ - actually we are rather proud of it - and thus are very grateful (a huge British understatement) to webdesigners 01 Digital who's expertees on behalf of Peter Troy The Publicist Ltd will make the site an awardwinning one (when we find a competition to enter it in to). In short dear reader we will now 'KBO'.

Editor - Peter Troy

The Sunday Quote

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'' Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly and applying unsuitable remedies.''

Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, (1875- 1954) publisher, writer and political publicist.
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Of Flags and Forgiveness

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The Editor's Sunday Ramble around the newspapers.

Ignoring the lead story on the front page of The Sunday Telegraph (this blog is boycotting the Olympic Games - please scroll down) and thus not getting upset that Rebecca Aldington the double gold medal winner is holding the Union flag both upside down and inside out in her moment of undoubtedly deserved glory yesterday in Beijing the reader will note the posturing David Cameron getting a hammering for (once again) seriously missing the point. It is the same point that Peter Hitchins takes up in The Mail on Sunday: that Cameron in an amazing demonstration that he is not fit for office is supporting the ''Olympically corrupt'' Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili. Additionally Mr Cameron wants Georgia to be allowed into Nato thus committing the UK to come to Georgia's defence (he also wants to do the same for Ukraine) quite crazy.

Moving on, the most important economic news of recent weeks, Irwin Stelzer tells us in today's edition of The Sunday Times is the recovery of the long-comatose dollar. But what is good news for the US economy seems to be bad news for the euro-zone. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported earlier this week that the European Central Bank (ECB) was taking a hammering for making a serious error by raising interest rates a quarter point to 4.25pc last month. It seems that the ECB has misjudged the seriousness of the downturn in the euro-zone economy, which has seen a contraction of 0.2 percent in the second quarter, compared with the first three months of this year, with the economies of Germany, France and Italy probably now in full recession.

Simon Jenkins in The Sunday Times gets it absolutely right when he comments on the ''costly candy floss'' of regional development agencies which have contributed to collapsing the the enterprise culture on which renewal in the English 'regions' depends. As this blog has alluded to in many postings the expansion of the public sector and in particular regionalization and all the nonsense that goes with the current crassly stupid business support culture is infecting the engine room of the British economy, small and medium sized businesses.
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As many activists in the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) have heard this blog editor repeat many times (and mostly to their annoyance) the most effective lobbying that small businesses can do is to plead to be left alone by government. The representatives of the engine room of our economy will, as an unintended consequence in true Orwellian style, become absorbed in the government machine at their peril. Government (particularly the present one) is the enemy of enterprise, not its savior.

Finally, an additional Sunday quote aimed at our politicians and their fellow travelers: ''Father forgive them for they know not what they do.'' (St.Luke Ch.23 v34). One could add that increasingly the electorate is becoming less forgiving with all politicians and that is becoming quite dangerous for all of us.
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Russian Invasion

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Yet an other example of the confusion and hapless muddle from our politicians and the EU (as if yet an other example is needed) whenever there is a real crisis was evident last week at the non reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia.

While Russia proceeded to ignore her own six-point peace plan and continued fighting in Georgia, targeting the largely civilian population and ruthlessly advancing towards the capital of Tbilisi the British Foreign Secretary said nothing, perhaps because he was more focused on internal Labour Party fighting. It also took days for both the Prime Minister and the Leader of HM Loyal Opposition to make any statements that made the slightest bit of sense.Still, it is good to know that when they met recently the foreign ministers of the EU member states decided to paper over their differences and agree to send monitors to the Caucasus to oversee the “negotiated truce”.

As is obvious from the news coming out of Georgia, there is no need for monitors, the truce is non-existent. What will our political masters propose when they realise what is actually happening, a consultation meeting ?
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Saturday, August 16

Global Freezing

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No matter how much hot air has been expelled by certain climate scientists and regardless of their short range predictions that the North Pole could be ice-free this summer (never mind those long range ones about catastrophic warming), the Arctic polar ice cap simply refused to melt away. In fact there is more ice than this time last summer. The Antarctic ice cap has grown even more than in recent years. Anyone would think the world was cooling down!
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Sunday, August 3

The Sunday Quote

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''During Stalin's speeches to the Praesidium, the first delegate to stop clapping was routinely haulded off to be shot.''
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Clive James - Writer and Broadcaster

It Simply Not Fair

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Three British fishermen who overfished their quota repeatedly, stand to lose their livelihood, vessels and even their homes due to a disproportionate sentence.
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Quotas issued to Dutch fishermen were not being used up and the Marine and Fisheries Agency (MFA) should have redistributed the available quotas, but failed to do so. EU quotas that shared out UK fisheries to foreign vessels were denying British fishermen a proper living and being wasted as they were not being taken up.
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As Christopher Booker reports in the Telegraph: Judge Neil McKittrick not only imposed crippling fines totalling £42,500, with costs of £27,646, but also agreed to confiscations of their assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act, to a total of £213,461. Unless this is paid within months they face two years in prison.
The root of the problem for the three men was that their sole quota had been reduced so much that it no longer paid them to fish. They were aware that substantial quantities of UK quota, allocated mainly to Dutch-owned "flag boats", were not being fished for.The Proceeds of Crime Act was brought in to penalise major criminals such as money launderers and drug barons. But it is being applied in this case as a British institution guilty of incompetence, the MFA, turns every mechanism in its armoury against British subjects in order to zealously appease nonsensical European regulations.
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The MFA audited the fishermen's bank statements and demanded that the fishermen must prove that each of thousands of payments was legal. Any payments received that could not be proved to be legal would be deemed to be the "proceeds of crime" and confiscated - without the MFA having to prove the payment was illegal. The burden of proof has been reversed by the state in order to destroy the lives of men who simply wanted to earn a living.