More from the guard...

Pulling into Southampton Central:

For those of you travelling on a cruise ship, I wish you a lovely time. And I'm quite jealous.

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (0)

South West Trains

I'm sitting on the South West Trains service to Bournemouth. I must say the friendliness of the guards has improved. This message has just come over the tannoy from the very well-spoken (female) guard:

I've now met most of you and, I must say, it's been a real pleasure.

...If you're worried about anything, do please catch me as I walk through the train. Please don't just sit there worrying.

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (0)

Cuba and Belarus wonderful, Israel beyond the pale

No one will ever be shocked by the proceedings of UN bodies, but the UN Human Rights Council's recent behaviour is pretty scandalous.

The Council, don't forget, was set up to replace the Commission in order, supposedly, to bring some sense to its proceedings. Dream on.

This Jerusalem Post report shows that the Council is just as perverse:

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (2)

Hurrah for ding dong

Matthew Parris has an excellent piece today in The Times, on the superiority of competition over consensus:

I worry that British voters benefit from dingdong politics without really liking it, or understanding why. We say: “I don’t need a choice of schools in my area, I just need one good school”; and many of us might say: “I don’t need competition between political parties, I just need one good administration made up of the best of all of them.” We might equally say: “I don’t need a choice of supermarkets in my town: just one good one.” But the point is that in all these areas it is choice, competition, the rivalry and the edge that sharpens performance and stimulates ideas. You may say that coalition politics leaves us free to choose between alternatives, but simply asks them to cooperate afterwards; but an ethos of cooperation suffocates argument, works against the careers of those who think the unthinkable and stick to their guns.

Good new ideas in politics and economics are often aggressive things; they often hurt somebody; they challenge vested interests; they challenge complacency. They do not thrive in committee rooms whose wood-panelled walls breathe the search for compromise. Would privatisation, the enforced sale of council houses, the taming of the trades unions, have survived a 1980s big-tent government? A political party is a kind of forcing-house for the growth of new ideas and spirits. It is an army by turns beleaguered or hubristic. It holds to and defends and hones doctrines and theories with an enthusiasm born of danger. A big-tent government produces a different internal culture – we see these all across Europe. Though in form it may be democratic because its formation follows an election, its spirit is that of an oligarchy. It ceases to believe, as a political party does, that it is going anywhere. It just is.

He's also got a good line about Brown's wooing of LibDems:

I think Mr Brown was trying to copy Nicolas Sarkozy but went about it ineptly, as so often happens when you attempt brain surgery with a big clunking fist.  

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (0)

Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio

Just pure, unadulerated good news. As The Times puts it in its print edition:

Loss of captain will shatter Arsenal

And, oh, how awful, here's how the Guardian describes it:

Arsenal reeling as £16m Henry joins Barcelona

Oh dear!

(Mind you, £16 million for Darrent Bent? I hope I'm wrong, but he strikes me as an average Premiership striker and no better.) 

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (0)

Glastonbury: a celebration of wrong

I won't be at Glastonbury this weekend. This piece of mine from three years ago explains why:

Do you long to free yourself from the shackles of convention? Do you gaze into space, bemoaning the fact that your life is one long obligation to family, work and friends? Are you panting with anticipation at the thought of this week’s Glastonbury Festival, knowing that for just a few days in the year you will be free to be yourself, free to commune with Nature and free to indulge in the hedonism you think life should really be about?

Then grow up.

There are few more pathetic sights than the annual paeans of anticipatory pleasure in the run up to the Glastonbury Festival. To hear the drivel that pours forth from its habitués, one would imagine that Glastonbury is some sort of mystical experience: an opportunity for the world to be a better place thanks to the positive karma that spreads throughout the ether, for those who make the effort to attend to turn themselves into better people for communing with Nature, and for those who miss out to think about how, next year, they too might take part.

The truth is that, far from making the world a better place, Glastonbury represents much of what is wrong with it today.

Glastonbury is not a departure from the norm but its very archetype — a clichéd, typical and deeply worrying reflection of how those with time and money choose to abrogate any sense of propriety, decency and upholding of legal, let alone moral, values.

The illegality of the drugs that fuel the Glastonbury experience is the least of it. Far worse is its sheer immorality and hypocrisy, based on the idea that law-breaking is fine so long as it is confined to “our sort of people” and takes place in a field of teepees. It’s only wrong when it’s committed by oiks.

There are few more grotesque double standards than those of the moneyed middle classes who take their children with them to experience the “mellow” (or, to be precise, drug-addled) atmosphere. It is what used to be known as the moral corruption of minors. They complain about drug-fuelled crime. Yet they somehow think it right to teach their children, by their own example, that drug taking is a good thing — the best way to relax.

Glastonbury is the epitome of the “let it all hang out” attitude that has so warped society — the idea that restraint and attentiveness to others is something not to be admired but to be sneered at, and that we are only truly free when we respond to our inner-most urges. It is the difference between sitting still and quiet at a string quartet recital and lying spaced out on the ground as the caterwauling of a fellow drugged-up performer wafts over you. One is despised as old-fashioned and buttoned up, the other commended as being at one with nature.

Not that Glastonbury is entirely without merit. It does allow one to apply the “Glastonbury Test”, a useful guide to public policy. Whether it involves welfare (“the tests for benefit eligibility are too harsh”), education (“a proper education revolves around children being allowed to express themselves”) or crime (“we need to appreciate the social stresses that force people to commit crime”), we can use the Glastonbury Test to determine the moral framework from which such ideas emanate. If the advocate eulogises Glastonbury then we know immediately to rule out his opinion as being based on the same dangerous, deluded fantasy that underpins the festival.

If you doubt me, look at the sheer crass stupidity of those who worship at the Glastonbury altar and claim that they are somehow leaving their usual life behind. Tickets to this year’s event started officially at £112; they were trading yesterday on eBay for more than double that amount. Add in the cost of getting there, camping (or, for the true hypocrites who want to empathise with nature but then retreat to the comfort of a hotel, the cost of a bed) and the ubiquitous drugs and we’re talking perhaps £500 a person. It is no more a retreat to Nature and feeling at one with the rest of humanity than a meal at Gordon Ramsay’s or the August villa in Tuscany.

Glastonbury should, rather, be seen for what it really is: the ultimate well-off druggie-wannabe- hippy weekend — a venue no less exclusive than Cowdray Park, Royal Ascot or Glyndebourne but without the restraint. And a gathering which, in its celebration of so much that has destroyed the norms of decent behaviour, has nothing to commend it beyond making for an easy identification of the forces that continue to warp society.

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (4)

I turn my back and...

Well, you go away for a day and then log on to discover that Poland has declared war on Germany, Sven's been approached to manage a 2008-9 Championship team and the EU's committed itself to communism.

Blimey O'Reilly. I'd better stay put before anything even worse happens.

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (2)

Some facts on investment

Anatole Kaletsky is full of sense - and facts - on the ridiculous fuss being made over private equity at the moment:

The largest study of British private equity deals, published late last year by the Centre for Management BuyOut Research at Nottingham University Business School, showed that employment had risen by 21 per cent on average after four years, although it did dip typically by 5 per cent in the first year after a buyout. It also showed that productivity almost doubled in this period and that product innovation and investment increased.

Embarrassingly for the trade union campaigners, the Nottingham study “found higher levels of employment, employee empowerment and wages” after these deals. To put it another way, private equity deals have turned out, on the whole, to be not very different from many other restructurings performed on sleepy British businesses since Margaret Thatcher launched her privatisation programme. All these restructurings, going right back to British Telecom in 1985, were opposed by the unions and initially by most employees, but in the end many of them produced not only more profitable companies, but also in many cases better working conditions and higher wages for the employees who remained.

As for the tax privileges of private equity investors:

It turned out, on closer inspection, that the unions’ criticisms of private equity companies as taxpayers applied to all private companies in Britain. What the unions were really calling for was a fundamental reform of the entire British corporate tax system – and one that would move directly against the pro-investment tax reforms adopted by successive Chancellors since the early 1980s and particularly by Mr Brown, who deliberately made debt financing more attractive to all private companies in his very first Budget ten years ago.

After suffering this setback, the opponents of private equity have been left with only one genuine argument – the tax privileges enjoyed by the employees of private equity firms as individuals. Here the critics have hit on a more promising issue, since a 10 per cent marginal tax rate does seem overly generous for multimillionaires. But again they run into the problem that the private equity partners’ advantages are just a specific case of a general tax relief that Mr Brown deliberately created for all investors in all private companies, to widespread and justified acclaim.

What a depressing commentary it is on the state of opinion and politics today that  ignorant attacks on private equity are not simply laughed out of court.

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (0)

Trust the people

Heavens to Betsy! Sometimes one finds oneself with different bedfellows:

We oppose top-down decision making on matters central to our lives and the way our nations are governed. We want a coherent process of reform. All who wish to be involved should be able to participate in this process of change. We refuse to be patronised with a 'dialogue' if the outcomes have already been decided. We ask you to join us in this appeal to all our fellow British citizens and to share our confidence that through a discussion based on evidence we can decide the best way forward. Please add your name to ours.

UPDATE: Lordy - one of them is the Yazzmonster herself. Pass the smelling salts...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (2)

More Italian

I have a piece in today's Il Foglio, Il dilemma di Brown.

Email to a friend  |   Permalink  |   Comments (0)