Command-c Command-v

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Mardell

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Mardell.

I see the anti-EU voices are shouting for the British ratification process to be stopped. Doesn't sound like they're respecting our national sovereignty if they want foreign voters to stop British parliamentary decisions in their tracks. But as we know, the antis think that it's only proper democracy when people are agreeing with them. That's why they don't think that the Irish second vote on Nice was 'proper' democracy. That's why they don't think that the European Parliament is 'proper' democracy. That's why they don't think that Parliamentary government is 'proper' democracy. Oh no, only referendums count, and then only those that get the 'right' result. If Ireland votes on a varied treaty and votes yes, watch for cries of foul: "Don't listen to Irish voters - they're only right when they agree with us!"

The Lib Dem dilemma | Comment is free

Link: The Lib Dem dilemma | Comment is free.

Boris Johnson worries me. Not because he might win (I live in Sussex, so what you decide at the top of the M23 is none of my business), but because he is the perfect representative of a kind of know-nothing rightish politics that I think is far more dangerous than the ideological Thatcherite variety. At least with Thatcherism, there was an ism.

The commenter who referenced GW Bush above has it right, I think - Boris seems like an amiable enough person to people who don't want to look behind his politics, and is skilled enough to hit several populist/nostalgic buttons like Routemasters and so on. However, his vision for the future appears to be that it should be very much like the past, and preferably the past of about 1954. This isn't the way to answer the problems that London is going to face the future, and more generally it isn't the way to answer the problems that the UK as a whole faces today.

In an era when media commentary on politics is all about Celia Bruni's dress and not at all about Franco-British co-operation, all sorts of unwelcome policies might get smuggled past voters in an old-fashioned wicker basket.

The Apprentice ep one

When the Rt Hon Nicholas Farkington-Brown was yammering on about football, I wondered why Alan S wasn't clambering across the table to lamp him one. I reached the conclusion that Margaret and Nick were physically restraining him out of shot.

EU popularity

yoric: no, most people in Europe do not want rid of the EU, and if you look at the stats, rather than your own fevered prejudices, you will find that 58% of the EU population as a whole think the EU is a good thing for their country, with Britain joint most sceptical (with Cyprus) on 37%.

Now, perhaps this is because only Britons are perspicacious enough to see the evil that is being wrought in our name. Maybe it's because we are a Great Trading Nation(tm) - although I thought that Spain (64%), Portugal (69%), and France (57%) had a bit of an overseas empire, too. Maybe it's because we cherish our British freedoms, though I seem to remember that democracy was invented in Greece (80%). Perhaps it's because we pay so much into the Union's budget, although the largest net contributor (Germany) has 58% of its people in favour of membership.

Or maybe - just maybe - the bile of newspapers and some politicians over the last twenty years has so poisoned the British dialogue on this issue that we are turning towards an dream of long-past or never-was economic sovereignty, and trying to solve the problems of the 21st century with the solutions of the Victorian era.

Building big buildings. And knocking others down. | MetaFilter

Link: Building big buildings. And knocking others down. | MetaFilter.

Lord Foster (designer of the airport) was on the radio in Britain the other day pointing out that the entire building process in China took less time than the public inquiry into the fifth terminal at Heathrow. Guess he didn't notice that China is a dictatorship.

I think China's rising GDP should be a worry for the regime, rather than a cause for celebration - once people start getting middle class, they get a lot harder to push around.

Britain: we discovered the queue | MetaFilter

Link: Britain: we discovered the queue | MetaFilter.

I don't say it's evil, but you are setting up a moral judgement that in this context I don't think is appropriate. As I've said before, it's a communitarian or populist approach that says 'they're our services because we're taxpayers and we've paid for them', and I completely disagree with it. They are the State's services, and their delivery has to be guided by requirements of equity as well as the desires of the electorate (expressed through elections rather than the Daily Mail letters page).

My big point is: we took a national decision in 1945 that healthcare, shelter and sustenance were so important they should be provided at a basic level regardless of people's financial abilities. I think it's just as important that they should be provided regardless of people's moral qualifications, whether those are based on criminal record, fat intake or immigration status. As soon as you start accepting that there is a moral test for universal services, you divide people into good and bad, sheep and goats, fatties and healthies, and you are on the road to discrimination and tyranny of the majority.

Tax is fun

I'm tired of hearing that tax is theft. Even if you're the sort of libertarian nut who believes the poor should be allowed to die in gutters because it will do them good in the long run, you've still enjoyed years of state-funded healthcare, roads, defence, education, transport, environmental protection that enabled you to earn that money?

Independent Kosovo? Why Not Vermont? | MetaFilter

I don't see that it's a hole in democratic theory per se. After all, if a country is a democracy, it would/should respect a stable democratic decision to secede - this is what the UK Government has said about Northern Ireland and Scotland, and I'm sure the same would apply for Cornwall, Padania, Brittany, etc. if there were a broad-based democratic movement supporting it rather than just a handful of independent thinkers.

The EU is changing the terms of the game in Europe, of course, in that the collapse of economic and now currency barriers to trade between nations removes some of the constraints against independence ("Scotland would never survive economically as an independent nation" has less weight when it could adopt the Euro and trade with the rest of Europe freely).

@.

Headline habits

Media mogul slams Yank journos

Fury at capital letter madness

British headlines: Do they use rhetorical questions?

Headlines "may talk bollocks" in quote marks

Crazy Eurocrats to ban British comma

Ron Paul quits with $30m in the bank

Ron Paul: "I can never possibly repay your generous donations"
But that's OK, because he's not going to try.