Monthly Archives: January 2014

Ed Milliband shows his socialist credentials

One of the latest wheezes from Ed Milliband is free childcare for all in the long term, to extend childcare in pre-school years for UK parents so they can go out to work and have their children looked after while they can increase their family incomes. In effect they are taking away responsibility for the children away from the parents and putting it in the hands of the taxpayer and the State. So you and I pay for someone else’s children to be looked after while they can work longer hours and earn more money.

No one is deriding the fact that a lot of people are finding life hard at the moment because of economic constraints, and the government does have a responsibility to ensure provision is made for the poor, the disadvantaged and struggling families, etc. Many would argue for instance that incentivising marriage through the tax system is not a bad idea, as marriage is the most stable relationship for bringing up children, so it is in the interests of the State to support it for the common good. Extremes are often problematic, and the idea that the State has no responsibility for the welfare of its citizens, that absolutely everything should be left to the individual, is such an extreme.

What is the key issue here? Women returning to work is not the priority and making financial savings is not the priority. The priority is the emotional health and wellbeing long term of the most important asset we have, our children. Maternal employees paying more taxes at work to the Exchequer is not the priority, it is the health and welfare of family life. You get family right, everything else falls into place, including the economy.

Here’s a quote from Lucy Powell, the shadow childcare minister, ‘Enabling women to go back to work who want to go back to work, in the same jobs they were doing before – so that they don’t pay that pay and status penalty for the rest of their careers – will increase revenues to the exchequer significantly, such that over time it pays for itself.”

Again this is an attempt to change reality. No-one is denigrating women working and wanting to improve their career but if you decide to have a family you cannot have it both ways, the ‘pay and status penalty’ is reality when people are running a business, and talented men and women committed to their careers are bound to have more opportunities and undivided ambition than those who decide to withdraw from the workforce to have a family. There is as an economist would say, an opportunity cost. If you decide to have a family, arguably the most important job in the world, the next best alternative foregone is a possibly uninterrupted rise up the career ladder and consequent higher earnings. You reap what you sow. Arguably, the decision to have a family is a more significant and valuable decision to society as a whole because you are raising the next generation.

The IPPR did a recent interim report where they estimated that getting 280,000 mothers back into the workforce would generate an extra £1.5B in tax revenue and make savings in benefit payments. But what about the existing unemployed who need to return to work? There were 1.27m people claiming unemployment benefit in October 2013 (claimant count) surely they are priority, especially the young people desperate for work.

But on this matter, let’s remind ourselves again, the government has no money. All the money it has is taken off you the taxpayer in order to fund its endeavours, and I suggest the less money it takes, and the more money you have in your pocket to decide how to spend, the better. It may be debateable the point at which a government ceases to incentivise a particular course of action it wishes its citizens to take, and starts to bribe voters with voters’ money, but childcare costs funded by the taxpayer to my mind is suspiciously hovering around the second category. When voters realise that they will substantially benefit from the largesse of the Treasury by voting for a particular party regardless of life choices, i.e. they will benefit from receiving other peoples’ money for which they themselves have not strived, then you are well on the way to total corruption of the democratic system. Some will say we are already there and have been for a good while.

It all comes back to individual responsibility, you are entirely responsible for your own life and must not look to the government to look after you in any way before using your own resources and ingenuity. I will come back to this again and again because it must become the default position of the UK population, as it has been in the past and can be again. If you decide to have children, you and you alone are responsible for them, not the taxpayer. History tells us that often parents go through a ‘poverty cycle’ when bringing up a family, but that’s just the way it is, it’s reality again which has a habit of cropping up at the most inconvenient of times when we want to enjoy personal peace and affluence. The benefits of sacrifice and responsibility are well worth it for I suggest the majority of parents when you can present responsible socially adjusted young adults to the grown up world after a sound foundation in life. Surely the benefits of a child being with its parents, and particularly with its mother, for the first five years, without her feeling pressured to work, are immeasurable. When you put money and the economy before everything else you are putting the cart before the horse. When you get family right, and strong healthy emotional bonding between parents and children, then you get everything else right. The government should be putting human relationships, health and well being first, not the economy.

So we have established the government has no money. Therefore not funding childcare means we all have more money in our pocket to begin with, including parents with children. They may not have a lot more money, but that reflects the fact that they have decided to have children and therefore presumably know they will have to make a sacrifice. Individual responsibility = big people = big society. Perhaps some families having a little more money in their pockets will enable them to make the decision not to have both parents pressured to go out to work. A tax system that faces us with our responsibilities will focus us much more sharply on the decisions we all as individuals have to make. Having children is a huge sacrifice and I’m not sure it should be shared to the extent of Ed’s universal childcare.

So Ed Milliband is giving us more of the socialism that gets us into financial straits every time. We end up with a bloated State and another predicable deficit. Roll on the revolution!

Camille Paglia breaks the mould

It’s always a pleasure when someone from the other side of the political spectrum agrees with something that you have believed all along. One thing worth mentioning in the debate is that we have to be humble enough sometimes to realise that people on the ‘other side’ as it were might just have a point in some areas. Political discourse is enhanced with a good dose of seasoning of salt sometimes, as insults, abuse and downright intimidation sometimes seem to dominate the narrative these days. It’s easy to allow that log just to be embedded in our own eyes for a long time and not see the good sense other people might have. We are all a complex jumble of different beliefs, experiences and motivations, and you can learn something from virtually anybody. My own conviction is that politics should involve doing what’s right regardless of whether you are considered to be on the ‘right’ or the ‘left.’

Some people take a ‘journey’ from one side of the political spectrum to the other, believing that they have received greater enlightenment in doing so. I have certainly read of those who have moved left to right, not so sure how many have moved the other way.

Famous luminaries who have made the journey from the left to the right include Melanie Phillips, who although seen as shrill by some has her finger on the pulse of the main issues of the day in a way that few others have. Not bad for someone who started their journey on the left as a Guardianista. Perhaps those who have made such a journey are the most effective spokespersons for their resulting worldview. Winston Churchill famously said that if you are not a liberal when you are 20 you have no heart, if you are not a conservative by the time you are 40 you have no head!’

Now we have a famous feminist, lesbian author and social critic, Camille Paglia, supporting some of the beliefs of the conservatives. I picked up two articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail.

Camille Paglia probably has more perception than a lot of conservatives, although she is certainly not about to give up her feminist principles and has evidently chosen an unconventional lifestyle. But she has nowse in spades in certain areas that are vital to the West’s survival.

One issue of great prescience is that it is one thing enjoying western freedoms and liberties, it is entirely another defending those freedoms and liberties to the death. Lots of us are Premier League exponents of enjoying the liberties we have inherited, doing virtually what we want, but we are not so good at understanding the roots of those freedoms in the first place. There never has been a time in history when men and women don’t have to fight for their freedom. The danger is that we have enjoyed such a long period of freedom and prosperity in the West that we have become too soft and unable to defend our culture or what is left of it if necessary. Sometimes you have to lay off the mantle of a peaceful unassuming citizen and take on the cloak of a warrior, and this especially applies to men.

Camille understands that men need a tough fighting spirit to draw upon in times of peril to literally defend their civilisation and culture. Men need a warrior mentality to deal with existential threats. To acknowledge this you have to recognise and accept the fundamental differences between men and women.

Camille has this to say about the West right now, ‘What you’re seeing is how a civilisation commits suicide.’ She gets really passionate about the efforts of modern society to undermine the basic biological differences between men and women. She is very concerned that many of the leaders in society, the elite, don’t have any background in military service so don’t think in military ways, having no clear conception of good and evil, that there are evil people out there and that you cannot be nice to everyone.

She says of that elite, “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”

She sure has a point there. A lot of the problems the US faces are similar issues in the UK. Many British for instance are trained to be nice to a fault, not to offend anyone unnecessarily, and that is a problem we are going to have to get over pretty quickly if we are to survive as a nation.

She argues that the softening of American society begins in the kindergarten “Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys,” She goes on to say, “They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.” Here she laments the shortening of ‘recess’ in American schools, or ‘break time’ as it is called in the UK, when boys can go and let off steam.

She sees the issues with her own son who she is raising with her ex partner, a female, hardly a traditional family. ‘She sees the tacit elevation of “female values”—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.’

We can see this pattern in the UK where primary schools are dominated by female teachers and the home situation is far from ideal in many households, with no father figure because women are bringing up boys on their own in single parent households or where the father has abandoned the family. The epidemic of fatherlessness in the UK is nothing less than a national disaster. No one is condemning anyone, we are where we are.

She goes on to say, ‘And the process goes on as education progresses “This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.” The result: Upper-middle-class men who are “intimidated” and “can’t say anything. . . . They understand the agenda.” In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by “never telling the truth to women” about sex, and by keeping “raunchy” thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.’

‘Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America’s brawny industrial base, leaves many men with “no models of manhood,” she says. “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.” She does have a point!

The UK’s ‘brawny industrial base’ has been dying a death for a long time. Years ago Britain was full of coal miners, factory workers, farm labourers, skilled craftsmen, those that used their physical strength and skills to make a living. And those old trades were male dominated. Now the UK has become an economy with seven or eight out of ten workers in the service sector where often more feminine skills are needed for success.

I have to say that I have noticed completely apart from this article over recent years that a lot of American men that I hear on the radio or in the media, especially on the radio, do not sound very masculine, in fact worryingly feminine, or even effeminate. Perhaps we should be thankful that both The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry who will play prominent roles in our nation in the future have both had military experience which should go against the grain of Camille’s fears.

She is a bit more impressed with the energy and enthusiasm of the guys she hears on sports radio, ‘If we had to go to war,’ the callers are the men that would save the nation.’ Again for the UK maybe there’s hope for us to be found on the football terraces every Saturday afternoon.

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a “revalorization” of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women’s studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing). Gender neutral restrooms are of course open to dispute! Surely such restrooms are blurring the gender differences she is pointing out.

She is just arguing for the place of good old apprenticeships in skilled trades for young men, who will never take to the academic world but are itching to get out to work on something worthwhile.

As she says, ‘Michelle Obama‘s going on: ‘Everybody must have college.’ Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum” and “people end up saddled with huge debts,”

By denying the role of nature in women’s lives, she argues, leading feminists created a “denatured, antiseptic” movement that “protected their bourgeois lifestyle” and falsely promised that women could “have it all.”

Camille is nothing but brutally realistic about the nature of life and the role of men and women, she could probably give David Cameron and Nick Clegg some pretty sound advice.

‘But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.’ Quite. ‘Our culture doesn’t allow women to know how to be womanly,’ she said. She is rather scathing about elite middle class women, ‘clones’ condemned to ‘Pilates for the next 30 years.’

She goes on to say, “I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don’t have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you’d like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you’re going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented.”

The feminist movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one “open to stay-at-home moms” and “not just the career woman.”

The feminists have been criticized for not being robust enough by far when it comes to the way women are treated in certain parts of the world, such as in India where the issue of gang rape has topped the agenda and in Islamic societies, where they are basically second class citizens. Ms Paglia has something to say about this as well.

‘More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women’s movement wants to be taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are “more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus.”’

To add fuel to the fire, she’s supportive of Duck Dynasty Star, Phil Robertson and his right to hold ‘homophobic views.’ Well, this old firebrand of the left keeps surprising us. Again here’s what she said:

‘In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality – as I one hundred percent do.’

‘If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again, they have a right of religious freedom there.’ In my humble opinion you either have freedom of speech or you don’t. Once you legally start proscribing peoples’ speech on the grounds of offence you are on the road to hell.

You have to say this is pretty refreshing stuff. It shows how in reality it’s impossible to stereotype people in the rigid way we love to do, and is a lesson to those politicians who are obsessed with identity politics, trying to neatly pigeon hole everyone into a particular ‘victim group.’ Camille represents a hotch-potch of views taken by both the traditional left and right.

If you take Camille’s logic to its conclusion, if nothing changes it’s a scary world ahead, men emasculated of their manhood and incapable of defending their culture, and women not being presented with an honest debate about choices of career and family. In the end whatever happens, if families don’t have those babies, there is no future anyway.

Sources

Wall St journal:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920

Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530741/Theres-no-room-MANLY-Controversial-feminist-writer-Camille-Paglia-speaks-against-loss-masculine-virtues-negative-impact-society.html

Ideology trumps reality

I was listening to Moneybox on Radio 4 today and my ears pricked up when they examined the effect of the new gender equality directive on the car insurance industry. I remember reading about this a year or two ago, the EU would be imposing gender equality in driving insurance premiums, after all we can’t distinguish any differences between male and female when it comes to driving vehicles. I knew then I had discerned some profoundly dodgy logic, another one of those salami slices they keep going on about!

Now call me simple or whatever, I’m no expert on the insurance industry, certainly no actuary, but I thought that the insurance industry was based on risk. So the higher the risk, the higher the premium. If I live in the equivalent of a Mogadishu suburb I would expect to pay a higher premium on my car insurance than if I lived in Hart in Hampshire, which if you didn’t know is just about the most salubrious place you could inhabit here in the UK, you know highest life expectancy, great health , etc. The chances of having your car stolen in such an idyll are pretty slim compared with Mogadishu, so the premium is accordingly lower. Likewise, a young man who has just passed his test behind the wheel of his second hand car poses a significantly greater risk to other road users than the equivalent young lady, given the nature of young men, naturally more risk taking, prone to drive faster (I am speaking generally here) and with not quite so much care as a young lady. So logic tells you that young men should take a greater burden.

Thus the well established British insurance industry would charge higher insurance premiums as a matter of course to young men as opposed to young women, to cover the costs of the greater numbers of accidents and injuries caused by young men. Seems entirely reasonable to me, basing the insurance industry on risk.

However, along comes the European Union and imposes on the UK its own interpretation of insurance rules, based on the premise that men and women must be treated exactly the same despite the differences in risk posed by both sexes. No doubt chaps will be rejoicing that their insurance premiums now won’t be so high, whereas ladies might feel a little aggrieved that they are paying disproportionately to cover risk. But we mustn’t let common sense get in the way of ideology, surely those EU officials have a better idea of how the world works than any Tom, Dick or Harry over here.

It might be quite interesting to look at what the the EU website has to say about these matters. Here is a quote directly from the road safety section of the Europa website:

‘Young novice drivers are heavily over-represented in single vehicle crashes (crashes that do not involve other vehicles) and loss of control crashes. Although young novice drivers are over-represented in crashes at all times of day, weekend evenings and nights present higher risks per kilometre driven, especially for male drivers.

For males, speeding is an important accident cause. This, in combination with the fact that young drivers often carry more passengers in their cars, also results in more severe injuries and a higher number of people injured.’

Under the section on risk it states that young drivers have a higher fatality rate per head of the population than any other age group. No surprises there. As far as gender is concerned, the website goes on to say that in the 18-24 age group, ‘the male young driver’s risk is considerably higher than that of the female young driver.’ No surprise there either. Even if it is the case that male drivers drive a higher mileage which would imply more accidents, making allowances for this still makes no difference to the overall pattern. So there we have it from the horses mouth.

You see the ideologues behind the EU don’t deal in reality, They deal in the world they would like to exist rather than what is obviously in front of their nose. Everything must bow to the shibboleth of equality and non-discrimination. Thus the revolution continues, little by little as we sit there like sheep until we have find ourselves sheared and sent to the abattoir without so much as a murmur. When the Soviet Union broke up, the same driver of totalitarianism thought it would have a go at reintroducing the same in Western Europe using nice language like equality and non-discrimination. So those who believe in state control, you can call them communists, socialists, the hard left, there are various words that could be used to describe them, went about their project with renewed zeal. In their world, ideology always trumps reality. Of course, if we want equality in all its forms, perhaps a lot more people want it than we think, then who am I do stop it? Just a thought.

The question is how long will it take before the tentacles of the EU really, really get up peoples’ noses? Perhaps Rumanians and ‘Uncle Bulgaria’ will help the British people to escape the befuddling fog that afflicts them at present.