Newspaper Watch

It did happen but it wasn\’t the newspapers running it.

David Hockney appointed Order of Merit member
David Hockney, John Howard, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Tom Stoppard among new memebers to be appointed by the Queen, Buckingham Palace announced today.

Err, no.

The article itself has it right.

Over the decades he has cemented his position as an important artistic figure and extended his talents to work as a photographer, draughtsman, printmaker and stage designer.

Former Australian prime minister John Howard, who served in office from 1996 to 2007, has also been appointed a member of the Order of Merit.

The honour is a special award presented to individuals of great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature, science and other areas like public service.

Whale sperm is not the cause of the sea\’s saltiness, despite what you may have heard.

Army foils coup attempt on tiny island of Guinea-Bissau

Err, Guinea-Bissau ain\’t an island folks.

Given recent history a failed coup there is hardly news (umm, well, maybe it\’s the failure that makes it so?) but to call it an island is pure ignorance.

Sure, it has islands as part of it, true, but then so do both France and Italy and we don\’t call them islands.

The actual article is OK, it\’s a wire report. Pretty much only the headline came from the Telegraph and that\’s the only part that is wrong.

Ho hum. The reactionary conservatives of the Telegraph of old may not have held particularly appealing attitudes towards the various flavours of BongoBongo land but they did at least know about them.

You know, Sao Tome and Principe, Africa, islands, used to be Portuguese, Cape Verde, Africa, islands, used to be P, Guinea Bissau, Africa, mainland, used to be P?

Richard Gott*, writing in the Guardian this week, accepted that socilaism is a \”source of systemic instability, unfettered misery and industrial-scale oppression\” but blamed the problem on a small number of rogue leaders. The task, it seems, is to find the few rotten apples that somehow manage to bring an entire system into disrepute. The reliance on a minority scapegoat in order to cover over much wider spread illegality, immorality and abuse of power is a particularly favoured tacticamong socialists. Rogue leaders such as Joseph Stalin and the more recent Maoist renegade Pol Pot along with rogue communists like Enver Hoxa and Fidel Castro are, we are told, the fly in the otherwise uncontaminated ointment of socialism leading to true communism.

The figure of the rogue is an interesting one. It implies both a destructive and unpredictable tendency as well as a mischievous but likeable trait. We all know someone who is \”a bit of a rogue\”. In recent years the rogue has become associated with the \”rogue states\” of North Korea, Iraq and Iran: cut off from the herd they are prone, we are told, to wild, unpredictable destruction. But despite the appalling suffering endured by the people of North Korea, the late Kim Jong-il, enjoyed somewhat \”roguish\”, laughable status in the west. The rogue is at once likeable, forgivable, mischievous, dangerous, destructive and unpredictable. The ability to evoke this sense of the simultaneously forgivable and the dangerous is perhaps why the term has been so widely used of late. The mischievous goings-on of a few bad apples in the tabloid press that were easily forgiven at the time; those impish rogue states that won\’t let the weapons inspectors in; the pesky few leaders that make the odd error on the road to socialism.

In every case, the figure of the rogue is evoked to apportion blame and ask for forgiveness. It\’s always just one or two rogue individuals, states or institutions that emerge as the unique source of blame for an entire system\’s failure. The rogue is blamed but ultimately the system that produces it is forgiven.

When the figure of the rogue is evoked, it stops us asking more challenging questions. What if North Korea, Castro and Ceausescu were simply the product of decades of failed diplomacy and geopolitical negotiations that are more intent on the empire building of the US and the security of Europe than anything else? What if the rogueleaders in hte socialist states that caused the misery and oppression are simply the best, and most effective, examples of everything that is wrong with the left today; merely the product of a system that rewards greed and exploitation?

Let\’s hope that the rogue institutions of the left are not allowed to fulfil the promise of their epithet – for their transgressions to be forgiven and ignored. These rogues are products of greater forces at work. Let\’s stop treating them like inexplicable anomalies and start to understand the conditions that make them and their misdemeanours possible. Then, perhaps, we can do away with the figure of the mischievous but forgivable soclaist leader rogue altogether.

* Seumas Milne if it makes you feel better.

To reinforce British diplomats\’ wilful blindness, the Foreign Office has closed half a dozen embassies in Latin America in recent years, to minimise the danger of receiving subversive opinions from foreign capitals. All part of Britain\’s national decline.

Erm, isn\’t that in fact the flip side of the European Diplomatic Service?

Replacement of individual country embassies with EU ones?

In Indonesia

Hadn\’t known that punk was such a big thing in Indonesia.

A tad odd we might say.

Sunny writes a piece arguing (oh so wittily!) that Maggie\’s State Funeral should be privatised.

In the comments, this:

Insiders say the company plans to cut around 100 jobs in total, although a Guardian spokeswoman said she did not recognise that figure.

\”100\”.

\”Ooooh, is that a number?\”

Bryony Gordon:

A \’Big Man\’ chucked a teenager off a ScotRail train, but perhaps the real problem was the ticket inspector.

It\’s the train company\’s fault, petty bureaucracy gone mad.

Julie Bindel:

The \’big man\’, the fare-dodger and the right time to intervene

Intervening is community in action except when it\’s vigilantes.

Still, I know the problem. Something\’s in the news and you\’ve space to fill. As long as you can add a twist (and a couple of personal stories, as both do) that\’ll be fine. Doesn\’t actually matter much what you fill the space with, as long as that white gap between the ads gets covered in print she\’ll be fine.

This columnist business isn\’t quite as glamorous as some seem to think….

John Harris: Support for the anti-EU lobby in Britain has risen from 19% to half the population in 10 years. Labour ministers feel trapped

Memo to John Harris (OK, Guardian subs).

What friggin\’ Labour Ministers?

Recall that \”election\” thing?

Worse, we have made it significantly harder for the 17 members of the eurozone rapidly to put in place the cluster of policies needed to save the euro. Chancellor Merkel said the compromise was workable – to widespread German scepticism; the European Central Bank warmly welcomed the progress, but announced no new measures. If the euro breaks up because its members have to move clumsily and slowly outside the formal EU treaties and institutions because of Cameron\’s veto, the resulting series of bank collapses and consequent depression will hurt Britain badly. What\’s more, fellow Europeans will not forgive us for a generation. This is a catastrophic moment in British and European affairs.

For someone who so loves the euro and the EU it\’s amazing how little Willy Hutton seems to know about how it works.

If the changes had been with all 27, through the mechanisms of the EU, then those changes to hte Treaty have to be ratified by all 27. This includes such things as a referendum in Ireland, parliamentary votes at minimum everywhere else and almost certainly a referendum in the UK.

This would take a couple of years minimum and good luck in getting a referendum through in Eire.

Having an agreement outside the EU structures is much easier and much faster.

Hutton\’s simply got the whole thing bassackwards: not for the first time.

Well, where else apart from the Guardian would you expect to go nowadays to find regular support for a theocratic regime that sponsors terrorism world-wide, kills gays, denies the Holocaust, and brutally suppresses any dissent?

Now there is official acknowledgment that a country burdened by bank assets five times its GDP and chronically poor productivity is being dragged into the deepest and longest economic setback in modern times

So that idea of yours, that banks should take on more assets by lending more to companies: if banks having too many assets is a bad idea then that rather blows up the plan that you\’ve been hawking to us these decades, doesn\’t it?

Costs money to get the actual articles but hours of fun there to be had searching for all sorts of things.

There was a Worstall wounded in the Crimea for example…..who knew?

Financial institutions that granted unrealistic mortgages at the height of a market they inflated themselves should be taking the hit here. Mortgages that default as interest rates rise need to be put under the control of local authorities, who will rent to a home\’s former owners at rates reflecting the fact that they have acquired a long-term asset (or part of one, under shared ownership).

Sorry? What?

Repossessions become council property?

Well, doesn\’t that just bankrupt the entire banking system overnight.

And I do mean overnight, as they\’ve now no security against their entire mortgage book. Oh, and mortgage interest rates overnight become 19%: unsecured lending you see.

This plan might need just a tad of adjustment perhaps?

Silly George, along with his silly political party, believed that the public sector was \”squeezing out\” the private sector. He is a dolt. Mostly, services are provided by the public sector, precisely because there is no money in them.

What?

Sorry, did hubby leave some of his old heroin lying around or something? Education is a service which some provide for profit: health care is a service which some provide for profit.

For a start, offshore companies need to pay a yearly levy, based on how many people they employ, in a direct contribution to the costs of educating people to the level that is amenable to these employers (whether they are employed here or abroad).

Err, yes, I think so. The education of the people is now the property of the State: thus you should pay the State for using the education of the people. Umm, folks, this is helotry, slavery to the State. And, err, a tax on jobs: way to reduce unemployment there, eh?

No, I think that putting down that crack pipe would be a really good idea.

The populations of much poorer countries are less happy than people in the rich developed countries. But above some threshold that Britain passed a generation ago, further economic growth doesn\’t seem to help.

Easterlin Paradox, above a certain level more income doesn\’t make you happier.

Wrong.

Although economic growth is what has transformed the quality of our lives over the last 200 years, it looks as if the real social and human benefits of growth are subject to diminishing returns.

And in the next fucking sentence he tells us about diminishing returns. Well, of course you twat. What\’s so damn surprising about diminishing marginal utility?

Well, which is it? No marginal utility or diminishing?

And there is of course the idea that it\’s not levels of income which induce this happiness, it\’s changes in them. Growth has two effects, one simply that we can see a better and brighter tomorrow which, most human beings being fairly optimistic creatures makes us happier. The other is that growing incomes make it easier to deal with the stresses and strains of distribution. If you like, jealously is less of a problem in a non-zero sum world.

Rather surprisingly, health – and probably other indicators of wellbeing – continued to improve in the great depression of the 1930s. This is likely to have been partly because that period saw the most rapid sustained increase in equality on record.

This would be nothing at all to do with the fact that the 30s were the one decade where technology advanced more than any other? Medical technology along with others?

Twat.

However, speaking from the picket lines outside St Pancras Hospital in London, TUC General Secretary Brenda Barber said public sector pensioners were being plundered to tackle the financial crisis.

Not that there\’s anything wrong with gender reassignment you understand, but the Mrs. probably didn\’t expect this when Brendan left for the hospital yesterday morning.

Of course, it could just be the Aussie subs……

Spotted by Dick P.

and property is greatly undertaxed compared with other countries.

This simply is not true.

Property tax as a percentage of total tax collected by the country.

The UK collects 11.9% of total tax revenue from taxes on property. This is the highest in the OECD and some twice the OECD average of 5.8%.

It might be that we tax property badly, that we don\’t tax really expensive property enough, all sorts of things might be wrong with the system. But it simply isn\’t true that we tax property lightly compared with other countries. Quite the opposite.

True, we don\’t have capital gains on first houses, we don\’t tax imputed rents for owner occupiers. But we do get over £25 billion each in domestic and business rates (except for one spot in Norfolk) and yes, those are taxes on property.

It\’s also fun to see Ritchie\’s figures mangled even more than he himself manages:

while some £25bn is evaded and £70bn avoided.

Other way around…..