2369 days ago
Surigng knife crime, a housing crisis, the list of London's problems goes on and on but its truly useless Mayor Sadiq Khan is focussing on the big issues like tackling tweets from Katie Hopkins and today proclaiming that cycling is racist. He is not talking of the cheats in the tour de drugs but of those folks who get on their Boris bike every day.
2798 days ago
And so Martin McGuinness is dead. I welcome no death - as I explained here with reference to this unrepentant murderer of many - but equally I would agree with Norman Tebbit that old Martin is right now suffering agony in a particular part of hell reserved for the truly wicked. Martin's crime, in the eyes of St Peter and indeed many on this earth, is not so much the killing many innocent folks but a failure to accept that this was a sin, that he had sinned and to show remorse. For that McGuinness can only be viewed as evil and damned to burn in hell for eternity.
3903 days ago
In a secret meeting George Osborne apparently stated that more folks paying 40% tax is good news. They feel happier because they feel like they are successful and have joined the middle classes and so will share Tory values and vote for his party. At every level these claims are stupendously stupid.
As a Conservative I believe that folks should pay as little tax as possible – I have always thought that this was a core conservative belief. We believe in a small state and a society where one is encouraged to work harder to earn and keep more money, not just to pay more in tax for an ever bigger Government to piss away. And I always thought that George Osborne was meant to be a Conservative. Have I missed something? Has he joined the Lib Dems?
If folks are mad enough to want to pay more tax then they always have the right to send a cheque off to the Treasury and make a voluntary donation. But it should be their call. Not that of a patronising dicked like George Osborne.
As to the idea that if the State steals more of my money then I am likely to reward the party in power? This is sheer folly.
Osborne like most of the out of touch upper class twits who dominate the Conservative Party these days has no idea how the aspirational working and middle classes think. They come from the classes who believe, to quote Leona Helmsley, that tax is for little people.” They come from families who have never had to juggle bills and dip into overdraft to pay the mortgage or to pay for Christmas. They simply have no idea how ordinary folks live and struggle.
It is inconceivable that anyone in the Conservative party of Thatcher, Tebbit and Joseph would have spouted such nonsense. But then they were not patrician fools like the current Tory elite.
3919 days ago
A friend of mine from my Shoreditch days says that he is heading off to a weekend of eating drinking and libertarianism on the 15th March and would I care to go. It looks great but then comes the libertarian dilemma.
If you are a pure thinking individual I would urge you to check out the Freedom Festival here
There are some entertaining speakers: Mark Littlewood, Norman Tebbit, Toby Young, Dan Hannan and I am sure that it will be great fun. However:
a) I am not convinced that this is ideologically pure enough for a true libertarian. I see there is a debate “is immigration a boon or a burden?” If you score straight A’s on the Ron Paul crystal pure test you would not need that debate, the answer is obvious. There is another debate “is the conservative family falling apart?” Heck, when did we join that family to start with?
b) Maybe I am a libertarian because I hate the idea of being organised. One of the joys of Shoreditch life right inside the triangle was that the residents were a pretty crazed bunch. On a day to day basis I had nothing in common with the Lebanese cookery writer for the FT, the fat American artist gay couple, the super geek IT guy from Morgan Stanley or the Australian architect with his French wife who’d been there since the sixties. I struggle to remember the other residents but occasionally we’d come together like a Wild West town
4404 days ago
Sir George Young is the new Government chief whip. As it happens I know a bit about him as he is also my second cousin once removed and, rather more importantly, brother of my step mother Helen. And I see that he is now a founder member of a new group of Tory MPs which wants to “reach out” to “blue collar” Tories. The sort of people Young’s predecessor Andrew Mitchell might have described as “plebs.” Young’s qualifications?
Born in a stately home at Cookham, like his grandfather, father and brother he went to Eton then
