1092 days ago
It is especially when you see the smiling face of a little kid who drowned yesterday in the channel that your heart melts. Or it should. Some of those on twitter appear to have no hearts while, for others, the important matter at hand seems to be weaponizing the deaths and playing the blame game. It is the fault of the Tories, or Labour or the Frogs and little Macron.
1491 days ago
As you can see below, my dim local MP reckons that 39% of violent crime is caused by booze and that alcohol is one of the “driving forces” of domestic violence. And thus Sarah Atherton is all in favour of banning those committing crimes from gaining any access to the sauce altogether. This, she claims, will stop re-offending.
2562 days ago
Finally it looks as if the SNP is going to get its way and from next year if you buy booze from a shop in Scotland you will have to pay a minimum of 50p per unit of alcohol. Scotland sets a world precedent in stupidity.
3825 days ago
The big news for libertarians, like me, last week was that vice (drugs and prostitution) look set to be included in how we calculate GDP in the UK. Apparently they are worth a combined £10 billion to the UK each year. You can from that number make a number of assumptions.
1. The vast amounts the State spends trying to tackle these crimes is not working and is money wasted.
2. There are very few rich hookers or drug pushers (the actual distributors) and since the non-labour cost of sales is very low (drugs are cheap as a raw commodity and condoms and a bit of advertising cost sod all) you can assume that organised crime is raking in billions a year.
So please can anyone explain why the current system ( which brings endemic health risks for many, a tab the State then picks up) can be said to work?
3935 days ago
Perhaps the UKIP leader is a libertarian after all? You know that I regard his utterances on immigration as truly awful and UKIP’s economic policies do not stack up – scrapping foreign aid and ending EU contributions saves £16 billion. You cannot re-use that n times to spend, spend, spend and also cut the £100 billion deficit. But he has today written a brave and good piece in the Indy on drugs. Well done Nigel.
Farage starts with a long grumble about dirty tricks and the anti-democratic nature of by-elections. There is one looming on Thursday in some grim Northern shit hole and Labour won before it started by tying up the postal votes. The system does not work. I agree with Nigel. Moreover the contempt with which Labour regard the “poor” vote as its own is – as Nigel says – pretty lamentable.
But Farage’s more interesting point is on drugs. He writes:
Last week, Nick Clegg returned from a trip to South America. Goodness knows what he smoked out there, because he actually made a couple of smart points. First, the so-called War on Drugs isn’t working. Second, we should appoint a royal commission to look into the alternatives.
The fact is our current approach to drugs is neither practical nor effective. I strongly believe in promoting individual freedom – but I also strongly believe in reducing the public harm caused by drugs. As a parent as much as a politician, I say we have to accept that current policy has not achieved the reductions in crime or consumption that we’d hoped for. I know he slagged me off in this newspaper yesterday, but on this one I agree with Nick
Ends.
Come on Nigel (and Nick) you are almost there saying what all politicians know to be true but just cannot be brave enough to admit. Prohibition NEVER
4182 days ago
Filmed in Spitalfields on Monday morning I guess I feel strongly about three issues covered.
1. Tax, prohibition, smoking and what we put into our bodies
2. The corruption of the political class
3. My hero of the year - the PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden and civil liberties
4183 days ago
My partner is in London and so for a laugh we are staying in a hotel just off Brick Lane in Spitalfields. Needing some of my poison of choice I wandered to a small store opposite the hotel last night and asked for 20 Marlboro Light. £8.50 I was told. Sure.
A pack of 20 cigarettes costs anywhere between £8 and £9.50 if you are mad enough to use WH Smith on Network Rail.
As I fumbled for a tenner the chap said, want a cheaper pack? £5. Yup, I slurred, having had a few drinks with my partner and colourful James earlier. And so from under the counter I was offered 20 Marlboro Light from Russia as you can see in the picture below.
When I pay £8.50 normally, around £7.65 goes to the UK Government. The rest is shares between Marlboro, its distribution company and the retailer. Under this revised arrangement Marlboro probably still gets 50p. The Russian taxman gets another 50p ( or perhaps nothing) and the criminal gangs who import this stuff ( I read today that this is how many of St Gerry's former comrads in the IRA are now employed) and retailer share between £4 and £4.50. The UK taxman gets nothing.
The huge profits you can make from flogging illegal fags means that crime DOES pay. The greed of the UK Government which knows that smokers fund not only the costs of treating them on the NHS but far more besides but are an easy target as one is supposedly "taxing for a moral purpose" means that it has created an opportunity for crime. Punitive taxation like prohibition is not only regressive taxation but also a real crime generator.
So what should I do? Should I go to the police and tip them off? I do not agree with crime and suppose I should. But crime is inevitable as things stand. I guess I shall buy one more back before I do anything.
4255 days ago
UKIP is running a poster at the moment “End EU Open Door Migration.” I disagree almost entirely with UKIP immigration policy as prohibition does not work and for many reasons I have explained numerous times. But the party has a right to express its view.
Deluded lefties always blather on about free speech and human rights to be heard, blah, blah, blah. Except when they disagree with what is being said. And so some deluded lefty tweeting as @binthecondems started complaining to the poster company - and getting others to do so – that the poster was racist.
The poster company is a giant enterprise but the bigger the corporation the more terror it has of being tarred as racist and so the lerfties claim that the poster has been pulled. @binthecondems is delighted and happily tweeting out about how UKIP is full of “bigots” “racists” and “Nazis.” The poster company says it may pull the poster, it is reviewing it.
This will be interesting.
Of course UKIP does not want this tweeter banned from expressing that (factually incorrect) view because it believes in free speech – that is the right of EVERYONE to be heard not just folks with whom you happen to agree. That more limited definition of free speech belongs firmly to the left.
4271 days ago
There are few sentient human beings who maintain that prohibition of alcohol in 1920s America was a roaring success. Criminals benefited and made a killing. The costs of law enforcement went through the roof. Customers had to pay more. Checks to ensure safe supply of liquor became impossible. And anyone who wanted a drink could get one anyway. Yet still mainstream opinion argues that prohibition is a good idea elsewhere. The results are always the same.
As a libertarian I believe it is my call on what I put into my body not that of the State. So I have a philosophical opposition to prohibition. I do not expect many of you to agree with that stance. But you should see that on a practical level it does not work. Legalise drugs and allow supply via tobacconists and you could ensure that no dirty heroin hits the streets, tax receipts would go up, prices would go down. The 80% of crimes that are drug related would disappear and so we could reduce policing costs. With your car & house less likely to be broken into your insurance premiums would fall.
But there is another prohibition which is an abject failure – that on the movement of people into this country. It emerges today that it costs £25,000 to boot an illegal immigrant out. And he or she will soon be replaced. Criminals make a fortune trafficking people into the UK. A whole industry of lawyers and other parasites makes a living (from the taxpayer) arguing that folks should not be deported because it will infringe the human rights of their cat, result in homophobic bullying or whatever. And still we have no idea how many illegals are in the UK – it is probably well over one million. The whole system is a costly farce as any system based on prohibition always is. All those who talk tough about immigration seem to miss the point. We could spend 20 times as much as we do on “getting tough” but prohibition NEVER works.
And so why not allow anyone who wants to come to the UK? But with a twist. It is quite clear that we have vast number of home grown Heather Frost figures who have never worked, will never work and regard welfare as an entitlement. That is not sustainable or equitable. And so we make a small rule change. You can only claim income support up to a value of x times the amount of NI contributions you have made historically. And unless you have paid NI you and your offspring shall have no entitlement to schooling, healthcare, subsidised housing or any other state benefit. If you cannot afford kids do not have them and simply expect others to pay.
If one adopts these rules for our own home grown Heather Frosts you will not – with an open borders policy – get folks moving to the UK to live off the State because the same rules will apply to them. By all means let the Rumanians come en masse. But unless they are working they will starve. Make that abundantly clear and those who want to work hard will come to the UK and we will benefit from that. Those who want to scrounge can go to a “caring, socialist paradise fucked economy” like France or Scotland when it gets its independence. Perhaps they can take Heather Frost with them.
Adopt this policy and UK welfare spending will plunge. The parasite lawyers who feed off immigration law at the taxpayers’ expense will have to go get proper jobs and save us all a packet. All those employed by the State in this futile pretence that we are tough on immigration can be let go. And the vast savings can go on slashing the UK’s unsustainable deficit and on raising the threshold at which anyone pays tax to £20,000 so making ,low paid work that much more attractive.
Obviously this makes sense. The chances of it happening zilch.
4336 days ago
Britain is getting fatter. The strain of treating a stack of lardbuckets like myself for diabetes (my issue), heart attacks, etc is a very real financial burden. All of that is a given. But calls to ban Frosties ( Labour health spokesman Andy Burnham) and Fried Chicken shops ( general lefty fruitcake and a bit of a lardbucket herself, Dianne Abbot) do not address the problem. Prohibition never works. It fails with drugs, it failed with alcohol in 1920s Chicago and it will fail with Frosties.
4350 days ago
In the wake of the dreadful slaughter of the innocents at Newtown Connecticut the response of the liberal left has been to argue for tighter controls on gun ownership. In bankrupt Britain the usual suspects at the Guardian and BBC say “is it not time that America caught up with us and banned gun ownership as we did after Dunblane?” In the US, Obama and the other liberals want to go down the British route. They are all wrong. Guns save lives.
One can play whatever games you want with statistics. But here are a few.
4433 days ago
Thanks to the Ambush Predator blog for this tale of utter hopelessness which shows why our current drugs policy is such a disaster. The blog recounts:
A Liverpool shoplifter snubbed the help that had been given her by travelling to Blackburn and stealing just six days after completing a residential drug rehabilitation programme.The chairman of the magistrates, Vanessa Pickup, said residential rehabilitation places were like “gold dust.”
“You were given a chance many people would give their right arm for,” said Mrs Pickup. “Your response was to come out, and six days later travel to Blackburn to steal.”
And so a custodial sentence was imposed.
She was jailed for 12 weeks.
Gareth Price, defending, had been faced with a large electricity bill and a drug debt and found herself in dire financial straits.
Okay so let’s work this out. Our heroin (or whatever drug it is) addicted scouser friend has to find a very large amount of money each week to buy a commodity (heroin) which costs nothing to produce. Her welfare cheques are not enough. So she steals. Not big amounts but enough to piss off a series of shop owners and homeowners in Liverpool.
4445 days ago
This is novel. Uruguay has today announced that it wishes to nationalise the cannabis industry. That is to say all production and distribution of weed will now be handled by the State and thus it will be completely legal to smoke dope. Half way there.
The Government of this country is described as left wing and progressive and argues that the measure is necessary to combat rising drug-related crime, decrease health risks for users, and counter ineffective US policies on drugs.
“We’re putting this forward as international policy,” says Sebastian Sabini, president of the parliamentary commission created to debate the bill. “The war on drugs has failed. There are more consumers and more violence.”
Spot on Seb. Your analysis is bang on the money. But…
