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Posts Tagged ‘Britain’
July 1st, 2016 at 12:56 pm
Perhaps the Funniest Post-Brexit Tantrum Yet, Courtesy of The New York Times
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So this apparently passes as intelligent commentary among The New York Times set and tantrum-throwing “Remain” pajama boy voters in Britain.

Namely, a perpetual adolescent who acknowledges:

Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford.  And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot afford to pay rent elsewhere after my temporary teaching contract ends.”

Nevertheless, he openly fantasizes about its utter obliteration and return to a state of nature, lamenting the area’s “Brexit” vote to declare independence from the European Union:

Sometimes, in the summer, I walk up the hill and I look out over it, the housing development on one side and the Georgian town center at the bottom of the other, and I have this fantasy image of how it once was, before Alresford was founded in the Middle Ages, when all of this was untouched:  just the wild, untamed nature that it keeps wanting to turn itself back into.  And sometimes, I think:  I wish that would happen.  Because all that humans have ever done here is ruin things.  Alresford is my personal hell.”

The poor soul.

Conspicuously, however, he doesn’t volunteer himself to stand first in line in his little return-to-nature scrubbing of humanity from the land.

‘Twas ever thus with leftists, of course.  Always let someone else endure the consequences of their dystopian visions.

June 24th, 2016 at 1:51 pm
Brexit Highlights the Enduring Value of Federalism
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Regardless of other economic, political and social implications of Britain’s vote yesterday to depart the European Union, it highlights a value at the core of America’s governmental system:  federalism.

On this side of the Atlantic, decades of almost uninterrupted centralization of authority at the national level has necessarily come at the expense of more localized decisionmaking.  Our own unfortunate experience has been an increasingly homogenized, sterilized, conformist, bureaucratic, technocratic, remote, suffocating, uniform, top-down, one-size-fits-all leviathan.  Ironically, those on the political left who so often pretend to value “diversity” defend that erosion of federalism most enthusiastically.  They expose themselves as intolerant of true diversity, freedom and independence of people who don’t see the world as they do.

Despite forecasts of economic doom from “Remain” advocates, a surprising majority of British voters felt the same sense of suffocation and loss of sovereignty and voted “Leave.”  That sentiment isn’t limited to Britain, as fellow European populations in places like France and the Netherlands express the same dissatisfaction:

The popularity of the European Union is plummeting across some major European countries, according to new data published by Pew Research Centre.  The US-based, independent organisation found that the mound of people who feel enthusiastic about the 28-nation bloc is rapidly declining across 7 of the 10 polled nations.  In France, only 38% of people have a favourable view of the EU, according to Pew.  In 2004, this number was 69%.  The same trend was picking up in Spain, Italy, and Germany too.”

It remains to be seen whether and to what extent similar sentiment affects the U.S. elections this November.  But regardless, it’s encouraging to see that the concepts that led our Founding Fathers to create a system of federalism here in the U.S. survives in our parent nation of Britain.

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September 22nd, 2014 at 11:44 am
If Britain Were a U.S. State, It Would Be the Second-Poorest
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An interesting new bit of original research by The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson entitled “Why Britain Is Poorer Than Any US State, Other Than Mississippi” helps reconfirm the concept of American Exceptionalism even amid the Obama Malaise. First, Mr. Nelson takes a welcome swipe against the all-too-common habit of American self-criticism:

No one beats up America better than Americans.  They openly debate their inequality, conduct rigorous studies about it, argue about economics versus culture as causes.  Their universities study it, with a calibre of analysis not found in Britain.  Americans get so angry about educational inequality that they make films like “Waiting for Superman.”  And the debate is so fierce that the rest of the world looks on, and joins in lamenting America’s problems.  A shame:  we’d do better to get a little angrier at our own.”

Nelson then gets to the heart of the matter:

If Britain were to somehow leave the EU and join the US, we’d be the 2nd-poorest state in the union.  Poorer than Missouri.  Poorer than much-maligned Kansas and Alabama.  Poorer than any state other than Mississippi, and if you take out the south east we’d be poorer than that, too.”

He also addresses the cliche of horrific American inequality along the way:

It’s not surprising that America’s best-paid 10 per cent are wealthier than our top 10 percent.  That fits our general idea of America:  a country where the richest do best while the poorest are left to hang.  The figures just don’t support this.  As the below chart shows, middle-earning Americans are better off than Brits.  Even lower-income Americans, those at the bottom 20 percent, are better-off than their British counterparts.  The only group actually worse-off are the bottom 5 per cent.”

Obama may not believe that American Exceptionalism is of any greater merit than British Exceptionalism, but the facts and some Britons contradict that notion.

April 17th, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Needed: An Expulsion from the House of Lords
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Under current British law, only a few factors can keep a member of the House of Lords from office: bankruptcy, conviction on charges of treason, and holding judicial office amongst them. Apart from that short list, removing a peer requires an act of Parliament, something that last happened nearly a century ago, when two members were removed for supporting the U.K.’s enemies during World War I. With that precedent in mind, Parliament should act to remove Lord Nazir Ahmed, who provides a similar set of circumstances. From the Daily Caller:

British Lord Nazir Ahmed put a £10 million ($16 million) bounty on both President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush Friday, according to The Express Tribune, an English language Pakistani newspaper.

Nazir, who is of Pakistani heritage and a member of the British House of Lords, reportedly made the comments while at a reception in Haripur, a Pakistani city 40 miles north of Islamabad. Nazir told the audience that he was putting the bounty out for the capture of the American leaders in response to the bounty placed on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed by the United States.

Saeed, by the way, is the terrorist thought responsible for the gruesome 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed over 160 people. By his words and his actions (he claims that he would sell his home to pay the bounties for Bush and Obama), Lord Ahmed has shown himself an enemy to Britain, the United States, and the forces of civilization throughout the world. He ought not be allowed in the front door of the House of Lords, let alone in a seat there.

April 22nd, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Growth in Entitlements Kills Defense Capabilities

Byron York continues sounding a lone alarm over the connection between ballooning welfare spending and shrinking defense budgets.  With the United States largely abstaining from the lethal aspects of NATO’s Libyan adventure, entitlement-heavy countries like Britain and France are running out of missiles.

The reason?  Decades of budget decisions that favored butter over guns.

On a trip to Libya, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) reopens the straight talk express:

“…it’s a sobering fact that many NATO countries, even some of the big ones, are simply weak. They’ve been cutting their defense budgets for years as their welfare state commitments grew bigger and bigger. Now, they can’t mount much of a fight, even by the small-scale standards of the Libyan action. “No one will admit it, but both the British and the French are running out of precision-guided weapons,” says McCain. “They simply do not have the assets.”

Not that this evidence is convincing to modern liberals.  York also points out that members of Congress’ Progressive Caucus recently proposed a “People’s Budget” that raises taxes to expand entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while “reducing strategic capabilities, conventional forces, procurement, and research & development programs.”

We’ve seen the future, and it’s the near military impotence of Britain and France.  The United States can and must do better.

February 6th, 2011 at 12:58 am
British PM Cameron Takes Aim at Multiculturalism

In a bold speech at Saturday’s Munich Security Conference, British Prime Minister David Cameron lashed the rise in Islamist extremism to the permissive multicultural attitude of state bureaucracy.  Announcing a dramatic shift in policy, Cameron called for “making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum.”

Kudos to the British Prime Minister for delivering a stirring alternative to the bureaucratic-enabled formula of claiming a grievance against the government, getting public funding, and still working to violently attack the hands that coddle.  Care to wager how long it will be to get a similar statement of national principle from the American President?

December 20th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
March 20, 2000: Snowfall Becoming “Very Rare.” December 20, 2010: Snow Grinds Europe to Halt
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March 2000:  Charles Onians of Britain’s The Independent penned a global-warming doomsday warning entitled “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past”:

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change:  snow is starting to disappear from our lives…  According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event.’  ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ he said.”

Does “the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia” ring a bell?  It was at the center of last year’s “Climategate” scandal in which global warming alarmists were shown to have manipulated their research and plotted against scientists whose views differed from their own.

Fast forward ten years, to December 2010, and a report from Britain’s Mail Online entitled “Coldest December Since Records Began as Temperatures Plummet to Minus 10 C Bringing Travel Chaos Across Britain”:

Swathes of Britain skidded to a halt today as the big freeze returned – grounding flights, closing rail links and leaving traffic at a standstill.  And tonight the nation was braced for another 10 inches of snow and yet more sub-zero temperatures – with no letup in the bitterly cold weather for at least a month, forecasters have warned.  The Arctic conditions are set to last through the Christmas and New Year bank holidays and beyond as temperatures plummeted to -10 C (14 F).  The Met Office said this December was ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest since records began in 1910.”

Thanks to Al Gore’s amazing Internet, which provides us a record to test the amazingly ludicrous assurances that he and his fellow climate change alarmists have made.

October 23rd, 2010 at 10:35 am
British & French Definitions of ‘Liberty’

Today’s New York Times draws out an helpful distinction between British and French notions of liberty.  The context is each country’s reaction to the growing public sector spending crisis.

“France’s problem is that, for too long, the economy has been run as a kind of job club for French workers,” said an editorial in The Spectator, a conservative British magazine. “Britain and France believe in liberty, but have different definitions of it.”

While the British believe in “liberty from government,” the editorial said, the French “still like the big state and squeal at the prospect of being removed from its teat.”

The French also pay higher club dues and expect commensurate rewards. French pensions can reach three-quarters of a working wage, compared with just over two-fifths in Britain. So, if French workers and teenagers strike over their pensions, there’s plenty to protest about.

One of the consequences of France’s keener devotion to socialism is a reduced sense of class conflict.  Not so in Britain.

If Britain falls prey to protest, there will be sharper overtones of class struggle than solidarity. Britain is a more divided society than France. Wealth is more ostentatious, poverty more visible. People in Britain have learned to have sharper elbows in pursuit of individual gain, while France prides itself on a broader concordat.

“Social confrontation is part of our democracy,” said Prime Minister François Fillon, “but social consensus is, as well.”

How each country’s government handles the coming backlash to ‘austerity’ in public spending will do much to define the future of freedom for their respective citizens.  Hopefully, they can make a credible argument that limited government and greater individual opportunity go hand-in-hand instead of coming to blows.

August 23rd, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Britain’s ‘Big Society’ Gamble May Be the Best Hope of Shrinking Big Government

Unless you’re looking for it there isn’t much stateside coverage of the political revolution going on in Britain under the country’s Coalition Government.  The stories that to poke through, however, are well worth the read, as is this article in today’s Christian Science Monitor.  A sample:

The final sight – and this is the most difficult to see – is the coalition’s attempt to create a “big society,” or a bolstering of social groups, charities, and entrepreneurs to step in as government withdraws from much of its role. The best example of this altering of Britain’s social fabric are preparations to enlist 16-year-olds into national volunteer service.

The big society is Cameron’s vision, one that assumes people are ready to shed decades of dependency on London and step in to help others.

The concept could be almost as difficult as the biggest of the budget cuts, due in October, which will test the coalition’s finely woven political compromises. And will the private sector be ready to fill the holes left by the cuts.

So, the biggest gamble in the Coalition Government’s plan to reduce the size of England’s central bureaucracy isn’t the “austere” budget reductions or even the controversial referendum to change a century’s worth of election law.  It’s whether Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Big Society” program can inspire enough of the private sector to step into the social services breach created by the receding government.

American conservatives and libertarians have long said that private charity and other civil society institutions are much better at creating a social safety net.  With Britain’s budget forcing policy makers into decisions they would never dream of implementing in good economic times, now is the moment for limited government types to seize the opportunity to deliver a better, more efficient version of the social safety net.  Otherwise, liberals and socialists will be quick to remind voters of all the needs that went unaddressed when government grew “too small.”

July 24th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Britain’s Coalition Government Plans to Decentralize Country’s National Health Service

I wonder if new British Prime Minister David Cameron offered any words of fiscal wisdom to President Barack Obama during the two leaders’ first meet-and-greet since assuming power.  If he did, Cameron should have pointed out that adopting an “austerity” budget program need not be code for lack of creativity.

Under a recently announced plan to decentralize much of the National Health Service (NHS), Cameron’s Coalition Government of Conservative and Liberal Democrats plans to “shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health care budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level,” reports the New York Times.  “Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.”

Already one of the chief criticisms is that eliminating several layers of bureaucracy will cause several layers of bureaucrats to lose their jobs.

To which the Coalition responds, “And…?”   Britons realize that it’s time to make government spending fit within government budgets.  If the NHS is about health care for all – and not bureaucratic full employment – then it’s time to give patients and taxpayers the most value (and discretion) for their money.

If President Obama really wants to impose a stateside version of the NHS on Americans the least he could do is give the soon-to-be nationalized doctors the ultimate say in how they treat their patients.  Doing that would not only give doctors an incentive to stay in the profession, it would also drive up demand for entrepreneurs to fill in their business knowledge gaps with services to manage their new workload.

That sounds like a job-creating business opportunity to me; even if it is born more from government regulations rather than a purely free market need.  In the current political climate, though, it would be an improvement.

July 2nd, 2010 at 8:07 pm
YourFreedom.Gov

While it may mark me a heretic to praise both an Englishman and a Liberal Democrat on the eve of the eve of the Fourth of July, I hope my recent paean to Everyday Americans evens the ledger.

I think it has to be said that Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is the most fascinating politician in the English-speaking world.  Unlike his rival for that title in the United States, Clegg has already made a positive contribution to the politics of his country.

Yesterday, Clegg announced the launch of a government website called “YourFreedom.”  It’s part of Clegg’s commitment to radically reduce the size of government in Britain in a direct reversal of the Labour Party’s thirteen years of increasing control of nearly everything Brits do.

I’d tell you more about it, but Clegg does better than I ever could:

June 7th, 2010 at 9:50 am
The Obama Doctine’s Failure, Cont’d.
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Following up on our commentary last week that Turkey’s increased malfeasance illustrates the Obama Doctrine’s failure, today’s Wall Street Journal includes a commentary by Eliot A. Cohen entitled With Friends Like the United States…

Cohen points out that even in supposedly Obama-loving Europe, America’s standing has declined, not risen:

When asked about relations with the U.S. under President Barack Obama, 17% of Britons in a recent poll thought they had improved; 25% thought they had deteriorated.”

Cohen also notes Obama’s poor treatment of such friends as Colombia and Israel, alongside his spinelessness toward North Korea, Iran, China and other antagonists.  As he cogently summarizes, “The Obama Administration has managed to convince most countries around the world that we are worth little as friends and even less as enemies.”

More ominously, Cohen concludes, “the administration is making a dangerous world even more so.”

March 29th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Obama’s Magic? Britain Declares US/UK Relationship No Longer “Special”
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The blunt-force trauma of cold, hard reality hitting Barack Obama’s vacuous “Hope and Change” artifice continues.

Sixty years after Winston Churchill proclaimed a “special relationship” with the United States, and approximately one year after Obama shamefully returned a White House bust of Churchill to Britain, members of the United Kingdom’s parliament returned Obama’s insult and declared an end to that designation.  Britain’s Commons Foreign Affairs Committee decided that the term “no longer accurately characterised the modern relationshiop between the two countries and should be dropped,” and held that the British/American alliance was now “just one of a series of relationships.”

Naturally, the committee sprinkled a gratuitous anti-Bush remark onto its pronouncement, saying that the term “special relationship” was “now more likely to be defined by what was seen as Britain’s support for President George Bush over the Iraq War.”   This ludicrous fig leaf, however, fails to explain why the committee made this determination over one year after Bush’s departure and Obama’s arrival, when a magical new era of international goodwill and harmony was supposed to descend over the world.

October 31st, 2009 at 10:12 am
Blair Out as European President

And so Britain continues its decades-long decline in influence. The nation’s candidate to become the first President of Europe is likely defeated, with reports out of Brussels saying that Tony Blair lost because he and his island friends wanted the job too much.

But the anti-Blair front that has developed is merely the result of months of tactical errors by his campaigners. Not only did his envoys not win over Paris and Berlin, but they also, it seems, forgot about the need to get the EU’s smaller states behind them. “To us, it seemed like the game was all about the big boys. But that’s not the way that the EU works any more,” said one diplomat from a Baltic state. “We were not consulted even though we were aware of lobbying for Blair, which had started already way back in the summer, far earlier than anyone else.” The diplomat expressed surprise at this clumsy approach. “It’s very odd, as Tony Blair had a terrific team of EU advisers when he was in power, which is how he got so much done. But clearly that’s changed.”

The campaign for Mr. Blair also suffered from a brazenness that is not in tune with the more subtle approach to diplomacy á la Européenne. Compare Mr Brown’s manoeuvrings to the quiet but effective manoeuvrings of the Dutch team, who have managed to get their man in pole position just by working the EU’s diplomatic ropes like pros.

Lastly, the Blair campaign probably started too early, giving opponents too long to attack. “This is a game about the dark horses who come up at the last minute, not about the early frontrunners,” shrugged one official.”

No bother. Now it’s time to lay the groundwork to become the next UN Secretary General!