Violence, hatred and bile

Elected Police Commissioners are pointless.

by inspectorgadget

Discussion about the relative merits of elected crime commissioners, robust police tactics and direct entry police leaders might be interesting to many politicians and social commentators. It is also completely pointless in the face of the reality of modern British sentencing policy.

In the last two weeks in Ruraltown, we have seen three men with a total of 78 previous convictions, convicted again for theft, domestic violence and vehicle-crime. Two of these men took over a  dozen other offences with them to ‘clean the slate’.

All three had previous records for ‘offences against the courts and police’. All three had breached community sentences, been recalled whilst on licence or breached bail in the last two years.

This kind of behaviour is now entirely normal for most of the criminal underclass in every town in Britain.

None of these men received a single day’s custodial sentence.

All three were dealt with by way of ‘community sentence’. All three were happy to keep their freedom. One was arrested again within 24 hours for stealing cars. He didn’t even attempt to run away when patrols arrived.

So you see for us, all these high-minded strategic issues are pointless if the fundamentals are forgotten. Too much thought in sentencing is given to the offender. What about the public protection issues? Local neighbourhoods need some space from these people, even if it is only for a few months.

Continually releasing these people from Court sends an appalling message to communities. It tells them that they don’t matter.

I suspect that the real reason behind policing devolution is a desire to shift responsibility for crime and disorder away from government. In the context of the current complete lack of serious consequence for criminal behaviour, it really doesn’t matter who is in charge, where they come from or how they get here.

On the subject of complete farces; Dale Farm.

Did anyone else see the delicious irony of a group of people celebrating and taking advantage of a Judge’s decision when it went their way, only minutes earlier having said that the decisions of the previous ten years worth of Judges decision were not going to be followed because they didn’t go their way?

I have to take my hat off for the way the Irish Travellers have performed the most giant confidence trick of even their careers; managing to convince a whole section of society that they are a persecuted minority. I suspect that many millions of people in this country are waiting to see if there really is a kind of legal apartheid in Britain today; one rule for so-called minorities and another for the rest of us.

Once again, police officers will bear the brunt of the violence, hatred and bile. In this case, I think it will be worth it.

Out of Control

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty

By P. Hitchen

In a minute, I will say why the new film of  'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is absolutely unforgivably awful, giving full details. But first I will give some background (and those who don’t want to have the plot spoiled can safely leave off reading here).

When John le Carre (David Cornwell) first began to write about the secret world, I was among millions who were overwhelmed by the power of his writing.

These books were thrillers, but also thrillingly potent ‘state of the nation’ novels about the decay of a country , the doubts of its governing class, the illusions of greatness which still clouded the minds of so many.

He knew exactly how his people spoke. He was a trained listener, and his conversations in dusty Whitehall attics, basements registries, safe-houses, committee rooms and clubs are so spot on that you can hear them in your head (though I should add that he cannot do male-female relationships).

I reckon he gained his amazing powers of observation during the alarming, chaotic, hilarious and tragic childhood which he more-or-less describes in ‘A Perfect Spy’, which I suspect is as near to his autobiography as we are going to get.

I have always loved his use of the word ‘actually’ in conversation. He had spotted that when a British public servant employed this word, he was (actually) saying ‘Oh, shut up, you blasted fool’.  It has gone now, and Mr Cornwell’s continued use of this device in some later books rings false, rather like the extraordinarily formal speeches which P.D.James gives some of her modern characters.

In those days, when someone ended a statement with ‘actually’,  it was a very bad sign, as it is now when an American official addresses you as ‘Sir!’ (when this happens, freeze).

His bottomless scorn for deluded sorts who could not see how much we had declined is savagely expressed in ‘The Looking Glass War’, a book so sad and full of rage that is painful to read decades after its targets retired and went to their graves.

‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, likewise drawn from the life, explores the matching cynicism of East and West, and first introduces us to Cornwell’s conviction that a country’s spy services are microcosms of its whole society, and that there is an alarming equivalence between the secret services of East and West. There’s some truth in this. Much of the Cold War was a choreographed dance in which both sides told their peoples that things were worse than they were. But it was not as true as Mr Cornwell thinks it is, in my view. It is this conviction which has gradually turned him into a rather silly anti-American and which has made several of his more recent books disappointing and flat. I still buy and read them. But only once.

Whereas I could not say how many times I have read ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, or seen the superb film which was based on it. Or ‘The Looking-Glass War’. As for what is in some ways my favourite, ‘A Small Town in Germany’, if I had a long journey to undertake, I’d pick up my tatty old copy of it and read it with joy yet again - holding my breath as the long-jammed lift ascends from the basement with its cargo of unwanted memories. It’s not in the Smiley sequence and is only marginally about spying. But it is marvellous about British embassies, diplomatic dinners, British decline, the aristocracy, the failed hopes of 1945 and the black German past. Mr Cornwell is that very rare thing in modern Britain, someone who knows and likes Germany and understands it. I often wonder if he privately thinks this book is his masterpiece.

Egalitarian superiors and other crackpots

Overlords

By D. Thompson

In the comments following this, a reader, Rich Rostrom, notes my use of the term “egalitarian superiors.”

Isn’t that an oxymoronic construction? They can’t be both ‘superior’ and ‘egalitarian.’

If the idea is unfamiliar, perhaps I should elaborate. In my experience, the more egalitarian a person says he is, the more superior he wishes to be, or assumes he already is. Egalitarian sentiment is, and generally has been, a license for hypocrisy, double standards and exerting power over others. Much as a professed disdain for inequality is a way to signal one’s own moral, intellectual and social superiority.

A rummage through the archives reveals no shortage of illustrations.

The Observer’s Kevin McKenna displayed his egalitarian credentials by calling for a ban on private education: “The ultimate iniquity is that independent, fee-paying schools are allowed to exist at all.” Picture the big, generous heart behind those sentiments. It offends Mr McKenna that private education should be allowed to exist - even when those who pay for it also pay again via taxes for the state system. How dare some parents want the best for their children when the best is something not everyone can have, or indeed benefit from? According to Mr McKenna’s moral calculus, parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked. And so they should be stopped. Therefore Mr McKenna or his ideological proxy must have power over others to stop all those evil people who work hard and save to pay for their kids’ tuition.

In a similar vein, the Fabian Society’s Sunder Katwala wants to “make life chances more equal” by minimising the role of conscientious parents and discussing “the impact of private education.” Mr Katwala seems very interested in the implicitly negative “impact” of private education on those who don’t experience it. The impact of state education and egalitarian sentiment on those who do experience such things – say, the curious and able - doesn’t seem quite so pressing.

Then there’s the socialist actress Arabella Weir, who deceived Guardian readers about her own education in order to display her egalitarian piety as a “good, responsible citizen.” So egalitarian is Ms Weir, she seems to view children not as ends in themselves but as instruments for the advancement of a socialist worldview. As formulated by Ms Weir, “the right thing to do” has a sacrificial air and entails mingling conspicuously with those deemed “disadvantaged.” By Ms Weir’s thinking, even if you had a grim and frustrating experience at a state comprehensive you should still want to inflict that same experience on your children. Ideally, by sending them to a disreputable school with plenty of rough council estate kids and people for whom English is at best a second language. Ms Weir tells us the advantages of this approach include, “learning street sense, who to be wary of, who to avoid,” and teaching clever children “how to keep their heads down.”

Zoe Williams went further, signalling her sense of fairness by conjuring scenarios in which parents would be humiliated and punished for trying to do the best for their offspring. (“As for vindictive, ha! Good.”) The Guardian’s advocate of “social justice” delighted in the idea of parents’ access to their preferred school being dependent on displaying a leftwing outlook and inversely proportional to the value of their car: “Do they have a 4x4? Can the parents provide a letter from any local leftwing organisation, attesting to their commitment to open-access state education?” In a move echoing Soviet educational policy of the 1920s, our embittered class warrior then went on to formulate her own punitive hierarchy: “At the very bottom of the waiting list, put the kids who have been removed from a private school, since the intentions of their parents are the most transparent: somewhat above them, but below everybody else, put the kids who have siblings at private schools.” And Ms Williams did all this while carefully omitting any mention of her own education at a school where extracurricular activities includevisits to the Sinai Desert.

Readers will no doubt recall Ms Williams’ Guardian colleague and fellow enthusiast of “social justice,” George Monbiot, who wants to arrest people he only hopes have committed a crime, and who flew around the world promoting a book telling the rest of us we shouldn’t be allowed to fly because it’s akin to “child abuse.” A position that suggests either a remarkably casual view of child abuse or, perhaps more likely, an assumed right to be exempt from his own professed moral imperatives. And let’s not forget the environmentalist David Suzuki, who denounces large houses as “disgusting” and thinks other people shouldn’t aspire to owning homes like his own rather spacious estates. 

Nor should we overlook the imperious Polly Toynbee - owner of a spare Tuscan villa - who insists “money doesn’t make us happier” and who calls for an end to the wrong kind of people earning as much as she does. Or Karen Armstrong, whose sense of “fairness” allows her to transcend mere facts and misinform wildly - for the greater good, of course. Or the playwright Jonathan Holmes, who expects to be subsidised by the taxpayer because he “speaks truth to power,” being as he is so terribly radical and leftwing. Or the late Barbara Castle, Labour’s “Red Queen” - a socialist Baroness who railed against private health care and denounced it as “immoral,” “obscene” and something to be banned. And whose adamance evaporated when her own son needed medical treatment and was discreetly admitted to a private hospital under an assumed name.

Further illustration comes via Jere Surber, a professor of philosophy who signals his egalitarian politics in a typically grand and superior manner. Surber’s leftist leanings are apparently the only “intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history.” He and his colleagues “have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition.” And so the professor finds it outrageous that “doctors, engineers and scientists” are regarded as more valuable and paid more than he is.

And then there’s the leftwing think-tank, the New Economics Foundation, whose Head of Social Policy, Anna Coote, tells us we would become “better parents, better citizens, better carers and better neighbours” if only our incomes were dramatically reduced. “We,” she says, will be “satisfied” without the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.” The preferences of the British electorate – whose taxes fund the NEF - don’t figure in this brave new world and the NEF’s deep thinkers simply know what’s best for us. What’s best for us is “introducing measures to reduce the gradient between high and low earners,” “growing our own food,” and “mending and repairing things.” According to Ms Coote, “freedom” will be found in sameness, make-do and unpaid manual labour.

These assumptions may sound like the musings of a pretentious and arrogant teenager, but they’re coming from adults who hope to influence government policy and determine the shape of our lives. Readers may wish to consider the psychology implied by the NEF proposal, and by other egalitarian sentiments outlined above. Apparently, “we” will learn to find solace in the fact that everyone else is in a comparably bad position, economically and educationally. (Though I’m guessing “everyone” won’t include those who’ve taken it upon themselves to ensure our utopia runs smoothly and without obstruction.) We’ll be equal, more or less, and therefore we’ll be happy. And kind, and just better people. We’ll abandon our cars, holidays and washing machines, along with the desire to give our children advantages that we didn’t have. After all, these things are selfish. And we’ll take comfort – perhaps even pleasure – in the lowered expectations of our neighbours.

It’s the psychology of socialism, people. Just don’t get it on the rug. 

Peak Oil anyone?

New Drilling Technologies Reshape Oil World

By M. Perry

1. REUTERS -- "Oil output from shale prospects in unconventional sources from North Dakota to Texas could reach 1.5 million to 2 million barrels-per-day (bpd) in the coming five to seven years, twice as much as the 700,000 bpd currently produced in these places."

2. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC -- "Oil exploration is moving to new corners of the country as drillers use a combination of technologies to tap crude that was always known to be there, but only now can be produced economically.

Colorado’s El Paso County, which had plenty of cattle but never a producing well, sits on the Niobrara shale. The geologic formation stretches from Colorado into Wyoming, while also touching parts of Nebraska and Kansas. The Niobrara is one of about a score of new and renewed oil plays made possible  through a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.  Gas producers early last decade combined fracking and horizontal drilling with outstanding results, significantly altering the U.S. energy picture and touching off major gas drilling booms in Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere."

3. NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO - The article "New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota" reports that in Williston, N.D. parking spaces for RVs are going for $1,000 per month and small one-bedroom apartments for $2,000 - sounds like Manhattan or DC prices.  Here's more:

"The boom in Williston is happening in spots across America. New drilling technology is also fueling boom towns in Texas, Louisiana, and Colorado. New drilling technologies mean companies can extract oil and natural gas from shale rock that was previously thought unreachable. 

The U.S. could have 2 trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drilled. South America could hold another 2 trillion. And Canada? 2.4 trillion. That's compared to just 1.2 trillion in the Middle East and north Africa."

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

In January, Ohioan Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced to 10 days in jail, three years of probation, and 80 hours of community service for having her children attend schools outside her district. Gov. John Kasich reduced her sentence last month.

School districts hire special investigators to follow kids home in order to verify their true residences.

By MICHEAL FLAHERTY

In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.

Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher's license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.

These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can't afford private schooling, they can't access school vouchers, and they haven't won or haven't even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there's the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.

Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.

In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups' efforts in Connecticut to pass the "parent trigger" legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT's success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from "the table." AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.

Kevin Chavous, the board chairman for both the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Democrats for Education Reform, senses that these recent events herald a new age for fed-up parents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. before them, they understand "the fierce urgency of now" involving their children's education. Hence some parents' decisions to break the law—or practice civil disobedience.

This life-changing decision is portrayed in Betty Smith's 1943 novel, "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn," also adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. In the novel, Francie Nolan is the bright young daughter of Irish immigrants living in Brooklyn's Williamsburg immigrant ghetto in the early 20th century. An avid reader, Francie is crushed when she attends her local public school and discovers that opportunity is nonexistent for girls of her ilk.

So Francie and her father Johnny claim the address of a house next to a good public school. Francie enrolls at the school and her life is transformed. A teacher nurtures her love for writing, and she goes on to thrive at the school. Francie eventually becomes an accomplished writer who tells the story of her transformation through education.

The defining difference between the two schools, writes the novel's narrator, is parents: At the good school, "The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans."

Were Francie around today, she'd be sad but not surprised to see how little things have changed. Students are still poisoned by low expectations, their parents are still getting bulldozed. But Francie wouldn't yield to despair. She would remind this new generation of courageous parents of the Tree of Heaven, from which her story gets its title—"the one tree in Francie's yard that was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement." The tree, the narrator adds, "liked poor people."

The defenders of the status quo in our nation's public schools could learn a lot from that tree.

Crossroads

Free Market Sweden, Social Democratic America

 Two historic countries, moving in opposite -- and unexpected -- directions.

By Samuel Gregg

"Sweden" isn't the first word that normally crosses our minds when we hear the expression "free market." But if President Obama, Paul Krugman, Warren Buffett, and other progressives want to find ways out of America's seemingly-intractable economic crisis, they might consider looking to the country once viewed as the very model of a modern Social Democracy.

They're likely to be surprised -- and probably appalled -- by what they discover. For while America has opted for more deficit-spending, bailouts, socialized medicine, easy money, failed state-subsidized Solyndra-like green businesses, "job-plans," and thus-far unsuccessful efforts to raise taxes, Sweden has been quietly turning social democracy into a museum-piece.

No one will be surprised to learn that Sweden was among the first European countries to create a modern welfare state. Between 1911 and 1914, Karl Staaff's Liberal government introduced some of Europe's first national pension and insurance schemes. Over time, additional programs were added.

But two things distinguished Sweden's welfare state from the very beginning. First, Sweden's progressives cleverly marketed their ideas as a way of realizing what they called a folkhemmet (people's home). The emphasis was upon realizing a once-overwhelmingly peasant society's traditional values in a context of industrialization. This helped the Social Democrat governments that ruled Sweden between 1932 and 1976 avoid being labeled as soft-Marxists in a country deeply wary of an expansionist Soviet Union.

The second distinguishing feature was Sweden's vision of state-provided social protection as a right. This led to successive governments insisting upon universal coverage and the costs being covered by general taxation.

It took several decades, but the relentless logic of these commitments eventually eroded the Swedish economy's competitiveness. The situation was worsened by the decision of governments in the 1970s to hasten Sweden's long march towards the Social Democratic nirvana. This included expanding welfare programs, nationalizing many industries, expanding and deepening regulation, and -- of course -- increasing taxation to punitive levels to pay for it all.

Over the next twenty years, the Swedish dream turned decidedly nightmarish. The Swedish parliamentarian Johnny Munkhammar points out that "In 1970, Sweden had the world's fourth-highest GDP per capita. By 1990, it had fallen 13 positions. In those 20 years, real wages in Sweden increased by only one percentage point." So much for helping "the workers."

Facing severe economic stagnation, Sweden began implementing several rather un-social democratic measures in the early 1990s. This included curtaining its public sector deficit and reducing marginal tax-rates and levels of state ownership. Another change involved allowing private retirement schemes, a development that was accompanied by the state contributing less to pensions.

These reforms, however, proved insufficient. In the early 2000s, according to James Bartholomew, author of the best-selling The Welfare State We're In (2006), more than one in five Swedes of working-age was receiving some type of benefit. Over 20 percent of the same demographic of Swedes was effectively working "off-the-books" or less than they preferred. Sweden's tax structure even made it financially advantageous for many to stay on the dole instead of getting a job.

But with a non-Social Democrat coalition government's election in 2006, Sweden's reform agenda resumed. On the revenue side, property taxes were scaled back. Income-tax credits allowing larger numbers of middle and lower-income people to keep more of their incomes were introduced.

To be fair, the path to tax reform was paved here by the Social Democrats. In 2005, they simply abolished -- yes, that's right, abolished -- inheritance taxes.

But liberalization wasn't limited to taxation. Sweden's new government accelerated privatizations of once-state owned businesses. It also permitted private providers to enter the healthcare market, thereby introducing competition into what had been one of the world's most socialized medical systems. Industries such as taxis and trains were deregulated. State education and electricity monopolies were ended by the introduction of private competition. Even Swedish agricultural prices are now determined by the market. Finally, unemployment benefits were reformed so that the longer most people stayed on benefits, the less they received.

So what were the effects of all these changes? The story is to be found in the numbers. Unemployment levels fell dramatically from the 10 percent figure of the mid-1990s. Budget-wise, Sweden started running surpluses instead of deficits. The country's gross public debt declined from a 1994 figure of 78 percent to 35 percent in 2010. Sweden also weathered the Great Recession far better than most other EU states. Sweden's 2010 growth-rate was 5.5 percent. By comparison, America's was 2.7 percent.

Of course Sweden's story is far from perfect. Approximately, one-third of working Swedes today are civil servants. Some of the benefits of tax reform have been blunted by Sweden's embrace of carbon taxes since the early 1990s. That partly reflects the extent to which many Swedes are in thrall to contemporary Western Europe's fastest growing religion -- environmentalism.

High unemployment also persists among immigrants and young Swedes (25.9 percent amongst 15-25 year olds). This owes much, Bartholomew observes, to "the high minimum wage imposed on the various industries by the still-powerful unions. Those who cannot command a good wage are not allowed to work for a lower one." On the income side, average Swedish wage-earners in 2009 still took home less than 50 percent of what they cost their employer. The equivalent figure for Britain was 67 percent.

It hardly need be said that the differences between Sweden and the United States are enormous. An economy of 310 million people is a very different affair to one with just over 9 million inhabitants. Moreover, small ships are easier to turn around than ocean-liners. Nonetheless, it's surely paradoxical -- and tragic -- that a small Nordic country which remains a byword for its (at times obsessive) commitment to egalitarianism has proved far more willing than America to give economic liberty a chance.