Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2012

The “international sporting event” in “the capital of the United Kingdom”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Dahlia Lithwick explains why we all need to be careful how we refer to a certain large organized sports extravaganza happening in a major city in England:

At the London Olympics, we’re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters being told they should sign up with authorities.

Then there’s the London Olympic Games and Paralympics Games Act 2006. The law was originally aimed at preventing “over-commercialization” of the games, but it seems to have unloosed something of a Pandora’s box of speech suppression. Provisions triggering worries for protesters include sections regulating use of the Olympic symbol “in respect of advertising of any kind including in particular — (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind.” The law further seems to authorize a “constable or enforcement officer” to “enter land or premises” where they believe such material is being produced. It also permits that such materials may be destroyed, and for the use of “reasonable force” to do so.

[. . .]

But it’s not just the Olympic rings that are being protected; it’s also Olympic words. As Nick Cohen recently observed, the “government has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls ‘List A.’ ” Those words: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, and twenty twelve. And woe betide anyone who takes a word from List A and marries it with one or more words from “List B”: Gold, Silver, Bronze, London, medals, sponsors, summer.

Spectators have been warned they may not “broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet,” making uploading your video to your Facebook page a suspect activity. Be careful with your links to the official Olympic website as well.

July 24, 2012

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, welcomes you to the Olympic Games

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:12

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

July 23, 2012

Disproportional British and Canadian combat casualties in Afghanistan

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Although the total losses hide it, British and Canadian soldiers took higher casualty rates than Americans during combat in Afghanistan:

In the last year, British troops in Afghanistan have been getting killed at twice the rate (1,300 per 100,000 troops per year) as Americans during the height of the fighting in Iraq. Canadian troops, until they withdrew from combat, had an even higher rate of loss. But the U.S. has a lot more troops in Afghanistan. Thus total combat deaths since late 2001 are; U.S.-2,050, Britain-422 and Canada-158.

The British military describes “major combat” as an operation where losses (killed) were greater than 600 per 100,000. Thus only recently did British losses go north of 600. There are several reasons for these different death rates. For one thing, a higher proportion of British and Canadian troops in Afghanistan are in combat. The Americans handle a lot more of the support functions and thus a smaller proportion of the U.S. force is combat troops. Finally, the U.S. had more helicopters for moving troops and a much larger number of MRAP (bomb resistant vehicles) for troops moving on the ground.

[. . .]

Despite the higher casualty rates for the British and Canadians, the overall death rate for foreign troops in Afghanistan is still lower than it was in Iraq. In the last four years, foreign troops in Afghanistan lost about 300-400 dead per 100,000 troops per year. In Iraq, from 2004-7, the deaths among foreign troops ran at 500-600 per 100,000 per year. Since al Qaeda admitted defeat in Iraq four years ago, the U.S. death rate in Iraq has dropped to less than 200 dead per 100,000 troops per year within two years, and to nothing by the end of 2011 (as the last Americans troops left). Meanwhile, the rate in Afghanistan peaked at 400 dead per 100,000 troops in 2010 and has been declining ever since.

July 19, 2012

Multiculturalism and suttee in the Raj

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Law, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

ESR on a famous incident in British India in the 1840s:

The first lesson is for the various sorts who call themselves “multiculturalists” and “moral relativists”. Napier showed us that these ostensibly liberating doctrines actually translate into “might makes right” — that, in the absence of a common normative ethical framework, disputes about “custom” will be won by the tribe with the most ability and will to use force.

The second lesson is for people who, having noticed than relativism and multiculturism are a road to ruination and blood, then argue that we must fall back on religion as the only possible source of truly universal ethical norms (If God is dead, is anything permissible?). Notice that the would-be widow-burners are priests? The “custom” they are arguing for is exactly their bid in the game of if-you-accept-my-religious-premises.

Napier, in promising those priests a hanging, says nothing of any religious counter-conviction of his own. And it would make no difference to the lesson if he had — except, perhaps, to underline the point that religion is just another form of tribal particularism and thus fundamentally unable to lift us away from the bloody muck of might-makes-right.

July 17, 2012

How the Nanny State undermines family life for parents and children

Filed under: Britain, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

Jennie Bristow at sp!ked:

… Bailey’s diagnosis of the dangers inherent in eroding parental authority was absolutely spot on. By attempting to ‘nationalise’ childrearing, whether by providing classes to instruct parents in officially approved childrearing methods or by using schools to inculcate children in a heightened awareness of the failings of their mothers and fathers, in recent decades, government parenting policy has stripped parents of their directly authoritative role.

Instead of being the boss of their own homes, parents are situated as mediators in the relationship between the child and the state, and told that their primary responsibility is not to do right by their child but to show that they are doing the right thing according to the current parenting orthodoxy. The effect of this, as Bailey suggested last year, is to disorient both parents and children, as both question the basis for parental authority.

Was this what caused the riots last summer? Not on its own. The behaviour of those young people engaged in the mayhem was profoundly shocking – but so, too, was the response of the adult population, from the middle classes cowering in their living rooms and boasting about that in the press, to the failure of the police to intervene decisively. What underpinned the chaos was the open collapse of adult authority, and this should have provided a wake-up call to our society about the need to grow up and take responsibility for the younger generations.

But the problem of parental authority forms an important part of the generalised crisis of adulthood, and it is worth reflecting on the relationship between the two.

July 16, 2012

If this forecast is accurate, we’ll all be nostalgic for global warming

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

In his Telegraph column on the current weather in Britain (and what it may or may not do to the Olympic schedule), Boris Johnson shares a long range weather forecast that is chilling — literally:

I have just been on the blower to my old chum, Piers Corbyn, the world’s foremost meteorological soothsayer, and he sounds like Jeremiah with an ingrown toenail. This is the same Corbyn, with a first-class degree in physics, who decisively beat the Met Office in 2010 and accurately forecast the cold and snowy winter — and I am afraid he has been bearish about this summer from sometime in February or March.

According to Piers and his team at Weather Action, we all underestimate the role of the sun. This is set to be just about the wettest July on record, he says, and that is mainly because of things taking place in the nuclear fireball millions of miles away from earth. “Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines,” says the Poet, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. This is one of the dim moments. The old boy is suffering from some kind of solar acne, called “coronal holes”, and on July 12 he apparently emitted a colossal flare — a cosmic spurt of X-rays and other charged particles; and, by a process that we (or at least I) do not fully understand — perhaps because rain droplets form more easily when there are charged particles around — this distemper in the celestial orb is helping to cause the current inundations.

For the sake of completeness, and so that no one can later accuse me of concealing the bad news (what did he know about the weather, and when did he know it?), I should say that Piers has a general thesis that the current phase of grim weather — cold, snowy winters and wet summers — is just the prelude to something yet more bracing. We are heading, he says, for a mini Ice Age. These wet Julys and frosty Januaries are part of the opening drum roll of a cold period that will set in over the next decades.

Some say it will be upon us by 2045, some say by 2030. Looking at the pattern of the last few years, Piers Corbyn now thinks it could be sooner than that. He does not say that sabretooth tigers will roam the streets of Newcastle. He does not say that the Thames will freeze at London Bridge and that we will have fairs on the ice — unlikely, given how fast the river flows these days. But he does believe that it will get nippier, and that we will see the kind of cold period last experienced in the late 17th century and early 18th century.

We’ll grant this petition, but only one condition…

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:48

A French petition calls for the return of the British Crown Jewels to Angers, in compensation for the execution of the last Plantagenet pretender to the throne in 1499:

Angers, in the Loire valley, was the capital of Anjou province and the geographical base of the Plantagenets, who ruled England from 1154 until 1485, providing some of the most celebrated monarchs in British history, including Richard the Lionheart and Henry V.

But when Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick, was executed for treason in the Tower of London in 1499, the house’s legitimate male line came to an end. “As redress for the execution of Edward, Angers today demands that the Crown Jewels of England be transferred to Angers,” reads a petition posted on the city’s official website.

Recalling 25-year-old Edward’s “unfair and horrible death” at the hands of henchmen working for Henry VII, England’s first Tudor king, the city believes it is owed an apology and 513 years’ worth of compensation.

Tim Worstall explains the one condition under which Her Majesty should accept the French claim:

Happily stick the Crown Jewels in Angers.

Immediately after the union of the Angevin Empire with the United Kingdom.

We’ll have the Duchy of Normandy back too if you don’t mind. And Brittany (they are Bretons after all).

Francois Hollande can keep the Ile de France, the bit we didn’t have back then.

This time around let’s do European integration properly eh?

July 14, 2012

Flood policy and personal responsibility

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

James Delingpole on the British government’s latest announcements on flood policy:

Yesterday it was reported that the Coalition had decided we should all be liable for the cost of flood damage, regardless of where we live. This puzzled me, as the Coalition’s decisions so often do. The only way it would make any kind of sense would be if you believed a) flooding is a new and unnatural phenomenon resulting directly from late 20th century Man Made Climate Change or b) that everyone is now so stupid they cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests and that it is therefore government’s job to hold their hands and wipe their bottoms for them from cradle to grave.

To discount a) you only have to go somewhere like the River Severn, just below Worcester Cathedral, and look at the flood marks on the wall. Many of the most dramatic inundations happened in years long before “man made global warming” was even a sinister glint in Al Gore’s eye. This isn’t to say that the cost of flood damage hasn’t risen to unprecedented levels these last few decades. But that has more to do with our insane practice of allowing property developments to be built on flood plains, together with our unfortunate habit of paving and tarmacking everything (such as the front gardens we would once have kept as front gardens) which means that in times of high rainfall floodwater is likely to accumulate in drains more rapidly. Plus, of course, we’re all richer — so there’s more expensive property for flooding to damage.

But it’s the b) aspect I find more worrying because of the way it rides roughshod over the most basic principles of free market economics. Can we really assume that when anybody buys a house by a river — or near a floodplain — they don’t do so in the full knowledge that flood-risk is one of the prices they pay for their pleasing waterside ambience? The very idea is a nonsense. Buyers, being rational, will factor this into their calculations: “OK, so it will be great for fishing and swimming and boating. But getting insurance will be a bugger and we’d better not keep anything too precious on the ground floor.” These complexities will be reflected by the market. While the value of the property may be enhanced by its attractive location, it will simultaneously be decreased by its flood-damage potential.

July 11, 2012

President Hollande “dwarfed” by Coldstream Guards

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

So much for a honeymoon period in office for French President Francois Hollande:

Francois Hollande was ridiculed today after allowing himself to look like a ‘dwarf’ alongside a British regiment which won battle honours at Waterloo and then occupied Paris.

During an official visit to London on Tuesday, the French President inspected a guard of honour from the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards at the Foreign Office.

He then appeared in hugely embarrassing photographs alongside Major James Coleby, who looked around two feet taller than the Gallic head of state.

Comments alongside the image on a website of pictures taken by AFP, France’s national news agency, suggested Hollande had fallen into a ‘trap’ made to make him look ridiculous.

‘Poor France,’ wrote Jean-Marc Rameau, from Paris, while Dmitri Kovaley mocked Mr Hollande, who is 5ft 7ins, with the words ‘Dwarfs rule the world’.

H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.

July 9, 2012

The constipated British housing market

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Tim Harford’s weekend column on the state of Britain’s housing market and a possible solution to the disconnect between supply and demand:

The chief obstacle to house building in the UK is the planning system, which, 65 years ago, did away with the idea that if you owned land, you could build on it, and replaced it with a system where planning permission was required. Permission to build houses is severely rationed, and such rationing can be seen clearly in the gap between the value of agricultural land without planning permission (a few thousand pounds a hectare) and the value of such land once permission has been granted (a few million).

The difficulty is that local authorities have the ability to grant planning permission but have little incentive to do so, because it tends to be unpopular with existing voters. The huge windfall from winning planning permission falls to whoever has managed to speculate on land and navigate the tangle of planning rules. These serve as nice barriers to entry for existing developers, while driving up the price of building land and so driving down the size of new homes.

Tim Leunig, chief economist at CentreForum, a think-tank, has proposed a two-part system of land auctions to get around this problem. Local authorities would buy land at auction, grant planning permission on it and then sell the land on to developers — with some strings attached, if they so choose. The profits would be enormous, and enjoyed by existing residents in the form of lower taxes or better public services. This isn’t the only way to liberalise planning, but it retains local control and democratic accountability — while dramatically increasing the incentive to develop.

Restoring a free market right to build on property you own would also be a fast solution to the diminished housing supply, but when have governments at any level willingly given up power?

July 8, 2012

Economic land mines laid by Blair and Brown’s governments exploding now

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

At The Commentator, John Phelan wonders if it’s now time for “an economic Nuremburg” for the 1997-2010 British governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown:

Like an iceberg, the extent of the damage wrought by the last Labour government is still becoming apparent.

One of the wheezes Labour used to camouflage its vast spending spree was the Private Finance Initiative. These had been brought in by John Major’s Conservatives (to criticism from the then Labour opposition) and involved a private sector entity building something and then selling it or leasing back to the government over a number of years, usually decades.

Upon winning the election in 1997 however, Labour performed a volte face and embraced PFIs. They appealed to Gordon Brown because the liabilities taken on under PFIs would not show up on the government’s balance sheet. In other words, they wouldn’t be included in the national debt figure.

Labour signed up to an estimated £229 billion of PFI projects. That’s almost two and a half times the entire projected budget deficit for 2012 – 2013, or 16 percent of GDP.

[. . .]

Indeed, like the cat who leaves little ‘presents’ around the house for you to discover when you return from holiday, the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 is the gift that keeps on crapping on your carpet. We will be discovering fiscal turds left by Labour for literally decades to come.

If you were being charitable you would ascribe the fiscal incontinence of the Blair/Brown governments to some sort of Keynesian economic theory, though that fails to explain why they applied fiscal ‘stimulus’ for seven years to an already growing economy.

If you were being slightly less charitable you might ascribe it to incompetence of a quite staggering degree. The last Labour government, after all, were probably the biggest set of mediocre idiots ever to govern this country.

And, if you were being even less charitable, you might ascribe it to something more sinister – Brown poisoning the wells when he heard opposition tanks at the end of his strasse.

Britain’s “two-tier” army after the recently announced cuts

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:49

At the Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey looks at some of the potential problems the reconfigured British army may face:

In summary, the Army will comprise two very distinct elements, the so-called ‘Reaction Force’ and the ‘Adaptable Force’. The Reaction Force will comprise what appears to be a slimmed down Armoured Division, built around three brigades, and augmented by 16 Air Assault Brigade (and effectively 3 Commando Brigade) plus supporting units to provide the short notice rapid response capability. The Adaptable Force is built around those units which are held at longer readiness to move, and which will provide the routine garrison, training and roulement duties. Within this structure some units will be held at different levels of readiness depending on how the security situation looks. Essential to this plan is the use of some 30,000 trained Army Reserve personnel to augment both forces, through a bolstered set of employment rules.

[. . .]

That said, there are real challenges that will need to be overcome in order to make this a success. From the outset real leadership is going to be needed to avoid the accusation and emergence of a ‘two-tier army’. It seems clear from looking at the wiring diagrams that large swathes of the Infantry and supporting units is going to be working under what was previously seen as the Regional Forces. Assuming that the Arms Plot has not been reintroduced, and that battalions will remain locked into their roles, it is going to take a lot of effort to convince people to join a unit which is posted to the ‘Adaptable Forces’. Who is going to want to join the part of the Army that is unlikely to deploy anywhere exciting, or where deployment is likely to be peace keeping, and not high intensity warfare? It will be a real blow to the morale of many soldiers if they perceive that their soldiering careers are in future going to be spent on Salisbury plain practising feeding Orphans or watching fake militias simulate slaughtering innocent civilians whilst they have to stand and watch in accordance with their UN ROE. Meanwhile their peers in the Reaction Forces will be charging around playing with the best equipment, newest kit, and better deployment prospects.

The Army manning cell at Glasgow is going to have to come up with a very good way of ensuring that those who join for a career regularly cross between the two forces. There already exists a sense of ‘them and us’ between the Regional Forces and the rest of the Army. One feels that this will only get worse over time, particularly if deployments go to units such as the Paras or Guards, which enjoy better publicity in the eye of politicians.

The danger is that the best posts get earmarked for the high flyers, and that over time the Officer Corps will emerge with the best and brightest occupying all the promotion jobs, while everyone else is left to stay in the Adaptable Forces. This could lead to a real challenge as good officers walk early, not leaving sufficient leadership across the Army as a whole.

July 5, 2012

British army reduces and consolidates 17 units

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

As reported earlier, the British army will be losing several battalions of infantry in the consolidation effort to reduce the army’s total manpower by 20,000:

The four infantry battalions to disappear are the 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, the 2nd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards), the 3rd Battalion the Mercian Regiment and the 2nd Battalion the Royal Welsh.

A fifth infantry battalion, the 5th Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders), will become a single company to carry out public duties in Scotland.

The Armoured Corps will be reduced by two units with the mergers of the Queen’s Royal Lancers and the 9th/12th Royal Lancers and the 1st and 2nd Tank Regiments.

The Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the Army Air Corps, the Royal Logistic Corps, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Military Police will also be affected.

[. . .]

Details of the other changes are:

  • The Royal Artillery will be reduced from 13 to 12 units with the withdrawal of the 39th Regiment Royal Artillery
  • The Royal Engineers will be reduced from 14 to 11 units with the withdrawal of 24 and 28 Engineer Regiments and 67 Works Group
  • The Army Air Corps will reduce from five to four units as 1 Regiment AAC merges with 9 Regiment AAC
  • The Royal Logistic Corps will be reduced from 15 to 12 units with 1 and 2 Logistic Support Regiments withdrawn from the Order of Battle and 23 Pioneer Regiment disbanded
  • The Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers will be reduced to seven units with the withdrawal of 101 Force Support Battalion
  • 5 Regiment Royal Military Police will be removed

Update: As you’d expect, the changes are not being welcomed by current or former soldiers.

The reforms have caused anger and frustration within senior ranks. Earlier this week, a leaked letter to General Wall from one senior officer in the Royal Fusiliers showed the anger brewing over the scale of the proposed cuts.

Brigadier David Paterson, the honorary Colonel of the Regiment of Fusiliers, said the decision to axe one of its battalions would not “best serve” the armed forces and “cannot be presented as the best or most sensible military option”.

He added: “I, as Colonel, have the duty to tell my men why it is their battalion, which at the time of the announcement will be the best manned battalion in the army, with recruits waiting in the wings, was chosen by CGS. I will then also have to explain to my Fusiliers in a fully manned battalion why they are likely to be posted to battalions that cannot recruit. This will not be an easy sell.”

July 4, 2012

British banks are “a cossetted, subsidised industry with captive consumers”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

If any industry has more than its fair share of “too big to fail” wards of the state, it’s the banking sector. Allister Heath in the Telegraph:

There is a horrendous problem, certainly, and urgent reform is required. But the ailment has been fundamentally misdiagnosed: banking has become a ward of the state, a cossetted, subsidised industry with captive consumers, and it is that which has crippled it. We have been there before, in other sectors, and the medicine is always the same. This may come as a shock, but we need more capitalism in banking, not less.

Banks need to be allowed to go bust, like every other private company. It was a disgrace that taxpayers were called upon to bail out some of the City’s grandest names. This must never happen again. The reason capitalism works so well, whenever it is tried properly, is that the principle at its heart — profit and loss — is the toughest of disciplines and the best of motivators. It is more ruthless than anything regulators, however clever, could ever dream up. It allows two conflicting emotions, greed and fear, to balance one another out. Shareholders, creditors and bosses want to make money — but they know that a step too far might entail ruin.

That, at least, is how it works for much of UK Plc — but no longer in banking, where profits have been privatised and losses nationalised. It is an obscene perversion of capitalism. Forget the nonsense about “light touch” regulation: the problem is that the fear of failure ceased to exist. Market discipline was replaced by extreme laxity.

There was no longer much need for prudence, proper capital buffers or strict internal controls: the taxpayer was ready to pick up the bill if anything went wrong, while incompetent regulators signed everything off. The Labour government which introduced this mad system wasn’t deliberately seeking to subsidise risk: it merely made a terrible mistake, though with the politically useful side effect of reducing the cost of credit and increasing its availability. The real blunder was that the Financial Services Authority had no plan to cope with a bank going bust. It simply assumed failure would never happen. After all, how could it? Gordon Brown had abolished booms and busts.

July 3, 2012

Details of British army cuts leaked

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:19

The Guardian has some details on the upcoming cuts to the British army, which will include the elimination of several battalions of infantry and the merging of some armoured regiments:

The acrimony and chaos surrounding plans to cut 20,000 troops from the army have been laid bare after details of the battalions to be scrapped were leaked before a ministerial statement on Thursday.

The proposals, whose publication has been delayed by Downing Street because of their sensitivity, show historic units to be axed include the third battalion of the Yorkshire regiment and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the fifth battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. One battalion will be lost from the Royal Welsh, the Mercians and the Royal Fusiliers.

[. . .]

Official letters to army commanders were sent out on Tuesday, ready for the announcement in parliament by the defence secretary, Philip Hammond. The hope had been that soldiers would hear about the cuts from senior officers, but this has been dashed by the leak in Tuesday’s Sun.

[. . .]

The army is losing a fifth of its overall strength because of budget cuts and restructuring set out in the much criticised 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review.

A subsequent MoD re-evaluation — last year’s so-called “three-month exercise” — more than doubled the number of troops to be lost to 20,000.

[. . .]

The battalions to be saved include the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, the Queen’s Dragoon Guards and the Royal Dragoon Guards. The Parachute Regiment’s three battalions will be spared.

Under the proposals, the Queen’s Royal Lancers will be merged with the 9th/12th Lancers, and the 1st Royal Tank Regiment with the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment.

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