Please note this piece is cross-posted from my substantive blog. There is a cranks’ corner of online libertarianism from which I dissociate myself utterly, a skin-crawling, tinfoil-hat and often borderline-deranged cabal of those who advocate violence and armed insurrection to achieve political change. The reality of this seditious and abhorrent internet abuse is the horror of Norway this morning. The killer is reported as having a known online presence and…
Smokers like me may be expected to be outraged at proposals by Stony Stratford Town Council to use a new bylaw to ban smoking in all public places, but actually I welcome the issue coming to a head. As a Localist, I’m all in favour of the exercise of local law-making powers, and bylaws have long been used to deal with nuisances. In fact, they’re a valuable snapshot into the obsessions…
Peter Preston. the Guardian’s ex-editor and current columnist, decided that Amsterdam was just the place for an early Summer break. Perhaps he took the ‘Time Out’ guide with him. Perhaps like many middle-aged men with car-legs (thin, spindly, pale unmuscled sticks that join the stomach with the ground) he finds it difficult to walk more than fifty yards. In any case, something decided him to hire a bike. Very Eco.…
I have to explain more frequently than one may imagine the meaning of ‘freehold’. In England, only the Sovereign owns land; the rest of us just hold bits of the Sovereign’s land on various terms. Freehold means just that – that we hold the land of the Crown free of fee and charge. Of course, from 1688 onwards the grounds on which the Sovereign could deprive us of our holding…
There is much common ground that unites conservatives (small c) and libertarians (small l) – both in a way the true inheritors of a pure liberalism; the bonds that unite are indeed more significant than the fractures that divide, yet members of both groups frequently focus only on the differences rather than the similarities. Whilst conservatives look back to Edmund Burke and libertarians to John Stuart Mill, neither would give…
Those of a certain age may recall the uniformity of appearance that school pupils were constrained to adopt in years past. Perhaps, like me, you were paraded for inspection once a week and the polish of your shoes, the shortness of your hair, the cleanliness of shirt collar and fingernails and the conformity of your dress were checked. The cloth and exact shade of grey of your suit demonstrated conformity;…
The Telegraph’s revelations about Ed Balls’ association with Brown have left the label ‘toxic’ firmly affixed to Labour’s favourite thug. What’s worse, the party Leader, who needs to be above party factionalism, has got his fingerprints all over the fringes of the cabal that plotted to unseat Blair and ruin the economy with reckless overspending. If Milliband is to survive, he needs to establish himself as the mediator, receptive to…
Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell are today’s most prominent torchbearers for Localism. It was Simon Jenkins’ 2004 paper for Policy Exchange that launched a coherent case for Localism, and this was followed by the founding of Direct Democracy in 2005 and a series of recommendations from Helena Kennedy’s Power Inquiry from 2006, but it was in 2008, with Hannan and Carswell’s ’The Plan’ that the first serious attempt came to…
Sackerson is perfectly correct. The revolution will not happen. The populace will not march on Westminster, MPs will not be hanged from the lamp columns, Mandarins will not be immolated on piles of computer print-outs. Threats to the power of the Central State from groups of bloggers are risible. Already we can look back at chaps dressing-up in Guy Fawkes costumes and strolling politely around Whitehall as amusing naivety rather…
It’s bad enough that the roads of east London are to be closed next year to permit the Olympic nomenklatura to speed through the Zil lanes in long convoys of expensive black limos whilst locals, held on the side roads, fume in despair. Bad enough that the Blackwall Tunnel is to be closed to the public as the Olympic elite wander between north and south. But now we learn that…
As a student I experienced the world of hard graft. It was bearable only because it was temporary, students paid no income tax in those days for some reason, and it earned me more cash than I had ever imagined. I started off washing pots in one hotel, then progressed to silver-service waiting. Some weekends I’d start at 6.30 on a Saturday morning serving breakfasts, clear and lay for lunch,…
Andrew Motion today joins the ranks of the luvvies in a plea for more bread and circuses in the face, as he would have it, of savage and philistine government cuts to the arts. Motion and the arts lobby paint the culture secretary as a man who reaches for his pistol at the mention of his department’s name, who snatches library books from the damp fists of infants and who…
The Spring of 1910 was hot and dry; so dry that the lack of rainfall during the season was not to be repeated until 2011. The breaking of the weather in September was not going to herald a return to normal, for the Summer of 1911 that followed was amongst the hottest on record. Europe baked. Wells ran dry, crops shrivelled, streams dried to cracked mud and horses sought the…
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