Friday’s Quote – from Gandhi

“Good government is the most dangerous government, because it deprives people of the need to look after themselves.”

Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

So it seems that Gandhi would never have defended Gordon Brown’s big government welfare programs, even if the poor would be the beneficiaries, but was more of a libertarian.  The ends of poverty relief would not justify the means of subjugating free will.  

Letter of the Day – from The Guardian

Licence fee doomed 

The Guardian: 30 October 2007

The successful global expansion of BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm (New channels galore, October 29), highlights the increasing absurdity of a compulsory licence fee in a multichannel televisual market.  

The BBC’s high-quality programme output does not deserve to be protected from the full impact of market forces, but neither does it need to be. The revenues generated by the corporation’s flagship productions, such as Doctor Who and the Teletubbies, should persuade even the most ardent supporter of the Beeb that an enforced annual subscription of £135 is ananachronism.  

A wider concern must be the apparently limitless proliferation of BBC channels. This doesn’t provide the public with the sort of programming that isn’t available elsewhere, but makes it harder for independent channels to compete.  

The BBC has the reputation, the personnel and the expertise to stand on its own feet. It needs to be broken up into sensible constituent parts and encouraged to do so. 

Mark Littlewood

Progressive Vision

Iain Dale on Conservative leaders of the future

A good mention of the Young Britons’ Foundation can be found at Iain Dale’s blog.  There is someone who knows what the YBF is up to and why it is so valuable!  With the backing of the likes of David Trimble, Guido Fawkes, Peter Lilley, Louise Bagshawe, Daniel Hannan and Anthony Seldon you can rest assured that the best training was on offer.

 As Iain says:

This sort of training course teaches them debating skills, media skills and how to campaign. It may sound dull to those not involved in the political process, but this sort of thing is vital for young people from all parties if they are to acquire the skillset to become our politicians of the future. Some people believe we’d be better off without political parties at all, but whenever I speak at these sort of events I leave feeling very optimistic about our political future.

Quote of the Day – War is an ugly thing…

“But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war, is worse.

“When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people . A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice – a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice – is often the means of their regeneration.

“A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

“As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.” 

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist

Inspirational words from a French Revolutionary

Thanks to Daniel Hannan, the excellent British MEP who writes a blog and columns for the Daily Telegraph, for his article today in which he highlights the following passage from Jean-Paul Marat’s Address to the Electors of Great Britain:

“Gentlemen, the present parliament, by law, must soon expire; and no dissolution was evermore earnestly wished for by an injured people. Your most sacred rights have been flagrantly violated by your representatives, your remonstrances artfully rejected, yourselves treated like a handful of disaffected persons, and your complaints silenced by pursuing the same conduct which raised them. Such is your condition, and if such it continues, the little liberty which is yet left you, must soon be extinguished: but the time for redress is now approaching, and it is in your power to obtain that justice you have so many times craved in vain.”

 Despite being written in 1774 the words are incredibly prescient to our situation in Great Britain today.

Letter of the Day – from the Daily Telegraph

Return to the Tories

The Daily Telegraph: 2 October 2007

Sir – I think that many of the votes that have deserted the Tories have, like mine, fled, not to socialists or Liberal Democrats, but to the None-Of-The-Above (Nota) party. I use my vote as an instrument of punishment, small and puny though it is.

The Power Inquiry showed that most people are not apathetic, as politicians would have us believe, but feel that voting is pointless in our debased political system. 

However, the threat to our civil society from Gordon Brown’s totalitarian intentions suggests that Nota members must swallow whatever distaste they have for the current Tory party and rally to it. 

Robert Jago, Illetas, Mallorca 

Letter of the Day – from the Independent

Standing up to Mugabe at last 

The Independent: 21 September 2007

Sir: Have we at last got a political leader who is both good and brave enough to speak his mind and act on it? Maybe I am naive, but the independence and courage of Brown to stand up against the thug Mugabe, in whose country I lived for 20 years until 2001, brought tears to my eyes (“It’s him or me, says Brown“, 20 September). 

At last perhaps we have a prime minister of integrity who will hopefully bring all other European leaders in with him for a mass boycott of this summit. If Mugabe thinks he can turn this to his advantage by screaming, yet again, “conspiracy”, then so be it; that is not the point. What thinking person cares about what Mugabe thinks or says any longer? The point is that for perhaps 20 years, since the Matebele massacres in 1985, good men have stood around and said nothing. And that has been all it has taken for this evil to prevail. 

Jane Tyrer Montagu, Western Cape, South Africa

Thatcher meets Brown at 10 Downing Street

The latest Tory to be courted by Gordon Brown surfaced today.  For the first time in seven years Lady Thatcher has graced the doorstep of 10 Downing Street at the invitation of the Prime Minister.

According to the BBC Lady Thatcher was greeted with a warm handshake and their meeting took place in the Thatcher Room (the Prime Minister’s study), before taking in a tour of the building. 

It doesn’t mention at any point whether Gordon presented the Lady with a copy of his 1989 book, “Where There’s Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future“. 

I can’t help thinking, despite his team calling the photo-op “psychological warfare” critical to an election, that if the Prime Minister had tried this stunt before he spoke at the TUC conference the reception he received would have been even more frosty!

Is Europe doomed to continued economic stagnation?

So asks Sally McNamara, a Brit working for the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in Washington DC. In her lecture delivered in June and published on the Heritage Foundation website this week, McNamara notes that the EU’s grandiose ambitions for economic domination have foundered, yet again.

She notes that

- 22 of the EU’s 27 member states have higher rates of unemployment than the United States;
- only 63% of people aged 15 to 64 are working, compared to 72% in the US;
- annual growth in the EU has averaged 2.1% compared to 3.3% in the US.

The reasons for this comparative stagnation? Strong state sectors and rigid labour markets. Also in the firing line was the Common Agricultural Policy.

FedEx v Federal Government

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, explains the difference between FedEx and the Federal Government. It is a 3 minute clip and very worthwhile watching.