The funny side of domestic violence

This blog hasn’t laughed so much since the Lord Meddlesome of Fey Green Slime Incident.

Con-Dem partnerships can be tricky……

Coalition partners resort to violence.

Liberal-Democrat councillor Christine James has been charged with assault and will appear in Weymouth Magistrate’s Court on September 9^th.

Feeling are running high amongst the tribal ground force. Passions inflamed as agendas are compromised. Who did she assault?

Her alleged victim is believed to be her husband of 19 years and Conservative Borough council colleague, Ian James.

Mr James is a champion of the Weymouth and Portland Domestic Violence and Abuse Forum and sits on the Community Safety Partnership…..

At a borough council meeting earlier this month, Christine James said that campaigners from the Friends of Weymouth Refuge for battered partners had ‘proven that a refuge like this is both relevant and needed’.

Respectful tug of the forelock to the mighty Al Jahom.

The left has suddenly remembered England

There’s quite a sensible piece by Eddie Bone in the New Statesman today, or very nearly.  The basic premise is that Labour should devote a large part of its time in opposition to rediscovering itself in England, and reconnecting with the English political base that it lost through its badly drafted and deliberate policies of devolution and imposed multi-culturalism.

All fine and dandy, a welcome return to democratic principles, you may think, but as several comments below the piece expose, eradicating the loathing for England that is hard-wired into Labour’s orthodox Fabian DNA will be no easy task.  This is what the ersatz reformers are up against….

An ‘English Parliament’ would not work; it would simply return a perpetual Conservtive majority and that is not good for democracy.

Whats needed is a radical shake up of the Constitution. Greater powers to Regional Govts rather like the ‘lender’ in Germany, and a Federal Structure for the UK, to recognnise the uniqueness of Scotland wales NI and the English Regions.

Which raises two points….

First, while this blog recognises that the Conservative Party as currently constituted doesn’t represent English, or British, interests at all, but those of an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels, what is “bad for democracy” about a perpetual majority for any party if that’s what the people decide?

And second, it’s not hard to see what the commenter is thinking here. This “radical shake-up of the Constitution” would emasculate England still further, consigning even the idea of an English nation to the history books and devolving what little control of our own national destiny we have left to the socialist empire that has been the dream of the homogenisers since Robert Schumann first proposed the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950.

In reality Bone’s proposal holds no hope for those of us who wish to redress the manifest imbalances created by Labour’s cynical gerrymandering, and nobody should be taken in by it.

They chose to despise England and everything she stands for, so now they’ve suddenly remembered we exist, now they need us, they don’t get to represent us.

Mind the gap

A fine and rigorously argued post by John Ward over at The Slog challenges the latest incarnation of left wing Utopian orthdoxy, The Spirit Level.

Going back over a hundred years before the CIA was ever imagined, Jeremy Bentham proposed – without the benefit of any data – exactly that truthful empiricism of balance: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, he felt, should be the aim of every society. Not only was Bentham a brilliant, instinctive observer of social anthropology before it was an ology, he was also a man blessed with a complete absence of bollocks in his thinking.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Nick Cohen. For his assumption in the Guardian/Observer piece is that, by definition, the Tories don’t want ‘more’ equality.

I wonder: is he mad? Cameron has had to work day and night for four years to explain away his background. The current Labour Party’s MPs are more middle class and Oxbridge than the Coalition’s.

Actually, Cohen’s a bright bloke and he isn’t mad: it’s just his job (and his preference) to keep on insisting that all Tories are evil and greedy…..unlike Mandelson, Prescott, Byers, Blair, and Hoon.

The Guardian’s Salvation Army will never accept that the differences between Labour and Tory policy on equality are ones of strategy and definition, not objective.

Quite, although the only question this blog would ask, and which John hasn’t addressed (at least in this post) is which is more desirable and more practical, a society where all social strata of are better off but the gap remains the same, or failed attempt after failed attempt to pursue a theoretical egalitarian Utopia, which always, but always, has the net result of leaving everyone worse off, and invariably only succeeds in replacing one imbalance with another?

For a more detailed (and thoroughly enjoyable) critique of The Spirit Level, try this.

Quote of the week

From Douglas Carswell….

I fear the notion of the Coalition as Whig radicalism re-born, or as Edmund Burke dot com, which really would change Britain, might not have made it into this evening’s script.

So, the BBC is still trying to find a distempered right wing Tory to attack the Coalition. So much for impartiality.

Turkeys voting for Christmas

Daniel Hannan is perfectly entitled to continue as a Member of the European “Parliament”, despite the fact that is a body whose legitimacy and sovereignty he questions. He is, after all, only following the time-honoured custom of champions of liberty like Charles Stewart Parnell, but one can’t help but wonder which audience he thinks he’s addressing here.

Doctrinally not quite up to his usual high standards….

Yellow card, Daniel.

Any enlargement of the EU is wrong because the EU is, in and of itself, wrong.

If Mr Cameron wishes to conduct bi-lateral diplomacy with a country that for decades protected our south-eastern flank against the Soviet Union (in the best Tory tradition, as you say) that is one thing, but to wrap his discourse in honeyed phrases about Turkey’s eventual entry into the EU is quite another. It is merely a continuation of the treason, committed by others and compounded by him, when he failed to deliver a referendum on Lisbon.

It won’t be the Liberal Democrats who bring down the Coalition, it will be the libertarian right that reclaims the party of Pitt and Peel.

Well, that was a nice holiday

10 days in Búzios. Nice.

Ah well, back to reality.

Why capitalism and libertarian conservatism are better than socialism….