ThunderDragon Blog

This is an unadulterated Good Thing. “Green” taxes are a bad idea, and don’t even serve any real purpose except as a means for government to take more of our hard-earned money away from us. Being “green” isn’t about paying extra taxes on “polluting” things, since taxes are already paid on them. And taxing them more will only hurt those lower down on the economic scale anyway.

Carrots work better than sticks in these situations. Any party who is serious about reducing Britain’s carbon emissions, for whatever reason, must accept that taxing “bad” things like this isn’t the way forward, and I am very glad that the Conservative Party has realised this, even if belatedly.

Monday

• Philip Johnston at the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip writes about the “dark side of internet…[because it] allows for indoctrination and radicalisation of vulnerable and impressionable young men in their bedrooms by faceless zealots.” Yet, really, how different is this to any other form of mass communication? The internet is just a bit more accessible is all.
• Matt Wardman asks which ad agency you would trust to write your own blog slogan. Personally, I just prefer to make up my own.
• Watt Tyler at Burning Our Money demonstrates that Yvette Cooper is talking Balls when she says that nationalising Northern Rock has been “costless”. There’s no such thing as a free lunch - or nationalisation.

Tuesday

• Peter Cuthbertson at ConservativeHome’s CentreRight says that Cuba’s hospitals are as dirty as it’s dictatorship. And that is very, very dirty. Even worse than an NHS hospital, even…
• Fraser Nelson at the Spectator’s Coffee House remarks that the Lib Dems have returned to their traditional fence-sitting position. On the EU “Treaty” this time. As if we really expected anything like a principled stand from a Lib Dem, even Opik?!
• CityUnslicker at Capitalists@Work fisks the Left’s defence of Darling’s nationalisation of Northern Rock. Truly, they are excreable.

Wednesday

• Asp chews over what it means to be English and challenges anyone to justify how an English council can celebrate Chinese New Year and yet not mark St. George’s Day at all. Can it be justified? I don’t think so.
• Norfolk Blogger is praising a Tory MP. Surely some mistake?
• Gracchi at Westminster Wisdom writes about how student lifestyles are too career-focused nowadays. I don’t recall it being massively career-centric, but then again there’s a lot of those four years that I don’t quite recall…

Thursday

• Mike Smithson at Political Betting asks whether it’s time to start betting on President Tony. Hopefully not.
• Paul Linford ponders the question of whether MPs who get voted out should ever go back. I suppose it all depends on the individual and what they can bring to Parliament. So yes and no.
• Mr Eugenides heralds the idea of blogging lessons in school. As he points out, learning can indeed be fun!

Friday

• Daniel Finkelstein at the Times‘ Comment Central proposes a British answer to beating Barack Obama. To be honest, to me it would seem idiotic of America to waste this opportunity to elect a President like Obama. He has what America needs.
• Guido Fawkes writes about the backfiring of the Tory’s Auschwitz “gimmick” jibe. Whoever included that in the press release needs to real bollocking.

Saturday

• Iain Dale thinks about who should be on the DNA database. Frankly, only those who have been convicted of a charge should definitely be kept on the database. But anyone who has been charged and taken to court over an offence such as murder or rape should probably be kept on as well.
• Madsen Pirie at the ASI keeps the “Common Errors” series going with a post debunking the myth that “the market cannot protect the environment”. So much for it taking government control to protect the environment. [One thing I'd like to be able to see is this entire series in one list.]

Sunday

• Benedict Brogan compares the predicament of Commons Speaker Michael Martin to the “Blair saga”. There are certain similarities…
• Tim Worstall tells us why to never bother going north of the Watford Gap. He has a point…

No, not Westminster but Brussels.

So MEPs are stealing £100 million from the European people every year. But this isn’t really all that surprising - pretty much the lot of them are just pigs with their snouts in the trough. What is most disgusting is the piece of the article that follows the revelation of the obscene amount of taxpayer’s money being stolen:

Excuse me? You can’t make reform if the people know how corrupt you all are? How does that make sense? That level of security stinks of a cover-up of an even greater level of corruption and criminal abuse than already revealed. Even so they have the audacity to claim that “the document is not secret. It is confidential.” - and to flatly reject an inquiry by the EU’s own anti-fraud office. One rule for us, another for them.

Trixy has the transcript of an email sent by the President of the European Parliament, asking MEPs to submit a declaration of their financial interests “within two months”. Which is a long time. And yet this isn’t the even first time a request has been made for this, originally made back in November. So they’ve had four months already, and get another two months grace now. That’s six months before they even start chasing them up. Absolutely ridiculous. And I thought giving British MPs two months to submit a list of any family members who work for them was ridiculous.

I was going to say “well at least it seems that our elected representatives really aren’t all that corrupt after all”. But then I realised that MEPs in the European Parliament are our elected representatives as well.

Ok, that’s not quite true. Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas party, actually said:

Erm… so if earthquakes are the fault of the gays, what happened to the whole tectonic plates thing? Or did Shlomo Benizri just skip basic geography, and headed straight to the bigoted religious nut class?

And if his conclusion is indeed true, why are those countries who offer gay marriage/civil partnerships not experiencing earthquakes to a far greater extent than Israel who is merely recognising them? Or is that just too much like logic?

In other news, Iain Dale promises to avoid shaking his genitals in future. Something I think we can all be thankful for.

Ruth Kelly has a deeper voice than Alan Duncan.

There’s no real point to this post, it’s just an observation.

But it is actually extremely disturbing to listen to and watch.

Especially since Ruth Kelly has grown her hair and actually looks slightly feminine. Well, until you hear her talk anyway.

Supermarkets sell alcohol. They have an entire section set aside for it, well marked and often sud-divided and sign-posted by type - beers, wines, spirits… - and people then choose to buy them because they want to drink.

Apparently it is a bad thing that they are allowed to do this.

It seems that us mindless proles just aren’t clever enough and don’t have a strong enough will be steer clear of these well-marked sections, and are instead “lured” into buying alcohol. After all, we’re not Professors, so we couldn’t possibly be able to resist the call of supermarket advertising and make our own decisions about what we want to purchase.

Alcohol is cheap - and often sold as a loss-leader by supermarkets - because people want to buy it. They don’t want to “lure” people in to buying a product which will reduce their profit margins. The best people for that are the idiots who purchase “organic” and “free trade” produce, on which supermarkets can make up to 25% profit.

We all know that alcohol is bad for us should we drink way too much of it over a long period of time. We all know that. But we drink anyway, because we want to. Like the British Retail Consortium says, no-one buys alcohol accidentally. It is a conscious choice made by a rational human being.

It’s not up to anyone else to tell us that we can’t buy alcohol at a supermarket any more. Especially based on such a ridiculous basis as “health” or to “combat Britain’s binge-drinking culture”.

Just bugger off leave us alone, Professor le Grand.

Also go and read Mr Eugenides take on this story. Well worth a read.

The governments new[ly reannounced] citizenship tests appear to be expecting immigrants to do more this country than is ever expected of “native” Britons.

So they have to do more than just work and pay taxes - which is itself something that way too many Britons are too lazy to do - but they also have to contribute extra towards public services through an extra levy on their visa, expected to raise a minuscule [in the scheme of public services] £15 million a year. Rather short of the £250 million needed by councils to prevent the need for council tax rises, wouldn’t you say?

But not only that, now migrants are to be expected to do charity work and the like in order to show that they are “active” citizens and earn the right to be a subject of the Queen. We don’t expect any “native” Britons to do this, so why should an immigrant’s citizenship be reliant on doing it?

I don’t think that it is all bad though. The idea that citizenship should be have to be earned is a good one, but this is hardly a new revelation. And the same goes for the requirement to speak English. Nothing new, trotted out again by a different Home Secretary and with a few slight differences to go with it.

Basically, this is a gimmick. None of it will cover citizens of other EU countries, and so is basically meaningless in reality.

I’m not exactly thrilled by the Conservatives suggestion of “a limit on the level of immigration” either. Rather, immigration is good for us, and fuelled by economic expansion and the sheer laziness of too many “native” Britons. Benefits: the cause of immigration.