Daily Archive

VOA:

In Somalia, several dozen residents of Dobley town, near the Kenyan border, are reportedly trying to cross into Kenya following a U.S. military air strike that was aimed at terror suspects in the area…

…In Washington, U.S. officials have confirmed that two missiles were launched at targets in Dobley. They say the targets were known Islamic terrorists, but have declined to give further details…

Is the military getting re-acquainted with the “tried and true” anti-terror “methods” that are the hallmark of Democratic administrations . . . just in case?

I know I seem to go on and on about it. Maybe it’s because watching this Government in action on a daily basis is increasingly like being mesmerised by an auto accident. You just stand there, unable to look away.

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The devolved Welsh Assembly, along with the Scottish Parliament a product of Labour’s “reform” of UK governance, has decided that all NHS hospitals in Wales will have free parking. The BBC reports:

Patients, staff and visitors will be able to park free at almost every NHS hospital in Wales by the end of 2011…

On the surface, a good thing for the Welsh. That despite such a roll back likely to encourage still more car usage for hospital journeys, rather than, say, walking to the hospital — because the bus link was shut down following “a review”, and even though that hospital could be in the next county — and thus undoubtedly setting back “the struggle against climate change”.

But that’s hardly unexpected, as the NHS kingdom-wide is “A long way from being green“. Yet this new announced initiative can only but also give additional meaning to the Labour health secretary’s recent observation:

Alan Johnson has told the Labour Party spring conference that the days of a “one-size-fits-all” NHS are over…

Yes, that is certainly one way of putting it. However, as to whether most of the UK population — which lives in an England Labour’s “always reviewing reformers” have decreed is never to be entitled to its own assembly — might see something similar? The BBC also tells us:

…There are no plans to abolish the charges in England, although a Department of Health spokesman said “all government polices are always under review“…

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Oh, they always are “under review”, as we know. Even from week to week. And especially if there is any chance higher taxes might somehow be squeezed out of the (particularly English) public. The Sunday Times:

THE government is preparing to impose drastic curbs on second home ownership that would stop people buying in sought-after rural areas.

An inquiry commissioned by Gordon Brown will recommend local authorities have the power to prevent outsiders buying property they do not intend to make their main residence. Those seeking to buy country boltholes that deprive local residents of houses would be forced to apply to the council…

This ever-increasing shrillness and vacuousness of this Government never but ceases to impress. For even the Liberal Democratic MP who undertook “the inquiry” points out:

…[Matthew] Taylor, MP for Truro and St Austell, said the shortage of affordable housing in most rural areas was mainly due to an influx of former city-dwellers moving to the countryside permanently…

Permanent residents are the big problem, not second home buyers? So then this is not really, despite the stated Sunday Times’ story focus, about second home ownership?

In fact, it isn’t also even about first time buyers. For if this Government really did care about them (which we keep hearing they do) it would, for example, scrap “stamp duty” for first time buyers (which the Conservatives have pledged to do). Doing that is far simpler and more straightforward to implement than trying to end second home ownership.

But that approach would also mean, of course, less tax revenue (for nothing in return: “stamp duty” is simply about government sticking its hand out, demanding its cut, much like the Mob). And this Government is all about devising ever-more clever ways to raise taxes . . . always while trying to couch the justification for them in terms of desperately needed “social improvement”.

“Social improvements” that somehow, unsurprisingly, never seem to follow on after the litany of tax increases in any given stated “reform” area. Actually, too often the opposite ends up being the case. Their constant meddling invariably creates loads of “unforeseen” knock-on problems.

For instance, consider actual second homes. While there are certainly reasonable concerns when there may be many second homes in any given area, naturally nowhere in that Times piece is there another stream of thought offered: that second home owners also pay substantial council tax on houses inhabited only part of the time. They do that while also producing much less rubbish that a fully inhabited year-round home, failing to create year-round parking problems and traffic on local streets, not sending their children to local schools, and tending not to draw upon “social services” from that same local council, or to commit violent crime. The smaller amounts of, or near absence of such, all subsidising to some degree the lifestyle of year-round residents.

And how many of those second homes are owned by non-Britons anyway? “Mega-rich” foreigners are already buying up large country estates in the likes of Devon and Cornwall. So how many “ordinary” Dutch or Germans own “second homes” in the southwest of England, as many already do in the west of Ireland? And just how does Labour propose to “stop” that trend?

Well, let’s not get that far ahead of ourselves. For considering actual secondary issues, which seem likely to become primary if “reforms” are implemented, almost never enters Labour “flat earth” thinking.

“Reform” in this instance is simply about localities having greatly more year-round residents, and voilà, said-identified “problem” successfully “reformed” . . . uh, at least until someone finally gets around to noticing all of the additional tons of garbage, all of the additional cars parking everywhere they can and jamming narrow roads all the time, the filling of (often very small, rural) schools to bursting, some of whose students, and their parents, will definitely end up needing council services for “social problems”, or even turn out to be violent lawbreakers.

Then, there will naturally need to be large-scale “reviews” about what to do about all those matters.

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Perhaps the most dramatic “review” of late, though, according to ePolitix.com:

Gordon Brown has said that the government is considering moves to ban plastic bags if voluntary moves are unsuccessful.

Writing in the Mail, which is running a campaign to rid the country of the environmentally damaging carriers, the prime minister hailed the example of retailers like Ikea and Marks & Spencer for taking steps to reduce their use.

“I want to make clear that if government compulsion is needed to make the change, we will take the necessary steps.

“We do not take such steps lightly - but the damage that single-use plastic bags inflict on the environment is such that strong action must be taken….

Obviously, there has to be an “offset” to the additional “carbon emissions” to be caused by free car parking at Welsh hospitals.

That’s not to say that plastic bags are not a pollution issue. Clearly they are. Rather, this “review” here has more to do with into whose (recycleable, of course) portfolio the likes of such have fallen.

In eras previous, prime ministers of Her Britannic Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were consumed by worries over V2 missiles, “winds of change,” confronting the East Bloc, and, more recently, the challenge posed by a concerted assault on Western civilization undertaken by members of a particular religion. Isn’t it marvelous how this prime minister is so under-burdened as to be free to devote his Government’s valuable time to confronting the innumerable dangers posed by second home buyers (when the bulk of “the problem” isn’t even actually second home buyers?), the non-scrapping of (often utterly exorbitant) parking fees at English NHS sites, and plastic nags, nags, nags bags? How fortunate, indeed, are the inhabitants of these happy islands.

Computer Weekly.com:

A Home Office laptop computer with a confidential encrypted disc was sold on eBay to a member of the public who discovered the disc when he sent the unit for repairs, say news reports…

Oh, yes, they could most certainly sensitively and confidentially handle an “everyone in Britain” DNA database.