The Blair years

The swearing in of Gordon Brown as British Prime Minister is seen by both the Labour left and the Tories as being positive.

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The Labour left, feeling burnt by 10 years of Blair (forgetting they experienced 18 years of opposition in a row prior to Blair) is champing at the bit to have more government and more spending of other people's money, and backing off from the relationship with the USA, but happily going along with the growth of Brussels.

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The Tories see Brown as less charismatic and less fleet in his speaking abilities compared with Blair, and easier to contrast with David Cameron. Unsurprisingly the Tories are calling for a general election, you know, like they never had when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher.

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Both, I believe, are wrong. However, before reflecting on what the Brown premiership might look like, it is worth considering the pluses and minuses of the Blair years:

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POSITIVES

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1. Amended Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution which once called for nationalisation of "the means of production, distribution, and exchange" to a far softer statement of belief in solidarity, and having power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many not the few. In effect, he cauterised the Marxist wing of the Labour party.

2. Took a strong line against the warmongering Milosevic regime in Bosnia and Kosovo.

3. Stood side by side the USA in fighting Islamism and supporting the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein and Taliban dictatorships.

4. Granted independence to the Bank of England (albeit a Gordon Brown initiative).

5. Facilitated peace in Northern Ireland (not half helped by the withdrawal of much US private funding for the IRA though, and mitigated by the early release of out and out criminals).

6. Liberalisation of laws allowing civil partnerships, and other measures removing state barriers to treating gay/lesbian/transgender people on an equal basis.

7. Supporting more private provision of healthcare and education, including trust schools having far greater autonomy. A small step towards proving that state provisions doesn't satisfy everyone.

8. Introduction of tertiary tuition fees, at last rescuing most UK tertiary institutions from funding impoverishment and ongoing demand from those who are less than enthused about their studies.

9. Personal commitment, in general, to liberal democracy and the values of Enlightenment society, over Islamism.

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NEGATIVES

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1. Instituting a culture of spin, surrounding himself with advisors that end of providing filtered advice. Preferring style over substance.

2. Establishing the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies and Executives, helping to cement socialist government in both "countries", and the higher levels of state funding per capita for Wales and Scotland, relative to England- and the ongoing relative impoverishment of both as their economies rely more and more on the state.

3. Establishing the Greater London Authority and Mayoralty of London - another expensive layer of government in London, with an authoritarian Mayoral role. The result is that London has a lunatic leftwing Mayor hellbent on doing deals with dictators and penalising road transport more out of ideology less than economics.

4. Millenium Dome. Classic example of a big government project, too expensive and a white elephant for far too long.

5. Cash for honours, disgrace pure and simple. The word begins with "C".

6. Supporting the evangelical rise of environmental puritanism in the UK, with councils fining people for throwing away envelopes in rubbish bins as they walk out the front door or for NOT recycling material that may not even be recyclable in the first place. The biggest ethical crimes in the UK today could include flying, driving, not recycling newspapers and not buying fairtrade organic locally produced whatever!

7. ASBOs instead of genuine law and order. Allowing the Police to avoid protecting the public and prosecuting people effectively, and avoiding building enough prisons, instead giving people orders to not do things because they are anti-social. A distraction from core government responsibility, and as a result prisons are overcrowded because of inadequate provision, and also due to ....

8. Inexorable growth in nanny state laws that prohibit more and more personal behaviour, and allow more and more state monitoring of individuals with little accountability, culminating in...

9. Support for national ID cards - the tool of the authoritarian state, to make the state's business of taxing, subsidising, regulating and compelling people more efficient. Britain has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other country.

10. Signing off the new EU Treaty which grows the Commission and role of the EU over the UK. Selling out some sovereignty for no good reason, without a mandate to do so.

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I probably could never have voted for a Blair government, had I been allowed to vote here. However, by and large, the Blair government's record is briefly summarised as being:

- Status quo on economic management (following Major);

- Pro-Western civilisation on international policy;

- Mildly submissive to the EU bureaucratic/ Franco-Italian-German agenda of big government;

- Mildly more market in social policy;

- More authoritarian in terms of civil liberties, individual freedoms and approach to law and order (except where it counts).

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I could say he has failed miserably to confront a wide range of problems in Britain, but would John Major have done much better? Unlikely. Will Gordon Brown? Highly unlikely. Would David Cameron? Well, except for perhaps more market in social policy, taking a tougher stance on the EU and opposing ID cards, there isn't much to choose from.

Greens and communists

So Frogblog is cheering like a groupie at the visit by Angela Davis, which appears to be funded by the New Zealand taxpayer. Maia is one of the biggest cheerleaders for her as well.

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What is she about? Well Frogblog linked to Wikipedia about this woman, who has her place in history because she was charged as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping and homicide. This was because a gun registered in her name was used by the brother of a man in prison to enter a courtroom and take a judge hostage in order to get his brother freed. The judge was murdered by his captors, two of the captors were killed in a police shootout. She was acquitted of all charges and pursued a life of political activism, which until recently included the US Communist Party. She stood as Vice Presidential candidate for the Communist Party in 1980 and 1984.

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Understandably, growing up in Alabama she experienced the rampant racism of the 1960s and 1970s, but she turned to communism for intellectual solace. As a student she found appeal in communism, gained her Masters in San Diego before crossing the Iron Curtain to get her Ph.D at Humboldt University of Berlin, East Berlin that is. Humboldt was a true communist university till the end. It was run by the Socialist Unity Party (east German communists "by rigorously selecting students according to their conformity to the party line, made sure that no democratic opposition could grow on its university campuses. Its Communist-selected students and scholars did not participate in the East German democratic civil rights movements of 1989 to a considerable degree"). A training ground for the bureaurats who liked the world in the Orwellian oppressive superstate of the GDR.

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In fact, her view of dissidents to these suffocating police states is noted in Wikipedia:

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"Russian dissident and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticized Davis' sympathy for the Soviet Union in a speech he delivered to the AFL-CIO on July 9, 1975 in New York City, claiming hypocrisy in her attitude toward prisoners under Communist governments. According to Solzhenitsyn, a group of Czech dissidents “addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?' Angela Davis answered: 'They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.'”

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Bitch!

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How despicable to be so callous towards those wanting the freedoms she took for granted in the USA. Indeed, the fact she campaigned for the Communist Party indicates clearly she didn't believe in political or individual freedom, she believed in communist revolution that would entrench a single party, with one truth, one source for media and imprisoning anyone who disagreed.

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The main reason the Greens are excited about her is because she supports the abolition of prisons. All those rapists really should have their freedom shouldn't they?

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Now to be fair Davis left the Communist Party USA because it supported the failed August putsch against Gorbachev and also supported the Warsaw Pact (funny, because she did too for so long), and founded the Committees_of_Correspondence_for_Democracy_and_Socialism. Nevertheless, she still holds up Cuba as a great example of democracy and socialism working together (no doubt forgetting those Cubans in prisons for their political activities and the complete lack of freedom for Cubans to set up private organisations without state approval).

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However, if Davis has repudiated her sympathy towards the USSR and its former satellites, then good. However, she should be held to account for her past sycophancy and lack of compassion to the victims of the communist nightmare. What sickens me is FrogBlog's complete evasion of the truth. It said:

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-"A woman who faced capital charges in the USA three times for her work for justice" Or being an accessory to kidnapping and murder, how about that? Or is it ok to demand the freedom of some men by kidnapping and shooting a judge at point blank range?

- "but also her warm humanity that really shone through". Maybe she has it now, but she shows little towards Cuban political dissidents or indeed showed none at all to Czech dissidents. Maybe she'd like to visit Prague and apologise, given that the Czechs have freedom no thanks to her.

- "She spoke of the enormous international solidarity of progressive people that has been demonstrated at times". Progressive meaning - people who want to replace one form of statism with another. It's a code word for socialist.

- "She also pointed out that women are the fastest growing section of the prison population". Couldn't be because they are committing more crimes could it? No! It's the capitalist industrial complex oppressing them.

- "Prisons, she said, are a dumping ground for people, as a means of control and maintenance of economic domination and conceptually, as a way of disposing of the unacceptable face of capitalist society" Or a place to put a lot of dangerous people who kill, rape, assault and defraud others. Not saying there is room for removing those who commit victimless crimes, but to say that violent offenders are the "unacceptable face of capitalist society" is actually true. They are unacceptable, and why not?

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Now I am not saying that she is wrong about many points, such as the role of prisons in not rehabilitating, and the uselessness of a single minded approach to law and order, but there is a point for prisons as preventive detention. To keep bad people from committing more offences. Angela Davis has some useful points to make, but she is no angel - her past support for murderous totalitarian regimes is despicable, and I am disappointed nobody seems to have asked her what her views are of that time now. I am certain Keith Locke regrets his cheering on of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, you think the Greens might have learnt, or is it ok to have friends who believed in dictatorships?

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UPDATE: This website has a fuller quote from Solzhenitsyn's book. He noted "Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts."

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You're either stupid or immoral to think the Soviet Union was a more moral system than the USA.

The shine comes off Cameron the unprincipled

After a honeymoon run, and on the verge of the beginning of the Brown premiership, it is becoming clear that the David Cameron remaking of the Conservative Party is no longer looking that attractive to voters.

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David Cameron, as you may recall, has been rebranding the Tories towards the centre, his top priorities being the NHS (as if that model isn't fundamentally flawed) and the environment - advocating taxes on aviation for example. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown increased tax on aviation, but also reduced the middle rate of income tax by 2% in his latest budget. Cameron has been unable to commit to tax cuts at all, terrified that he can't defend it on principle (how can you defend something when principles seem so easy to sell out) .

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None of this was helped by the grammar school debacle, with the party having two different policies in concert!

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Now Tory MP Quentin Davies has defected to Labour. I hardly approve of course, given his constituents voted for a Conservative MP - had they wanted Labour they would have voted Labour. Nevertheless, according to the BBC Davies made some very good points about Cameron:

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"Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything.... It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda....Although you have many positive qualities you have three, superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve"

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Indeed, although why Davies thinks Labour is any better is unclear. All I can say is that more points of principle seem to come from Blair and Brown than from Cameron anyday, which shows you how much of a vapid marketing exercise politics now is.

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Brown is perceived, quite rightly, as being strong. He might seem like a grumpy old sod, but he also speaks when he has something reasonably intelligent to say.

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Don't get me wrong, I'm no friend of the Brown administration, it has failed miserably in its core goal of law and order, with overcrowded prisons and moves to defer prison sentences and encourage some early releases. This is when there is someone under 18 stabbed to death every week in Britain. Money has been poured into public spending, often with derisory return and local authorities continue to be the new generation of fascist enterprises, keen to regulating and prosecute to ensure people follow the religion of recycling. Meanwhile, Labour signs up to a new EU treaty, which increases the role of Brussels in British affairs and continues to expand the bureaucracy of what should simply be a glorified free trade agreement. There is nothing much to celebrate from Labour, at best it has slowly taken some of Thatcher's reforms further, and in some instances backwards. It is distinctively uninterested in personal freedom, and uninterested in challenging the cultural wasteland of underclass worshipping Brits.

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The point is, the Tories are probably a slight improvement - but how can you trust political prostitutes who will sell everything they once stood for, for power. This is what happens when you're ashamed about freedom and capitalism, and don't know why they are both practical and moral.

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David Cameron has done a bit of good for the Tories, taking it out of the gentrified grey haired old bigoted white men brigade, ready to pass judgment on non Anglo-Saxon immigrants, gay couples and people of other religions (or none, good god!). However, he hasn't stood up for anything that couldn't also be seen in Labour or the Liberal Democrats.

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I wonder what other political party, and especially leader does that? and I wonder how long that honeymoon will last?

Video on demand entertainment on Air NZ Trans Tasman/Pacific flights

Well about time really. Thankfully the government is a passive shareholder in Air NZ, otherwise it might regard the $50 million investment in installing individual on-demand entertainment TV screens for all classes on the Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s as a waste of money.

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The 767s fly all services to Cairns, Honolulu, Perth, and Tahiti, and some from Auckland to Apia, Nandi, Rarotonga, Nuku'alofa, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney, and extensions of flights from Apia, Nandi and Rarotonga to/from Los Angeles (the long slow way from Auckland to LA).

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The A320s fly all services from Wellington and Christchurch to Australia and the Pacific, and from Auckland to Noumea and Port Vila, and some from Auckland to Adelaide, Apia, Brisbane, Melbourne, Nandi, Norfolk Island, Nuku'alofa, Rarotonga and Sydney.

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Finally NZ can compete a bit better with the likes of Emirates across the Tasman, only the odd international 737 flight (usually to Niue and Norfolk Island, but occasionally elsewhere) will be without any decent entertainment. What the report doesn't note is that this means new seats on the 767s in both classes.

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On top of that, shortly you'll be allowed to use Air NZ Airpoints to upgrade on flights by other Star Alliance carriers that have joined the Star Alliance upgrade scheme. They are:

- ANA (Japan);

- Asiana (South Korea);

- Austrian Airlines;

- LOT (Poland);

- Lufthansa;

- Singapore Airlines;

- Swiss;

- Thai;

- TAP (Portugal); and

- United.

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I'll wait and see how many airpoints dollars I need to upgrade to first class on Singapore Airlines!

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UPDATE: It appears the Boeing 767s will be losing business class in favour of premium economy class - hmmm.

Rushdie knighthood provokes murderous talk

Salman Rushdie gets a knighthood, and the self appointed spokesmen (it's always men) of the Muslim world demand "justice" because they have been offended "If somebody has to attack by strapping bombs to his body to protect the honour of the Prophet then it is justified" said Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister (even having one of those is ridiculous and tells you how much freedom of religion and religious impartiality Pakistan has).

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Funny how a man writing a novel creates talk of murder, but this, this, this, and this don't. You figure out what values that culture has that puts being offended ahead of the systematic abuse and subjugation of women.

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Salman Rushdie has had to put up with many years of have a death threat hanging over him, which some Muslims condemned, but few did anything to confront those who threatened him. He is a symbol of free speech, enlightenment values and secularism, against the bloody minded caveman like murderers who would kill him and all of us who refuse to submit to their chosen religion. Britain has nothing to apologise for granting him a knighthood. Lord Ahmed who condemned the knighthood could have at least respected Rushdie's right to free speech and his bravery against those offended by his literature. As is all too often the case, others are expected to censor themselves to not offend Islam, but they are not.

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Many Muslims need to go through the enlightenment and separation of church and state, instead of continually showing that they are stuck in a medieval era.