Lying bastards

Foxton's estate agents

but then, if you live in the UK you ought to know that - especially if you work for them.

Lib dems rudderless

The Liberal Democrats as far as third parties is concerned, is an odd grouping. Formed from the Liberal Party (which genuinely was a believer in less government) and the Social Democrats (a breakaway from Labour in its truly Marxist days - which means the 1980s!), it was at first a bridge between Thatcherism and the isolationist loony left of old Labour - with New Labour it has swung to the left. All very well, except that with Gordon Brown taking over, New Labour has swung a little back to the left- plus the Tories rejected Thatcherism now in favour of a green agenda.

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The Liberal Democrats are hardly liberal, they subscribe to the intolerant environmental politics as personified by Al Gore - the deliberate lies in order to get attention, the selective application of science, and preferring government intervention to achieve environmental goals, rather than getting government out of the way. They also want more government, like surrendering more powers and laws to Brussels. The Liberal Democrats are the new socialists- utopian dreamers whose best hope of getting power is local government (meddling petty fascism) or hoping neither Labour nor the Tories win an absolute majority - so they can form a coalition and blackmail Britain into electoral reform. There is a chance of that happening next time, although both major parties would much rather try to form a government and fail, than let electoral reform be foisted on them - unlike Jim Bolger

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So now they are at around 11% in the polls, you have to ask "why bother". The only major policy they have different from the two major parties is their cut and run policy with Iraq - but besides that they have an old fashioned agenda of pouring tax money into the state sector, which continues to fail - and more taxes. The Independent is effectively the newspaper of the Lib Dems.

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So they are a yawn, I am hoping that Labour voters might return to Labour and the Tories attract enough to squeeze the Lib Dems into a smaller party. They might find there is a part of the political spectrum ignored in the UK - it's called being Liberal!

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Oh and Menzies Campbell (pronounced Mingus) has resigned... as they try to find their way. The problem is that it is appearing the Tories are a potential incoming government - the Lib Dems offer little new

Returned from the land of censorship

Well I hadn't disappeared, more I was unable to blog whilst behind the firewall of an authoritarian state. Now I'm in central Europe and "free" again.

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Mainland China is invigorating, it is absolutely astounding - and is so incredibly different from Hong Kong. Setting aside the choking pollution (at times), the selective censorship (which frankly is subtle enough to not be apparent to those who wouldn't think different) and the usual handful of those wanting to cheat you, it is full of life, people who throng the streets at 7am on a Sunday! The spectrum of humanity from the friendly and ever helpful, to the grumpy, lying and remarkably poor, the cheerful families with cute kids, the helpful policeman (yes really!), the annoying salespeople, the joking taxi drivers - well and the driving.

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Take a taxi in Beijing, in fact take dozens - you will learn to develop a fearlessness that will put you in good stead for life - you'll see that the way to cope with traffic jams is to cut in, to pull across, to push in, to overtake, and everyone does it. In fact, walk around. If you walk you'll learn you get nowhere obeying the signals, in fact it could kill you to rely on them - just look out and walk, walk fast, be prepared to stop fast, and you'll be fine.

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I'll say more about China, how there is much reason to be optimistic about it - and how difficult it is to understand. If the capital has very few who know English outside shops in the main shopping street, then figure out how easily they understand the world.

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China's Communist Party Congress will, secretly, be debating across the political spectrum about reforms either to have more socialism and state control on the one hand, or to separate state and party, have the party accountable to the law and party discipline not equivalent to criminal law. Meanwhile, those in the centre are increasingly aware of the corruption that their own "free market" capitalism engenders without an independent judiciary, guaranteed individual freedoms and property rights.

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It's worth understanding China, to see confucianism, Marxism-Leninism and entrepreneurialism co-exist - and because by the end of the decade its economy will be second is size only to the United States.

Propaganda victory

So a South Korean President visits Kim Jong Il for the second time. Kim Jong Il is clearly too scared to make the return trip as what was originally intended. Significant?

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No, not really. You see President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea is seeking re-election in December (something Kim Jong Il no doubt thinks is awfully quaint), and trying for a peace treaty in advance is meant to gain him popular support. He almost certainly wont raise the plight of the tens of thousands of men, women and children providing slave labour in the gulags. His policy of engagement is not about making North Korea lose face - and the North Korean media monopoly is making a huge deal out of the visit (although frankly the news item about the frogs making "good drug stuff" is funnier).

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Kim Jong Il wants to split South Korea's loyalty from the USA - the only country seriously deterring a North Korean invasion, and he wants money, in one form or another, to keep propping up his slave state. There has been peace on the Korean peninsula since 1953, and the relative prosperity and freedom of South Korea (with a GDP 12 times the north when it was once about two thirds the size of the north) speaks volumes about the difference between capitalism and anti-capitalism.

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As i said before, any compromise between good and evil can only benefit evil - North Korea can not be trusted to reduce military tension - it is too well armed and secretive to be honest, and is addicted to lying (given it does so profusely to its own people). All you can trust North Korea to do is oppress its citizens and seek to undermine defence of South Korea.
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South Korea should simply engage on fairly simple terms. Normalisation of relations when:
- North Korea verifiably destroys its nuclear programme;
- End to imprisonment of children, end to imprisonment of political prisoners by both sides, Red Cross monitoring of operation of all remaining prisons;
- A framework to allow divided families to be reunited by free choice in both directions, and return to their relative sides if they so wish.
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of course North Korea wont allow any of this, remember North Korea and Burma get on very well too.

So why should good compromise?

Most supporters of the United Nations see it as a way of sorting out peaceful disputes between countries, to avoid war, and to promote dialogue rather than violence. On the surface, and in a vast range of cases that is a good thing. However, the United Nations was created as part of a idealistic view that it is better for countries to bicker within an international organisation than to use arms - it was specifically designed to oppose traditional initiation of war - that is one country invading another.

As much of a despicable action as that is, it doesn't take much thought to consider how much less bloodthirsty the 1930s and 1940s would have been had Hitler NOT been expansionist, or indeed had Japan not been expansionist beyond Korea (which the rest of the world effectively handed to Japan in 1910). German Jewry would still have been wiped out, Stalin would have continued to slaughter his own people, and Japan continued to treat Koreans as slaves and useful for chemical and biological weapons experiments.

The UN's supporters present it as an arbiter of morality. However any organisation is only a function of its members, and its members are the very worst members of the international community. You see the UN sends an envoy into Burma to seek peace and a compromise -a compromise between those with guns and bullets and their victims shot in the back and left to die. It mirrors the view of China, which seeks restraint from BOTH sides - imagine calling for restraint from Jews in Hitler's Germany in 1940, or those sent to Year Zero by the Khmer Rouge, or the Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein.

What the Burmese deserve is uncompromising support to overthrow their murderous regime. If the Burmese government did what it does in any Western country its perpetrators would be locked up. Of course if someone could arm the monks...