Labelling regulations

What the?

Under the draft legislation, to come into force as early as next year, the sale of groceries using the simple measurement of numbers will be replaced by an EU-wide system based on weight.

It would mean an end to packaging descriptions such as eggs by the dozen, four-packs of apples, six bread rolls or boxes of 12 fish fingers.

I want to know how many there are in the pack, not how heavy they are - weight is a measure most of us are unaccustomed to when we buy these sorts of products - our knowledge is of, for example, how filling a bread roll is. To sell by weight would confuse the customer - the EU clearly doesn't understand the whole reason they are sold by number is that customers know what they are buying, how many they need, etc when sold by number. It's a stupid restriction on the free sale of goods, and chances are the UK will adopt it without question.

To the EU: this sort of thing is why the average Briton opposes you. Silly and, to be honest, completely unnecessary rules that make our lives harder.

And the weight is on the back of the packet anyway. It's just pedantic and unnecessary.

Rights and entitlements

Oh dear:

“We must establish the right to a decent period of retirement otherwise we will soon see people working till they drop.”

It's not a right, it's an entitlement. Classic trade unionist forgetting an important question: how is this going to be funded? About time some system of personal accounts for pensions was brought in - the state pension resembles one of Madoff's Ponzi schemes.

Trade unions

Ministers are asking public sector staff to suggest savings that can be made.

But Mr Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: "Cameron and Clegg have a damned cheek in asking public sector workers to co-operate in sacking thousands of them. It is an utter outrage."

He said unions were "perfectly capable of speaking up on their behalf" and would be resisting "savage cuts in public services".

No, unions are not 'perfectly capable of speaking up on their behalf'. The 'unions', or rather union leadership, are generally a bunch of far-left loons who do not represent what their members think. To try to say that the workers themselves are incapable of speaking up for themselves and their own opinions is disgusting in all honesty.

Of course, the government could go one step further, and offer financial rewards for good ideas. Now that really would irritate the unions.

Teenage girls, abortions and underage sex

89 girls have had 3 or more abortions by the age of 17, according to the Telegraph. This in itself is utterly horrific - for someone who is completely opposed to abortion like myself, and should be for any person, even the pro-choicers.

But this statement got to me:

The head of Britain’s largest abortion provider said many young women were living chaotic lives that meant they could not organise contraception.

What utter rubbish. Ever heard of, urm, not having sex if you don't have contraception? Especially when you're below the age of consent anyway? I suppose in this age, everyone has to have what they want, whenever, regardless. Dr Saunders gets it right (emphasis mine):

Dr Peter Saunders, from the Christian Medical Fellowship, which represents Christian doctors, said that the figures were profoundly depressing. “It is increasingly clear that abortion is simply being used as a form of contraception by a growing percentage of girls and women, and that tired policies of values-free sex education, condoms and morning-after pills are not working,” he said.

I'm 18, I know what the pressures are like, and I know we are seriously lacking values in society. It's a real cause for concern - and my concerns about values are some of the things that put conservatism into the mix of my views, alongside classical liberalism (which is more economic).

Values, especially those of the moral kind, are generally a good thing, and about time that we re-adopted some.

On John McDonnell and the left vs. the right

Ed West gets it right:

The violence with which Lefties hate the Conservatives, personified in their greatest post-war leader, far outweighs the corresponding dislike Tories have Labour, and yet is no more justified by events. So Thatcher abolished your job? Brown destroyed our pensions and our economy, but we don’t anticipate the death of any Labour politician with glee, or fantasise about murdering opponents.

That’s the difference between the centre-Right and the Left. We view our opponents as misguided, foolish or economically illiterate; socialists view their opponents as evil obstacles to progress – no wonder that in just half a century, socialism managed to kill more people than all the world’s religions combined, a record it will hang onto for some time.

I've always noticed the way that the left want to wipe out, kill, etc the right-wingers they disagree with - but the right tend to be more mature about their opponents. I've also said countless times that these comments, even jokes, about Thatcher's death are (a) a step too far and (b) are generally made by those jealous of her success.

According to Sunny Hundal it's a joke, ok, but then he says this:

Oh dear. Well, it was a better joke than Daniel Hannan, darling of the loony right, calling the NHS a 60 year mistake. Oh wait…that wasn’t a joke?

So joking about someone's death is OK, but saying that the NHS isn't the greatest health system in the world and being realistic isn't? These socialists are a strange bunch, incredibly foolish sometimes. These jokes about Thatcher's death, and that includes Frankie Boyle's (I think) about the state funeral, are getting rather weary and immature now.

What's it got to do with you?

The European Commission have decided that London has too much air pollution.

The European Commission has threatened to take the UK to the European Court of Justice over air quality breaches.

The UK could end up paying as much as £300m in fines.

The government received a second and "final" warning from the commission after the levels of dangerous airborne particles, or PM10s, in London and Gibraltar exceeded EU limits.

The commission says high levels of PM10 may lead to serious health problems.

Or why not leave those who are elected to govern London, i.e. Boris, accountable to it? And that way, people in London can decide themselves how important an issue it is. As for the fine, what benefit does it give for even more money to leave the UK and be wasted by the EU?

I suppose the commission thinks it knows best though. "EU limits" and all that.

Oh dear

Voter: “But I didn’t know! I don’t want the Conservatives to get in so I voted for [Conservative candidate]. I should have voted for someone else!”

Me: “Um, why did you vote for the Conservative?”

(The girl turns scarlet and looks utterly miserable.)

Voter: “I thought it was like TV where you vote them off!”

Reminds me of a few people I know...

'More than 1,000 new academies'

More than 1,000 schools in England have shown interest in becoming an academy, says the education secretary.

Michael Gove told the House of Commons that 1,114 schools have responded to his letter last week inviting applications for independent status.

Among these are 626 schools rated as "outstanding", who will be fast-tracked to have academy status by this autumn.

The level of interest in becoming an academy is "overwhelming" , says Mr Gove.

Fantastic.

On the Cumbria shootings

I really feel for those who have lost relatives in the shooting. We thought this had gone away following Hungerford and Dunblane, and now is not the time for the knee-jerk reactions in political terms that followed them.

Thankfully such incidents are rare, but whatever the result of this, clearly even more control on guns hasn't worked following the last two massacres and I doubt would work again. Trying to stop loners having guns? Seems to be an appropriate thing to do, but not exactly easy either.

More on Hoover's "laissez-faire" and "spending cuts"

As I mentioned before, Hoover wasn't laissez-faire nor did he cut spending.

I present you with three graphs from the Mises Institute. The final one shows he didn't use monetary tightening either.


Austrian economics seems more and more reasonable by the day.

The "taking money out of the economy" fallacy

To Gordon Brown, Ken Livingstone, and other assorted lefties: government spending being cut does not "take money out of the economy". There is only £X in the economy, and it will remain that way unless the Bank of England decides to print more.

In fact, spending cuts represent money being returned to the economy. Either they result in tax cuts, in which case it's back in the real economy for obvious reasons, or a cut in borrowing, in which case investors are spending less on bonds and funding more capital investment, mortgages, etc.

The left never have been very good with economics.