Bel is thinking

It has been ages since the last entry, but this blog is back on track. Apologies for the break in transmission. I sincerely hope you had some other source of keeping up to date with the news, because if not, I must say, a lot has passed you by in the last week while this blog was on holiday.

A few things:

David Cameron and David Davis won through as the two leadership candidates to face the Conservative party faithful in the membership vote.

Joan Rivers did what many have long desired to do and whupped Darcus Howe’s ass all over a Radio 4 studio. He had had the gall to imply that she was a racist. (Incidentally, he would have been the prime candidate for last week’s Lunacy of the Week award.) By the time she had done with her withering comments, one had almost begun to feel sorry for the poor man.

The ban on smoking in public places has been confirmed, but it will not affect private members’ clubs.

I think we can now carry on from here, and this we will do, God permitting.

More later.

While we were all distracted over the Conservative Party leadership election, MPs were preparing to vote on the ID cards bill. The Opposition wanted to amend the Bill to remove the requirement for applicants for a passport to submit their details to the ID card database. Unfortunately, the Government got its way, albeit with a slashed majority of 32. The Bill is scheduled for a Third Reading next week, and some more backbench rebellion can be expected. I for one am still hopeful, even in the teeth of indications to the contrary, that this Bill can yet be defeated. In June 2005, the Government was forced to deny claims that it would sell our details to private companies to pay for the ID card scheme. That sits somewhat oddly with a Home Office statement that banks would be able to check our details against the ID cards database. And what is a bank if not a private enterprise? It is a short step from that to opening up the database to other companies. There are many reasons to oppose the introduction of ID cards. Catch up with me another day, say next week, and I will give you the civil liberties argument. I will be following this Bill’s progress and commenting as necessary.

So our sources were right, after all. Kenneth Clarke got the fewest votes and has now been eliminated. It is widely expected that David Cameron will be the beneficiary as many of Clarke’s supporters are expected to switch their support to him.

David Davis received fewer votes than expected, although he still topped the poll. David Cameron received more votes than expected, and it is clear that the momentum is with him. There is now talk of Liam Fox overtaking David Davis in the next round of voting. Fox’s supporters are trying to get the right wing vote behind them by trying to convince Davis’s supporters to switch to them. They are expected to argue that their candidate has a better chance than Davis to beat Cameron in the poll of the party members. I wouldn’t rule out a surprise result after the next round of voting on Thursday, with David Cameron and Liam Fox going forward to face the party faithful.

Conservative MPs have finished voting in the first round of the election to choose a new leader. They had to choose from four candidates, Malcolm Rifkind having dropped out of the contest last week. The result of the first round of voting will be announced in the next 20 minutes. However, rumours are circulating that David Davis and David Cameron are safely through to the next round. Speculation is rife that Liam Fox has scraped into third place. If true, this will mean that Kenneth Clarke will finish in last place and will therefore drop out of the contest. I know what I have said in the past about Kenneth Clarke, but if this is true, I for one will be sad to see him leave frontline politics. Having thought about the matter for a while, I would prefer the final two candidates to be David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke. They are the two candidates who are most able to reach out to the non-traditional Tory voters that the party needs.

Still, it is good to see the media all a-frenzy over the Conservative Party leadership election. It shows that the party is not irrelevant, and that everyone, even the BBC, realises that we need a proper Opposition.

The results will be announced shortly, so there will be more later tonight from this blog.

I think I have just had an epiphany. Perhaps I should celebrate, as such moments do not come along every day. Strangely enough, I don’t feel moved to do so. I am oddly elated, and yet at the same time pensive beyond belief.

Indulge me today. This blog will be back to normal tomorrow.

This is the second Lunacy of the Week entry. For the second week running, I am submitting this after the Friday deadline. My, my, the auguries are not good. I promise to be more efficient from now on.

Ever heard of the Local Government Ombudsman? I hadn’t until last week. For now I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that they do a useful job. It is hard, though, as the next paragraph will demonstrate.

We are informed in the Sunday Telegraph of 9 October 2005 that a council that expelled a boy from school for carrying a knife has been fined 10,000 pounds by the Ombudsman for failing to find him another school. Poor Greenwich council. We are told that the ruling includes a payment of 5,000 pounds to the pupil’s mother to compensate her for the ‘anxiety and uncertainty she has suffered’ while her little cherub was out of school. I should add that the council did make attempts to place Bladeboy in other schools, but not surprisingly, not all the schools were willing to have him. One school, though, was brave enough to take him, but he did not want to go there. He was then offered a place in a pupil referral unit, but his mother was not happy as it did not offer the full range of GCSE results. One would think that Mama Bladeboy would have been more concerned about keeping her loathsome child out of jail.

The Ombudsman also ordered Greenwich council to pay 6,000 pounds to meet the cost of tutors for the boy.

For the avoidance of doubt, the award for Lunacy of the Week goes to the Ombudsman, although Mama Bladeboy came pretty close to nicking it. I promise, I will get round to contacting the Ombudsman. I still haven’t contacted last week’s winner though, so first things first.

How sad to hear that the Railtrack shareholders have lost their case against the government.

It’s a long story, and I’ll try my best to be brief. It all began when the Conservative government privatised the rail network in the ’90s. Some bright spark came up with the goofy idea of packaging and selling the rail tracks separately from the train routes which ran along them.

A company, imaginatively named Railtrack, was set up to look after the rail tracks, and other companies bid for the franchise to run trains on the routes. The public enthusiastically took up the invitation to buy shares in Railtrack. The company subsequently did very well in the market, posting record profits year on year.

This arrangement had problems, not least the fact that the route operators had no control over the punctuality of their trains in cases where delays were caused by problems with the track.

Then disaster struck. There was a train accident at Hatfield and four people died. The accident was caused by the poor state of the tracks. As a result of the publicity generated by this tragic event, Railtrack was forced to spend a lot of money repairing all the tracks across the country. Its productivity suffered, and profits fell. The government ended up ploughing millions of public money into the company to keep it afloat.

Sick of the increasing demands for even more public money, the Department of Transport and the Treasury hatched a plan to force Railtrack into administration. Documents exchanged between both departments (which were produced in the court case) revealed the disdain with which Railtrack shareholders were regarded. An official queried whether public money should be used to compensate these investors in the event of Railtrack being forced off the rails, and there was a sneering remark about worrying about ‘grannies losing their blouses’ when the company went belly up.

The company was eventually put into administration by the Secretary of State for Transport. It was replaced by a not-for-profit entity. The ‘grannies’and other enterprising persons who had bought shares in Railtrack lost all their money. They took the government to court, alleging misfeasance of public duty. At the time he put Railtrack into administration, the Secretary of State had claimed that he had no other option as the company could no longer support itself. However, evidence was adduced at the trial to show that the company would not have gone under if it had not been so spectacularly derailed. The Secretary of State even admitted to the court that he had not told the truth to Parliament about conversations he had had about plans for the company.

Sadly, the shareholders lost their case. The court held that malice on the part of the government had not been proven. In order to succeed, the shareholders had to prove that the Secretary of State put Railtrack into administration with the intention of injuring their interests. This is a tall order, so the ruling should have come as no surprise. However, the judge dismissed the reasons given by the Secretary of State for lying as ‘little above gibberish’.

A moral victory, if nothing else, for the shareholders. For me, it raises questions as to why we should believe the government when it claims that it wants to foster an ‘enterprise culture’. The sneering disregard for people who have invested their money in a company, having been invited to do so by the government, is stunning. We used to talk about nationalisation by the back door, but this is a straightforward battering-ram job. We should be concerned about a government that has no compunction about mounting such a raid on private property. Admittedly Railtrack sat in an ambiguous position as a private company receiving government handouts, but that does not justify the government’s actions. I am sure you will not be surprised to hear that when the Secretary of State announced his assault on Railtrack, he was cheered to the rafters by the Old Labour brigade. These people, with their raging waves of self-righteous cant, foaming out their own envy, can always be relied on to resist sound capitalist progress. Armed with an ideology that has been shown to be withered from the roots, they have managed, for the past eight years, to block economic progress in this country. To give Tony Blair credit, he has occasionally managed to face them down. However, if Gordon Brown does become the next Prime Minister, we could be in for a lot worse.

In the last ten months, we have been ravaged like never before by the forces of nature. Now, terrible news from Pakistan. At least 20,000 people have been confirmed dead as a result of the earthquake that struck last weekend.

PS. Does anyone know if Osama was hiding out in the hills of Muzaffarabad?

Today is the 80th birthday of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.

Margaret Thatcher, Maggie Thatcher, Lady T, or even M******t T*****r, is probably one of the most famous people in the United Kingdom today.

I will not spend any time discussing Lady Thatcher’s record as Prime Minister. Everyone has heard of her, and everyone has an opinion about her. All I will say is that she made an invaluable contribution to the economic landscape of the United Kingdom. She quite correctly grasped that the role of the State was that of an enabler. She believed that the State should provide enough to inspire its citizens to achievement, but not spoonfeed, harass or nanny. It has been stated before that her one failing was that she did not realise that in every society, there are people who need more than ‘inspiration’. As a result, in many cases, the State kicked away the crutches without stopping to check that the poor citizen was able to raise himself up by other means.

Nevertheless, history will be kind to Margaret Thatcher. We are already getting indications of this by the fulsome tributes being paid to her by people from all parts of the political world. Even her one-time foe, Tam Dalyell, who attacked her for lying during the Falklands war, has stated that her untruths are as nothing compared to Tony Blair’s statements over Iraq. That surely is praise of a kind.

Margaret Thatcher’s legacy lives on. It is no secret that Tony Blair has picked the more successful parts of Thatcherism and used them to his advantage. As Charles Moore (Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2005) infers, it is a pity that the Conservative Party appears unable to do the same.

As ‘Thatcher Thatcher the milk snatcher’ enters her ninth decade, we wish her all the best for the future. She is having a birthday party which will be attended by the Queen, Prince Philip, the Prime Minister and the outgoing Leader of the Opposition. This is as it should be. Have fun over the canapes, dear Maggie, and stay well away from that oily showman Blair.

First, I must apologise for the late appearance of this maiden edition of the Lunacy of the Week series. I was away for the weekend.

Now, straight to business.

As expected, competition was stiff, but I have decided to award first prize to Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council. Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph (4 October 2005) reports that the Council has, following a complaint by a muslim employee, banned all pictures and items relating to pigs. This includes, we are told, an employee’s box of tissues, because it had a picture of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

I intend to contact the Council to pass on the glad tidings of their win. I shall keep you posted.