Bel is thinking

I was planning to write something about the Big Brother racism and bullying charges (well, why not? It has even made it to the floor of Parliament). However, I see that Ellee has prepared a well-argued article on it, so I won’t bother writing anything else. You can read her article here. There are lots of interesting comments, too. For another perspective, check out the excellent Morag. She has a few observations on BB and the state of our society.

The only thing I will say is that this is precisely what happens when pig-ignorant members of the British underclass come up against someone or something outside their extremely narrow scope of reference.

Not really in the mood to write anything today. Probably just as well as there are enough stories in the newspapers to make one despair of this country. Please check out any of the blogs in my sidebar, there’s bound to be something of interest.

Also, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there is a lively debate still raging in the comments section of the BNP ballerina post below. You can also check out my Shared Items site. I will spend the rest of the evening reading blogs and adding any interesting material I find to that site.

In the Daily Telegraph today, he makes a case for traditional Tory values, distancing himself from New Labour thinking.

Thank goodness for common sense, at last. But what caused this? Was it the threat by Professor Tim Congdon to defect to Ukip? Perhaps the news that one major Tory donor has had a meeting with Nigel Farage of Ukip, while another is considering voting Ukip?

Whatever it was, David Cameron has emerged in the Daily Telegraph, heaping praise on Margaret Thatcher, and associating himself with her legacy.

What an about-face of dizzying implications. This, remember, is the same David Cameron who has used every opportunity in the past to distance himself from the Thatcher legacy (see here, for example). What’s the matter, David? Have you now discovered that the Blair mantle wasn’t as desirable as you had first thought? You believed it to have been knit from the purest wool, but have now discovered it to be no more than a threadbare, filthy rag.

But I must not be cynical. I am glad you have seen the light, David. The only thing is, I remain unconvinced about the strength of your ‘conversion’. To prove yourself the heir of Thatcher, there are a few things to which you must commit. For starters, commit yourself to a low tax economy, and to the building of more grammar schools. Do that first, and I will begin to take you seriously.

The Assets Recovery Agency, which was set up with the lofty aim of separating criminals from their ill-gotten gains, is to be scrapped.

The purpose of the Agency was to take civil court action seeking the seizure of money and goods obtained through criminality. With effect from April 2008, it will be merged with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Turns out that while the Agency has incurred costs of around £90m, it has only been able to recover around £8m from the bad men.

But why the poor results? The Agency’s head, Jane Earl, blames the crooks. Rather than obligingly handing over the money, these criminals were instead employing stalling tactics, ensuring that the court cases took a lot longer than necessary.

Such touching naivete. What exactly did Ms Earl expect a criminal to do? Write out a cheque and hand it over to the Agency as soon as a demand was made? One would think that an agency set up to deal with people convicted of serious crime would take a more hard-nosed approach to their work.

Apparently not. So that’s £90m of taxpayers’ money thrown away. I certainly consider that a crime.

Over at Raw Carrot, an interesting and thought-provoking video on multiculturalism.

So-called anti-fascists protested outside the home of the English National Ballet. They are unhappy about the ‘BNP ballerina’. Some of them carried placards calling for her to be sacked.

Let me get this right; membership of BNP should preclude one from gainful employment? Have we now come to the point of driving out from society anyone whose views we do not like? No doubt many of these ‘anti-fascists’ were earlier this week in support of the Sexual Orientation Regulations, stridently making the case that no-one be deprived of the right to buy goods and services on account of their sexual orientation.

All very well, but do they not see the irony in their position? Or is it simply that in our prevailing morality, members of the BNP have no rights?

In the so-called fight against fascism, perhaps a little consistency wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Ruth Kelly is threatening to report the Daily Mirror to the Press Complaints Commission on the ground that they breached her son’s right to privacy by naming her as the minister who had enrolled her child in a private school.

Has the woman taken leave of her senses? A wise woman would now be lying low, thankful that the Opposition did not make a bigger deal of her hypocrisy. Instead, she seems bent on drawing attention to herself and her dubious morality.

Is this foolishness on her part? Blindness? Or perhaps it is arrogance stemming from hypocrisy so deep-rooted the afflicted soul cannot recognise its predicament. Whatever it is, Ruth Kelly’s got it bad.

Where education was concerned, was not the New Labour buzzword supposed to be ‘choice’?

What then is this that I hear?

Children from middle-class families may miss out on the best schools under plans to allocate places by “lottery”. New admissions rules, published yesterday by Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, suggest that head teachers in leafy suburbs should draw names from a hat to stop schools becoming monopolised by families who buy houses nearby. Schools are also banned from considering parents’ backgrounds, interviewing families or pricing poor children out by ordering families to buy uniforms from expensive suppliers.

These proposals are based on the premise that schools in bad areas tend not to do very well, for obvious reasons. In order to ensure that one’s child got a good education, people who can afford to do so will move to a good area.

Our interfering Government does not like this, so it wants to ensure that moving to a good area is no guarantee that your child will get into the nearest school. It will also no longer matter if your child already has a sibling at that school. Even if you live right next door to the best school in the borough, your child’s name could be picked out of the hat, and he may end up being bussed daily to the sink school at the other end of the borough.

Let us first ask ourselves who created the situation that these new rules are trying to address. In the past, the mere fact of growing up in a run-down part of town did not mean that you had to attend the failing local comprehensive. A bright child growing up in these circumstances had the opportunity to escape that destiny. That was the point of grammar schools. There was also the Assisted Places Scheme, whereby such children were given the opportunity to be educated in the private sector, with their fees being paid by the Government.

But what happened? New Labour came to power in 1997, and one of its first acts was to abolish the Assisted Places Scheme. This Government also has a policy of open hostility to grammar schools. So now a poor child growing up in a poor area with a run-down comprehensive is condemned to attend that establishment.

Faced with this problem of its own making, the Government has come up with this mad policy. True, grammar schools are no longer being built in this land, and the Assisted Places Scheme is gone, but there is still hope for the poor bright boy. If his name gets picked out of a hat, he gets to go to a good school. Someone tell me how this utterly random madness passes for policy.

This is a Government obsessed with social engineering. What it does not seem to grasp is that that is ultimately dangerous in the long term. The best way to ensure high academic standards is to leave the good schools alone to flourish, and to establish a system to provide the best education possible for clever but disadvantaged pupils. Plucking names out of a hat will not achieve this. By removing completely any element of selection from the process, the Government will end up destroying the few good comprehensive schools that remain. Then, as all the schools would be uniformly bad, there would be no need even for a lottery.

A few months ago, I joined the fine team of bloggers over at Anyone But Ken. I wrote my maiden post today, a short article on the rumoured rise in council tax to pay for the Olympics. I would appreciate it if you could check it out sometime.

Tony Blair. I always thought it impossible ever to be disappointed by the man, such are my already low expectations of him. Even so, I cannot believe that he has backed down on his comments about not giving up long-haul flights. He has now given some mealy-mouthed promise to ‘offset the carbon emissions caused by his personal travel’.

I supported his original stance. A shame that he has now given in to the clamouring of envirofascists all across the land.