This morning, my wife – a GP – shared with me a BMJ article entitled “How to become an MP”. It might well have been titled “Why become an MP?”: Ours is a participatory democracy—startling chiefly for the lack of participation. Membership of the hopelessly debt laden political parties is […]
Read MorePolitics
Modern liberal conservatism
Charge or release
I won’t reproduce Liberty’s arguments. See Liberty’s briefing for more information.
Read MoreJack Straw: “Labour’s decade is liberty’s best since the vote was won”
See this Guardian article: First, the Human Rights Act. We really did “bring rights home”, as we said we would. At last British people have been able directly to access and to enforce positive rights in the British courts, rather than having to go to Strasbourg and wait for years […]
Read MoreHMRC: you couldn’t make it up
Without apparent irony, HMRC offer both an update on the personal information lost and warn of fraudulent attempts to obtain personal information: This front page has been up for a while.
Read MoreShould we act on climate change?
(This isn’t me!) Yes, then. But let’s not stop living to do it. Now, how do we get this message to the Chinese?
Read MoreAn “Aha!” moment
I just discovered Fabian gradualism. Put this in the context of the Lisbon Treaty and Hayek‘s “The Road to Serfdom” and things begin to make sense. The great ideological battle continues: Hayek shared his Nobel Prize with rival Gunnar Myrdal. The problem is, the combatants are in different places. While […]
Read MoreIndependent: Cameron has a vision that is “potentially revolutionary”
… but it confuses the right-wing media, who want government out of our lives, but who also want to blame government for every crisis. At least I am not alone in spotting that Cameron is ahead of the game. In rare moments of calm the focus switches from a troubled […]
Read MoreThe Death of Democracy
John Redwood puts it well. I have commented there.
Read MoreWhat’s wrong with HMRC?
In my seven years working with HMRC on and off, either providing services from a small company or representing software developers’ interests, it has been perfectly obvious that trivial technical tasks become time-consuming and expensive once they have been put to HMRC’s prime contractor. I have been on conference calls, […]
Read MoreSuffocation for business innovation
There is the potential for a long post here, but for the moment, I’ll stick to “Innovation grants”. A small client worked for weeks, hiring consultants, to obtain an innovation grant for part of one R&D effort. They won a grant, and then spent the duration of the project accounting […]
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![😡 A wise building site carpenter once said to me,
🗣️”A Labour government is the worst kind of government for the working man [and woman].”
🇬🇧 True then. True today. We battle on.](https://www.stevebaker.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/442413775_18432903037051538_3387178564604183858_n-320x320.jpg)
![😡 A wise building site carpenter once said to me,
🗣️”A Labour government is the worst kind of government for the working man [and woman].”
🇬🇧 True then. True today. We battle on.](https://www.stevebaker.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/442413775_18432903037051538_3387178564604183858_n.jpg)
