Your duty is to keep it down

Well done to George Osborne in last week’s Autumn Statement to not only postpone the planned increase in fuel duty, but to scrap it entirely.

I suspect it has now got to the stage where fuel costs are such a critical component of the typical household budget that any further rise is politically impossible before the next general election.

In general quite a deft performance by Osborne in the face of the generally appalling economic situation. The pratfalls of the 2012 Budget were conspicuously avoided.

Outdoing Moscow and Peking

Tory MP Aidan Burley has found himself in hot water for daring to suggest that yesterday’s Olympic event was “the most leftie opening ceremony” he had ever seen. But, as Chris Snowdon points out here, surely that’s just a statement of fact. Can anyone think of one that was more so, even going back to Moscow in 1980?

The glorification of the NHS was utterly disagraceful. It seems to have become a national shibboleth and yet, if it’s so wonderful, why has no other country, even the supposedly lefty Scandinavian countries, adopted the same inefficient, monolithic, bureaucratic model?

Chris’ more general musings about the whole Olympic hysteria are also well worth reading.

Escalator scrapped!

Great news that Osborne has scrapped the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty planned for 1 August - which would have become 4p/litre at the pump once VAT was taken into account. Let us hope that this heralds the end of any duty increases so long as the pump price remains above 100p.

As pointed out by Tom Stevenson, the fall in the international oil price will hopefully presage a general economic recovery.

An Olympic-scale waste of money

He’s only saying what we knew already, but Dominic Lawson is quite right to point out here what a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money the 2012 London Olympics are going to be. Not to mention the fact that, overall, they will have a negative effect on tourism.

Some years ago, the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) produced a study which concluded: "There appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games and considerable evidence of damage." It added that predictions to the contrary by the politicians attempting to justify the outlay of their taxpayers' money "form part of a tradition".

There’s no evidence either that they will lead to any increase in participation in sport (as if that was government’s business anyway). And if you dare to complain about the whole gravy train you risk being branded as a killjoy:

But the best of all news is for the politicians and sports bureaucrats who committed us to spending £10bn on facilities for two weeks of running and jumping: they will have the grandest seats in the stadium entirely free, and will be chauffeured there in special lanes while the rest of the capital's inhabitants are snarled up in Olympic traffic jams.

Anyone who begrudges them that is clearly a killjoy, and not participating in the Olympic spirit.

The Arab Autumn

We’ve been repeatedly told how the “Arab Spring” represents an upsurge of freedom and democracy in countries previously governed by authoritarian rulers. But the recent news from Egypt doesn’t seem to bear this out. Is it really going to result in tolerant, liberal countries, or is it more likely to open the floodgates of ignorant, hate-mongering Islamism? I would say Israel is much more concerned about her security than she was six months ago.

Home truths about the riots

Melanie Phillips pulls no punches about the underlying causes:

What we are seeing, in the sluggish and unprepared reaction of the police and political class to these events, compounded by their serial failure to grasp from previous such disturbances just what is going on here, is a catastrophic combination of professional inertia and incompetence, serial eyes off the ball, paralysing political correctness, an apparent reluctance to identify, name and deal with subversive activity, a capital’s police force in systemic disarray, a criminal justice system that has become an insulting joke, a refusal from the top to draw clear lines in the sand and to exercise moral and political leadership, a pandering instead to mob rule, tyro politicians who have never had a grown-up job and couldn’t run the proverbial whelk-stall let alone get a grip on a culture teetering on the edge of the cliff, a third-rate civil service machine that no longer can be relied on to keep the show on the road, a culture of narcissistic selfishness on an epic scale and a general breakdown in education, morality and elementary codes of civilised behaviour, much of it deliberately willed on for the past three decades by a grossly irresponsible and politically motivated intelligentsia that set out to smash the west.

Max Hastings in the Daily Mail:

Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?...

…So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail again:

The notion that all this was provoked by deprivation is nonsense. Many of those who have already appeared in court are opportunist thieves who hold down proper jobs. Even the unemployed are well-fed, designer-clad and shod, and equipped with the latest digital technology.

One of the most ridiculous TV clips was a young, blinged-up black man telling London mayor Boris Johnson that ‘de yoof’ had to riot because they ‘had no food in dem bellies’. It’s a wonder McDonald’s in Brixton is still in business.

And Tim Montgomerie in today's Sunday Telegraph:

Over the past week we have witnessed the culmination of the liberal experiment. The experiment attested that two parents don’t matter; that welfare, rather than work, cures poverty; you tolerate “minor crime”; you turn a blind eye to celebrity drug use; you allow children to leave school without worthwhile skills; you say there’s no difference between right and wrong. Well now we’ve seen the results.

The modern Labour Party’s answer to every social question is to open the taxpayers’ cheque books. We’ve tested that world view to the point of destruction. The welfare state has never been bigger but nor have our social problems. Today’s historically high tax burden has forced parents to spend more and more hours outside the home, just to make ends meet.

The Left is always ready to attack hyper-capitalism for the ways in which it can erode community bonds, but it looks the other way when it comes to thinking about the ways in which the hyper-state can devour social capital.

That global warming, it's a bastard

Peru declares state of emergency amid plunging temperatures

Over the past three or four years we have seen temperatures during the winter months get lower, and people are unable to survive this," said Silvia Noble, from Plan Peru, an NGO. "This cold weather is now extending into areas that never saw these low temperatures before and children and elderly people are especially at risk as they are not physically strong enough to last month after month of sub-zero conditions.

Better crank up the SUV and go out for a long drive, then.

On your bike, Boris

There’s a superb article here by Brendan O’Neill about the way cyclists are elevated into modern-day secular saints. “When cyclists are continually told that their mode of transport is saving humanity from doom,” he says, “it’s no wonder so many of them are annoying pricks.” He concludes:

Look, we’re never going to have ‘cycling cities’. Why not? Because people have children whom they don’t want to transport to school on a tandem thanks very much; because we do weekly shops which won’t fit into a wicker basket; because workmen need to deliver big things to businesses and building sites and that can’t be done on a BMX; and because some people like the speed and wind-through-the-hair feeling that comes with driving a Ferrari but not a Chopper. More cars and fewer bikes is a sign of progress, which is why 80 per cent of Beijingers used to slog through that vast city on bikes and now only 19.7 per cent do. Our rulers need to deal with this fact, and find ways to accommodate it, rather than pushing forward the cyclist to do their dirty work of making drivers feel so guilt-ridden that they sell their hatchbacks and pedal like it was 1939.

End of the road for Labour’s kilometre

Excellent news that the new Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, is planning to end the use of kilometres in official transport statistics, and revert to using units that most people can actually understand. If only the BBC would also stop their constant and often laughable pandering to the metrication lobby.

It must be said that Hammond has got off to a good start by proclaiming the end of the “war on the motorist”, even if the coffers are empty for funding new road schemes. He certainly seems to have rattled the cage of the Guardianista lentil-munchers.

We know where you live

Aware that they are slowly but steadily losing the argument, Greenpeace are now resorting to naked intimidation in their climate campaigning:

If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

This really underlines their utter contempt for free speech and democratic values.

But, sorry greenies, according to recent opinion polls, I think we be increasingly many, and you be increasingly few.