The summer solstice is only 28 days away, but in parts of Scotland yesterday, it was like winter had never left, as people awoke to a blanket of snow.
At a time of year when thoughts should be turning to sunscreen and barbeques, a blast of wintry weather swept in from the Arctic, bringing blizzards and icy temperatures to the North-east. Drifting snow closed two roads, and many more were only passable with care.
The Express reported on the comments of the pro-global warming Met Office:
A freezing blast from the Arctic today will bring icy gusts, blizzards and temperatures plunging to -5C (23F), forecasters said.
It comes as Met Office figures reveal this spring is likely to be the coldest for 30 years.
The period from March to mid-May show average temperatures have not risen above 6.1C making it the 6th coldest on record.
Forecaster Sarah Holland said: “This year’s particularly cold spring was heavily influenced by an exceptionally cold March which had a mean temperature 3.3 °C below the long-term average. April and May (so far) have been less cold, but have also registered slightly below average mean temperatures.
[...]Leon Brown, forecaster for The Weather Channel, said parts of Scotland were expecting up to eight inches of snow today.
Heavy wintery showers in Aberdeenshire brought parts of the region to a standstill this morning and caused chaos on the roads and transport networks.
Mr Brown said the entire county is going to be colder than average for the time of year with the mercury struggling to get into double figures.
This is all the fault of global warming! We have to let government regulate the private sector and control our consumption, or we’ll all burn up in flames for our eco-sins!
Here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail with some more details about her.
Margaret Thatcher stood almost alone in driving through the tough policies now credited with saving the economy, secret papers reveal.
The Tory Premier had to take on her predecessor Harold Macmillan, Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson and even her own Chancellor Geoffrey Howe to push through the policies which pulled Britain back from the brink of economic chaos.
Documents released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule show the pressure Mrs Thatcher faced from the Establishment behind the scenes – and the extent to which she was isolated.
In 1980, the year after becoming Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher embarked on a controversial programme to revive the moribund economy through deep public spending cuts and strict control of the money supply, intended to stamp out inflation.
He warned that while her programme of cuts might give a ‘sense of exhilaration’ to her supporters, the country was heading for industrial collapse and ‘dangerous’ levels of unemployment.
Macmillan, then 86, sent the letter following a meeting with the Prime Minister at Chequers in August 1980.
He criticised her for abandoning ‘consensus politics’ to pursue radical reforms and ‘divisive politics’, which he said went against the ‘essence of Tory democracy’.
It was Macmillan who coined the phrase ‘you’ve never had it so good’ in 1957 during the long post-war economic boom.
His brand of consensus politics is now credited with contributing to the economic malaise that brought Britain to its knees in the late 1970s.
Years later, in her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher poured scorn on consensus politics, writing: ‘What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner “I stand for consensus”?.’
[...]In 1981, 365 economists wrote to The Times urging Mrs Thatcher to change course and limit the damage caused by the recession.
But she was unmoved, and her tough stance succeeded in reducing inflation from 27 per cent to four per cent in four years, putting Britain on the road to recovery.
Mrs Thatcher’s economic views were heavily influenced by the right-wing Cabinet minister Sir Keith Joseph, with whom she set up the free market think tank the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974.
Both drew on the work of the influential American economist Milton Friedman whose monetary theories challenged the post-war consensus on economic thinking.
I recommend reading the whole article for some more articles where Lady Thatcher had to stand against everyone and hold onto her convictions in the teeth of the majority.
Here’s an article from Forbes magazine that summarizes her effort to turn Britain around.
Excerpt:
It’s hard to appreciate today how desperate Britain’s condition was before Thatcher took office. Its economy was a laughing stock, the perennial sick man of Europe. Strikes were endemic and union bosses effectively governed the country. Her Conservative Party had long ago made its peace with the welfare state and the ethos of high spending and high taxes. While the previous Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, wanted to revive Britain, he hadn’t a clue how to do it. In a make-or-break showdown with the coal miner’s union, Heath called a special election under the banner “Who Governs Britain?” Heath lost and unions’ dominance in Britain seemed secure.
Great leaders have an astute sense of taking advantage of circumstances. Even though Heath had lost two elections, none of the senior party officials would challenge him. At the time, Thatcher was not regarded as one of the party’s major figures. But she was the only Tory who firmly believed in free markets and in Britain’s ability to become again a proud nation based on the principles of liberty. She was a devotee of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and of the idea of paring back big government and giving free enterprise room to flourish. Astonishingly she beat Heath in a leadership fight in 1975 and led the Tories to victory in 1979.
Immediately she began slashing income tax rates and reining in galloping spending and fighting inflation. She also exhibited that critical sense of timing. When she took office, she was faced with a potential strike of nurses whose union was demanding huge pay increases. Thatcher compromised in a way that some thought she didn’t have the backbone to turn Britain around. Instead she was exhibiting a great politician’s sense of knowing when to pick a fight. Thatcher eventually pushed through major labor union reforms and made it clear she would not tolerate any union riots or violence. Shortly after Thatcher won reelection, the coal miners union, which had destroyed Heath, decided to take her on. But unlike Heath Thatcher was fully prepared. The big showdown ensued and Thatcher beat the coal miner’s union resoundingly. It never recovered from that defeat.
Thatcher knew the deadweight on the economy of excessive taxation. She cut the top income tax rate from 98% to 40%. She cut the corporate income tax rate from 52% to 35%.
One of Thatcher’s greatest innovations was the systematic selling off of the government’s business assets, dubbed privatization. After World War II Britain nationalized enormous swaths of the economy which actions subsequent Conservative governments left largely untouched. Thatcher sold government companies off and her example has been followed by countless nations around the world.
In the area of privatizations, she did two remarkable things. She sold off much of Britain’s public housing. An enormous number of Britons, far more than in the U.S., lived in these government-owned buildings. Thatcher pushed the sale of these apartments to occupants at low prices and on very advantageous terms. The purpose was to begin to shift the mentality of people and their dependence on government. Her other smart move was in the privatization of government-owned companies: offering a significant number of shares to workers at very low prices. Union leaders hated privatization but their opposition was undermined as their members realized that they could do very well buying cheap shares in these newly-privatized entities. Here again she was changing peoples’ thinking: pro-big government workers now saw themselves as share owners, taking on more of a capitalist mentality.
Before Thatcher, many social observers thought that Britain had an ingrained, unchangeable, anti-commercial culture that would forever stand in the way of the country becoming an economic success. Yet within a decade of her taking office, Britain had the most vibrant, large economy in Europe, one even more dynamic, innovative than that of Germany’s. London became a magnet for entrepreneurs from France, Sweden and elsewhere.
One unchangeable characteristic of a great leader is courage and that means taking career-breaking risks. Thatcher demonstrated her mettle in the Falkland Islands crisis. When the Argentinean military dictatorship seized Britain’s Falkland Islands, most military experts felt the Sceptred Isle simply did not possess the military means to take them back. Defying almost the entire political establishment which was haunted by both Britain’s current weakness and the memory of the Suez Canal debacle in 1956, Thatcher declared that the seizure would not stand and that Britain would go to war to take the Islands back. Thankfully she received critical help from the U.S. thanks to in large part the unrelenting efforts of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who years later became Publisher and Chairman of Forbes). To the surprise of experts, Britain’s military expedition succeeded. The Argentinean military dictatorship fell and democracy was restored in that country. For Britain the Falklands war was a huge boost to a demoralized nation. To the world it meant that once again tyranny would be resisted.
I recommend reading that whole article. It’s hard not to smile at a woman who clearly loved her country and worked to save it from poverty.
Why good men love Maggie
And now I must offend everyone. See, I have a theory about women. I think that women generally tend to be more beholden to the opinions and fashions of the crowd than men are. It’s not absolute, but it’s maybe two-thirds to one-third, in my experience. I think that it is generally hard for them to hold to their convictions in the face of peer pressure. That’s why so few young, unmarried women are conservative after graduating from college. As soon as they reach college, they are swayed towards liberal views by their need to feel good about themselves and their need to be liked by others. Their views at home were not rooted in real knowledge, they were just fitting in with their families and churches and saying whatever words they were expected to say. And then they go off to college and learn other words to say from another community that uses praise and blame to replace their former convictions with new convictions.
But Maggie Thatcher wasn’t like that. And here’s why:
John Ranelagh writes of Margaret Thatcher’s remark at a Conservative Party policy meeting in the late 1970′s, “Another colleague had also prepared a paper arguing that the middle way was the pragmatic path for the Conservative party to take .. Before he had finished speaking to his paper, the new Party Leader [Margaret Thatcher] reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting [the speaker], she held the book up for all of us to see. ’This’, she said sternly, ‘is what we believe’, and banged Hayek down on the table.” (John Ranelagh, Thatcher’s People: An Insider’s Account of the Politics, the Power, and the Personalities. London: Harper Collins, 1991.)
Policies like unilateral disarmament, wealth redistribution and redefining marriage sound good to many women – especially in college, and especially when only one side is presented and the other side is demonized. The only way to resist ideas that feel good and ideas that get you peer-approval is to have formed your own views through independent study. Lady Thatcher’s economic policies were formed through a study of real economists like Nobel-prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek and Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. The reason why she was able to hold to her principles is because she knew what she was talking about, and her opponents did not. She didn’t care about feeling good. She didn’t care about what other people thought of her. She knew was right, and that was enough to sustain her in trying times. She had the knowledge, and her opponents couldn’t change her core convictions by trying to shame her. It didn’t work.
Richard Hannay is a Canadian visitor to London. At the end of a show in a music hall, he meets Annabella Smith who tells him about a plot by foreign agents to transfer secrets out of the UK. This is the beginning of a thrilling adventure for Hannay. Based on the novel by John Buchan.
When he became Tory leader seven years ago, the youthful and telegenic David Cameron pledged to transform the blue-rinse image of his party and boost its membership by attracting thousands of young, ethnic and gay members.
In doing so, he would destroy forever the Tories’ reputation as the ‘nasty party’ as these new ‘inclusive’ members joined the 300,000 activists whose average age was 64
‘I was elected Leader of the Conservative Party on a mandate to change and modernise the party,’ he said. ‘I want to increase membership. I want to see a broader base. I want to see a significant increase in the number of members from all communities.’
[...]But the bitter and ineluctable truth is that, far from increasing numbers, Mr Cameron has presided over the sharpest decline in membership in the Conservative party’s history.
Today, I can reveal that the number of Tory party members has fallen below 130,000, a drop of around 60 per cent since he took over in 2005.
[...]The uncompromising language deployed by Mr Cameron who, in another sop to the Lib Dems, has cynically dumped his repeated promise to reward traditional marriage through the tax system, enraged Tory MPs and activists alike.
[...]In a tense meeting in Downing Street last month between Mr Cameron and 20 of the party’s most senior members, he was given a stark warning that membership will plunge below the psychologically crucial 100,000 mark if there were no change of heart on same-sex marriage.
[...]The damage done by the gay marriage proposals is not confined to within the party. Potential Tory voters don’t like them.
A national poll by ComRes on the likely effects of allowing gay marriage — which, incidentally, was not in any of the parties’ manifestos — revealed the Conservatives could lose 1.1 million votes and 30 parliamentary seats in an election because so many supporters would stay at home or switch to UKIP.
A ComRes poll also revealed that 56 per cent of Mr Cameron’s constituents who voted for him at the election oppose his plans to make redefining marriage a priority.
Andrew Hawkins, the chairman of ComRes, said: ‘It’s the way it has been handled that has done so much damage. The Government has a consultation, but says it is pressing ahead whether people like it or not.
‘One of the scariest things for the Tories is that three in four of those people who voted for Cameron in 2010, but say they won’t again, cite gay marriage as the reason.
[...]One senior party official said: ‘Gay marriage is the final straw. In London, Bristol, Birmingham and other major cities, there are dozens of constituencies with no party organisation at all.
‘The voluntary party is virtually extinct in Scotland and in parts of Wales.
We are relying on a dwindling band of volunteers, the majority of whom are in their 70s. It’s the most desperate situation the party has ever faced.’
The UK Telegraph notes that Cameron has angered American Republicans with his “unprecedented” embrace of Barack Obama – despite the Falklands betrayal, the leaking the name of a British agent to the press, and other gaffes by Obama.
A LANDMARK Supreme Court ruling, in which a man has been ordered to pay his former partner compensation after they separated, could open the doors for thousands of claims from unmarried couples who split up, a family lawyer has claimed.
In yesterday’s judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that Angus Grant should pay Jessamine Gow £39,500 after the cohabiting pensioners’ relationship ended.
The right to compensation for unmarried couples became available under section 8 of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006, but had not been tested in the Supreme Court until yesterday.
[The ruling] does create a precedent that could allow unmarried couples to seek financial compensation similar to that available to divorcing couples, but without the assumption of an equal division of assets.
Last night, a family law expert warned that it could affect thousands of couples and lead to a rush for “cohabitation agreements” – a kind of pre-nuptial for the unmarried – from people planning to move in together.
[...]Robert Wright, professor of economics at Strathclyde University, said: “It will make people rethink cohabitation, rethink marriage. It might lead to people waiting longer, so we could see less cohabitation, less marriage and less fertility.”
Are people responsible for the damage caused by their own free decisions? According to the court, they are not.
The relentless war against the family in Britain continues in the highest court of the land. Baroness Hale, the veteran ‘lifestyle choice’ radical who, as a member of the UK Supreme Court, is the country’s top female judge, has called for cohabiting couples to be given more legal rights.
[...]For sure, cohabitation often results in hardship, very much more so indeed than marriage. Cohabitation breaks down far more frequently than marriage, and even more so after the birth of any children. Cohabitation is therefore one of the most significant factors behind Britain’s catastrophic and galloping phenomenon of mass fatherlessness, the single most important cause of so much misery and harm for both children and adults, and the major cause in turn of unquantifiable damage to society.
If people want to avoid the hardship they very understandably fear will result from the absence of legal protection under cohabitation, they can choose to get married. That’s what marriage is for. To bestow this legal protection upon cohabitation is to turn the ratchet of family breakdown another notch. First you undermine marriage by removing the stigma of ‘living together’, illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood; then you turn the ratchet by hymning the sanctity of ‘lifestyle choice’ and the social acceptability of cohabitation as an alternative to marriage; then you turn it again by bestowing the benefits of marriage upon un-marriage, thus incentivising a socially destructive phenomenon which will create yet more misery and harm.
Lady Hale’s call is not for justice in family life but gross injustice. It is yet another boost to our rights-without-responsibilities, something-for-nothing, me-first culture which has already advanced the destruction of family life in Britain, created regional deserts of social and moral breakdown and made victims out of the most vulnerable.
My biggest concern about this is the message that it sends to men who are already turning away from the responsibilities of marriage. Men already have to contend with no-fault divorce, a massive repression, etc. which causes them to doubt the reasonableness of marriage at this time. This ruling will push them even further away from relationships with women, by making even cohabitation threatening financially. I don’t think that the judge in this case realizes the incentives that are being created by this decision. When men see that relationships with women that go beyond just sex are becoming more costly and risky, they will stop doing that. Why take the risk of being cleaned out financially? My prediction is that this short-sighted ruling will push men and women further apart, so that sex without any structured relationship becomes the norm, and children have even less of a stable environment in which to grow up.
People are more inclined these to complain that men need to “man up” and get married, but it is important to consider what the incentives are for men. Are we doing a good job of educating men with practical skills, encouraging job creators with lower taxes and less regulation, and lowering the legal risks of marriage for men? Are we encouraging women to understand men and to respect them, which is the main thing that men are looking for in a marriage? Are we encouraging women to be chaste so that men are encouraged to perform at a higher level to earn a woman’s commitment to him in marriage? If we are not giving men incentives to marry – or even to cohabitate – then we mustn’t be surprised when men decide that other things are more rewarding than marriage.
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04/09/2013 • 2:00 AM 7
How Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, saved Britain
Here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail with some more details about her.
I recommend reading the whole article for some more articles where Lady Thatcher had to stand against everyone and hold onto her convictions in the teeth of the majority.
Here’s an article from Forbes magazine that summarizes her effort to turn Britain around.
Excerpt:
I recommend reading that whole article. It’s hard not to smile at a woman who clearly loved her country and worked to save it from poverty.
Why good men love Maggie
And now I must offend everyone. See, I have a theory about women. I think that women generally tend to be more beholden to the opinions and fashions of the crowd than men are. It’s not absolute, but it’s maybe two-thirds to one-third, in my experience. I think that it is generally hard for them to hold to their convictions in the face of peer pressure. That’s why so few young, unmarried women are conservative after graduating from college. As soon as they reach college, they are swayed towards liberal views by their need to feel good about themselves and their need to be liked by others. Their views at home were not rooted in real knowledge, they were just fitting in with their families and churches and saying whatever words they were expected to say. And then they go off to college and learn other words to say from another community that uses praise and blame to replace their former convictions with new convictions.
But Maggie Thatcher wasn’t like that. And here’s why:
Policies like unilateral disarmament, wealth redistribution and redefining marriage sound good to many women – especially in college, and especially when only one side is presented and the other side is demonized. The only way to resist ideas that feel good and ideas that get you peer-approval is to have formed your own views through independent study. Lady Thatcher’s economic policies were formed through a study of real economists like Nobel-prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek and Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. The reason why she was able to hold to her principles is because she knew what she was talking about, and her opponents did not. She didn’t care about feeling good. She didn’t care about what other people thought of her. She knew was right, and that was enough to sustain her in trying times. She had the knowledge, and her opponents couldn’t change her core convictions by trying to shame her. It didn’t work.
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Filed under: Commentary, Boldness, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Courage, Economics, Economy, England, Europe, F. A. Hayek, Falklands, Hayek, Inflation, Interest Rates, Iron Lady, Labor Union, Lady Thatcher, Liberty, Margaret Thatcher, Privatization, Scotland, Socialism, Strike, Tax Cuts, The Constitution of Liberty, The Road to Serfdom, UK, Union, United Kingdom, Wales