Waste Stays

Unfunded tax cuts 'deeply unconservative', says Hunt ahead of Budget

The chancellor has played down expectations of tax cuts in Wednesday's budget, telling Sky News his spending plans will be "prudent and responsible".

Speaking to Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, the cabinet minister it would be "deeply unconservative" to take decisions that were unfunded and increased borrowing.

We're well down the rabbit hole now. Presumably it would be 'deeply unconservative' to cut government waste and profligacy to fund those tax cuts. Apart from HS2 of course, but chopping that back isn't going to fund tax cuts for the peasants. Oh no - waste stays. 

A series of pictures

She did not think connectedly of her past at all. Old people do not. To the old the past comes in a series of pictures, not of necessity connected, here intensely vivid, there dim and blurred — a green field, a quiet evening, an angry quarrel, some loving face, some sharp disappointment — and all, vivid or blurred, dispassionately removed. No call for action any more. Quiescence. And then a strange wonder that to those about them these scenes so real, so actual, mean nothing, stir no reaction.

Hugh Walpole - The Old Ladies (1924)


The other day found me passing the time in Littleover, a suburb of Derby which was once a village. It is still possible to see hints of its individuality, traces of the village it once was. I know it well, having lived there as a teenager with my parents and brother, then again some years later with Mrs H because it happened to be convenient for my new place of work.

Mrs H and I left the area for good nearly forty years ago when my job changed again and a series of pictures crossed my mind as I sat there in the café. Family, friends, bike rides, tennis, visits to the library on the corner, the old pub, the birth of our children, shopping, an alarmingly expensive barber I only visited once, people I once knew who lived there.

I still know the area well, but forty years is too long for the thread to remain unbroken and still feel a sense of belonging. Now it is merely a series of pictures. Maybe that was the sense of belonging, the immediate familiarity of the pictures. Maybe that’s all it was and still is - a series of pictures.

Doomed in only five billion years

How the world will end: Terrifying graphic reveals the gruesome fate of every planet when the Sun dies

• In five billion years the Sun will expand into a red giant 100 times larger than now
• The inner planets will be destroyed but the Earth might avoid being consumed

I could never be a journalist. It would never occur to me to use words such as terrifying and gruesome for an event predicted to occur in about five billion years. 

Humans will be long gone, everything we have ever built will be long gone and Net Zero won't even be a memory of a memory. Even the language will have vanished, even the BBC licence fee will have come to an inglorious end - probably.

Heads we win, tails you lose

We must face down extremists, says Rishi Sunak

The UK must face down extremists trying to "deliberately" undermine the country's "multi-faith democracy", Rishi Sunak has warned.

The PM said Islamists and the far-right were "two sides of the same extremist coin" who loathed Britain...

However, his speech did not contain details of any new policy changes.

Net Zero, forced adoption of electric cars, mass immigration, large scale postal voting, gender politics, lockdowns, dabbling in war, increasing censorship and collusion between political parties on all major policy issues. Lump that lot together and it seems like a pretty extreme package to me.

Aid for Gazaine

Joe Biden twice confuses Gaza with Ukraine as he approves US military aid airdrops

The US president referred to airdrops to help Ukraine in a speech - but White House officials clarified he was referring to Gaza. The airdrops of "food and supplies" will be provided "in the coming days", Mr Biden said.

President Joe Biden twice confused Gaza with Ukraine as he announced the US would provide desperately needed aid to the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

The history of the flat cap

 Forget Sunak and Starmer, this is important - the history of the flat cap.

Death by a thousand regulations

Harry Phibbs has a useful Critic piece on the destructive effect of far too many laws and regulations on civil society.


Death by a thousand regulations

British politicians are allowing unnecessary laws to ruin civil society

I would bet a crisp five pound note that a Ten Minute Rule Bill introduced by Dr Thérèse Coffey last week regarding the driving licence requirement for minibuses and medium-sized goods vehicles passed you by. Yet even regulations which might seem trivial can serve, in their own way, to depress the joy and energy of the nation. Together, they can make Britain feel like a joyless, listless place.

Under the current law, inevitably inherited as a regulation from the European Union, those who passed their driving test prior to 1997 are allowed to drive these “categories D1 and C1” vehicles as well as an ordinary motor car. But those who passed their driving test after 1997 must pay between £2,000 and £3,000 to do a special course. Coffey wants driving licences for those C1 and D1 categories to automatically be given to everybody who has passed a driving test for a car.

There are still plenty of us who passed our driving tests before 1997 but each year this perverse and ageist restriction is causing more damage. Each year the cohort legally allowed to drive the minibus becomes more grey and wrinkled. Soon, only the doddery Mr Magoo element will be entrusted with the task under rigorous modern safety culture. What makes it even more perverse is that driving tests have become considerably more exacting since 1997.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how official interference and meddling grinds down civil society. It is also a reminder that we need political parties who are willing to grind down the civil service when it becomes necessary. We don't have them.


But then what is this vacillating, craven, supposedly Conservative Government doing? Here is a modest but popular reform that would be obviously sensible. The Labour Party are foolish enough to oppose it, setting themselves against thousands of small charities. Yet Ministers defer to civil servants, who will always be able to come up with administrative difficulties. Meanwhile, the noose around the Big Society’s neck tightens as the minivan drivers slowly die off. It’s enough to tempt one to fill a minivan and leave.