Bruce on politics: March 2015

Thursday, 26 March 2015

Political correctness is for idiots

Bruce 26 March 2015 3 Edit This

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Political Correctness is when someone thinks that their view on a topic is the correct one and that you are wrong. So they try and force their view using a spurious moral argument. Often using words ending in -ism and -ist. By this means they impose their views on the world. The BBC is full of this. But political correctness is itself morally wrong, it takes away our freedom of speech. And its proponents (who are virtually all of the left) seek to take away our freedom to think. They have made many politically correct laws that make it a criminal offence to exercise our basic rights. And they continually seek to further restrict our freedoms. They are the enemy.

Cultural Marxism is the sweeping away of all our traditions, our individuality, our freedoms and our rights. To be replaced by a dystopian future where we are all uniform and we all conform. This is a fundamental precept of socialism. It is what they seek to do to Great Britain and the BBC is one of their tools.

Multiculturalism. This is the institutionalisation of cultural diversity. So foreigners who come to Great Britain are actively encouraged and even forced not to become British. Not to integrate. This is the ghettoisation of our society and will always lead to friction. As we see in the largely racial riots that feature so regularly on our news. Under multiculturalism people are defined in every way by their ethnic background and official policy is predicated upon this.

Diversity seeks to differentiate and label us according to ethnic background, age, gender, socioeconomic background etc. Having done that it seeks equality of outcome for each differentiated group. Not equality of opportunity. So the BBC has to have its quota of old, homosexual, black etc presenters to show us how wonderful they are about promoting diversity. Choosing the best person for the job doesn’t come into it. Here is the BBC’s prattle on diversity. George Orwell could have written it as an addendum to 1984.

As I pointed out in an earlier article the application of policies of multiculturalism and diversity were major contributors to the industrial scale child sex abuse by Pakistanis committed in Rotherham and other town and cities. The left should be utterly ashamed at what they caused.

Taking Offence is a mechanic by which people try to force their views on someone else. Notice that offence is never given it is always taken. Anyone who takes offence is an intellectual lightweight. They have no cogent argument to support their own views so they try to enforce them by a form of bullying instead. Social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter all really need an algorithm that automatically deletes the entire account of anyone who “takes offence”. Taking offence as a mechanic is often an alternative in people to having a sense of humour.

The BBC must go

Bruce 12 March 2015 15 Edit This

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Jeremy Clarkson is a top rung professional journalist, he is an excellent entertainer and he is very driven and hard working. Which is why Top Gear is the most successful factual TV programme in the world, with 350 million viewers and sold to 214 countries, and why it makes the BBC many tens of millions of pounds every year.

If the star player of a Premier League soccer club had a small fracas with a member of the back room staff then that club would not announce they were withdrawing from the league for the rest of the season. In fact we would probably never even hear about it. Yet the BBC seem to be unable to manage a very similar situation. But then the BBC are funded by the taxpayer, so they are very happy to throw money away. And it could end up being a lot of money because the BBC are now in breach of contract with all those overseas broadcasters.

Then there is the “slope” incident. We all say things that we would not want to see broadcast on air. That we got to hear the “slope” episode is the fault of the BBC editors who left it in, which is the fault of the BBC producers and thus the BBC management.

You can see a pattern emerging here. Either the BBC management aren’t very good or they are after Clarkson. Or maybe both. They don’t have to answer to shareholders or investors and can act in an utterly cavalier manner with no concern for the taxpayer who funds them. But the taxpayer knows this, which is why the Clarkson petition shot to over 700,000 signatures so quickly.

It is not just Clarkson. The BBC knew about the child abuse that was happening on its premises, perpetrated by its employees, for decades. Stuart Hall, Jimmy Savile and many more. When Meirion Jones tried to report this on Newsnight the BBC went for Stalinist suppression, instead of acting as the news provider it is supposed to be. For all of these appalling events the BBC would have been broken up had it been a private company.

The BBC have unbelievable power. There is something called “news reach”, which looks at all the media through which we receive our news: TV, Radio, Newspapers, internet, etc. The BBC have around half of the total UK news reach. This is a near monopoly and would be illegal for any private company to have. Hypocritically the BBC are constantly complaining about Murdoch, yet he has only about 20% news reach and doesn’t have full editorial control over a lot of that.

And it is not just the news. The BBC grew as the propaganda arm of the Post War Consensus. Their task was to brainwash us for Attlee’s false utopia. They called it “public service broadcasting” and they are still at it today. The soap operas are full of it, the BBC use them as vehicles to shape their view on society. They are crammed with political correctness. An unfeasable number of the female cast of the Archers run their own businesses with diligence and care and the vicar’s wife is a Hindu. Whist the male entrepreneurs are portrayed as improbable pantomime villains. Matt Crawford, Cameron Fraser, Justin Elliot, Martyn Gibson and so on. All the BBC soaps are the same. It is all propaganda.

Then there is “comedy”. The BBC version is to get a rabid leftie to make snide remarks about the “Tories”. Marcus Brigstocke, Jeremy Hardy, Sandi Toksvig, Hugh Dennis, Rory Bremner, Phill Jupitus, Jo Brand and so many more. Totally unlike when we had comedy that was actually funny. And non political. Morcambe and Wise, Porridge, Only Fools and Horses, Dad’s Army, The Two Ronnies etc. The repeats of these are far better entertainment than any new comedy produced by the BBC.

So basically you can’t turn the BBC on without being brainwashed. Unless it is the sport or Top Gear.

The BBC propaganda is subtle. They don’t overtly support or rubbish one view or another (except for the rabid “comedians”). Instead they portray their political viewpoint as bein the best in their fiction programmes (plays, drama, soaps etc). On the news they minimise or omit what they don’t like whilst giving emphasis and slant to stories that support their message. It is constant and all pervasive. Everyone in Britain has been brainwashed.

The BBC don’t support one political party. They are far too big and far too powerful for that. Instead they have their own agenda. This is dominated by liberal Oxbridge graduates who have never worked in the real world. They love the state and statism. They hate the private sector, commercial success, wealth and its generation, independent thought, true free speech and especially the banks, who they blame for everything. The BBC are the main drivers of the evils of political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism and diversity in the UK. The still seek to promote all the facets of the Post War Consensus. Their house journal is The Guardian. And they work to have a Labour government because it is more closely aligned to their distorted world view.

It is ridiculous that a modern democracy like ours has a state owned broadcaster, it puts us alongside Cuba and North Korea.

Then there is BBC funding. This takes the form of a hypothecated tax called the license fee. This was based not on the consumption of media but on a blanket fee for real time terrestrial broadcasting. But technology has moved on. Now we can get our programmes by satellite, cable or internet. We can catch up any time we want and we can view content from around the world. It is utterly outrageous that to watch Sky Arts I have to pay both Rupert Murdoch and the BBC. The license fee is a very long time past its sell by date.

Even worse is that the license fee is one of the few bills in life that is enforced by criminal law. The BBC regularly put people in prison for not paying it. This is utterly immoral and totally unacceptable.

I could go on. The BBC is so unremittingly awful. And we really do need to fix it, let’s hope that this Clarkson episode has focused people’s minds.

The BBC needs to be broken up into small parts and then those parts need to be sold off. The state must get out of the broadcast business. No one person or organisation must be allowed to have more than 10% of the total UK news reach, so Murdoch needs pruning as well. We need a highly diverse media freely reflecting a very wide range of views, from Cornish Nationalism, to Druidism to the carnivorous lifestyle.

Air transport. Another British government disaster

Bruce 17 March 2015 1 Edit This

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Commercial aircraft are amazing:

One version of the Boeing 777 can fly 17,395km (9,395nmi) non stop. It is used to fly between long haul destinations such as New York-Singapore, Perth-London, New York-Auckland, Chicago-Sydney and Miami-Taipei. Pretty much between any two points on the planet.
One version of the Airbus A319 uses 1.93 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres per passenger, which is 122 miles per US gallon, or about four times better than a commuter in their diesel car.
The Airbus A380 cruises round our planet at 676 miles per hour. A startling speed which is many times that of any other form of transport.
More than 700,000 passengers are in the air in the world at any one time.

The huge increase in the wealth of our planet in recent decades, compared with what had gone before, was down to four factors: the shipping container, the geostationary satellite, the microprocessor and the Boeing 747. Commercial aircraft have revolutionised our lives. It is now normal to travel to do business or take holidays internationally, to the point that we now think nothing of it. The quality of our existence has been massively enhanced. And like all good things our politicians seek to punish it. To make it less good, so we get less benefit.

Their first stupidity is not providing airport capacity. All those aircraft have to land and take off somewhere. Air transport is organised on a hub and spoke system. It is impossible for every airport to have flights to every other airport. So to make a given journey, say from Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, to Denver, Colorado, you fly to and from hubs and between hubs. Which makes hubs incredible important.

One small desert country with not much in the way of natural resources decided to become an aviation hub. Dubai and its airline, Emirates. They have powered the economy there to an incredible high. It is now the world’s busiest international airport with 70,475,636 passengers and 2,435,567 tonnes of air freight a year, flown to more than 260 destinations. But it is near its capacity limit so Dubai are building a new five runway airport with a capacity of 160 million passengers and 12 million tonnes of cargo per year. But they have competition, Istanbul is building a 6 runway hub airport, and Amsterdam already has one. Detroit, Denver, Boston, Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth also have 6 runways.

Heathrow, with just 2 runways, was the hub airport for Europe, but ran out of capacity in 1977. There are only so many landing and take off “slots” and the limited number of these means that each one has become very valuable. So, quite simply, the business moved elsewhere. To Amsterdam, to Copenhagen, to Frankfurt. The business we have lost must now have built up to be billions of pounds a month. All because our politicians refuse to allow runways to be built.

The solution is startlingly obvious. Build a new 6 runway airport in the Thames Estuary, on an artificial island, just as Hong Kong’s airport is. This so called “Boris Island” works brilliantly:

Landing approaches would be over the sea and take offs would be before central London vastly reducing noise and exhaust pollution for millions of people.
The airport could operate 24 hours a day, increasing its capacity and making many flight timings far more convenient.
The airport would be connected directly to the Channel Tunnel railway services, replacing the demand on short European flights.
Extending Crossrail to the airport would provide much of the transport infrastructure.
Location over water reduces the risk to the population from crashes. Remember the BA 777 that only just made it over the fence at Heathrow?
The cost of the airport development would be absorbed by the cost to include a new Thames Barrier that will generate power using hydropower turbines.
The huge 2,500 acre Heathrow site could be used for a much needed housing development.
It would connect air, rail, sea and motorway transport within a single hub.
Expanding beyond 6 runways would be quite easy, if world air traffic continues to grow, which it will
The project could be largely financed by private investors.

The benefits are so enormous for Great Britain that it is almost incomprehensible that it isn’t already built.

But if you think that is stupid, there is more. And, inevitably it involves Gordon Brown and his utter economic ineptness. He ramped up Air Passenger Duty (APD) as one of his stealth taxes, doubling it in February 2007 alone, for instance. APD is now £194 for a seat over 40 inch pitch for a journey over 6 thousand miles, £138 between 2 and 4 thousand miles. It has become a significant part of the cost of a flight and is the second highest such tax in the world (after Chad). So what has happened:

It has significantly reduced British economic activity as people and businesses have gone elsewhere. In 2013 a study by PwC, “The Economic Impact of Air Passenger Duty”, found that abolition of APD could provide an initial short-term boost to the level of UK GDP of around 0.45 % in the first 12 months, averaging at just under 0.3 % per annum between 2013 and 2015. It stated that this increase would permanently raise UK economic output, to the point where the economy could be up to £16bn larger in the period 2013-15 than under the current system of APD. In addition, it found that abolition would result in an increase in investment and exports, implying investment may rise by 6% in total between 2013 and 2015, with exports rising by 5% in the same period.
It has reduced Government income as all other taxes have had their take reduced. Getting rid of APD would increase government revenue. The PwC report says that the abolition of APD would result in £3-4bn in lost direct revenue, but a positive net gain of £0.25bn per annum for the Government.
Huge numbers of people are avoiding APD. Just take a short flight to Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Copenhagen then make your long flight from there. The savings are considerable. This is why every local airport in the UK now has lots of shuttle flights to these European destinations. And the economic damage to Britain is immense.

I have long ceased to be amazed at the stupidity of Gordon Brown. Luckily we now have a competent Chancellor and George Osborne has got rid of the top two bands of APD, effective 1 April 2015. After which the top rate will be the £138. But really he needs to get rid of it completely.

So there you have it. The wonders of aviation could and should bring great riches to our country, instead our politicians are doing everything they can to prevent this.

Finally for the Greens out there who think they are saving the planet and who hate aircraft that use fossil fuels. Already it is possible to use fuels made from biomass. In other words the power of the sun. And it is possible to adapt aviation to run on liquid hydrogen, which can be made using windmill or tide power. Whilst the startling fuel efficiency of aircraft make them one of the most energy friendly forms of transport.

Let’s shoot the NIMBYs

Bruce 15 March 2015 2 Edit This

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I have previously written about our utterly dysfunctional housing market here and here. Basically we have disproportionate power in the hands of a relatively small coterie of anti planning fascist NIMBYs, led by the CPRE. And politicians of all parties pay lip service to fixing the problem but then do nothing to actually allow the houses that we need to be built. Until the 1947 and 1990 Town and Country Planning Acts are repealed we will get nowhere. They are charters to deny nice homes to tens of millions of people.

We need to build at least half a million new homes a year for several years just to build our housing stock to where it should be. There are just two ways to do this:

New Towns. New Villages. Eco friendly with proper homes with gardens. We have, as a nation a long history of doing this. From the Garden Cities such as Letchworth before WW1 and Welwyn just after to the many post WW2 New Towns. These include Milton Keynes, Runcorn, Stevenage, Telford, Redditch, Cwmbran, Peterlee, Hatfield, Glenrothes. Cumbernauld and many more. Each is built from scratch with all the infrastructure it needs. Schools, hospitals, transportation. We have done this successfully before and we can do it again.
Radial expansion, currently artificially prevented by the ridiculous “green belt” which denies us the natural way that communities have evolved for thousands of years. Green belts cover one and a half times the area of Britain than that covered by towns and cities. Between the mid 1500s and 1700 Birmingham expanded fifteen fold, from the third largest town in Warwickshire to the fifth largest in Britain. From 1890 to the 1920s the Northern Line in London went out into the countryside and immense residential building followed. British cities can do this again with radial commuter train lines running into countryside, with very relaxed planning permission.

It is worth repeating here a very important fact. Britain is very, very undeveloped. Power up Google Earth and fly round Great Britain a bit and you will find that, amazingly, very little land is used for housing to accommodate the human beings who live and work here. The best measure is from the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK NEA), they calculated that 6.8% of the UK’s land area is now classified as urban, 10.6% in England, 1.9% in Scotland, 3.6% in N. Ireland and 4.1% in Wales. But in England 78.6% of this urban area is designated as natural rather than built so the percentage of England’s landscape which is actually given over to homes is a ridiculously small 2.27%.

The anti planning fascist NIMBYs are pure evil. They are happy in their nice homes with their pleasant life styles. But they want to deny this to many millions of other people. This is disgusting and it is amoral. They have two idiotic and inadequate solutions to our housing problems.

In-fill. Building in gardens and little patches of land. To me this should be illegal. It is very expensive compared with building whole large areas of housing, it adds strain to all the existing infrastructure, it increases the population density which reduces everyone’s quality of life and it de-greens urban areas, making them into concrete jungles.
Brownfield development. Basically knock a factory down and build houses instead. This has many of the disadvantages of in fill with the added one that this land will usually be in an area where people don’t really want to live. You don’t see the CPRE NIMBYs rushing to live in brownfield homes.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that in-fill and brownfield will never, ever provide even a fraction of the homes we need, even at sky high population densities. Never mind in pleasant, affordable homes with large rooms and decent sized gardens. The NIMBYs are just using these as a token offering, to fob us off.

Another NIMBY tactic is localism, so a hundred metres of hedge become more important than homes for millions of people. They deliberately obfuscate the big picture. CPRE promote this a lot because it is a very effective tactic to prevent development. They don’t want other people living in nice homes. This is why planning has to be forced through by central government. Which it is utterly failing to do.

Look at the following diagram and you will be shocked. Not only do we live in amongst the most expensive new homes on the planet, we live in amongst the smallest. Rabbit hutches. This is what the NIMBYs have forced on us. An ever increasing number of people squeezed into a limited area means an ever increasing population density and an ever reducing quality of life. All because the nasty, amoral NIMBYs prevent planning permission:

We are rapidly reaching the state where the dearth of housing and its poor quality makes decent life in Britain impossible to sustain. People are already leaving in large numbers and you can see why. And the people who leave tend to be our best, our brightest, well educated highest earners. Because their talents are mobile they can easily relocate to a far higher quality of life. The damage that the NIMBYs are doing to our economy is horrendous. I would take the NIMBYs and CPRE outside and shoot them in front of their children.

The results of NIMBYism are utterly disgusting More of Surrey is now under golf courses – about 2.56 percent – than has houses on it. How can we, as a society, tolerate the immorality of this? And how can the people responsible face themselves in a mirror? They have no moral compass and have lost their status as decent human beings.

And remember that a nice detached family home with a big garden costs only about £100,000 to build when a whole big development is done at the same time. If you paid more than this for your home then blame the NIMBYs.

The only answer is a huge liberalisation of planning permission. The planning authorities around Britain are controlled by NIMBYs so the only way is to force it upon them. Central government must create many new towns and planning permission for greenbelt and farm land should be close to automatic. It really is the only way. Planning authorities that refuse to liberalise must be taken over by central government. The vast majority of our population are at war with the disgusting NIMBYs and we must win.

Useful memes for the election. Part 1

Bruce 19 March 2015 0 Edit This

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So the general election is on Thursday 7th May. Obviously, for the good of Great Britain, we need an overall Conservative majority. Use these memes on social media to help in achieving the best outcome for everyone. I have standardised them at 650 wide. UseIrfan View if you want to change this.

Here is a very useful guide to optimum tactical voting in Scotland, to prevent the SNP from becoming the tail that wags the Westminster dog.

This meme exposing the truth about Miliband is so true. He doesn’t know where the North is and he despises working people.

Another good Miliband meme. This one encapsulating the truth of how Labour works.

Here is the truth of the Labour political philosophy. Because it is based on envy and punishing success.

The proof of just how much Miliband is a trade union poodle. Voters come a distant second in their needs and importance.

A Labour minority government, kept in power by the SNP in return for huge concessions is a very possible nightmare for Great Briton.

This one is handy because it shows what happens when Labour run an NHS. It is a disaster:

Everyone by now must know the truth of this meme. Ed Balls is a walking financial disaster.

I like this about UKIP. It sums them up very accurately.

More evidence that Labour are useless on the economy and must not be trusted with it

And here is the famous long term economic plan that is working so brilliantly for Great Britain.

Conservative long term economic plan 650

And here, paraphrasing Hayek, is what we all know to be the truth.

This one is useful for illustrating how socialists think they can finance their fiscal incontinence.

You must wonder why these three are still in Parliament.

A really big one this. It reminds people that Labour can never be trusted with the economy.

Never mind the Bullingtons. Privately educated Balls was in The Steamers drinking club at Oxford. Here he is on the left.

The corruption, bigotry and plain lack of civilisation of UKIP are disgusting. Surely only uneducated people vote for them.

George Osborne is an amazing chancellor. We really don’t want to throw his success away.

I would like to thank the creators of all of these. A second batch will be posted before the election.