Go on, ask me what I think of the new “Equalities” bill. 

The Bill also aims to tackle discrimination against the elderly and people from working class backgrounds.

Hey, Harriet. Here’s some ideas for you. Why don’t you devise a National Accent, a new version of received pronounciation based on the Yorkshire accent. Come up with a National Dialect, too, and use the school system to enforce this so that all children emerge from school speaking with the same accent and dialect. 

While you’re at it, try to limit the number of words taught to children down to what those in the bottom sets might be reasonably expected to be familiar with by the end of their ‘education.’ This will, of course, mean making it illegal to sell books to children, or to allow children to be exposed to the internet, and children’s books will need to be removed from the library. I’m sure a few children will be resourceful enough to get their hands on books, but if you ban dictionaries and make sure it’s illegal for parents to help children learn non-curriculum vocabulary then, after 16 years, all children will emerge from schooling with roughly the same accent, dialect and vocabulary.

Another advantage the middle classes have is in the ability to pay for better quality clothes for their offspring. No-one wants to go down the Chinese road of a National uniform, but I’m sure Jeff from the Clothes Show could design something really stylish that, if people are reasonable about all this, will see that it takes away a source of pressure and angst for a great many people who can’t dress well, and are unfairly judged because of this.

But, see, I’m an old fashioned totalitarian. I like to bring about equality through taking away the ability to be different, but you Harriet, you’re much more sophisticated and have these new advanced techniques that rely on manipulating people’s perceptions rather than actual reality. 

You want to make it illegal to spot the difference. You want to encourage people to train themselves to be blind to difference, to make it a crime to be able to tell that you’re looking at an old person or a young person. I can’t tell the difference. What difference? I thought I was looking at the same person!

See, how did a word like “discriminate” which literally means nothing more sinister or evil than, “to recognise the difference between; distinguish” turn into something sinister and evil?

I dislike people making invalid assumptions about individuals based on the individuals membership of a particular grouping – everyone should be judged as individuals… but they should be judged and people, employers should be allowed to judge for themselves, surely?

What differences are we allowed to notice? Or are we heading for a world where jobs are like school placements – it’s whether you’re in the catchment area, first come first served and a few lottery systems here and there?  Obviously that would be madness. Let’s make it simpler – why not have the Government record people’s skills and capabilities and anyone wanting to recruit would go to the State and be sent someone. No interview. No application, just – blam – here you go, there’s your new employee. Standard National Wage to apply, with 40% going to the Government. 

Let’s do that, eh? That’ll end discrimination once and for all, and Equality will be achieved. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Let’s make this absolutely clear. A subsidy of between £2k and £5k on electric cars, starting 2011, is “Good” protectionism. All the other forms of protectionism are bad, but if it’s the Green Industry? Well that’s totally different.

The Government has a problem – that problem is that people don’t want electric cars. They want us to want them, so they’re going to help us to want them by using £250,000,000 of taxpayer’s cash to reduce the sticker price of these awful things. Bribing us with our own money to create a whole new dependent industry: Rapture!

The scheme starts in 2011 – which gives the car companies plenty of time to begin designing, testing then mass producing what’s sure to be the hot sellers of that year. At least, that’s what Labour hopes, but I suspect the car manufacturers will wait until the next General Election before investing hard cash – assuming they have hard cash left by then.

Labour assure us that by 2011 they’ll have enough renewable energy sources feeding the National Grid to offset all the addition electricity required by these toy cars. Despite the obvious rationality and believability of this plan, I’m still left thinking, “clowns.” I wonder why?

Well, I’m thinking “clowns” because that’s exactly what they are. No offense to clowns, obviously.

But on the negative side for the LDs,  Labour’s doing a grand old job of daring us to go further.  I can see it now: Lib Dems screaming at Labour, “You’re not going far enough!” while the rest of the country backs away from us looking slightly embarrassed – and a bit scared. Except for the Greens, of course, who glower at us and call us traitors.

With Green stuff, you just can’t win. I still stand by my opinion that it’s electoral poison. The only reason this policy is even being considered is because it’s the only way the Government can dump money on the Car Industry without incuring the wrath of the EU.

The real pity is that the market will not be allowed to decide what comes after oil based engines – the politicians want to do that for us.

Imagine at the start of the Betamax/VHS war*, the British Government had decided to subsidise sales of Betamax players to encourage companies to build factories and so on. In the real world the market decided that VHS was the better technology (it had longer tapes to record onto… who knew?), and so it’s a very good thing we didn’t sink taxpayer’s money into the rival, but this is what we’re about to do to the car industry. We’re about to plough1 serious cash into the Betamax of Next Generation Personal Transportation.

At least, that’s what Labour will do to the car industry if they get a 4th term. I’m thinking… “Electric Leyland” I’m thinking… you know what? New Labour is very, very dead isn’t it?

*Let’s not have any boring Betamax Versus VHS arguments. This you can’t win, and it’ll just be humiliating for everyone involved.

1 – Thank you Blackacre, via Pedant’s Corner.

Technology, right? It gets cheaper. You get more for your money every single year. Ferocious competition to meet voracious customer demand makes things cheap.

And that’s good. 

But housing? With housing, the expectation is that they’re going to get more expensive over time. In fact, your house is supposed to get more valuable. That’s the deal, right? You take on ridiculous debt and devote a significant chunk of your income and in return you get something that generates money while you do absolutely nothing. 

In any other walk of life, there’s no such thing as a dead cert profit, but politicians are supposed to deliver it. Their careers depend on it – and with the help of nimbies, environmentalists and zealous planners, they’d still be delivering now if the world money supply had been able to keep pace. 

It’s simple: A) Ensure housing supply never meets demand and B) Have banks lend more (which they were prepared to do so long as A was true). 

Except the legacy of this almost constant increase in house prices is that, for most people, rent and mortgage payments become the single biggest drain on their incomes after taxation, and in a very real way this imposes a great deal of financial hardship – an increase in the value of a house is not an increase in wealth. It’s a reduction in the value of money. It’s a trick – and a pretty nasty one at that. 

It seems to be the British disease that we insist on protecting the value of our houses. To exceed demand for housing – and therefore bring genuine competitive forces to bear on the housing market is to advocate madness. To want better and cheaper housing, not just ‘affordable’ housing is somehow a radical and controversial idea! 

And “Affordable Housing”? Ugh. There’s a euphemism. In the real world it’s propertly like the tiny little peasant huts that are technically houses because they have multiple floors, and the soul-crushing and overpriced ‘luxury apartments’ that dehumanise even Yuppies. The market is flooded at the bottom end of the market with substandard, crappy properties.

These sorry excuses for housing have one thing in common – no-one, in their right mind, would buy these things unless they were desperate to get on the housing ladder to cash in on the fat profits everyone else seemed to be enjoying. Get on the ladder, that’s what matters! Sell it in a year and buy something better with your profits! Houses really do print money!

What makes me incomprehensibly angry about all this is the complete lack of understanding that when a house goes up in value from £100k to £150k, it’s not that the house is worth 50% more – it’s that money buys you 33% less. We’re all being made poorer, and yet we cheer it and welcome it as if it’s a marvellous boon to our civilisation. It’s called the “Feel Good Factor” in fact – which is apt. You feel good, while we’re actually witnessing people being empoverished by rampant inflation in the cost of roofs over heads. But it feels good, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?

So what to do? I look around Halifax, where I live, and I see those old victorian terraces, built as housing for the very poorest mill workers, and I see that even these bottom of the rung houses are actually quite desirable now – and out of my price league, despite being a fairly well paid computer programmer. That houses and flats being built more than a hundred years after these terraces are even smaller and less generously fitted. Something’s not right. In this particular market, we’re going backwards, in the opposite direction to everything else. 

I say again: What to do?

So 50 hours of compulsory “community service” is to be demanded of all 16-19 year olds, under plans that form part of Gordon Brown’s “please for the love of God don’t make us clean up this mess” manifesto for the next General Election.

Oh where to begin with this?

Let’s talk about enforcement, because, ultimately, if it’s going to be compulsory then there needs to be some sort of disincentive for evasion.

Will these young adults be subject to fines for failure to comply with a work order?

One can easily imagine that the well heeled will simply pay the fines as a means of getting their offspring out of this indentured labour.  To guarantee compliance, as with convictions for cannabis use in the states, being banned from attending university will be the only means of ensuring all children, from all backgrounds, are forced into this unpaid, unvoluntary labour. Or, at least, the nice middle class kids will attend, while the kids from the estates will find themselves in an even worse situation.

Of course, it may be that the parents will be the ones that suffer the burden of fines – it will be have to be determined who, exactly, is responsible. There are children that cannot be made to go to school… how do you make them attend a compulsory work order?

See, from a libertarian perspective this is simply a means of taxing young people. It’s taxation ‘in kind’ because they have no wealth worth taxing, but as yet they remain an unplundered resource, so they’ll pay it in pure labour. Based on 3.2 million 15-19 year olds (2001 census), and a minimum wage of £3.53, that equates to a levy over half a billion raised on the least powerful, the least democratically enfranchised part of the British workforce.

It took the Ancient Egytians an average of 15,000 people working over 10 years to build a pyramid (with numbers of workers peaking at 40,000 at times). With this scheme, Brown could build a pyramid in over 9 years (assuming that they get their half a billion worth of free labour once every 3 years). I just thought I’d put that in a bit of context for you.

If we accept that it’s good for the state and the nation to have state mandated compulsory labour (also known as slavery, even if it’s just for 50 hours) from 16-19 year olds, pressure will grow to have 50 hours from absolutely everyone. Think what you could do with 30,000,000 people doing 50 hours of work? A windfall to the state of £86 billion (based on full national minimum wage) every single year!

Taking cash is one thing, and there’s enough problems with that as it is – but taking tax in kind through labour is a whole new level of evil, as far as I’m concerned – and it must be fought, stopped and whatever else necessary to prevent this abuse of human beings as commodities to be exploited.

What makes all this possible is the ID cards programme. It’s easy when all young people have ID cards. You’ve got a centralised database of all the ‘eligible’ teenagers, and you can track how many hours they’ve ‘donated voluntarily’ through that. No exemptions, no excuses.

Worst still, they’re not going to be able to vote against this, just like they can’t vote against being forced to take up ID cards.

The minds that dreamt up this policy seem to me to be sick. That this has come from the Labour Party doesn’t surprise me anymore – it would have done 10 years ago – but to me this, when I talk about ‘socialism’, is what I’m afraid of. I can’t help it. I have this irrational fear of people making me do things against my will, and a sense of anger and outrage when I see someone else being made to do something against their will, too.

Of course minors are a special case, but to exploit this is beneath contempt.

Call me weird.

UPDATE: Anton Howes kindly reminds me that he did, in fact, send me a link to a Facebook group opposing this. If Web 2.0 based Cyber activism is your thang, try this facebook group.

Tomorrow letters are going to be issued to all ISPs, large and small, demanding that details of emails, internet phone calls and browsing history be retained for 12 months.

I don’t need to say that this is unspeakably diabolical. Truly, this is the most terrifying milestone of them all. Available to the Government, for the first time ever, will be the ability to build up detailed profiles on individuals, their relationships with other people, their personal information, their sexuality, their membership of organisations, their shopping habits and in some cases their political beliefs and affliations.

Once the ISPs begin doing this, we’re all going to have to make sure we don’t look at the wrong sorts of websites – anything that might be compromising, anything, in short, you might need to explain when a Police officer or Government official pulls out a file and asks, “so what were you doing looking at this?”

I’ve looked at Mein Kamph on the internet. I’ve read Das Kapital on the internet. I’ve watched Ken Bigley being decapitated. I read political blogs from across the specrum, and occasionally that’ll include looking at stuff from fascists, Trotskyite revolutionaries, Eco-Warriors.. a full gamut of extremists and freaks in politics, religion and anything else. I like reading and discovering things in all walks of life, but how do you tell the difference between harmless intellectual curiosity and dangerous obsession that might indicate a deviant or seditious mind? 

For example, people convicted for looking at Child Porn on the internet have never successfully argued that they were ‘just curious’ about it (to my knowledge).  The crime is to look – your motives do not matter. We accept this as a society because Child Porn is one of those unforgivable, unspeakable horrors for which no succour for suspects can be tolerated. 

The prescedent is set, however, and the Government is empowering itself with the ability to find all anti-Government related activity on the internet, both producers (like me) and consumers (like you). We have to put it on blind faith that this Government or no Government after it will ever consider pushing this particular Nuclear Button. 

Of course, trying to record our browsing history for 12 months was, itself, an unspeakable Nuclear Button – and they’ve pushed that. Labour can’t stand this idea of something so huge and important they’ve got no control over, no access to and no ability to tax or regulate.  It makes me feel physically sick such is my impotent rage. 

So we face the prospect of having to try to guess what might, or might not, be compromising to look at on the internet, or who might or might not be compromising to email. I say this is a cruel and unusual punishment indeed.  It’s diabolical. It’s Machiavellian. It’s cutting the British off from a free, uncensored internet in an even nastier and more monsterous way then the Australian or Chinese  scheme. Our version uses uncertainty and fear to police the internet. Thought Police. 

What are the wrong sort of websites? Who knows. I certainly don’t. Is it better to be safe than sorry and simply not use the internet at all? Does using ‘the internet’ make us like those ‘outer party’ members who are subjected to extreme scrutiny, while the ‘proles’ who have no access to the internet are allowed to wallow in filth and muck unmonitored because they simply don’t matter enough for anyone to care what they do? 

How long it will take ISPs to implement these rules, and whether or not they will fight the Government (presumably a legal battle that lasts until, oh, say, after the next General Election) is as yet unknown.

The cost is mindboggling. An independent review suggested that something in the region of 40,000 terabytes of storage would be required by the largest ISPs. The Government’s promised to use taxpayer’s moneys to reimburse them for the costs, but 40,000 terabytes of enterprise level storage would set you back. according to my rather brief research, approximately £1.5 billion, with astronomical power and running costs requirements. Multiply that by the number of really big ISPs, and consider the effect on small ISPs and, once again, the Government’s created a mammoth barrier to entry for the ISP business and is about to dump billions and billions into storage providers. They’ll soon rethink their promise to fund all this when they discover how much it costs – or the public finds out – at which point the cost of the internet is going to rocket, ISPs are going to go bust and someone will come up with the clever idea of nationalising BT Broadband for the purposes of making it a universal public service. 

And so on.

We have to hope that this becomes a protracted legal battle and that the Tories overturn it, assuming they win. The alternative doesn’t even bear thinking about. There’s nothing that Labour do that makes this okay, that makes us happy to live with it because of all the other good things they do.