'Nother Solent

Don't push your luck, health-wowsers.

Is it usual to publish private correspondence supplied as evidence to House of Commons Select Committees? The reason I ask is that the BBC gleefully reports that derogatory comments about smokers made in internal memos by the staff of advertising agencies working for tobacco companies have been published on the internet under the title "tobaccopapers.com". What surprised me was the source of the evidence: the "tobaccopapers.com" press release says that "The Committee [referring to the Health Select Committee - NS] demanded that the tobacco industry's top five UK advertising agencies release all relevant internal documentation relating to their advertising and marketing activities on tobacco accounts."

So far as I know Select Committees have always had and used wide powers to demand evidence. But the publication of that evidence for propaganda purposes seems to be new.

If I am wrong, and this is all quite usual, what does that do to the incentives for honesty on the part of those who submit evidence?

I hope the law on privacy and breach of confidence was followed. Or don't those who make the law have to follow it? Somehow I'm not convinced that Simon North, contemptuously quoted (and quite possibly quoted out of context - his remark could well refer to an ordinary workplace crisis) here, gave his full informed consent. It seems something of an abuse of position that Her Majesty's Government as represented by the National Health Service should jeer at the inflecities of expression of one of the citizens it is meant to serve. Does Mr North get a right of reply, I wonder?

The "Tobacco papers" website was funded by NHS Scotland and the charity Cancer Research UK. Next time either body earnestly laments how desperately short of vital funds it is, remember what it did have the money for.

As it happens, I see what the scornful ad-men meant. My apologies to all the cultured smokers I know are out there, but in my brain the neural pathways linking the concept "smoker" and the concept "downmarket" are pretty well-worn, particularly if I picture the smoker as a woman. Those who wish to discourage women from smoking should accept with gratitude the tremendous help given to their cause by the low social status of the habit and stop there. If they carry on pushing they may find that nicotine re-acquires the rebellious glamour that helped popularise it among women in the first place. This may already be happening: did you know that the number of young women smokers is going up?

There's yet another update

, or a clarification at any rate, to the 'More on cakes and famines post' below.

In the land of Mordor, where the lawyers lie...

Even the Dark Lord is subject to legal scrutiny. (Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Nothing to see here, move along.

The chalk outline you see on this space marks the place where I killed a post linking to Chris Bertram talking about the Irish Famine. Don't be sad for it, it was resuscitated and reincarnated as an update to my "More on cakes and famines" post yesterday.

Were YOU left out of the capture of Saddam Hussein?

Call Happy Fun Pundit. No laugh, no fee.

Poison is worse than a big stick.

I can't get my head round the latest proposals from the Home Secretary. He wants to remove social security benefits from asylum seekers. In some cases that would have the effect of putting the children of failed asylum seekers into care.

I can't quite figure out whether Blunkett sees the bit about putting children into care as a problem his policy must and shall deal with or as a desirable part of the policy, the part that gives it teeth. Probably Mr Blunkett has his own reasons for being unclear on this point.

For the moment, let's forget all my wild see-saws on the subject of immigration. Let's also forget that I support the removal of social security benefits from everybody in the country. Can we just assume for this post that the consensus view, "welfare OK - legal immigration OK - illegal immigration not OK", is the correct one. Then it's the job of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to decide who stays and the responsibility of the courts and the rozzers to throw out those refused entry, if they won't go of their own accord.

Full stop. That's it. Do your job.

Meanwhile it is the job of the social workers to decide which children go into care. (Again, I leave aside all consideration of whether this is an ideal state of affairs.) Proper grounds for putting children into care are such things as cruelty, neglect or incapacity on the part of the parents, or because the children are orphans.

Full stop. That's it. Do your job.

The fact that the parents are in breach of the Immigration Act should have nothing to do with it. Thousands of parents all over the country are in breach of thousands of our many laws. Their children aren't taken. (The criminals may be taken from their children and put in prison, but that's another matter.) Never before have I heard a minister defend the idea that children who were not at risk should be taken into care merely because having them there might be a useful tool to get the desired behaviour from their parents.

As I said, my own opinions on immigration are divided. But Mr Blunkett's aren't. If he's going to eject someone, better that he send men with truncheons and get on with it. Almost anything is preferable to stooping to make the poisonous threat "we can take your children, you know."

It is typical of the way one failed part of the system tries to pass the buck to another part that hasn't failed yet.

A 'Lunch On Shoes' Moment From Cherie.

Scott Burgess of The Daily Ablution comments on the way Cherie Booth (Mrs Tony Blair) is sucking up to the Saudis. She tells the Saudi Ambassador that it's sad that so many Westerners have got it into their silly little heads that Saudi women are not treated as equals.

Maybe she doesn't see it as a problem that Saudi women are not pemitted to drive cars because she and her female peers don't drive their own cars either. "Qu'elles emploient des chauffeurs."

Jackie D doesn't fisk often

. She has to be in the right mood for it to work properly. She was in the right mood.

More on cakes and famines.

Peter Cuthbertson of Conservative Commentary suggests two more links, both from National Review: this one by Jonah Goldberg on Marie Antoinette (it's very funny, contains some good points, but is so bitchy that it actually had me feeling that Goldberg had been unfair to liberal movie stars) and this much more serious one on the Irish Famine. Also, there are some updates to my earlier posts. Scroll down.

UPDATE, Thursday 18th: More on the Irish famine from Chris Bertram in Crooked Timber.

This is really a separate subject, but you may notice that Chris Bertram deleted some of a comment by Dan Hardie referring to the views on World War II held by Paul Dunne of the Shamrockshire Eagle. I'm not arguing with his editorial decision that going so far off-topic is not allowed in Crooked Timber comments - but I am under no such restriction. If you are curious, "The Shamrockshire Eagle" is the same pro-IRA blog that Oliver Kamm had an argument about with Ryan in Manchester, as a side issue to the well known debate about the Red Army Fraction. Dunne's opinions float somewhere in the space where anti-imperialism of the Chomskyite sort stretches out tendrils to the extreme right. He isn't a Nazi. He just doesn't think the Nazis were strikingly worse than the Allies. For instance he says that "Hitler's economic policies (or more accurately those of Schacht) were classic Keynesianism, and quite similar to those pursued by Roosevelt in the same period, up to and including agressive war as a means of curing domestic problems." He also holds that being in the German sphere of influence following a Nazi victory would have been no worse than being in the British sphere of influence. He regrets that so many Irishmen volunteered for the British army in WWII, saying "This is shown by the tens of thousands of Irish volunteers who fought for the crown (including, I am sorry to say, members of my own family)". He praises Seán Russell and Frank Ryan, two IRA men who joined forces with the Nazis, on the grounds that at least they fought the English.

Does all this make his other opinions, about the Irish famine, for instance, wrong? No. But it is relevant to assessing them.

FINAL UPDATE/CLARIFICATION, Saturday 20th Dec. I had an email from Paul Dunne. It was private, so I won't quote from it or argue with it. However I think I can legitimately correct two misunderstandings that stemmed from my own lack of clarity in Thursday's post, since others may also have been misled.

1) In "...not strikingly worse than the Allies" I should have said Western Allies. I had in mind the quote about Roosevelt immediately following, as well as the mention of British vs German spheres of influence.

2) Regarding the same Roosevelt quote, I should have made clear that to me the damning part came after the second comma. I only quoted the earlier part about economic policies so that the whole sentence would make sense to the reader.

I don't think Mr Dunne necessarily expected a reply to his email, but in case he did, I had better state that, having limited time and energy, I don't often get into private debates at all, and when I do it is with those with whom I share some common ground. Given the bitterness towards the IRA which I have inherited from my Irish Catholic family the necessary common ground is not present in this case.

Someone*

- the email address is familar, and I feel I ought to know who it is but I don't - someone writes:

Oh, about the Russian pun you mentioned vis a vis aromatherapy and 'aroma terrorism,' it does work in Russian because Russian transcribes
'th' into 't,' and we have 'terist' for 'terrorist.'

I smirk. I swank. Knowing no Russian, I only guessed it was a pun from the tone, and I guessed right.

*It was John Costello. Born 1948. Degrees in Anthropology/Archaeology.
Proprietor, Fossicker Press.
Translator "Those Who Survive" and "Alice: the Girl From Earth." SF fan. At time of writing had Stargate playing in the background and planned to
watch Sobaka Baskervilei, with V. Livanov as Sherlok Holms.

A grim bit of historical info

I didn't know from Michael Jennings:

The brutality [in Belgian Congo under Leopold] was exposed by a passionate English advocate of free trade named Henry Morel, who founded the Congo Reform Movement after observing that the ships sailing into Antwerp were full of rubber and other things of great value. The ships going out contained nothing of value, except for some firearms and ammunition. From this Morel (correctly) deduced that the only explanation was slave labour.

There might be modern equivalents to this deduction. Not North Korea - the place is full of slave camps, yes, but nothing of value comes out as well as nothing going in. But has anyone looked into whether anything much goes into certain parts of China from which streams of electronic gadgets and soft toys certainly do flow out? I'm sure 90% of the fluffy bunnies with MADE IN CHINA stamped on their backsides are made by comparatively free people and represent steps on the way to making that "comparatively" obsolete. The other 10% I worry about.

Diana Dlugash

writes:

"I just started reading your blog and, thus far, I am really enjoying it. But I saw David Gillies' explanation of the "Let them eat cake" quote. While it is a more interesting explanation than some others (not to mention more in tune with Libertarian sympathies by displaying Marie Antoinette as a misguided person with liberal values whose belief in government supported good deeds leads to bad consequences), the lady in question never actually said it. As explained in Straight Dope she was 10 years old and not in any position of power when that line was first recorded.

"As I continue my way through your archives I want to tell you thanks for giving me such an interesting diversion from finals."

"...diversion from finals..." Look, just keep reading. I might just be able to save you from having the qualifications to get an extremely well paid job. Instead let me direct you into a life of wholesome frugality and blogging.

UPDATE: David Gillies writes:

OK, I admit I boobed on the Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake thing. But the ordinance was a real one, although sadly this is all I've been able to turn up as evidence: link.

An interesting aspect of this cite is that, mirabile dictu, it appears that the law still stands in part!

Tim Blair and Peter Briffa have both flown off the handle about the same engagingly loopy article by Mr Monibot. Personally I blame the Sumerians.

Jim Bennett

writes:

"Gary Farber seems to be conflating the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which were passed more or less at the same time. The Civil Rights Act overrode what was left of the state segregationist laws that were still standing by 1965, and carried additional civil and criminal remedies for discrimination in the public marketplace. The Voting Rights Act overrode the de-facto practices of Southern states that had the effect of making it impossible for black people to vote in most parts of the South. Without having read the Murray piece in question, but being familiar with his general arguments, I believe he is pointing out that de jure segregation as practiced from 1895 on was already a dead duck; courts had already begun overturning the laws after Brown v. Board of Education knocked down the "Separate but equal" argument of the Supremes in Plessey v. Ferguson. Meanwhile pressure on nationwide chains was ending segregation in most major facilties in the South. On the other hand, the Voting Rights Act triggered the real revolution in the South; black voters, black office holders, and white politicians who had to start paying attention to blacks, like Thurmond and Wallace.

"With the Voting Rights Act, I think almost all of the change that did happen would have happened even if the CRA had not been passed; conversely, without the VRA, the CRA wouldn't have been nearly as effective.

"Perhaps this is what Murray meant."

Big killers.

Good post from Marcus at Harry's place on killer ideologies, left and right. There are some interesting if vituperative comments on the origins of Nazism.

When taking a break from blaming all the world's mass murders on leftists I like to blame all the world's famines on them. Chris Bertram writes:

An overdogmatic post on famines IMHO. The BBC report you link to reports on Sen's views but misrepresents them. Sen's central finding on the causes of famine is that famines don't happen in democracies. Sure, Marxist or "Marxist" dictatorships are vulnerable to them, but so are non-Marxist dictatorships and any regime where the government can ignore mass starvation with impunity. Your emphasis on property rights doesn't convince: where colonial administrations have been undemocratic but rigorous in their enforcement of private property and the market famine has not been avoided - the classic cases being 19th century India and Ireland.

(This is actually a comment to a Biased BBC post. I'm posting it here because the subject of discussion is no longer even tangentially the BBC. )

Hmm. Well I did say property rights were a cause of famine, not the cause of famine. Unlike Chris I haven't read Sen and I don't know much about Bengal - but my impression of the story of the Irish famine is that although much is made of the laissez-faire objections raised at the time to state aid, much less is made of the malign effect of all the tariffs that Britain imposed on Ireland to stop the Irish competing with us. For instance the Irish linen industry arose because British textile barons sucessfully lobbied to kill the Irish cotton industry. Britain put the kibosh on Ireland diversifying, leaving it as a producer of primary resources i.e. vulnerable. Behind, above and all round that, of course, was the fact that Ireland was not free. The property rights of Catholic peasants were not nearly so rigorously enforced as those of higher station. In that respect Chris Bertram's and my opinions coincide.

I found This essay, "Learning the Wrong Lessons: Governments, Hunger and the Great Irish Famine" by Gareth G Davis on Google. There's a note at the top saying Do Not Quote, so I won't. But it argues that the reason such large numbers died was that (a) the potato blight is a devastating disease, (b) state efforts to help in the first year were counter-productive, in that they disrupted the normal mechanisms of importing food, and (c) the Irish were already poor, and it's poor people who die in famines.

I'd also heard (OK, I know "I'd also heard" is not very impressive - perhaps readers will educate me further) that well-intentioned efforts of the part of government and gentry to promote the potato, so ideally suited to Ireland's climate, had meant that Irish farmers concentrated on that one crop. Then along came the Blight.

Gary Farber writes to take issue with this quote from Charles Murray, that was up here the other day:

"...that the various Civil Rights Acts had little to do with the eventual dismantling of segregation."

"I'm too tired to go into any detail right now, but that is so very breathtakingly wrong. And I really do know quite a bit about the subject. Black people had been working in an organized way for civil rights since the end of the civil war (and long before, when allowed to, for that matter). It wasn't until they were given legal and physical protection to organize and register to vote that it made any significant difference. "

Actually, I am not so far from agreement as one might think. If I'd been thinking straight I'd have put more context around the quote. Murray's book Losing Ground isn't really about the earlier tranche of Civil Rights Acts that did what the name says: enforced equal protection of the laws and equal rights to vote. What it is about is the way that despite the reforms of the early sixties designed to help them, life seemed to have got worse for the poorest Americans from the 1960s to the 1980s when the book was written. Food stamps, Medicaid, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, not to mention the court decisions that from 1965 onwards enshrined various preferences designed to help blacks... all that, but a decline in hope. Eventually one has to ask whether the 'despite' shouldn't be a 'because of'.

Here's another good quote, from near the end of the book:

It seems that those who legislate and administer and write about social policy can tolerate any increase in actual suffering so long as the system does not explicitly permit it.

Not for the likes of us.

MPs getting special VIP treatment under the NHS can use aliases to protect their privacy. Handy. When "The People's Avenger" passes his parliamentary pair "Righteous Dude" in the clap clinic corridor they can both avert their eyes and pretend not to know the other.

Ach, that was a bit mean. I should try to avoid reflexive cynicism about politicians. One job I had required me to skim-read Hansard every day. I came away with more respect for MPs, not less. They are not usually corrupt. An ordinary MP's life frequently combines stress, drudgery, tiredness, conflict and, by definition, lousy job security. Even a Cabinet Minister attending a glittering dinner party in Belgravia will frequently be the worst-paid person there. You know and I know that 95%of "lawmaking" is either pointless or harmful - but they don't. They think they are doing good.

But one sign of a bad system is that it insulates people from the evidence that they are not doing good. In this case politicians (not just Labour ones) lumber us with a command economy in health. The inevitable result of that is queues. Then they jump the queues.

The Labour and Lib-Dem MPs quoted who are criticising the scheme are right to do so.

What to do with Saddam?

I don't know, but it's a luxury problem.

I have another reason for happiness

closer to home. The boy I mentioned in this post, who nearly died from his injuries after being hit by a car, has passed the crisis point and is making good progress.

Smile. Be happy.

Are you sure it was Saddam, Mr Bremer? Because the guy looks an awful lot like Fidel.

UPDATE: Yes. Mr Bremer is sure. Bet Saddam really regrets (a) telling the pizza delivery man his home address and (b) going for the 'Fires of Hell' Xtra-Hot Chili Topping.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Not Fidel. Not Karl Marx. Get the awful truth from David Janes.