Rise of LPUK

This is neat, the Libertarian Party UK has its first electiony candidatey thing coming up

As part of the Cambridge County Council Elections.

Wisbech South Division

Andrew Peter Hunt - Libertarian Party
Simon John Edward King - Conservative
Mark David Plumb - Labour
Verity Jade Colbert Roscoe - Liberal Democrat
William Schooling - UK Independence Party


So if you are in the Cambridge area, and would like to offer Andrew your help and support on the ground, I am sure he will be most grateful, his contact details can be found on his blog HERE.

I am a big fan of LPUK, a supporter in fact. I'm not sure if I can join them right now so I'll just have to vote for them instead, if I have the opportunity.

There's a wee bit of controversy over the local newspaper in relevant area, the Wisbech Standard, not giving the LPUK candidate much coverage, the LPUK blog covers it here, and the candidate himself, Andrew Peter Hunt, covers it here.

Windfall taxing MPs

Over on Obsidian's World, he suggests if MPs are going to trough up on expenses using taxpayers money, they ought to be taxed:-

In that spirit I propose the following:

* A 90% tax on all profits from houses sold during, or within a 15 year period after they leave, their career as an MP or Lord. Made retroactively for the last 20 years.
* A 50% tax on all public sector pensions over 30k p.a.
* A 75% tax on all MPs income that isn't related to their primary job as an MP.

All monies go into a pot and is annually split and distributed to the long term unemployed.

Now whilst he's clearly insane in suggesting the money is given to the unemployed (what? we're paying people to be have careers in being unemployed?) there's still merit in the plan. Not so much clawing monies back from MPs, but the state profiting from them.

It we tax them too heavily, like big business, they'll find loopholes and ways to avoid tax, but there's probably some level of taxing that is just enough of a deterrent to stop them troughing 'too much' but also pays revenue into the treasury.

Would that level be 49%?

Like I mean, the 90% tax on property sales will just encourage them to put property into trusts for their children or something, and they'll avoid paying tax entirely. Or even, they'll just keep the properties once the taxpayer has paid for them and rent them out in definitely. As soon as MPs lose their seats, they'll remain as landlords.

Ooh, how about the state retains ownership MP's property, however expensive or expansive that property portfolio ends up being, essentially using the MPs and their talents as letting agents.

This is all bullshit of course.

My money's on the second home allowance being abandoned, the 2012 Olympic Village being converted into MPs flats, and for all expense claims some kind of live Twitter feed application being set up with discussion available possible for every single claim.

The problem is, the current set of MPs aren't going to do a damned thing about it, they're just going to retain their positions for as long as possible, until the election next year. What we need is a quick general election now, with candidates putting forward their honest credentials and party's manifestos covering proposals for the new expenses system. Then the propblem will go away in a month rather than being dragged out until the middle of next year.

Conforming feet

Dug from the depths of the internet, here's a photie of feet that have worn shoes for much of their life, like most people in the west.

And here's a photie of feet that have never worn shoes, natural feet, if you will.

Although its not like our feet are bound like chinese ladies, we're still a long way of the natural look.

Ranking Libertarians

Elsewhere on the internet Brian Micklethwait has done a second version of his list of UK libertarian blogs. Me, without paid employment, my life is empty and meaningless, which gives me plenty of time for spreadsheets and internetting. So, here's the updated list, ranked by number of blog reactions according to technorati:-

1. Guido Fawke's Blog (7257 reactions link)
2. Samizdata (3352 reactions link)
3. Devils Kitchen (2198 reactions link)
4. Burning Our Money (2083 reactions link)
5. Daniel Hannan (1672 reactions link)
6. Adam Smith Institute (1400 reactions link)
7. UK Bubble (1261 reactions link)
8. Old Holborn (1065 reactions)
9. Craig Murray (948 reactions)
10. An Englishman's Castle (877 reactions link)
11. Tim Worstall (794 reactions)
12. PJC Journal (732 reactions link)
13. Obnoxia The Clown (689 reactions)
14. Mark Wadsworth (636 reactions)
15. Capitalists@Work (545 reactions link)
16. UK Libertarian Party (529 reactions)
17. Bishop Hill (386 reactions link)
18. Ambush Predator ( 385 reactions link)
19. Libertarian Alliance: Blog (334 reactions)
20. The Last Ditch (333 reactions)
21. Little Man What Now ( 326 reactions)
22. Looking for a voice ( 320 reactions)
23. Douglas Carswell ( 314 reactions)
24. Freeborn John ( 291 reactions)
25. Underdogs Bite Upwards (280 reactions link)
26. Lander Underclass (269 reactions)
27. A Very British Dude ( 268 reactions link)
28. Longrider ( 264 reactions link)
29. Huntsman ( 257 reactions link)
30. Brian Micklethwait ( 250 reactions link)
31. IEA blog ( 210 reactions link)
32. Appalling Strangeness ( 182 reactions)
33. Counting Cats in Zanzibar ( 168 reactions link)
34. UK Liberty ( 153 reactions link)
35. Henry North London (144 reactions)
36. CharlesCrawford.biz ( 143 reactions link)
37. Freedom and Whisky ( 134 reactions)
38. Sinclairs Musings ( 124 reactions)
39. Anglo Saxon Chronicle ( 109 reactions link)
40. Taking Liberties ( 98 reactions link)
41. John Trenchard ( 94 reactions link)
42. The Welfare State We're In (89 reactions)
43. Blognor Regis ( 80 reactions link)
44. Liberty Alone ( 79 reactions)
45. Dick Puddlecote ( 76 reactions link)
46. Neuearbeit Macht Frei ( 75 reactions link)
47. Womble on Tour ( 63 reactions link)
48=. From the Barrel of a Gun (52 reactions)
48=. Shades of Grey (52 reactions)
50. Charlotte Gore ( 49 reactions link)
51. Resistance is Useless ( 45 reactions link)
52. Anna Raccoon ( 32 reactions link)
53. Their Contempt for you is Total ( 31 reactions link)
54. ill and ancient ( 30 reactions link)
55. Robs Blog ( 29 reactions)
56=. CrozierVision ( 23 reactions)
56=. Mark's Any Musings ( 23 reactions link)
58=. Woking Libertarians ( 19 reactions link)
58=. No Borders South Wales ( 19 reactions link)
60. Big Brother Britain ( 18 reactions link)
61=. AngloAustria (17 reactions link)
61=. Englands Freedom (17 reactions)
63=. Bella Gerens (16 reactions link)
63=. Edinburgh Sucks (16 reactions link)
63=. Public Interest (16 reactions)
66. Voyage of Discovery (15 reactions link)
67. One that really is most unhappy about this (13 reactions link)
68. South West Libertarians (12 reactions link)
69=. Boateng & Demetriou (11 reactions link)
69=. Ferraris for all (11 reactions link)
70. Libertarian Party South East (10 reactions link)
71=. Craggy Island (8 reactions link)
71=. Picking Losers (8 reactions link)
73. Panem et Circenses (7 reactions link)
74. Paul Lockett (6 reactions link)
75. Jerub-Baal's Spleen Vent (5 reactions link)
76=. A Brief Encounter (4 reactions link)
76=. A Libertarian's Perspective (4 reactions link)
78=. Towards Mutual Benefit (3 reactions link)
78=. Life, Liberty and Proper Tea (3 reactions link)
78=. Mara's Una Musings (3 reactions link)
78=. Marmelade Sandwich (3 reactions link)
78=. North West Libertarians (3 reactions link)
78=. Nough.point.zero (3 reactions link)
84. Digger (2 reactions link)
85=. Disobeying the Whip (1 reaction link)
85=. Liberty Column (1 reaction link)
85=. Marsh Harrier (1 reaction link)
85=. North Briton (1 reaction link)
89=. Constantly Furious (0 reactions link)
89=. Think This (0 reactions link)
89=. This Observer (0 reactions link)
89=. Obsidian's World (0 reactions link)

The following sites are no longer updated or may have mysteriously moved to some other server and without anyone.

Natalie Solent ( 43 reactions link)
Bag's Rants ( 37 reactions link)
Oxford Libertarian Society (24 reactions)
Michael Jennings (15 reactions)
Caligula's Palace (14 reactions link)
Don't Hold Your Breath (5 reactions link)
Garner blog (3 reactions link)
Sleepwalking Britain (2 reactions link)
Liberal Bob (0 reactions link)

Counting Cats in Zanzibar will be disappointed to learn that he's fallen eleven places since ten days ago, not as disappointed as I am with this blog falling twenty-two places. I guess it'll be fun to try and catch back up.

Also to note is Charlotte Gore's blog, she changed servers recently, if we were counting her old blog, Reluctantly Lib Dem, with 321 reactions (link), she'd be ranked 22nd, but as she said previously, its the price you pay for moving domains. That said, ten days ago technorati had new new site on 31 reactions and now its 50, so she's catching up quick.

I have a pang. Whilst I love spreadsheets and graphs and rankings and stuff, its in my blood, it gives me warm fuzzy feelings, this list is ripping off and stealing Brian Michlethwait's hard work in compiling the list. Sure, I'm adding quality information, and enriching the original list, and I give Brian credit for first publishing the list, but I still have this pang of guilt, that well, its essentially just link bait.

On the other hand, my wee spreadsheet says he's got 250 blog reactions compared to my lowly 30, so its not like I'm any kind of competition.

Hmm.

Job vacancies update - 07-MAY-2009

Total vacancies for the UK
384,333

Up 3.01% on yesterday
Down 5.25% on a week ago
Down 7.08% on last month

This graph shows the total number of job vacancies for the past eight weeks.

This graph shows the nine sectors with the most jobs on Reed.co.uk and how they've lost vacancies over the past eight weeks.



Everything's pretty similar to a week ago, same sectors are booming, the overall picture is quite gloomy, doesn't look like last week's budget has made any difference on the number of job vacancies out there. Aye, it'll take a few weeks / months / years to filter through, but there's no sign of anything yet.

If the unemployment figures are at 2.10 million, you've got around 5.6 candidates per job vacancy. National Statistics Online also has a figure of 7.85 million for economically inactive folk of working age, that'll be the worklessness figure, gives you 20 or so candidates per job vacancy.

Camden Social Housing

Trying to get my head round it all.

The BBC has this

About 17,000 people are on the housing list at Camden Council but the authority wants to renovate up to 500 homes for rental to raise revenue.

Theo Blackwell submits this

Camden council is set to rent out hundreds of flats on the private sector market, despite waiting lists being 17,000 strong.

The story, regarded by one councillor from another London borough I spoke to as "outrageous", has attracted widespread criticism, even making it to the BBC.

The Mighty Camden New Journal also carried this story

There are 17,000 people waiting for a council home in Camden and the council has shown little sign of making a dent in the queue over the last decade. Objectors are angry at the idea that people in desperate circumstances might miss out on a flat because it had been rented out to somebody with far more comfortable economic circumstances.

Raedwald carries a story about The 'Housing Demand' Myth

In every call for an increase in social rented housing, the need is justified by quoting that some 4.5m people or 1.8 million households are now on waiting lists. Have you ever asked yourselves where these millions of people are living now? Are there great tented camps in Hyde Park? Are they sleeping in your High Street? Well, since the latest figures for 'rough sleepers' are astonishingly low, I guess almost all of these 4.5 million people are already living somewhere with a roof over their heads and a bed to sleep in.

Which might have been triggered by Peter Hetherington's piece in Teh Guardian

With 4.5 million people on a waiting list for social housing in England alone, and the level of building failing to meet rising household growth, the need for more and better homes becomes more urgent by the day. Remember, the government's own housing targets are based on an extra 240,000 homes annually from 2016, but this year we might be lucky to reach 70,000. Alarmingly, that's half last year's level - itself 19% lower than 2007.

I myself believe that amongst doing the law and order business, rubbish collections and defense, the state (local/national government) has two wee additional duties, namely providing shelter for homeless people and providing low cost housing for paupers. (Me, I'm a pauper, so I get Housing Benefit and I get to stay in the same flat I stayed in when I was fully employed).

Anyhoo, I think out of all I've read so far, Raedwald's piece provides the most illumination, questioning the nature of the 4.5 million on the waiting lists for social housing. The 17,000 in Camden are the same mob. I'm not questioning that there are some vulnerable and deperate people in need of cheap social housing, but what's the make up of the 17,000?

How many are contently staying with their parents or boyfriends and just think it would be nice to have a social housing? What's the breakdown? How many people on that waiting list, just ticked the box without actually needing to? How many people need social housing and how many would just like to pay less rent?

Sure its an admin thing, but its also a cheap fix and lets the debate be a bit more honest about the numbers involved.

In Camden they do it by points, you get points for being ill, for being vulnerable, for having kids, for being on the waiting list for a long time. You get to bid on properties with how many points you have.

So, to validate the 17,000, it would be neat look at the distributiony thing graph, to see if there's like a straight line from the folk with the most points to the folk with the fewest or is it a logarithmic sort of line, which tails off sharply? And furthermore, can we prod at it and see what the graph looks like if you ignore points for being on the waiting list for a long time.

Should it be a 'waiting list' or some kind of 'priority list'.

Pigs, flying

Tom Watson MP, Minister for Digital Engagement, on news that lots of people were searching google for Swine Flu last month:-

As a very large number of click throughs for swine flu went to the wikipedia page, should public health officials spend time ensuring that the page is accurate and up to date? If not, should our content editors at DirectGov and NHS Direct be working with Wikipedians to make sure that wikipedia is providing the very best health care advice on how do deal with the H1N1 virus?

The hitwise article he's talking about states

DirectGov ranked second, although it – like NHS Choices – paid for most of its traffic.

People trust and rely on wikipedia far more than government websites, even though we pay for the government websites through our taxes and wikipedia is free.

My two cents:-
What makes Tom Watson think that 'public health officials', DirectGov and NHS Direct know better than wikipedia?

Since people trust wikipedia more than state funded websites, won't it contaminate the brand?

Like as Dave Cole off of Twitter says

@tom_watson No, not as a corporate entity; it sets a bad precedent. What would happen if (say) the MoD edited pages on the Iraq war?

An extra cent, from me, for free:-
Could the government save a bit of money by not investing / spending / buying sponsored links / adverts for its websites?

Its all propaganda, that's what's getting paid for, so the government can be seen to be doing something.

There was an advert in the Guardian, a big full page advert, those things don't come cheap, they come expense, it told me to use a hankie when I sneeze and blow my nose. My gran told me that for free. Can the state not take my money and spend it on telling me the same things my gran told me.

Actually, fuck it, I was trying to to blog this one, but here we go...

The other week I went along to a comedy night, Beat the Blues, with Peyvand Khorsandi & Hils Barker, it was very funny, there was even a surprise appearance of Shappi Khorsandi. Anyhoo, one of Hils Barker's lines was about how on the London Underground there are adverts advising people to drink five glasses of water a day. The government is prescribing that people drink water to stop being dehydrated.

Human's have been drinking water for hundreds of years, dare I say thousands of years, in fact, we always have done, it keeps us alive. Its fucking ludicrous that the government are spending money (that they don't have) on adverts telling people to drink water.

Whatever next?

Well, clearly its the adverts telling people how to breath.

Can they no fuck off and stop investing / spending money?

The photies later

As promised previously (top provided by Fashion Targets Breast Cancer / Topshop , jeans - model's own)

I am a fuckwit and you might be too

Here's a graph of how the Go Gordon petition on the Number10 website has been accumulating signatures since last Friday when Kalvis Jansons started it and it was covered in The Register.


It'll be over 40,000 by the time you read this.

And here's Chris Qwghhlm calling everyone who signed a fuckwit.

For starters, we already have a mechanism for kicking Prime Ministers out of power. They’re called elections. True, they only come along every 4-5 years, but then democracies can only function with some continuity in administration. If you don’t want to wait till next year to cast your vote, then fucking tough, and count your blessings you live in a country where the citizenry can vote leaders out of power.

Second, you’re missing the wood for the trees. Gordon Brown’s premiership has been nothing short of a disaster, but it’s been very much a team effort. It isn’t just the man at the top, it’s the whole bloody team around him. Darling, Mandelson, Smith, Blears, Geoff fucking Hoon. Not to mention the old guard of Blair, Clarke, Blunkett, etc. setting it all up. The whole lot of them are responsible for the miserable idea-starved philosophy of New Labour, with its craving for power, its thrall for made-up wealth and its authoritarian managerialism in every department.

Third, what comes next? If Brown resigns, then Harman or Miliband or possibly Straw or some other New Labour apparatchik takes his place. A PM resigning does not mean a change in the ruling party, or even an election, and you don’t have to go that far back in history (Wilson, Thatcher, Blair) for examples. If you’re not happy with the current government then you really should be making a case for what the next one should be bringing (and fuck knows, the current Opposition need every bit of help in that department).

Finally, you’re a fuckwit because you’re a petition-signing fuckwit. Petitions have some very good uses - raising awareness of a previously unknown issue, or for co-ordinating action for the disadvantaged and disparate, or to help lobby for changing unjust laws. But these don’t account for many of petitions on the Number 10 site. Many of them are just ways for the inarticulate and incoherent to vent frustration at something they dislike, and petitioning the Prime Minister to resign is the stellar example. It has no hope of changing anything. It advocates nothing positive whatsoever. All it is is another way of childishly wailing “I don’t like you” to someone who doesn’t give a fuck, just so you can congratulate yourself with the delusion that you are sticking it to The Man. Well done, you must be so proud. Fuckwit.

Maybe he has a point. Maybe he's just very bitter about something.

A bit harsh calling so many people fuckwits though.

If you gave the people of the UK a general election we'd vote out Gordon Brown, but an election is a long way away, so the people are expressing their views in any way possible and right now, there's a petition on the Number10 website.

Back in the hours after the April 1st protests and some lefty moaning that right-wing bloggers were strangely quiet about it, Mr Eugenides posted a thoughtful piece about how lefties go on protest marches and right-wingers just want to be left alone. And so I reckon its the same sort of thing with signing petitions.

Some people go on protest marches to express themselves, some people sign petitions, and some people try to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and I'm not going to be all judgemental on anyone's ass and call them fuckwits if I don't subscribe to the same means of expression as them.

Blog stat pron - April

So, according to google analytics, for April, this blog got:-

927 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,823 Pageviews

Compared to March's

1,046 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,438 Pageviews

Bit of a dip from last month's titanic heights, but still healthier than in the past. I guess its cos of not so many interesting posts, well, the Ian Tomlinson things got a lot of traffic and the link baiting lists of other blogs, everyone loves those. Must try harder for original content though.

These are my top referers for April (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook (70 visitors)
2. Twitter (50 visitors)
3. Counting Cats in Zanzibar (44 visitors)
4. Lib Dem Voice (27 visitors)
5. Bloglines (17 visitors)
6. Technorati (17 visitors)
7. Matt Wardman (16 visitors)
8. Landed Underclass (12 visitors)
9. Liberal Conspiracy (9 visitors)
10. Brian Micklethwaite (7 visitors)

So quality posts, with original content seem to be paying off in terms of visitors more than any kind of comment pieces.

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during April.

1. Facebook IQ test gubbins (181 views)
2. Liberty or Dearth (89 views)
3. Locations of cameras round Cornhill (68 views)
4. Guide to doing animations on Windows Movie Maker (45 views)
5. Origami instructions (33 views)
6. Final moments of Ian Tomlinson (32 views)
7. Breast Cancer Bloggery (30 views)
8. Last month's blog stat pron (28 views)
9. Facebook Scramble graphs (22 views)
10. Facebook Scrambles statistics (21 views)