Headmistress May declares immigrants and libertarians the enemy

 

“Come with me and let’s seize the day,” UK PM Theresa May told an adoring Conservative Party conference overnight. But libertarians, foreigners? We can all can piss off.

It was unclear from the get go how a Remainer and not-so-closet authoritarian would handle the opportunities of Brexit. Would she plump for freedom and opening up Britain to the world? Or become a “Little Briton” and hunker down instinctively in her statist bunker. From the conference presentations, it looks like the latter: her Home Secretary telling the conference foreigners are taking British jobs and must be stopped (“Don’t call me racist, but …”) – a “sharp line of distinction” perhaps being drawn between true natives and those simply working there?; May herself declaring “it's not racist to worry about immigrants” (prompting wits to suggest It's not racist to worry about immigration' is the new 'I'm not racist but..'); and the hundreds-of-thousands in her party and across the land who subscribe to freer markets, smaller govt and lighter taxes were told their day is done. Get used to it.

Her enemy, she says explicitly, is the “libertarian right”:

Government can and should be a force for good [says Mrs May]; the state exists to provide what individual people, communities and markets cannot; we should employ the power of government for the good of the people. Time to reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and embrace a new centre ground in which government steps up – and not back – to act on behalf of the people.

Hers will be an “interventionist Conservative government,” she says, acting “on behalf of the people.” A populist interventionist statist then oblivious even to facts – the fact for instance that “British workers already have British jobs. The employment rate for UK nationals is the highest since at least '97 (as far back as data goes)”:

Guido Fawkes responds forcefully to May’s garbage populism, pointing out that “claiming to reject ideology is nonsense”:

May is advocating an ideology of “centrism”, statist, intervening in the economy, acceptance of perpetual borrowing and over-spending, coupled with greater intrusion by the state into the lives of individuals. Remember her Snoopers’ Charter, giving the state powers to intercept personal online data of every individual. Her conference speech last year, lest we forget, was panned by the Institute of Directors and described as “chilling and bitter”. May, whilst claiming the state is a “force for good,” is proposing to force companies to list foreign workers, an ominous and pointless intervention in the private contracts of business. She will also hint this afternoon at imposing price controls on energy companies, another interventionist policy for which the Tories rightly monstered Ed Miliband. Thatcher wanted to “roll back the frontiers of the state”. May wants “government to step up, not back.”

As Christopher Snowdon points out, this anti-liberty streak is very much Conservative, her predecessor David Cameron having told the 2008 conference that “freedom can easily turn into the idea that we all have the right to do whatever we want, regardless of trhe effect on others. That is libertarian, not Conservative – and it is certainly not me.”

He got that much right.

So there were hopes after Brexit that Britain might open itself up to the world, note necessarily completelyt opening its non-European borders but at least perhaps (re)joining the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), kicking off a Commonwealth Free Trade organisation, and even, as ACT’s David Seymour suggests, announcing a "free movement" agreement with Britain that could include the likes of Canada, Australia and the NZ …

… "Britain's revision of immigration settings is a chance to propose a free movement zone similar to what we have with Australia," said [Seymour] on Wednesday. "In the long term we could even negotiate a broader zone for citizens of Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - CANZUK."

After May’s declaration however, any part of those dreams looks like the boldest kind of fantasy.

[Hat tip Terry Barnes, Sarah O'Connor, Christopher Snowdon ,,, and Private Eye for the Headmistress jab]

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Quote of the Day: “The side-effect of rock-bottom interest rates is inequality”

 

“We know … what happens when the [central bank] starts to manipulate the financial markets by printing money. Interest rates do fall, which crushes savers. And pension funds get hit too, meaning larger liabilities for some companies and bankruptcies for others. The side-effect of rock-bottom interest rates is sky-high asset prices, delivering a windfall for the richest. It’s the best subsidy scheme ever devised for the 1 per cent.
    “QE is a magic wand of inequality.”
~ Fraser Nelson, ‘Forget QE. Theresa May should cut taxes f she wants to drive growth. – TELEGRAPH

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New Aus climate department head damned by Greenpeace – so he can’t be all bad

 

While new UK PM Theresa May was disestablishing Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change in her very first day in office – raising hope with some of us that she may be as completely wet as she appears – Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull is going the reverse route:

The Dept of Environment has been merged with Energy, which makes sense for carbon traders and the renewables industry, but perhaps not for the environment. [ref: JO NOVA]

Mind you, Greenpeace and the Greens don’t like the appointee in charge of the new super-ministry, which offers some cause for hope:

Former Greens leader Bob Brown said Mr Frydenberg would bury Australia’s environmental hopes and aspirations.
    “The pro-nuclear, pro-coal Frydenberg has been whingeing about environmental campaigns against him in his seat of Kooyong,” Mr Brown said.
    He has previously supported an end to Victoria’s moratorium on onshore gas exploration and praised Margaret Thatcher’s record on environment and climate change.

Although Thatcher’s record is not great, to be fair. There is evidence for example that it was her who helped begin the climate wailing. Nonetheless:

Greenpeace campaigner Nikola Casule said Mr Frydenberg’s views on climate change were “an embarrassing relic from a different era.”

Which sounds much more promising. As does this:

The Victoria MP has long been a supporter of nuclear energy, and has shown he is also a strong supporter of the coal industry, recently insisting it had a strong future, describing it as a “living, breathing, success story.” …
    On coal … Frydenberg said: “There is a strong moral case here,” …. “Over a billion people don’t have access to electricity. That means that more 2 billion people today are using wood and dung for their cooking.”

Which is true – and Al Gore’s wet dream would keep them that way.

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Never let a good crisis go to waste–how the new PM just turned the UK away from warmism

 

So maybe May isn’t the total ho-hoper many Britons thought she might be.

While everyone was still agog over Brexit and admiring David Cameron’s parting jokes, she moved while their gaze was averted to enthrone Boris as Foreign Secretary, and to create one new department while peremptorily disestablishing another. We’ll get to that shortly, as the media and opponents will too, eventually.

As you’d expect, most of this morning’s headlines are because she’s appointed a buffoon to head abroad and bat for Britain. But how much worse is that than the usual awful office-holders, you wonder? To cite just one contemporary example, could he be any worse than John Fricky Kerry? Could anybody? At least he won’t be inflicting James Taylor on a mourning nation. And perhaps the worst you could say for Boris is that he’ll have instant name recognition whoever and wherever he visits, and how bad’s that for a diplomat needing to open doors?

A few have noted that the new department has Brexiteer David Davis at its head, given the job of peacefully exiting Europe—which at least tells Brexiteers the May Ministry is serious about what voters have told her, and establishes a department whose final mission will be to make itself unnecessary. (Let’s hope his first decision is to give certainty to EU citizens resident in Britain that their residencey remains permanent).

And the old department ready for the high jump? Very few have even bothered to mention it, so far, but this is really the biggest and most important surprise of all, not just because it was one of Cameron’s own love-children – both a symbol of his ministry’s all-encompassing wetness, and as a handbrake on energy use and production one of the many reasons for the country’s economic stagnation—but because it signals a major economy’s turn away from the warmist disease. It is the Department of Energy And Climate Change (DECC) and its disestablishment, says James Delingpole, drives a stake through the heart of a green vampire.

Established in 2008, DECC was a hangover from the Gordon Brown era of woeful misgovernance…
   Under the terms of the Climate Change Act – written by a green activist from Friends of the Earth called Bryony Worthington; endorsed by Cameron’s Conservative opposition and rejected by only five MPs – Britain is legally committed to more stringent “decarbonisation” targets than any other country in the world, at an annual cost of around £19 billion a year…
    Sure, DECC might have seemed on the face of it a nothing department which could safely be handed over to … losers, perverts and half wits….... [but] any department with the word “Energy” in the title – effectively puts the people who run it in charge of a goodly part of the economy…
    DECC’s final incumbent as Secretary of State was Amber Rudd – now promoted to Home Secretary. She seems to be a fervent [warmist]. But this does not appear to be a view shared by her boss Prime Minister Theresa May. Nor, perhaps even more importantly, by May’s right-hand man Nick Timothy who is an implacable opponent of the Climate Change Act….
   It’s true that the most significant benefit its closure will bring lies not so much in saved costs as in the likelihood of reduced regulation. In Britain, as in the rest of the world, green taxes and regulations have added a significant burden to economic growth, as well as having a distorting effect on energy markets.
    This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.

Let other countries take inspiration from its axing.

Mr Key, are you watching?

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