I wonder whether they've censored "Nineteen Eighty-Four" yet?

From Part One, Chapter 7, as printed in 1976:

Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston... He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy hair, his face pouched and seamed with thick negroid lips.

If anybody has a more recent print, I'd love to know what happened to that sentence.

UPDATE: Lucy (in the comments) confirms that the sentence in book she bought in Canada in 2012 is as follows: "Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston... He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed, with protuberant lips."
--------------------------------
A couple of other things struck me on re-reading it recently:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

There are endless articles like this trying to explain or justify why Orwell didn't make the second slogan "SLAVERY IS FREEDOM", which would fit in with the logic of the other two. I'm not convinced. I don't think it was a 'mistake' as it was clearly deliberate, but I still think it was a misjudgement on his part. Unless he wanted to troll his own readers.
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Part One, Chapter 1, on a visit to the cinema:

A woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didn't oughter of showed it not in from of kids...

I'm in two minds about this. Was Winston highlighting the proles' incapacity to distinguish between 'have' and 'of', or was Orwell highlighting that under IngSoc, not even Party workers like Winston have a basic grasp of grammar any more?

Either way, he called that one right. I have colleagues - whom you'd expect to be reasonably intelligent or well-educated - who think that 'of' is an acceptable alternative spelling of 'have'. I usually send the terse one-word reply "Have" (making sure to hit 'reply' and not 'reply all').

The original Peloton advert reminds of a chapter from Nineteen Eighty-Four

From here:

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. 

The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.

'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'

Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.

'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! ...'

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood...

Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air.

The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One- two! ...'

Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit.

'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

Why on earth anybody would pay £2,000 to be subjected to this rubbish is a mystery to me.

The Electricity Trilemma

From a recent City AM:

Margaret Thatcher’s former energy secretary [Lord Howell] said that with coal stations being phased out by 2025 and nuclear coming online “10 years beyond that”, the UK faces a huge energy gap.

“Wind can come on when the wind is blowing, and we can get up to quite a high percentage of green electricity, but there’s still a big gap.”

He also slammed successive governments’ attempts to address the country’s energy “trilemma” – reconciling affordability, supply security and decarbonisation – dubbing policy on this front a “failure”.

“We’ve got some of the most expensive energy in Europe, even more expensive than Germany. That hurts people, particularly the poorest, and hurts industry and undermines our steel industry. We’ve got the most unreliable system.”

Fair enough, that is the trilemma, those are your three constraints (reliability - cost - "greenness/sustainability"), to which different people attach different importance*.

Minitrue resolves the trilemma by sticking its fingers in its ears and whistling:

A DECC spokesperson told City A.M.: “Our priority is crystal clear – to ensure our families and businesses have access to the secure, affordable and clean energy supplies they can rely on now and in the future.”

* My view is:

1. Security is paramount - which probably means slight overcapacity; which in turn means slightly higher costs and probably prices to consumers. Electricity is so fundamental to so many things, society grinds to a halt without it, but in terms of input costs it is only a tiny percentage unless you are an aluminium smelter or steel forge (which raises the question, why don't they build their own power stations and tell the government/generators to go hang?).

2. Cost - of course, for a given capacity, we should use whatever generation method is cheapest in pence per kWh. Whether that is solar, wind, nuclear, gas, coal or hydro is a separate topic. We have to ascribe monetary values to pollution and potential loss of output and factor them in, this is important albeit difficult/subjective.

3. Greenness/sustainability - is a subset of "cost" IMHO. We could have 100% solar/wind/hydro by tomorrow if we wanted, All we would have to do is shut down everything else, but then you have the add back the cost of economic collapse/sky rocketing electricity prices.

Short List

The three items on the previous Short List ("Musicians who had a cameo rôle as a shop keeper in a major Hollywood film") are:

Ray Charles in The Blues Brothers (Pavlov's Cat and MacHeath)
Ian Dury in Judge Dredd (Pavlov's Cat, again)
Bo Diddley in Trading Places (The Stigler)

Near misses (not cameo rôles):
Mos Def in Be Kind Rewind (DBC Reed)
Phil Collins (florist-cum-Great Train Robber) in Buster (The Stigler, again)

Doesn't count:
Henry Rollins as a doctor in Johnny Mnemonic (Richard Allan)

UPDATE: Make up your own minds whether this one counts:
Ricky Gervais (who was a musician before becoming a comedian/actor) in Stardust

UPDATE2: Tom Seddon (on the original post) asks: "Wouldn't Aretha Franklin count as well? She was in Blues Brothers as owner of the food place where the guitarist and saxophonist worked, and then again in Blues Brothers 2000 as owner of a car showroom." Pavlov's Cat/Macheath, any answers?
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Next short list, and I can think of two (or three): "Television programmes, the title of which is based on/inspired by something/somebody in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four".

Hate Week

From 1984:

It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran...

Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of bunting.

From The Huffington Post:

BBC does Home-Owner-Ist history re-write

An article about the history of welfare for single mothers caught my eye, all mildly interesting, which links through to the BBC's summary of The Poor Law 1601:

- The money was raised by taxes on middle and upper class people, causing resentment. They complained that money went to people who were lazy and did not want to work. (1)
- Critics also suggested that allowance systems made the situation worse because they encouraged poor people to have children that they could not afford to look after. (2)
- Another criticism of the old Poor Law was that it kept workers' wages low because employers knew that wages would be supplemented by money provided by the Poor Law. (3)

1) The tax was not on middle and upper classes per se, it was on the rental value of land, as anybody who has taken the time to look this up on Wiki knows:

The [1601] Act was criticised in later years for its distortion of the labour market, through the power given to parishes to let them remove 'undeserving' poor. Another criticism of the Act was that it applied to rated land not personal or movable wealth, therefore benefiting commercial and business interests.

Further, a tax on the rental value of land is a tax on people who are lazy and don't want to work, so I don't see the problem. You can see the Faux Lib's at work even then, trying to pretend that the rental value of land is 'just another asset' like personal or moveable wealth; if all this benefits commercial and business interests, I see that A Very Good Thing.

The BBC's next page then explains who was behind stirring up opposition to the tax on rental values:

Landowners, including Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, supported the Act [of 1834 which restricted the tax and welfare payments].

2) Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but the rule was that the authorities could go after the father and try and get the money back off him.

3) You can argue that welfare subsidises wages and so pushes them down; you can argue that welfare disincentivises work and thus pushes them up. The chances are, it makes no net difference and so the point is irrelevant.

What a difference a day makes...

From the front page of this morning's Metro:

Hundreds of thousands of skiers could see their holidays ruined as a record-breaking warm spell leaves slopes across Europe snow-free. The dry weather has meant nine out of 12 French Alps resorts which are particularly popular with British skiers have yet to start their seasons...

Up to 400,000 British people travel to France to ski every year, with 250,000 heading for Austria and 150,000 to Italy. About 75,000 go to Switzerland but it has experienced its driest autumn on record.

This evening's Evening Standard devoted a mere three column inches on page 2 to the sequel:

European ski resorts celebrated today as snow "bucketed" down. Bookings surged as bare slopes were coated in snow. "Last week we were getting calls asking us when it was going to start snowing, now we've got people waiting on the phones to book," said Peter Miller of IgluSki.com...

Up to 400,000 British people ski in France every year. Another 250,000 go to Austria and 150,000 to Italy. About 75,000 go to Switzerland, which has had its driest autumn on record.

Both The Metro and The Evening Standard share articles with the Daily Mail of course (or they are just syndicated or whatever the technical term is), what is striking is that the bloke at head office who had to write the updated article just re-wrote the first one (which said exactly the opposite) but one sentence survived the re-write almost intact.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, POVERTY IS WEALTH

The Daily Express takes a leaf out of 1984:

This morning they called for lower interest rates:

An 11 per cent increase in sales reflects the enormous benefits to the economy of our record low interest rates, a point that should not be lost on the Bank of England.

A property-owning middle class has been one of the foundations on which our economic success over the past 30 years has been built. Those who urge that interest rates should go up would do well to reflect on the damage it would cause to home-owners and businesses.

Ho hum, that's their opinion. But yesterday they were arguing exactly the opposite when they offered their readers the keys to unlocking letting's rewards:

WITH first-time buyers continuing to struggle to get a mortgage and the number of properties to rent in high demand it’s no wonder the market is booming.

New figures from LSL Property Services show the average asking price for rents reached a record high of £696 in May after four successive months of rises, while the National Landlords Association (NLA) suggests as many as one in five households will rent privately before the end of this decade...

I suppose the only way to square this apparent contradiction is to assume that they envisage a world where the 'middle class' own all the housing and the 'working class' pay rent, which doesn't seem like a 'property owning democracy' to me - I though that democracy means that everybody has an equal say, which applied to land must means that everybody has an equal share - which could only be achieved with a Georgist tax/redistribution system.

And I know it's easy to make fun of The Daily Express, but this kind of Home-Owner-Ist DoubleSpeak is widespread. Remember: if you own a real asset like a TV or a car or if you have valuable experience or qualifications, you are no worse off if others also have such assets*, but there's only an advantage to 'owning' land if there are others who are excluded - or else there'd be nobody forced to buy or rent your land from you, natch, and land would have no value.

So land 'wealth' can only exist if there is an equal and opposite land 'poverty, and land 'ownership' is a zero-sum game at best and a negative sum game in practice.

* if the roads get too crowded, we can build more roads; and provided we have the right mix of experience and qualifications, we are all better off

What's £14.73 between friends?

From Yahoo:

Plans to reinstate weekly bin collections have been shelved by the Government after a row between Cabinet ministers. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman has announced the findings of the Government's Waste Review - a cross-department examination of how to tackle waste. It contains a u-turn on the Communities' Secretary Eric Pickles' pledge to bring back weekly rubbish collections...

Caroline Flint, shadow communities secretary, said: "This latest evidence of the Government in chaos is a personal humiliation for Eric Pickles. He has spent years leading people on with overblown promises to restore weekly bin collections, despite Labour's warnings that he would never be able to deliver. The Local Government Secretary should learn the lesson that chasing headlines is no substitute for properly worked out policies to make communities cleaner, greener and better places to live."

Estimates of the costs of reinstating weekly bin rounds have been put at £140m in the first year alone...

Ho hum.

I personally am perfectly happy with fortnightly for normal rubbish and weekly for kitchen/garden waste (which is what they have where I live), others clearly are not.

But if you divide £140 million/year by 9.5 million households, that works out at a princely £14.74/year per household (28 pence/week!), which is hardly unaffordable, even in these straitened times.

I left in the rant from Caroline Flint because it is another fine example of DuckSpeak (Labour politicians seem to be better at this than Tory ones), it sounds quite fluent and sincere when she says it, but it's actually completely devoid of any meaning or relevance to anything whatsoever.

DuckSpeak

DuckSpeak is the term used in 1984 to describe people who reel off jargon without really meaning anything.

John Healey gave us a splendid example of this on Radio 4 yesterday morning, the clip is here, ostensibly he's talking about the NHS but actually he's just talking.

Fake Statistics Of The Day

The BBC wheel out their fakecharity template yet again (the clue is at the end where a government spokesman agrees that 'more must be done'):

The number of people admitted to hospital in the UK because of problem drinking could rise to 1.5 million a year by 2015, a charity says. Alcohol Concern estimates that it will cost the NHS £3.7 bn annually [up from £2.7 bn at present] if nothing is done to stop the increase...

The charity says the number of people being treated in hospital for alcohol misuse has gone from 500,000 in 2002-3 to 1.1 million in 2009-10.

I try and keep track of the constant doubling of chocolate rations alcohol-related admissions, so here's a quick summary:

Daily Telegraph, 22 July 2008:

Alcohol is thought to cause about 17,000 cases of cancer a year and £2 bn of NHS money [sic] is spent every year treating patients with alcohol-related diseases...

Office for National Statistics figures showed last month that in 2005/6, hospitals admitted 208,000 people with diseases caused by drink. That was double the figure 10 years before... Officials estimate that the true figure for alcohol-induced admissions last year was 811,000.

BBC, 15 March 2009 (who clearly hadn't read the memo):

The NHS bill for alcohol abuse is an estimated £2.7 bn a year. The most recent figures show hospital admissions linked to alcohol use have more than doubled in England since 1995. Alcohol was the main or secondary cause of 207,800 NHS admissions in 2006/7, compared to 93,500 in 1995/96.

I think that the real giveaway is that they appear to be sticking with the £2.7 bn figure, which if correct would mean that the NHS is now treating twice as many people as it did a few years ago for the same cost*. And Alcohol concern are now going for broke, not only do they claim that the number admissions went up five-fold between 1995-96 and 2002-03 (they never revised up the earlier, lower figure of course) but that it will have trebled yet again between 2002-03 and 2015 (i.e. a fifteen-fold increase in twenty years, a compound annual growth rate of 15% at a time when alcohol sales are flat or falling).

* If you take their entirely made up figures and divide £3.7 bn cost by 1.5 m admissions, that works out at a princely £2,467 cost per admission, which seems a tad over the top for an X-ray, a bandage or whatever.

Ten Years Gone

Cross posted at Nourishing Obscurity.

I have often described the last decade as the pinnacle of Home-Owner-Ism - an economic philosophy which, in true 1984 fashion, represents the mutually exclusive beliefs that "Rising house prices are a good thing" and "It is important to encourage a wider spread of home ownership".

"Home-Owner-Ism" (with hyphens and capitals) just happened to be a phrase I coined started using* on one particular day, which has led to some people thinking that I am somehow against owner-occupiers or the idea of owner-occupation. Far from it! I was one in the past and fully intend to be one again in future (and Her Indoors is definitely in favour), it's deeply engrained in our national psyche and I wouldn't deny others that which I'd like for myself.

What I believe in is the second half of the Home-Owner-Ist mantra: I'd like to see a wider spread of home ownership, which entails lower prices and/or more new construction and/or lower taxation of incomes etc. Remember that during the Home-Owner-Ist decade, the proportion of household who are owner-occupier actually fell quite markedly (see page 9 of this).

So, without further ado, I've drawn up a Venn Diagram, with 'homeowners' (in the narrower sense) in the left hand set and "Home-Owner-Ists" in the right hand set. Of course there is a large overlap in the middle, and none of these categories are clear cut, but hopefully this will give you an idea of who is driving "Home-Owner-Ism" and who really benefits from it.

* DBC Reed and Lola both claim they invented it, see comments.

Junior Spies

It's good to see the BBC wheel out their fakecharity fakenews story template for one its increasingly rare outings.

More than 100 children a week are contacting the ChildLine helpline with worries about their parents' drinking or drug use, according to the NSPCC... Two-thirds of those callers had mentioned their parents' drinking...

Although concerns about parental drug and alcohol abuse made up only a small percentage of them, the head of ChildLine, Sue Minto, said: "The fall-out from parental drug and alcohol abuse is a ticking timebomb in many children's lives. It's vital these children are helped before lasting damage occurs."

Thirty-five per cent of those had reported suffering physical abuse, which was more than three times the rate among other children who called. Twenty per cent mentioned issues with family conflicts, while 10% spoke of sexual abuse.

It's not like old times though.

Although the NSPCC is clearly a fakecharity, they/the BBC couldn't organise a couple of rent-a-quotes from other fakecharities to pad out the article at the bottom (yes, Don Shenker of Alcohol Concern, that means you).

Drinkaware is not a fakecharity, it's organised by drinks manufacturers to coordinate their counter-propaganda, And the article does not end with a spokesperson from the relevant government department agreeing that 'more must be done'.

1984 (22): Home-Owner-Ism (4)

From 'The Book' within the book 1984:

... the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.

For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power could be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. if human equality is to be for ever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

I'm sure we're all familiar with modern examples of this - such as the Ministry of War being renamed Ministry of Defence in the 1960s or the Central Office of Information which just pumps out propaganda.

But what about our 'Housing Minister'? Would one not expect that this rôle involves ensuring that the markets provide good quality and affordable housing, or failing that, at least providing social housing for those at the bottom of the heap? Nope, this job involves flogging off existing council housing* and misdescribing this as 'an age of aspiration'; trying to get the number of new dwellings built down to the lowest level in a century** and bullying the banks into lending ever more (taxpayers') money to potential buyers to drive up the price of existing homes that come up for sale.

Further examples of this 'controlled insanity' is the idea that as long as house prices keep going up, we will all magically become wealthier, when any sober appraisal of the facts suggests that only a small minority ('the High') can become wealthier and that the vast majority of people become correspondingly poorer.

The ultimate deliberate hypocrisy underpinning this madness is the old saying "An Englishman's home is his castle". People ascribe different meanings to it without realising that this is probably the finest bit of propaganda that the old landowning aristocracy ever invented. It is tantamount to an African dictator telling his starving countrymen "An African's grain of rice is his feast" or an Islamic theocrat announcing that "The burka gives women freedom to walk the streets".

The key to this is that the Norman invaders and their descendants brutally oppressed the English (or Celts or whoever else was kicking around) and they lived in castles - the castle was a symbol of oppression rather than protection. The landowners did a bloody good job as well, as late as a century ago, ninety per cent of the UK population were still tenants. Lloyd George briefly threatened the status quo, so what the landowners or 'the High', did over the last century was to sell off two or three per cent of their land for inflated prices to anybody whom the banks thought were worth exploiting.

The number of households who were owner-occupiers did not reach fifty per cent until about 1970, and has since levelled out at about seventy per cent. Electorally, they hold the upper hand so these are the people who have to be hoodwinked. In reality, most people 'own' very little indeed, apart from their bricks and mortar and a few hundred square yards of land. But they are sold the dream that this is their 'castle'.

Of course, the large landowners and their willing sidekicks the bankers, can only maintain their elevated position by exploiting those beneath them. So to keep the charade going, they engineer house price bubbles, cream off what they can in the good times and let the little people bail out the banks in the bad times.

This gives the English homeowner, briefly, the illusion that he too, like a landowning aristocrat is becoming wealthier without effort (income from business or employment is taxed until the pips squeak, of course, but work is for the little people, isn't it?) or 'living in a castle' to continue the analogy, but as there is nobody beneath him to exploit, all he is doing (consciously or not) is exploiting future generations (including his own children and grandchildren) - either by selling them houses at vastly inflated prices or by landing them with the future tax bill to repay the debts incurred with the bank bail outs.

Can nobody else see the 'controlled insanity' that sustains our rigid social system?

* Highlight from that article: "Among other things, [selling off council housing] was aimed at giving those in social housing more freedom to move to respond to job opportunities in different regions of the country." In the name of all that is unholy, who is more likely to be willing to move to another part of the country to find work - a tenant or a home-owner?

** Yes, I know the fat bastard isn't the Housing Minister, but he might as well be for all the impact that Grant Shapps has had.

1984 (21): Home-Owner-Ism (3)

As we well know, the best way of running things is some form of democratic, small government free-market liberalism. The good thing about Socialist experiments is that they tend to go bankrupt after a while, and by and large are replaced with something slightly better (although question mark over Russia). The bad thing about 'capitalism' is that it goes nearly bankrupt every couple of decades (the so-called 'business cycle' or 'credit cycle') but seeing as we know the alternatives are worse, we plough on doing the same thing.

Actually, the these cycles are not inherent in free-market liberalism, they come from a much older and more deeply engrained school of economic masochism, a particularly malign form of corporatism/self-perpetuating privilege which I refer to as 'Home-Owner-Ism'.

For clarity: this has nothing to do with having a wider spread of homeownership, which is broadly agreed to be A Good Thing. In fact, it tends to lead to the opposite (the percentage of homeowners in the UK is down one or two per cent over the last fifteen years) - and boils down to the belief that 'house prices can only go up and rising house prices are good for us'. But by dressing itself up as free-market liberalism, it is what we always fall back on, even after the most dire of recessions.

So just for fun, let me illustrate this by doing a 'track changes' on an excerpt from The Theory And Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism, which is a book-within-the-book '1984' by George Orwell:

After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism making everybody think that they are wealthier than they really are.

Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly even the Middle and Low believe that they have a share. The so-called 'abolition of private property nationalized industries and social housing' which took place in the middle years of the century 1980s and 1990s meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals included, albeit briefly, a significant number of the Middle and Low. Individually, no member of the Party very few Home-Owner-Ists own anything, except petty personal belongings, some bricks and mortar and a few hundred square yards of land, more often than not subject to a crippling mortgage debt.

Collectively, the Party Home-Owner-Ist coalition owns everything in Oceania The United Kingdom, because it controls everything planning permission and land use, down to the last brick, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit via heavy taxation of incomes and subsidies to homeownership and the banking system. In the years following the Thatcher Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization privatization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated nationalized industries were privatized and council housing sold off (in exchange for votes), Socialism capitalism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated they had been sold off, often at a massive loss to the taxpayer.

Factories, mines, land, houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them 'the state': and since these things were no longer private state property, it followed that they must be public private property. Ingsoc Home-Owner-Ism, which grew out of the earlier Socialist Conservative movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme which had spawned The Corn Laws in an earlier century; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

OK, I'm hamming it up a bit, but it strikes me that Home-Owner-Ism is the antithesis of free-market liberalism, and in practice has a lot in common with Socialism.

Discuss.

Black is White! Up is Down!

From Monday's FT:

For internationalists everywhere, for believers in much deeper co-operation between nations, for those pushing for the establishment of an international legal order, the EU is a beacon of hope.

If the European experiment begins to unravel – after more than 60 years of painstaking advances – then the ideas that Europe represents will also suffer severe damage. Rival ideas – the primacy of power over law, the enduring supremacy of the nation state, authoritarianism – may gain ground instead.

As opposed to the EU dream, which is, er, the primacy of power over law, the enduring power of the EU and authoritarianism?

And yes, I know that the FT is an EU-phile paper...

BIG SOCIETY

Don't forget your photographic ID on 6 May!

See over at the El Comm website.

OK, it only applies to Northern Ireland this time round, but give it a year or two...

His eyes seem to follow you around the room...

"A positive alternative to Labour's big government approach"

From the BBC, without any apparent deliberate irony:

David Cameron has said that a Conservative government would train a 5,000-strong "neighbourhood army" to set up community groups. The Tory leader said in a speech this offered a "positive alternative to Labour's big government" approach.

"Our aim is for every adult citizen to be an active member of an active neighbourhood group," he said...