Stephen Fry is widely believed to be a rather clever man, but on an episode of QI that they showed this evening because of the snooker finishing early, he said something deeply stupid, to widespread agreement from all the fawning panellists by whom he was flanked.  He said that British weather forecasts are hopeless, about as much use as looking at the insides of a bird, or some such oh-so-clever classical illusion.

I’ve said it before and I will now say it again.  Nonsense.  Our weather forecasts are superb.  If ever I have in mind to go out tomorrow, I make a point of attending to the weather forecast very carefully.  Often my decision to go out at all tomorrow is made the night before purely on the strength of the invariably almost unreally accurate weather forecast that I have just watched.

We have just been told that tomorrow, for instance, as in May 6th 2008, the south of England will be delightfully warm, breezy and sunny.  Ideal for a day out and about.  And that, I am here to tell you, is exactly how it will turn out.  Tomorrow, I will show you the photos to prove this fact, as fact it most certainly will prove to be.

We have just been told that tomorrow, for instance, as in May 6th 2008, the south of England will be delightfully warm, breezy and sunny.  Ideal for a day out and about.  And that, I am here to tell you, is exactly how it will turn out.  Tomorrow, I will show you the photos to prove this fact, as fact it most certainly will prove to be.

These universal ideas that are obvious bollocks are very odd.  Another one I recall from my youth was that people all used to say, to universal applause from every other idiot present, that there was “no difference between the major political parties”.  This is not true now, but it was total and obvious tripe in those far off days.  Yet everyone kept on repeating this mantra about there being “no difference” out of sheer habit.  It never seemed to occur to anyone at all to give the matter twenty seconds of solid thought and then to declare the notion to be the idiotic nonsense that it quite clearly was.  Now, if you want a cheap laugh at a party, say that weather forecasts are useless.  Or, maybe not.  Maybe someone with both a mind that works and a willingness to make use of it will be present, and you will be firmly contradicted for the thoughtless fool that you are.

Boris wins.  And actually not that narrowly.  1,043,761 to Boris.  893 thousand something or other for Ken Livingstone, with not that much difference between the second choice totals.

Here is the photo of Boris that I took in July 2006, at Lords Cricket Ground:

I’m watching the proceedings on BBC News 24, or whatever it’s called.

Boris is now making his victory speech, and he said it is already tomorrow.  Not so, this still gets in as May 2nd.  He’s going with magnanimity towards Ken rather than putting the knife in.

“Let’s get cracking tomorrow.  Let’s have a drink tonight.” Well said.  I feel a sense of connection to these London politicians.  It won’t last.  Tomorrow I will get back to realising that they are only politicians, and that politics is daylight robbery.  Now Ken is saying that it’s his fault he lost.  Also very impressive.  No doubt these two men will very soon also get back to stabbing one another, the way nature intended.  But for a brief moment, they conspired to create a little moment of magic.  Very cunningly but also very classily done by both men.

I’ll add a link or two to news coverage over the next few minutes.  It now really is tomorrow morning.

BBC.

The Man From YouGov is now crowing, ever so politely, just as Guido said would happen.

Rob Fisher is not amused.  Londonist is.  Diamond Geezer despairs.

Fraser Nelson on Boris’s secret weapon: driving the left mad.  Coffee House roundup of their Boris v Ken bloggage here.

Instapundit notices with more linkage, in particular to this.

John Redwood on Labour’s rubbish policy.  Not a metaphor.

Boris’s acceptance speech.

Last night they had bloggers on BBC1, and the BBC woman talked about them as if they were there to lower the tone.  In fact they raised it, and the BBC’s own Jeremy Vine lowered it.  Iain Dale did very well, I thought, coming across as thoughtful and analytical.  He too thought Vine made a twat of himself, as did Guido.

By the way, and I keep meaning to mention this, I don’t like the design of the top of Guido.  It makes it look like there’s dirt on my screen, which is annoying because there often is, so the illusion is credible.

Guido’s commenters are expressing the fear that a great pile of pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap postal votes will crash in and steal it for Ken.  I hope this doesn’t happen, and have now worked out why.  Aside from disliking tax-and-spend lefties, I am simply curious to see how Mayor Boris will turn out.  He reminds me of a recent radio comedy joke: “His men would follow him anywhere, if only out of morbid curiosity.” That’s Boris, I think.  The other Guido comment that stuck in my mind was from someone saying that Gordon Brown will now punish London, with complicated but deadly tax tinkerings, etc.  I hope that it’s Mayor Boris, that he proves as clever as his enthusiasts say he is, and that he bellows at Gordon whenever he does this.  Samizdata’s Johnathan Pearce has been drip-drip-dripping away lately with stories of big businesses leaving London, or, in the case of Shire Paharmaceuticals, Basingstoke, which is nearly London.

Another complaint about Guido, peculiar to just now I trust, is that whenever Guido is up on my screen, the rest of my computer misbehaves.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but no links to him for the time being.  I think he has just crashed Internet explorer for me, again.  Guido Fawkes, that is.  See my blogroll if you are confused.  Good luck.

Despite myself, I always get sucked into elections and election watching on the night.  I think the big news for London is that it is, finally, a political battleground, with two great\ political machines vying for the Mayor and all the Mayor’s budgets and buildings and corruption opportunities, instead of merely one Ken Livingstone machine just hoovering up all this stuff unopposed, or opposed only by the Evening Standard.  I suspect the big story of the next few days in London will be the high turnout, nearly as high as for a general election.

I hope Boris doesn’t put a stop to London having more skyscrapers.  Maybe the change will merely be that the skyscrapers will be Jewish rather than Arab.  I hope that if they decide to build a Thames Estuary Bridge, Boris decides to hustle up enough more money to make it a great looking bridge instead of a boring one, such as is I believe is threatened now.  And I hope Boris cancels the London Olympics, which will bankrupt us all for generations, but that is presumably too much to hope for.

There’s an election happening in London today, and the early guesses say that Boris Johnson will be the new Mayor, and Ken Livingstone the new ex-Mayor.  I have no idea.

Shane Greer is angry about this article by Steve Richards.  Greer says that Richards’ piece is elitist, because it calls the voters stupid and ungrateful.  But Richards has half a point.  Ken Livingstone has done quite a lot of popular things for Londoners, if you are the sort of Londoner who relies on public transport rather than your car., and who doesn’t pay that much in the way of council tax.

Voters aren’t stupid, but they are indeed ungrateful.  They don’t vote about what you’ve done, they vote about what they want done.  They don’t vote about the past, they vote about the future.  The most famous British example is probably the way that the victorious Winston Churchill was unceremoniously dumped in 1945.  War won, thank you Winnie, but no, you are not the post-war Prime Minister that we now want.  You can do heroism, but not a land fit for the heroes to come home to.  Goodnight.

Voters can also be punitive.  When someone they basically don’t like has done the job they were voted in to do a few years back, the backlash can be something terrible.  This is partly what happened to the Conservatives during the last decade.  This may now be happening to Ken.  Ken may have been regarded as necessary, to make the trains run on time, etc.  But he has never been really liked, and now all those corruption stories and all that disgusting cosying up to terrorists starts to count for more than the tube and the buses.  So, thanks for the buses mate, and piss off.

What I think also may be happening in London is that Ken Livingstone has made being the Mayor of London matter, and this has had the effect, it would now appear, of causing potential Conservative voters in London local elections to become actual Conservative voters.  Boris Johnson has served to highlight this same effect, by being a celeb with high recognition, and by not making any big mistakes.  My favourite comment about the London Mayor election is from a commenter at Guido’s - which I can’t now find because my I-now-wish-I-was-a-swear-blogger computer is playing up, as it is now doing from time to time - saying that the amazing thing was that Boris had said and done nothing seriously stupid for three whole months.

He has gone from the authentic Boris as seen on HIGNFY to a boring twat, in the manner of Robert Redford in The Candidate.  Which means he will probably win.

As regulars here know, bridges are a big deal here, so the biggest story in Italy just now, from the point of view of this blog, is the plan to build a huge, huge suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina.

Apparently Mr Berlusconi, Italy’s recently victorious Prime Minister or President or whatever it is, had this to say about the Messina Bridge:

He said that work on his pet grand projet, the planned suspension bridge over the Strait of Messina to Sicily, cancelled by Romano Prodi’s government, would resume without delay.

To quote Wikipedia about this bidge, under the heading Controversy and concerns (so take with pinch of salt):

There are concerns about the role of the local mafia.  It is feared that organised criminals obtain a monopoly on construction contracts by intimidating competitors and bribing local officials and then overcharging for the work, generating large profits.

Many also question the priority of the bridge, since some towns in Sicily are still without running water, and claim that the money used for the bridge would be better spent elsewhere.

There are also those who claim that the bridge would be totally unnecessary, since the local economy is already providing for the conversion of a local former NATO airport into a commercial terminal to export vegetables to northern Europe.  Alternatively, a much cheaper revamping of the current structures is claimed to be sufficient (for instance, the ferry lines on the Calabria side are now accessible by trucks only by driving through very narrow streets, which are a tight bottleneck for transport).

Finally, there are concerns about the environmental impact of the bridge, its actual feasibility, and whether it could resist earthquakes, not uncommon in the region.

Well quite so.  I’m sure that if this thing does ever gets built it will be a huge political bribe of some kind.  But most bribes don’t look nearly as good as this one will.  If they do build it.  And assuming it stays up.

This, from Shane Greer, is rather shrewd, I think:

It’s important to bear in mind that Clarke’s criticism, like that of the others, is a direct result of Brown’s approach to personal relationships; namely that they exist in black or white, enemy or friend.  The simple truth of life under Brown is that if you aren’t a ‘friend’ you have absolutely nothing to lose by attacking him, and indeed in the current climate have everything to gain.

This is the exact personal equivalent of the principle that the law must make a distinction between, for instance, how it punishes armed robbery and how it punishes murder.  Don’t make that distinction, and there goes any motive for armed robbers not to kill people.  From time to time, judges have to remind politicians about such things.

Most of the explanations I have read about why Labourites are now rebelling in such numbers and with such vehemence concern the political situation.  Tax changes, marginal constituencies, etc.  But this personal angle adds a definite extra something to the mix.

There’s a sort of automatic process (one of quite a few) that ruins governments.  Nowadays governments can’t just, you know, let things be, and confine themselves to governing.  Unsatisfied with the mere governing of things, governments now insist on controlling how things turn out.  They have a “vision” of what the world should be like, to which, eventually, everything must conform.

So, as time goes by, they stick their sticky fingers into more and more stuff, until eventually you can feel their prodding and poking in everything you do, in everything that ever happens.

At which point they get blamed for absolutely everything that goes wrong.  Every cock-up, made by anybody, is blamed on them.  So then, after a period of furious recrimination, another government is installed and the whole nonsense begins all over again.

The current British government is now rapidly approaching the they-get-blamed-for-everything stage.  But even if it were not, this glorious logo cock-up, perpetrated by something called the Office of Government Commerce, is actually quite close to the New Labour heart of things.  New Labour is obsessed with logos, with redesigning things in a way calculated to annoy The Forces of Conservatism and to inflict a “radical shake-up” on whatever it is.  (One simple way to irritate and to generally make it clear who and what is now in charge is to make the capital letters at the beginnings of the proper nouns that describe the enterprise into small letters.) New Labour people notoriously have jobs like designing stupid logos at vast expense, instead of real jobs.  So, New Labour will get the blame for this glorious fiasco, and they probably do actually deserve a lot of it this time.  Either way, the more any of them protest that it is nothing to do with them, the more idiotic they will look.  It’s not in the Northern Rock or Ten Percent Tax Rate category.  But, like I say, this government is reaching the point where every little hurts.

Apparently a mere £14,000 was pissed away on this particular logo, which is nothing by the standards of your usual saga of government waste.  But, then again, there is this:

OGC helps the public sector get better value on goods and services across a wide range of categories.

Which is far too good an open goal to miss.  The whole idea of “Government Commerce” is ridiculous, and is itself a guarantee of vast waste.  I bet these people have presided over cock-ups massively more expensive than this one, many times.  Just not such funny ones.

All the reportage of this logo fiasco that I have seen coyly presents the logo in its horizontal form.  Now I usually like horizontal pictures, but this time, I think I prefer the vertical version, as will almost all bloggers, surely.

Deepest thanks to David Thompson for spotting this.

UPDATE: Pollard had all that two days ago, including the OGC quote.  And he goes vertical too.  Oh well.  One of his commenters supplies this.

Yes, home to Mum’s today, and this time it was slightly different, because my Mum has reached the age when she just might be gone at any moment.  She may, and I hope will, live for at least another decade or more, but ... she may, now, not.  Some time soon or soonish, she, and her house (the house), and her garden (the garden) may all be gone, smashed up and replaced by about five new suburban houses.  And I found myself looking at the house and the garden with new eyes, those of a stranger.  I saw all kinds of things I had not really noticed since I lived there in my childhood.

I noticed the chimneys.  If you had asked me to describe those chimneys any time before today, I wouldn’t have been able to even say how many of them there were.  Yet there they are, and have been ever since my family moved in, in 1945, two years before I did.  And where on earth did that nest (a bees’ nest apparently) come from?  When did that happen?  And who knew that Mum has plants that produce pink flowers that look like they are made of sugar (at any rate when I photo them)?

The car is the UKIP battle wagon of brother Toby.  He drove me back down the hill to Egham station via the territory which he is trying to persuade to elect him as a councillor, and which he has flooded with UKIP posters.  If posters determined elections, he would win by a landslide.

The final picture merely shows how very rural Clapham Junction has become lately.  Looks more like somewhere deep in the countryside, doesn’t it?  Of the sort that Doctor Beeching closed down.

Nothing here today, because today I was building more shelves, and because Samizdata needed replenishing and I’m the only Samizdatista who has no life and hence is free at the weekend.  So, I did a(nother) piece about the Indian Premier League, which strikes me as being at least as important a thing as the ghastliness of Brown or Mugabe.  (About the only dignified thing the first of those has done lately is complain about the second.)

So anyway, here’s a flat picture, suggested for inclusion here (or at least a mention here) in an email from David Thompson:

Actually, I consider panoramas to be a cheat for getting pictorial flatness.  All panoramas are flat.  It’s in their nature.  If you shove six snaps in a horizontal line, the result is bound to be horizontal.  What I prefer are things that are horizontal by their nature, such as horizons.  Or bridges or pencils or blog top pictures.

While you thought you are only treading water you were actually getting poorer.

That’s it really.  That’s my thought for the day.  It arose from the travails of the national economy, recently not so much perpetrated as revealed.  Wise souls like Paul Marks have been saying for years that the British economy was heading for a grim reckoning, but to most of us it just felt like the British economy was jogging along okay.  Not doing as well as it might and should (tax cuts, deregulation blah blah blah) and maybe drifting downwards a little, like a glider.  But not nose-diving.  But then, suddenly, disaster.

It’s like that for individuals and families.  You live in a nice area.  You are paying your bills, and getting by.  But then, rather suddenly, it is revealed that actually your whole area has been slowly going down in the world.  People as well off as you used to be now pay four times as much rent and get paid four times as much for the same kind of work as you used to do, and you, without the numbers looking so very different, are suddenly revealed as far poorer.  (As of now, by “you” “your” I actually do not mean “I"and “my”, although perhaps this is also happening to me and I don’t yet realise it.)

Speaking of Paul Marks, someone should really dig out him ranting away three or four years ago about the fact that the British economy is doomed, doomed.  Now everybody is talking like this.  They are merely telling us so, now.  He told us so, years ago.  With luck, it will be possible to find an entire Samizdata posting, from way back, in which this last week’s cursings are all there.  At the moment Samizdata doesn’t do a complete listing of everything by each single author, more’s the pity, but I hear that this may in due course be changing.  Hope so.  If so, finding things like this will get a whole lot easier.

I spent an hour wading through Samizdata postings from the past, but did not encounter Marks saying things about the money supply.  Taxation going inexorably up, yes.  Money supply going up, no.  But I’m sure he said this stuff.

Talking of Lebrecht and Karajan, as I was in the previous posting, I totally agree with this piece by Dominic Lawson about Karajan, and think it very well expressed.

Quote:

Some have seen his early affiliation to the Nazi Party as an indicator of strong political belief in the doctrines of Adolf Hitler. In fact, Karajan’s only faith was in himself and his ambition to become Germany’s – and later the world’s – dominant interpreter of classical music. There is no evidence that he had any interest in politics, other than the politics of personal achievement in the always brutally competitive world of classical music. In other words, he used the Nazis as much as they used him. Indeed, he once admitted that he “would have sold my grandmother” to get the orchestral appointments that the cultural commissars of the Nazi Party had it in their gift to award him.

Norman Lebrecht wrote a characteristically stirring article in the London Evening Standard a couple of days ago, damning the classical music business for launching the celebrations: “It amazes me to see Karajan’s demagogic pose in Paris, where he conducted the Horst Wessel Lied during Hitler’s occupation. It astonishes me no less to hear the self-made Valery Gergiev and Simon Rattle claim Karajan as a mentor, as if they secretly covet his power.”

Well, perhaps they do, although no conductor will ever again wield the power that Karajan exercised. Apart from anything else, it is hard to imagine any modern orchestra tolerating the dictatorial behaviour he inflicted wherever and on whomever he conducted. Surely, however, what the likes of Sir Simon Rattle worship is not Karajan’s character but his musicianship. Lebrecht describes him as “a moral and creative nullity” but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he believes the first part of that accusation leads inexorably to the second.

It doesn’t follow. Much as we would like it to be the case, there is no connection between good character and good art ...

Having not read very much about Karajan’s supposedly Nazi past, but a bit, I said pretty much all of that stuff about how Karajan wanted only the power to make music the exact way he wanted to, in this talk.  It is good to have it all confirmed by someone else who has presumably researched Karajan a bit more thoroughly.

Radio 3 played the Eroica Symphony this afternoon.  I knew it was the Berlin Phil because the Radio Times said so, but I missed the beginning so I didn’t know who the conductor was.  It sounded very fine to me.  Excellent, but a tad too “Germanic” and to be the recent, excellent Abbado recording.  So who?  It sounded so beautiful, while still sounding suitably like Beethoven.  So, probably Karajan.  Yes, Karajan.

I almost feel sorry for our beleaguered Prime Minister.  The Peter Principle is a horrible thing, when it happens to you.  The only cure is to get out of there, and if you want to hang around the place in some other capacity, go down a rung.  See: William Hague.

Even on the frontbench, fear of the formidable Brown machine has been replaced by fear of the electorate.

Cruelest cut of all, from TV funny man Rory Bremner:

“It’s like having an uncle who’s been building something in the shed at the bottom of the garden for 10 years … you look through the window and there’s nothing there.”

Prediction: Mugabe lasts longer than Brown.  It’s starting to look like a melt-down, along the lines of May 1997.

Although, re Mugabe, as soon as I put that, I did some googling and came up with this.  Blog and learn.  Sounds promising:

Zambia has called an emergency summit of southern African leaders for this weekend to discuss Zimbabwe’s post-election impasse.

Levy Mwanawasa, the Zambian President who chairs the Southern African Development Community (SADC), said that the crisis required a concerted effort by all southern African countries to find a solution.

The SADC summit will be held in Lusaka on Saturday. It was the first move by Zimbabwe’s neighbours to intervene after the March 29 elections and is likely to anger President Mugabe, who clashed bitterly with Mr Mwanawasa when the Zambian leader tried to put Zimbabwe on the agenda at an SADC meeting last year.

About bloody time.  But, they’ll have to make him an offer he can’t refuse.  Anything less, and he will refuse.

I have felt this way for some time about the Olympics:

It is all very well banging on about the way the Chinese government treats the people of Tibet, and indeed its own people, but it remains important that we do not lose sight of the true meaning of the Olympic ideal in all this. Remember - Our bunch of drug takers is better at certain bizarre and irrelevant activities than Johnny Foreigner’s bunch of drug takers!

That’s one of the commenters on this posting.

I feel rather sorry for athletes, because I truly now believe that what the Olympics measure is a combination of how good an athlete you are and how good you are at cheating.  When some athlete pulls a “surprise”, I simply assume it’s drugs.  I remember an Irish swimmer lady, I think it was, who got three gold medals, out the blue, and who looked suspiciously muscular.  The belief that it was drugs seemed to be near universal, although nothing was said in public for a while until some clever journo proved it.  I think that was the story.  Sport is rather pointless in an atmosphere like that.

By the way, I’m talking about the serious athletic bits of the Olympics, not the bizarre extreme-minority sports that emerge from the shadows every four years, like that daft thing they do with big lumps sliding along, with people brushing brooms in front of the lump’s path to divert it by a fraction of a degree.

One of the things I like about cricket is that I suspect that drug-enhanced performance wouldn’t be that different from regular performance.  But is that true?  In particular, would bowlers be more effective if they were allowed to take lots of drugs?

Given advances in drugs and genetics, is it the case that a whole swathe of sport will become ungovernable, because it won’t be possible to stop people cheating, and because in any case, “cheating” will be indistinguishable from regular medical treatments and in particular anti-aging treatments.  You can imagine honest athletes retiring, simply so that they can have the sort of proper medical treatment that everyone else has as a matter of routine.

Or will athletics retain its appeal by becoming something more like Formula 1 racing.  In F1, the contest is not between individual drivers, so much as between teams of engineers and mechanics, with the driver doing the final bit of actually driving the wonder-machine around the track, but with brilliant driving being powerless in the face of mechanical inferiority.  Will top athletes take huge teams of doctors with them everywhere they go?  That might keep it interesting.

I’ve been busy all day, mostly making CD shelves, and in among it, putting stuff up at my Education Blog.  So here’s a photo which I thought of sticking up there but which will do just as well for here, suggested by Bishop Hill, who chose another from the same set:

On the left is Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, whose job is to pretend to continue with the Blair education “reforms” while ensuring that any point they ever had is now utterly lost and that we get all the turmoil and expense and none of the improvements.  And on the right, with his trousers about to split, is a Mr Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

How all occasions do inform against them.  The next government will be just as bad in its own new and distinct way, but it is fun watching the government we have disintegrate.  Five years ago, the journalists would have chosen the most dignified shot of these two people cavorting about, and everyone apart from a few right wing buffers and anti-Iraq war freaks and loony libbos like me would have said: “How democratic!” and: “How relaxed!” and: “And yet how dignified!”.  Now, the journalists choose the three shots that make them look most completely like a pair of pillocks, and everyone says: “What a pair of pillocks!”

A lot of this is that almost everyone now hates Mr Brown, apart from people like Balls and Burnham.  But it is also partly Mr Cameron’s doing.  Mr Cameron has managed to persuade what used to be called Fleet Street that he agrees with them about everything, nudge nudge wink wink, and that he too finds your typical Conservative abominable just as Fleet Street does.  This has made Fleet Street relax about hating Labour, and they’ve been systematically putting the knife into Labour for about two years now.  The risk Cameron is taking is that he will alienate all his own natural supporters, who might abstain or vote UKIP or something.  But Cameron has gambled that those people just want to win, and that most voters now hate Labour so much that they will vote Cameron just to get Labour out, no matter what Mr Cameron says.  The gamble has worked.

And then, when he is Prime Minister, Mr Cameron will be able to do whatever he likes.  Which will start off being democratic and dignified, and by and by degenerate into being ghastly and ridiculous.

Last Monday Antoine Clarke and I had another chat. about American politics, with me asking what the blazes is going on - and it is pretty weird – and him telling us all.  If, like me, you learn better through hearing people chat about something than you do by just reading stuff, then this will suit you very well.

Basically, Hillary C and Barack O and no nearer to sorting out which of them will be the Democrat candidate for the Presidency than they were a month ago.  The big changes are (a) that the upper levels of the Democrat Party have become less sure about being pro-Hillary, and (b) the general public has become less sure about Barack O being Jesus Christ reborn.  It turns out he’s just a politician, with a past, with dodgy mortgage deals, etc., albeit a slightly more ingratiating politician than Hillary C.  The longer it goes on, the worse it will get for the Dems, and the more damage it will do to them.  The more, for instance, bitter loser Dems will prefer McCain to the evil Dem winner.  The problem is, said Antoine, because both of them symbolise something.  Dump him and you’re a racist.  Dump her and you want “women to go back to the kitchen”.  I heard myself saying: why not a coin toss?  Well, it is a thought.  That it is a semi-rational thought shows you what a ludicrous pickle the Dems are in.  The alternative is it could all end up being decided by the Supreme Court, and not quickly.

But, at any moment, a delegation of Dems could persuade HIllary to drop out, since it still seems to be reckoned that she can’t win, but Barack O might.

About half way through, we switched from the big parties to talking about how the US Libertarian Party are going about things, and we then turned to discussing the fact that someone has started a Libertarian Party here in the UK.  I know extremely little about this, and have long cautioned people against the miseries inherent in such a project.  I talked about the impact that the internet has had upon small organisations, like such a party, and like the Libertarian Alliance.  Basically, people like me and Antoine no longer need such enterprises to have a voice.  Antoine said he reckoned there ought to be lots of different libertarian parties.

In practice this may happen, but in a watered down form.  In the event that this particular Libertarian Party makes any waves, other libertarians will start saying: no you’re doing it all wrong you should be saying XYZ.  In the event that it doesn’t make any waves, ditto.

Anyway, that was what we talked about.  Enjoy.  It lasts just over forty minutes.

Antoine said that this UK Libertarian Party has some kind of event or public meeting or something coming up.  If I learn anything about that, I’ll flag it up here.  Or maybe, Antoine will, and I’ll link to that, just as he’ll be linking to this if and when he mentions this at his place.