Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize 2007

The 2007 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize
£1,000 to be Won

In honour of Dr Chris R. Tame (1949-2006), The PROMIS Unit of Primary Care has established a yearly prize of £1,000 for an essay on a subject to be announced by Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance.

By the 1st October 2007, contestants are invited to submit essays to Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance.

Essay Title: “Does Britain Need a Libertarian Party?“
Essay Length: 2,000 words excluding notes
 

Rules

• Essays must be submitted in English and typed and in hard copy by sending to The Libertarian Alliance, Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, Mayfair, London W1J 6H, United Kingdom. Files sent through the Internet will not be accepted.

• Essays must have been received at the Libertarian address no later than Monday the 1st October 2007.

• The winner will be announced on the evening of Saturday the 27th October 2007, at the banquet of the Libertarian Alliance Conference, to be held at the National Liberal Club in London.

• The winner will be required to make a ten minute acceptance speech on Saturday the 27th October 2007, at the banquet of the Libertarian Alliance Conference, to be held at the National Liberal Club in London. This speech may be made in person or by pre-recorded video.

• The prize will be £1,000, made out to the winner and payable in Sterling by cheque drawn on one of the United Kingdom clearing banks. No other form of payment will be considered.

• The winning essay will be published by the Libertarian Alliance. All essays submitted may be published by the Libertarian Alliance.

• In all matters of deciding the winner of the Prize and in all associated matters, the decision of Sean Gabb shall be final.

• The act of submitting an essay shall constitute full acceptance of these terms

For all questions, please contact Sean Gabb

Brian Micklethwait on 18 Doughty Street Tonight

The former Editorial Director of the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Micklethwait, will be on the on-line TV Channel 18 Doughty Street tonight between 10 and 11pm. Still an active supporter of the LA Brian is always worth watching.

There is no problem so small and inconsequential that state involvement can’t make bigger.

Welcome again to the bolg!

Today, a private prophesy I made two years ago, as the father of school age children, came true. I thought I would bolg about it for you.

It seems that uptake of “school food” particularly in the “secondary” (in all respects! Sic!) sector, has fallen sharply since “Jamie”, the laddish faux cockney Ozymandycookery laddie, got his teeth into the ankles of British teenagers’ desired daily diet.

You can get the full monty from the Daily Telegraph here. But additionally you could forgive me for wanting to bet anybody my usual 5p-for-ever that the poor teenage farm-animals, brought up on the following;

(1) careless parents (cheap, tasty, easy, tasty, fast, tasty, scrumptious, tasty pre-processed food is the natural free-market-result of forced two-earner Socialism in One Country),

(2) Macdonald’s (lovely, see above – a boon when you are ravenous, poor, on the motorway to a jam, or just hungry),

(3) the Simpsons (I don’t understand the Simpsons) because their parent(s) is/are too shagged out to socialise with them,

WOULD UNDER NO CONDITIONS eat the rabbit-food, milk, water, dried rat-droppings and sawdust that were now suddenly to be all that was available. (Apologies for the point size change, I can’t find how to sort it.)

My boy, a budding libertarian, has taken to slipping into the local tobacconist before school, buying (WITH his school lunch money) a few packs of something sugary he thinks is the “next thing”, and auctioning them in break times. He can’t lose; if he’s made a bad Nick Leeson – type commodity-dealer’s choice on the day, and is out of the money, he can always scoff the assets – unlike bullion!

If states treat their citizens, and – worse – children, as farm animals, to be force-fed on what the latest Gosplan “expert” says is the dog’s bollocks, then they mustn’t run whingeing to the media every time the animals rebel, and refuse to eat the tasteless compost on offer. The marvel of food-production-capitalism lies in taking cheap stuff of yet OK food value, and turning it into yummy twizzlers and burgers and fries and all sorts of delights that actually taste like you want to eat them, instead of “tasting of themselves”. Pre-capitalist food in the Warsaw pact countries mostly “tasted of itself”, and that of course was one of the problems that early travellers there encountered!

If the British school meals service runs out of money (a tautology) and fails, then “opinion-formers” will have themselves to blame for pretending to themselves and to the rest of us that they own our children’s bodies, and can dictate what is inserted therein. The food tastes of our teenagers are largely formed by the culture in which they live. If you think their food tastes are “wrong”, then, as the Irishman said when asked the way to somewhere, “You should not start from here!”

“Junk Food” (there is no such concept imho, and this is a deliberate, malicious socialist slur on firms that make tasty food affordable for poor-people, who have only 5 minutes to buy it and eat it) is the natural result of states forcing every adult member of every family to go out to work, simply to bear the taxation burden imposed by the employment of the bureaucrats who then do all this bullying-around, so that the taxation burden has to go up, in order to…………….

LA Statement on Tory “Social Justice” Report

NEWS RELEASE FROM THE LIBERTARIAN ALLIANCE
In Association with the Libertarian InternationalRelease Date: Thursday 12th July 2007
Release Time: Immediate

Contact Details:
Dr Sean Gabb (Director), 07956 472 199, sean@libertarian.co.uk

For other contact and link details, see the foot of this message
Release url: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/news/nr054.htm

STATEMENT BY THE LIBERTARIAN ALLIANCE ON TORY “SOCIAL JUSTICE” REPORT

The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties policy institute, today issues the following statement on the Report of the Conservative Party Social Justice Policy Group. The statement is prompted by the resulting proposals to use the power of the State to “strengthen families”. These proposals include a tax allowance of £20 a week to married couples, and higher taxes on alcohol.

Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Sean Gabb, says:

“The Conservatives are half right and half wrong.

“They are right when they admit that fifty years of social engineering by Conservative and Labour Governments have been a miserable failure. We have been taxed. We have been subsidised. We have been regulated. We have been endlessly preached at. And, after two generations of all this, we have, as a nation, been made neither happier nor more virtuous. There is more illegitimacy, more divorce, more drunkenness, more crime.

“But the Conservatives are wrong when they believe that the harms of social engineering can be cured by different social engineering.

“Above all, this Report shows the usual Tory obsession with sex. These people seem to believe that, without laws to restrain us, most people would be copulating in the street. This is probably true for some Conservative politicians. Most ordinary people, however, are naturally inclined to join in stable, heterosexual unions and to produce children. Some people are not inclined to this, and libertarians respect their choice. But most people are so inclined. They do not need to be bribed with their own money into getting married. They do not need “help” from politicians.

“If the Conservative Party were really interested in improving the quality of family life, it should promise:

• To abolish income tax and reduce all other taxes, thereby allowing one partner in each marriage to stay at home and look after children;
• To abolish inheritance tax, thereby allowing the thrifty to leave property to their children;
• To abolish all new regulations made since 1987 on the setting up and running of small businesses, thereby better enabling the ambitious to start family businesses, rather than work as salaried hirelings for big business and the State;
• To repeal all new criminal offences created since 1987, thereby giving families the renewed sense of living in a free country;
• To repeal the European Communities Act 1972, thereby giving families the renewed sense of living in an independent country;
• To repeal all compulsory attendance laws at schools that are at best academies of ruling class propaganda, and at worst a form of child abuse;
• To dismiss all social workers and close down all child and family welfare agencies, thereby ending a petty inquisition over family life.

“But, of course, the Conservative Party is not interested in reviving family life by trusting the people and giving them a renewed sense of personal and national pride. This whole report is nothing more than a public relations exercise to hide the increasingly obvious fact that there is no difference between the Conservative and Labour Parties on any issue of importance.

“The Libertarian Alliance believes that all social problems can be solved by keeping politicians from doing anything about them.”

END OF STATEMENT

Note(s) to Editors

Dr Sean Gabb is the Director of the Libertarian Alliance. His new book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, is published on the 25th July 2007 and may be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3. His other books are available from Hampden Press at http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk.

He can be contacted for further comment on 07956 472 199 or by email at sean@libertarian.co.uk