The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

David Davis

“Steve Richards, this papers  [sic]  political columnist, recently boiled Brownism down to one succinct phrase, it was about “making capitalism work for the poor”. Only the problem is that capitalism doesn’t work for the poor. It works to create winners and therefore losers. It’s the job of centre-left governments to ensure that accidents of birth do not blight the rest of people’s lives. The market is singularly ill equipped to carry out such a task.”

And why is the “Independent” so precious and touchy? Just look at the following:

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The comments are worth a scream or two, but then having read that threatening and customer-unfriendly screed in red just above here, in clear, I personally would not deign to post a comment on its site, even if they paid me. They either want traffic or they do not. Or perhaps they just want to pretend that the “centre-left” is still winning…?

David Davis

Guido thinks that the soft left have turned against him (er, Brown, that is - not Guido! I must learn how to write.) Since they, the Enemy Class, run everything, I’d offer 5p at 10:1 that Gordon goes by 30th June.

The feeling of schadenfreude, that I can’t help enjoying, over Brown’s years of tantalised torment until he finally got what he wished for, has to be experienced to be believed.

That Indy columnist whose name I can’t remember, and who I believe would not invite me to his dinner parties, doesn’t get it about socialism. he just doesn’t: he thinks people want it, and can’t figure out where they’ve gone wrong. Oh, it’s someone called Neal Lawson, I’ve remembered now.

David Davis

Nice article about Meccano, a great scientific/mechanical invention, out of Liverpool.

The modern plastic stuff with all the wrong types of dedicated, non-standardised parts, in wacky zazzy colours, is just not gong to do what we want.

Here are the “Giant Blocksetting Crane”, and the “South Shields Assymmetric Blocksetting crane”, both famous models, realised all over the world, for decades.

OK, OK, OK, we can pay Chindia to build real ones for us, but we lose stature as a people if the knowledge of how to make one is no longer present as embedded in the culture, not as folk-memory but as something which people are proud to know.

When I was a boy, probably about aged 9 or so, I overheard a converstaion between my parents and my maths teacher, Mr Roberts, en ex-WW2 RSM. He was advised by my father that I was building fairly ambitious structures out of Meccano, but said that…

“Well, Mr Davis, here in the school, we don’t really recommend science toys in which the young boys are presented with pre-fabricated metal parts - it kills their initiative, you see. They should learn how to machine the parts themselves!”

Oh well, at least there’s K-Nex. It’s a good toy, but not really a patch on Meccano…

I often think about Mr Roberts, who fought all the way across North Africa, and up Italy, until he fetched up as a maths/Scripture/current affairs teacher at my prep school. If he had seen what was coming in the guise of “education, education, education”, in his nation, I can’t predict his reaction.