Save the UK Theme!

Amid all the excitement caused by the dead London whale, the sexual antics of antics of Liberal Democrats, and the election triumph of Hamas, the real news story of the week has slipped out almost unnoticed: the BBC has announced that it plans to scrap Radio 4's UK Theme.

For the last 33 years, this five-minute medley of tunes including Danny Boy, What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?, Scotland the Brave and Rule Britannia, has greeted listeners as the World Service switched back to Radio Four at half past five in the morning.

Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer has decided it has to go. In its place there'll be "a fast paced news bulletin". This hardly seems a pressing case for change. It's surely not too much to ask for people to wait half an hour until the next news bulletin, and we have enough rolling news channels anyway. The suspicion therefore remains that the change is attributable to the traditional and patriotic nature of the music.

Whether you think that the UK Theme is an uplifting, pastoral synthesis of folk tunes from each of the constituent nations of Britain, which should be kept as a symbol of our island's great history, or that it's an undistinguished dirge-like musical melange, I would suggest that anything that the pinko liberals at the BBC want to get rid of must be worth keeping, and that we should rally to its defence, even if only to annoy people like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

To annoy them more, I'd like Radio Four to surrender its name and go back to being the Home Service.

Was I the only one to see the irony in this headline?

Cameron wants young forced to be volunteers

So much for entering politics because he wanted to set people free, and not because he wanted to tell them what to do!

Racist soup!

Before Christmas the BBC carried reports about a far right group in France that was handing out soup to the homeless. There was only one catch: they only serve pork soup which Jews and Muslims cannot eat.

Many asked what had happened to goodwill to all men over the holiday season. Many more decried the far right groups as evil racists.

Now the BBC reports that the authorities have stepped in. Despite these groups protesting that their soup is traditional cuisine, it's declared that these soup kitchens are a form of discrimination against the Jews and Muslims.

While the groups are making a political statement through this gestures that renders it less than truly altruistic, I have to wonder what exactly the problem is supposed to be. Why can't a far right group offer food that acceptable only to those that find it acceptable?

It's not even as if they are actually disbarring Jews or Muslims from taking their soup. The only people who can't accept it are those who freely choose to place their religious beliefs over taking the soup on offer. It's not the far right group that's restricting their choice.

Yet the French authorities would rather that nobody receives soup, than it even be thought to discriminate against minorities. All they have achieved by implementing a ban is bolstering the far right group's claim to be victimised and down trodden by minorities - and thus aided its cause.

The European approach of artificially-creating racial harmony remains as counterproductive as ever.

Edited to add:

The excellent Civitas blog also comments on this story.

A master of simplicities

In between a series of Liberal Democrat scandals and Cameronesque retreats from sound Conservative positions, one recent death has attracted little attention. On January 21st, Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong in the 60s, passed away.

Cowperthwaite is the hero of the chapter on tax and growth in James Bartholomew's book The Welfare State We're In, precisely because he pursued the low tax and small state policies that the likes of David Cameron want nothing to do with, despite their tremendous success.

Arriving in Hong Kong in 1945, Cowpwerthwaite was asked to find ways in which the government could revive the economy. However, the economy was rapidly recovering without intervention. The lesson was taken to heart and non-intervention became a key part of his approach.

Cowperthwaite called his approach "positive non-intervention". Personal taxes were kept at a maximum of 15 per cent; government borrowing was avoided; there were no tariffs or subsidies. Bureaucracy was kept at a minimum.

During his tenure, pursuit of these policies produced a 50 per cent rise in real wages, and a two-thirds fall in the number of households in acute poverty. Exports rose by 14 per cent a year, and Hong Kong evolved from a trading post into a major economic power.

As Cowperthwaite observed in his first budget speech:

"In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen,exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralised decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."

He really was a man who trusted people.

By contrast, modern Conservatives appear to think that the way to meet the challenges of global market doesn't involve trimming down the bloated state, but rather in managing it better, despite the wight of evidence that suggests Cowperthwaite was right.

Like Cowperthwaite, I'd prefer a dynamic economy that delivers growth. Setting people free from the dead hand of the state and cutting their taxes is the way to do that. But this seems to lost on certain Big Government Conservatives.

As the share of GDP consumed by the state excedes even that of Germany, and growth predictions are continually downsized, it becomes more obvious that now is the time to argue for lower taxes and deregulation - to demonstrate that we see "trusting people" as more than just a soundbite.