Tag: UK

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free trade & free markets international affairs

Sabotage or Neglect?

UK, British, steel, manufacturing, China

“It might not be sabotage,” says Member of Parliament Jonathan Reynolds. “It might be neglect.”

Reynolds serves as the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary. He’s talking about the behavior of Jungye, the Chinese owner of troubled British Steel. 

“The conscious decision not just to not order raw materials but to sell existing supplies of raw materials …” Reynolds fulminated, leading him to tell the BBC that “he doesn’t want any future Chinese involvement in British steel making.”

Over the weekend, the UK Government seized British Steel, with Reynolds explaining that “he was forced to seek emergency powers to prevent owners Jingye” from “shutting down its two blast furnaces, which would have ended primary steel production in the UK.”

“They wanted to close down steel production in Britain,” argues Nigel Farage, an MP and leader of Reform UK, “This is a big strategic decision by the CCP.”

Asked if he was accusing the Chinese owners of “lying about the numbers,” the fiery Farage replied, “Yes, absolutely,” adding, “Lying about everything.”

In a single day, Saturday, Parliament passed emergency legislation to facilitate the Business Secretary’s request. 

One opposition MP called it a “botched nationalization,” as the company is still in Chinese hands. It seems more a rescue attempt for Chinese owners who don’t want to be rescued. 

Takeaway? Maybe China isn’t such a great economic partner after all. 

Free countries are reluctantly rediscovering that we still live in a dangerous world, in which we better be able to protect ourselves and not depend on the sworn enemies of freedom. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy social media

Against British Censorship

U.K. British, censorship

The dictates of the neo-​redcoat British government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are out of control.

Starmer’s Labour government wants the whole world to obey its censorship demands. The latest is that its Office of Communications, called Ofcom, is threatening the American social media platforms Gab and Kiwi Farms with mega-​steep fines for unwaveringly safeguarding the freedom of speech of users. 

Which of course Gab and Kiwi Farms have every right to do.

Ofcom says it’ll sock Gab with fines of up $23 million USD for refusing to censor its users per UK orders. 

“We will not pay one cent,” says Gab CEO Andrew Torba.

Gab is not only not cooperating with Ofconjob’s insanity, it has also reported the Starmer government to the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. Department of Justice in hopes that the U.S. government will retaliate against the United Kingdom for trying to gag social media in the United States.

Kiwi Farms, threatened with the same fine of up to 10 percent of worldwide revenue, is telling UK users who want to use the site to access it through a VPN or Tor in order to protect their online traffic and disguise which country they’re from. Otherwise, they’re out of luck.

Kiwi has also reported success in obtaining pro bono counsel for dealing with “the UK’s attempts to enforce its censorship regime in the United States.”

As the U.S. president famously said in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Musk Avoids a Trap

Elon Musk, UK, censorship, freedom

After reports that British MPs wanted to summon Elon Musk to interrogate him about the role of his company, X (Twitter), “in disseminating ‘disinformation’ during the summer riots,” I didn’t suppose that he’d be eager to rush across the pond to be grilled by enemies of freedom of speech.

One of his would-​be interrogators, Chi Onwurah, a Labour committee chairwoman, said she wanted to “cross-​examine him to see … how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation.”

What a mystery. How can someone champion freedom of speech and letting people say things with which others disagree? Isn’t freedom of speech only for government-​authorized speech, the kind King George III would have approved?

On X, a Malaysian commentator sought to warn Musk: “This is a trap,” tweeted Miles Cheong, “They’ll detain him at the border, demand to see the contents of his phone, and charge him under counterterrorism laws when he refuses.”

If we were concerned even a little that Mr. Musk might fall into this or a similar trap, we needn’t have been.

In reply to Cheong, Musk asserted that MPs will, rather, “be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”

In September, in response to being pointedly and publicly not invited to a British investment conference, Musk had said, “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Give Mr. Bean Another Hearing

Mr. Bean, UK, Great Britain, censorship, mind control, authoritarianism

Twelve years ago, Rowan Atkinson of “Mr. Bean” fame took a stand against a law that criminalizes “insulting” speech. He was participating in a campaign to reform Section 5 of the Public Order Act of 1986.

In his remarks launching the campaign, recently resurrected on Twitter, Atkinson said that his concern was less for himself as a person with a high public profile than “for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile. Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse gay. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult. Or the café owner arrested for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.”

And what about the thousands of cases that “weren’t quite ludicrous enough to attract media attention? Even for those actions that were withdrawn, people were arrested, questioned, taken to court and then released.… That is censoriousness of the most intimidating kind.…”

And he said more than this. Luckily it’s recorded.

This effectively delivered argument, forceful and often funny, by a well-​known personality, had its effect. The Reform Section 5 campaign succeeded. The law was amended.

But the victory, though important, was narrow. And, since that win, sweeping assaults on speech that offends somebody or other continue in Britain, the United States, and other Western countries where people should know better than to emulate the censorship of authoritarian governments to which we aspire to provide an alternative. We’re going to need a lot more funny speeches.

Because this threat to freedom is so serious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture international affairs

BBC Apologizes, Bankers Squirm

Nigel Farage, gangsters, banksters, censorship

Banksters. It rhymes with “gangsters.”

The pejorative for bankers came to mind as I was reading about the British Broadcasting System’s public correction of a story it had published. In covering Coutts bank’s closure of Nigel Farage’s account, back on July 4, the BBC had said that it was not political.

But Mr. Farage, the former leader of the United Kingdom’s Independence Party, “later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered.”

Like we all guessed. 

The lengthy document seen by Farage and then the BBC “included minutes from a meeting in November last year reviewing his account” in which he was called “xenophobic and racist” and characterized as not the kind of customer compatible with Coutts’ “position as an inclusive organisation.”

Britain, like the United States, is in the throes of a very political “culture war.” Farage was the main proponent for Brexit in 2016. The unexpected success of Britain’s plebiscite to secede from the European Union became part of the global populist rebellion that led to the election of Donald Trump here. 

And, like here, in Britain it has gotten nasty.

Farage’s beef with the BBC was easily resolved, as Farage accepted the BBC’s apology and its reporter’s excuse that a “trusted and senior” confidential source within Coutts had fed the news organization misinformation.

The bank in question considers itself very upright and moral, apparently. Hardly a “gangster” — that’s not in its mission statement! But by taking sides in politics (apparently solidly in the Remainer rather than Brexiteer camp), the bank is following a trend we’ve seen here, where big business balks at doing business with people it doesn’t like — ideologically.

This is a recipe for the breakdown of open markets … and civil strife far beyond what we’ve seen so far.

That’s not good for business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Robert P. Murphy

It is wasteful for the government to commandeer resources from the private sector during good times, and it’s even more harmful when the government kicks the economy during a recession.

Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian (2018), p. 18.