Robt Fenwick Elliott
4.9K posts
@RFenell
Where we are is where we sleep at night
My Democratic colleagues are big fans of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. His loony, woke ideas give Rep. Ocasio-Cortez a run for her money—which is why he’s polling right up there with gonorrhea.
@ClarkeMicah @Dead_as_a_dodo I like @ClarkeMicah. But this one is downright silly. Cars work fine without a subsidy. For sure they need roads which are paid for by taxes, but the cost of roads is much less than the tax on cars
Finally, in Darren Jones, there is a Labour minister who is beginning clearly to spell out the story of this government.
@ClarkeMicah @cjsnowdon Catering on transport doesn’t work without a subsidy.
@ClarkeMicah A number of my dearest friends have religious beliefs. I do not get stuck in the mire of pointless argument with them. Enjoy your day, @ClarkeMicah, with my very best wishes.
How long have you got, @ClarkeMicah? But in the shortest terms: mankind has over several millennia in many different places believed in deities in ways which are wholly inconsistent and mutually exclusive. That speaks only to an ubiquitous human predisposition to belief founded, not in truth, but on instinct. Not based in rationality, but in a craving for spiritual comfort, real in its force but arbitrary in its formulation. At the very, very least, all but one of these thousands of belief systems is utter bunkum. But hey! If it makes you happy, and if your particular imaginary friend is not calling on you to murder imagined infidels, good for you. And anyway, if your particular delusion does in fact make you happy, I suppose it has a certain rationality to it, in a way? Christians have built some great churches and have some brilliant hymns.
🗣️ We are delighted to announce that @DanielJHannan will be joining us as our new Director General. "The IEA set Britain free. When it was founded in 1955, there was a consensus in favour of high spending, industrial management and economic planning. Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon showed people what was wrong with those ideas, and thus unleashed the genius of our nation. We face a similar challenge today. Public spending and taxation are higher now than they were in 1955. We are back to the fatal conceit, the idea that politicians, bureaucrats and planners know best. Just like the IEA's founders, we need to change people's minds, to open people's eyes. The route to national prosperity, now as then, is through deregulation, free trade, sound money and low spending. It's not just the politicians we need to convince; it's not even primarily the politicians. When voters understand the case for smaller government, MPs follow. I am so grateful to every one of my predecessors, from Ralph Harris, who inspired me as a teenager, to David Frost, whom I am proud to call my friend. They kept the flame burning. Now it is time to heap up the fire." — Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, incoming Director General of the IEA, from 1 June 2026.
Obviously, belief in an external deity (at any rate with at least some vestige of omniscience and/or omnipotence) is irrational. But I learned the hard way when required to study hardback-chair philosophy when young, the cleverer people are, the more ingenious their ways to circumvent the obvious, if that is their bent.
This is one of the more striking Reform policies: a UK version of ICE. To deport 2m would require a separate police force and methods more intrusive than anything seen hitherto.
Some clever people are religious and it makes me wonder if a predisposition to believing in the supernatural and being superstitious is inherited and genetic. Peter Hitchens and Christopher Hitchens, brothers and both clever people - one very much an atheist, the other very religious. What is it that allows otherwise forensic minds to override rationality?
