Over the past two weeks in Meikle’s Blog I have been looking at how ostensibly altruistic, benign liberal values and principles, have become enmeshed with grand totalising solutions and attempts to enforce norms and values, in effect to micro-manage people’s behaviour and interactions with each other, on a scale unprecedented in liberal-democratic societies. This combination […]
(Last week we examined the situation where benign liberal ideals have been allied to sweeping regulation enforced by law reinforced by a set of all-embracing values and principles which attempts to direct how people behave and interact with each other. This has been described as liberal-fascism. This week we look at how this impacts on […]
Recent Meikle’s Blogs looking at regulation (REGULATION AND INSPECTION: ALL FUR COAT AND NO KNICKERS, posted 16th December 2009), reaction to the recent severe weather in Britain (Risky Weather: posted 19th January) and last week’s blog examining the current moral panic regarding alcohol use (The Trouble with Alcohol: posted 26thJanuary), have had two underlying sub-texts. […]
No-one living in the UK at the moment could fail to notice the high profile that is being placed on what has been described sardonically as “our love affair with alcohol”. In the last ten days alone here in Scotland we have had an academic report which states that the costs of alcohol per head […]
The thaw has set in (for now) here in the west of Scotland, but from just before Christmas until last week the UK has been experiencing its worst winter weather since… well that depended on which paper or TV programme you were watching which varied somewhat on what year the weather was last as bad […]
Happy New Year! But not I fear a very prosperous one. This year in the UK a general election will have to be held probably in the spring. At the moment the two main political parties are wooing the British electorate by assuring them that they will be able to get the huge public sector […]
Our culture and society are awash with regulation and inspection. Virtually every organisation in every walk of life is now subject to intensive levels of scrutiny and compliance backed up by legislatively enforced regulatory regimes. All this, in theory, to ensure that organisations are performing as they should do and delivering good quality services to […]
Unregulated, untrammelled, unsupervised free market capitalism can end up being very similar in characteristics to its erstwhile opposite: a state controlled society where the bulk of economic life is directed by a few large public corporations. To prove my case I will call in evidence that most unromantic of vehicles the humble bus. It was […]
A HEALTHY ECONOMY Two years ago, out of the blue, I contracted a severe form of pneumonia. It was diagnosed relatively swiftly and I was admitted to a major hospital in Glasgow for an operation. One of Scotland’s leading specialists in respiratory illnesses performed the operation which was completely successful. Post-operative care was excellent and […]
Some say it all began with the late Jim Callaghan. “Sunny Jim” was British Prime Minister between 1976-1979. At the height of the UK’s mid 70s’ strike prone, crisis-ridden stagflation infested economy (thats’ a stagnant economy simultaneously coupled with an inflated one; something that was thought impossible by economists prior to the 70s’) the then […]