The Tory Party's 'Right to Porn'

Apparently, although they didn't know it, Stone Age men and women had an intrinsic 'right to porn' granted to them by their Creator. Yes, the technology wasn't around to provide it, but now that it is, no matter where any of their descendants choose to live, no matter how inaccessible their location, and no matter how expensive it is to get them hooked up to broadband, these descendants have a 'right' to empty my pocket of cash to provide themselves with porn.

Which is nice.

Thank goodness for all of these 'natural rights' that the politicians of the conservative party are discovering each day, no doubt with no eye at all on the latest polling figures from rural marginals, which despite endless farming subsidies engineered over the years by the Tories, aren't looking so hot.

So as well as farmers being born with a 'right' to endless lifetime subsidy, rural dwellers now have the 'right' to have expensive cables laid out to their modernised farmhouses and dinky little cottages so that they can watch porn and broadband TV and fill in online government tax forms. Their lives would be incomplete without this ability. How medieval people managed, I don't know. Or how these same people managed twenty years ago, in the same locations, is beyond me.

And there was me stupidly thinking that the only 'natural' rights our Creator gave us was the right to be left alone, the right to acquire previously unowned property, the right to peaceably trade their own property voluntarily with others, and the right to defend yourself against unwanted aggression trying to steal your property, which is necessary to maintain your life (such as government inland revenue officers coming to your house to empty your wallet to pay for broadband for other people to encourage these people to vote for the government).

Now I should imagine that most rural people in Britain are extremely robust on property rights, and their right to defend their property. However, they have fallen into the usual trap of thinking that when the government does the robbery, it's OK. Or that when they ask the government to rob other people on their behalf, that this is OK too.

So those people in the Hambleden valley, which is a stone's throw from Maturin Towers, who are 'demanding' broadband, need to be asked a question. If it's OK for you to send government tax men around to my house to rob me to pay for your broadband, the next time I'm walking past your mod-conned windmill, will it be alright for me to pop in the back-door and rob some stuff from your kitchen, to make up for it?

If not, why not?

The Tory party are a disgrace. What they should be offering us all is massive tax cuts, paid for by cutting all farming subsidies to zero, so that no matter where we are, we can easily afford to pay for broadband cables ourselves, or 3G mobile broadband (which is pretty cheap anyway, really), not the offer to rob other people on the robber's behalf.

Oh, and if cutting a farmer's subsidy makes it financially impossible for him or her to continue on the land, then get off the land, useless farmer, and go and do something else which doesn't keep stealing from me on a continual basis. Sell up, and let somebody else have a go at making your farm pay.

Where is Daniel Hannan when you need him?