We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
What is happening today, it seems, is that the entire population of the UK is in the midst of realizing that whether a controversial idea may be safely expressed depends, in large part, on the hearer, and not the speaker.
Current law fails the rule-of-law test:
the law hands police and magistrates wide discretionary powers to decide which viewpoints are acceptable, depending on the social or political mood at the time and on the ground.
Legislation can not seem to fix the problem:
Because every legislative fix proposed in recent years has failed to address the root problem: the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. This is the idea that the King-in-Parliament wields unlimited power with no guardrails, and has long been a foundational principle of British constitutional order. The British state does not concede the existence of any legal limits on its own authority. Individual rights have become casualties of rigid adherence to this ancient doctrine, which, plainly, no longer serves the interests of the society it governs.
Byrne goes on to argue that the application of speech laws has changed over time due to fashion. The only real solution to that is absolute free speech like that granted by the US First Amendment.
Encouragingly, in 2025, wearing a mask in shops, leisure facilities, workplaces or on public transport is for the most part confined to a tiny minority. Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors. While these pockets of fanaticism exist, there is always a danger that – fuelled by the contagion of safetyism – the imposition of mask requirements can re-ignite across all community settings. With this in mind, on this five-year anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, the campaign group Smile Free is about to release a short film, Masking Humanity, in which health and social care experts vividly convey the enormous harms of masks in these settings. Please help to spread the word to assist in the mission to keep blanket masking out of health and social care.
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it.
In Ms Harvey’s universe – occupied by the likes of Corrêa do Lago, Greenpeace and the UK’s very own ‘Mad Ed’, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the science is settled, the energy transition is an imperative and decarbonisation will not only save the planet from an impending environmental catastrophe but also bring about economic growth and prosperity. Harvey’s article hinges on the tired assertion that the science of climate change is settled, with a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that human activity drives catastrophic global warming. This figure, derived from John Cook’s 2013 study, has been debunked repeatedly for its methodological flaws — most notably by scholars like David Legates, who found that only a tiny fraction of the studied papers explicitly endorsed the catastrophic narrative.
Ukraine secretly delivered FPV drones and wooden mobile cabins into Russia. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the cabins, which were later mounted on trucks.
At the signal, the roofs opened remotely. Dozens of drones launched directly from the trucks, striking strategic bomber aircraft.
And — Russia can’t produce these bombers anymore. The loss is massive.
Nothing like this has ever been done before.
In one sense, of course, it has been done before. The military history of the twentieth century contains many examples of large numbers of planes being destroyed on their airfields – by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour, by the Germans at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and by the Israelis in the first hours of the Six Day War, to name but three.
But such damage being done by itty bitty little drones that were considered little more than toys a few years ago is new.
As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
“President Trump appears to be annoyed that trade negotiations with the European Union are dragging along too slowly. Join the club, pal. The biggest victims of Brussels’ indecision and sloth on trade are the Europeans themselves. Even if Mr. Trump’s tariffs fall to U.S. courts, it won’t liberate the Continent from trade war. The bloc is too good at doing damage to itself.”
This, by the way, is part of why I voted for Brexit nine years ago. I saw little chance that the bloc would reform, become more accountable, and make it easier to roll back red tape, and replace one-size-fits-all with mutual recognition of standards.
Tory MP claims ‘law breaking is out of control’ in video in which he accosts travellers on the underground
Robert Jenrick is perhaps best known to the public as the former government minister who unlawfully intervened in a planning decision involving a billionaire Conservative party donor.
To others, he may be the Tory MP that parliament’s spending watchdog said was centrally involved in wasting nearly £100m on a botched plan to house asylum seekers.
Now, however, Jenrick has a new claim to fame: as the man who released a video of himself delivering “vigilante justice” to people he accused of fare dodging in London.
The failed party leadership candidate posted a video online on Thursday morning in which he accused the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, of “driving a proud city into the ground”, adding: “Lawbreaking is out of control. He’s not acting. So, I did.”
The alternative media outlet “The London Economic” has been busily putting out anti-Jenrick arguments that exemplify how left wingers miss the point, and which contain the word “akshully” even when they don’t:
“It’s been pointed out that Jenrick’s constituency of Newark actually has a higher crime rate than London”
So the Shadow Justice Secretary isn’t allowed to care about crime outside his own constituency?
and
“Robert Jenrick broke TfL rules in video complaining about Tube fare-dodgers”
Oh no, won’t somebody please think of the poor Transport for London rules – since TfL itself evidently does not.
I came across this tweet a week ago and bookmarked it because I knew it would soon be relevant:
One of the fundamental operating modes of the British state is that it will make everyone’s lives worse in numerous small ways rather than properly get to grips with the people who actually cause the problems.
The standfirst to Pauline Block’s article is: “Whatever the explanation for the incident, the reaction points to backward French attitudes – including from the president himself”. Although Ms Bock probably did not write those words, they are a fair reflection of her article. It casts its net wide, and among the fish brought up from the depths are the age gap between the Macrons, the convention by which the French press says nothing about the romantic relationships of French politicians, how would we feel if it was a man pushing a woman, and…
That Macron doesn’t see the potential problem in the video points to a narrow, obsolete understanding of couple dynamics and domestic violence. He has twice proclaimed gender equality to be the “great cause” of his presidential mandates before refusing to properly fund it; he has spoken in support of the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who has recently been found guilty of sexual assault and is soon to be on trial again for rape; and to this day, the former interior minister and current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, who was accused of sexual assault (the case has now been dismissed), has remained in Macron’s cabinet.
It would have been easy enough to turn this moment into a public health message. He could have simply said that he’s all right, thanks for your consideration, but that men who do experience violence should feel no shame in seeking help, using it as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence prevention. Instead, he mocked the “fools” who thought anything could be amiss.
But why should he turn it into a “public health message” if he and his wife really were only larking around? There is something very cavalier about the Guardian‘s “whatever” in “Whatever the explanation for the incident”. The true explanation of the incident is the only thing that matters. If it was play, even play mixed in with annoyance (and such pretended fighting moves can be used to defuse quarrels as well as to escalate them), then it is nobody’s business other than the Macrons’ own, and the demand that he – or she – use it as a teaching moment is intrusive. How would Mme Bock like it if a similar demand for an impromptu sermon were made of her after some innocent but embarrassing incident in her private life was accidentally caught on camera?
But if it was a real attack, there are indeed things to discuss. Does anyone have the right not to have their act of domestic violence investigated because their spouse or partner has not officially complained? Does anyone have the right not to have an act of domestic violence against them investigated because they have made no official complaint? Does it make any difference whether either party is male or female? Does it make a difference if either party is a political leader?
If it was real. But we don’t know if it was. Looking at the video at quarter speed, I still couldn’t decide. So all the questions above are repeated with “act of domestic violence” replaced with “what looks on the face of it like an act of domestic violence”.
In favour of the push crossing the threshold into being an assault, albeit not one intended to cause injury, is the fact that Mme Macron looked angry and refused to take her husband’s arm as she descended the steps, and that the Elysée Palace initially lied and said the video was fake. In favour of it being mere bickering horseplay is that the plane was full of bodyguards specifically charged with protecting the President of France.
Triggered by the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, the EU Commission launched a campaign to reassert control over Europe’s political narrative. Central to this is the rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, framed as threats to democratic stability. The Commission presents these programmes as public-interest research initiatives, but they constitute a form of soft authoritarianism, enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which should be relabelled as the ‘Digital Surveillance Act’, is the crown jewel of this strategy. The legal framework enables the EU to regulate online speech under the guise of protection.
The MCC Brussels report underlines a disturbing fact: the Commission spends 31 per cent more on narrative control than on research addressing cancer, despite cancer causing nearly two million deaths annually in Europe. This prioritisation signals that Brussels fears the cancer of free speech more than the disease. Public funds are being funnelled unaccountably into a disinformation narrative designed to shape, limit and manage the terms of public debate.
My point is: to anyone who understands the reality of Putin’s regime, the idea that he has “gone CRAZY” and is killing people is… well, CRAZY. Vladimir Putin is in power and retains power precisely because he has always been someone who is prepared to lie, manipulate and kill to achieve his objectives. That is literally what the KGB trained him to do.
In his post criticising Putin, Trump went on to add: “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right”. Finally, it seems, our American friends are beginning to understand who they are dealing with.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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