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]
In the beginning there were wireless sets. But the government worried that these could be used by spies for a foreign power. So it demanded that wireless owners took out licences. The licences were free the government just wanted to know who had a wireless. Just in case.
Then someone came up with the idea of broadcasting. Music, lectures, news, that sort of thing. The government came up with a scheme. They would charge a fee for the licence. It would also demand that wireless manufacturers make a contribution. To sugar the pill it would make it illegal to sell a wireless set that wasn’t made by a member of the British Broadcasting Company.
The minister responsible for this? One Neville Chamberlain.
And so in late 1922 the BBC, in the shape of such regional broadcasters as 2LO, came into being. And it was very popular – save for the fact that building one’s own set was illegal. But the arrangement had an expiry date. And a committee was set up to decide what to do next.
A hundred years ago it reported and as you can probably guess, the manufacturers were ditched with the recommendation that a public body to be known as the British Broadcasting Commission be put in its place financed entirely through the licence fee.
Why? I seem to remember being told that the Company was in dire financial straits. But there’s not a hint of it in the report as published in The Times. Actually, there is very little justification at all. Although they do say this:
Notwithstanding the progress which we readily acknowledge, and to the credit of which the company is largely entitled, we are impelled to the conclusion that no company or body constituted on trade lines for the profit, direct or indirect, of those composing it can be regarded as adequate in view of the broader considerations now beginning to emerge.
So you are getting rid of something you “readily acknowledge” is a success for something that might work?
We do not recommend a prolongation of the licence of the British Broadcasting Company or the establishment of any similar body composed of persons who represent particular interests.
I’ve got some bad news about how that’s going to work out.
We think a public corporation the most appropriate organization. Such an authority would enjoy a freedom and flexibility which a Minister of State himself could scarcely exercise in arranging for performers and programmes, and in studying the variable demands of public taste and necessity.
The British Broadcasting Commission will be appointed by the Crown, and the Committee feel that the proposal is an interesting development in the application of the principle of public ownership.
So, the whole thing was a communist experiment. Great. And then there was this doozy:
It is felt that that principle can be easily applied in this instance, because broadcasting must of its very nature be a monopoly.
Clearly that argument falls because it is not true that broadcasting is a monopoly. But even if it were, as a libertarian, in principle I would prefer such things to exist in an unfettered free market.
Before it became Lenin in the lounge
Update 10/4/26. Incredulity has been expressed over the idea that d-i-y wireless sets were illegal. They were but only for about a year or so. And I don’t think there were any prosecutions. Oddly enough, when “interim” licences were first issued – for just such sets – the number of licences doubled more or less overnight.
The other day the Triggernometry boys sat down with a Professor Robert Pape to discuss the Iran War. Here are his main points along with my commentary:
Airstrikes do not change regimes. – Spot on. They don’t change their aims either. Although they may change their capabilities.
The 12-Day War of 2025 didn’t work. – That sounds about right. It would appear that Iran still has stocks of the stuff you make nuclear bombs out of.
Kharg Island will be difficult to take. – Nonsense.
Iran has become an oil “hegemon”. – In other words, by demonstrating it can close the Straits of Hormuz it dominates supply. I doubt it.
Suicide bombing has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with desperation. – While I am always open to other ways of looking at things I can’t help but notice that suicide attacks are almost never carried out by Westerners however desperate.
The Obama deal, which Pape advised on, is as good as it gets. – He’s losing me.
Israel is involved in ethnic cleansing in Gaza. – Now he’s completely lost me. “To Hell or Connaught” it is not.
Israel will end up having to allow inspections of its hitherto unacknowledged nuclear facilities. – Maybe, but there won’t be any bombs to inspect because by then the Israelis will have used them.
There was something else that bugged me. It was his general tone: defeatism mixed with smugness.
*Of course, this interview does no such thing. It seems to me that Obama’s guiding principle was the destruction of American liberties and their replacement with a communist tyranny. The Papes of this world just provided suitable intellectual cover.
Dr. Mackail, in one of his recent essays, has laid fresh stress on this point when he says there were not enough Romans left to carry on the work of Rome. There are fears among those who are responsible for Government to-day, fears not yet gripping us by the throat, but taking grisly shape in the twilight, that the Great War, by the destruction of our best lives in such numbers, has not left enough of the breed to carry on the work of the Empire. Our task is hard enough, but it will be accomplished ; yet who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West and the civilization of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome ? She has left danger signals along the road ; it is for us to read them.
– Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister as was), 9 January 1926. Maybe fear of a repeat of the collapse of the Roman Empire is an ever-present feature of Western civilisation. I still fear it though.
News today got me thinking about a quote from T.E Utley’s Lessons of Ulster which was first published in 1975. Below is a scan from my copy.
Click for full page.
For the uninitiated he is referring to the creation of a “no go” zone in Londonderry which lasted from 1969 to 1972.
Lessons of Ulster is a magnificent work. Flicking through it 30 years after having read it I was surprised how perceptive he was – more perceptive that I recall thinking at the time. But as you can see from the marginalia, I didn’t entirely agree with Utley and after hearing the news that the threat of Islamic violence has led to Israeli football fans being banned from attending a match in Birmingham I think I can claim that I was right and Utley wrong. Sure, we may not be seeing barricades but there can be little doubt that the British state lacks the will to face down mob violence.
Lest I am doing Utley a disservice, he did also have this to say:
It… seemed to me that, in some degree at least, the tragic conflict in Ulster might turn out to be a rehearsal for an even more devastating challenge to authority on this side of the Irish Sea.
Although – given that this was written in the 1970s – I think he was probably thinking more about communists and trade unions.
This has been the subject of some debate. Tommy Robinson says 3 million. The police say 150,000. That’s quite the discrepancy.
Oddly enough, I am in a rather good position to judge. I was there. Did I count them all? No, I didn’t. What I did do, however, was skulk around the back. Oh, and do some maths.
The plan was for everybody to assemble in Stamford St which, for those who don’t know, is a street in South London between Blackfriars and Waterloo Stations. Stamford St was packed and there was an overflow into Southwark Road, Blackfriars Road and Blackfriars Bridge. I was right at the back of the overflow into Southward Road. I would say that extended for – if I am being generous – 100m. (My apologies for using Nazi units but I can’t be arsed to do the conversion.)
Whitehall is 700m long. Stamford St is about the same length. So with the overflows we get 1000m of march. Stamford St is maybe 30m wide. So we get the whole march – I didn’t see many late comers – in 30,000m².
So how many people per metre? I understand the rule of thumb is 4. For comparison, Wembley manages to 90,000 people sat down in 90,000m². Four standing in the same space as one seated? Bit of a squeeze but possible.
Ernest Benn was the uncle of Tony Benn and great-uncle of Hilary Benn. Luckily for us he was the black sheep of the family and pursued a career in business before becoming one of the “great and the good”. And then he decided he didn’t want to be great or good any more, founding the Society for Individual Freedom. As I understand it the Libertarian Alliance – who most here will be familiar with – emerged from that association.
A hundred years ago Benn was compiling a list of good economics books which – seemingly unbelievably – The Times published. It includes – as you might expect – Smith, Bastiat and Mill and – as you might not expect – Spencer and Smiles. It also includes Henry Ford – presumably before he started blaming the Jews for everything. But there is one book that’s missing. Luckily a young Austrian is on the case.
The Times, Tuesday, 14 April 1925
[I hope this is legible. It’s a bit blurred on my computer but the original is fine. The list is totally blurred if I try to include it inline with the post. All very odd.]
Many conservative commentators have hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the recent election as a “landslide”. It would appear – not all the votes have been counted yet – up your game, yanks! – that he will get 50% v 48% of the popular vote and 312 v 226 (58% v 42%) of the electoral college vote.
For comparison, in 1924 Calvin Coolidge got 54% of the vote and 72% of the electoral college although he may have been aided by the presence of a third-party candidate.
Calvin Coolidge won bigly.
Rather puts a damper on things. Not least because Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, has to be the worst candidate I have ever seen: cowardly, inarticulate, trivial, vacuous. She couldn’t even decide if she was the continuity candidate or the change candidate. I really do struggle to think of somebody worse. McGovern ’72? Carter ’80?
So, how come Harris did as well as she did? The communist media certainly helped. By the way how did the media get so communist in freedom-loving America with a free market in media? Is it something to do with the “Fairness” Doctrine?
But there is also academe once an incubator of intellectual curiosity, now a factory for the production of brain-dead communists. How did that happen in free-market America with a free market in education?
We would also have to look at big-government programmes like pensions and healthcare which give a powerful incentive for people to vote for high-spending candidates. And the Democrats were adept at using the abortion issue.
The truth of the matter is that if the Democrats had put up an only slightly more plausible candidate than Harris they would have won. They might even have won fair and square. I hope the people who Trump will be appointing to senior positions in the coming weeks are aware of this and will be focused on evening up the odds.
By the way, seeing as the 1924 election came up – entirely by chance you understand – here’s a little quiz for you. There were three candidates that year: Calvin Coolidge (R); John Davis (D) and Robert LaFolette (communist). Which of them said this:
If any organization, no matter what it chooses to be called, whether Ku Klux Klan or by any other name, raises the standard of racial or religious prejudice or attempts to make racial origin or religious belief a test of fitness for public office, it does violence to the spirit of American institutions and must be condemned by all those who believe, as I do, in American ideals…
The big political story in Britain at the moment is the Labour Prime Minister accepting free clothes on behalf of his wife from a benefactor – an act that the cruel – and cruelly funny it must be said – have thought worthy of ridicule.
But would you know it! A hundred years ago (where I live) the big story is also the Labour Prime Minister accepting free stuff from a benefactor. In James Ramsay MacDonald’s case the free stuff is a car (a Daimler no less) and the means to maintain it. At this point things take a turn for the better for Keir Starmer’s predecessor. The benefactor, a Sir Alexander Grant happens to be an old friend of MacDonald’s and also happens to be a biscuit millionaire. Sir Alexander claims that he was moved to his act of unbidden generosity when he heard that MacDonald was travelling around London by Underground Railway which he felt was tiring him out and undermining his efficiency. I suppose the equivalent today would be if his modern-day counterpart had discovered that Sir Keir and Lady Starmer were wandering about in garments made of sack cloth.
By the way, I am not sure what travelling around on the London Underground says about Ramsay MacDonald but I can’t help feeling that it says a lot about the society of the time.
…A charismatic politician – once a supporter – is now it’s greatest foe. It’s members have abandoned the beliefs that made the party an electoral force. It’s enemies smell blood. Annihilation beckons.
I am, of course, talking about 1924. The party is the Liberal Party. The politician is Winston Churchill. The beliefs are liberal beliefs: property rights, low taxation, low regulation, sound money.
At this point the similarities with anything more modern start to end. The great shift in politics over the previous quarter of a century had been the rise of the Labour Party. Helped by the socialist take over of the trade unions and the extension of the franchise, Labour found themselves in government albeit as a minority administration.
The Liberal response to the rise of the Labour Party had been to steal its clothes. Hence, Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. This introduced state pensions, a state-run GP service and a limited unemployment benefit scheme. Worse still, a lot of the Liberal Party’s members gave up on the very idea of liberalism. Hence Lord Haldane, one-time Liberal Minister of War could became a Labour Lord Chancellor.
Churchill’s role in this was to identify socialism as the great threat. His argument was that Liberals and Conservatives (or Unionists as they tended to call themselves in those days) needed to put aside their differences to fight the greater enemy. As I write this, a hundred years ago Churchill is inching his way towards becoming a Conservative but – Churchill being Churchill – his first step in that journey is to fight a by-election against an official Conservative candidate.
A week or so ago I posted about the case of Abdul Ezedi – the corrosive liquid attacker – and compared it with a similar case from a hundred years ago. Ezedi would appear to have been found in Mayor Khan’s makeshift morgue otherwise known as the River Thames. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago Ezedi’s counterpart’s case has reached a conclusion. This is from The Times of 29 February 1924:
At the Central Criminal court yesterday, EDITH LOUISA BASSETT, 30, was found Guilty of throwing corrosive fluid upon Arthur William Thompson, and upon three other persons, with intent to do grievous bodily harm to Thompson. MR. JUSTICE SHEARMAN sentenced her to three years’ penal servitude.
Only three years? But there’s a bit more to this woman:
After the jury had found the prisoner Guilty, Inspector Aldridge said she had a remarkable history. Throughout her life she had been of a violent disposition. In 1905 she was sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour for wounding with intent to murder. She had made the acquaintance of an omnibus driver and one night after he had stated that he wished to have nothing more to do with her she went on the top of his omnibus and cut his throat with a razor. In 1910 she married a man named Bassett. The marriage proved a unhappy one and the husband joined the Navy. She next met a wealthy young man, and saying that she was the daughter of a retired doctor, persuaded him to go through the ceremony of marriage with her. She was charged with bigamy and bound over. Later she went to Scotland and assaulted a gentleman whose son, she said, had failed to carry out his promise to marry her. The prisoner in 1914 was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment with hard labour at the Central Criminal Court for perjury in the name of Melville. In that case she had borrowed a person’s baby to obtain an affiliation order against a man. In 1915 she made the acquaintance of an Army officer, and told him that her father was a ranch-owner in Mexico, and induced him to marry her. She also married another officer, and in that case borrowed a baby to work on the generosity of the officer’s parents. For that bigamy she was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment.
I make that 4 weddings, 4 assaults and 3 jail sentences. The women of today yesterday…
One of the big stories over the last couple of week has involved an attack involving a corrosive substance. The fact that the perpetrator appears to have been an illegal immigrant has not gone unnoticed.
Here’s another case:
After being five weeks in hospital, Arthur William Thompson, an omnibus inspector, attended at the Westminster Police Court yesterday to give evidence against EDITH LOUISE BASSETT, alias Mabel Young, 31, of Fentiman-road, Lambeth, on the charge of throwing corrosive acid in his face in the vestibule of the Court with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
But – as you’ve probably guessed from the presence of the word “omnibus” and a hyphenated road name – this isn’t recent. In fact it’s from The Times from Thursday 14th February 1924. And it’s far from an isolated case.
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
