(7)

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

From the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

It is a melancholy thought that in much of the Anglosphere today, the concepts of classical liberalism: natural rights, limited government, private property, free trade, freedom of speech, rational enquiry, and the pursuit of a happy life, are under attack. The US has been and still is an imperfect exemplar of those values, but in my mind it still is the best of them, amd I wish my American Anglosphere cousins a very happy Fourth of July.

Fire up the barbecues!

(0)

...or should I say Ron Paul. The previous post makes the case against Ron Paul as a champion of the libertarian faction of the US Republican party.

However, I shall be speaking about the US primary system and what Congressman Paul's campaign means at the Putney Debates tonight. I shall try to get a summary up over the weekend, either on Samizdata or here. The title of my talk is ‘Change at the Top: How the US Election Process Works and What are the Opportunities for Ron Paul?’ Details from here.

I shall also be continuing to cover the US primaries on my election blog.

(21)

The screenwriter, Tad Safran (whoever he is), has penned a rather coarse and unpleasant item about the physical pros and cons of British vs American women. It says something about the state of the Times (of London) that they would print this sort of thing at all. There may be some limited truth in his observation that women (or for that matter, men), spend different amounts of time on personal grooming and appearance. But in my experience of travelling to the States, I have seen enough examples, from both sexes, of scruffiness/smartness to reckon that his generalisations are BS.

This is a rather more uplifting study on the wonderful womenfolk of these Anglosphere nations.

Note: in my original item I said Safran was an actor, not a screenwriter. Mea culpa.

(0)

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

- General Charles Napier expresses a nineteenth century view of multiculturalism, quoted by Douglas Murray in the course of explaining that the West's values are better.

(41)

Now I am always quick to say nasty things about the British state and the state's educational system in particular, but this article is really strange (as in 'has little relation to reality' type strange).

So waiting for the Dolphin swim at Discovery Cove in Orlando, my daughter Nikki and I were seated with a Brit family - mom, daughter and son. After small talk about the great value of the pound vs the dollar etc, I mentioned that Churchill was one of my heroes. The son, no more than 16 countered that he really liked Hitler, and his sister Gandhi. I was stunned and sickened. [...] In speaking privately with his mother after my discussion, she stated that this is the new curriculum in the British schools to combat "prejudice" against Germans. They teach the children not to "judge" Hitler.

Sorry but much as I might slag off the state and all it's works, this is preposterous. In fact of all the screwed up things I have heard about the goings on in British schools, I have never heard of anything even close to this. I suppose it shows the dangers of deriving your views of the situation in some other country on a casual conversation with a single group of strangers.

(9)

Yes, I know what the actual charges filed against Black were, but there is an interesting article in the Guardian by former Telegraph editorial director Kim Fletcher called The wages of envy which raises some interesting points.

It is in the nature of court cases that findings of guilt lend an artificial certainty to the world. Black will now find himself spoken of as another Robert Maxwell. But while Black's detractors were quickly out of the traps to say "we told you so", it became clear during the trial that nothing going on at Hollinger was in the same league as the Mirror under Maxwell. Before his trial the result had been seen even by Black's circle as a foregone conclusion. "There's no way a blue collar jury in Chicago can let a man who looks like Conrad off every charge," said one of his friends to me, before the trial began

Given that the central charges failed, it does make me wonder if he was not in truth convicted of being unapologetic about being rich and being called Lord Black. Perhaps the verdict had as much to do with the jury selection process and where the prosecution chose to hold the trial than whatever Lord Black actually did or did not do.

(26)

Conrad Black has been convicted of some of the charges that were directed against him.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case (my own view is that the whole case was bullshit and the jury convicted him because of envy of his 'lavish lifestyle') it underscores the old point that being a director of corporation is a very dangerous thing to be in the United States. Far more managers go to jail in the United States than in any other Western country (even as a percentage of the total).

Perhaps the first Henry Ford had it right. After losing some civil cases against him by minority shareholders, he bought them out - every one of them. Only if owned 100% of the company could he feel secure against someone saying he was not doing right by the shareholders.

As for the other shareholders, the campaign against Lord Black has cost them vastly more than his pay and perks ever did. Too late perhaps some of them now understand that he was the company and, without him, it was nothing.

All the above should not be held to mean that I now accept Lord Black's opinions. For example, I still do not agree with his opinion that FDR was a moderate man or a good President. However, it is possible that Sir Conrad may now revise his opinion of the person who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to help create the vastly powerful (almost arbitrary) American government that was directed against him.

(14)

Guy Herbert this morning posted a piece commenting on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's decision to "ban" the Australian cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later this year. I generally have little time for Mr Howard, but in this case I can not personally be very harsh on him. What clearly happened is that the Australian Cricket Board (which these days prefers to call itself "Cricket Australia") begged him at length the make such an announcement, and he eventually gave in despite considerable resistance, and he did this because the alternatives open to him were probably worse. I have no disagreement with Guy that the outcome is essentially a dishonourable one, but the other easy options were worse. Some background.

In international cricket, there are only three countries for who the game is directly profitable. These are India, Australia, and England (in decreasing order of profitability). The other countries that regularly play international cricket make money by playing the national teams of these three countries, and then selling television rights and other sponsorship opportunities for these matches. Thus it is very important to (say) Sri Lanka for (in particular) India and Australia to regularly tour Sri Lanka and play matches.

In order to assure its members of some sort of regular cricket and regular income, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has in recent years created a mandatory tour program, requiring each of its members to play each other both home and away over a five year period. Reactions to this rule have varied, and compliance with it has been variable. The rule allows two sides to postpone a series if both are in agreement, which has allowed India and Australia to at times get their way by offering more money or more matches if the matches are played at some undefined "later". However, if a team takes a hard line, then (at least theoretically) the other side must tour, or must pay a fine to the ICC which will be then forwarded to the host team as compensation for the lost revenues from the matches that were to have been played. The ICC's rules allow for two situations in which a fine is not payable: firstly in cases where there is a genuine issue of safety - tours of both Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been called off for this reason in times of high political tension and terrorist threat - and in cases where a government forbids a tour. This second rule has come into play more in cases where Zimbabwe were potentially the touring side, most notably when Zimbabwean players were refused visas by the government of New Zealand.

Zimbabwe are a full member of the ICC. In the mid 1990s Zimbabwe had quite a decent cricket team (of mostly but certainly not entirely white players) but in the years since then Zimbabwean cricket has gone the way of most other things in Zimbabwe. At the demand of the government, white players were pushed out of the team, as were any non-white players who dared to say anything critical of the government. Officials who ran the game and actually cared about cricket were replaced with compliant government yes-men. The organisation of cricket in Zimbabwe became a shambles, and we are not sure right now to what extent the domestic cricket is even taking place. (The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians has recently been complaining about being unable to get scorecards for the domestic Logan Cup, which it has documented with no trouble for over a century). Inevitably, the standard of the national team has dropped from "decent, but not world beating", to utterly woeful. Their performance in the recently completed World Cup was dreadful, and they have dropped to 11th in the world rankings, way behind the rapidly improving Bangladesh, and behind even Ireland, a side just consisting of part time Australian and English expatriates and who are not a full member of the ICC.

However, through all this Zimbabwe has maintained its full membership of the ICC. Zimbabwe has been "temporarily suspended" from playing test matches due to its declining standards, but it is still playing one day international cricket, and other teams are expected to tour in order to play these games. Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe this year.

The obvious thing to do would be to expel Zimbabwe from the ICC, not necessarily on political grounds explicitly, but simply because cricket in Zimbabwe is no longer being administered and organised properly, that the board is no longer independent of government, and because selections are no longer taking place on the basis of merit. However, there are two reasons why this has not happened. The first is that there is a "third world" versus "first world" divide in international cricket, and some aspects of the administration of the game are a post-colonial nightmare. For many years Australia and England (and, prior to their expulsion from international cricket in the apartheid days, South Africa) had the right of veto over any decisions made in the ICC, and the other countries still have a lingering resentment of this. Once this veto was abolished, the Asian cricketing powers were eager to elevate other countries to membership of the ICC so as to gain a voting majority against the former "colonial" powers, and this is one factor that led to the elevation of Zimbabwe in the first place. Expelling Zimbabwe would increase the voting power of the "first world" bloc, and many people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka do not want this.

Secondly, what are the objections to Zimbabwe playing international cricket? For one thing, Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictatorship that restricts civil liberties. Well, other members of the ICC include Bangladesh and Pakistan, who are not exactly wonderful on this score either. South Africa is ruled by people who consider Robert Mugabe to be one of their old comrades in arms. If Zimbabwe were kicked out of world cricket on these grounds, then this would "set a bad example" to Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular. Did I mention that the governing body of cricket in Pakistan is traditionally a branch of the army and the head of its board is usually a general? That complicates matters further, and rules out the "We should expel Zimbabwe because the government controls cricket in the country" argument. The government of Sri Lanka appoints that nation's cricket board too (although not through the army). As for "Zimbabwe selects players on something other than merit", well, South Africa does that too. (Affirmative action with respect to black and coloured players). One would think that "Zimbabwe should be expelled because Zimbabwean cricket is a shambles" might be enough, but the organisation of cricket in a number of countries is a shambles (most notably Pakistan again, also (sadly) the West Indies). The ICC is also a shambles, having demonstrated in its organisation of the recently completed World Cup that it is an organisation that could not collectively get pissed in Porto)

Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe later this year. The Australian players did not want to make the tour. The Australian government definitely did not want the tour to go ahead.

However, until recently it stated that as Cricket Australia is a private organisation, then it is not the government's job to decide. The Australian board mainly cares about making as much money as possible, but in the crunch it did not want to tour either, and really would have just preferred that the whole issue would go away. However, it did not especially want to upset the ICC, and it did not really want to pay a fine. Quite typically, the board asked the government to solve its problem for it.

When it initially got this request from Cricket Australia, the Australian government made comments about how it did want the tour to go ahead, and about how it might be willing to "indemnify" Cricket Australia against a fine from the ICC. What this means is that Cricket Australia would have cancelled the tour as this is what the government wanted and that the government would then have paid the fine on its behalf. This would have been an easy enough thing for the government to do - after all it was only taxpayers' money,. However, when the government said this, it had not comprehended the full implications, which was that the fine would be paid to the Zimbabwean board in compensation, and that as the Zimbabwean board is controlled by Robert Mugabe, paying the fine would essentially mean giving a gift of $2 million directly to Robert Mugabe.

Once the Australian government comprehended this, paying the fine was not a feasible option. The Australian government was not going to give Robert Mugabe a $2 million gift. The only other option was to take advantage of the ICC's rule that a government ban could stop a tour without a fine. In defence of John Howard, I believe he genuinely did this as a last resort. The alternative was worse.

However, from the point of view of Cricket Australia, there was another alternative, which was to simply withdraw from the ICC. The ICC is very culpable concerning Zimbabwe. The participating teams in the recent World Cup and other ICC tournaments have been given a share of the profits of the tournament. This includes Zimbabwe. The ICC is already partly funding Robert Mugabe, and Australia is partly implicated simply by participating in the ICC's tournaments. The recent World Cup was such an organisational debacle that there is no great loss in not participating in future such events. If Australia were to leave, the ICC certainly could not stop Australia playing its traditional series against England, and if they tried then the national boards of England, New Zealand and probably other nations as well would follow Australia out of the ICC. Australian cricket is also based on expectations of receiving money from playing India frequently (next January's series between Australia and India is anticipated to be extremely lucrative), but it is hard to imagine that India would not find a way to continue playing Australia - they need the revenues they receive from playing such games

What Australia should have done was called the ICC's bluff. It may have suffered some short term financial insecurity as a consequence, but it would have regained control over its own destiny and would have at least fixed these kinds of problems for good.

This would have been good, because there is another cricketing crisis in the background. When Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered in March after Pakistan's elimination from the World Cup. most of us speculated that the murder was in some way connected with subcontinental bookmakers, as cricket's problems with match fixing and betting were well known. I expected that this would confirm and the details would leak out relatively quickly, but it did not happen. One thing I did not take adequate notice of was a series of strange articles that were published about the religious devotion of certain members of the Pakistan team, in particular captain Imzamam-al-Haq. Apparently a significant portion of the Pakistan team were devotees of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement, which stresses living a pure and authentic Islamic lifestyle and which is aggressively evangelical. Apparently the team was factionalised between devotees of this movement and non-devotees, and there were prayer rooms set up in team hotels and Tablighi Jamaat clerics mingled with the team and were present in the dressing room. Allegedly Bob Woolmer saw this as divisive and detracting from the team performance.

There have been various leaks and observations since Woolmer's death suggesting that he must have been murdered by someone he knew and who was connected to the team. The possibility is very real that he was murdered by someone in or closely connected to the team, and the reason that he was murdered was mixed in with fundamentalist Islam rather than bookmaking. There are now doubts that the final e-mail sent by Woolmer (resigning his position as coach) before he died was written by him (it does not sound like it was written by a native English speaker). which again suggest that the murderer may have been some what connected to the team, and somehow had access to his laptop. (Of course, this story has already long passed six impossible things happening before breakfast, so perhaps it was some bizarre combination of the two). The fact that we still do not know who killed Woolmer after two months does make me wonder if some sort of cover-up has gone in within the Pakistan team, and if so the "Islam" explanation becomes more likely and the bookmaking explanation less so, I think

I do not know what happened, obviously. The story gets stranger and stranger. It may be that the state of the Pakistan cricket team is symptomatic of the decay and radicalisation of the country of Pakistan every bit as much as the decay of the Zimbabwean cricket team is as symptomatic of the decay of that country. If so, countries such as Australia and England should not be playing Pakistan either. However great the rivalry between Pakistan and India, one cannot imagine some of these revelations increasing the eagerness of India to play Pakistan regularly either. If the ICC mandates regular tours of Pakistan, then this may well be another reason why the ICC is not an organisation that it is advantageous for cricketing authorities in Australia, England, or elsewhere to be connected to any more.

(19)

"The severing of Britain's economic ties with its Commonwealth partners as a price of European (Union) entry further strained those relationships. Today, Germans arriving at London's Heathrow airport breeze through the domestic arrivals line, while Australians who fought against the Germans at El Alamein for Britain's sake wait in the foreigners' line with the Japanese."

- Jim Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge, page 279.

Not that I have a problem with Germans or Frenchmen "breezing through" customs.

(33)

AA Gill, the Scottish columnist and restaurant reviewer, has always come across in my eyes as a man who wears chips on his shoulders like military epaulettes, which for an upper middle class lad seems a bit odd. He does not like the English much, does he? Even so, read the article, as it contains some painful truths as well as some unfair bile. He makes the point that the English/British are not always great adopters of life in New York. I have been to the city many times and saw this clubby sort of behaviour a few times. We Brits do not seem to realise how rude we can strike Americans. When I read of Americans being cut short at dinner parties or insulted by Brit tourists, I cringe, even though I tell myself that I am not responsible for the behaviour of my fellow countrymen and women. I feel much the same way when I overhear some idiot in Paris or Milan refusing to speak the local language and assuming that everyone speaks English rather than French or Italian.

I would be interested to know what Jim Bennett, the Anglosphere man, makes of this sort of behavioural friction. It may be just a matter of Gill being an arsehole. But he may also have a point.

(10)

I am sometimes asked why I seldom write about matters in my local part of the world. Partly this is because local events are too depressing, but it is also that there is a 'culture clash' between myself and the local environment, something that becomes even more apparent if you compare the political fate of 'conservatives' in Kettering Northamptonshire and Kettering Ohio.

Recently a political leaflet from the 'Conservative' party landed on my doormat. The leaflet boasted of the ten thousand Pounds that 'Conservative' Country Councillors were each spending on local projects.

For a few seconds I was impressed. True some of the councillors are wealthy people, but none is the league of Bill Gates - ten thousand Pounds is a lot of money for them.

But then I understood that it was not their money. It was local taxpayers money that the County Council, which is 'Conservative' party controlled, had given to the councillors to be spent on various projects.

Now in some parts of the world this would be called a 'slush fund' or 'pork' to buy votes. But in the United Kingdom it is called 'pavement politics' and is considered entirely ethical rather than corrupt 'political machine politics'.

How different things are across the Atlantic when you consider how the Republicans lost Congress partly for following a similar line of policy with many of the 'pork barrel' projects getting so much negative publicity with suggestions of impropriety. The Republicans in Ohio (Kettering Northamptonshire is the 'sister city' of Kettering Ohio and there are links between the Ohio Republicans and the Northamptonshire 'Conservatives') turned the State into the third highest taxed in the nation - and thus lost control.

The problem is that the situation is different. The Northamptonshire 'Conservatives' really are not being corrupt by the prevailing local standards in Britain. It is just that their minds are so different to mine that no real mental link exists - it is of limited use to write about people one does not understand.

(8)

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode, swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a frightful perisher?'"

- Bertie Wooster helps Keith Windschuttle describe the English-speaking century

(23)

It is of course too much to expect much rationality in the debate about immigration occurring on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment. I keep getting completely deranged e-mails from an outfit calling itself Conservative News NYC from across the puddle who are claiming that the USA and Mexico are in a de facto state of war due to the 'invasion' of the USA by illegal aliens. They also take the view that anyone who takes a more measured opinion on this is clearly a vile traitor. This is the same outfit who thinks any American who supports Israel is also a traitor, a word they rather like it seems, although of course they preface this with "but we're not anti-Semitic". No, of course not, perish the thought.

Now just because I think the fine fellows of Conservative News NYC are barking moonbats that does not mean all is well when it comes to immigration. There are indeed two groups in the USA (and one in the UK) who really are a problem. On both sides of the Atlantic we have an increasingly radicalised and non-integrating community of Muslims amongst whom support is very widespread for values completely antithetical to post-Enlightenment western civilisation.

Add to this in the United States the quite similar, at least in outlook if not action, ethnic fascists of La Raza, the one form of overt in-your-face racist fascism that seems to be quite acceptable for members of the American left to praise and with whom they are quite happy to share a stage (I guess being racist to white people is not really racism, eh Hilary?). At least one good thing about La Raza is that they are a lunatic fringe amongst Hispanics in the USA (much as Conservative News NYC are a radical lunatic fringe amongst US Conservatives). Of course the same could probably be said of Samizdata in many ways as we are hardly mainstream in many of the views we take, so it is not like I am against lunatic fringes per se.

Sadly the same cannot be said for much of the Muslim community who do indeed appear to share a wide range of views with the people we quite incorrectly call 'extremists'... I say incorrect because it appears they actually reflect increasingly mainstream Muslim opinion, particularly in the UK. They are not extremists, they are merely practising Muslims who actually believe what their religious texts tell them to believe. The problem is not extremism, it is Islam itself and anyone who actually takes it seriously.

One thing both of these groups have in common is that they must be relentlessly confronted and cannot be compromised with or appeased in any way whatsoever. It really is 'them or us'.

However...

Most immigration is actually a very good thing and has for the most part been a resounding success. In particular the current large wave of arrivals in the UK from Central and Eastern Europe has been a fantastic boon to this country, both economically and socially. Not only are we being inundated with highly motivated skilled people from Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Hungary, these folks are rapidly assimilating and the overwhelming majority quickly find employment.

And that brings us to what makes some immigration good and some bad.

In short, if people come to another country in order to sponge off its welfare state, that is bad. If they come to fill skill shortages, take jobs others do not want and to benefit from a greater freedom to pursue opportunities, that is very, very good.

So welfare states attract the 'wrong' kind of immigrant (and frankly pander to the 'wrong' kind of indigenous people as well), whereas an employment and entrepreneurship friendly environment attracts the 'right' sort of immigrants. Quelle surprise!

A good indication of which of those are in the majority in any immigrant community is to see if they are asking for tax funded schools for their children in their own languages and for various other things provided by the state at taxpayer expense but exclusively for their own ethnic or religious community.

And by that test, yes, we really do have a problem with a significant portion of the Muslim communities in the West and to a (much) lesser extent, a few elements of the Hispanic community in the USA (and the politicians who pander to them). It makes no sense for supporters of immigration such as myself to pretend otherwise.

Yet overall, free for the baleful influence of government, immigration works just fine... like so many things in fact once you get the dead hand of the state out of the way.

(4)

London's New Year parade, watched by a crowd of more than 500,000, was the unlikely setting for a small victory of normal civic virtue over the craven risk averse culture so beloved by the post-modern political classes of the western world.

An American marching band and cheerleaders from Fort Myers High School in Florida flew to London and participated in the parade in spite of being initially banned from doing so by school officials nervous about terrorism in London. A revolt by the parents of the students reversed this bizarre ban. It might not seem like much but any time someone makes a common sense refusal to allow the minuscule risk posed by Islamic terrorism to alter one's behaviour, it is an event worthy of praise, just as the reverse is worthy of scorn.

(13)

The more I read about the flood of money coming into the City of London from the United States, the more I am convinced that in the spirit of Christmas and fraternal Anglosphere conviviality, the people of London should say a heartily thank you to Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes and Ohio Republican Michael Oxley.

In fact, in the new year I plan to launch a subscription appeal to put up a pair of gold plated statues somewhere in the square mile, depicting these two fine politicians throwing handfuls of dollar bills to a multitude of grateful City of London bankers, fund managers, stock brokers and other sundry worthy capitalists, as great numbers of companies decamp from New York and list in London instead.

And so Paul and Michael, on behalf of all those fine folks here in Merry old England whose Christmas bonus packages have gone through the roof, thank you. We could not have done it without you. God bless globalisation.

(13)

An unsavoury developement of Le Web 3 in Paris, a conference about and for bloggers organised for the third time by Loic Le Meur of Six Apart. I have always considered Loic as one of the clued up people in this area and I will give him the benefit of the doubt as to what really happened. Politicians are a toxic breed. Dealings with them tend to backfire and so I'll wait to hear his side of the story. Jackie has more on this. Following a link from her post, I came across a comment that captures one of the fundamental differences between the Anglosphere and ze Europe.

The very notion that liberty can be restricted by rules and STILL be called liberty is very difficult for English or American people. Actually, I don't really know about the notion of liberty in the UK, but I do know that the Americans tend to define it as the absence of constraint (especially from the State... constraint from the dominant Opinion is still quite strong and widely accepted).

Now for the French side: liberty is defined as the ability to do what you want INSIDE of a collectively defined set of rules. See Rousseau on that matter.

I'm not pretending that any of these view is better than the other. But I think it helps why a Frenchman can say that liberty should be bound without (French) people gazing at him like he was a madman.

(34)

There are some similarities in the USA and UK with the convergence of practical politics into a 'radical centre' of regulatory big government statists, whose 'left' and 'right' labels are rather like those of Coke and Pepsi... sure there are differences, but in the end they are still selling sweet brown fizzy drinks... or selling a vision of state in which the mainstream 'right', be it Dave Cameron or George W. Bush, are not talking about shrinking the state (even a bit) and freeing the individual (or even the community) but rather just increasing the pace of regulation a bit slower and in different places than the 'left'.

Similarly the mainstream 'left' like Tony Blair or Al Gore are not selling wholesale paleo-socialist nationalisation of businesses as they did in the past, because they, like the mainstream 'right', now follow a more (technically) fascist economic model in which property can be 'private' but control of it is contingent upon being in accord with national political objectives and permission from some local political authority.

The 'left' and 'right' use different metaphors, different cultural references, different symbolism, but in truth they are selling much the same product. They put huge effort into fetishising their product differentiation precisely because there is so little difference in their core beliefs. In the USA, even the issue of self-defence and opposition to victim disarmament is less than solid with the Republicans than it once was as Bush made is clear he was 'flexible' regarding anti-gun legislation and needed hard lobbying to not renew the so-called 'assault rifle' ban (i.e. semi-automatic rifles which look 'scary'). Put simply, all mainstream political parties (at the moment) are statist centrists, neither in favour of overt nationalisation nor of individual autonomy, regardless of their sales schpiel.

Why this is true is not hard to glean. Professional politicians are people who have the psychological disposition to both meddle in other people's lives and to use force to have their views imposed. They are people who value having power over others above all else and the more aspects of society that are subject to political direction, the more important politicians become regardless of their hue.

So the natural order of things, if you are a person who makes their living out of being a politician, is to work to extend the state into more and more areas of life because the state is what you have influence over, thereby making yourself more important to ever more people.

Politicians who do not want to constantly expand their power do exist of course, trying to work within the system to limit the system's power over people. But the very nature of politics makes such folks a rarity, particularly as decency, honesty and frankness are hardly survival traits in in their chosen profession. Centrist politicians keep themselves in power by identifying a group of people that want to hear certain things and then by adjusting their sales techniques to appeal to them whilst being pragmatic about moving your 'opinions' to wherever advantages lie.

Most importantly, politicians use what can only be called 'tribal loyalties' to act as a base upon which they can rely regardless of their actual voting records. They do this by carefully genuflecting towards a few of the sacred cows the people who vote for them seem to regard as important (hence the obsessive fetishisation of minor differences with the Other Party)... and then by adjusting their actual policy-making to buy voters less concerned with appearances, by diverting bits of national wealth to them either directly or more usually by regulating in ways that favour a narrow sectonal interest. A classical example is Dave Cameron promising all manner of big state interventionism and yet praising the antithetical set of principles offered up by Conservative Way Forward. Thus the quixotic faithful are given a gleaming golden thread upon which to hang their fantasies that their chosen leader actually shares their values and when elected will act completely differently from how he has been telling everyone he intends to.

But the Chosen Leader knows that as long as he can highlight one or two differences with his political opponents, the fact he will leave 99% of the state more or less unchanged if he finds himself in power does not matter to the loyalists. After all, even though conservatives groan about the way George Bush has expanded the state in the USA, or the way Dave Cameron promises to add more 'green' regulations and not cut taxes in the UK, those men know that most loyal Tories/Republican would not be able to break the habit of a lifetime and vote for the Bad Guys... why? Because "vote for the lesser evil" has been drummed into them. You are told to be realistic and as you will never get want you really want, you have to vote for the least-worst choice.

And so after years of voting for the lesser evil, Tory and Republican voters have only themselves to blame when all that is on offer is evil. Just slightly less of it than the Other Guys. Or so you are lead to believe.

But to ever have even a chance of getting what you really want, you have to be prepared to let the old party of your tribal affections lose and for the Even Worse Guys to get into office. Again and again if that is what it takes, which is not a pleasant prospect, I grant you.

But in the end, "spare the rod, spoil the child". Even better (if you think The System is salvageable in the long run) if there is another party which more correctly reflects your views, vote for them rather than staying at home. You may not win but voting for another 'fringe' party does make it clear why your previous party lost your vote. At worst you send a message to your old party to reform in ways you can support, at best your new party starts to actually make a difference itself. If you vote for a party which does not really share your convictions, you are part of the problem. In the UK in particular, there is no excuse for any conservative to vote 'Conservative' when there is an alternative party that actually is conservative (i.e. UKIP) in a more or less classical liberal sense. It is unrealistic to expect something like a political party to be in complete lock-step with all your views but for a socialist (say someone who wants Harold Wilson style nationalisation of industry) to still be a member of Blair's Labour Party or a conservative (say someone who wants society strengthened rather than replaced by the state) to still be a member of Cameron's Conservative Party, that must require some extreme cognitive gymnastics when it has been clear for years that neither party will give those folks what they want.

'The Blogging Caesar' makes an impassioned plea for Republicans to get out and vote regardless of the scandals and ever bigger government. He makes a direct "Or the Even Worse Guys will win" argument... and of course that is true. But if you really do not like the fact the GOP has expanded the state, abridged civil liberties and a passable attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq (force levels too low, refusal to allow country to be partitioned) and Afghanistan (sub-moronic ally alienating anti-drugs policy), voting for the party which did those things is tantamount to saying "fine... keep on doing that". Sure, if the Democrats win control of the house and/or senate, they will do even worse things, but only a bit worse. However by making Big Government the ONLY political reality for both parties, you will never, ever get anything except Big Government.

(52)

For some weeks Mr. Cameron's friends in the media (such as the Telegraph group writer and editor of the Specator, Matthew d'Anconia) have been pointing to an upcoming speech that David Cameron was to make. This speech was intended to show what sort of politician Mr Cameron is, to define him - just as the first major foreign policy speech Mrs Thatcher made defined her (earning her the name the 'Iron Lady' from the Soviets - what was intended as an insult became a honoured name).

The speech was finally made on September 11th - on the day that the Iron Lady herself stood shoulder to shoulder with the Vice President in the United States (old, betrayed, hit by several strokes, the Lady still stood and walked ramrod straight - held up by courage alone).

Mr Cameron duly denounced anti-Americanism - it was "cowardice", but then he said Britain must not be "slavish" in any alliance with the United States, and the American leadership was guilty of"'sound bites", lacked "humility" and that the American division of things into good and evil was "unrealistic and simplistic" (and so on and so on).

Leaving aside the point that when someone says that they are beyond good and evil, light and dark, (they are more sophisticated than old fashioned ideas of "right" and "wrong") it tends to mean that they are evil, it was irritating to hear of Mr Cameron first denouncing anti-Americanism and then indulging in exactly that.

Mr Cameron is free to hold any opinion he wishes, even though I might suspect that his Yank bashing was less a matter of principle than an effort to get a favourable editorial in the Daily Mail (on the correct calculation that this newspaper hates the United States even more than it hates him, although some Daily Mail people such as Richard Littlejohn clearly despise what Mr Cameron said yesterday).

However, it is still unclear what Mr Cameron's opinion actually is - for whilst he attacked the United States he did not say "the Iraq war is wrong". David Cameron tried to have his cake and eat it as well, and thus playing to both pro and anti war people in his party.

Now being undecided about the Iraq war is not a crime and opposing the Iraq war is not a crime - I myself wrote against the idea of war, although I believed (and still believe) that once the war had started it must be carried on to victory.

I am not attacking Mr Cameron's right to have an opinion, or his lack of clarity about what his opinion is - it is not even the general patronising tone of his abuse of the leadership of the United States that I object to. It is the date of his speech that is astonishing.

The anniversary of 9/11 is not the time to make this type of speech (far less to bill the speech as some equivalent of the 'Iron Lady' speech). If Mr Cameron really does not understand this it shows that just being born into a wealthy family and going to Eton and Oxford do not make a man a gentleman.

(21)

Great article in American magazine Reason here about the arrest of David Carruthers, CEO of the BetOnSports online gambling business. Following hard on the heels of the arrest of the three Natwest bankers on charges connected with the collapse of Enron, it seems the British state is steadily losing the ability to protect its citizens from being grabbed by U.S. authorities for arrest for offences which are not offences in this country and where the domiciles of a person's businesses are outside the United States.

Carruthers was on his way from London, where his company is headquartered, to Costa Rica, where its online betting operations are based. The business is perfectly legal in both of those places, but not in the United States. And since most of its customers are Americans, Carruthers is guilty of about 20 different felonies.

Or so the FBI and the Justice Department say, and they are the ones with the guns and handcuffs. Catherine Hanaway, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, accuses Carruthers and 10 other people associated with BetOnSports, including company founder Gary Kaplan, of violating the 1961 Wire Act, which prohibits using "a wire communication facility" to accept bets on "any sporting event or contest."

Despite the talk of fraud, BetOnSports is not accused of ripping off its customers. This case has nothing to do with consumer protection, except in the sense of protecting consumers from their own desire to bet on sports.

These cases present a number of difficulties. I think American authorities are entitled to crack down on crimes of theft, fraud and violence even if those crimes have not occured on U.S. soil but involve injury to a U.S. citizen. That is fair. But the BetOnSports case suggests that, in this internet, globalised age, the writ of the U.S. legislature seems to run across the whole planet (well, most of the planet. I do not think extradition will work any time soon in North Korea).

Besides the legal niceties, there is also hypocrisy of nanny-state legislators at work here. America boasts the ultimate gambling city on the planet: Las Vegas, not to mention hosts of other places in Reno, Atlantic City and various Indian reservations. Not to mention the various state lotteries from which the U.S. tax-eaters gain a hefty income. And that is what this arrest and closure of on-line gambling is about. The faux moral scolds who decry gambling are not concerned about people pouring their hard-earned cash down the drain. No, they are worried that a nice source of tax revenue is passing them by.

Our own political masters in Britain are scarcely better in their approaches to the various 'sinful' activities that need to be regulated to protect a benighted populace. Drinking hours are liberalised and super-casinos are encouraged and yet smoking in a private member's club is banned and cultivation of cannabis plants in your back yard for medical use will get you sent to jail or hit with a hefty fine. What a great world we live in.

(69)

There is a fine article in the Telegraph rebutting anti-Americanism and another which features a splendid quote from an unnamed US embassy spokesman who responded to claims that a poll has found many British people are opposed to the US decision to overthrow Saddam Hussain and suggesting many had a low opinion of US civil society:

"We question the judgment of anyone who asserts the world would be a better place with Saddam still terrorizing his own nation and threatening people well beyond Iraq's borders. With respect to the poll's assertions about American society, we bear some of the blame for not successfully communicating America's extraordinary dynamism. But frankly, so do you [the British press]."

Quite. Never apologise to your enemies.

(16)

Attending a Bruges group bash at the IEA yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen to the cogent James Bennett elucidating further on the concept of the Anglosphere. As always, the talk was clear and precise, dodging the pitfalls of contemporary topics that can blind many to long-term opportunities through a strong pessimism about Britain's current predicaments.

Bennett's arguments on the pervasive individualism that biases the English speaking countries towards liberty proved a welcome long-term antidote to the current gloom. Indeed, his accounts of the spread of English through India, and its transformation from a language of the elite to the masses, was described in terms of a social revolution.

Whilst we are trapped in the short-term carcrash that is the EU, the positive trends of globalisation and the adoption of English throughout India, China, Asia and Africa will prove far more beneficial in the long-term. We will know that the world is becoming far saner and far brighter when we see the outsourcing industry open its first call centres in Kabul or Waziristan. Their turn will come...

(42)

We seem to have become practically as theocentric at the higher levels of the administration as these people we're waging war against. It makes me kind of uncomfortable.

- Christopher Buckley, interviewed in the Sunday Times Magazine

He's talking about the US; but there are some discomfortingly morally aggressive Christians in charge on this side of the pond, too.

(40)

The alleged atrocity carried out by a fire-team of US Marines in Iraq is ghastly news and whilst I hope, like so many other allegations against Allied soldiers in the Middle East, it turns there is much less to this than meets the eye, the reports do seem to be indicating that this time there really was a monstrous massacre of innocents.

However the fact this horrendous incident has not been swept under the table shows that the US military does have structures that work as intended. Whilst it is appalling such a thing could have happened, it would be even worse if it had happened and the people responsible got away with it.

In that respect at least, one cannot but compare the accountability of the USMC with what happened when British police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a innocent Brazilian man, and what we got was a stream of barefaced lies and complete fabrications and still no one has been brought to book (which should not just be the people responsible for the killing, but everyone involved with what has clearly been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice).

It is when things go badly wrong that you discover how decadent an institution has become. The contrast between the US military and British Police is quite revealing.

(20)

There is another interesting article in the Washington Post about why it is a bad idea for conservatives to always support the Republican Party regardless of what it does. This closely echoes what I have been saying about conservatives in Britain supporting David Cameron's Blairite Tory Party. The WaPo article does not take the pro-liberty stance on this I would (it is an article by a conservative for conservatives) but the underlying political calculus and logic behind it is hard to argue with: if your votes can always be taken for granted, do not be surprised if your views do not count for anything with the person you voted for.

The differences between the two main parties in both Britain and the United State has been largely an illusion for quite some time. In the US at least the Republicans and Democrats use very different cultural references and language to make themselves appear meaningfully different, but in Britain the utterances of David Cameron and Tony Blair are so similar that I would be willing to bet that if shown to a person out of context, most would be hard pressed to tell which of the men said what.

What makes the tribal loyalties of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic so foolish is that time and again, year after year, those loyalties are not reciprocated. Tory policy towards the EU, where the parliamentary party has never reflected the views of the Tory rank and file, is perhaps the most extreme example but by no means the only one. Similarly it has long amazed me how conservatives who excoriated Clinton for trade protectionism and hugely costly 'social' programmes (a misnomer if ever there was) remained silent when G.W. Bush did the same in spades.

If conservatives are not willing to punish their leaders for fear of the Other Tribe getting elected, they have only themselves to blame if they get the same corrupting policies the Other Tribe's leaders would have enacted anyway.

(13)

How can I disagree with A C Grayling on British values when he sums up Blair's agenda so succinctly:

Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm. Or the government should be prepared to allow us to stay home behind drawn curtains, and to pay our mortgages and deliver our groceries under armed guard, to protect us form venturing into the streets where (so government fear-mongering might have us believe) thousands of bomb-carrying lunatic fanatics lurk.

To sum up, Blair would prefer us to be sheep, compliant, uncomplaining and stoical. These are the values that he would instill in new immigrants for his legacy: the great and glorious socialist millennium. That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:

To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort (the sanitised version) and the demand for, and founding of, Parliament.

This will gloss the fact that all our "revolutions" (after the Civil War at least), which by being so called give us a faint aura of past flair, were very pragmatical affairs, and like the empire almost accidental ones, driven from below by thoroughly banausic impulses and only retrospectively embellished, Boys' Own style, by a sense of the heroic.

Their pragmatism is no doubt a virtue, and it would do no harm to anyone to learn as much; but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke - an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras, stoutly resisting the temptation to have opinions, and certainly not to voice them if by chance one should form between its safely capped horns.

Indeed, we would no longer be part of the Anglosphere.

(69)

The other night I enjoyed a pleasant meal with a business contact, who works in the property industry and for a large U.S. company. He was talking to a group of people and struck me as a thoroughly charming fellow: articulate, funny, interested in other people, highly intelligent. And then he said something that slightly vexed me in that he started to go on and on about how we must be so appalled by this nutcase rightwinger in the White House, how most Americans were insular and dumb, yadda-yadda. It was so obviously an attempt to deflect what anti-American prejudices potentially might have existed by getting in the blow first. He was, then, slightly surprised me when I said over a drink later that I did not like the way that Americans felt the need to abase themselves this way, or denigrate their home country, or its people. In fact, I told him that, much that I disagreed with many of Bush's policies, such as his fiscal profiligacy and Big Government leanings, I liked the United States a great deal, not least much of its culture, its vitality and the niceness of most Americans.

So a gentle tip for American travellers from this Brit: don't slag off your own country when abroad. The locals will see through it and despise you for it. Be proud of what you are as an individual living in Jefferson's Republic, which for all its faults is the greatest free nation on the planet, and likely to be so for a while to come.

(54)

On Friday the 13th of January I listened to BBC Radio 4's Any Questions, The first question was "Can we trust President Bush over Iran...?"

Now I am no fan of President George Walker Bush (on his watch there has been the biggest increase of government spending since President Johnson and the biggest increase in domestic government spending since President Nixon), but it was an odd to hear someone clearly regard President Bush as worse than the President of Iran (a man who has denied the Holocaust, pledged to wipe Israel off the map, and has supported suicide bombers, in various parts of the Middle East, for many years).

The audience cheered and clapped the various anti Bush comments of Clare Short M.P., and the (rather milder) anti-Bush and pro-UN comments of the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes present.

The Conservative party person on the panel (Mr Ian Duncan-Smith) did not really try to defend President Bush (although he did say we should not exclude the United States from world affairs). So that left the last member of the panel.

This man (whose name I can not remember) is the new editor of the 'Financial Times'. Now this newspaper has (perhaps surprisingly, given its name and target readership) normally been on the left of British politics (it tends to favour government spending and regulations, and it favours the statist European Union) so I did not hold out much hope for balance.

And indeed, later on, the editor turned out to have some very standard statist opinions - for example he supported a total ban on smoking in bars and restaurants (almost needless to say, the audience was wildly in favour of a ban "by 98%" - most likely they would have supported any bit of statism that was put in front of them). However, I was surprised as the editor started a pro Bush story of how he had met the President some time ago and...

Then the BBC suddenly went off the air. The broadcast of the show started again when the story was over. At the end of the programme the BBC blamed "technical difficulties" for the break in transmission.

So I listened to the repeat of the show (today Saturday the 14th of January) in order to hear the editor's story of his meeting with President Bush. It was cut out of the programme - even the start of the story that had been broadcast on Friday night. It seems that the BBC will not tolerate any pro-Bush comment.

Of course it is not a simple of hatred of President Bush as a man (indeed if the B.B.C. people bothered to find out about his policies they would be surprised to find that they support some of them - the bad ones, "No Child Left Behind", the medicare extension, and so on). They hate President Bush as a symbol of certain American characteristics that they, as members of the 'liberal' (i.e. illiberal) left hate - opposition to higher taxes, opposition