(31)

One of my hobbies is to browse the pages of the (London) Times from a hundred years ago. As I intend (though I promise nothing) to write the odd post around articles from the time I thought it might be a good idea to describe (as best I can) the world in 1912. Or, at least, the world as seen through the pages of the Times which is a potentially dangerous thing to do. Imagine, for instance, describing the world of 2012 with the BBC News as your only source.

I cannot read articles from 1912 without being aware that there’s a big war coming up. A huge war. A Great War. A war that will change just about everything. Mostly for the worse. But can I see it coming? Not really. There clearly are tensions between Britain and Germany. Last year two British officers (Brandon and Trench) were jailed for spying. Seeing as one of them went on to become a leading light in MI6 it looks like the Germans got their man. More to the point it demonstrates that there is a lot of distrust.

More recently, the German press has been up in arms over a visit by British parliamentarians to Russia. They feel they’re being surrounded.

Mind you the road to war is not an entirely straight one. It’s recently emerged that a French Prime Minister tried to give French Congo to Germany in an attempt to smooth feathers ruffled in the Morocco Crisis. (No, I don’t understand what it was about either). The Prime Minister, Caillaux, had to resign. He will pop up again in July 1914 when his wife is goes on trial accused of the murder of a newspaper editor. Despite being as guilty as sin she gets off.

In Germany, the socialists have done very well in the recent elections to the Reichstag and become the biggest party. While I am a bit shaky on what influence the Reichstag has (not a lot, I think) I suspect this has deeply worried the Prussian military.

This is a global trend. Buy democracy and socialism. Sell God and monarchy.

In Britain, there was a national rail strike in August, and a major coal strike is about to start. This comes after last year’s major coal strike which ended in riots and the use of troops. The army was also called out to a few months later to put down riots in Liverpool.

When it comes to radicalism (i.e. making things worse), Britain’s Liberal-led government knocks modern British governments into a cocked hat. It has massively expanded the state pension, neutered the House of Lords, nationalised the telephone network, is in the process of nationalising general practitioners and introducing devolution to Ireland. Ulster objects and Winston Churchill recently had to call off a planned meeting in Belfast due to concerns over security.

Opium is about to be banned. Mostly, it seems, to help the Chinese emperor. Although, given the recent revolution there it would appear he is beyond help. It is far from obvious that opium is much of a problem domestically.

Crime. There are certainly plenty of murders. If there is a difference in reporting between now and then it is the reporting of the minor crimes. Last week the Times reported a case of GBH only just down the road from where I currently live. I don’t think it would do that these days.

Suffragettes (or suffragists, as they seem to be called). They appear to have won the argument. I have yet to see a serious argument against votes for women expressed in the Times. And yet, there is no plan, timetable or bill for its introduction. My understanding is that at the time many men couldn’t vote. In its New Year editorial the Times warns of the dangers of “extreme democracy”. Yes, but what’s your alternative Lord Northcliffe?

Italy is in the process of taking Libya off the Turks.

America is mostly harmless.

Times editorial, 1 January 1912:

(15)

I suppose it'll add some spice to history exams though. Get the wrong answer and you not only fail: you get carted off to jail as well.

- The concluding sentences of a piece by Mick Hartley criticising a new French law which, once President Sarkozy signs it, will make it a criminal offence to deny that genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.

(10)

Sample:

Here.

(11)

Michael Jennings is now, as he recently said here that he would be, in Israel. Knowing my fondness for amusing multilingual signs, he today emailed me this photo, taken in Acre:

At first I thought that "Crusader" was some kind of business brand, although on second thoughts probably not. Maybe ... actual crusader latrines? To clear up any doubt, Michael added:

It means exactly what it says.

Yes indeed, these are latrines which were once upon a time used by crusaders. And here, I presume, are those very latrines.

Don't you just love the internet?

(3)

They said it would never be agreed. Then they said it would never be launched. Then they said it would fail. When it was a success, the euro-haters still insisted that the single currency was a recipe for economic chaos and political instability. The phobes are proving to be wrong again. At a time when so much of Europe's political leadership is in flux, the single currency is the steadying point in an uncertain and worrying world.

That this has not happened is thanks to the euro. The single currency has taken all this political upheaval in its calm stride.

- From an anonymous editorial in the Observer headed "A tolerant euro".

From 2002, in case you were wondering.

(12)

There is nothing in this film for the Left.  Where they demonized Margaret Thatcher, the movie humanizes her.  It is not about the great events of her political life; these are its backdrop.  Her entry into Parliament, her leadership bid, the miners' strike, the IRA and the Falklands War all feature, but the movie is not about them.  Rather is it about the strength of character with which she confronted successive challenges and crises.

- Madsen Pirie reviews The Iron Lady. Unlike Nicholas Wapshott, Pirie liked it a lot, and says it will make those who see it like and admire the lady herself more.

(6)

I link a lot to the sayings and doings of Steve Baker MP (that being the last time I mentioned him here), so this time I will be brief, and only say that I like the phrase "new money being loaned into existence". The piece this phrase appears in is entitled Could this be a second crisis of state socialism? If you are already saying to yourself something along the lines of: "yes I rather think it could be", you will, you will be unamazed to learn, find yourself in agreement with Mr Baker.

(9)

One of the things I notice about technological change is that it is, so to speak, quite abrupt but not completely abrupt. In historical terms, the arrival of, say, the printing press, was a huge upheaval, changing one reality to a completely different one. But on closer inspection, something like printing turns out to be a series of disruptions, including disruptions yet to come, rather than just one. And if you actually live through one of these disruptions, you typically experience it as something far more gradual and complicated than, say, a mere once-in-a-lifetime explosion.

Consider that old stager of our time, the "paperless office", and in my personal case, its more chaotic younger sibling, the paperless home.

I have spent quite a lot of time during the last few weeks de-cluttering my home, and that has involved chucking out much paper. A particular clutch of paper that I am about to chuck out is a book. But it is not a book exactly. It is a pile of photocopied A4 pages. It is a big and cumbersome copy of a book, a copy of a copy. But it is a copy of an interesting book, one I would still like to own and consult. So, what am I replacing this biggish pile of paper with, which enables me still to read the same words? Answer: an actual book. Now that the internet enables me to buy an obscure book for coffee-and-a-sandwich money, but does not yet offer me an e-version of the same book, the logical thing to do is to buy yet more paper. In the long run, as Amazon knows better than anyone or anything else on earth, paper for reading will soon (in big historical time) be superfluous. In the meantime, Amazon circulates, hither and thither, still, a veritable mega-cyclone of … paper. For quite a few years, that was the only thing it did.

I am purchasing my new and smaller copy of this book from Oxfam, an enterprise I have no love for, and only have dealings with for private gain on my part, never purely because Oxfam itself benefits. The internet has opened up a whole new semi-business, in the form of people who can't be doing with selling their own (often presumably inherited) piles of books on the internet, instead dumping these book onto charities, and charities then selling them for what they can get on the internet. (I sometimes suspect that the impact of Oxfam upon British society is far more profound and helpful than anything it does for places like Africa.) Again with the complication. Paper is not being chucked into a skip. It is, thanks to the internet, being rescued from the skip. Temporarily.

This is, as I say, the kind of process that does not show up in the big, broad brush history books, but it is typical of the complicated way that new technology works its complicated magic.

Another example of something similar that I recently learned of (and mentioned in passing in this earlier posting here, also about the complexity of technological change) is how the arrival of the railways caused a greatly increased demand for horses, to transport people to and from railway stations. In the long run, mechanised transport doomed the horse to becoming a mere leisure item. In the short run, it caused many more horses to be used.

(33)

Not long ago, Rob Fisher asked, back at his blog, before he started writing here, whether there is a correlation between an early enthusiasm for science fiction and later being a libertarian, and if so what might be the cause of such a correlation. And I seem to recall the notion finding its way here also, although I can't recall or find where. It may have been in a comment thread. My take is that SF embodies the idea that things could be very different. Maybe a more general version of the same idea is that SF leads to political radicalism of all kinds. There was certainly a huge enthusiasm for SF on the left before World War 2. Think only of H. G. Wells.

I recently mentioned to Michael Jennings that I too went through a big SF phase in my teens and twenties, while in the process of becoming a libertarian, and that although I subsequently stopped reading much SF, I did later become very keen on reading history. I still am. The connection between reading SF and reading history, at any rate in my mind, is that just as SF says that the world can be very different, history is all about the fact that, in the past, the world actually was very different. Things change, from era to era, from epoch to epoch. History and SF both say that very loudly. Libertarianism, and all the other isms, say that also.

As far as history is concerned, I'm thinking of things like how the sea, in the European Middle Ages, far from being any sort of defensive wall (as Shakespeare's John of Gaunt famously describes it - and as it later became) was actually more like a motorway system, for those able to command the vehicles to make use it of. I'm thinking of how very different life was if most of the people in the place you lived in were illiterate, perhaps including you. I'm thinking of how very hard it was even to preserve the great ideas of the past, let alone accumulate new ones with any success, before the printing press was contrived. I'm thinking of what a difference swords and bows-and-arrows and gunpowder and machine guns successively made, and what a difference atom bombs and hydrogen bombs have made to our own time. I'm thinking of what a different world it was when it was very hard to send messages of any complexity (or for that matter human beings) any faster than a succession of very expensive horses could gallop.

Michael's response was that reading lots of SF, then becoming something like a libertarian, then reading lots of history, is a fairly common intellectual biography. So rather than ramble on, let me ask commenters. Does that sequence of interests ring any bells with any of you good people?

(10)

As was flagged up by this recent SQotD, I have been reading The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogers, the point of this posting being that some of these Last Crusaders were also the first global explorers. This can't be a review, because I have only reached page 50 out of 481, but I will be very surprised if my good opinion of this book now is in any way challenged by the experience of reading the rest of it.

A question that had always vaguely puzzled me, in a very not-thinking-about-it-carefully way, was: why Portugal? How come Portugal, of all now rather insignificant little backwaters, was the country that lead the way in the European conquest of so much of the rest of the world, a gigantic epoch only now drawing to a close?

It is of course not at all hard to see how this should be. Portugal may now be a backwater (I'll say more about that at the end of this posting) but in the fifteenth century, from the point of view of exploring the world, it was a frontwater. All you need to do to understand how Portugal led Europe into the big wide world out there is to stop looking at the Portuguese East Indies or the various Portuguese parts of Africa or South America (which is what I had been doing), and look instead at Portugal itself, and its immediate surroundings. Once you do that, Portugal making the first big steps in the when-Europe-ruled-the-world story is not just explicable, it is close to inevitable.

Time for a date. In 1415, Portugal captured and, even more significantly, subsequently held the North African trading city of Ceuta, just across the Straights of Gibraltar from Gibraltar itself. They hoped this would drop into their laps all the trade that was done between West Africa and everywhere else through Ceuta. But not for the first or last time, grabbing the physical place turned out not to mean effortlessly controlling what had previously gone on there. Nevertheless, it was a start, by which I mean a start in the process of Europe confronting Islam not in the obvious way, but the other way. The obvious way was to bash on against Islam in the Western Mediterranean and surrounding parts, the Balkans, North Africa and what we now call the Middle East. The other way, of course, as we now all know, was to go round it.

Forget for a moment all the European nations who subsequently did this, and forget all the many places the world over that they arrived at and did business in and with. Consider only the very first steps in that process, that needed to be taken in the early fifteenth century. What did they consist of? Basically, someone European needed to sail down the coast of West Africa, establishing bases and trading relationship along the way.

If this had been easy, Portugal would probably never have lead the way. Spaniards, Genoese and Venetians, even though preoccupied with that Islam bashing in other parts of the Mediterranean world, would probably have overwhelmed those very early Portuguese efforts. But crucially, it was not easy. The Atlantic was a huge barrier, requiring huge efforts before even the possibility of profit could cut in. So far so obvious. But what is less well known nowadays (certainly not known by me until now) is that something similar applied to the West Coast of Africa.

Let Rogerson tell the story (pp. 29-31):

The Arab merchants settled on the coast of Morocco had little interest in exploring the Atlantic, which they called the 'Sea of Obscurity' and the 'Green Sea of Darkness'. For them the land route across the Sahara was more direct and safer. The progress of a series of freebooting Portuguese squadrons sailing south down the Moroccan coast during these years must have further discouraged any Arab trading ship from sailing too far from its haven. But it was not all one-sided, for the roles of prey and predator could be easily reversed. Indeed maritime records show that in this period some forty-six Portuguese ships were captured by corsairs on the Atlantic.

For their part, the Portuguese sea captains were reluctant to cross the southern threshold marked by Cape Bojador (about two-thirds of the way down modern Morocco's long Atlantic coast), and with good reason. The last known expedition, by the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa in 1291, had never returned. It was widely feared that the very strong southern current that sweeps along the shore would frustrate any return. And to this day Cape Bojador marks a climatic, cultural and emotional frontier. For once Cape Noun is passed on the way south towards Bojador, all recognisable signs of Mediterranean life - trees, cultivation, farmland, villages, houses, man and goat - are gradually bleached out of the landscape, to be replaced by the savage intensity of the empty lands of the western Sahara. The region even lacks the customary grandeur of the desert, that romantic juxtaposition of dark mountains and golden sand dunes, and is instead composed of a series of bleak gravel uplands. The shoreline is awesomely sterile, overlooked by wind-eroded cliffs, protected by reefs and with the tidal reach of the rocky shore everywhere presenting a razor-like surface. In addition the whole region is made even more dangerous and impenetrable by salty sea mists, a dense, muggy intensity of climate and erratic compass fluctuations.

However, by 1434 one of the young squires of Prince Henry's household, urged on by words of affection from his master, rather than threats, did manage to break this psychological frontier. Throughout the subsequent century of seafaring nothing halted the spread of Portuguese mariners across the oceans of the world, as Cape Bojador had. The breakthrough was the cumulative achievement of decades of unaccounted and unacknowledged work by shipwrights and observant sailors who had slowly transformed the traditional Arab-derived coastal craft of the Algarve into the lateen-rigged caravel. Together they created a craft strong enough to ride out oceanic storms but light enough to navigate estuaries and river mouths. It had the tactical ability to make use of the Atlantic winds and yet it could also be manned by a scratch crew of a dozen hands. This was the tool with which all the first great European explorers - Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama - opened up the sea lanes of a new world.

I laughed out loud on learning of those unfortunate "Vivaldi brothers", who sound like characters in a Monty Python sketch. "Prince Henry" is of course Henry the Navigator. Even I had heard of him.

It all makes me think of an egg timer. The whole of Europe, without (apart from Henry the Navigator and his cronies) knowing it, awaiting its new destiny. The world beyond, waiting for Europe to crash into it and gobble it up. But, meanwhile, that tiny little stem off the coast of West Africa that had to be squeezed through.

The Spaniards were that little bit nearer to the stem of this egg timer, but the Spaniards had other battles to fight, with each other and with other Mediterranean powers. Those other Mediterranean powers were similarly busy knocking seven bells out of each other and out of any Muslims they could confront, or whom they were obliged to confront. Even the Portuguese had had ambitions to join in the more conventional sort of crusading, and only because that went so badly did they switch to truly concentrating on their southern adventures.

The Portuguese had also had to prevail in a European battle of their own, against the Spaniards, in 1385 (p. 22). How much more significant this battle, Aljubarrota (which I still struggle to spell, let alone pronounce – don't click on that if you prefer silence), now seems to me than Agincourt (which happened in the same year that the Portuguese captured Ceuta and with which, says Rogerson, Aljubarrota is frequently compared), even though I am an Englishman. England's offensive victory at Agincourt led England into a futureless French quagmire. The Portuguese defensive triumph at Aljubarrota gave Portugal the domestic stability and the leeway to set about changing the entire world.

So it was that for several generations Portugal lead the way. Only when the Portuguese had well and truly surmounted the Cape Bajador barrier did the rest of Europe follow, and by then the Portuguese were already putting their own indelible stamp on the world.

A further reminder of which came to me today in the form of an incoming email from Michael Jennings, after a phone call from him to me (concerning a rather remarkable cricket match) had informed him of my interest just now in matters Portuguese:

An interesting recent fact about Portuguese in Africa is that the number of Portuguese speakers in Africa is apparently growing rapidly. Portuguese has long been the language of the elite and much schooling in Angola and Mozambique. With the current rapid growth of literacy in Africa, helped by the fact that Portuguese language popular culture is extremely rich (thanks to the Brazilians) Portuguese is apparently finally becoming a mass spoken language in the former Portuguese colonies, even though the Portuguese left 35 years ago.

Which also chimes in rather well with Johnathan Pearce's posting earlier today about the economic progress that Africa now looks to be making.

The rest of Rogerson's book is, I assume, about how Europe and Islam bashed into each other directly, as they (we) are still doing of course. But what a fascinating preliminary sideshow these early Portuguese chapters are. And what a show it turned into.

(8)

James Taranto quotes Thomas Edsall, saying (among other things) this, about the kinds of votes that Democrats are now trying to get, and other votes that they are no longer bothering to try to get:

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment - professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists -

Edsall goes on to say that the whereas the Dems have now given up on the white workers, they are still eager to get all the non-white workers to vote for them.

One of the ways to understand the libertarian movement, it seems to me, is that it is an attempt to convert from their present foolishness all those "professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists" whom Edsall so takes for granted. It gives them the "social libertarianism" that they are so wedded to (even if they often don't get what this actually means), but it insists on the necessity of at least some – and in the current circumstances of economic crisis – a lot more - libertarianism in economic matters. Okay, libertarianism will never conquer these groups completely, but it threatens to at least divide them, into quite a few libertarians or libertarian-inclined folks and not quite so many idiots.

Also, demography is not destiny, when it comes to voting. People's "interests" are not necessarily what many party political strategists assume them to be.

The thing is, it is entirely rational to vote for more government jobs and more government hand-outs (a) if you are at the front of the queue for such things, and (b) if the supply of such things is potentially abundant, or not, depending on how you and everyone else votes. But, if the world changes, and you find yourself at the top of the list to have your job or your hand-outs taken away from you, in a world which is going to take these things away from a lot of people no matter how anybody votes, it makes sense to ask yourself different questions, and to consider voting for entirely different things. Like: lots of government cuts, so that you aren't the only one who suffers them, and so that the economy has a chance of getting back into shape in the future, soon enough for you to enjoy it.

The far side of the Laffer Curve is a rather strange place. Different rules apply.

Quite a lot of unemployed British people voted for Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, because they reckoned that Thatcher was a better bet to create the kind of country that might give them - and their children and their grandchildren - jobs in the future and a better life generally. (Whether or not they were right to vote for Thatcher is a different argument. My point is, this is what they did, and they were not being irrational.)

There is also the fact that how you vote in such circumstances of national and global crisis will be influenced, far more than in kinder and gentler times, by how you think. For a start, how bad do you think that the national or global crisis actually is? If you think it's bad, what policies do you think will get that economy back motoring again, in a way which has a decent chance of lasting? How you vote depends on how you think the world works. And how you think can change.

(3)

In nine tenths of the written treaties between the Kings of Portugal and the various reigning Princes of Hindustan, the matter of pepper came up in the first clause.

- Admiral Ballard

I have been reading The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogerson. Like many books it has apposite quotations at the start of each chapter, of which the above quotation was by some distance my favourite one. The Ballard quoted is presumably the Ballard who wrote this book, who was indeed an admiral as well as a historian.

(11)

I have already quoted from and commented on The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 a couple of times here. Now I've read it. Unless I'm being paid to read a book, I only read it to the end if I'm enjoying it, so point one to make about this book is that I wasn't paid to read it. Samizdata writers and readers are not brought together by a shared fascination for classical music and the world in which it was created and had its first impact, so I don't know if you would also enjoy reading this book. But I can say a bit about why I did.

I know Beethoven's music, and the Ninth Symphony in particular, quite well, possessing as I do a large classical CD collection containing lots of Beethoven and more than a few recordings of the Ninth. A painlessly entertaining way to learn more about classical music in general, and Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is, for me, always welcome. This book was painless partly because it is all written in a language I can easily follow, English. Many books about classical music use lots of musical notation. I can just about decipher such symbols, but seldom with the fluency that is necessary immediately to get the points an author is trying to make with them. Sachs could easily have peppered his text with such hieroglyphics, having himself been a conductor before he became a writer. He did not. He relied on words. He also avoids using Italian words, saying very loud rather than fortissimo, and so on.

This book is also painless in being quite short. 225 pages, including all the extras. I'm a slow reader, so that, for me, was another plus.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony itself famously includes words, in its particularly famous final choral movement, as well as just orchestral music. It is therefore entirely proper, when pondering the meaning and impact of this symphony, to think also about the general artistic atmosphere - involving such things as poetry and literature - that surrounded its creation and reception, rather than just, say, Beethoven's earlier pieces and the other music being composed at the time. More so, if anything. Nobody else was then writing music like Beethoven's, but the wider artistic ambience definitely chimed in with what Beethoven was trying to say with the Ninth. The Ninth, in its turn, reinforced these tendencies by setting them to music.

How accurately Sachs describes this general artistic ambience, I am not educated enough to say. But he at least convinces me that he knows what he is talking about. That I was doing something to fill a big gap in my knowledge of a crucial time in cultural, political and economic history, was yet another reason for me to be glad to have read this book.

The political story Sachs tells is of a continent aroused into radical enthusiasm by the French Revolution, but then disappointed both by that revolution's subsequent Napoleonic nature and then by its defeat by a coalition of anti-radical powers. The Napoleonic Wars were followed by a period of political reaction, all over Europe. In such a world, the liveliest minds shied away from real world politics and instead turned inwards. Instead of challenging the powers-that-were with riots and revolutions, they challenged them with Art, asserting the primacy of Great Artists over merely aristocratic inheritors of power. Power from within would trump the inherited privilege of the old aristocracy who remained, temporarily, in political command. (If that reminds you a bit of the history of the USSR, Sach agrees with you.)

The contemporary of Beethoven who came most alive for me, as a result of reading this book, was Byron. Poet, scored with lots of women, died fighting in Greece for … something or other. That was pretty much the limit of my knowledge of Byron. I don't know a lot more now, but I do know a bit more. The point of Byron's Greek enthusiasm being that supporting Greek resistance to the Turks was just about the only kind of radical enthusiasm you could publicly indulge in, and get away with. On the back of this peculiar gust of political emotion, Byron, himself a hereditary aristocrat (although he didn't know he would be that until he suddenly became that), became that very modern sort of figure, an international celebrity, with no official position but lots of influence. As Beethoven had already become. Other early nineteenth century artistic celebrities whom Sachs also writes about are: Stendal, Hegel, Pushkin, Delacroix and Heine, about all of whom, as with Byron, I now know a bit more than extremely little.

Like their confreres of our own time, these Great Artists were typically very scornful of those other sorts of new men, the money grubbing capitalists. Heine is quoted expressing lofty disdain for these mercenary oafs and their contemptible preference for mere entertainment over Art. This despite the fact that it was the new money of these mere tradesmen that, then more than now, was providing the Artists with their new found clout, either directly, or indirectly via the spending power of the greater number of state bureaucrats that their endeavours were making possible. The first performance of the Ninth was staged for a paying audience, and at least partly with the idea of easing Beethoven's money worries (so much for the notion that artists don't fret about mere money), rather than commissioned and all paid for by an aristocrat. The contrast with how the Eroica Symphony (number three of Beethoven's nine symphonies), as shown in the film Eroica that I referred to in an earlier Beethoven posting here, was extreme. The Eroica Symphony first exploded into the world, assuming Eroica has the story roughly right, in a large room in an aristocratic mansion, in front of an audience that was outnumbered by the orchestra. The premier of the Ninth differed from a classical concert nowadays in that the audience responded to the music more in the manner of a jazz audience nowadays, but nevertheless it was a much more modern occasion.

Not that Sachs spends much time describing that concert. He describes the music itself, in English, but now so much how the audience first received it. Describing classical music in English is a lot like writing about sex, being awfully liable to provoke unintended mirth, but Sachs does it pretty well. However, I learned more about the actual event itself, as opposed to the music, by reading the sleeve notes of one of those Ninth CDs of mine. Sachs is more concerned to describe the Ninth itself, the world that gave rise to the Ninth, and the impact upon the world that the Ninth then had. He writes about a great many years besides the year 1824, and many more afterwards, and includes a very good short biography of his hero.

As far as Beethoven's and the Ninth Symphony's impact is concerned, the personality who, for me, came most alive from reading the bits in this book about the decades after the Ninth Symphony was created was Richard Wagner. Sachs (perhaps his name got him paying particular attention to Wagner from an early age) entertainingly quotes Wagner patting Beethoven on the back for showing the world the way towards the artistic perfection that was "Music Theatre" (which is something entirely different from the Italian trash known as "opera"). Beethoven dipped his toe in the process of setting significant Words, expressive of profound philosophical ideas and profound spiritual and emotional sentiments, to music. Wagner perfected the process. According to Wagner, that is. Fair enough. When Wagner said the things Sachs quotes he was well into creating his great body of op … sorry, works of Music Theatre. Wagner's Great Artist posturings were all part of what made him a great artist, just as such ambitions did the same for Beethoven himself. Had Beethoven not stormed the musical heavens, would Wagner have been able to? We will never know, but the question is a good one, because it gives us a sense of Beethoven's colossal influence on everything that followed.

What I hadn't really taken in before, although I am sure I read through such things in all those CD sleeve notes of mine, was just how obsessed Wagner was with Beethoven's Ninth, his Ninth in particular, mentioning it constantly in his voluminous writings, and being constantly mentioned talking about it, right up to his own death, in the diaries left to us by Wagner's wife. Wagner launched the building of his brand new Bayreuth … Music Theatre in 1872 by performing this symphony, his point being: this is where Beethoven ended, and where I, Wagner, have taken over.

For somewhat different reasons, when the Bayreuth Festival was relaunched (following that embarrassing Nazi interlude) in 1951, Beethoven's Ninth was again performed. The point of that being that the impeccable Beethoven brand, as we would now say, would help to purge the much sullied Wagner brand.

As Sachs notes at both the beginning of and at the end of his book, Beethoven's music generally, and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is felt by almost everybody who responds to it to communicate and to represent all that is good about humanity and human aspirations. Every good cause of our own time (by which I simply mean a cause that thinks it's good) that can afford to (EUrope being the most famously obtrusive current example) basks in the moral aura cast by the Ninth. That so many of the great political villains of the twentieth century, of the sort alluded to in my previous paragraph, who between them did so much (as Sachs notes) to make us all think again about worshipping Great Men, used this music to confer moral grandeur upon their mega-slaughters, seems to do nothing to change this.

Sachs concludes his book with a little autobiographical essay along the lines of: What Beethoven Means To Me. Way back when he and his friends were protesting against the Vietnam War, Beethoven provided Sachs with his inspirational soundtrack. Again, fair enough, given that, crucially, Sachs does not say that Beethoven would, had he been alive now, have been on Sachs's side. Sachs merely says that it felt like that, as I am sure it did. Beethoven still sounds as if he is on your side, whoever you are. And no piece of his music did more to make this true than the Ninth.

(9)

In London right now, it is an hour or more past 9 am. But in Cape Town, South Africa, just over an hour ago, it was 11:11 am, on the 11/11/11 (November 11th 2011), and South Africa needed 111 runs to win the international cricket match that they were playing against Australia. South Africa, sadly, were not 111-1, chasing 222. They were 126-1, chasing 236. So, time and date oddities aside, a cricket match is drawing to a calm, even predictable end. Right? Well, yes. But yesterday, 10/11/11 or 11/10/11 or whatever you call yesterday, it was very different.

Those baffled and/or repulsed by cricket and its arithmetically obsessed followers like me should probably skip the next few paragraphs. Summary: this has been one weird test match. But now, skip down to where it says: "Okay, here is my serious Samizdata-type point."

Okay cricket nutters, on we go with the story. Here is the sort of thing that was happening in Cape Town yesterday:

W W . 4 . . | W . . . . . | . . W . . . | . . . 4 . W | 1 1 . W

At the end of the first day of this test match, Australia had reached a rather meagre 214-8, but on the morning of the second day, yesterday, they did better, getting to 284 all out, thanks to more excellent batting by their new captain, Michael Clarke, who was last out for 151. South Africa then progressed to 49-1 at lunch. So far so normal.

About an hour later South Africa were all out for 96 having only just avoided the follow-on, the above WW stuff being a slice of that action. Australia then went into bat, and at the tea interval were themselves struggling on 13-3. Then, in no time at all after tea, they had slumped to a truly catastrophic 21-9. They then recovered, if that's the right word, to the dizzy heights of 47 all out. Another action slice:

W . . 3 . . | . . . W . . | . W . W

The South African Vernon Philander, playing in his first test, took five wickets for fifteen runs, bringing his total for the match to eight. Quite a start. Earlier Shane Watson had taken five for seventeen for Australia.

A Cricinfo commenter suggested that Australia should declare at tea time, setting South Africa two hundred to win in very adverse conditions. He didn't say, an hour later, that Australia should have declared at tea time. He said it at tea time, when Australia were 13-3. And they probably should have! Australia having batted successfully in the morning, South Africa began their second innings and ended this bizarre day with similar batting success, reaching 81-1 by the close. Today, they began needing only a further 155 to win. If South Africa do win, they'll be thanking their last wicket pair, Dale Steyn and Imran Tahir, who added thirteen and saved that follow-on. Take away that stand, and South Africa might have lost by an innings by now. As it now stands, and given that they have made a fine start this morning, South Africa now look sure to win.

If, despite being a cricketphobe, you read all that and would like to know approximately what it means, think of it as the cricketing equivalent of a world cup soccer quarter-final match between, say, Italy and Germany, where the scorecard after half and hour was 0-0, but by half time it was Italy 6 Germany 0, and then about fifteen minutes later it was Germany 8 Italy 6, followed by twenty entirely goalless minutes with Germany looking favourites to play out time and win it, 8-6. Calm, mayhem, even greater mayhem in the opposite direction, calm. Bizarre, right? I'll say.

Okay, here is my serious Samizdata-type point. (Welcome back, normals.)

My point is that the internet is uniting the world into one huge ultra-high-density global super-city. Not a global village, because that would suggest that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about, and, as the above few paragraphs illustrate very adequately, that is not at all what is happening. Most of us are baffled by most of what goes on in our Global Super-City, most of the time. But the thing is, cricket fans like me can now tune into the fine detail of matches which we would never before have been able to find out about. And you can likewise easliy tune into the fine detail of whatever it is that gets you excited and has you interrupting your normal daily routine.

When I was a kid, the British mainstream media (the only media we had so we didn't then call them "mainstream") enabled me only to pay attention to local cricket games between English counties, and international games between England and whoever England were playing. Following games like this one that is finishing up today, between South Africa and Australia, was something I could not do, in earlier decades. And when cricket got pushed off the British sports pages by soccer (as I had better call it here), life got even harder for what we would now call a "virtual" cricket fan like me. But then, the internet changed everything. It took me a while to realise how much things had changed, but now, I lend a fraction of an eye and ear to pretty much all international cricket matches, and sometimes, as yesterday, my day is severely deranged by events that just demand to be attended to.

Now, like I say, search and destroy the word "cricket" from the above couple of paragraphs, insert instead whatever you care about that happens all over the world, often involving total foreigners on both or all sides. Replace my incomprehensible cricket blather with your own preferred incomprehensible blather. You can now pay attention to that, in a way that you probably never could before. We can all now do this.

This results in a world not so much of geographically separated national cultures, but of globe-spanning and intersecting communities, uniting people from all over the planet into a tightly woven ball made of countless different strands of different coloured and different textured string and wool and twine.

That is an exaggeration. All prophecies of the death of the nation state for as long as the nation state has existed have been exaggerations, and this one is no different. As far as cricket is concerned, the internet doesn't just plug me into faraway international matches between Not-England and Not-England; it also enables me to track English county cricket in far greater detail than I ever could in earlier decades, even when I was a kid and cricket still vied with soccer as our national game. Nevertheless, the biggest change of the last decade, for me as a cricket nut, has not been that I see my local cricket foreground better, although I definitely do. It is that I see the once far distant world beyond my own country, which in the past I couldn't not ignore, in the exact same detail.

Similar things have happened in politics. More and more, our various "national" political rulers now also have their own globe-spanning communities of shared interest, and they now increasingly seem to feel more fondness and loyalty towards one another than they do to anyone who merely lives in their country, whom they merely "lead" or "represent", and it is a different world. Am I the only one who now regards David Cameron not so much as our Prime Minister, but as the local District Commissioner? For part of his day he represents Us to Them, but from where we sit, he seems to spend a great deal more of his time and energy representing Them (he being one of Them) to Us, imposing Their interests on top of Our interests. To me, it all feels rather Medieval, by which I mean that local considerations still matter, but that our rulers are not really members of our various local clubs. They merely own them. They have their own club.

And actually, this has been going on for quite a while, because unlike the rest of us, the world's rulers have for many decades now had their own email and internet equivalents. They have long been able to afford international phone calls and international telegrams. They flitted around the world, before the rest of us did. The internet has changed the politics of the world not by turning it global, but by causing the rest of us finally to notice that it has been global for quite some time.

That, in my opinion, is a pretty good way to understand the Twentieth Century and its numerous dramas and disasters and mysteries. This was not just a time of national war and national contention. It was a time of global civil war, hot and then cold, in which members of that global club wrestled with one another, using the rest of us as their cannons and cannon fodder, to determine what sort of global club they would all end up members of, and which of them would be the senior members of it. Then, our parents and grandparents found it hard to see this. Now, we can all see it. (Don't forget that the internet also contains lots of history, much of it different from the national histories that dominated the past.)

South Africa now coasting. 214-1, needing only another 22 runs. Hashim Amla finally out for 112. South Africa 222-2, still needing another 14. Not long to go now. And … South Africa win by eight wickets, with their captain Smith reaching his century off the last ball of the game? It looks that way. Dot. Dot. Dot. One. No, Smith 100, but scores even and South Africa still need another one. Dot. New over. Dot. One, and that's it.

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"All this [illicit trade] suggests that, while customs barriers stifled trade, they did not necessarily increase isolation. The `fortress' of France was remarkably porous. Any commemoration of European unity should remember the smugglers and pedlars who helped to keep the borders open."

Page 152, taken from The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb. The entire book is crammed with wonderful examples of French life down the ages, and in particular, I am struck by what were, by the standards of the time (18th and early 19th centuries) vast migrations of people within the country in a way that resembles the even longer migrations of people around the world today. Even the "Tour de France" cycle race seems to have its echoes in the heroic journeys made by pilgrims, travellers and labourers of ages past.

This is a great book if you are thinking of spending a week in that country. Robb has also written a fine biography of that giant of French literature, Victor Hugo.

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Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

- Richard Feynman, quoted by Matt Ridley in his Angus Millar lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh, the entire text of which you an read at Bishop Hill. Do read the whole thing. Following on from the above quote comes one of the best summaries of why climate skeptics are climate skeptics that I have ever encountered.

Does anybody know if Ridley's brilliant lecture is, or will be, available on video?

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I'm now reading that book I mentioned here earlier, by Harvey Sachs, about the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth.

The event itself was nearly shifted by Beethoven, for both financial and organisational reasons, from Vienna (where Beethoven lived for all his adult life) to Bonn, which caused a great gang of Viennese high-ups to write Beethoven a public letter, begging him to keep the show in Vienna. Of this letter, Harvey Sachs writes (pp. 30-31):

The letter-signed by seven aristocrats and various well-known local bureaucrats, musicians, music publishers, and the piano maker Andreas Streicher - is valuable not only as proof of the esteem in which Beethoven was held in his adoptive city but also because it demonstrates how deeply the notion that great music could be both "immortal" and widely disseminated had taken hold in Europe within Beethoven's lifetime. Pre-nineteenth-century audiences had tended to lose interest in music that failed to follow the dictates of fashion. Bach, who was born in 1685 and whose works were already stylistically passé at the time of his death sixty-five years later, would have been delighted but astonished to learn that his music would be venerated and widely performed nearly three centuries after it was written. He may have believed in the hereafter, but he wrote for the here and now - for the church ceremonies and court occasions that took place as his life unfolded and for the instruction of the musicians of his day. Haydn (1732-1809) and even Mozart (1756-1791) still worked within the specific-piece-for-specific-occasion system, although the fact that Mozart began at the age of twenty-eight to keep a catalogue of his works, and the even more significant fact that he and Haydn published as many of their compositions as possible, demonstrate composers' dawning ambition to have their works survive them, perhaps even for a considerable time.

Not until Beethoven's day, however, did winning a place in posterity become a major goal - the greatest goal, for many composers. With the rise, in his lifetime, of the bourgeoisie, middle-class families were able to give their children music lessons, and Hausmusik - music in the home became the home entertainment system of the 1800s. The equipment required for making it comprised a piano, one or more other instruments and/or voices, and printed music, the demand for which increased almost exponentially. This phenomenon occurred just as the figure of the Romantic genius - the artist as a being unhampered by normal constraints - was taking hold. The music of the brilliant, eccentric Beethoven circulated widely, and the conviction that this music would become "deathless" was a logical consequence of both his persona and the diffusion of his works. In the letter from his Viennese admirers, the reference to "the many who joyfully acknowledge your worth and what you have become for the present as well as the future" is an exceptionally significant sign of the times: The arts were no longer to be considered mere "means and objects of pastime." Composers were becoming the high priests, perhaps even the gods, of a secular religion; the best among them were expected to create works that would endure, . . .

All of which reminded me of something Benjamin Britten once said:

The rot set in with Beethoven.

Meaning, Beethoven was the first of a huge tribe of artists who from then on took themselves, and were also taken by others, a whole hell of a lot too seriously. Beethoven was, of course, entitled to think of himself as a genius. In his case, it helped to turn him into the genius he became. Most of his imitators got the trappings of genius off pat enough, but neglected the bit in the genius rule book where it says that you have to produce works of genius.

After writing that, I tried googling that Britten quote, and look what I found, almost immediately. Yes indeed, a review of The Ninth by Michael Henderson, which begins thus:

'The rot set in with Beethoven’, said Benjamin Britten, who, cold fish that he was, could never understand the idea of the artist as hero (though he admired Mahler, whose music is nothing if not attention-seeking). He had half a point, because the past century has been chock-full of artists, or ‘artists’, who have asked us to soothe their fevered brows. They are still around today. No matter. Their egotism cannot disguise Beethoven’s greatness, . . .

Snap.

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I don't often do that LOL thing, but I did yesterday, in a crowded café, when I read this:

Beethoven's contempt for most human beings conflicted with his all-embracing love for humanity.

That's on page 54 of a book by Harvey Sachs entitled The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, which is about the composition and first performance of the Ninth Symphony, and about the world and the time in which this happened.

Remembering that I had written here before about Beethoven, I just reread an earlier piece I did called Eroica (at first mis-read by some as Erotica - what can you do?). It still reads well, I think. And it tells you all you need to know to enable you to forgive Beethoven a hundred times over for preferring humanity to humans.

I haven't read this Sachs book yet. Yesterday I was just doing a preliminary flick-through, and came across the above sentence only by the sheerest good fortune. I certainly now want to read to rest of it.

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'Why Britain Should Join the Euro' - a pamphlet by Richard Layard, Willem Buiter, Christopher Huhne, Will Hutton, Peter Kenen and Adair Turner, with a foreword by Paul Volcker.

One of the authors, AdairTurner, now Lord Turner, is interviewed in today's Observer, which is where I saw the link. He has changed his mind a little since 2002, when the pamphlet was written, but not to an unseemly extent. Now Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, he is concerned about the current situation but remains confident that "sensible decisions are going to be made".

So there you are then. Cheer up!

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Andy Janes has just bought one of these:

He paid £1.70. Not bad. But how many pounds will such a thing cost in a few years time?

Have a nice weekend.

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Johnathan Pearce regularly mentions here the Rational Optimist himself, Matt Ridley, very admiringly, most recently in this posting. For those who share JP's admiration, there's a video of his recent Hayek Lecture, which everyone who wins the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize, for the year's best book promoting the ideas of individual liberty, gets to give.

Videos are also very handy for people like me, who only learn things half decently if told them several times, in different media, in different voices, so to speak.

I'm now watching this video at Bishop Hill, to whom thanks because this is where I learned of it.

Here's a quote from the lecture (of the SQotD sort that we like here) that has already stood out, as I concoct this little posting:

Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty.

Maybe that's two words. But: indeed.

As the man introducing him said, one of the things that makes Ridley particularly special as a writer is the enormous range of evidence that he brings to bear on the matter of why trade and trade networks work so fabulously well, compared to isolated individuals or isolated local communities.

The lecture lasts nearly an hour, but shows every sign so far of being very well worth it.

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It would (will?) be interesting to hear what our own Paul Marks has to say to in answer to this, from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Judging by the commentary, there has been a colossal misunderstanding around the world of what has just has happened in Germany. The significance of yesterday’s vote by the Bundestag to make the EU’s €440bn rescue fund (EFSF) more flexible is not that the outcome was a "Yes".

This assent was a foregone conclusion, given the backing of the opposition Social Democrats and Greens. In any case, the vote merely ratifies the EU deal reached more than two months ago – itself too little, too late, rendered largely worthless by very fast-moving events.

The significance is entirely the opposite. The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy - as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery - has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer.

Clearly, Evans-Pritchard had in mind commentary like this (Paul Marks yesterday):

It is the end - not just the end of any prospect that people will really face up to their problems (rather than scream for endless bailouts), but also the end for any pretence that modern government is in any real sense "democratic". It is not a sudden emotional whim of the people that has been ignored - it is the settled opinion (conviction) of the people, which has been held (in spite of intense propaganda against it) for a long period of time, that has been spat upon.

Evans-Pritchard, however, says this:

Something profound has changed. Germans have begun to sense that the preservation of their own democracy and rule of law is in conflict with demands from Europe. They must choose one or the other.

Yet Europe and the world are so used to German self-abnegation for the EU Project – so used to the teleological destiny of ever-closer Union – that they cannot seem to grasp the fact. It reminds me of 1989 and the establishment failure to understand the Soviet game was up.

So, have things changed, or have they not?

I agree about the USSR parallels in all this. But Evans-Pritchard's reportage also reminds me rather of that vote of confidence that they had in the House of Commons, which Neville Chamberlain "won" in 1940, but actually lost.

I remember once speculating, here, there or somewhere, that one of the many things that could reasonably be said to have caused Word War 2 was the failure of any sort of German Parliament to meet - circa 1939, and say, in the manner of a British Parliament: No! No more of this! That time, the idea was for Germany to conquer Europe (and much else besides) with armies. Now the plan is and has long been for Germany to buy Europe, and give it to … EUrope. But the price is again proving ruinous and the object being purchased is a crock.

This time, the means are surely still in place, as they were not in 1939, for Germany to say: No! But, did they? And if not, will they? Over to you, Paul Marks.

LATER: Detlev Schlichter agrees with Paul, using the word Götterdämmerung. Germany, he says, is finished.

He also says this:

And one final word to my English friends. No gloating please about the clever decision to stay out of the euro-mess. You have the same thing coming your way without the euro. The coalition’s consolidation course is apparently so ruthless that every month the state has to borrow MORE, not less. Even official inflation is already 5% but pressure is growing on the Bank of England to print more money. See the comical Vince Cable yesterday, or Martin Wolf, the man with the bazooka, in the FT today. Since 1971 the paper money system has been global. Its endgame will be global, too.

Indeed.

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Europe on the Brink, a Policy Brief published by the Petersen Institute for International Economics, makes for grim reading. My favourite quote from it is this subheading:

This potential break-up of the euro area is exactly what happened in the ruble zone when the Soviet Union broke apart.

"Potential"? Also, I think, for "euro area" read state-backed but not gold-backed currencies everywhere.

But the USSR comparison is spot on. When the USSR disintegrated, this was rightly hailed as a triumph for capitalism, but not rightly hailed as the triumph of capitalism. There were other walls yet to fall, other statist follies yet to be destroyed. The commanding heights of the economy used to be thought of as big companies that did physical stuff to physical stuff. 1991 was the date when the idea that governments should micro-manage such enterprises got its comeuppance, and the torrent of high quality stuff that has gushed forth ever since continues, as yet, unabated. But the real commanding heights, the loftiest and most commanding of all, the politically (mis-)managed currencies of the world, are only now collapsing.

Think of our current travails as the unfinished business of the twentieth century.

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For those interested in the battles of classical antiquity, today represents an important date. And the name "Marathon" lives on for all those masochists who insist on doing those punishing runs in London, New York and other places.

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A Brief History of the Age of Steam: The Power That Drove The Industrial Revolution
Thomas Crump
Carroll & Graff, 2007, 370pp., paperback, $15.95 (but now much less - I got my copy for £3.99 in a remainder shop)

The best thing about this book from my British point of view is that it does not focus only on British events and circumstances. It surveys the entire world, as best it can in the space it allows itself. In most other stuff I can recall reading about the history of the steam engine, Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, the British pioneers of steam engines during the eighteenth century (Trevithick being the first to build a steam engine that propelled itself along a track – in other words the maker of the first locomotive), are followed immediately by the heroic deeds of George Stephenson and IK Brunel, the mighty British railway pioneers of the Victorian age. Foreign places get mentioned because Stephenson's son did railways in them. Steamships are mentioned because Brunel also did them. But before you know it, you are being told about streamlined steam locos breaking speed records by hurtling from London to Scotland in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which was all good stuff but hardly central to the history of steam technology. By then, steam locomotives were a mature technology and soon to be an obsolete one.

In this book, by contrast, the steam engine arrives at its early nineteenth century state, but then the scene switches from Britain to North America. Steam engines, being still very heavy, made sense as the engines of big river boats on big American rivers well before they made sense as small locomotives on railway lines less than five feet apart. The USA, unlike Britain, has an abundance of huge rivers, in exactly the parts of the USA that were then developing most rapidly. The next chapter then concerns itself with rivers and canals (the two often being rather hard to distinguish) elsewhere in the world, most notably in central Europe, in particular in the form of the Rhine and its many reconstructions and appendages.

But already, I am getting ahead of the story. The first big job performed by steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines, the market that Newcomen catered to (1712 being the date of Newcomen's first installation), and then the one in which James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton also got their start. Until Newcomen made his engine, many a British coal mine would have to cease operating, not because the coal had run out but because the coal that remained, often in large quantities, was under water. Any kind of mechanically powered pump, however expensive and inefficient, could make itself useful in circumstances like that, a classic niche market of just the kind that a cumbersome but clearly important new technology needs to get started.

Thomas Crump (and yes, that is a rather Victorian sounding name, isn't it?) does not make anything of the comparison, but the similarity between the early steam engines and the computers of our own time will strike anyone who reads this book. Steam engines started big and cumbersome. Then they got smaller and more powerful, thanks to a succession of technical innovations, and thanks to a general rise in engineering savvy and all-round craftsmanship. Not that this steam engine/computer parallel won't have occurred to Crump. It's merely that this book is published as one of a series called "A Brief History of …", and you often sense, sometimes because Crump comes right out and says it, that lots of interesting stuff is being left out.

Personally, given my technological ignorance, I would have appreciated just a few more pictures to explain how steam engines and their successive iterations and improvements actually worked. The big improvement that Watt made was that he contrived for the down beat of the steam engine to be powered, as well as the upbeat. And, he somehow made steam engines better at twiddling wheels than they had been hitherto. Another hugely important development was when they started using steam of much higher pressure, which is the sort of thing you can only do if the general standard of craftsmanship is high. A good idea like that in an unsatisfactory engineering environment is a recipe not for success, but for untimely explosions, of which there were plenty anyway. Later came the steam turbine, which means squirting a jet of steam at a big propellor, yes? A few more pictures might have fixed the details of these and other developments in my head a bit better, and also given a better idea of how big each of these things was, and what they looked like from the outside. The general point, however, I did get. The steam engine wasn't just one giant leap forward. It was a succession of important steps, resulting in a constantly improving power to weight ratio and a steadily widening range of applications. Crucial from the historical point of view was the moment when it was possible to put an engine on railway wheels that was powerful enough not only to drag itself along, but other loads also. But, there were plenty of other important moments in the story.

This, however, is a book which is strong on maps of railway systems and waterways in various parts of the world, less so on the ins and outs of the technology itself. That is because it is at least as much about the impact and context of the steam engine, about what circumstances made people invent and develop it and what they did with it, rather than merely what, in their various and successive forms, steam engines actually were. Never mind. The Internet (our internet mania being not unlike the mania that kicked off the railway age) is a big and most informative place, and at least I now know more of the words that I need to type into google to learn more.

I did enjoy the maps. One of my favourites shows the many early – pre-Stephenson's rocket - railways in the vicinity of the River Tyne (p. 149). The point being that the railway age had begun well before the Rocket made its first journeys between Stockton and Darlington in 1825. Railways as a technique for shifting stuff were actually centuries old by then, having a history that is entirely distinct from the matter of putting machines on them, to drag things along them. People, horses and gravity had been doing this for ages, until the late eighteenth century along rails made of timber rather than iron or steel. There are some very good pages about the development of rails to assist military engineers in their efforts to life earth out of trenches, and suchlike. The first application of the steam engine to railways was in the form of stationary engines at the end of short railway lines, dragging wagons along with ropes or chains.

That Tyneside map of ancient railways illustrates a general point about transport technology. Please now follow me along a slight digression.

I have long been fascinated by the ins and outs of the history of communications technology, which is of course heavily dependent upon transport, especially in the days when complicated messages could only travel as fast as a human message-carrier could. And a recurring story in the history of the technology of communication is how someone invents a new method of communicating, and everyone then says: hey, this is going to put a stop to … some earlier and much loved method of communication. Printed books, it was said, and then television, would kill the art of conversation. The internet will finish off books and television. And so on. But what really happens is that methods of communication combine and assist one another. People use emails not to stop meeting each other, but, among many other things, to arrange meetings and to continue the conversations started at those meetings. Television gives people new stuff to talk about, and it also sells books, for example the books on which television dramas are based. The internet doesn't kill off books either. On the contrary, one of the first mega-businesses of the Internet age is a bookstore. Physical books like this one that I am now writing about may in due course become a thing of the past, but virtual books will live on vigorously.

Similar things apply to transport. Someone invents a new way of travelling or of transporting stuff, but as likely as not and especially to begin with, the new system of transport revitalises the older methods rather than rendering them instantly obsolete.

What that map of the River Tyne shows is all the little railways which connected coal mines to … the River Tyne! The railways were all separate. They went downhill, with horses dragging the empty wagons up to the top again when they had been unloaded. Then, when the railway age as we now think of it got into its huge and interconnected and above all steam-driven stride, horses, far from being done away with, increased greatly in number, to transport people to and from railways stations, and to transport people into and within the huge new cities that the railways made all the huger. The horse population boomed in the steam age, before later forms of locomotion pushed both steam locomotives and horses, and smaller horse-drawn boats on smaller inland waterways, into the relative (but only relative) backwater than is the leisure industry.

Or consider those big rivers in America. There comes a point as you travel downstream on the upper reaches of such a river when it becomes navigable by ocean going ships, at which point there is invariably a big city where all the resulting loading and unloading gets done. But loading and unloading is cumbersome, especially in the absence of twentieth century cranes and the like. So instead, you can bind lots of little boats together, like so many tree trunks, and stick a super-powerful steam-powered tug boat on the front. Steam doesn't put a stop to smaller boats on smaller waterways. It instead greatly increases their productivity, even though the boats themselves are far too small to accommodate a steam engine actually on them. Are you thinking "containers"? Me too.

Railways and state power were always intermingled. In Britain, this mostly took the form of the politicking needed to contrive the lines of violated property rights that railways needed to get built at all. Then, the government was again "needed" (Crump has entirely conventional ideas about this) to compel railways to be operated more safely than might otherwise have happened quite so soon. Crump's political views seem to be conventionally centrist. He favours human advancement and prosperity, but takes it for granted that governments were needed to get railways started, and then to regulate them, impose safety regimes upon them, and so on. As a libertarian, I can't help wondering what might have happened to the steam age if landowners could simply have vetoed railways on their land if they felt inclined, and if those railways that did nevertheless materialise had been allowed to be as unsafe as their proprietors felt inclined for them to be. But, as is often said in pro-laissez-faire blogs like this one, the triumph of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century was only very partial.

In the USA, railways were all mixed up with the creation of new states of the union. Railways made it possible for new settlers to move in, and for them then to sell their produce to rest of the USA. And of course, railways played a huge part in the waging of the American Civil War, railway junctions, then and since, becoming important military objectives. I was charmed to read an oddly large number of pages in this book (pp. 140-146) about an amazing episode in the Civil War, upon which the movie The Great Locomotive Chase was based, which was one of the very first movies I ever saw. All I remembered, of course, was locomotives chasing one another. I didn't care why, and I assumed they'd made the whole story up. But not so. Now, I know more about who really was chasing whom and why. Many other late nineteenth century wars, with prominently featured railways, are referred to, most notably wars in China.

Railways and war is another topic that British-centric books about the steam age tend to neglect somewhat, apart from how the railways managed to keep going during World War 2 despite all the bombing, because British railways were probably more innocent of military motivation in their origins than the railways almost anywhere else in the world. In most countries, economic and national-strategic considerations tended to go hand in hand, giving rise to lots of financial corruption involving politically adept plutocrats, most especially in Russia, surprise surprise. In Russia the plutocrats got vast amounts of money from the government. In the USA, the plutocrats used their vast amounts of money to buy governments. The pattern in the world generally tended to be that the railways were built to aggrandise states and state military power, but then it was thought by the relevant national grandees, well, now that we've built these things, we might as well allow mere people to use these trains to transport themselves and their produce, if they would like to, which invariably many of them did.

I especially enjoyed the pages about Japan. I knew, very roughly, about how Commodore Perry first parked his ship off the coast of Japan and demanded that Japan get with the nineteenth century. I did not know, until I read this book, that when Perry made his second visit to Japan to sort out the details, he brought a train set with him:

Conforming to oriental custom, Perry, on his second visit, brought a variety of gifts, among which was a quarter-size model railway, complete with locomotive, tender and a carriage, with several miles of rails. The American visitors having laid a circular track - about a mile long - behind the reception hall at Yokohama, proceeded to show the assembled dignitaries what the train could do. They were overwhelmed. According to Perry's official record: 'Crowds of Japanese gathered around, and looked on the repeated circlings of the train with unabated pleasure and surprise, unable to repress a shout of delight at each blast of the steam whistle." One official actually rode the whole circuit, sitting on the roof of the diminutive carriage, and reported that the experience was 'most enjoyable'. Travelling at 20 mph was far beyond anything conceived possible in what was still a feudal state. ...

And the "assembled dignitaries" duly decreed that the railways should come to Japan. Their heads were full of armies which could then be transported hither and thither and which could then more easily rampage about in China and Korea. But much more entertaining, for me, was the story of how the new trains in Japan impacted upon the Japanese silk trade, which was the big economic story in Japan when the railways first arrived. When silk is first harvested, or whatever it is you do to silk when you first get your hands on it, you have then to spin it into silk thread very quickly. Wait more than a few hours and the silk stops working, apparently. This meant that the traditional Japanese silk industry required silk spinning, as well as harvesting, to be highly decentralised. Harvesting and spinning effectively had to be the one operation. But once railways started snaking their way across Japan, that all changed. Now it was possible to transport harvested silk to bigger, steam powered spinning … places, by train. If the train went through where you lived, then your silk harvesting stayed in business and prospered as never before. But if the train went elsewhere, your silk business collapsed. I knew nothing about any of this, until I read this book. In general, Crump observes, the railways centralised. They created huge new cities, with huge new business empires based in them, while causing many a small town to die.

In India, the same pattern was repeated, of politics leading and people following. The rulers, this time British, built their railways to do such things as suppress the Indian Mutiny, and then wondered if mere Indians might like to travel on them also. As many a dramatic photo tells us, Indians took to train travel with a passion. I am fond of writing at this blog about the game of cricket, which now serves as one of the great modern unifiers of India. Right up there with cricket is another British designed, Indian built wonder of the modern age, the Indian national railway system.

Ocean going liners figure prominently towards the end of Crump's story, as they should, and he credits Brunel with the key insight upon which the nature (very big) of modern ocean going steamships was based (p. 289):

Brunel, although no shipbuilder, had the fundamental insight that a substantial increase in size was the key to building a ship that could carry sufficient coal for crossing the Atlantic in either direction. Quite simply, with the increase of the dimensions of a vessel by any factor, its carrying capacity increases by the cube of that factor while the resistance to be overcome by its engine increases only by its square. With the help of this principle it is possible to determine the minimum dimensions of a steamship able to carry sufficient fuel for a voyage of any prescribed length - such as the distance involved in any Atlantic crossing.

This will seem banal to many of Samizdata's tech-savvy commentariat, but I had never before encountered this particular point about how much size matters, when it comes to steamships. Does any similar kind of principle apply to modern jet airliners, I wonder?

Crump makes much of the sinking of the Titanic, a story he tells at similar length (pp. 313-317) to his earlier telling of the story of the Great Locomotive Chase. His excuse is that the Titanic sinking drama illustrates the crucial contribution made by wireless telegraphy to ocean going liners and their voyages, and the "need" for the law to demand greater safety at sea. Had just one wireless telegrapher on a nearby ship been at work instead of having just a minute or two earlier gone to bed, all of the Titanic's passengers would have been saved. Having made a point of ignoring the movie-induced Titanic mania of recent years, I did not know this. Crump also earlier emphasised the contribution made by telegraphy of the wired sort to railways. Obviously communications technology is intimately mixed up with the story of transport, to the point where it is hard to separate the two. Think only of national newspapers and postal services everywhere, both impossible without the means to transport the messages.

A number of things make me suspect that this book was first written not as a history of the steam age generally, but rather as a history of the application of steam to transport. The final chapter, for example, is entitled: "The Eclipse of Steam Transport". Steam did utterly transform transport, but it did other things too, like spin that Japanese silk. Crump tells us little about how steam power was applied to making clothes, printing newspapers, and powering "industry" – i.e. industry of the sort that goes on inside huge and immobile factories. Crump describes steam engines before they climbed onto the rails, so to speak. And he also mentions the stationary steam engines that still throb away, still powered by coal and still generating the bulk of the modern world's electricity supplies. And, he makes the further point that steam power lives on in nuclear power stations, in the form of steam turbines supplied with steam heated by nuclear means. The steam age is still very much with us! But as a general observation, Crump tells us little about what steam did indoors during the railway and steamship age. I guess I should read this book.

Nevertheless, as you can surely tell, I enjoyed reading this book very much, being much more diverted by what it did say than in any way annoyed about anything it may plausibly be said to have omitted. That's usually the way with books reviewed by unpaid bloggers. Why read a book carefully enough to write about it if you aren't enjoying it?

I'll end this with a general point, about technology and technological history and about the people who made it, and continue to make it. One of the great intellectual divides of modern times is between those who take technological modernity for granted, and those who do not. Those of us who regularly write for or read Samizdata are surely in the latter camp. We know how much sheer graft, as well as intellectual insight and analysis, went into and goes into the development of steam engines, railway lines, steam locomotives, steamships, power stations, and cars and airplanes and computers and space rockets and nanotechnology and mobile phones and better washing up liquid and cheaper laser eye surgery and corn flakes, etc. etc. etc. We also know that the right economic policy setting is needed for such things to be devised, or even borrowed from elsewhere and applied. This stuff doesn't just design and make and operate itself. That much I do know about technology and its ongoing history, even if I know little of the technological detail, as I fear I have made only too clear in this review. This, fundamentally, is what I liked about this book. It celebrates the achievements of people who deserve to be celebrated, just as our current techno-wizards also deserve to be celebrated. True, a lot of what the steam age pioneers did was construct the technological sinews of war, as the book well explains. But that doesn't diminish the impressiveness of their achievements, or the debt that we, who are fortunate to live the almost uniquely peaceful and comfortable and entertained lives that we mostly do now live, still owe to them.

(5)

I am now, as if regular readers of my recent stuff here need to be told, paying at least as much attention to the final game, which began this morning, in the England India test match cricket series as I am to such things What To Do About The Deficit. England are already 3-0 up, and are now looking to make it a 4-0 thrashing. This morning England, batting first, made another good start. But then it rained for the rest of the day.

Which meant that the radio commentators and their various guests had to talk amongst themselves, rather than commentate on the mostly non-existent action. And one of the things they talked about was the contrast between the general demeanour and attitude of the two teams, as illustrated by how they both warmed up at the start of the game. Compared to the quasi-military drill in perfectly matching attire that was the England warm-up, India looked, they said, like a rabble, and have done all series. The biggest recent change in how the Indians actually play, they all agreed, is that the Indian fast bowlers are now significantly slower than they were two or three years ago, and several inches fatter.

Why the contrast? Well, it seems that the top Indian cricketers now play too much cricket of the wrong kind – limited overs slogging basically, which encourages run-restricting rather than wicket-taking bowling, and careless, twist-or-bust batting. And they play not enough cricket of the right kind. Hence their arrival in England in a state combining lack of preparation with apparent exhaustion and general lack of fitness. But, you can't really blame them, said the commentators. The Indian Premier League now pays its players more in a month than cricketers of an earlier generation would ever see in their entire careers.

The reason I mention all this, apart from the fact that I personally find it all very interesting, is that, in among all this cricket chat, somebody said something very Samizdata-friendly that I thought I would pass on. Former England cricketer, now cricket journalist and pundit, Derek Pringle, threw in the following, concerning the impact of the Indian Premier League on the attitude and physical preparedness of the top Indian players:

The IPL has become a bit of a welfare state for them.

You might reckon it odd to compare the predicament of men who are being paid rather lavishly to do too much work, but of the wrong sort, with the very different circumstances of people who are being paid very little by comparison to do next to nothing, beyond go through the motions of looking for work without actually doing it. You might also want to ask whether limited overs slog-fests really are "wrong". After all, if that's the sort of cricket that people generally, and Indians in particular, will now pay most readily to watch, what is so wrong about it?

Good points both, but not the point I want to make now. What my point is about the above soundbite is that Derek Pringle was simply assuming, when he said it, that state welfare makes you fatter and lazier and less industrious than you otherwise might have been. Pringle, famously inclined to being a bit of a fatty himself, just knew that we all knew what he was getting at. It didn't have to be spelt out. Simply: state welfare rots the body and the mind and the soul. Anything else which, arguably, resembles state welfare in its financial impact upon the individuals concerned is likely to do similarly debilitating and demoralising things to those individuals also. If you are one of those eccentrics who still thinks otherwise, the burden of proof is entirely on you to explain your bizarre and contrarian opinions.

The argument that state welfare corrupts - physically, mentally and morally - is not, to put it mildly, new. When the modern British welfare state got under way after World War 2 this argument about the potential impact on its recipients of state money was already centuries old, and it was duly re-presented in opposition to the new welfare arrangements. But, the old argument was dismissed, with scorn, and also with, I believe, much genuine sincerity. These were the days, remember, when the masses of the British people were at a unique summit of mass moral excellence. (Thousands upon thousands of them used to turn up to watch county cricket, in other words the kind of cricket those cricket commentators are saying the Indian cricketers haven't been playing enough of.) Are you seriously saying, asked the welfare statists, that a bit of help when times are bad is going to turn these good people (good people who had just won the war, don't forget) into barbarians? Not, as Americans now say, going to happen. Yet, as a crude first approximation, this is what did happen, if not to them then to a horrifying proportion of their descendants.

And before any anti-immigration commenters pitch in, let me answer them with two questions and my two answers. Given the same welfare arrangements but no mass immigration, would there now be similar barbarism? I strongly believe so, even if maybe not on the same scale. Given the same mass immigration but no state welfare to speak of, would there now be similar barbarism? Much less, I think.

Realising that state welfare corrupts is one thing. Taking state welfare away from the millions of people whose entire lives are now organised around the assumption that state welfare will continue indefinitely is quite another, which is why this radical change of opinion has been somewhat subterranean. So far it has had little practical effect. But, as Derek Pringle's casual aside illustrates, this changed opinion is now well in place, and sooner or later this will surely have consequences.

(35)

These riots could be Cameron's Falklands War. That's what just occurred to me, as I was watching my television, as the arson and rioting spreads throughout London and beyond.

Some man on the telly - I don't know who or what he was - has just said, very uneloquently, that we are about to learn what David Cameron is made of. His decision concerning when to come home from his holiday (arguably he left it far too late), in Tuscany, will pale into insignificance beside the decisions that he will have to make in the course of the next few days.

Enoch Powell said something very similar of a previous Prime Minister, a great deal more memorably, at the time of that earlier war. You can read here what Powell then said, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page:

"The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the 'Iron Lady'. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the Right Hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made."

Nobody has ever made any such observation about David Cameron, or not in my hearing, but a similar examination of him is now about to occur.

It could actually be the making of the man. But then again, ...

Alas, this kind of thing is the Health of the State.

LATER:

Labour politicians and spokespersons are out in force, if only to make it clear that they too are against it all. Smart move. The trick in these situations is to blame your political opponents, but without seeming to blame your political opponents.

Kevin McGuire, a journalist close to the previous political regime, has just said something rather more memorable:

"If he comes back from holiday, and it makes no difference, what's the point of having a Prime Minister?"

In other words, if he makes no difference, we should have a different Prime Minister. As indeed we should. Nicely put.

(8)

August the 4th 1789...

The day when the serfs (the few serfs there actually were in France) were freed and the day that all the old taxes and feudal restrictions were abolished.

Yes I know that what went before this day was evil and what came after this day was evil - but the day itself was good.

The one good day of the French Revolution.

Although (before the pedants start to bash me) I know the repeals did not fit into exactly this 24 hour period.

But the 4th of August has become known for the pro liberty moves.

(11)

“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. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.”

- AJP Taylor, historian. The funny thing is, that AJP Taylor was a lifelong socialist and therefore, supported policies and ideas that led, directly and indirectly, to the destruction of some of the liberties he wrote about in this much-cited passage, on page one, from his classic, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).. Like many of his generation, he was naive about the Soviet Union, to put it kindly, although he did break with communism while remaining a lifelong member of the Labour Party. But as he would respond, much of the damage to British freedoms mentioned in this passage had been done by the calamity of the First World War and its aftermath. And piecemeal changes - starting in the late 19th Century and arguably hastened by the arrival of the mass franchise, made these liberties vulnerable. But are we being starry-eyed about Victorian-era liberties? Is he describing a myth or a reality? There's a question to stir up the commenters.

I see that Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media liked this quote too. I imagine it resonates with American readers quite as much as with a Brit.

(15)

As a new (slightly overweight) inhabitant of Neuilly-sur-Seine, I have got into the habit of walking the boundaries of this small suburb to the West of Paris [link in French]. The idea is to become familiar with the street names and neighbourhoods, and drop a few kilos in the process. At many of the main road junctions, rather nicely-built small brick houses can be found, looking like 19th century rural railway stationmasters cottages. They are in fact a vestige of one the French Revolution's greatest failures, and probably the only thing the collaborationist government of Le Maréchal did right.

August 1st, 1943 is the date when Pierre Laval's proposal to abolish internal customs tariffs in France came into effect. It was even done for a good reason: wartime hardship meant that the population of France was suffering enough trouble obtaining food at all without having to deal with a tax for crossing a city boundary.

One of the complaints that triggered the 1789 revolution was the practice of taxing the transport of goods within France. For nearly a decade, the "octroi" was eliminated, but restored by the Directorate in 1798. Several attempts were made to scrap the tax during the 19th century. At the turn of the 20th century, individual towns were allowed to scrap the tax, but many did not do so, due to the lack of an alternative source of revenue.

The Neuilly Octroi buildings have been preserved and in some cases have better (or worse) uses today. One of them is a shop selling newspapers and sandwiches. Another is the local office of a trade union syndicate, which I am guessing, is provided either free of charge or at a subsidized rate.

I like the fact that a reminder exists of a time when families would go out of town to buy such things as butter or jam, and smuggle it in baby prams to avoid the tax, less dramatic versions of Checkpoint Charlie. I have not checked, but Montmartre was outside the Paris octroi in the 19th century and as a result a lot of bars opened up offering the Parisian equivalent of "booze cruises." This in turn became the spot where artists looking for cheap alcohol - especially absinthe - would hang out. So the octroi may well have had a profound indirect effect on the artistic careers of Salvador Dalí, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.

Pierre Laval was shot for his crimes in 1945. Scrapping the octroi was not one of them.

(12)

There is a great piece up at Cricinfo in which Suresh Menon remembers cricket dramas past, and reflects on how memory plays tricks.

Particularly fascinating was this, about this match played at Old Trafford in 1936:

India's captain the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram (the only active cricketer to be knighted, we must remember, although it was not for services to cricket - he didn't serve cricket till he gave it up altogether as player, captain, selector and broadcaster) called his opening batsman Mushtaq Ali aside for last-minute instructions. Vizzy had been worried about the growing stature of Vijay Merchant, and instructed Mushtaq to run him out. Mushtaq told Merchant, they had a good laugh, and put on 203 for the first wicket.

What a selfish, self-important bastard, and what a great punishment. I'm guessing that the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram was totally bought and paid for by the British (hence the knighthood), and that when Mushtaq and Merchant disobeyed him they felt that they were also defying the very Empire itself. You can see from the scorecard that "Vizzy" batted at number nine, scoring a grand total of six runs, and did not bowl, even though seven other Indians did. Talk about a non-playing captain.

What a joy for cricket fans like me that India used cricket to defy Britain, rather than defying Britain by dumping cricket and taking up - I don't know - baseball, or something similar.

More Indian anti-Imperial defiance is reported here (my thanks to Antoine Clarke for the link). I think it's a sign of how strong the Indian presence in the world generally now is that people feel relaxed about taking the piss out of Indians, and out of the non-Indians who now grovel to Indians. We couldn't comfortably do that when Indians were nothing but the Starving Millions, and when, cricket-wise, they were mostly Ghandi clones who could only bowl slow and bat slow and play for draws.

I have been following the current England India cricket series with fascinated delight. This already feels like the best series here since 2005, which it will definitely be if the Indians come back hard, as is their recent habit, after their poor first test at Lord's. At Lord's, legendary Indian batsmen like V.V.S. Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar looked a bit like ancient monuments rather than current threats. Tendulkar's mere participation in the game turned its last day from a fine occasion into a great one, but his actual batting was a disappointment. Of the three surviving members of the Big Four (the now retired Saurav Ganguly being the other), only Rahul Dravid made his presence truly felt. But Tendulkar is not old, he was merely ill. And if he in particular does some great things in the later games, what a series this could be.

By the way, I have been getting it wrong about England being already ranked number two in the test match rankings. Now that I have actually consulted the relevant website, I see that England are only at three, behind South Africa (India being top). My apologies. But, England will go to at least two if they beat India in the current series, and they will indeed go top if they beat India by a clear two games. That last bit, I definitely got right.

Game two starts tomorrow.

(10)

A few years back, I proposed an alternative budget for the UK. IIRC, it involved cutting taxes by a quarter, spending by a third. Even assuming no increase in economic growth (that would boost sales tax revenue), this would have created a massive budget surplus that could have cut the UK national debt by over 10%.

I opposed default then for what I still think were good reasons: first, many private individuals and institutions bought bonds in good faith; but second, because the UK nearly had to surrender to Nazi Germany in 1940, and had refused to confront Hitler when war was still not necessary partly because of the consequences of a partial default on war bonds from the First World War. In essence, appeasement was the necessary policy of 1930s British governments because they could not expect to borrow so had to pay in gold and whatever the British public could be persuade/forced to raise (yes I know pacifism was big too, but the financial imperative meant that it was the only option).

Whether we take an interventionist view or not, the re-militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 was the moment when, without firing a shot, Hitler could have been stopped.

What does this have to with events in Europe and the USA today? In short, I think the financial situation is so dire, and the political solutions on offer so inadequate, that default is now the only credible outcome. I therefore conclude that it needs to happen very soon, rather than after wasting more resources on more "bail-outs."

We will just have to take our chances that no one decides to, invade the Falklands, or grab Gibraltar, or build nuclear weapons and give them to terrorists, or blow up US embassies. I explain why below.

The US debate on "raising the debt ceiling" misses an essential point. The credit ratings of many governments are on the brink of being downgraded unless there is an improvement in the debt/asset ratio or there is clear evidence of economic recovery without inflation. Neither of these outcomes is clearly at hand.

To increase the debt ceiling by any amount merely worsens the over-borrowing of the past two decades. If anything, the debt ceiling should be cut not raised. There are exactly four ways of doing this: default, print "money," cut spending or raise taxes.

As Barack Obama put it so eloquently during his US presidential election campaign: "raising taxes in a recession is stupid." Putting up rates will probably not raise revenue because the people and businesses that are driven to bankruptcy will more than offset any marginal increase in revenue.

Cuts is spending are almost impossible: contractual obligations have been made, any cuts to public sector pension payments will be challenged and, judges being so-to-retire-public-sector-persons, they might not interpret the law the way spending cutters would like. The sad truth is that the commitments cannot be met, but only a default will prove the legal way for governments to stop spending.

Printing "money," is actually the current strategy, and it looks OK, until inflation kicks in. When it takes a wheelbarrow of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread and cash registers have to count pounds by the hundred million, such a policy could lead to political instability and revolution.

I've outlined two problems with defaulting: bondholders are punished and in a real emergency, the government would not be able to raise money. There is a third problem, which is an opportunity: once a default has been called, the interest rates for government bonds have to go up, a lot.

This normally bad thing means that entire government programs will simply have to stop because the money to pay for it cannot be raised. It means that private borrowing becomes harder too, at least for those whose credit ratings are not good. But it also means people quickly have incentives to sort out their own over-borrowing and to start saving: those savings accounts offering 10% suddenly look quite attractive.

It is by cutting excessive debt and re-building deposits that the financial system can re-build itself.

I'm therefore praying for the most childish behaviour from the American politicians and for someone to say "No" in Europe to propping up the Greek welfare state.

(27)

I love David Thompson's ephemera postings, which he does every Friday. Buried in among the fun and games are often things with a bit of a message, in favour of Thompsonism and against horribleness.

So, today, for instance, there is a link to three lists, of top migrant destinations, top emigration countries, and top "migration corridors", migration corridors being country pairs, from and to. List one says how many people in each country were not born there, and the second list says how many people who were born there have now gone.

I have always believed that how people have been voting with their feet is one of the most potent judgements there can be at any particular moment in history, on the varying merits and demerits of different countries and different political and economic systems. The USSR bombarded the world with high decibel claims about the wonderfulness of itself and of its various national possessions, but could not explain why so many people wanted out, and so desperately, and so few in. How come the Berlin Wall only pointed in one particular direction? How come they were the ones who built it?

Contrariwise, the world's anti-Thompsonists of an earlier time cursed the hideous exploitation of the emerging sweatshop (then) economies of South East Asia, but could not explain why people would swim through shark-infested waters, in order to be hideously exploited.

Such numbers also register how welcoming or unwelcoming different countries are towards being "flooded" with incomers. The USA, of course, is the country that positively defines itself as the country of migrants. That the USA, now as always, is by far the top migrant destination, leaving the rest in a clump far behind, says it all about the continuing vitality of the USA as the go-to superpower of the world, still, despite all the blunders its rulers are now making and which the USA itself is so good at drawing everyone's attention to.

Russia and Saudi Arabia must also be doing something right, despite the stories you hear, and at least compared to the alternatives for those flooding in. Money plus labour shortages would be my guesses, in both cases.

The UK features in the top ten both for migration in and emigration out. That is a telling fact, is it not? India and Russia are also on both lists.

The biggest upheavals are surely the big numbers that pertain to countries with small populations. When you talk percentages, Australia looks to me positively USA-like in its eagerness to attract newcomers. That China, despite its colossal size and formidable recent economic vitality, is not on the top destination list is also quite telling, is it not?

These numbers are more than just ephemeral curiosities, I would say.

(8)

I like this, towards the end of a long comment from Michael Strong, on this piece by Clay Shirky:

Democracy is a fabulous way to prevent the most horrible errors such as the massive famines, death camps, and large-scale wars of aggression that are characteristic of totalitarian regimes, but one should no more imagine that democracy is a finely-tuned instrument for determining the public good than that a hack saw is suitable for brain surgery.

"Deliberative" democracy, i.e. the sort less like a hack saw, doesn't work beyond about 10,000 people, he says.

See also Amartya Sen, who also admires what the hack saw can do.

Being an American with a knowledge of history, Strong does not claim that democracy prevents civil war. But I would say that democracy does make civil war far less likely, provided certain other conditions are also met, like a relatively static political entity and not too much tribal voting (i.e. a willingness of at least some voters to vote this way or that way, depending).

In many ways (but not the most important ways), democracy is civil war. Which is precisely why it works as well as it does as a substitute for civil war. Whoever wins the democracy civil war would probably also have won the real thing, using not unrelated methods – bribes, threats, propaganda barrages, opinion polls, friendliness towards turnable enemies, treachery towards dependable friends, and so on and so forth. That being so, the losers take their defeat. Instead of contesting the result of the election by force (i.e. starting a real civil war) they wait for the next round.

Which, by the way, means that the reasonable certainty that there will be a next round is crucial to democracy's effectiveness. It is often said of Hitler that he was impeccably democratic. He was indeed democratically elected, but promptly cancelled all subsequent elections. At best, democratically speaking, he scores one out of two. Other political strong-arm men, who got power by old fashioned civil warlike methods, but who then left a democratic legacy, that is, they contrived (or at least permitted) the circumstances which would allow elections in the future, get denounced as "totally undemocratic", when they also score one out of two. And which election matters more, the last one, or the simple fact of the next one, when it comes to how safe and sound life would be right now?

None of which means that I love democracy, merely that I prefer it to civil war, famine, concentration camps etc.. Cue clichés about democracy being the worst system, except … More to the point, here's what looks like another quite good link to the sort of notions I and Michael Strong agree with.

One of the many reasons why I would like to live for more like the next two centuries, rather than the mere two decades which is my likely best shot, is that I would love to see what happens to democracy in the next little clutch of decades. Currently, it is just growing and growing in strength, for all of the above reasons. I'm not the only one who wants a quiet life, and will settle for a disappointing one if that's the price to be paid. But, will democracy last? Will it, for instance, attach itself to the emerging government of the world which I believe we are now witnessing in our time? If it does, will it then do anything to prevent global civil wars? If democracy fades, what might replace it?

When I say "democracy" please understand that by that I mean big noisy elections deranging regular television for weeks at a time, political parties, legislative assemblies of self-important bores, lying, cheating, thieving, grandstanding, moral self-aggrandisement and relentless disappointment for almost all concerned, bar only a tiny few particularly rapacious and particularly lucky winners. I do not mean that fatuous construct of political malcontents known as "real democracy", as in: everything the malcontent wants from democratically elected politicians, however far fetched, such as financial security for all (especially him), equality for all (ditto), openness of decision-making (by others rather than in the unlikely event that he is deciding anything of importance), environmental perfection, and immediate answers to his mad letters or emails to politicians, telling him that his mad arguments, no matter how numerous or how many CAPITAL LETTERS they may contain, have all triumphed.

Speaking of political malcontents, what I want is free markets in everything, a cheap internet connection, a cheap digital camera with a twiddly screen which takes perfect pictures with just the one (mega-mega-zoom when I want it) lens, and to stay comfortably alive for at least the next two centuries (see above). But, I never refer to these desires as "real democracy".

(1)

Christopher Hitchens - I hope he can fight his cancer as long as possible - has this crackerjack of a piece about Patrick Leigh Fermor, the soldier, explorer, journalist and raconteur who recently died at the age of 96:

"Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn't look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions. (He had also just finished, for a bet, translating P.G. Wodehouse's story The Great Sermon Handicap into classical Greek.) That other great classicist and rebel soldier T.E. Lawrence, pressed into the service of an imperial war, betrayed the Arabs he had been helping and ended his life as a twisted and cynical recluse. In the middle of a war that was total, Patrick Leigh Fermor fought a clean fight and kept faith with those whose cause he had adopted. To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one."

Marvellous stuff. I have one of Fermor's books on the shelf, as yet unread. I really look forward to dipping into it soon.

(13)

Yes Lawrence of Arabia is showing on Channel Five, now. I've been only half or less paying attention, but I heard this loud and clear:

"Money. It'll have to be sovereigns. They don't like paper."

Said by Lawrence to Allenby, on how to pay the Arabs to fight against the Turks.

He would agree, as would all our mutual friends here.

This is a point of view which is now spreading rather fast.

(27)

As part of a continuing series where yours truly tracks down particularly barmy comments on the Web that deserve to be protected for posterity:

"Jefferson was certainly a slave master, owning and inheriting as many as 250 at one time, although he professed to have great qualms about the morality of slavery. Thre is also the ongoing mystery of his relationship with one of his Octaroon slaves, Sally Hemmings and her children. She was by all accounts exceptionally attractive. I agree with Taki's supposition that life in antebellum Virginia must have been a particularly beautiful and wondrous epoch."

Written by someone called John Bidwell in response to an article by Taki that I link to below. I love that final sentence; at first, the paragraph might appear quite reasonable but the final sentence gives the lie to that. The slave-owning South was "particularly beautiful and wondrous". You know, a part of the world in which humans were bought and sold at auction, flogged, or worse, for trying to escape.

What the fuck is wrong with these people? What next: the slave-owning society of ancient Rome was "particularly beautiful and wondrous" unlike, say, the boring, materialist world of the liberal West?

Here is my comment the other day, on the US Civil War, prompted by a Taki article.

(6)

David Friedman, the academic, libertarian and enthusiast for things such as Medieval cooking, has a nice post up about the way in which parts of the left try to claim that Adam Smith said things that support their ideas, such as progressive tax. Friedman shows what a misleading thing this is to say. I suppose it can be seen as a sort of backhanded compliment that socialists, or Big Government types generally, should feel a need to try and claim that Smith was "one of them", despite his being renowned for support for free trade and limited government.

Here is something I wrote by way of a critique of an article on Smith in the American Conservative; here is also something I wrote a while back on some books on the great man, such as by James Buchan and PJ O'Rourke.

(20)

Like a lot of libertarians who had to put up with abuse from his more "purist" minded fellows for my support for the overthrow of Saddam's regime in Iraq, I had second, third and even fourth thoughts about the whole venture. And my views on the situation are still not really settled eight years on from the start of full combat operations in 2003, and so I am still trying to reach a conclusion.

With that sort of thought in mind, a few days ago I got hold of Douglas Feith's War and Decision, a book by a former senior Bush administration policy man at the very centre of things. Feith's book contains absolute dynamite: links between Saddam's regime and various terrorist groups (established as a clear fact) including al-Quaeda, and also a fair, but in its way devastating critique of the politicking, deviousness and general uselessness of the CIA. And after reading this book it occurs to me, rather like it did to writers such as Mark Steyn, that the CIA had become riddled with bureaucratic do-nothingism around the time of 9/11. There is a very good case for shutting the CIA down and rethinking how to handle such issues from a clean sheet of paper.

The book is also fatal to the reputation and judgement of Colin Powell, former Secretary of State. It also rehabilitates that of Donald Rumsfeld in certain respects, while not sparing criticism where it is due. And the book certainly does fess up to the administration's failure to predict the scale of the insurgency, although Feith argues that one major error - encouraged by the CIA and the likes of Paul Bremer - was not moving fast enough to get Iraqis, both "external" and internal, into the government of Iraq post-invasion. By acting as an "occupier", Feith says, the US gave opponents valuable propaganda. He's got a good a point: consider that one of the smart moves by Churchill et al in 1944 was to get the Free French involved in the invasion of Normandy and subsequent entry into Paris. Getting the Iraqis to have "ownership" of the liberation of that tormented country would have been a smart move. It never really happened. And part of the reason for that was an almost pathological distrust of expat Iraqis by Powell, the CIA and other anti-neocons. This is fascinating stuff I had not really been aware of before. Another big error is over the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction: Feith argues that Bush and others gave needless ammuntion to fairweather hawks by arguing that Saddam had large stockpiles of X or Y; rather, the problem was Saddam's capacity and clearly proven willingness to produce such weapons and use them that was the core of the problem. The 1990s-era sanctions were fast eroding by the turn of the last century; given a few years, it is highly likely that Saddam would be able to re-start his WMD programmes and use such weapons to deter any regime from trying to make him behave, in much the same way that Iran is now dangerously close to the point where it can support terror groups with impunity.

Through it all, the central issues that remains - in terms of foreign policy and defence - is George W Bush's "pre-emption" policy. And it is well to remember that as far as Feith and other wonks were concerned, this was not about spreading democracy at "the point of a gun", or about some dastardly neocon project to completely reshape the Islamic world. Rather, it was about a more specific objective, and one which, in my view, is fully consistent with the libertarian principle that military force in self defence is justified. That objective is to throw jihadists and their state sponsors off-balance: by destroying their bases, cutting off funds, killing key operatives, etc. The more that jihadists have to hide, to run, and spend time playing defence, the less time they have to cause mischief.

It is pretty clear from the letters and information presented by Feith that terrorist groups were using Iraq as a haven, and with Saddam's active blessing. It also nails the idea that because Saddam's regime was, in some ways, a "secular" one, that meant he had no real incentive to support islamic terror against the West. As Feith says, this argument has been greatly overdone: there is plenty of reason to suppose that tactical, for-convenience-sake alliances between "secular" and religious groups can be as lethal as those between religious states and religious groups.

Anyway, having read the book, I can strongly recommend it. I leave with this quote, on page 523:

“But the largest benefit of success is avoiding the horrific costs of failure. Preventing calamities is one of the most important and least appreciated functions of government. When an evil is averted – perhaps as a result of insight, intensive effort and administrative skill – the result is that nothing happens. It is easy, after the fact, for critics to ignore or deprecate the accomplishment. Political opponents may scoff at the effort as unnecessary, citing the absence of disaster as proof that the problem could not have been very serious to begin with. After the Cold War, some commentators argued that the West’s victory was no big deal because the Soviet Union’s demise proved that the communist empire wasn’t much of a power after all. Likewise, because the United States has not suffered a large-scale terrorist attack since 9/11, some commentators have belittled the challenge of jihadist terrorism as overblown and ridiculed the description of it as “war”. And since Saddam has been overthrown, there are critics who speak dismissively of the danger he posed.”

(17)

Gitta Sereny, the dark chronicler of Nazi Germany, spent many hours in conversation and correspondence with Albert Speer, the organisational genius of that regime. From this sprang her study of immorality, dishonour and ambiguous redemption, "Albert Speer: His battle with truth". Gitta Sereny's mother was also the wife of Von Mises from 1938. This connection sprang to life when Abert Speer sent her a clipping in 1977. The clipping was an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the theories of Von Mises.

Manfred von Poser recalled that Speer had two strong beliefs: a maximum of individual initiative at the expense of state power and a European Community. Whilst the latter may have been expressed in some dark, racialist principle, the former was stillborn within Speer's thoughts and actions. It is pointless to ask if Speer was a libertarian: since these are principles arrived at through understanding freedom in all its forms, not the inchoate grasping of a malformed mind that understands the damage caused by the state he supported and the evil that it perpetrated.

Yet, Speer understood the failures of the state in some shape and form. He understood its inability to meet its requirements, its responsibilities and the monstrous outcomes of state planning. Not at the beginning of his career within the National Socialist movement, but a gradual awareness as his own responsibilities grew. Speer's experiences show that a comprehension of state failure is insufficient without a moral framework. It is observing freedom through the wrong end of the telescope. Speer's alternative did not champion individual liberty at the beginning. It was an instrument for achieving better outcomes and efficiencies. Perhaps during his process of coming to terms with what he did, Speer finally knew that freedom is a moral value. We will never know.

(77)

Incoming from Michael Jennings, which started with the link to this Fukushima update piece in The Register (subtitled "Still nothing to get in a flap about") which at the end says this:

Reaction to our earlier piece praising the actually rather brilliant response of the Fukushima reactors and their operators in the quake's wake has shown that hoary myths and legends surrounding Chernobyl persist, and that one will still, even after all this time, generally be pilloried for suggesting that Chernobyl – far and away the worst nuclear incident ever which didn't involve an atomic bomb – was genuinely not that serious.

We here at the Reg attended the launch of this rather excellent recent book, Flat Earth News, in which veteran Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies dared to include the Chernobyl myths of thousands dead (actually the established figure is 56) alongside other great, baseless modern scares like the Millennium Bug.

Davies said that nothing else he has ever done in his life earned him as much flak as that.

Michael says:

I think most people are unfamiliar with the story of what actually happened at Chernobyl in 1985, beyond "There was a meltdown". Basically, pretty much every possible fuckup happened one after another (from reactor design, to reactor management, to employee supervision, to safety procedures (there weren't any, quite seriously) to after the fact disaster recovery. This of course had little to do with problems with nuclear power and quite a bit to do with problems of the Soviet Union. Not that I need to tell you this.

But I do need to pass it on.

(57)

Freedom/liberty is defined in different ways. Some people talk of "free will" of agency, of the ability (sometimes and to some extent) to choose. Of how human beings are just that (beings) not flesh robots whose actions are either determined by a process of causes and effects going back to the start of the universe or are a matter of random chance (neither determinism or random chance being agency - being human choice).

This is not the place to debate the existence of the "I" (the reasoning, self aware, self) and to argue that agency is not an "illusion" (although if it is a illusion who is having the illusion - humans being simply being flesh robots), but I will say that if humans are not "beings" (not agents) then freedom is of no moral importance. No more than it is of moral importance whether water is allowed to "run free" or constrained behind a dam. But then, of course, if there is no agency (no freedom of choice) then there is no morality anyway. A clockwork mouse does not have moral responsibility - and neither would something that looked like a human being but was, in fact, not a "being" (an agent - a choosing "I") at all.

As for the position that it is "compatible" that a human might have no capacity what-so-ever to choose any of their actions (including lines of thought) and yet still be morally responsible for them - well it is not compatible, basic logic does not allow us to have our cake and eat it as well.

Others talk of freedom in terms of stuff - goods and services.

Such people may or may not accept that humans have the capacity (sometimes to some extent) to make real choices - but they hold that even if humans do have the ability to make choices this does not mean they should be allowed to.

People will make the wrong choices - they will do things make the world a worse place, even for themselves.

To some extent the political libertarian actually agrees with that - after all we do not believe that people should be allowed to make the choice to rob, rape or murder other people.

Or, rather, they should be allowed to make the choice - but not to act on it (aggression should be opposed), and they should be punished if they do act upon it.

Some people have suggested that we be called "propertarians" (rather than libertarians) because of our opposition to chosen actions that aggress against the bodies and goods of people - to which my response is "if you want to call me a propertarian do so - I do not take it as a insult".

However, the political libertarian (such as myself) tends to deny that non-aggressive choices - choices that respect the bodies and goods of other people, tend to be "wrong" in general.

We hold that most people, most of the time are more likely to get things right than the "great and the good".

Not just "were you ten times and wise you would not have the right to impose your plans upon myself and others", but also "even if you were ten times as wise you would still muck it all up". Indeed it would be claimed that the clever elite are not "wise" at all - for if they were "wise" (rather than just clever) they would understand that trying to "plan society" always ends badly.

In part at this point we move from philosophy to political economy - economics...

The statist claims two things, that giving the state (under the control of the "correct people" of course) control of resources (money) and people (via regulations) will make life more prosperous - and that this prosperity is "true freedom".

In terms of economics this is just flat wrong. To prove their case (the case that collective control will produce more prosperity than allowing people to get on with things as best they can) will produce higher material living standards the statists would have to refute the most basic laws of political economy as outlined by such thinkers as Bastiat or Ludwig Von Mises. And normally the statists have not even opened their works - let alone come up with any refutation of their reasoning.

In fact more statism tends to produce less prosperity than would otherwise have been the case.The grand process of finding better ways (technologically better or organizationally better) of producing goods and services may continue for some time - but less well than it would have gone without the "help" of the state.

Also even if people were better fed (and so on) with increasing statism - this would not be freedom.

A well fed slave is not a free man (although he has the capacity for freedom - as the Stoics noted) - and a free man who is starving to death is still a free man

In short "you are wrong and it would not matter if you were right".

More statism does not produce more prosperity, it produces less prosperity than would otherwise have been the case. And even if the opposite was true this would not be freedom - goods and services (even "happiness" - which may have very little to do with goods and services anyway) is not freedom. The supporter of "positive freedom" (in the sense of goods and services - not in the older sense of the control the passions by our reason) is caught in a category mistake.

Having given some indication that freedom is possible (i.e. that human beings are a different sort of thing from a clockwork mouse) and that the rise of the state is a "bad thing", as it can not achieve its objective of making people better off, in the long term, than would otherwise have been the case (indeed that it makes people worse off than they otherwise would have been) and that material prosperity is not "freedom" anyway... I had better outline the actual historical events:

The key historical events in the decline of freedom in Britain - the rise of the state.

A word of warning - the reader may well note an bias towards English matters in what follows (indeed a confusion of Britain and England) this is true. I will mention other places from time to time, but my prime area of historical interest, in relation to this island or islands, is England.

Also I am not going to consider ancient history.

Perhaps the person in a hunter gatherer band was more free than someone today, or perhaps the leader of the band horribly persecuted weaker members (I do not know - I would guess it varied).

Perhaps fields in the bronze age were worked by slaves at the mercy of their lords, or perhaps they were not (again I do not know - although I rather doubt it).

Perhaps with the collapse of the Roman Empire (and its vast taxation) in the 5th century AD there was a period of great freedom for farmers in some parts of the island of Britain (at least before the Germanic warbands reached them), or perhaps there was not. Again I do not know.

Basically I am going to deal with recent centuries - and leave the ancient past to people who know something about it.

First it should be noted that is some ways freedom has not declined.

For example acts of sodomy were punished for centuries and since the 1960s they have not been punished - this is advance for freedom. Whatever one may think of sodomy in moral terms - it should not be a matter for the criminal law.

Also, at least since the Norman Conquest, women were denied their property rights upon marriage - up till the late 19th century. And marriage itself (whilst in Christian theory a free choice) was often decided upon by the parent or guardian.

Also in Ireland in the 18th century (a century that was perhaps the golden age of freedom in England) Roman Catholics had very little property rights (till the late 18th century) and both they and Protestant Dissenters (the latter group often ignored by historians and others) were persecuted in other ways also. The economy of Ireland was so distorted by the "Penal Laws" that even after they were repealed Ireland was left (mostly) a land of peasant plots, a "catastrophe waiting to happen", and it did happen - in the horror of the 1840s.

Indeed religious freedom was not fully established in these islands till the 19th century. Although I am not one to agree that there was widespread religious persecution in England in the 18th century (although there was intense fear and distrust of Roman Catholics - partly for political reasons, the claims of the Pope and the rivalry between England and Catholic France and Spain) - sorry but Dissenters not being allowed to take degrees from Oxford and Cambridge does not rank as "persecution".

Regulations are hard to measure.

Which regulations should be ranked as important (in regards to reducing freedom) and which less important?

With the size of the state (the proportion of civil society it takes) things are hardly easy (for example virtually every writer assumed that taxes in Ireland in the 18th century were lower than in Britain - till Edmund Burke pointed out that as proportion of economic output they were much higher in Ireland than in Britain).

Also many of the (essentially 16th century Tudor) regulations that existed in 18th century England were not enforced (there was not formal civil service structure to deal with such matters) indeed they had never been fully enforced - certainly not in northern England (where such things as complex economic regulations passed under Elizabeth the first were basically a dead letter in places like Lancashire).

However, it is the case that many of these regulations (restricting not just freedom of trade, but even freedom of movement) were not formally repealed till the early 19th century (this is the argument against considering the 18th century the golden age of liberty - even in England).

Nevertheless, it tends to be the case that as the state increases as a proportion of civil society (as government spending goes up faster than economic growth) so regulations also tend to increase. And as the state declines as a proportion of civil society - so regulations tend to decrease.

For example, the deregulation of the early 19th century happened at a time when the state was declining in relative size (in relation to civil society) with the end of the French wars.

And the "set the people free" deregulation under the Churchill and Eden in the early 1950s happened also at a time when the state was declining as a proportion of civil society.

In any case this is the judgement must be made - and I am going to now concentrate on government spending and taxation, not regulations.

At the start of the 19th century taxation was very high by historical standards - not as high as it now, or (perhaps) as high as it was during the last period of the Roman Empire, but still very high.

Perhaps as high as a quarter of all of economic activity went to the state at the start of the 19th century. One reason who people were so eager to leave for the United States (not just from Ireland, but from England, Scotland and Wales also) where after Jefferson's reforms there were no internal Federal taxes at all - i.e. America was the land where the income tax collector and the excise (taxes on internal goods not just imports) man were unknown.

This high taxation was for three reasons:

Firstly the very high cost of the French wars of the early 1800's is the first (and obvious reason), Britain was fighting for its life (just as England had done against Philip II of Spain and Britain was to do against Germany in the 20th century) so no expense could be spared.

But there were two other reasons...

The policy of financing wars by vast borrowing (rather than just by taxation) that had been followed for a century. Those people (including historians) who boast that the Bank of England (created in 1694) allowed England to finance its wars are essentially talking out of their backsides.

The Bank of England financed nothing - it was just a way of borrowing money, and the people you borrow money from have to be paid back one can stress how the Bank of England meant lower interest rates - but really this misses the point.

The point is that wars cost money (lots of money) England was a richer country than France (per person) because it was (already) a more free country (see above for the economics of that) so it was able to finance more military spending (per person) than France was. Thus England was normally able to win its wars with France - even though England was greatly outnumbered.... but only at a terrible cost.

By the late 18th century half of all government spending went simply on servicing the National Debt - and this was still true in the 1820s.

For every Pound raised in taxation ten shillings just vanished into what William Cobbett called "The Thing" (the money dealers of the City of London and their political friends). This led to endless taxes - as was noted in Scotland after Union with England in 1707. Taxes on the poor had been almost unknown in Scotland, taxes were for well off people - the taxes on the well off continued, but after unification the poor got taxed as well. Union may have been unavoidable (due to Scotland bankrupting itself with the insane scheme to set up a colony in the Americas) but anyone who says the poor in Scotland were not hit by it is wrong. And the burden of excise taxes and so on did not go away - more imposts and duties came over time.

But there was a also a third reason for the very high level of taxation at the start of the 19th century - less important than the first two, but still interesting.

Welfare...

Contrary to certain BBC historians (Michael Woods) government poor taxes (rates - as opposed to charity) were not the invention of the 1834 Act (in fact this Act was a desperate effort to reduce the poor rate, not to introduce it). In fact they go back to Acts under the Tudors in the 16th century.

However, in the 18th century the burden of the Poor Rate (although often complained about) was not vast, if someone in the parish really could not work (very young, very old, hopelessly crippled) the Justices of the Peace had the legal task of making sure that they did not starve to death (in Scotland and Ireland the law was different than it was in England and Wales) and they had the power to levy a local tax to get them the money to prevent this happening. If someone could work but did not - then the J.P.s could take action against them (if they were a burden on the parish) a punishment or a threat of being sent to a workhouse (not an invention of the Act of 1834 - it existed in the Act of 1723) normally inspired the able bodied poor to find work (in Ireland they most likely would not be punished for having no work - but the local taxpayer would not be feeding them either).

However, in 1782 a Act of Parliament was passed that might have come from the brain of Gordon Brown - it allowed the magistrates to levy a poor rate to subsidize the wages of those people who were actually in work.

Starting in the village of Speenhamland in 1795 (under the pressure of the French wars) this system spread like a plague in England and south Wales.

Of course people in work liked having their wages "topped up" (as it were), the ratepayers did not like it (at least most of them did not - see later) but the magistrates were unelected so there was not much they could to about it.

The largest farmers (with a lot of hired labour) might get by with this system (the Parish was basically paying a lot of their wage bill), but small farmers (who had few hired hands, other than their own family) faced a heavy burden.

And it was a burden that got worse.

In the 18th century when peace came so the bills for govenrment spending got less - and so it proved after the end of the French wars in 1815, but the bills for the Poor Law did not get less.

At first it was thought to be the deflation (the return to sound money after the fiat money inflation of the French wars) - but the burden carried on into the 1820s and 1830s.

Hence the Poor Law Reform (Workhouse) Act of 1834. No more would the able bodied be paid not to work - or have their wages topped up.

True those who were judged to be incapable of work would still be paid (and it is often forgotten that there were twice as many people on "out relief" as in Workhouses - even under the new system), but if you were capable of work and presented yourself as a burden on the parish - into the Workhouse with you.

For all the bad reputation of this Act it was a clear success in rural areas of England and Wales - people who had insisted they could not possibly manage without tax money suddenly found they could when told "so you are able bodied and can not manage your own life - well is it the Workhouse for you then". The Poor Rate fell - and fell dramatically over time. And yet the poor were NOT starving to death - in fact the mid 19th century is a time of dramatic increases in real wages, although there were setbacks (the coming of the Irish in the 1840s, the war of the 1850s, and the effects of American Civil War in the early 1860s) in spite of all these setbacks wages were dramatically higher in 1870 than they had been in 1834.

The story in the big cities is more mixed - few people actually had their wages topped up when they were in work (because, contrary to the myth, factory work was better paid than farm work), but the old Poor Law was useful during bad period for trade (when there were fewer factory jobs to be had). Under the New Poor Law for those capable of work it was the Workhouse or (perhaps) nothing so there were riots and so on. Partly motivated by one of the Jeremy Bentham elements of the Act - they belief that people could be taken to the Workhouses or kept their against their will (to a utilitarian of Bentham's type "happiness" not freedom was what was important - and he believed that even forced work made people "happy").

It should also be noted that for the first few years the Poor Rate in the northern industrial cities actually went up under the new system - hardly what was intended.

But was any of it needed anyway?

Scotland was a poorer country than England - the soil was not so good, wages were lower, the country was more damaged by civil strife (such as the revolt of 1745) and economic collapse (it is often forgotten that the "Highland Clearances" were motivated by landowners facing bankruptcy - great landowners in England did not fact that in the early 19th century). Yet most of Scotland managed to get by without a compulsory Poor Rate - right till the Act of 1845 (by the way Scotland learned by the English mistake - people might complain about the Workhouses, but they were their strictly by their own free will, their own choice).

Even in Glasgow (during the darkest days of French wars and the deflation after them) the Rev. Chalmers managed to look after the poor with voluntary donations alone. And even Chalmers' worse enemies (and he had many - for religious and other reasons) did not claim that people were starving to death.

Perhaps the English "voluntarists" (such as those associated with the Leeds Mercury newspaper) could have done such a job in England - a richer country anyway. Without any need for the state.

After all government has no money of its own - just resources it takes. The Scottish example casts doubt on whether people really need the threat of government punishment to pay money to avoid other people starving to death on the streets of their town.

However the fact remains that neither the 1834 Act in England and Wales or the 1845 Act in Scotland led to any massive burden in Poor Rate (they were designed not to - it is possible to do that). And the locally elected Board of Guardians in England and Wales (elected by the ratepayers - not by those who got the welfare money as is partly the case with modern governments) neither allowed people to starve to death on the streets (more than happens in any time or place anyway - there will always be a few people who slip though any net) nor made living on welfare a comfortable "life style choice" (no sane person would want to live in a 19th century Workhouse).

As for Ireland...

A Poor Law was introduced there after unification with Britain. It was a failure - an utter failure.

Almost one third of the entire population of Ireland either died or left the country in the 1840s - a horror that most British people seem unable to grasp (then as well as now).

I do not know if things would have been much better even without government poor relief - but it did concentrate the poor together (for example on the "roads to nowhere" the public works projects the British government financed in Ireland) and it was sickness (not starvation) that tended to kill people. However, the basic structure of the Irish economy was a mess - it was not useless peasant plots in all parts of Ireland, but it was in most of Ireland. And that was a economic system that could only end one way - in horror.

And it was a structure the Penal Laws had created in Ireland.

The principle of taxes to fund poor relief in England and Wales (although not in Ireland and Scotland), as we have seen, goes back centuries. But that does not mean an out of control Welfare State as we have today.

And it is worth remembering what the causal words "out of control" actually mean. To give some sense of proportion...

In 1904 there was a terrible panic over a vast increase in the number of people dependent on the state - eight hundred thousand people were on poor relief in England and Wales (250,000 in workhouses). There is a trade recession (perhaps partly due to the costs of the Boer war, the costs of war normally being seen after it is over, although the human costs alone were about one hundred thousand lives).

Terrible - it led to (or was used as excuse for) demands that a Royal Commission be set up on the Poor Law (the Majority Report was bad enough, but it was demented "Minority Report" that the Liberal party government decided to follow). But look how small a percentage of the population it was - about two per cent of the people were dependent on government support even in a supposed time of crises.

Today well over 40% of total income is from state benefits.

Not those working for the government (which is also a vast amount of money), but just benefits.

In the United States (in the "Age of Obama") it has reached a third of all income - here it is heading for half of all income (again even excluding the people who actually work for the governmental. Cloward and Piven must be pleased (well Piven is pleased - I believe her husband is uncomfortably warm at the moment).

And people wonder why my writings seem like a suicide note (and I do not deny that they do) why they basically boil down to "we are DOOMED (TM).

Think of the Roman Empire - but not with just the city of Rome (and a few other cities) with a large mob dependent on govenrment handouts, but rather about half the population of the entire Empire dependent on government benefits.

That would not have taken centuries to "decline and fall" it would have fallen within a few years.

Yes technology has changed - but the laws of mathematics have not changed.

This is why fundamental Welfare State reform (what Americans call Entitlement Program reform) is not optional - or rather there are two options, reform or die.

This growth was not natural - the principle of government Poor Relief existed for centuries without it.

There were not dramatically more people dependent on it in 1702 then there had been in 1602, there were a lot more people dependent upon it in 1802 (and still more a few years later), but this was dramatically pushed back after 1834 - and by the early 1900s even 2% of the population (remember this includes the old) on welfare was considered a crises.

So what caused the growth?

The first cause was the "Minority Report" mentioned above - basically a bunch of Fabian Socialists (plus useful idiots) produced a let-us-copy-Germany-but-with-a-few-extra-things-added-on report and Lloyd-George and co (including a young and sadly misinformed Winston Churchill) said "fair enough". So we have old age pensions, health "insurance", and unemployment pay (this was one even Bismark had not introduced in Germany - think about it, it is payment for not working). All with the bland assurance that none of these government benefits would undermine self help and mutual aid - such as the "Friendly Societies" that covered 80% (and rising) of industrial workers in 1911. Of course they start to go into decline almost at once - just as the Fabians (and so on) intended.

Secondly this was all extended in the 1920s and 1930s (largely by Neville Chamberlain) when such things as forcing local councils to provide council houses (to make up for a shortage of housing for rent - caused by the government's own World War One rent control measures).

Thirdly there is the formal Welfare State itself in the 1940s.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 (to which, in the cabinet, only Sir Kinsley Wood and Winston Churchill expressed any doubts) and then the extreme interpretation of the report made by the Labour Atlee government after they came to power in 1945.

Since that time the Welfare State has grown and grown (under governments of both major political parties) and many reorganizations of it parts of it (such as the National Health Service, and benefits) have been made. However, they have all accepted its fundamental principles - so they have not restrained (let alone reversed) its growth.

More on size and principles...

The most obvious measure of state control is the ownership of industry (the "means of production") the old style socialist dream (before they were converted to indirect control by government regulation and unions and community activist groups - what used to be called, in the days of the Empire and then of Hitler, the "German form of socialism").

At its hight (in about 1951) the British government owned about 20% (or a bit less) of the economy (due to old nationalizations such as the telephone industry, and the orgy of nationalizations under the Atlee government after World War II), but almost at once this dream started to fall apart.

Not just because of the few denationalizations of the Conservatives after 1951 - but also because the nationalized industries themsleves went into decline.

The railways lost money hand over fist - they were then dramatically cut back and lost even more money (cut "feeder lines" and find out what the word "feeder" meant). It was the same with steel and coal - Labour governments closed more coal mines than Mrs Thatcher did.

By the time Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister nationalized industries were about half the share of the economy they had been - and the lady (at leastO) cut it half again.

Direct state ownership has been a failure (a farcical failure) whereever in the world it has been tried, so socialists (in such places as Britain and especially the United States) are turning to the "German form of socialism" (the system mentioned above - the system of "War Socialism" during World War One, and under Adolf Hitler in the 1930s) of indirect control by the provision of easy credit money (for those who fit it), vast webs of regulations and control by activist groups. In Germany itself (partly due to a stronger tradition of family owned business enterprises and partly because of a caution drawn from history) the "German form of socialism" is actually less of a problem (even though their are trade union representatives on Boards of Directors and so on - the whole context is very different).

The other main threat to modern society is (as mentioned above) government spending.

The overall size of British government (local and national) as proportion of civil society must likely reached its low point in about 1870 - at government spending at less than 10% of national income (it is about 50% now). However, national government spending reached its low point in 1874 (the low point for income tax - most excise taxes and import duties being abolished long before).

It was in 1870 that the Forster Act was passed allowing (but not forcing) local communities to set up a School Board and levy Poor Rate - my own home town of Kettering Northamptonshire did not do this (till forced to after the Act of 1891) so the low point for statism here (unless one wishes to speculate about what things were like under the Anglo Saxons or whatever) would have been 1874 (not 1870).

However, this is to miss a vital factor - principles.

Certain principles were accepted long before 1870 that made the future growth of government much more likely.

For example remember that there were a whole web of vile economic restrictions passed by the Tudors (they not only restricted freedom of trade and freedom of movement - but a final demented Act under Elizabeth even tried to compel every ordinary person to do the same job as their parent, in a sort of throw back to the legislation of the late Roman Empire) - but that I suggested we not be obsessed with them because England lacked an administrative structure (a complex Civil Service) that could really administer them?

Think what Tudor ministers (such as Thomas Cromwell - with his unrealized dream of great formal department of state, rather like Jeremy Bentham's 13 departments of state covering every aspect of human life) would have done with a structure based on the report that Charles Trevelyan and Strafford Northcote produced for a well meaning Gladstone after 1853 (you do not have to think very hard look around you, this is what men like Jeremy Bentham would have created).

This led to the Civil Service Commission of 1855 and the system by competitive examination (perhaps the worse possible system) introduced in 1870. No longer would government work be looked upon a perk for knowing a minister (or whatever) something to be done for a year or so (or whatever) or, at the lower levels, just clerking that one did because no other job was available at the moment. Now it would be a "profession" and people would devote their entire lives to this "public service" seeking the details of other people's lives (for there own good of course). Hardly what Gladstone intended - but "the man in Whitehall knows best".

This was a system rather like that of Mandarin dominated China - which is where we get the nickname for senior civil servant "Mandarin" from. Intellectuals as far back as the late 18th century (Voltaire springs to mind) had suggested such a system for the West - forgetting the older wisdom of such thinkers as Montesquieu that the centralized and state dominated society of China was not the "most perfect in the world" (Voltaire), but rather something to avoid.

But this was not the only bad principle to be accepted in 19th century Britain.

The principle of a govenrment police (which would have horrified most 18th century Englishmen, who even thought the Bow Street runners smacked of France or some German "police state" - oh yes the term was in German thought at the time and included what we would call a "welfare state", see F.A. Hayek's "Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty", although the size of most German states in the 18th century made such dreams utterly impractical, Bismark was to alter that).

In Britain Sir Robert Peel introduced the London police in 1829.

And by 1856 every county in England and Wales (whether it wanted to or not) had to have its own police force.

That is a different world from 18th century England. Although the police were polite and deferential at first - and unarmed (where as the British people remained an armed people till the First World War - a "little" thing that has slipped down the memory hole).

In a free society (as Jefferson never tired of pointing out) the main body of domestic force lies with the people, in an unfree society in lies with the government. Britain slipped from one state of affairs to the other with so little fuss that most people did not even notice.

As late as 1911 it was considered normal for unarmed police (in London) chasing armed criminals, to ask for the help of armed ordinary people who happened to be walking by.

Just think about that for a little while

A false interpretation of such things as the French Revolution (presented as liberty going "too far", rather than as Edmund Burke tried to explain, the increase of statism and tyranny) had prepared British opinion for an ever stronger state - so when such things as the gun control Acts came along there was little protest.

Just as their had been little protest about the Act of 1856 - on the contrary people of property thought that it would be a "good thing" they would no longer have to worry about protecting their own property and protecting other people, the state would do it all for them (in their hearts they were already half slaves).

Other principles...

The basic idea that the people must be counted, and measured whether they want to be or not (rejected by supporters of liberty - such as the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong in the 1960s "population figures - what would we want them for") was conceded by the Census of 1801 (a return to the principles of the Roman Empire and the Doomsday Book). According to Walter Bagehot (third editor of Economist magazine and author of the vile "classic" the "English Constitution" of 1867 with its demands that "everything that it is safe to concede should be conceded" - referring to any demands for statism) this was no reduction of liberty only an "old women" objected to it, according to him (I like to think he was lying - as J.S. Mill lied in claiming that no one opposed the Labour Theory of Value of his father and David Ricardo).

No doubt only an "old women" objected to the Births, Marriages and Deaths (Registration) Act of 1835 either.

Good person this "old women" Churchill (in his young statist period) was still attacking her in the early 1900s - only this "old women" thought the new government welfare schemes and regulations were a threat to liberty.

Clearly the "old women" was Miss Marple - but I must get on.

As part of the Public Health Act of 1848, Edwin Chadwick slipped in a national Public Health Board - (straight out of the dreams of his master Jeremy Bentham) which would plan such things on a national scale. True it was abolished in 1858 - but, of course, it came back with a vengeance in the 20th century.

But where did even local statism come from?

It came from the Act of 1835 - what the Duke of Wellington called an Act for creating a little Jacobin Republic in every major town and city in England and Wales.

Certainly it was not sold as increasing statism - on the contrary the promoters of the Act (such as those in Manchester) claimed that having elected councils (rather than corrupt closed Tory Corporations - only one was left by the Act, the City of London "the square mile") would lead to lower local taxes.

Even when taxes went up (not down) it was a temporary thing and taxes would come down soon - we are still waiting.

However, this is not entirely the fault of local politicians ("Paul - you are covering your backside" perhaps) as a weird principle was introduced in England and Wales.

Logically "local government" means (if it means anything) that local people (either directly or via elected representatives) get to decide what (if anything) to spend tax money on.

However, in 1875 the great "reformer" Disraeli got together most of the things that local councils could do (if they wished to - under about 40 previous Acts of Parliament) and made most of these things compulsory.

Local government (at least a logical understanding of the term) took a bit of a nock at that point - and things have got worse and worse since (especially with Neville Chamberlain's antics during the interwar period) as for post World War II - well it best not to think about this period (unless you wish to lose your will to live).

By the way, also in 1875, Disraeli also put trade unions above the Common Law (or tried to with his Act of Parliament of that year) not just legalizing obstruction ("picketing" - a military term), but trying to put unions beyond being sued. Certain flaws in his plans delayed the destruction of the Common Law in this area (and the destruction of basic British industries such as the railways) till after the Act of 1906 (which put the matter beyond doubt - at least till Norman Tebbit, under Mrs Thatcher, tried to do something about it all).

But it should be remembered that the principle of the subsidization of local activities by the state had already been conceded as long ago as 1833 - the first annual subsidy for education in England and Wales.

In Scotland there were several education Acts (going back more than century before this) however, the system remained under local control (indeed basically Church control), contrary to what is often taught it is only after the Act of 1872 that one can talk of a national system of education in Scotland.

In England it is even later - the Act of 1833 leads to other subsidy Acts, which in turn leads to the Act of 1870 (the Forster Act), which then leads on to the Act of 1876 (if you have a School Board education must be compulsory) and then to the Act of 1891 - you must have a School Board (till they were abolished in 1902) and education must be free and compulsory. In short game over - England is now Prussia (at least in this respect).

Just to show you how far things had fallen - look at the front page of the "Daily Telegraph" for January 1st 1900 (or was it 1901).

Britain must imitate an another country - we must copy them in all things. For this country is the new top nation.

No not the United States (that just had the largest economic output in the world - so, of course, it does not even get mentioned) no it is Imperial Germany we must copy in all things.

Well the British upper classes had already started talking in a weird clipped way (no they did not speak like that in the 18th century) as if they were Frederick the Great and his Junkers. So I suppose the rest was natural enough - if one is barking mad.

Think - what would have been the reaction to a British publication in the 18th century that had seriously argued (not as a satire) that "we must copy the French in all things - they are better us, they are scientific, they are the wave of the future......."

Exactly.

Under the chest thumping patriotism of the start of the 20th century - the leadership in Britain (Conservative as well as radical) had lost all belief in the principles of liberty. The ordinary people might still have been holding out (in part), but the leadership was rotten to the core.

Of course it was the same in the United States - where the self styled intellectual elite first fell in love with Imperial Germany (even when they urged war with Germany - they envied Germany as a rival, they did not hate the deeds of the German government) and then fell in love with the Soviet Union (just as so many of the British elite did).

Edward Heath going around licking the boots of the worst mass murderer of all time, Mao (responsible for the murder of some 70 million people), was following a "progressive" and "scientific" tradition that was a century old (at least).

All of a piece with his putting the nation into the EEC (now the EU), smashing up traditional counties (indeed traditional anything -from coinage to weights and measures), imposing wage and price controls, "scientific" planning, and so on.

"But Heath had a good war record" - being a soldier does not make you love the traditions of your country, and Heath's education (the elite parts of it anyway) might as well be summed up as "down with Britain, death to Britain, Britain is always wrong" and so on.

When P.E. Moore (the American tutor of the once American T.S. Eliot) visited Oxford in the 1930s he noted that, under the ultra civilized surface, the principles of liberty were dead (utterly dead) among the elite.

Of course F.A. Hayek noted the same thing at the same time - thus he dedicated the "Road to Serfdom" to "the socialists in all parties".

If one understands socialism in the indirect way that, for example, Adolph Hitler did - then nothing much has changed.

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Travel books, or adventure books chronicling experiences of living abroad, can be highly variable in literary or other qualities. I have my favourites: I loved that PJ O’Rourke classic, "Holidays in Hell"; I enjoyed the travel and memoirs of the great Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and another favourite of mine was Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race (describing his experience of sailing aboard a four-masted clipper-type ship). Being a bit of a yachtie, I also enjoyed the Robin Knox-Johnson account of his single-handed sailing trip around the world. And of course there are military memoirs where adventure and travel are co-mingled with armed expeditions. And a case in point is the writing of Norman Lewis.

I have not read much by Lewis, who died at the grand age of 95 after having spent a rich and varied career in places ranging from Brazil, Indonesia to Western Europe. And perhaps his most celebrated book is "Naples '44", describing his year in the southern Italian city in the immediate aftermath of the Allied landings in Italy. It is a superbly written account – Lewis has a wonderful eye for detail – and conveys the sheer bloody awfulness of life for ordinary Italians recovering from both the invasion and the Fascist regime that had been dislodged. For example, his descriptions of how little food the populace had, and what they had to eat, is sobering indeed to anyone reading moral-panic journalism about our supposed obesity crisis.

Of course, any account of southern Italy will include tales of the Mafia, and banditry, and the relentless amounts of corruption. What is particularly striking – and this is where the libertarian in me gets interested – is how the black market for stolen Allied goods, such as penicillin – thrived. Naturally, with so many goods suppressed or in short supply, criminal gangs and bent military personnel sought to make a market. This highlights how when markets are suppressed and where the fabric of civil society has been smashed by war, thugs can often fill the gap. In some cases, theft of supplies from the Allied forces got so bad that Lewis and his colleagues had to do something about it. Ordinary Italians who got caught pilfering supplies often received long jail sentences; well-connected businessmen (ie, Mafia guys), were acquitted when witnesses suddenly failed to show up.

Lewis became something of an expert on the Mafia and this region of Italy. He does not romanticise what he saw – he was too lacking in fake sentimentality for that. I have sometimes heard fellow free marketeers liken government to a sort of Mafia – tax is a kind of legalised thievery – but I am not sure it is an analogy I would push too far. I wonder how many of us would have wanted to live in Mafia-run Sicily or the neighbouring mainland, even with the tasty wine, olives and sunshine.

I intend to read a lot more of Lewis's output. His writing is wonderful.

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A literary work, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, a brief essay or a lengthy treatise, should be composed with constant attention to the underlying theme of the work, summarised if possible in one sentence. I have borne this precept in mind. The message that integrates the text of this biography is that one man, relying on reason, and daring to stand alone, can make a difference in the world.

- The last paragraph of the preface of Dare To Stand Alone, Bryan Niblett's biography of nineteenth century atheist, republican, birth control advocate and radical individualist, Charles Bradlaugh. Niblett spoke eloquently about Bradlaugh last night in London, at the most recent of Christian Michel's 6/20 evenings.

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It has been good to get out of the UK this Christmas. As one or two Samizdata regulars will know, I had a crap December as my dear mother, at the relatively young age of 69, died of cancer on 9 Dec. I just needed to get away and decompress and gather my thoughts.

Fortunately, I have wonderful relations via my wife who work with the US military in Southeast Germany, about 20 km from the Czech border. They are a great group of folk who know how to put on a good Christmas. Bavaria has been spectacular due to all the heavy snowfall. It has seen temperatures as low as -18 Degrees.

One of the places I visited was a museum all about a huge US army base near the small German town of Grafenwoehr. The place dates back to the start of the 20th Century, when the then German government built it up and it remained in German hands until the Allied armies, with Patton's 3rd Army to the fore, captured it at the end of WW2. During WW2, for example, the place was used by the various groups within Hitler's armies for training purposes. Himmler gave a speech there. During WW1, it was used, among other things, as a PoW camp. Many soldiers are buried there. Later, during the Cold War, even the likes of a young Elvis Presley did some army training on the base.

Going on the base with a relation of mine, the place seems so pristine and businesslike with lots of US servicemen and women getting ready for deployments to the MidEast. I wonder what they think about the uses to which this huge training area has been put in the past. It is, so I am told, the biggest US army training facility outside of the US. Of course, a lot of bases have been closed down since the early 1990s, but the presence of NATO forces is still evident, judging by the various North American accents I hear in the local shops and restaurants.

I can strongly recommend this part of Southern Germany as a place to visit. The locals are very friendly and the economy is, judging by a massive shopping mall in Regensburg, buzzing. And the local beer is awesome. What more excuse do you need?

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[with apologies to the Four Yorkshiremen]

A fantasy writer produced this:

But there's a dark side as well. We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It's the world that bequeathed us the adjective "Dickensian", that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).

Oh really? Try this from the Old Bailey's website:

1760-1815 From approximately three-quarters of a million people in 1760, London continued a strong pattern of growth through the last four decades of the eighteenth century. In 1801, when the first reliable modern census was taken, greater London recorded 1,096,784 souls; rising to a little over 1.4 million inhabitants by 1815. No single decade in this period witnessed less than robust population growth. In part this urban bloat resulted from a marked decline in infant mortality brought about by better hygiene and childrearing practices, and a changing disease pattern. By the 1840s children born in the capital were three times less likely to die in childhood than those born in the 1730s.

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Hanoi, Vietnam. October 2010

Apparently, it takes about a third of a century for the remains of a B-52 that fell into a lake after being shot down to turn into an interesting piece of municipal sculpture in a nice part of town.

Okay...

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It may be surprising to present-day readers to think that it was once thought a “soft option” to transport a convicted criminal to a colony such as Australia’s Botany Bay. But as this letter shows, that is what some influential people thought at the time:

“the sentence of the Court is that you shall no longer be burdened with the support of your wife and family. You shall be immediately removed from a very bad climate and a country over burdened with people to one of the finest regions of the earth, where the demand for human labour is every hour increasing, and where it is highly probable you may ultimate regain your character and improve your future. The Court has been induced to pass the sentence upon you in consequence of the many aggravating circumstances of your case, and they hope your fate will be a warning to others.”

Sydney Smith, Whig clergyman and wit, as quoted in Robert Peel, by Douglas Hurd, page 78.

As an aside, Peel was involved in two issues - re-connecting bank notes to bullion, and the 1844 Bank Charter Act - that have enduring relevance to our own time. Hurd's biography is very readable and has a nice tone to it; in my view, however, Norman Gash's study remains the definitive one.

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There have, as I might expect, been a flurry of reviews about a recent biography of Harold Macmillan, who - to those non-Brit readers who might not have heard of him - was prime minister in the late 1950s through to 1963, and who was involved in controversies that hung over his head until his very old age, such as the issue of his alleged involvement in sending Cossack forces back to the tender mercies of Stalin at the end of WW2. He was a complex and interesting character in many ways; my mother remembers his nickname of "Supermac" and the extraordinary period in the early 1960s when the Profumo Scandal broke, as well as Macmillan's own resignation through ill health and the subsequent emergence of Alec Douglas Home as leader. Home, let it not be forgotten considering how he was mercilessly lampooned by parts of the leftist press, almost won the 1964 general election.

One review here by Simon Heffer more or less sums up my own views of the man. Heffer recognises that for all Macmillan's undoubted merits - he was, for example, an extremely brave army officer wounded several times in the First World War - that he was a decidedly flawed politician in certain respects, particularly on the crucial issue of economic policy and industrial relations. The 1950s and 60s saw the rise of what was to be dubbed the "British disease" - a time of rising industrial strife, inflation, low productivity, endless "stop-go" cycles of Keynesian-inspired reflation followed by subsequent slamming on of the monetary brakes. And while it would be grossly unfair to pin too much blame on one prime minister for the sort of problems that eventually came to a head in the 1970s, he must take some share of the responsibility for the mess that was eventually addressed - after a fashion - by Mrs Thatcher's administration in the 1980s. And yet the impression I get from Heffer's review, and particularly, this one by Peregrine Worsthorne, is that the biography more or less absolves Macmillan of any blame whatever. Worsthorne's review in the Spectator - behind a subscription firewall - carries this, for instance:

"He was right to have himself been the main political champion of his old friend Keynes and his economics."

Oh dear. Fell asleep during the 1970s, did we?

He also says that Macmillan was right to have played down the danger of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I am not sure that is really true, but if it was true, is that to his credit? With the benefit of hindsight, the Soviet Union was a rotten house that looked imposing with all its mass Red Square parades and all the rest but eventually crumbled very fast, but at the time, it did not seem that way, and some very supposedly clever people, such as that Keynes fan (!) JK Galbraith, were arguing as late as the early 80s that there was no real difference economically between the West and the Soviet Empire. And the sheer size of the Soviet armed forces, and the way that the Hungarian and Czech revolts were harshly suppressed, hardly squares with the idea that that Empire could be treated with a sort of shrug of the shoulders. By the way, for a dose of good sense on the Cold War years, I recommend this by Norman Stone.

But perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of Worsthorne's review is this part, in which he writes mournfully of what might had been had Sir Alec Douglas Home won in 1964:

"This would have spared us both the Thatcher interlude, which put power in to the greedy hands of what Macmillan called the 'banksters', and then the Blair/Brown years, which entrusted it to the equally grasping and disreputable New Labour cabal, which purported to be a meritocracy. But it is beginning to look as if a promising reaction has set in - not too late one hopes - and although David Cameron is not exactly a 14th earl, he is the next best thing, so Uncle Harold must be cheering in his grave."

I am going to do Worsthorne the respect of assuming he is sane, and serious, when he wrote that somehow, Mrs Thatcher's time in office was some sort of ghastly "interlude" when the rightful aristocratic rulers of us unwashed were horribly pushed aside by a bunch of grammar school educated City slickers and Jewish intellectuals. Macmillan once infamously said that he regretted there were more Estonians than Etonians in the Tory Cabinet of the time, a particularly nasty little line. Sure, the attack on the Blair and Brown bunch is perhaps more deserved, but let's not forget that Blair was a Fettes public schoolboy, and a good many of Mrs Thatcher's ministers came from smart backgrounds.

In fact, when all is said and done, what Worsthorne rates as Macmillan's greatest achievement, is contained in the opening paragraph of his review. I leave readers with this to ponder:

"Since the main purpose on earth of the Conservative Party was, and still should be, to keep Britain's ancient and well-proven social and political hierarchy in power - give or take a few necessary upward mobility adjustments - Harold Macmillan must rank very high in the scale of successful Conservative prime ministers; just below Benjamin Disraeli, whose skill in sugaring the pill of inequality and humanising the face of privilege is never likely to be bettered."

In other words, whatever Macmillan may or may not have done to stem the UK's post-war economic decline, at least he kept the toffs on top.

Words fail me.

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On this day in 1805, a famous signal was sent in the context of the struggle against an earlier iteration of pervasive European Union.

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I am reading a review of this book (thank you Instapundit), about Stalin and Hitler and their many and mutually supportive crimes, and I came upon a fact that was very surprising to me:

About as many people died in the German bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as in the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Here in Britain we remember, those of us who are the remembering sort, Winston Churchill's metaphor-mangling talk of winds and whirlwinds, sewing and reaping. Relatively mild bombing of British cities by the Luftwaffe was followed later in the war by truly horrific bombing of German cities by the RAF.

But that original wind, in other parts of Europe, was windier than I had realised.

LATER: And here's another little fact that pulled me up short:

In just a few days in 1941, the Nazis shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all their concentration camps.

Although, I am not clear whether that is inmates in camps at that time, or inmates in camps over the whole period. The former, I think. Either way, it is hideous. Not sure I want to read the entire book. I already get the general idea.

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You never stop learning strange things, do you? For instance, this morning, I was (still am) listening to CD Review, and the presenter Andrew McGregor suddenly starts talking about how, in the year 1612, the heir to the throne, James I's son Prince Henry, rather foolishly went for a swim in the Thames, caught typhoid, and died. Cue an "outpouring of grief", which included songs about the death of the young Prince (aged 18), hence the CD angle.

And who became king of England instead? Why, only Charles I, who got himself executed in 1649, in the midst of a ferocious civil war between himself and his severely angered Parliament. That I had heard about. Prince Henry was apparently, and in fascinating contrast to his younger brother, a Protestant:

Henry was quite the Protestant - when his father proposed a French marriage, he answered that he was 'resolved that two religions should not lie in his bed'.

You can't help wondering: What If? What if Prince Henry had not gone for that swim, and had become the King instead of Charles I? How might English history have turned out then?

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David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:

I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.

The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.

Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.

But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.

In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn't got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day - puff-puff - the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.

We'll see. Well, I probably won't see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.

And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.

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I like this article about the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. It is a reminder that at one time, the holder of that office did not regard himself as a rockstar. Maybe he was lucky in being born before the age of TV. If he had been around in more recent times, maybe our views would be different. I bet Churchill would have been massacred on TV.

My favourite story about Silent Cal, as he was known (not a man of long windy speeches), was when he was once coming out of a church, and was approached by the usual journalist types asking him about what the preacher said in his sermon. "Sin", replied the POTUS. "Er, what did the preacher say about it?", asked the hacks.

"He's against it," replied Mr Coolidge. (Try and top that, PJ O'Rourke).

Paul Johnson's Modern Times, about which I wrote the other day, taught me a good appreciation of Coolidge. There is also a nice collection of some of his comments here.

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You can always count on Sean Gabb to take a controversial line. And on the British Empire in India (he says it was in many ways a good thing), he is not frightened to do so, even if it means saying things that have driven a few Indian or expat Indian readers into a rage. (I urge readers to read the entire Gabb piece).

There have been empires of a fairly liberal nature, and at times, it is fair to say, that there was greater respect for life, liberty and property under certain relatively liberal empires than in sovereign, nation states. I have heard the Austro-Hungarian Empire defended on such grounds; the British Empire was in some ways a pretty loose-knit thing (it had to be - we did not have the manpower to run it in a more heavy-handed way); and certain other empires might have stacked up quite well when looking at what replaced them. But, and this is surely the key point: we are talking about empires. They developed out of conquest, of kicking out rulers or property owners of various kinds, and moving in. Sometimes the invaders were actually invited in to get rid of the existing scumbags, but usually not. (Malta, in the late 18th Century, asked Lord Nelson to kick out the French who had taken control of the island. The Brits stayed until the early 1970s).

So, it does rather make me scratch my head to read Sean's defence of the BE when I consider that, for example, he and many others like him in the Libertarian Alliance have fiercely criticised the European Union as a sort of France-German imperial regime, imposing a certain kind of social democratic worldvew. Libertarianism is not a monolithic creed (thank god), but on the face of it, the presumption must be that a believer in liberty must look askance on empires and conquest, and be wary of attempts to rationalise it by reference to certain outcomes that are only known after the event.

Take another sort of "empire": the Brussels elite of the European Union - who are not exactly respectful of democratically expressed "no" votes in referenda, may defend their ambitions as being high-minded, and indeed, there is a sort of "new imperialism", known as Transnational Progressivism, or Tranzi for short. Or take the case of US foreign policy, also sometimes damned as imperialistic. It is also worth noting that Sean, and other critics of the American-led military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, have condemned what they see as the "neocon" doctrine of seeking to spread democracy and liberty into barbarous lands at the point of a bayonet (or Apache helicopter). But that is exactly how Sean frames the case in favour of the British Empire. Odd. The likes of Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and other priests of empire (not to mention Kipling) were the neocons of their time. (In fairness to Sean, he also criticises the conflicts in the ME as not being about the defence of British interests).

Some of this support of empire also explains, so I understand it, some of why Sean Gabb casts Churchill as a villain of 20th century history, as a destroyer of empire. Gabb claims that by refusing to capitulate to Hitler in 1940 and sue for peace and leave Western Europe under Nazi rule, Churchill ensured that the British Empire was finished, whereas had we been neutral in the 1940s, then - so the argument goes - the Nazi-dominated Europe of the time would have left the Empire alone, or at least for a fairly long period. Although obviously horrible for those Europeans under Nazi rule, avoidance of war with Germany would at least have spared the Empire all the losses it suffered.

I am not convinced of this line of reasoning. First of all, it is far from clear, given Hitler's record as being a serial breaker of treaties, that any non-aggression pact signed between Britain, its Empire, and Germany, would have been worth the paper it was written on. If the Empire had stayed out of military conflict with Germany, that would have given Hitler the knowledge of having a free hand against Russia, making it far more likely that Germany's invasion of Russia would have been more of a success. From Bordeaux to Vladivostok would have been one, huge national socialist empire, greedily looking south at the oilfields of the Middle East under British influence, potentially threatening the Suez Canal and link to India. It is hard to see how such an immense landpower would have been able to rub along with the British Empire without conflct in the medium term.

In any event, the Empire, while it may have come to an end sooner than it did due to the immense costs of WW2, was already in a state of flux: Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other dominions were moving towards greater self government; there was a vigorous, pro-independence movement in India during the 1920s and 1930s, and suppressing that movement with the use of armed force hardly sits easily with a libertarian credo.

One final point, to which I am indebted to Paul Marks for pointing out: there was a brief campaign, led I think by the likes of Joseph Chamberlain, to create an Imperial Parliament in which all members of the Empire would have had some sort of representation, perhaps like a sort of BE version of the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. The idea never really got off the ground as a serious political venture.

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For all of the talk about a fourth branch of government, calling to account corruption on both sides of the aisle, and informing the people’s decisions with transcendent objectivity, the media has always been a bullhorn for specific biases. The virgin media of our youth did not exist, and it should not exist. As with every other facet of life in a free society, it is only competition that creates progress and openness. In media, this means diverse views and diverse sources, calling not only corrupt politicians into account, but each other as well.

- Jeremy D. Boreing

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From a WSJ review by Trevor Butterworth of Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy:

But the power of knowledge would not, by itself, have given Britain its formidable economic edge; the Continent, too, had an array of scientific genius as brilliant as any in Scotland and England. (Think only of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.) The reason for Britain's exceptionalism, Mr. Mokyr says, lies in the increasing hostility to rent-seeking - the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth - among the country's most important intellectuals in the second half of the 18th century. Indeed, a host of liberal ideas, in the classic sense, took hold: the rejection of mercantilism's closed markets, the weakening of guilds and the expansion of internal free trade, and robust physical and intellectual property rights all put Britain far ahead of France, where violent revolution was needed to disrupt the privileges of the old regime.

Such political upheaval in Europe, notes Mr. Mokyr, disrupted trade, fostered uncertainty, and may well have created all kinds of knock-on social disincentives for technological and scientific innovation and collaboration with business. Much as we might deplore too many of our brightest students going into law rather than chemistry or engineering, it is not unreasonable to think that many of France's brightest thinkers were diverted by brute events into political rather than scientific activism (or chastened by poor Lavoisier's beheading during the Revolution).

Thus Montesquieu may have advocated free trade as passionately as Adam Smith, but Smith's "Wealth of Nations" - the canonical text of the Industrial Enlightenment - fell upon a society primed to judge and implement it as an operating system. Evangelical and liberal alike shared in the vision of "frugal" government, as Mr. Mokyr puts it. In the opening decades of the 19th century, Parliament took an ax to itself, pruning the books of what were now seen as harmfully restrictive laws.

I have my doubts about whether robust intellectual property rights did much to encourage the industrial revolution, but apart from that ...

This books is now in the post to me, thanks to Amazon, that characteristic trading innovation of our own time.

I suppose reading books like this is, for a British libertarian, an experience somewhat like that of a religious believer contemplating the delights of the Garden of Eden. It may be a bit bogus, in the sense that like all earthly Edens this one was decidedly imperfect and probably felt just as discouraging to its contemporaries as life seems to a lot of us now, a lot of the time.

For who knows? Maybe the times we are living through now may be looked back upon by later generations as similarly Eden-like, either because we are now making huge intellectual (as well as more obvious economic - think Amazon) progress, but we can't quite see it (maybe any decade now our Parliaments will take axes to themselves), or because times are about to get a lot worse.

I hope (although I promise nothing) to report back here about whether the book deserves the above praise.

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Last Saturday, Michael Jennings, Rob Fisher and I went to the Farnborough Airshow, to which, of course, we all brought our cameras. The one with the cheapest and cheerfullest camera tends to take the most pictures, (a) because the pictures tend to be smaller and will fit with ease onto today's infinite SD cards no matter how many you take, and (b) because with a cheap and cheerful camera you want to give yourself lots of chances to have taken some good snaps, in among the torrent of bad ones. So I took the most photos. There follows a very small selection of these compared to how many I took, and a very large selection compared to how many photos there usually are in Samizdata photo-essays. In the event that you would like to see any of them bigger, click on them. They are shown in chronological order.

Rob's photos can be seen here. They include quite a few that show what it was like arriving. Rather chaotic, and aesthetically shambolic, in a way that really doesn't suggest a great show of any sort. Farnborough only happens every two years, and I guess it just isn't worth organising all the incidentals associated with the public descending on the place for just one weekend every two years, any better than only just adequately. The train from Waterloo (they're very frequent) having taken about forty minutes (I bought a train-and-bus-included ticket to the show at Waterloo), there was then a satanically convoluted bus journey from Farnborough railway station, smothered in traffic jams of people trying to get to the same spot in their cars, a journey that caused us, in the evening, to prefer to take the same journey back to the station on foot. But we finally arrived at the airfield, where there was yet more too-ing and fro-ing, this time along improvised queue routes, bounded by temporary barriers such as you get around roadworks. We were herded along these tracks and into the show by men in flourescent tops shouting at us. Is this what pop festivals are like?

Mercifully soon we were in, and wandering past further aesthetic shambles, in the form of closely bunched exhibits with euphemistic signs on them about "all your force projection needs" (calling in an air strike when you get into a fight outside a pub?), "delivering ordnance efficiently" (killing people efficiently), "creative solutions" (killing people creatively), "mission specific solutions" (killing exactly the people you want to kill in exactly the way you want to kill them) and so on. Fair enough. The truth is too horrible to be faced head on.

Here was my favourite of these preliminary exhibits:

It's this. Looks like a whale, doesn't it? The twenty first century looks like being a golden age of unmanned flight. Who would have thought that model aircraft would turn into a grown-up industry?

Then on to join the main throng next to the runway, to confront sights like this:

This was the moment when I began to fear that I would be without food or water for the next six, hot hours. I could see lots of people, with their own picnic equipment, and lots of other guys with cameras. I could see a big runway, and distant hangers and airplanes. But what if I starved to death? I postponed such thoughts, because just as they were occurring to me, the main show (scroll down to Saturday 24th to see what we saw) was getting under way.

Item one, which I was really looking forward to seeing close up, having already photoed it from far below and far away, in central London, was this:

The A380 did a slow motion impersonation of a plane doing trick flying, going up too steeply and then down too steeply, and then tilting itself too steeply and cornering too much, all with the stately grace of the white elephant that I assume it to be. Beautiful.

Then, a real show of trick flying, by these characters:

There was much falling out of the sky leaving a trail of smoke, and at one point they did synchronised falling out of the sky leaving two near identical trails of smoke, to prove that they were doing exactly what they intended, rather than just letting it happen of its own accord. I was impressed:

Then came another giant, one of the dominant airplanes, indeed one of the dominant world facts, of the last half century:

That's the first time in my life I've seen a B52 in the flesh, so to speak. The surprise to me there is the fuselage. The B52, from that angle and in my distinctly approximate photo, looks like a wooden toy made by a super-dad in the garage for his small son, small son being too small to care that the fuselage is so unrealistic. A bit of sculpting under the rear, and at the front of course, but otherwise, just a length of broom handle, an effect greatly enhanced by the sawn-off look at the back. Real airplanes don't look like that!

World War 2 relics were much in evidence. Yah boo hiss!:

Hurrah!:

Also present were modern jet fighters. Trouble is, they take off so damn fast that they are a dot next to a cloud before you (by which I mean I) have realised they are even performing. The noise they make when they do take off is: noisy. The unprepared brain (by which I mean my brain), when subjected to this noise, does not make decisions any better or any faster. Here is an American F something doing its thing:

There came a moment when all those zoom lenses suddenly pointed straight upwards, without any moving about, and I snapped all the vertical zoom lenses for a while before I became curious about what they were pointing at. Parachutes! Again, much smoke, but also a union jack:

Foreigners, I instinctively assumed, sucking up to us. But then I thought, maybe not. Maybe here, the union jack is no apologised about by anyone.

There was a World War 1 show, involving lovingly preserved relics such as this:

There was another F something from America:

The World War 2 relics took to the air, thus:

And thus:

Owing to its implausibly shiny black paint, and my camera's habit of freezing all moving propellers into immobility, the Avro Lancaster looked like an assembled Airfix plastic kit, hanging from a kid's bedroom ceiling (i.e. my bedroom ceiling), circa 1965:

Then a "Typhoon". I was expecting an unwieldy mid-forties propeller-driven job, but it turned out to be this:

Again, it was a dot in the clouds by the time I clocked that it was even in the sky. Luckily it has a distinctive sillhouette, and luckily it did come back, but it never got as close to me again as when it was taking off.

Then this:

Photographing the Farnborough Airshow really well is a skill like any other, one which I do not really possess, what with this being my first visit since I was about six, and my absolute first with a camera. But if you can't get at least some good snaps at Farnborough you are really not much of a photographer, and it you can't get some good snaps of the Red Arrows, you are beyond photographic hope. I got some good shots of them:

I also got shots with red white and blue smoke, and less effective shots of Red Arrows suddenly charging madly off in all directions from one red, white and blue spot, many of them right out of my picture, and of two Red Arrows nearly but not colliding, none of them snapped at the exact right moment. Anyone who wants to see all the regular Red Arrow pictures has seen them. I felt I needed a different slant on the Red Arrow phenomenon:

We saw several of those.

So, it's the second last slot, between the Red Arrows, and the final grandstand finish. What do you shove in there? Answer, a really boring airplane - on its own, no smoke, no loud noises, no nothing, not even the outside chance of a collision - doing really boring aerobatics. Had I encountered such airplane behaviour on some other expedition, say to a London suburb, and had that been the only aerial oddity I spied that month I might have been very impressed. As it was, yawn:

And then, finally, the very much not-yawn Avro Vulcan:

Okay not much of a snap, but by then I was seriously tired. In any case the www is awash with state-of-the-art vulcanography.

And that was that. I've missed out quite a few performers. There were various helicopters, and a couple of transport planes taking it in turns to do their party tricks. The second was a Hercules, but we felt it was upstaged by the previous and smaller Italian plane. There was a Catilina flying boat. There were surely others that I've forgotten. But it was a good show.

Nor did I starve or die of thirst. On the contrary, the many food and drink stalls along most of the length of the public area did thriving business, providing expensive but eloquent lessons in the Austrian theory of the subjectivity of value. Ice cream on Westminister Bridge? Pass. Same ice cream at 5 pm at a hot and sunny Farnborough Airshow? A bargain at twice the price, in other words: a bargain.

It all seemed very safe. When I was a child, I can remember there being a huge crash at Farnborough, with lots of spectators killed, sadly involving a de Havilland airplane. Since which drama the planes have been forbidden to go anywhere too near to the spectators. No chance of anything like that happening now. Or this. Although I'm sure the reason all we spectators now take such safety for granted is that the flyers themselves never do.

I suspect that in two years time it will all be much the same. The same revered and two-years-older planes from the history books, the same kind of more recent jets doing the same kinds of tricks, spectacularly or solemnly depending on their size and demeanour. I think I'd like to go back in about ten years time, to see if and how things have changed by then. Hope I can.

I would sum the day up as great fun, and great to do in good company rather than alone. So deepest thanks Michael and Rob, without whose promptings such a trip would never even have occurred to me. But it was hard work for me to be at, what with the heat and there being nowhere to sit comfortably. But it was unreservedly great to have been at, although even as I finish this piece the skin is peeling off my stinging, lobster-coloured cheeks and forehead.

The biggest plus about Farnborough is that you can see most of what is on offer from anywhere. You don't have to hack your way to the front of the throng to get a view of the aerial performers, which means that everyone is relaxed and unpushy and friendly. You just have to look upwards, from wherever you happen to be. Which is a good approach to adopt towards life in general, I think.

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From the latest Radio Times:

McCarthyism: There Were Reds Under the Bed

In the light of recent spy revelations, David Aaronovitch uncovers dramatic evidence that the notorious Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy may have been right after all about Soviet infiltration into the US government.

That's this coming Sunday, July 25th, at 1.30pm, on BBC Radio 4.

Google, google. Here is more about the programme:

David Aaronovitch thinks the unthinkable about the McCarthy period.

The hunt for the so called 'Reds under the beds' during the Cold War is generally regarded as a deeply regrettable blot on U.S history. But the release of classified documents reveals that Joseph McCarthy was right after all about the extent of Soviet infiltration into the highest reaches of the U.S government.

Thanks to the public release of top secret FBI decryptions of Soviet communications, as well as the release under the fifty year rule of FBI records and Soviet archives, we now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was extensive, reaching to the highest level of the State department and the White House.

We reveal that many of McCarthy's anticommunist investigations were in fact on target. His fears about the effect Soviet infiltration might be having on US foreign policy, particularly in the Far East were also well founded.

The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets. We explore why much of this information, available for years to the FBI, was not made public. We also examine how its suppression prevented the prosecution of suspects.

Finally, we explore the extent to which Joseph McCarthy, with his unsavoury methods and smear tactics, could have done himself a disservice, resulting in his name being forever synonymous with paranoia and the ruthless suppression of free speech.

Hearing from former FBI, CIA and KGB operatives as well as formerly blacklisted writers, David Aaronovitch, himself from a family of communists tells the untold story of Soviet influence and espionage in the United States.

Interesting. Phrases like "thinking the unthinkable", coming from the BBC, generally signify something drearily conformist, of the sort that it is almost unthinkable to contest, like the claim that, I don't know, economic growth is not all good, or that pollution pollutes. Not this time, I think you will agree.

Although, I distrust that last bit, about McCarthy's "unsavoury tactics" being to blame for his failure. It was McCarthy's fault that the Bolsheviks weren't unmasked? I wait to be convinced that what saved the Bolsheviks of that time and place was Joe McCarthy's ineptness. I prefer the more obvious explanation, which is that the very Bolsheviks who had, as McCarthy rightly claimed, dug themselves into the US government were the ones who stopped him.

I also rather resent the timing of this revelation. Now, they tell us? I think that one of the habits of the bad guys is to concede the truth, but only when it's too late to do much good. The purpose of such admissions is not the truth for the sake of it, but to establish what honest fellows the bad guys are, so that their current or next pack of lies will also be believed, until that too is unmasked, too late, and so on. But maybe that's to be too cynical, at any rate in this matter. I am not familiar with Aaronovitch's writings and thinkings over the years. Maybe he's a good guy.

I'll certainly be having a listen to this. Either at 1.30pm on Sunday, or failing that, soon after.

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Thanks to Patrick Crozier for pointing me to this essay by Paul Kennedy. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are a couple of paragraphs that stuck in my mind:

Like it or not, American policy makers, pundits, strategists and high-level military officers cannot avoid the Appeasement story. Frankly, the tale of Britain’s dilemma during the 1930s is still far too close. Here was and is the world’s hegemon, with commitments all over the globe but also with pressing financial and social needs at home, with armed forces being worn out by continuous combat, with an array of evolving types of enemies, yet also facing recognizable and expanding newer nations bearing lots of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. So, what do you do: Appease, or not appease? Appease here, but not there? Declare some parts of the globe no longer of vital interest?

And, yes, there comes a time when you have to stand and fight; to draw a line in the sand; to say that you will not step backward. As did Great Britain in September 1939. But those British and Commonwealth citizens fought the war with such fortitude and gallantry because, one suspects, they knew that their successive administrations had tried, so often, to preserve the peace, to avoid another vast slaughter and to offer fair compromises. After the German attack on Poland, appeasement vanished. And rightly so. Now the gloves were off.

As Kennedy says, it is sometimes smart to back down, to make a concession, to buy time and avoid bloodshed if at all possible. Interestingly, he brings up a number of rows between Britain and the United States in the late 19th Century, around issues such as control of the Panama Canal and other territorial issues in the Caribbean basin. Fascinating.

The other point worth mentioning, particularly to those who argued that Britain could and should have stayed out of any conflict with Germany/Japan indefinitely, is that Western governments clearly did agonise for a long time before the eventual decision to fight was taken.

Compared to the sometimes piddling issues that our politicians talk about these days, I find this whole issue rather more interesting.

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“A boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating – here, it would seem, lay the source of that subterranean medieval fanaticism which has been studied in this book. It may be suggested here, too, lies the source of the giant fanaticisms which in our day have convulsed the world.”

- Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, page 288.

This is a classic study of the revolutionary, religious groups and mystics of the Middle Ages. Cohn, famously – and much to the anger of the Left in the late 1960s – pointed out certain ominous parallels. I could even go so far as to suggest that the more extreme parts of the Green movement could be also viewed in a similar light. The desire for a purer, perfect world free of Sin, pollution or material wealth are themes that sound remarkably similar.

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I was driving past Duxford, the airbase near Cambridge, at the weekend and unfortunately, I was so busy with other things that yours truly did not have time to go to the airshow there. They were marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Then, as now, the skies were a deadly clear blue - ideal for any bombers looking to find their targets at the time. We curse heavy clouds in Britain, but we should be grateful for them occasionally.

It is perhaps not surprising why this epic battle over the south and southeast of England continues to capture imaginations, even among those usually and rightly wary about military power: there is the fact that the battle was a largely defensive one, pitting a relatively under-strength air force up against a larger, and more battle-hardened, German airforce, although the UK had the great benefit of an integrated radar/fighter dispersal system put in place in the late 1930s and run with magnificent calm by Dowding. If there ever was a case of a relatively clear Good versus Evil sort of conflict, this surely was it. (That should get the peaceniks going, Ed). For us aviation nuts, there is, obviously, the aesthetic as well as emotional appeal of one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built. And whatever some revisionists might claim, there is little doubt in my mind that Britain's decision to resist invasion in that year rather than agree some sort of grubby and easily-broken deal with Hitler was the right one.

Many of those who fought in the skies are no longer with us; soon, this conflict will be captured not in first-hand memories, but in books, films and TV documentaries. Here is a review of three books of that conflict.

The headline on this blog entry was taken from one of my favourite war films, The Battle of Britain. It was uttered by the great Ralph Richardson. The film does have some great one-liners. I must run that DVD again some time.

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The words are mainstream anarcho-lefty stuff, but the name being quoted is a bit of a departure for the place where I spotted this. I took this photo in March, in Leake Street, which is a tunnel under Waterloo Station where graffiti artists do their best and their worst, with results that constantly change. Thank my Photoshop clone for how clear those words are. I went through the Leake Street tunnel again today and wondered if this sign had survived, but of course there was no sign of it. Here is how Leake Street mostly looks.

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Read Squander Two on Bloody Sunday.

... of course hiding amongst non-combatants gives you a huge advantage. Such tactics would give anyone — the British, the Israelis, the Americans — the same advantages, yet they don't use them. There's a reason why civilised people disallow such behaviour, and that is that every single time you step into battle disguised as just another member of the public, you make Bloody Sunday more likely.

I would add that one defining characteristic of a terrorist organisation is that it wants to make Bloody Sunday more likely.

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I can think about football, but not for very long. So, when I observed the generally convivial, if noisy, multi-racial crowd in South Africa, it did not take long for me to forget about the ball game and start to think about Boudicca's massacre of the Romans in Verulamium and of Suetonius' slaughter of her and her army that followed it. This is known as being cultured.

My line of thought was this: although many whites have left Africa, there are also many who are committed to making a future for themselves and their families there. Presumably they are not troubled by the thought that their descendants will eventually intermarry with the black majority around them. Their not so distant ancestors who settled Africa were so troubled yet went to Africa anyway.

Vast amounts have been written about why it is wrong for people of one race to oppress those of another race. Much has been written about why it is wrong for people of of one race to be prevented from marrying those of another. What has been written about much less is why the whites in Africa thought they could succeed in ruling over the blacks and keeping separate from them forever. Because, simplifying massively, that must have been what those early white settlers thought. Racial mixing was not acceptable to them, being ruled by people of another race was not acceptable to them, yet they took the irrevocable step of taking their families to another continent where their race would be vastly outnumbered.

And they did this with the example of Boudicca and Suetonius known to them. Bloody rebellion followed by equally bloody reconquest, and the empire still goes down in the end. By the time whites were leaving Britain to settle in Africa no one knew which of them had Roman ancestors. Did they not wonder whether their descendants would eventually merge with the natives in the same way? Or if not that historical example for the Dutch, French, Germans, Portuguese or Belgians, any one of a thousand others would teach the same moral: that ruling castes do not stay ruling or castes forever.

On the other hand, that word "castes" reminds me that the caste system in India has lasted thousands of years. And the Jews have been "a race apart" for almost as long.

How did the early white settlers envisage the future of whites in Africa? Did they hope to become the majority as had happened, or looked set to happen, in America? Or is this whole business of imagining the far future a purely modern pastime, given that Christians of olden days thought of the time between creation and Last Judgement as lasting thousands rather than millions of years?

(Please, not too much modern politics in the comments. Isn't there a football match you could watch instead?)

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David Friedman has a thought-provoking item up on whether politicians in the 1850s would have acted differently had they known of the carnage that was to be caused by the US Civil War of the following decade. He runs some interesting scenarios.

Counter-factual history is a genre in fiction, of course. I remember Philip Chaston wrote about this issue some time ago. Sean Gabb, one of the current leaders of the Libertarian Alliance, has thoughts related to this about the Second World War (as readers may recall, I find his revisionist perspective unconvincing, as does Patrick Crozier).

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The usual explanation for the troubles now afflicting the EU that is doing the rounds now is that the Greeks and Spaniards have recently been behaving even more like Greeks and Spaniards than they usually do. But Helen Szamuely offers an alternative explanation for the EU's current woes. Germans, she observes, are finally reverting to being regular Germans.

Having quoted a Der Spiegel article about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now mysteriously unwillingly to bow to France in the manner of her predecessors since WW2, Helen says this:

This fits with the point I have made over and over again: the EU is predicated on a guilty and subservient Germany. With time going on and new generations, who cannot even recall the war, appear on the scene (and in Merkel's case there is the added point of growing up under the Communist system) guilt and subservience can no longer be relied on and the Franco-German motor, which presupposed French supremacy is now sputtering. In many ways, that is more important than the Greek or Spanish fiscal crises.

And that fits a point that I have made over and over again, which is that when it comes to predicting the future, there is one kind of thing that one can say with certainty, when all else is guesswork. Statements of this kind are always going to be true: in twenty years time, you and I and everyone else will either be twenty years older, and influencing the world in the way that people twenty years older that all of us are likely to influence the world (in my case hardly at all), or dead.

All manner of interesting suggestions about the relationship between events and later events can be derived from this kind of observation, including even events which have yet to happen, as Helen Szamuely's own earlier versions of the above presumably suggest. Such speculations are not all going to be right. But they can be very interesting and suggestive.

Historically, one of my favourite such twinning of two events is: Battle of Crecy 1346, Peasants Revolt 1381. A great many of those "peasants", including their leaders, were the veterans of earlier continental wars.

Now? Well, can it be coincidence that our current financial turmoil is happening just when, for the first time since it happened, hardly anyone is still alive and counting for anything who remembers the previous bout of such financial turbulence, that started erupting around 1929?

(3)

"We are building socialism ... and as long as we are building socialism but have not yet built it, we will also have homeless children."

- Anne Applebaum quotes Nadezhda Krupskaya in this review of Children of the Gulag

(26)

The ultimate cause of the problem with the banks was indeed chronic government interference, in the form of implicit and explicit guarantees supplied to them free of charge, which hopelessly weakened the entire industry. Reserve ratios - the percentage of deposited cash which is actually retained by the bank rather than lent out - has fallen from over 50% in the 19th century to 2-3% today (or a negative percentage in Northern Rock's case). That could not have happened in a free market, at least not on an industry-wide scale; nobody would lend to a bank if it tried to take on that much leverage without a government guarantee.

In a free market, firms fail from time to time; they aren't bailed out, people don't expect them to be bailed out, people arrange their affairs accordingly and so the failure of one firm doesn't bring down an industry or an economy. Banks were a long way from being a free market.

- "Some Guy" (that's what he calls himself) commenting on the Bishop Hill piece also linked to below by Johnathan Pearce in connection with Matt Ridley's inglorious career as a banker

(34)

Incoming from Michael Jennings, alerting me to this:

UK survey calls iPhone 'more important than space travel'

The headline could equally well have said: UK survey calls Sky+ 'more important than Post-it Notes', but the iPhone and space travel were what they zeroed in on. Fair enough.

I agree about the relative triviality of space travel, except insofar as it makes things like iPhones work better. I mean, you couldn't have those maps on your iPhone telling you where you are and where you're going were it not for GPS, as in S for Satellite, now could you? So, space rockets of some sort are needed for iPhones. But space travel? How significant is that? The bigger point, made by all those surveyees but then contested by the headline writer, is that space travel is now rather oversold, compared to how things are - insofar as they are - hurtling forwards here on Earth. Which, I think, it is.

The people who are for space travel keep going on about how Man Needs to Explore the Universe, and no doubt Man does. But is Man anywhere near ready to make a serious go of that yet? The trouble is that there is so little out there, in the immediate vicinity, accessible to actual men, easily and cheaply, now.

I suspect that the problem is that people, especially political people when composing political speeches, automatically assume an equivalance between the expansion of Europe circa 1500, and the expansion of Earth circa now. But the rest of the world in 1500 was full of stuff, much of it really very near to Europe, and much of it right next to Europe. There was continuous positive reinforcement available to any explorer brave enough to give it a go and lucky enough to hit some kind of paydirt. Now? Communications satellites? Weapons? Tourism? Astronomy? All we can yet really do in space is make various very Earthly enterprises work that little bit better. Which is not a trivial thing, and I'm certainly not saying we should give up even on that. All hail Virgin Galactic! Go SpaceX. But for many decades, most of the important space action will be in geo-stationary orbit rather than anywhere beyond.

And as for that constant libertarian refrain you hear about how Earth is becoming a tyranny and we must all migrate to space, to rediscover freedom, etc. ... Please. People found freedom in America because there was this great big place to feed themselves with. America. Settlements in America were, pretty soon, potentially if not actually, self-supporting. Our technology has a long way to go before a colony on some god-forsaken wasteland like the Moon or Mars, without even breathable air, could ever be self supporting, in the event of Mission Control back on Earth getting shut down by something like an Earth war of some kind. Profitable, maybe, eventually. But able to stay alive without continuous contact with Earthly back-up of various kinds? That will take far longer. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, any humans who set up camp on the Moon or Mars or wherever will be far more dependent upon the continuing and sustained goodwill of powerful people back on Earth than the average Earthling is. There is no America out there, or China, or Australia or Africa. Those early European pioneers found a world full of land and resources, to say nothing of semi-friendly aliens whom we Europeans could trade with. But now? Just a few little rocks and gas blobs bobbing about in a vast sea of utter emptiness, emptiness that is an order of magnitude emptier than our actual sea, which is a cornucopia by comparison. And apart from that, for decades, nothing seriously big that isn't literally light years away. It's an entirely different state of affairs to Europe in 1500.

I wrote all of the above with my own personal blog in mind, but now realise that Samizdata is the place for it, if only because of all the enlightening and perhaps contradictory comments that may become attached. And since this is liable to be picked to pieces by people most of whom are far more technologically savvy than I am, it behoves me to rephrase it all as a question. Which can basically be summarised as: Is that right? Am I missing something here?

Am I, for instance, getting too hung up on mere distance? Yes the Solar System is almost entirely empty. Yes, the Asteroid Belt is a hell of a way away. But, if you are willing to be patient, is it actually quite cheap to send rockets there? Does all that emptiness cancel itself out as a barrier to travel, because of it being so easy (and so much easier than our Earthly sea) to get across?

I actually would quite like to be told that I am wrong about this. In particular, I really really wish that there was somewhere else nearby where the Fight For Liberty blah blah could be restaged, but on better terms to how the same fight seems now to be going here on Earth. But I just , as of now, don't see that happening any time soon.

(18)

I commend this fascinating article to those who have not yet come across it - A Hidden History of Evil:
Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About the Unread Soviet Archives?

The archives contain "unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War", yet their guardian "can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation." Amongst numerous other tidbits, there is some very interesting stuff about Soviet dealings with François Mitterrand, Neil Kinnock, and several past and present "European Project"/EU bigwigs.

(From the excellent Michael Totten, who's doing a fine job of holding the fort over at Instapundit)

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Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they'll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication.

And they are still bashing ahead with this policy, as I serendipitously discovered when I got home last night and was browsing through an internet site called Weird Asia News. Mostly this site features weird headlines concerning weird stories like: Papuan Police Recruits with an Enlarged Penis Denied Job; and: Britons Suffer Chemical Burns From Chinese Sofas, which I suppose I ought to care about more than I do what with me having bought a sofa myself not that long ago; and: South Koreans Revolutionize iPhone Market with Sausage Meat Stylus, the last one being a lot less interesting than it sounds. But in among such drollery is to be found this report, entitled Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown, about how they are even now, still - well, as of last month anyway – enforcing this exercise in national suicide.

A 20-day campaign was begun on 7 April to sterilize 9,559 adults in Puning county, which with a population of 2.24 million is the most populous area of Guangdong Province. On 12 April local officials said they had already achieved about half their goal.

Doctors have been working 20 hour days to complete the massive round of surgeries. Local officials are so determined to reach their target they have been detaining relatives of those who resist the operation, potentially in violation of Chinese law.

Some 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions around the county and forced to listen to lectures about the one-child policy while their relatives refuse to submit to the surgery.

At Perry's, conversation later ensued about why they unleashed this madness. What were they thinking? What are they still thinking?

My guess was that this began as a classic communist response to shortages. Communism always causes shortages. Faced with their shortages, the Chinese Communists figured that if they could only reduce the number of people suffering from these shortages, the shortages would go away. If that's right, then, as Perry said, this was another of those Fixed Quantity fallacies in action. Also a classic case of a doomed attempt at economic calculation under Socialism.

My further guess now is that this has become a pissing contest between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, with the government now being too bloody stubborn to back down. If they give up on this policy now, that will suggest either (a) that it was wrong for them to have persisted with this for so long, and maybe even wrong for them to have done it at all; or else (b) that they no longer have the power - the balls, you might say - to enforce such arrangements.

I have heard it suggested that it is simply that the Chinese government fears the Chinese people and wants to thin the numbers down. When this policy got started, the Chinese government was much more completely in charge than it is said to be now. But if that is the thinking, why impose a policy that results in millions of sex-starved men wandering around? That's not going to keep the peace.

(11)

One of the most striking political developments of my lifetime has been the rise of opinion polls. Now that we are into an election campaign, rival polling enterprises announce results concerning the relative strengths of the various political parties, major and minor, and the relative popularity and performing skills of their leaders, seem to be announced every day and sometimes, when something dramatic like an election debate has just happened, every hour, and become the object of obsessive analysis by the kind of people who like thus to obsess.

The contrast with general elections of an earlier epoch, such as the one in 1945, when the election result, a massive Labour victory and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the war that made his reputation had even been concluded, came as an enormous surprise to vast numbers of people, not least to the amazed and delighted mass membership of the Labour Party. The Conservatives were gobsmacked. Were there opinion polls then, telling anyone who would listen about this landslide before it happened? My understanding is: not. The only poll that happened then, certainly the only one whose results were widely discussed, was the election itself. Now, opinion polls don't just happen before elections; they happen all the time.

So what has this change, from pretty much no opinion polls to wall-to-wall hour-by-hour opinion polls done to politics? I am sure that commenters will be able to suggest all kinds of effects that have not occurred to me, but I can certainly think of a few political trends that have at the very least been reinforced by the relentless rise of opinion polling.

One trend, I suggest, is that opinion polls have drawn political leaders away from concerning themselves with the opinions of the members of the parties they lead, towards the opinions of voters generally. I'm not saying they totally ignored mere voters way back when, before opinion polls, or that they totally ignore mere party members now, but that is surely the direction in which things have gone. If their members believe X, but it turns out that most voters, especially swing voters in marginal seats, believe the opposite of X, then those party members will now tend to lose out. Opinion polls have discouraged parties from adopting ideologically distinct positions, and tugged them all towards the centre, partly because now they know far better what the centre consists of.

Not only are the opinions of party members now set to one side. These party enthusiasts are no longer even needed as sources of information about what the voters think. So, it is no wonder people have been leaving all the major political parties in their hundreds of thousands. They leave because they have become superfluous to requirements. All anyone asks them to do is shove pamphlets through doors and stuff envelopes. What they think doesn't matter.

Another effect of opinion polls is that they have turned politics into continuous campaigning. One of the most off-putting features of New Labour's moving spirits, to me, has been their inability to shake free of their most glorious moment, namely the 1997 election campaign. This was the moment when everything they did worked a dream, and they have carried on with the formula that worked then ever since. The people running the resulting Labour government have remained in campaign mode, behaving in government as if still in opposition, crafting policies and laws and announcements about policies and laws not on the basis of the impact of such policies and laws on the country, but on the basis of what the media will say about these announcements. And hence what the opinion polls will then say. Many, me included, particularly associate this perversion of political leadership with the recent years of the Labour Party, as lead by Tony Blair. But does anyone think that Brown's regime has been that different in this respect, or that the next government, whatever it turns out to consist of, will be any less media and opinion poll driven? Why do modern governments obsess about opinion polls? Because they can. Because, you might say, they can't not.

Another suggestion I'd want to offer concerning the rise of opinion polls is that opinion polls have made a nonsense of old-fashioned political demonstrations, and have thus created an atmosphere, and a somewhat misleading one, of political apathy. It's not that people don't any longer have any strong opinions about anything. It is more that if you gather up lots of placards and hire lots of buses and descend on London and march through the streets and stop all the traffic, and shout whatever it is that you want to shout, well, so what? How ever many thousands of you think whatever you think. Big deal. Immediately an opinion poll reveals that many thousands of others, often many more thousands of others, think that you and all your friends and comrades are greedy and/or deluded fools. Result: fewer demos of any kind, about anything.

You may reply, but what if your demo aligns with public opinion? Well, if that's the case, you should simply commission your own opinion poll that demonstrates that fact. If that's what your demo was supposed to draw attention to, why not simply prove this, and make that your story? Far more persuasive, and far more efficient.

Which brings us to another fact about opinion polls, which is that they are political ammunition. I first learned this when I got to know Dr Julian Lewis (now a Conservative MP) in the nineteen eighties, when he was making it his business to sabotage CND and (as it turned out) helping win the Cold War. Oh, Lewis and his gang of collaborators had great fun ratfucking those CND demos, by such methods as hanging his own signs (saying things like "KGB APPROVED") above the crowds of his enemies, thereby hogging about half the media attention, and driving the demonstrators mad when they watched themselves on the evening news or looked in the newspapers the next day. But at the heart of Lewis's operation were cunningly worded opinion polls, the results of which he would then show to the politicians. In the old days, politicians would be mightily impressed by mass demonstrations. What else, other than election results, did they have to go on? But, Lewis argued then, and proved then, opinion polls trump demonstrations. The next generation of politicos who are determined to have some day to day influence on things (such as those who run organisations like this one) have learned this lesson well.

The impact of opinion polls is hard to separate from the impact of that other great game-changer, television. But the impact of television on politics (to say nothing of the impact of television on, in particular, opinion polls and opinion poll results) has been talked about a lot more than has the impact of opinion polls, even before the Kennedy Nixon TV debates, and pretty much continuously since then. Television has also strengthened the hands of political leaders compared to political followers, provided of course that they are leaders who look good on it, because the leaders can use the telly to talk directly to voters (having first checked with their opinion polling what the voters want to hear). They no longer need their own followers to arrange mass meetings for them star in.

How opinion polls would have played out in politics if there had been no television, or how televised politics might have worked without opinion polls are hypotheticals I leave others to ponder. I will content myself with saying that television with no opinion polls would have meant that demonstrating would still now be in full swing, what with television having done so much to encourage demonstrating in the first place. The reality, meanwhile, is that the two transformations have in fact gone hand in hand, or perhaps I mean hand in glove.

Meanwhile, old fashioned politics, the kind where you have opinions of your own, has migrated elsewhere. We manic internetters like to think of the internet and blogging and twittering and all that as very modern, and of course technologically it is indeed the latest thing. But there is also something very old-fashioned about it. The internet, you might say, is where old politics has found a new home for itself, at a time when politics itself had become something different.

And now, this new-old politics is starting to have consequences of its own, maybe not here in the UK yet, but certainly in the USA. To anyone who says that nobody told the Tea Partying tendency that the age of public political demonstrations is over, I would say: yes, good point. But I think I'd want to distinguish between the kind of demonstrations that are merely arranged, in a top-down, organised way, and the kind that erupt from below. The organised kind strike me as the pointless ones, because all that clout can now be better directed to cannier indoor stuff. It's also worth asking where the Tea Partiers would now be without those plummetting Obama poll ratings. The long-term importance of something like the Tea Party movement is that it will bring together lots of people who will do more than merely demonstrate. If all that those Tea Partiers organise is yet more demonstrations, then they will accomplish little. But now I can feel this argument crumbling in my hands. Time for me to stop, and ask others what they reckon.

So, have opinion polls changed politics? 55 percent say yes, 35 percent said no way, and the rest said sod off you nosy bastard, who gives a toss?, what does it matter what I think?, etc. etc. ...

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"I think that one of the narrative themes of the progressive era that spawned our modern state is the deliberate smashing of the poor and, in particular, of the “petty capitalism” that sustained them. One of the things I get from reading through the hugely influential London Labour And The London Poor by the reformist activist Henry Mayhew is a horror of the poor, as he describes the costermongers and hawkers and small underclass production businesses which sustained them. The poor had to be done away with and replaced with something more acceptable to higher class tastes and, by all kinds of social activism and regulation they were, to a large extent, done away with as, their petty capitalism squeezed out by the State, they were dragooned into a compliant workforce for factories run by bewhiskered, interfering philanthropists who voted for Victorian Nick Cleggs. And in the end, they all got their council flats and a better wage, and all they had to give in return was their spirit."

IanB, who has happily resurfaced over at Counting Cats after a period away from the blogging gig.

I'd add my two cents to this article by arguing that although some people want things like council houses, rent controls and minimum wage laws out of a naive but sincere belief that these are good, it has always struck me that part of the reformist zeal to do away with things like "cheap labour" is a sort of "yuck" factor. I sense a lot of this whenever I watch a programme about the downtrodden, poor workers of distant lands. It never seems to cross the minds of the do-gooders here that such folk face far worse alternatives to working for a relatively low wage to a Western one - not working at all. The poor child labourers of Asia do not have the alternative of spending much of their teens in a school and then off to college. And in any event, their best hope of escaping their plight is to have as much vulgar capitalism as possible.

IanB identifies puritanism - both of the religious and the secularised versions - as a key driver of the reformists' zeal. I'd also add in a sort of aesthetic dislike, even hatred, for industry and trade. The Fabian movement that has had such a baleful effect on the past 100 years or so was inspired not just by the Evangelical "Great Awakening" of the 19th Century, but by the back-to-the-land movements inspired by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris.

Read the whole article.

Update: It might be objected (and indeed it was, predictably, by an incredibly rude and now banned commenter) that religious puritanism has anything to do with the nanny statist trends of our time. But while there are some who argue, with Max Weber, that the "Protestant Work Ethic" was in some ways pro-market, the fact is that that ethic was double-sided. Sure, there was a striving, pro-enterprise side of it, but there was also a strong, anti-materialist side and a side that scorned pleasure, which provided some of the intellectual fuel for groups such as the "Christian socialists" of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The teetotal movement, for example, found ready adherents. And consider the intellectual backgrounds of folk like RH Tawney, Arnold Toynbee, and so on. To deny that they had religious inspiration for their views is obtuse.

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Fellow imperialist Norman aggressor Harry de Quetteville does an exquisite take down of Oliver Stone in the Telegraph. It is so delicious that extracting a passage just does not do it justice.

...Oh I just cannot resist...

I pushed a woman under a bus this morning. Nice looking old girl she was, looked like she'd just had her hair done. Maybe she was off somewhere special, but we won’t know now will we, not since I pushed her under the bus.

She hadn't done anything wrong, apart from being old. But you wouldn't believe the hoo-ha the whole scene created. Some people next to me looked positively aghast as those big double-decker wheels rolled over her. Then some others jumped on me and held me down until the police arrived.

Read the whole thing. Simply splendid.

(25)

The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now - even, now, in central London - but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.

Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn't, has it?

As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:

... which of the climate models had predicted this?

None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband's faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).

But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband's "experts" (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn't they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood's follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world's climate than the British Met Office.

Forgive me for always banging on about that other Cold War whenever I write about Climategate, but I truly believe that these comparisons are relevant. Much the same people were locked in combat then as are now, and the same economically catastrophic policies are being argued for and against then as now, the big difference being that now it is the entire global economy that is being threatened with economic derangement, which means that the world won't now, as the deranging tendency well knows, be able to make the obvious and damning comparisons that it could make then.

Meanwhile, the AGW debate has arrived at the same position that the Cold War argument had arrived at in or around about 1970 to 1980. An informed minority of pro-economic-progress critics had won the academic argument against the pro-economic-derangement academics, and word of this victory was spreading. And a particular thing that happened then is starting to happen now, which is that even intelligent layman critics of the John Redwood (and Brian Micklethwait) variety are starting to understand the details of the argument better than even the very smartest of the pro-derangement scientists, of the sort who are still advising governments, or who are still receiving and still trying still to believe this advice. It's not that these "experts" were born stupid, nor that they are now ignorant. Nor is Ed Miliband stupid, even if, what with all the other things on his mind, I suspect him of still being fairly ignorant. The climate science "experts" still know far more mere facts about this debate than John Redwood does, or than I do. It is simply that these people have now said - and nailed their egos to - too many stupid things, too many non-facts, and there is now no sensible way out for them. It's what these "experts" still insist on saying they know, but that clearly ain't so, that is hanging them all out to dry. The science, they keep saying, still, is settled. In their dreams.

I remember when I and my fellow anti-Marxists began correcting self-declared Marxists, who suddenly found themselves as a result on the theoretical defensive, about what Karl Marx himself had actually said. Communism is fine in theory, they then said, retreating hurriedly, but it just didn't work quite so well in practice. No, said we, pressing forward some more, a theory that doesn't work "in practice" is called an untrue theory, a bad theory, and anyone who persists in following it is stupid, and by and by: evil. And so on. So it is now with AGW. Okay, I might not now be able to demolish the sinister and preposterous Michael Mann in a television studio, but give me another few months, weeks even, of reading the skeptic blogs and I surely could.

Then as now, the mainstream media were very reluctant to report what had become obvious then, and is gradually becoming obvious now. But despite there being no internet then, the obvious economic inferiority of communism was nevertheless reported and did get around, in the form of capitalist stuff galore and adverts galore for yet more capitalist stuff galore, and nothing but jokes and complaints about the communist stuff. Not even journalists could fail to observe in which direction the Berlin Wall was pointing, and which side built it. Now the word about the fraudulence of the AGW crowd is also getting out, in the form of misbehaving weather, and, despite the best efforts of most of the regular journalists, via the internet.

The next step is to destroy - or at least try to cut down to size - the various Evil Empires that have been erected upon the fraudulent foundations of the AGW argument, as Richard North also well understands.

(9)

When an argument is being won and lost, the retreating team does not issue statements saying: By gad, you were right and we were wrong, sorry and all that, we'll try not to let it happen again. No, the way you spot a victory and a defeat is when you see bits of bullshit (linked to rather admiringly, on account of the piece not being complete bullshit throughout, from here) like this from the Los Angeles Times:

The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.

Actually that is pretty much exactly what the real scandal was, except that they missed out the bit about sabotaging the entire world economy.

But allow me to draw your particular attention, just in case you missed it, to this bit:

... scientists and advocates on both sides ...

Position one: Our guys are right and your guys are wrong. Position two: Yes, it's true that our guys are wrong, but ... but ... so are your guys! "If we have the decency to admit that our bad guys are bad, now that your good guys are proving it, can't you at least be a sport and say that your good guys are bad also?"

No.

How, exactly, do the AGW sceptics "continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science"? How has their conduct earned them the insult of being part of a "charade"? How have the sceptics been undermining science? Or democracy? There has been a charade. But the sceptics are busily unmasking it, and replacing it with truth.

This is a classic retreat from fraudulent moral superiority to fraudulent moral equivalence.

Once again, as so often in this ruckus, I'm thinking: Cold War. "Yes indeed, Communism is not working very well and many of the communists are very bad people, but capitalism and those who support it are no better ..." No, communism was indeed a catastrophe, but capitalism was and is colossally, world-transformingly better. I despised the fraudulent army of anti-anti-communists then, and I despise the fraudulent and soon-to-be-huge army of anti-AGW-sceptics now.

(21)

This evening I am doing a recorded conversation with Bishop Hill, and by way of preparation have been rootling around in his archives. And I just came across this, which the Bishop posted on November 19th 2006:

In this connexion the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against "the liberty of the subject" they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.

Excellent, apart from the odd spelling of "connection".

That's not by Bishop Hill himself. It was recycled from somewhere called "Outside Story", the link to which no longer works. But there's no reason to doubt theis particular story, which should now inspire us all. For too long we have been ruled by politicians who measured their success by how many laws they could pass. Because of these fools, we now need politicians who measure their success by how many laws they can unpass.

Bishop Hill's latest posting, as I write this, is to this. Well worth reading. Climategate is not nearly over. It is just getting into its stride. At Copenhagen, lots of laws, seemingly unshiftable from then on, will be made, maybe not as many as would have happened without Climategate, but still, most of us here surely fear, a lot. But the point is: laws can be unmade. There can be, and there must soon be, another great purgation.

(20)

I've just watched the Channel 4 Sky news video clip to be seen here, in which Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, berates Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, thus:

"... it's remarkable how the so-called sceptics have been using this as a propaganda tool to promote a political end ... People with a clear vested interest in creating public confusion because they want to undermine action on climate change, they should shut up and wait until the investigation is done rather than carry on a witch hunt."

Fraser Nelson took exception to this, in particular because Fraser Nelson thinks that AGW is quite a bit truer than I now think it is. In other words, said Fraser Nelson, he is a true sceptic, rather than a "so-called sceptic".

However, if Bob Ward had been shouting at someone like me, instead of at Fraser Nelson, as in his own mind he surely was, then he would have had a point. I definitely want the whole AGW thing to collapse in ruins, and suspect that it quite soon may collapse. In the meantime, I definitely do dislike all the regulations and taxes that Bob Ward and co want to see introduced, and I am most definitely using Climategate as a propaganda tool to promote that political end. I certainly prefer the current state of public confusion about climate science to the public unanimity that this confusion has now replaced. Insofar as I had any tiny part in helping to create and spread such confusion, and I did, I am a proud man.

But, as the true object of Bob Ward's ire, I do have some incidental disagreements with him.

Bob Ward says that it is "remarkable" how people like me are using Climategate to score political points. No it isn't. And the reason Bob Ward is so alert to the true nature of his politically biased and point-scoring enemies such as me is that he is quite clearly just such a creature himself. He is almost certainly telling lies, while I am sincerely trying to tell the truth. But when it comes to point-scoring and having a political agenda and being keen on propaganda, we are two of a kind.

Rather unpleasantly, Bob Ward says that we anti-AGW-ers should "shut up". Well, yes, I'm sure he would like that. He and his team are now losing an argument that could end up wrecking all their careers, and he wants that argument to cease. But that is not a proof that it should cease, and of course there is no chance of that happening, now that the internet makes it so hard to shut people up.

Talking of shutting people up, and of the internet, the notion that we anti-AGW-ers should wait, in silence, for a "public inquiry" is also very bizarre. What on earth does Bob Ward think has been in progress on the internet for the last fortnight, if not a gigantic inquiry of the most public kind?

Telling people to "shut up" these days is rather ridiculous, so maybe I am making a bit too much of what is really just silly bluster. On the other hand, shutting people up was what some of the nastiest of those GRU emails were all about, so on second thoughts I think I am not making too much of this phrase. I wonder what kind of teacher Ward is, when teaching students who don't share his worldview. I wonder what kind of scientist he is when faced with scientific disgreement. Not a nice one, and not a nice one, are my guesses. My guess is that Bob Ward is someone who says "Shut up!" rather a lot. Especially just lately.

I don't have any "vested interest" in the sense of being paid by anyone to say the things I now say. My vested interest is intellectual rather than economic. Bob Ward's vested interests, on the other hand, are both intellectual and economic. He stands to lose both an argument and a job if this argument carries on going against him.

Nor am I part of a witch hunt, exactly. A Bob Ward hunt yes, a witch hunt no. As has been said many times, and as is now going to have to be said many times more, the bad thing about the original medieval witch hunts is that those accused of witchcraft did not, on the whole, do the things they were accused of. They did not, for instance, fly across Europe on broomsticks at the dead of night and participate in Walpurgisnacht ceremonies. Lots were accused of this. None actually did this. This was an entirely imaginary crime. However, the victims of the anti-Communist "witchhunts" (sneer quotes there because the phrase was and is deliberately misleading) were, on the whole, guilty as charged. They were accused of being Communists and of being supporters of the vile tyranny that was the USSR, and they mostly were. Certainly many people were, at that time and since, guilty of being Communists and USSR supporters - real Communists, who did exactly the evil things that Communists were accused of. "Witchcraft", on the other hand, was not actually practiced by anyone.

And now, a quite large number of climate scientists are, I believe, about to be proved guilty of manipulating the science of climate to create both unnecessary climate panic and consequent new global political arrangements that could do huge political and economic harm to the human species. Unlike all those poor medieval witches, most of them are probably once again: guilty as charged. They are green Communists, people who want the exact same global political and economic catastrophe that the earlier Communists worked so hard to achieve, but by using different arguments, different academic and scientific frauds and manipulations, different lies.

The basic problem with what Bob Ward said in his little contretemps with Fraser Nelson is not that Bob Ward is wrong about my motives, and he may even have been right also about Fraser Nelson's motives. No, Bob Ward's problem is that what we partisan politicos are saying about him and his fellow climate scientists is probably true. Wishing something to be true does not make it true, but neither does it make it false. What you want to be true sometimes is true. I and my political comrades do indeed want to believe that Bob Ward and his political comrades have been foisting a fraud upon the world, and we want this to be proved, asap. Boy, do we want it! We will rejoice at such an outcome, and absolutely will not be shutting up about the possibility of this, and reasons for hoping for this, in the meantime. But that does not mean that this outcome, if it materialises, will be unjust or untrue.

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History is an interesting thing, often said to be "written by the winners"... but is it? Certainly in much of Eastern Europe, the end of Communism did not necessarily means the political end of the communists behind the system.

James Mark is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter and he has written a very insightful article on the subject that I commend to all Samizdata.net readers.

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There is a very revealing article in the Guardian (natch) called 'East Germans lost much in 1989'. The 'money quote' (in GDR Marks of course) is:

On 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down I realised German unification would soon follow, which it did a year later. This meant the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the country in which I was born, grew up, gave birth to my two children, gained my doctorate and enjoyed a fulfilling job as a lecturer in English literature at Potsdam University. Of course, unification brought with it the freedom to travel the world and, for some, more material wealth, but it also brought social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an "elbow society" as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.

Yes it is hard to not shed a tear for all those unemployed Stasi and blacklisted apparatchik that made the whole system possible. I have long suspected the real reason the wall was built was to keep out the waves of oppressed Western workers who were flooding into the socialist worker's paradise and threatening to overwhelm the system.

More seriously, the blacklisting process did not go nearly far enough in my view. A large number of people who were the enablers of the communist state should have spent a great many years in gaol. In 1955 the USSR created East Germany... and it ended in 1990... so it would seem to me that putting the most egregious enablers of that system in gaol for thirty five years would be a measure of poetic justice for the people who lost a generation of personal liberty by living in that open air prison called East Germany. Blacklisted? Apologists for tyranny deserve far worse than just being 'blacklisted'.

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Bishop Hill:

Devil's Kitchen has a must-read post up, detailing the increasing use of enabling legislation by the government. And he doesn't swear at all - must be serious.

Indeed.

I daydream that one day, a British Cabinet Minister will grab hold of one of the laws that DK writes about, where it says that, if there is a crisis (and it is up to him to decide), then he, the British Cabinet Minister, may do whatever he considers to be appropriate (i.e. whatever he damn well pleases). I daydream that he, the British Cabinet Minister, will bring into the House of Commons a huge list itemising all the laws that he is now going to repeal, just like that, no ifs no buts no discussion, because he, the British Cabinet Minister referred to in one of the laws, says so, on account of there being a crisis caused by all the damn laws.

Impossible, you say? Very probably. But it is surprising how much of history consists of impossible dreams that were dreamed during earlier bits of history.

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So asks John McWhorter:

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.

But let's remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota.  So our case for preserving the world's languages cannot be based on how fascinating their variegation appears to a few people in the world. The question is whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.

See also this article about Indians who write their novels in English rather than in one of the local Indian languages, partly because they just do, and partly in order to increase their potential readership around the world. The piece is by Chandrahas Choudhury, himself the author of a novel in English. He also blogs.

Both pieces were recently linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, to whom thanks.

I suppose a danger of everyone on earth speaking the same language, as was explained in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is that we would all of us then understand each other's insults.

... the ... Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

But this is to assume that hostility causes wars. I think it is at least as true to say that wars cause hostility.

Quite aside from the rights and wrongs of English conquering everyone and everything, there is the intriguing question of whether it in fact will so triumph, or whether any other potential universal language, like Spanish or Chinese, will triumph, in the nearish future. Perhaps English will triumph, but in the process it may itself fragment. If one language does triumph, it may well be English, but not necessarily English as I know it.

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Some thoughts on Anglo-American history contrasted with Bavarian history - with possible political and/or cultural consequences. The main expanders of the state in 19th century Britain are remembered (at least by most of the minority of people who remember them at all) as good people.

Edwin Chadwick was a good man who urged for state police forces to be made compulsory in every town (done in 1835 as part of Municipal Corporation Act, the Act that swept away, apart from in the City of London, the nasty Tory closed corporations and created the new councils that would mean more economical local government - of course we are still waiting for those lower local taxes). And in the rural areas , achieved by the Act of 1856 (which also provided central government funding and controls) - before this time the people of the villages of England and Wales were savages who hunted each other for food.

Chadwick was also the nice man who saved us all from being killed by filth (government being the only thing that can provide water or remove waste you see) or falling over in the dark (government being the only thing that can provide street lighting) and so on on and so on. A noble reformer in the tradition of his mentor Jeremy Bentham (although Bentham's dream of 13 departments of state controlling every aspect of human life, had to wait till the 20th century to come to pass - even the national Public Health Board was repealed in 1858 in the time of the wicked Palmerston).

All of Chadwick's doctrines are described as things that "everyone agrees with" in J.S. Mill's "Political Economy" of 1848, of course there were large numbers of things that looked human that did not agree, but J.S. Mill did not count them as people (a full person being someone whose mind is fully developed - and whether someone had a fully developed mind could be determined by whether or not they agreed with J.S. Mill, this is also true of the Labour Theory of Value which was "settled" with everyone in agreement the people who did not agree, such as Richard Whately and Samuel Bailey, being nonpersons). Academics and media people carry on with J.S. Mill's tactic to this day, and like him, they talk endlessly of "freedom" and "liberty" as they do so.

There were some large cities in Britain were "public services" were mostly provided by private companies funded by voluntary payment (Newcastle for example) right up to the First World War, but conventional history draws a veil over such places.

Later on even the evil Tory folk (at least at the leadership level - which is often different to the drink sodden local Tory folk) accepted the need for reform and produced such noble people as Disraeli who as well as expanding the franchise (partly to people who would have lost it when the next generation of "pot wallopers" lost the vote under the noble Reform Act of 1832 - but we must not make history too complicated for the children) also did such things as try and put the unions above the Common Law on such things as obstruction ("picketing") and contract breaking (the effort behind the Act of 1875 - sadly held up by pesky court judgements till the Act of 1906) and further with such things as council housing (sadly only taken up by a few places before the First World War) and local government Acts (such as the one of 1875 which took about 40 different powers that before local councils might do and said they must do them - whether local rate payers liked the idea or not) and, of course, compulsory education (the Act of 1876 - for those places who had been enlightened enough to set up a School Board under the Liberal Government Act of 1870).

Even Gladstone can be thrown in (if one is selective) - with his support for government regulation (or outright control) of the railways, and his support for a government savings bank via the Post Office. And, of course, after Gladstone's "retirement" (which came as news to him at the time - but a veil can be drawn over that as well) the Liberal party was free of the reactionary parts of his thinking (one can tell the rare curious person that the reactionary parts of Gladstone's thinking came from him starting out as a Tory). There had once been a "voluntarist" stream within liberalism - but by the 1900's it was reduced to a rump (for the tradition of liberty in the various political parties see W.H. Greenleaf's "The British Political Tradition", two volumes, specifically the section titled "The Libertarian Strand").

In the United States things are much the same.

The man behind the revival of government education (it had declined in the 18th century and in the early 1800's) was the noble reformer H. Mann - with his religion of humanity style of thinking, the true "Father of American Public Schools" (and government madhouses, where some of the people who were shoved in were not mad when they first arrived - but let us not dwell on that...). A true citizen of Massachusetts. Followed decades later by the noble Bellamy brothers - Francis and Edward, with their Pledge of Allegiance (so beloved by conservatives who do not notice that it contains no mention of the United States Constitution - and this was no accident), and their religion without God, sadly reactionaries removed Francis Bellamy from his position as a minister over his desire to introduce a religion in which government, rather than God, is worshipped - he was ahead of his time, and there other ideas as advocated in their magazine "National Socialism" funded, in part, by the flag making companies (the Bellamy's ideas would mean that schools would buy flags - and their socialism would never be dangerous...).

Of course the biggest spending politician in 19th century America and the man who established that no State may leave the Union (regardless of anything the Constitution might or might not say) was the Henry Clay Whig ("a national bank, a protective tariff and internal improvements - these are my principles" first speech on slavery in 1854) Abraham Lincoln - another hero lauded by history.

Here I will get into trouble with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute people - as I hold that the Civil War was (in main part) about slavery. I do not believe that State governments like Virginia and North Carolina, which were (for the time) big government States - spending taxpayers money just about everything,, tried to leave the Union because they were concerned about the rise of big government. And the actual economic policies of the Confederacy during the war were actually more collectivist (on inflation, on "progressive" income taxes, on imprisonment without trial - although Governor Vance of North Carolina dissented from that), even than Lincoln's.

Abraham Lincoln was indeed a nasty piece of work, he was a corrupt politician (as his record in Illinois shows - although just about every politician was corrupt there, and they still are) a big government man - and incompetent to boot (with the overwhelming advantages Lincoln had the Civil War should not have lasted four years and cost 600,000 lives - it did, in part, because Lincoln was useless). Lincoln was far from the hero presented in the school text books and shown in the statues - but the other side was even worse, as southerners who faught for the Union like General George Thomas understood. As did other people from States such as Virginia, especially those people from what became West Virginia (as well as eastern Tennessee - which is Republican to this day) - oh yes many of the hill-billy Rednecks were for the Union although it has slipped down the memory hole now.

Even in the West pro Union (or "anti slavery" "free State" people - which is what they called themselves) groups were every bit as good fighters, and often every bit as brutal, as their foes - in a war that actually started in "bleeding Kansas" (although it spread to other areas - in the Civil War there was large scale fighting as far West as what would one day be the States of Colorado and Utah) before Lincoln - and lasted till the last remaining of those foes in arms, the James "gang" and the Youngers, were defeated in their raid on a town in Minnesota - decades after Lincoln was dead (defeated by local residents who out-shot them - although they did not hang the people they captured, Minnesota not having the death penalty for attempted armed robbery).

Although some have even claimed that the last gasp of the Civil War was on a street in Tombstone Arizona - where the Earp brothers (with the assistance of Doc Holliday - who rather complicates the picture, being both a TB sufferer and a "moral defective" - i.e. the sort of person who H. Mann and co would have had locked up back in Boston) defeated the Clantons and their friends. But I do not know enough about the situation there to make a judgement.

"Well what has this got to do with Bavaria Paul".

Simple enough, in both Britain and the United States statists of the 19th century have gone down as heros. The "reformers" in Britain were noble people (and by "reform" the history books and the culture that history informs do not mean the free trade movement or the movement to reduce taxes and government spending - liberals of the type of Joseph Hume are not what is meant).

And in the United States Lincoln is the liberator of the slaves (forget everyone else - and forget Lincoln's own incompetence), thus proving that big government (especially big centralized government) is noble. Again forget that Jefferson Davis (the President of the Confederacy) was an even bigger big government centralizer than Lincoln was (although the burning of the Confederate records in Richmond allowed Davis to pretend that he had not wanted to be) and...

In 19th century Bavaria things are not quite the same...

They start off the same - with noble reformers, in the early 1800's, imposing taxes on the nobles and Church and setting up compulsory education, and "ending serfdom" (which meant a rather different thing in Bavaria compared to other places - but such details can be kept from people).

But then things change.

Government is no longer about noble reformers - it is a matter of mad Kings building fairytale castles and subsidizing Richard Wagner (actually I prefer that, especailly the bit about building fairytale castles - but "progressives" do not). And then in the late 19th century government is not about noble Bavarians at all - it is about the dictates of an outsider.

Otto Von Bismark (not my favourate person - as some of you may know) could not claim to be the liberator of the slaves when he defeated Bavaria (and the other traditional Germanic states) in war. Nor was he romantically killed in the year of victory - in fact he clung on to power (by every corrupt means) till 1890 and lived on till 1898.

Nor was he even totally victorious - he had to make deals that gave Bavaria (and some other Startes) a wide measure of autonomy (even their own army).

Nor was Bismark even a democrat (and the constitutional form of democracy is the religion of Progressives - as long they totally control the "democracy" in practice) in fact he came to power by the whim of a King (the King of Prussia) and kept power by using the Prussian Army to trump the Prussian Parliament (collecting un-voted for taxes by force) and by a policy (and it was a policy - whoever formally declares war first, Bismark had written the script and manipulated everyone) of successful wars against Denmark, Hapsburg Austria (and the rest of the Germanic states that would not follow him) and France. Wars that made the name of Bismark a legend. Unlike Lincoln, Bismark choose the correct Generals and had clear military plans (rather than working from fantasy assumptions).

However, this did not make Bismark popular in Bavaria (unlike, oddly enough, a previous Prussian enemy of Bavaria - Frederick the Great in the 18th century, who at least had abolished torture and declared freedom of religion before he started his wars of conquest).

Nor did Bismark achieve popularity by his policy of persecuting the Roman Catholic Church in his "war of cultures" (which was going on at the same time as the start of the "War of Method" in economics - between the logical, partly Aristotelian, Austrian School of Carl Menger and the Historical, partly Hegalian, School of Bismark's Germany, although the actual economic policies of Austria were actually more statist than the traditional economic policies of Prussia).

The Welfare State (the dream of so many German thinkers for centuries) was achieved by Bismark - at first on a tiny scale (the seeds would grow), but all the essential features (bar unemployment "insurance" which Germany did not have till after the First World War) were introduced by Bismark - but he can not be praised as the creator of the Welfare State by Progressives in Germany, especially in areas (such as Bavaria) which he defeated and persecuted the people of. Especially as Bismark eventually lost his "war of cultures" - and had to go begging to the Roman Catholics for aid against the socialists (Bismark had subsidized socialists early in government, as a stick to beat liberals with, - the socialists were Bismark's monster, but he lost control of them).

In Britain the creator of the first Welfare State schemes (again on a tiny scale at first) was the Progressive hero Lloyd George.

And in the United States the first Presidents to talk of such things (although they did not achieve them - due to the resistance of evil reactionaries in Congress) were the Republican "Teddy Roosevelt" (held as a hero by John McCain and cited on health care by Barack Obama) and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson (the first American President to have spoken admiringly of socialism - although he was careful not to do so publicly, the little people were not ready they had not been "educated" enough yet). Both of these men are presented as hero types, good guys - and most people have some vague idea of them (or know someone who does - the names have been heard of and are "good names").

But after the fall of Bismark the man who led the charge for statism in Germany was the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) - who had actually kicked out Bismark for not being statist enough (the Kaiser wanted more welfare schemes, more colonies, a bigger navy - and so on and so on).

Opinions of the Kaiser vary wildly - to some he was a racist madman bent on world conquest, to others he was a well meaning kindly man, who was scared of all the big powers around Germany and has been repeatedly misquoted. However, there are few people who hold Wilhelm II to be a hero - he made repeated misjudgements (the first being to break the alliance with Russia - a misjudgement that Bismark desperately tried to prevent) and then managing to alienate Britain (the traditional ally of Prussia), by a series of misjudgements.

The Kaiser has all the faith that Bismark had in "blood and iron", but none of Bismark's skill in politics/warfare. The Kaiser was more on the skill level of Lincoln - but Lincoln's Union free population outnumbered the free population of their enemies by about four or five to one (that comes as a shock to modern Americans - who live in an environment where southerners have been out breeding northerners for decades, and where people who live in the mountain and hill country of the South also count themselves as "southern" which was not always so in the past), the Kaiser was outnumbered (greatly outnumbered) by the people he made the enemies of Germany.

The Kaiser led Germany to defeat - and how can a Prussian King come German Emperor be a hero for modern Progressives anyway? Remember their love of the forms of constitutional rule (the German Parliament was democratically elected - but the Kaiser choose the ministers).

Things go on:

In the 1920's and 1930's the main leader in developing welfare state schemes in Britain was Neville Chamberlain (working in the tradition of his father "radical Joe"), but memory of Neville Chamberlain is so dominated by his policy of talking to the National Socialist government in Germany that things like his housing policy or his general policy of taking the schemes of Lloyd George and working them up into univeral policies is overshadowed). Besides Chamberlain can be presented as a "reactionary" because of his insistence that welfare state schemes be paid for by taxation - rather than by borrowing and printing. And borrowing and printing (and modern variations of printing money) are the road to prosperity, especially in a slump, - as every progressive academic and media person knows.

In the United States there was little Progressive going on in most of the 1920's (apart from government racism and prohibition - but it is forgotten that these were parts of the Progressive movement). However, then came FDR - President Roosevelt (Roosevelt the Second) who "saved America from the Depression" and "won World War II".

Of course FDR did not save America from the Depression (caused by the credit money bubble of Ben Strong's Federal Reserve and President Hoover's panic response to the bursting of the bubble) - like Herbert "The Forgotten Progressive" Hoover, everything that President Roosevelt delayed recovery ("he had to do something" - well he could have cut taxes and government spending as Warren Harding did during the slump of 1921, after the collapse of the World War One credit bubble, and the economy was in recovery within six months "we do not mean that").

However, President Roosevelt was around during World War II and the Nazis and Imperial Japan were defeated. And, contrary to some of the Ludwig Von Mises institute people, it was right for the United States to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan (it was just wrong not to defeat the Communists as well - when America had the chance). So FDR goes down as a hero - as does his statism.

In Germany in the 1920's there was first the Weimar Republic (a total mess that even the Progressive can not claim was a great success) and then the leader of Progressive politics in Germany in the 1930's - whose policy of government spending, printing and borrowing, and direct controls of prices and wages (and so on) was so praised by J. M. Keynes in the introduction to the German edition of the "General Theory..." in 1936 - Adolf Hitler. Of course Lloyd-George was a big fan to - rightly seeing in the economic policies of the Nazis the logical destination of his own thinking, and dreaming that (even at his advanced age) a deal could be made with Germany to bring him back to power (however let us not confuse the kiddies with that stuff).

It is not respectable in Germany to be a fan of Adolf Hitler (although a politician in Austria did try and praise Hitler's employment policies - but he is dead now), so the Progressive can not use Hitler as a hero.

After World War II the United States has the "Fair Deal" effort of President Truman - defeated by "reactionary" elements in Congress (as with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson), but Progressives can still point to Truman as a hero and say "he was in favour of these things - if only they had come to pass".

In Britain they all did come to pass of course - the final transformation of the schemes of Lloyd-George and Neville Chamberlain into a fully formed Welfare State (with no limits on its further development). And nationalization and "planning" and other controls and...

And the Atlee government is widely held (by the education system and the media) to be the foundation of post war prosperity in Britain - so his policies must have been correct. The fact that Britain fell behind virtually every other Western European country (and many outside Western Europe) in economic growth after World War II can be ignored - so much if they got richer faster, we were still better off and that must be because of Atlee and his Progressive politics (although if only they had been more Progressive as Harold Laski wanted - then Britain would be as prosperous as North Korea).

However, Germany after World War II was the land of Ludwig Ernhard (who first started as an adviser to the Bavarian government before he moved to the national scale) and Konrad Adenauer. The land of radical deregulation and free markets.

So it is hard to see how the Progressives can claim that the "German economic miracle" after World War II was the result of Progressive policies (it was the result of "reaction" of the most literal kind - reaction against both the policies of World War II and the pre war policies of Hitler and the National Socialists).

However, Germany began to move away from the free market path in the late 1960s and in the 1970's.

Just as the United States had President Johnson (whose Welfare State policies are also attributed to President Kennedy - although I have never seen much evidence that Jack Kennedy believed in building a Welfare State) and President Nixon (who expanded Johnson's "Great Society" and added massive regulation of the economy on top) and Britain had Harold Wilson and Edward Heath (see Johnson and Nixon), so Germany had Willy Brandt and Helmet Schmidt.

And as with Britain and the United States the 1960s and 1970's are remembered in Germany (especially by people who look back with the rosy glasses of the memory of their youth) as a time of consumer pleasure (yes even in Britain - people remember the bright colours and forget the unburied dead) and sexual revolution - and whatever the long term consequences of the "sex, drugs and rock and roll" (que Samuel Adams 1772 quote about those who seek to undermine the liberty of the people first conspire to corrupt their morals, and then add in musings about the lies of Kinsey Report of the late 1940's and the intentions of the left to...) it was fun for the people involved - at least if they did not get to closely involved and got made deaf by the pop music, or got a nasty sexual illness, or died of an overdose of drugs.

For the record I have my doubts about the Samuel Adams position - after all Americans may have been (were) a very socially conservative people in 1936 (for example the most religious people in the Western World, the old Nazi jibe about "German soldiers carry copies of Nietzsche's writings on the Superman - Americans carry copies of Superman comics" was false - American soldiers were more likely to carry a copy of the Bible than a comic, and to call on God in battle rather than a political leader), but that did not stop 60% of them voting for Franklin Roosevelt (thus showing a somewhat less than strong commitment to liberty - although the nature of the population did limit just how far FDR could go, he could never be worshipped as more important than God). However, it is true that there was one long Progressive orgy in the late 1960's and 1970's (eating the seed corn of the future in terms of industrial investment).

However, Bavarian just continued to be ruled by conservatives and not "conservatives" like Nixon, Heath, or George Walker Bush either. And this has continued right to our own times.

Even the government school system never had a great "Progressive" reform (as happened in Britain and the United States decades ago). Although there are signs of "legal" (i.e. activist court) attacks on religion in schools and there are signs that changes in German Federal tax law on inheritance may hit the family owned companies that have been the life blood of German manufacturing for centuries (already that vampire Warren Buffett has been seen in Germany).

However, over the last one and half centuries both Britain and the United States have had a strong Progressive tradition, but after the Progressive reforms of the early 1800's it is harder to maintain that Bavaria has such a strong Progressive tradition over the last one and half centuries. All this I think I have established above.

What are the political and/cultural consequences of this (if any)? I have written quite enough - so I leave this question for others.

(2)

... thirty nine years ago, the Dawson's Field hijackings were in progress.

I have long thought - longer than eight years - that the seeds of a poison tree were sown by an event that happened soon afterwards. To quote the Wikipedia entry linked to above:

About two weeks after the start of the crisis, the remaining hostages were recovered from locations around Amman and exchanged for Leila Khaled and several other PFLP prisoners.

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The Libertarian Alliance made a bit of a splash during the week, after a Daily Mail journalist conflated the LA's regular blogger, David Davis, with a man of the same name who happens to be a senior Tory MP. Sean Gabb, one of the head honchos of the LA, has had a bit of fun with this, and very enjoyable it is to watch the discomfiture of a journalist who, plainly, did not do the necessary checks.

But during my reading of this silly saga, I came across Sean Gabb's thoughts about the start of the Second World War - 70 years ago - which the Daily Mail journalist came across, and which no doubt prompted some sharp intakes of breath. Here is his opening paragraph:

"Today is the 70th anniversary of our declaration of war on Germany. My own view is that this was the greatest single disaster in British and perhaps world history. It beats the decision to go to war with Germany in 1914. That was a disaster in its own right, but did not necessarily mean the destruction of western civilisation. By 1945, around fifty million Europeans had been killed in battle or murdered or starved or bombed, and Bolshevik Russia was supreme across half the continent. British liberalism and world power had collapsed. Their best replacement was American corporatism with its increasingly ludicrous fig leaf of “human rights” and “democracy”. None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war."

Repeat that final sentence: "None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war".

It seems to me that Sean Gabb is seriously overplaying the argument and as a result, has rendered it seriously defective, in my opinion. For a start, it is far from clear to what extent Britain, and its then-empire, could have "stayed out" of a conflict involving various European nations only a few hundred miles away. For instance, one question I would put to Sean and others is this: how neutral could Britain have been, and to what extent would it have been endurable, either morally or practically, for Britain to stand aside while millions of refugees, such as Jews, sought a place of escape? For example, suppose that Hitler had demanded, as a condition of UK neutrality, that the UK ban any of its citizens from joining anti-Nazi resistance movements, or even promoting causes designed to weaken Hitler's regime?

It is also, in my view, verging on outright nuttiness to suggest that had Britain stood aside, that Western civilisation would have been saved in some way. Western civilisation necessarily includes the West, ie, Western Europe - you know, places such as France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Scandanvian nations, and so forth. It is not just about the UK, North America and the Anglosphere diaspora. And consider this point: had Hitler defeated Soviet Russia, and the whole Eurasian continent, from Bordeaux to Vladivostok, fallen under his iron hand, it is naive to suppose that this would be a great result for "Western civilisation". At best, the remnants of that civilisation would have lived under the shadow of a huge and menacing empire, based on racial and socialist dogmas that are too obviously horrifying to need spelling out.

So while I can heartily endorse Mr Gabb's disgust at some of the outcomes of the war and its cost, his argument does not convince me. That is not to say that there are not revisionist interpretations of WW2 that do not deserve taking seriously, nor do we have to denigrate those men, such as former UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who worked so hard to avert a conflict. But unlike Sean Gabb, I am glad that the young Winston Churchill escaped a violent death during his soldiering days, and ignored the advice of those who imagined that Britain could cut some sort of deal with a revolutionary racialist-socialist with a proven record of deceit.

Victor Davis Hanson has a good take on WW2 revisionists like Pat Buchanan. I also recommend this post by Patrick Crozier, taking on, and taking apart, the arguments of Ralph Raico, another revisionist, but unlike Buchanan, is a libertarian.

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Here is a story about a woman, who recently died at the great age of 98. She helped send thousands of young Jewish people to safety in WW2. This is an amazing story. Her tale needs to be more widely known. RIP.

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There are lots of bridges in Normandy - like this elegant beauty of civil engineering - but in this very pleasant region of northern France, few such constructions carry more historical significance and reminders of the costs of war than this one. I visited the Pegasus Bridge museum during a very enjoyable trip to the region last week on holiday. I also went to Arromanches, which has an excellent exhibition about the Normandy landings. You can see the remaining bits of the old Mulberry harbours that were used by the Allies to land their equipmment before the main ports along the French coast were eventually captured.

Most of the folk in France last week were enjoying the usual August holidays without a care in the world. I like to think that is what the men who fought so brilliantly to liberate the Continent would have wanted us to do: have a good time.

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I must admit that in many respects, I find the former Labour cabinet minister, Roy Hattersley, to be a bit of a buffoon in his clinging to socialist dogmas of a planned, highly taxed economy. But he can write: and this essay on the funeral of Harry Patch, who had been the last surviving British soldier of the First World War, is first class.

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August 4th was one of the good anniversary dates of the French Revolution, argues our own Paul Marks. Here is his comment from a year ago, explaining why.

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One of the most evil books I ever read was a quite short Penguin paperback that I inherited from my father. It was written not long after World War 2, when the pre-war trickle of honest reporting about the horrors of Stalin's USSR was becomimg a post-war, Cold War, gush. But the author of that Penguin paperback argued that, since very few of these reports were first-hand and in writing, they could be dismissed as merely malicious gossip. Beautiful. The Soviet Government shifts heaven and earth to obliterate all first-hand, written reports of its crimes. It then, echoed by persons like the evil writer of that evil paperback, declares that, in the absence of the very written reportage which it has laboured so hard to suppress, these crimes are imaginary, invented by malevolent enemies of the inevitable and noble tide of history. After I had read that evil paperback, I understood far better Alexander Solzhenitsyn's obsession about getting the Gulag story, with its wealth of first hand accounts, into print in such voluminous detail.

I cannot now locate that evil paperback, although I believe I still own it. Such is the disorder that is my library that if I do still own it, the book is hidden from view. Contrary to the argument made in it, this does not mean that it does not exist or that its author never said what he said, or that him having said it is of no significance. On the other hand, neither does him having said what he said automatically make what he said true, for in fact what this particular writer said was evil lies.

It may seem odd to be starting a piece about medieval history with this uncertain recollection of a book which I have not recently set eyes on, concerning the recent and recently collapsed USSR. But not long ago I stumbled upon a debate about how to write medieval history which reminded me of the claim made in that evil book.

My recent interest in medieval history was provoked by the purchase of a book about a man called Mortimer, by a man called Mortimer. The overlap is potentially confusing, but surely not surprising. Had a man called Micklethwait been the ruler of England between, say, 1327 and 1330, I would have been more than casually interested. Well, Roger Mortimer did rule England between those two dates. No wonder historian Ian Mortimer got interested, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this interest was what turned him into a historian in the first place.

I hugely enjoyed that book about Roger Mortimer. All previous attempts by me to put flesh on the bare bones of my schoolboy knowledge of those times, mostly consisting of a few history dates, had been engulfed in tedium. Yet now, I was suddenly engrossed in the fourteenth century. Partly, it must have been because I was at last ready to be fascinated by it. My historical knowledge had finally, tediously, arrived at the state where a bit of medieval detail finally had a bulky enough structure to get attached to. But there was something else going on in Ian Mortimer's book about his namesake besides my mere readiness to take it it. I found the book to be, as they say, a page turner, something I had never experienced before with a book about medieval history. When I learned that Ian Mortimer had written a follow-up volume to his Roger Mortimer book, about the king who toppled Roger Mortimer, Edward III, about whom (not least because neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had written any plays about him) I knew pretty much nothing apart from his presumed involvement in a couple of those schoolboy history dates (Battle of Crecy 1346 and Black Death 1349), I bought that, and immediately became engrossed in that book also. A further book by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV wasn't quite the thrill that its two predecessors had been, if only because Henry IV did marginally less exciting and surprising things than Roger Mortimer and Edward III, but that too was pretty good, and contained many fascinating titbits. (For instance, did you know that when Henry IV ascended the throne of England, he was the first English monarch to proclaim his newly monarchical status in a document written in English? Well perhaps you did know this, but I didn't.) And now, I am looking forward to reading this, which will flesh out another big history date. And after that one, there will be yet more. To get a sense of what Ian Mortimer is all about without buying any books, try reading one of these. (Some of these pieces I like, others not so much.)

But what was it about Ian Mortimer's writing that so fascinated me, when so many other writings about the same historical era had failed to strike any sort of spark?

I found a clue in the introduction to the third book, the one about Henry IV. Apparently debate has long raged among professional historians about the very possibility of writing satisfactory biographies of medieval personalities, a debate which Ian Mortimer describes thus (pp. 9-10 of my paperback):

There was for many years a general perception that biography was too populist a medium for serious consideration. 'It is despised by the hard and practised by the soft in one discipline after another', wrote a correspondent in the Times Higher Educational Supplement in 1987. Sixty years earlier K. B. McFarlane had declared that 'the historian cannot honestly write biographical history; his province is rather the growth of social organisations, of civilisation, of ideas'. One could talk about a king's reign, or the interaction between a king and his people, but biography itself was seen in a negative light on account of its sympathetic (as opposed to objective) approach, or, as other critics have said, because biographical authors 'opt for narrative rather than analysis'. Thus, for most of the twentieth century, academic historians tended to write history books about individuals, not biographies, and justified this on the grounds of the intellectual superiority of the objective, analytical approach. At the same time, there was a widespread belief in literary circles that a 'proper' biography could not be written for a character living before 1500, as personal letters do not normally survive to attest to what the subject thought or felt. This view was seized on by the anti-biographical academics and used as a justification for why it was essential to avoid the biographical medium when writing about medieval political figures: the whole exercise was impossible, they said, 'for the sources to permit such a study have not survived'. For decades no one exposed the weaknesses of this view.

That struck a chord, both in terms of what it said about how medieval history should be written, and how it shouldn't. What it should be, these anti-biographical academics had been saying, was tedious analysis of the development of "social organisations, of civilisation, of ideas". And what it should not be was like the stuff Ian Mortimer writes, and which I had been so greatly enjoying.

I also possess other Penguin paperbacks, this time ones which I can lay my hands on, with titles like English Society in the Early Middle Ages, these being the books about medieval history that I had, over the decades since my school history lessons, tried and failed to read. I do not say that the growth of the manorial system, say, or the rise of trade and the weakening of feudal ties, were social processes and civilisational developments which did not happen or were of no significance. But such things do not explain why particular events occurred. The Battle of Crecy, for instance, did not happen merely because of certain social processes - even though plenty of interesting and important social processes are illustrated by that battle, notably the rise to prominence of the unmounted, unwealthy footsoldier as a military force to be reckoned with (see also Peasants Revolt 1381). Crecy happened because two kings - two individual persons - decided that it should happen. One king, Edward III of England, was in France with an army, spoiling for a fight. The other, the King of France, felt he had no choice but to oblige, what with all the spoiling that would otherwise have continued, on his land, had he decided not to fight. So, to understand what happened and why, you need, in particular, to understand the individual attitude of Edward III, the man who set all this in motion. Why did Edward III think it a proper, even noble, use of his time and resources to invade France? Ian Mortimer's writing, to put it bluntly, makes sense of the times and events he is describing. Certain powerful individuals made decisions with big consequences for the lives of others, and with the available facts Ian Mortimer gets as far as he can inside the heads of such persons, to explain why they thought of themselves as they did, and why they decided to do what they decided to do. The most pertinent historical analysis of events, medieval or otherwise, is, again and again, biographical analysis. X did Y because of the kind of person X was and because of how X thought of himself. As Ian Mortimer says of his namesake (p. 10):

For example, in order to understand Roger Mortimer's actions against Edward II in 1322-6, it is necessary to understand his earlier loyalties, disappointments, military experiences and political awareness from his own point of view.

All those, for me, relatively unexciting ruminations about the manorial system and suchlike embody a moral judgement of medieval times, to the effect that the experiences of ordinary people should not be written out of history, however insignificant these experiences may have been thought to be at the time. Quite so. But it is one thing to regret that ordinary people counted for so little in those times and to believe that they should have counted for more; it is quite another to suggest that no individual counted for as much then as individuals have in more recent times. On the contrary, one of the features of life in settled times and places such as my own is that I and my lucky contemporaries in countries governed as mine now is are not now at the mercy of cruel or incompetent individuals to anything like the same degree that most other people have been in the past, and that many people still are, and in the way that almost everyone was in medieval times. Oh, my finances get regularly mucked about because of the mistakes of powerful people. But these are mere pinpricks when compared with what it must have been like for a French peasant, perhaps already on the edge of starvation, who found himself and his dependents on the receiving end of some of that spoiling that Edward III did in order to provoke the battle of Crecy, or to be an Englishman of any kind during the latter stages of the disastrously cruel and incompetent reign of Edward III's father, Edward II (the king deposed by Roger Mortimer). If you were a lowly farm worker, it mattered desperately whether the king who reigned over you was capable (like Edward III) or not (Edward II). The former, and war and its associated havoc and misery was a distant rumour in France. The latter, and the havoc was all too likely to happen all over you. So, to simply block out the individual decision making processes of individual people like Edward II or Edward III, to block out the fact that all those ideas and social processes had their greatest impact in shaping what such individual men decided to do, and how to do it, and where to do it, and who to do it to, is like trying to understand a car while ignoring the nature and impact of the petrol that powers its engine. And you also, let it be added, block out one of the most characteristic and distressing experiences endured by all those ordinary people in those times, which was what happened to an ordinary person when bad luck or bad judgment caused an ordinary person to get in the way of an extraordinary person, like a powerful or vengeful or angry king. Such history is The Godfather without Brando or Pacino, just a great crowd of extras labouring away in the fruit business. Which is interesting, if you are interested only in that kind of thing, but I want more. And it's not only me. Ian Mortimer paperbacks are now to be found in all the history sections of the mainstream bookshops. He is now a successfully self-employed historian.

The written evidence of the lives of these extraordinary and powerful medieval individuals is indeed harder to come by than about powerful people of later times. But historians must do their best, and if Ian Mortimer's work is an example, their best can be very good indeed. What is more, as Ian Mortimer says (p. 11):

This ... leads us to ask why a biography based on a man's actions should not be every bit as 'biographical' as a life based on his letters? Indeed, we delude ourselves if we think that letters prove a man's feelings, or necessarily convey an accurate impression of his inner life. Men and women may misrepresent themselves and their feelings in their letters for any number of reasons, consciously and subconsciously, perhaps due to momentary depression or elation, or even due to their inability to express themselves. In a long summer of happiness, one may take a moment just to write down a single line of regret or bitterness, and what is left of that summer a hundred years later? But although men and women often deceive in what they write, it is rare that they deceive in what they do.

It would seem that Ian Mortimer's attitude to medieval biography is now becoming more fashionable, for he introduces all these ruminations thus (p. 9):

In the summer of 2003 a whole string of leading medievalists attended a conference at the University of Exeter on 'The Limits of Medieval Biography'. Almost all echoed the conclusion of the keynote speaker: that biography was not only one of the most important approaches to the past, it might actually be the most important, for 'only through biography could one argue why this had happened, or that had not happened'.

Exactly so. And more public and less personal writings than letters and diaries must, as my opening paragraph in this posting illustrates, be treated with even more suspicion, as all honest historians have long known. In the matter of the USSR, the truth of the deeds presided over by that extraordinary individual, Stalin, speaks far louder than the torrent of lying words that Stalin's governmental apparatus also unleashed.

And the extreme excitement and enjoyment that I got from reading Mortimer's medieval trilogy (so far) of biographies was derived from the fact that I was finally not just reading about but understanding what was going on.

When I read what Ian Mortimer said about how "anti-biographical academics" had "seized upon" the difficulties of medieval biography to say that medieval biography simply could not be properly done, I believe that I also heard an echo of that vile writer who claimed that since the evidence of Stalin's alleged atrocities was, allegedly, not available in writing, that too was a kind of knowledge which it did not make sense to pursue.

I do not want to suggest that all those medieval historians whom I found to be boring were also evil, although I am sure that some of them were. But I do at least speculate that, intellectually, some of their anti-individualist emphasis may have shared the same evil intellectual ancestry. Communists were definitely responsible, if not for creating, then at least for reinforcing the notion of history as the working out, in a succession of stages, of impersonal, abstract social and economic forces, in a way that made the mere decisions of individuals relentlessly less significant than they, or Ian Mortimer, or I, think that they actually were or are. In writing like this about the past, Communists were seeking to create a kind of historical momentum behind the idea that individualism of the sort that Ian Mortimer and I both regard as a permanent fact of history - the fact that what powerful individuals think about and decide to do matters - is really only a passing phase. Such individualism, they tried to suggest, counted for less in medieval times. Social forces and social systems and social institutions counted for more. Which makes it that much more credible that individual decision-making might, for equal and opposite reasons to the ones that caused it to rise, fall again. Were individuals making big decisions in medieval times? No. If they thought they were, they were deluding themselves. If we think they were, we are deluding ourselves. Do we now make a silly sentimental fuss about how other individuals fell foul of another very significant and powerful individual, Stalin? A silly and sentimental fuss is also all that that is. You can't stand in the path of history, and you shouldn't try to.

The above is, I think, a fair summary of the intellectual atmosphere that has surrounded the Soviet-inclined brand of Communism during the twentieth century. And now that Stalin's successors and what remain of their apologists elsewhere have found themselves on the receiving end of some more history of a sort that their Communist prejudices did not prepare them for, it makes sense to me that this Communist attitude should now be in retreat, and that a more realistic approach to the importance of medieval individuals should now be catching on amongst historians.

Such speculations about a possible link between anti-biographical medieval historians and the more recent sort of anti-individualists are reinforced by an Ian Mortimer endnote (note 18, p. 389), which reveals that the piece he quotes from the Times Higher Educational Supplement, published on October 9th 1987, was by a certain Eric Homberger. That is where Ian Mortimer got his K. B. McFarlane quote from. Both McFarlane and Homberger are new names to me, so I did some googling. I found very little about McFarlane, more about Homberger. Homberger is not remotely a slavish Stalinist, but he has written, I'm guessing not unsympathetically, about American Communists of yesteryear who were closer to that kind of foolishness, and his political inclinations are definitely towards the left. Might Homberger perhaps be the kind of leftist who regards Stalinism as an individualist deviation from the true faith, rather than the kind of thing that should have been expected in any time or place that took Communism seriously? Might he be someone who, noticing that that inevitable and noble tide of history, in which earlier leftists had invested such hopes, has not obliged, still believes that it should have, and that one day it still might? If Ian Mortimer himself has any such suspicions he keeps them to himself, perhaps wisely.

But now, I am entering "But what do I know?" territory, a land I often stray into when blogging, if only because commenters often know far more about whatever it is than I do. And since this posting of mine, although rather long, is still only a loose-ended blog posting rather than a properly topped and tailed essay, I would be particularly interested to read comments on the degree to which the anti-biographical arguments I have referred to really do overlap with concurrent Communist notions about more recent events. Was Homberger any sort of overt Communist sympathiser in his youth, and did other Communists and Communist sympathisers ever echo these anti-biographical sentiments? I'm guessing yes, but would dearly love to know chapter and verse.

Paul Marks, to name but one potential commenter on this, knows American Communism pretty well, and history, and well, everything. So, Paul?

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Via such blogs as this one (see the list of recent postings on other blogs), and this one (the previous list being how I got to that blog), I today encountered a video of someone called Ian Plimer plugging his latest book, which is called Heaven and Earth. Watch it here.

And here (via this posting) is a piece about an Aussie politician who seems to be following Plimer's lead.

I am no scientist, and politically I am heavily in favour of the free market capitalism that the Green Movement wants to shut down or at least castrate. So I would say all this. But I can honestly say that I find Plimer more convincing than those persons who talk about climate change as if the urgent need now is to stop all climate change (impossible) of as if those who doubt their prophecies of apocalypse (such as me) believe that climate is not now changing. The climate always changes.

Plimer is eloquent, and relatively brief. Even pro-AGW greenies would find this, I think, a quite useful short compendium of all the arguments against their views, in fact they already are using it this way. That's if they are interested in answering arguments, as some are.

The clearest insight that I personally got from this video performance was Plimer's claim that the AGW (as in anthropogenic global warming) people are all atmospheric scientists (insofar as they are scientists at all), who are plugging their apocalypse without looking at any other kinds of scientific evidence, or much in the way of historical evidence either. He also says that this particular evidence is itself very threadbare, but that is a distinct argument that I have long known about.

I was also interested that Professor Donald Blainey [Correction: Geoffrey Blainey], an Australian historian whom I have long admired, is in his turn an admirer of Plimer's book. Big plus, for me.

Plimer is optimistic that the current economic woes, woes that really are now being experienced by our entire species if not our entire planet, together with the little bit of cooling that has recently been happening, will concentrate people's minds on what a load of humbug the AGW scare is. No doubt pessimists commenting here will say that the damage has already been done, and will take decades to undo. I'll pass on that argument.

I now guess that the next argument for AGW here in Britain is going to be that since the BNP also says AGW is humbug, it must be true.

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How has the current Western political class come into being?

What economic, social, historical, cultural, technological or other factors have contributed to its growth and ascendancy?

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Calling a Roman Emperor a possible father of the West is problematic enough, but one from the late Empire is especially problematic.

Since the time of Diocletian peasants, the great majority of Roman citizens, had not been allowed to leave their farms - as it was feared they might be trying to dodge taxes by doing so. And since the time of Constantine it was "legal" to put peasants in chains if they were suspected of planing to leave.

And, of course, anyone below the rank of Senator was open to flogging and torture if Imperial officials felt such treatment was needed to get a confession for a crime or just to inspire greater tax revenue. Technically a town councillor could not be treated in this way, but such old fashioned legal technicalities were largely a dead letter in the late Empire. And even Senators could be flogged, tortured and murdered if the Emperor felt like it - because his will was law. In a way that baffled some barbarian tribesmen - who were used to a tribal chief not being able to change the basic laws of the tribe whenever he felt like it.

Roman legal practice (both due to the arbitary will of Emperors and the degenerate thinking of scholars) had long become infested with notions like the "just price" (of which there are traces even under the Republic) - defined not as a price freely arrived at by buyer and seller (an interpretation of the "just price" that one can see in one tradition of Roman law going from Classical times up through such things as Bavarian law in the 8th century, right to our own times) but as some "correct price" for bread (and other products), laid down by the arbitrary will of the ruler - in a way such tyrants as Charles the Great of the Franks (Charlemagne) and his pet scholars would have approved of centuries later.

Nor was Valentinian himself a gentle man - for example the punishment he brought in for trying to avoid conscription was to be burnt alive. Nor did Valentinian think of removing the ban on the private ownership, and training with, weapons - which under the Republic was just as much the mark of a free man, as it was among the Saxons or other such tribes.

Valentinian is also attacked for his "old fashioned" concentration on the frontier - building forts and other such, and stationing his best troops in the frontier areas (and leading them himself till he dropped dead of the strain of command). Rather than the enlightened "defence in depth" conception favoured by Emperors like Constantine.

The attack on Valentinian military policy is, however, wrong headed. At the time when men either marched or rode on horseback to war modern "defence in depth" ideas were not really an option. The main armies had to be on the frontiers or invasions would destroy whole provinces before "strategic reserves" could come up. After all just sending message for help could take weeks.

Nor was Constantine really thinking about "defence in depth". He created an elite army (with the best troops and equipment) and positioned them round himself in his new capital (Constantinople) to guard against frontier commanders doing what he himself had done - leading a military revolt against the Emperor. His plan was a political, not a military, one.

But just being correct on the military question would not make Valentinian a father of the West - after all the Roman Empire fell and (given the degenerate nature of the late Empire) probably had to fall for the West to be born. So Valentinian was, in the end, a failure and we should not be sad that only a few years after his death the Visigoths sacked Rome. Although this "in the long term it was for the best" thinking does leave aside the horror of the barbarian invasions themselves - and the fact that much of civilization was lost. For example Roman notions of sanitation (not a small point) only really returned to Europe in the mid 19th century.

And lastly I can not even claim that Valentinian did not add some statist ideas of his own. For example he set up a free medical service - and although it was only 12 doctors servicing the poor of the city of Rome (itself only a small percentage of the population of the Empire) this was yet another expense the Empire could have done without. And yet another betrayal of the old, pre "bread and games", Republic of independent families and voluntary association - at least the voluntary association of citizens.

So why the claim that Valentinian may have been one of the fathers of the West?

There are two reasons...

The first is land ownership.

Valentinian forbad slaves on the land being sold apart from the land they cultivated - a small point perhaps to a person in chains being flogged to work harder. "Rejoice, the Emperor has prevented you becoming just a thing that can be carried off at will" - but it did reinforce the idea that a person on the land (whether a coloni adscipticii or a formal slave) could not just be traded like a commodity, and it laid down a tradition that later people would work on far into the future. For example Hadrian IV (the only English Pope) ruleing, in the far off 12th century, that an estate owner could neither prevent his serfs marrying or break up their unions.

However, it is more than this.

For many years, indeed centuries, the Emperors had been confiscating land from "traitors" and other such. Land under state management did not produce the same level of produce over the long term as land under private ownership (for reasons which the Marxists and neo-Marxists, who have come to have such influence over classical studies in recent decades, seem unable to understand). So various Emperors tried to sell land - both to gain current income, and to increase the long term revenue of the land tax.

However, the Emperors tended to sell the land on leases - supposedly perpetual or emphyteuic leases (much like those granted in China since 1978), but leases still. So that the land could be confiscated again without the need to formally frame someone for "treason" or other serious crime. The confiscated land could then either be managed by the state, or sold on to someone else.

This system did not work very well, but Valentinian seems to have been the first Emperor to understand that. Hence the policy of granting land holding on the basis of ius privatum salvo canone - this was private ownership. Even failure to pay taxes (or what the Imperial officials claimed was failure to pay taxes - a standard dodge to confiscate land) did not, under the new system, give any right to confiscate the land itself.

Thus the idea was planted that whilst the government might claim ownership of the land in some sense it could not normally confiscate it or prevent familes passing it on to their children.

The various barbarian rulers (Ostrogothic, Visigothic or Frankish) indeed committed terrible crimes at times - but the idea that land was not just the plaything of the ruler did not die.

One can see this in such things as the Edict of Quierzy of 877 forbidding a King from confiscating a fief or preventing it being passed on to the next generation. This was not presented as a new restriction on Royal power (much though such tryants as Charles the Great might not have followed it their day), but as the defence of an ancient right.

The other claim to favour that Valentinian has is over religion:

Valentinian was a sincere Christian. This does not mean he was a nice man (see his burnings and so on), but it proved to be important for history.

Valentinian had not only been an open Christian under the pagan Emperor Julian (when being a Christian placed his prospects under a clowd), but he also seems to have the same "Catholic" opinions as the majority of Christians of his time. Unlike his brother Valens, who the Church later condemed as an "Arian" heretic who persecuted the true Christians.

I say "seems to have had" - for this brings me to the central point.

Valentinian refused to bring the power of the state into religious disputes.

Pagan Emperors had traditionally favoured Pagans - and Christian Emperors had not only favoured Christians but had favoured Christians of one or other of the many sects of Christian, persecuting all the others.

And when Valentinian died such persecution started up again - with the Emperor Theodosius (who came to power a few years later - first in the East and the in the West) persecuting not only pagans, but Jews and also any Christian who did not agree with him (and his faction of the Church) on every point.

But the memory of Valentinian's position did not die.

For centuries monks continued to write out Valentinian's reply to demands that he use the power of the state to decide religious matters and persecute dissent.

Rather than Constantine's position "What higher duty have I in virtue of my imperial office and policy than to dissipate errors and and redress rash indiscretions, as so to cause all to offer to Almighty God true religion, honest concord and due worship".

We have Valentinians' position "It is not right for me as a layman to meddle in such things. Let the Bishops whose business it is meet by themselves wherever they like".

Certainly the old Roman laws against eastern magic remained and there was even some action against the Manichees. But the general position was that religion was nothing to do with the magistrates - the civil power would not lend its arm for persecution.

This is a devstating position for persecutors - as right from the time of Augustine onwards they have tended to rely on the civil power to do their dirty work. Even if they, like the Spanish Inquisition of centuries later, dishonestly plea for mercy for the heretics when they hand them over to be executed (dishonestly as any magistrate who took the Spanish Inquisition at their word and showed mercy, would soon have a visit from the "Holy Office" themselves).

Whether the Church set up the persecuting organization itself (as with the centuries later Roman Inquisition) or the state creates the organization (as with the Spanish Inquisition) without armed men an Inquisition is of no importance.

And it was armed force that Valentinian was denying the persecutors.

In the centuries that followed Valentinian's interpretation of the position of the state tended to lose out.

As stated above Theodosius persecuted widely. Although, hypocritically, he did not try and impose his opinions (or perhaps those of his spiritual guide Ambrose of Milan) on the Visigoths - instead he made an alliance with them for the conquest of the Western Empire. An alliance that made itself felt at the terrible battle of the Frigid River in 394 when the Western army was broken by the alliance of the East and the barbarians.

Theodosius allowed the Visigoth barbarians to live inside the Empire on wide lands - untaxed. Which is libertarian in a way (if one ignores the fact that the lands in question were already settled) - but was a policy born of fear. Persecuting helpless Roman citizens was fine but armed Visigoths were quite another matter.

So it was in the Western Empire - more and more land was given or taken by the barbarian "federates" (normally heretics or pagans) and the Empire went down to collapse.

Meanwhile in the East persecution continued - till (in the 7th century) heretic Christian Arabs allied with new invaders who they hoped might treat them better than the Imperial government.

Thus the Empire of Islam was born.

However, the position of Valentinian was not forgotten.

Ever afterwards (thanks to the efforts of the monks of the Church itself) whenever someone wished to oppose persecution there was the example of respected ruler to be pointed to - and in centuries past every educated person knew of Valentinian and his position. And this Classical example eventually became one of the basic principles of the West.

(6)

The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the "Westminster Village" (see also: "Westminster Bubble") somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, "Westminster Village", right there in the title.

So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?

Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn't be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention - if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against - to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must "move on". We mustn't be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.

And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various "reforms" of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do