(7)

My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland:

The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams.

I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state, it is school examinations. Schools and parents and children need to be able to choose the best exams to take, and employers need to be able to choose which exam results they will take seriously. That way, exam results will change to suit the needs of the times, but will continue to be a meaningful test of educational excellence.

More than 30 schools have said the tests in English and maths, will be held over either two or three days.

The Association for Quality Education said the exams would be held in venues across Northern Ireland.

So far so good. But this is where the report becomes less pleasing:

However, Caitríona Ruane accused the schools of being elitist ...

Ah yes, elitist. What kind of a vicious school wants to teach only those pupils whom it wants to teach, and to teach them really well? Monstrous.

... and said they could face legal action from parents.

Parents, that is, demanding better exams results. At present, the government pays for all such litigation. An independent exam system will have to pay the costs of resisting all such legal challenges for itself.

Now comes the really scary bit, the bit that got me putting this here, rather than only, say, here:

"They have a choice, people always have a choice," the minister said.

"What I would say to them is think very carefully before you go down the route of bringing boards of governors into situations were they may find themselves spending their time in court."

This is the language of the Mafia.

What is happening here is that the state has made something, in this case exam results, so complicated and legally challengeable that only the state can easily afford all the litigation involved in supplying such a service. Then, they impose "progressive" and "radical" change, i.e. they wreck the state system. At which point, some people and some institutions try to make an independent go of replacing the formerly adequate (albeit ruinously expensive for the mere taxpayer) state service with one that they have devised themselves. And, legally, they can go it alone. They can do this. But the laws they have then to obey are so complicated that it will cost them an arm and a leg.

Back door abolition of whatever it is the politicians want abolished, in other words. Nationalise part of something. Throw money and laws at all of it, thereby herding everyone into the arms of the state system, on purely cost grounds. Then shut down whatever bits of the state system they always had in mind to destroy, and defy the "private" sector to respond, in an impossible legal environment that only the state can afford to function in.

Only very wealthy institutions can afford in their turn to defy such arrangements. Politicians duly denounce them as: very wealthy. If the private sector decides to charge quite a lot for the now very expensive service that they provide, they are accused of charging a lot. And the politicians use those excuses to pass yet more laws, if they prove to be necessary, turning difficulty into impossibility. There's a lot of it about.

The overall result in this case, Shane Greer fears, will be the destruction of the really quite good top end of the Northern Ireland education system.

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Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.

... Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”

There's a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for "not doing enough" on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain - and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address - liberty is no longer intelligible.

Does the word "liberty" appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? ...

Not here. But ... a Google site: search at www.curriculumonline.gov.uk brings up just two items.

The first is, a rather icky, PC, citizenship teacher's guide to the internet:

This unique and invaluable resource is a guide to the best of a huge collection of Citizenship resources available on the Internet. Fifty nine sites are included and each site is evaluated in terms of its content, usefulness, links and suitability. Sites included: ActionAid Schools and youth groups anti-slavery Central Bureau for International Education and Training Council for Education in World Citizenship Global Citizenship Global Dimension The Institute for Citizenship Montage Plus QCA Subjects Citizenship Hampshire Citizenship Project United Nations Home Page Knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens Campaign for Freedom of Information European Citizens' Rights The Citizenship Foundation Commonwealth Secretariat Council of Europe Education in Human Rights Network Europarl Explore Parliament The Hansard Society ippr Local Government Information Unit Local Government Association WEB SITE: Oxfam's Cool Planet Save the Children's Fund Scottish Human Rights Trust Department for International Development Understanding Global Issues Developing Skills of Enquire and Communication The Bar Human Rights Committee The Commission for Racial Equality : The Council of Europe Portal The British Institute of Human Rights The Runnymede Trust PICT Developing Skills of Participation and Responsible Action Amnesty International UK The Anne Frank Educational Trust UK The British Youth Council The Centre for Alleviating Social Problems Trough Values Education CEDC Community Education and Development Centre Community Learning Scotland Development Education Association Democracy 88 The Global Caf?? Age Concern Centre for Citizenship Studies in Education Human Rights Unit The Institute for Global Ethics NSPCC Kid's Zone : Liberty Peace Child Schools Council The Howard League The Human Rights Centre of The University of Essex Changemakers Windows on the World Worldaware This book comes with a disk that you can run through you web browser so that you just have to point and click to be connected to sites without having to type the address (you will need Internet access on your computer)

Not a huge variety of viewpoint there, though at least the "Liberty" referred to is the organisation of that name, which (in its soft-left way) definitely understands the meaning of the term.

The second is rather more sinister - a published standard lesson product, entitled "Why Obey the State":

Product Details
Description: Information about obedience to the state, with activities, for KS3 and KS4.
Publisher: Pearson Publishing (Publication date-15th Nov 2002)
Covers: Lesson
Teaching subject: Citizenship
Key Stage: Key stage 3 [11-14], Key stage 4 [14-16]
[...] Resource Information
Product type: Drill and practice
[...] Education Information
Covers: Lesson
Who is the resource for? Learner
General keywords: state, obey, democracy, intervention, liberty
National curriculum keywords: Citizenship and PSHE (Responsibilities - general information)

I wish I were making this up.

(48)

Fabian Tassano, who has recently written a rather fine book, links to this rather darkly amusing outline of how a country goes down the U-bend.

The interesting question is whether there is an equivalent series of steps showing how things get better. An issue that occasionally comes up in the comment threads is how do we get from the current god-awful statist mess A to sunlit uplands of liberal society B? What should happen first, second, third, fourth, etc? For instance, what would be the sequence of changes? Should we start with the little stuff (abolish the Arts Council, confine Polly Toynbee) or the Big Stuff (slash the Welfare State, abolish state education departments, repeal most taxes)?

(22)

Overheard this morning on Topsail Island, North Carolina, not far from USMC Camp Lejeune...

Two Chinook helicopters flew down the coast at low level, almost directly over the beach:

Male Person on Beach: Damn I hate it when they fly right down the coast like that, it's inconsiderate.

Female Person on Beach: Well I kinda like it, honey. That there is the sound of Freedom.

(72)

As suggested by a Samizdata reader called Hugo, I am going to kick off a Friday discussion which takes the following line: "A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we'd let people starve in the streets."

I think the contention would be grossly unfair, to put it mildly. Libertarians oppose the welfare state, we do not oppose welfare. That logically means that we support charity, although not necessarily existing charities, many of which have been subsumed by the state. As history has shown, mutual aid and philanthropic societies typically thrive because of, not in spite of, a powerful pro-freedom, pro-free enterprise culture. The belief that we are entitled to pursue our self-interest (so long as it does not involve aggression, theft or fraud) does not clash with the idea that it is good to be generous and helpful to those who have been dealt a crap hand in the cardgame of life.

In fact, the philosopher David Kelley recently wrote a book, which I heartily recommend, saying that feelings of generosity and benevolence towards one's fellow Man are an actual consequence of a society where people feel no shame or guilt about the pursuit of happiness in this life. In many cultures, including the Judeo-Christian one, generosity is a duty that is owed at the command of God. However, in the sense that Kelley and I use it, a generous, friendly approach to our fellows does not have to be commanded because such a trait generates long-term benefits to the giver as well as the recipient. This guy makes a good set of points in a review of Kelley's book. Okay, vicious, grasping people may be happy in the very short run after they have achieved their goals, but they usually have very few friends and often end up getting shunned. And being shunned is not very nice.

Given all this, a society in which every able-bodied person had to work if they had no private income, and where the rise in wealth would be great because of a free market system, is likely to be one in which there would be plenty of people willing to give to charity to help out the infirm, the handicapped, and so on. It also goes without saying that the idea of poor people starving in the streets would be a near-impossibility in a dynamic economy oozing with wealth and ideas.

The one place where starvation of the poor is a likely occurrence, of course, is under collectivism. Just look at the great socialist disasters of the 20th Century.

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David Selbourne is one of those intellectual figures who swims in similar currents to that of John Gray: mixing a sort of gloomy, conservative (small c) dislike of much modern culture and public life; a sort of grumpy dislike of the inevitably messy impact of individual liberty combined with a sort of authortarian desire for those in power to somehow rein in all this terrible individualist excess and take us back to say, 1950. Tim Worstall, well known around here, subjects his latest article to a fairly gentle fisking.

Here is the original piece by Selbourne. It follows a similar, arguably even more incoherent rant in the Spectator last week (sorry, I could not get the link to work, so you will have to trust me). Here he goes:

To expect the fulfilment by the citizen of his or her duties is no impertinence. It is essential to liberal democracy. Indeed, government ministers today speak hesitantly of a need for "constitutional renewal" or for a more "contractual" relationship between citizen and state. Under it, the performance of civic duties would be made a condition for the gaining of rights, many of the latter now routinely and shamelessly exploited by rich and poor alike.

As Tim puts it:

To return to a feudal system in which I owe duties to My Noble Lords in return for whatever rights they might see fit to grant me? Fuck that quite frankly.

Quite. Feudalism is actually a polite word for what this character wants to impose. A society in which freedoms are handed over like sweets in return for the prior performance of duties might be known as something rather ruder, like fascism.

Or maybe the problem could be more easily solved if Selbourne was honest about what he understands the definition of "rights" to be. In the classical liberal sense, a right is nothing more than a prohibition on the initiation of force against a person and his or her property; under socialism, the term "right" has been debauched into a claim on things such as the "right" to "free" schooling, which means that someone else be coerced into paying for the latter. The former negative definition of a right implies no such zero-sum game.

Selbourne must surely have heard of Isiah Berlin's famous attempt to unscramble this confusion.

(16)

This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn't put it up a week ago, when I should have.

So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we'd talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And "Devil's Kitchen", one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:

We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen's Tavern, Westminster.

Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …

So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen's Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil's Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. "They all are", he said.

I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.

Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.

But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.

I also learned something else. Mr Devil's Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That's another thing that maybe should not count, but does.

(1)

Over on The Line is Here, they are hosting the Carnival of the Libertarians, where various folks sound off about, surprise surprise, issues to do with liberty.

Check it out.

(9)

The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years.

This quote is great:

“The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”

Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter.

(11)

I like this:

For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.

"Us" being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although I link from Rao would have been good.

To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people's religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.

Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!

Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you're there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.

I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao's argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).

That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.

(4)

On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.

The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: "How to Cure Government Obesity," which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.

Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA's president, by email: tim [at] libertarian [dot] co [dot] uk. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.

I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It's the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves - even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed "the rape of the libraries" and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.

(19)

David Mamet, the US playright who for most of his adult life thought of himself as a liberal in the US sense - ie, a leftist with a favourable view of government - has had a sort of epiphany:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

He finishes thus:

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Interesting. Sowell is primarily an economist - and a great one - rather than a philosopher, although he has written on the topic (his debunking of Marxism is first-class). Even so, Mamet joins that small but influential group of writers, like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who have become disenchanted with the default mode of big government worship of their peers. Mamet deserves applause for writing this piece; it appears in the Village Voice, and I bet his readership will get a sharp dose of the vapours.

(25)

A friend of mine ("Don't give any names!") has just told me some very good news. The friend of mine's landlady has a way of dealing with nasty lodgers, who don't pay (despite being warned), or who make too much noise at night (despite being warned), or who do anything else evil (despite being warned). She expels them! That's right, she chucks them out. This is illegal, and they (the scum being chucked out) often point this out. But it works. She has her own locks to the doors, which she duly locks. And just puts all their crap out onto the street and refuses to let them in ever again. They have the law on their side, but what bloody use is that if you need somewhere to live tonight and all your crap is out on the street? The law takes months!

The landlady has now done this thirty six times, including last Sunday, just after Church (the landlady is a born again Christian). They smoked indoors, and left hairs in the bathroom. They were warned, but paid no attention.

Good to know. Civil society is being re-established. See this, linked to, again, by Patrick Crozier today, for details. Be civil. Or suffer the consequences.

(51)

Rob Johnston has produced a very interesting essay on the true soulmates of Green Politics in Britain

• Forbid the purchase of corner shops by migrants
• Stop people from inner cities moving to the countryside to protect traditional lifestyles
• Grant British citizenship only to children born here
• Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites
• Restrict tourism and immigration from outside Europe
• Prohibit embryo research
• Stop lorry movements on the Lord’s Day
• Require State approval for national sports teams to compete overseas
• Disconnect Britain from the European electricity grid
• Establish a "new order" between nations to resolve the world economic crisis

These are the policies of one of Britain’s most influential political parties: a party that has steadily increased its vote over the last decade; a party that appeals overwhelmingly to whites; and a party that shares significant objectives with neo-fascists and religious fundamentalists.

Perhaps - the BNP? Despite its attempts to appear modern and inclusive and the soothing talk in its 2005 General Election Manifesto, of "genuine ethnic and cultural diversity" [1].

Or UKIP? It harbours some pretty backward-looking individuals - but would they stop Britain buying electricity from France if necessary?

Or, maybe, the Conservatives? Could that be a list of recommendations from one of Dave’s lesser-known policy groups - chaired by the ghost of Enoch Powell - quietly shredded to avoid "re-contaminating the Brand"?

Actually, affiliates of the progressive consensus may be surprised to learn that all the reactionary policies in the first paragraph are from the Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (MfSS) or were adopted at the party’s Autumn Conference in Liverpool over the weekend of September 13-16, 2007 [2].

Of course, the Green Party will protest against the accusation of reactionary politics. However, in an article critical of the G8 leaders in June, George Monbiot, (capo di tutti capi of the green movement) advised readers to judge politicians for "what they do, not what they say".

For example, as well as supporting ethnic and cultural diversity, the BNP says it accepts:

"... the right of law-abiding minorities, in our country because they or their ancestors came here legally, to remain here and to enjoy the full protection of the law against any form of harassment or hostility..." [3]

But, use Monbiot's argument, disregard the rhetoric and look at what the rest of the BNP manifesto promises would actually do and it remains a party of racist and neo-fascist ideology - internationally isolationist and domestically reactionary.

The trouble for Greens is that their manifesto pledges would result in many of the same outcomes as the BNP programme.

You will not find the words "Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites", in the Green Party’s manifesto, but consider Monbiot’s advice about the effects of these policies:

"The Green Party recognises that subsidies are sometimes necessary to protect local, regional and national economies and the environment, and we will support them in these instances" [4].

"Controls such as tariff barriers and quotas should be gradually introduced on a national and/or regional bloc level, with the aim of allowing localities and countries to produce as much of their food, goods and services as they can themselves. Anything that cannot be provided nationally should be obtained from neighbouring countries, with long distance trade the very last resort" [5].

The paradox of arguing for Fair Trade while refusing to buy African vegetables because of "food miles" has been noted many times, but it is a paradox the Green Party simply ignores. According to the Guardian, Britain has two black farmers [6], so any policy to subsidise domestic produce and erect barriers to outsiders will, ipso facto, support white farmers and disadvantage black farmers. Even if supplies are "obtained from neighbouring countries", white European farmers benefit at the expense of poor farmers in Africa and the developing world.

On agricultural policy in general, Greens will agree with the following sentiments:

"Britain's farming industry will be encouraged to produce a much greater part of the nation's need in food products. Priority will be switched from quantity to quality, as we move from competing in a global economy to maximum self-sufficiency for Britain, sustainable agriculture, decreased reliance on petro-chemical products and more organic production" [7].

However, those promises come from the BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto - in a section indistinguishable from the Green Party manifesto:

"To be able to fulfil all our basic food needs locally. To grow as many other products as we can to meet our basic needs (e.g. for textiles, fuel, paper) on a local or regional basis. To enable all communities to have access to land which can be used for growing for basic needs. To ensure that all growing systems use only natural, renewable inputs and that all organic waste outputs are able to be recycled back into the soil or water system" [8].

Perhaps this is why, according to the BNP:

"We are the only true 'Green Party' in Britain as only the BNP intends to end mass immigration into Britain and thereby remove at a stroke the need for an extra 4 million homes in the green belts of the South East and elsewhere, which are required to house the influx of 5 million immigrants expected to enter the country under present trends over the next twenty years" [9].

Greens agree with the BNP about migration and the green belt. They promise to: minimise the environmental degradation caused by migration; not allow increased net migration; and end the pressure on the Green Belt by reducing population and stopping growth-oriented development [10]. Reduction in non-white tourism and immigration would be an inevitable consequence of government restrictions on air travel. Few refugees from Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe manage to get all the way to Britain without a large carbon footprint, neither can tourists from beyond Europe.

How about the accusation that the Green Party would:

"Stop people from inner cities moving to the countryside to protect traditional lifestyles and prevent crime; forbid the purchase of corner shops by migrants."

Here, are the relevant resolutions from the MfSS:

"Communities and regions should have the right to restrict inward migration when one or more of the following conditions are satisfied: [11]
a) The ecology of the recipient area would be significantly adversely affected by in-comers to the detriment of the wider community (eg. National Parks, Antarctica).
b) The recipient area is owned or controlled by indigenous peoples (eg Australian aboriginal people) whose traditional lifestyle would be adversely affected by in-comers.
c) The prospective migrants have, on average, equal or greater economic power than the residents of the recipient area and they or their families were not forced to leave the area in the recent past."

"Regions or communities must have the right to reject specific individuals on grounds of public safety" [12].

The examples (breathtakingly disingenuous) assert that they intend simply to stop Richard Branson driving a new main line through Stonehenge, Rupert Murdoch building a printing press on top of Uluru or Caesar’s Palace opening a casino at the South Pole.

Surely the Greens, of all people, know that Britain has hardly any desolate tundra and few Australian aboriginal communities. In practice, these policies would give the "indigenous" white folk of a quaint rural hamlet the right to rebuff a Leicester Bangladeshi purchaser for its corner shop because she has "greater economic power" than the villagers – whose "traditional lifestyle" would be "adversely affected" by her ethnicity and religion. They could also keep her out "on ground of public safety" because her inner city Muslim children are more likely to be criminals than their own offspring.

Not surprisingly, the BNP agrees with the Greens about the "right of all peoples to self-determination and that must include the indigenous peoples of these islands" [13]... Alas, not every small community is Ambridgely-correct – thrilled to embrace a half-Irish gay couple, a Vicar with a Hindu girlfriend and a mixed-race child, and an African husband for the daughter of the Lord of the Manor with the same enthusiasm it has for organic ciabatta and carbon trading.

In the 1980s, when the Thatcher government restricted immigration to Britain to those with at least one grandparent born here, it was accused of constructive racism. Thatcher claimed her measures were not racist – any discrimination against nonwhites was just an incidental consequence of the need to maintain what is now called "community cohesion". Green Party policy would go even further down the road of constructive racism than Mrs Thatcher, refusing citizenship to children born overseas even if their parents hold British passports [14].

The Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence identified "unwitting racism" in the police that can arise from well intentioned words or actions that arise out of uncritical self-understanding born out of an inflexible ethos of the "traditional" way of doing things:

"It persists because of the failure of the organisation openly and adequately to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership. Without recognition and action to eliminate such racism it can prevail as part of the ethos or culture of the organisation" [15].

By its uncritical acceptance of "traditional" ways of doing things - from the "spiritual link between ourselves and nature" [16] in agriculture, to anti-globalisation, to making the home "an important centre of economic activity" [17] - the Green Party allies itself with some of the most reactionary contemporary political forces in the land. And the "traditional" way of doing things is usually a reactionary approach to modern social issues.

Green Party agreement with Christian fundamentalists on at least two issues requires no textual analysis: MfSS policy number EU523 would ban lorry movements on Sunday throughout Europe and H329 calls for an immediate ban on embryo manipulation and cloning for any research, therapeutic or reproductive purposes [18].

Policies EU532 and 533 would scrap all connection of electricity grids throughout Europe - partly because interconnectivity allows nuclear generated power to creep along the wires [19].

For national sports teams, CMS871 would require politicians to determine "whether it is appropriate for the team to take part in competition against a country with whom normal friendly, respectful, or diplomatic relations are not possible” [20].

It is frequent for parties on the extreme fringes to share an analysis of contemporary politics - and Greens and BNP certainly share a lot of analysis. From the BNP 2005 Manifesto [21]:

"For most of human history, the existence of such ethnic and cultural diversity among humanity was so obvious and apparently unchallengeably natural that the political theorists and philosophers of past generations simply took it for granted. Only in the last few decades has this been changed forever by the advent of mass passenger travel, the insatiable desire of the globalised capitalist economy for cheap labour, and the worldwide reach of US consumerist culture through film and television."

"That poison is in large measure the blind economic force of global capitalism, with its insistence on the unrestricted flow of goods, capital and labour to wherever in the world they will make the maximum short-term profit ... It is not about 'love' and 'tolerance', it is about profit."

"Formidably powerful and publicly unaccountable transnational companies are becoming ever more footloose, their strength and mobility facilitated both by technological advances, and by the progressive withdrawal of investment controls by governments and by multilateral institutions such as WTO. TNCs are now increasingly able to exploit differences in social and environmental standards between countries in order to maximise profits" [22]. "The rush towards globalisation is neither inevitable nor desirable. It is leading to the sharp reduction in powers of local and indigenous communities, states, and even nations, to control their futures, as economic power is transferred to global institutions. A worldwide homogenization of diverse, local, and indigenous cultures, social and economic forms, as well as values and living patterns increasingly reflect the new global monoculture" [23].

To solve these "problems" the Green Party calls for an international "new order" to address a "global economic … cris[i]s" [24]. That language requires a very special kind of historical ignorance. Can no one in the Green Party have noticed that the last ideology to emphasise the spiritual oneness of man and nature ("blood and soil") and used the phrase "new order" was the fascism of the mid-20th century? A fascism represented in contemporary politics by the BNP. Similar analyses may be common for parties on opposite wings of politics, but it is not so common to posit the same solutions.

No doubt, when the Green Party adopted its manifesto there was no deliberate intention to implement a reactionary and racist strategy. But the Green Party is overwhelmingly white: of more than three dozen individuals listed as speakers and discussion leaders at its Autumn Conference only one was obviously a member of a visible ethnic minority (VEMs to those in the know) [25]. Even the discussion on issues affecting women from ethnic minority communities was led by a white woman and just 2% of Green Party candidates in the 2006 local elections were VEMs [26]. Perhaps the absence of minority members in Green Party counsels results in the same sort of "canteen culture" that affects the police, making it oblivious to the right-wing, pseudo racist nature of its plans for Britain.

The lessons of the Macpherson Report’s "institutional racism" could be expanded to include "institutional reactionaryism" and should be learnt not only by the state apparatus and large companies, but also by the Green Party - which declares its desire for a fair and just society.

References:
1.BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto: Rebuilding British Democracy (BNP 2005) pg 3 http://www.bnp.org.uk/candidates2005/manifesto/manifesto2005.pdf
2.Green Party Autumn Conference 2007: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2007/Final_Agenda_Autumn07.pdf
3.BNP 2005: pg 21
4.Green Party Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (GP MfSS): EU413 http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/
5.Ibid: EU443
6.The Guardian Monday June 26, 2006 “Meet Britain's other black farmer” http://www.guardian.co.uk/country/article/0,,1805973,00.html
7.BNP 2005: pg47
8.GP MfSS: AG500, AG501, AG502, AG503
9.BNP 2005: pg 48
10.GP MfSS: MG200, MG400, CY561
11.Ibid: MG204
12.Ibid: MG207
13.BNP 2005: pg 3
14.GP MfSS: NY515
15.Rachel Morris, Cardiff Law School: Summary of Macpherson Report: http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/tlru/Lawrence.pdf
16.GP MfSS: AG100
17.Ibid: EC403
18.Ibid: EU523, H329
19.Ibid: EU532, EU533
20.Ibid: CMS871
21.BNP 2005: pg 18-19
22.GP MfSS: EC902
23.Ibid: EC903
24.Ibid: EC900
25.Green Party Autumn Conference 2007 Timetable. http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2007/Liverpool_timetable_full.pdf
26.Green Party Candidates for May 4th 2006 http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/election/2WebverLE06cand.htm

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Would laws to protect animals from cruelty and/or neglect be legitimate in a free society?

(9)

...Good.

It is also insensitive to Catholic feelings, Nazi feelings, Buddhist feelings, Communist feelings, Capitalist feelings, Manchester United Supporter feelings, Surrealist baboon trousers, Scientologist feelings, Creationist feelings, Darwinist feelings...

"Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group."

The whole point of a reference book or reference wiki, is to present information regardless of anyone's 'feelings'. And if some Muslims do not like that... tough shit, here is a link to the 'Mohammed Cartoons' for you because to my mind it is not enough to just ignore them, intolerant Islam must be confronted and loudly defied. I could not care less whose 'feelings' get hurt by publishing something and thankfully to their credit neither could Wikipedia.

Samizdata is also fairly insensitive to Muslim feelings

(17)

In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer gets stuck right into police forces, and especially the constabulary of Kent, for various offences against liberty and common sense. It is a rather populist article, designed to stir the pot, but I think it is a pot worth stirring. I myself on the other end of the world share his disdain for my local police force, which I regard as nothing more or less then the armed enforcers of the Treasury Department.

I certainly have reservations about their ethics, methods, and purpose, and I suspect much worse of them. Given that the head of Australian Federal Police is trying to push for a media blackout of its anti-terrorist activities, a power that could easily be abused, I think I have good reasons to fear the worst from the boys in blue.

How did it come to this? My own guess is that police forces are just reflecting the nature of the governments that supposedly control them. Monkey see, monkey do.

(63)

I am fond of telling people who are asking or reading about my views on the rights of employers, employees, etc., that I think that an employer should be allowed to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes. But I think that, courtesy of the ever alert Dave Barry, I may now have found a more vivid way of making the same point:

In her civil case, which is slated to begin in Los Angeles tomorrow, former employee Mary Nelson charges the eccentric Charney, 39, once had a meeting with her wearing only a fragment of clothing called a "c- - k sock," invited her to masturbate with him, and then fired her when he learned she planned to meet with a lawyer.

Nelson's lawyer, Keith Fink, said his first witness would be Charney, who's turned his company into a multimillion-dollar retail giant with 7,000 employees.

Asked in a deposition whether he'd ever referred to women as "sluts" at work, he said, "In private conversations, where such language was generally welcome."

Asked whether he considered the word "derogatory," he said, "There are some of us that love sluts ... It could be also be an endearing term."

Asked whether he'd ever used the c-word for female genitalia at work, he said, "Absolutely."

He also acknowledged traipsing around his company wearing only his American Apparel-made underwear.

"There is no evidence to say that you can't walk around in your underwear all day anywhere in the United States of America," he testified.

"Not only does he admit to virtually all of the outlandish allegations in this case, [but] he's somewhat proud of how he comports himself in the workplace," Fink said. "That's what I find so shocking."

Yes, how appalling. A man, who clearly likes very much being a man, struts about in his own property, behaving like some ancient God of Fertility. Worse, what with his enterprise being a "multi-million dollar retail giant", I'm guessing that a great many of his employees actually enjoy all this horsing about, and work harder and more alertly than they would if employed by somebody like lawyer Fink. Working for Charney probably wouldn't suit me, although you never know, maybe I would enjoy it too.

Mr Charney overstates his case when he says he can wear only his cock sock "anywhere in the United States". The essence of his defence should be his right to wear what he likes in his property, not any right to upset other property owners with their different and duller ideas about what constitutes suitable apparel. But as for everything else, my verdict would be that Mary Nelson and her lawyer, Fink, should leave Mr Charney alone. If Ms. Nelson has discovered that she does not like working for Mr Charney and his multi-million dollar retail giant, she has a simple alternative. Find somewhere else to work and someone else to work for. Clearly this was the arrangement Mr Charney preferred, once he discovered Ms Nelson's perverted taste for litigation. Ms Nelson should simply acknowledge the wisdom of Mr Charney's decision, and look elsewhere for employment.

(32)

Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).

It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine's writers. This has to hurt:

I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I'll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn't do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul's newsletters back in the early '90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul's populist appeals. (Note that by "cosmopolitan" I do not mean "Jewish." I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul's record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.

The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.

(19)

There is an outstanding article on the interesting new blog The Line is Here called I am no longer a child and I strongly commend it to everyone. It captures the essence of the New Totalitarianism in a very different way to my polemical approach to the subject and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.

(34)

I have quite liked the music of Joe Jackson but I did not realise he had such sound views on things like personal liberty. Check out his site.

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Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words "tequila slammer" would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker's head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state's whim. They'd have thought you a paranoid loon.

- Samizdata commenter Ian B. We do not have to imagine these things any more, alas. The only problem with his quote is that he omitted to mention assault on jury trials, Habeas Corpus, double-jeopardy...

(77)

Instapundit has linked to this story, but I am not yet wholly convinced. I am happy to add to the general blog-yell that may or may not now be going up everywhere in the non-pro-Islamic blogosphere, but suspect - although I could be entirely wrong in my suspicion - that this may turn out to be a bit of an exaggeration:

I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.

This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, ...

At the risk of being pedantic, what precisely happened? Did Lionheart get a letter? If so, what, precisely, did it say? To be even more pedantic, the phrase "This charge if found guilty" It does not fill me with confidence. Nor does it that, on what is obviously such an important matter, Lionheart has allowed a pair of inverted commas to go awol. But maybe that is to read too much into what is merely some stressed-out grammar.

I suspect that, if any ruckus does now occur, there will in due course be an announcement to the effect that Mr Lionheart has entirely misunderstood the situation and has nothing to fear, free speech is sacred, blah blah. If that does happen, it may then be hard to know how much this official clarification will be a true clarification of what had, truly, been the attitude of the authorities, and how much it will be a tactical retreat in the face of an Instalaunch, and of any blogosphere and mainstream media fuss that follows from it. But whatever has been and turns out to be the true story here, I would now like to know a bit more.

Lionheart's central claim, albeit floridly expressed, is one I have come around agreeing with, having started out (on 9/12) believing the opposite. The enemy is not "Islamic extremism". The enemy is Islam. Although please note that this says nothing about the manner in which this enemy should be responded to. I daresay I might disagree somewhat with Lionheart's ideas about that.

But even if I disagreed with Lionheart about everything, I still agree with Instapundit's attitude:

I don't know much about the blogger, but I don't need to - people shouldn't be arrested merely for blogging things that the powers-that-be don't like.

If Lionheart's claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance.

(5)

Even more predictable than the post-Thanksgiving appearance of shopping-mall Santas is the inability of pundits at this time of year to say or to write "commercialism" without prefixing to it the word "crass" - as we encounter in your pages today in Tom Krattenmaker's "The real meaning of Christmas."

What truly is crass is politics - that sorry spectacle of power-seeking ego-maniacs who, when not pronouncing platitudes, are promising to help group A by picking the pockets of group B. While commerce is honest, politics is duplicitous. While commerce is peaceful, politics inevitably pits citizen against citizen. Far more enlightened and ethical behavior is on display during any one day in a shopping mall than the most intrepid observer will find in a century on Pennsylvania Avenue.

- A letter from Donald J. Boudreaux to USA Today. Amit Varma liked it too.

(38)

Is it possible to be both a nationalist and a libertarian?

(14)

Amazon has just been ordered by the French state to stop delivering books for free, and in general to refrain from charging too little for books. This is just wrong, says Instapundit.

With questions like this, I come over all Paul Coulam. I start not with what might or might not seem nice, but with libertarian dogma.

Amazon owns some books. They should be allowed sell them to you for any price they like, and subject to any conditions they like. They should be allowed to offer to deliver them any way they like, for any price they like. And if you are interested, you should be allowed to say ... yes! Or: no. It really should be that simple. If you have to die your hair blue before they will sell books to you, well that would be a strange business model to follow, but: the books belong to them and they should be allowed to part with them, or not, on any basis they like.

However, the principle that if you own something you should be allowed to sell it on any basis you like would also allow certain other arrangements to pertain.

Suppose publishers want to sell their books (books that are their property) any way they like. Suppose, for instance, that they decide that you can only buy their books if retailers agree beforehand to sell those books to other people at a price which they, the publishers, not the retailers, determine. And suppose, if a retailer makes a deal like that, but subsequently break it, and the publisher then says: sorry, we don't trust you any more, we won't sell you any more books. Fine. It may be a bizarre way to do business, but if that's how publishers want to do business, let them try to do it that way, and see if they can make it stick. So long as they don't expect you and me to pay for a huge police force to punish deal-breakers, but merely punish deal-breakers by not doing any more deals with them, then, from where I sit: no problem.

If supermarkets want to be able to sell books cheaper then bookshops, well, then I guess they'd have either to find publishers who don't price their books this way, or else go into the publishing business themselves. Again, fine.

The bizarre arrangement I just described in the previous two paragraphs actually did pertain, until in Britain (definitely) and in other EU states (guess) such arrangements were made illegal, for books, and for everything else. This change was called "the abolition of Retail Price Maintenance" and was hailed (definitely in Britain) by many deluded Free Marketeers as a Good Thing. One of the earliest IEA publications was about, and in favour of, this very change, before it actually happened. Says IEA Director John Blundell:

An early study, by Basil Yamey, urged the abolition of Retail Price Maintenance. The texture of everyone's life has been transformed by the result. We forget that supermarkets were effectively illegal under the old price-rigging but there is no thanks in politics. Who now recalls the 1979 election scrapping of exchange controls? We had to get authorisation to take even small sums abroad.

Note the blurring together there of (a) the imposition of a government control (making a particular sort of contract illegal) and (b) the relaxing of a government control (exchange control). I think I shall write about this for my next piece for CNE Competition, where I have until now always defended supermarkets against politicised gangs of small shop-keepers. This puts the whole existence of supermarkets into a quite new light, I think you will agree. John Blundell was not trying to convince me that supermarkets are wicked, but I think he might just have done so.

More recently, I recall a case where somebody making bicycles wanted to sell these bicycles only to shops which didn't then ever sell them for knock-down (as they saw it) prices. The retailer Halfords did want to sell them for knock-down prices. The manufacturers accordingly didn't want to sell their bicycles - their bicycles – to Halfords. But, the British state (which is now for this and for many other purposes a mere branch office of the EUrostate) compelled these bike-makers to "sell" their bikes to Halfords even though they didn't want to. As Instapundit might have said, but I am pretty sure never did say: this is just wrong.

The point is, there was a free market, property rights respecting way of solving the problem that the French bookselling rivals of Amazon now have, which was for those booksellers to sell only those books which publishers forbade to be discounted. That solution was made illegal. And I'm guessing that French supermarkets have a far tougher legal time of it than supermarkets do in Britain. Now the shopkeepers want the resulting arrangement, which was bound to hit them eventually, once global businesses beyond the reach of French law got involved in the French book-selling market, also to be made illegal. Foolishness.

Mind you, if the market had been allowed to decide, Amazon, like Britain's book-discounting supermarkets, might by now also have become a publisher. It might even, by now, be publishing books in French.

Freedom, in this case and in many others, should not mean the state imposing its own idea of freedom by in fact restricting freedom (in the form of some rather odd contracts that various people want freely to make). It should mean different groups of people with different ideas about how to do things confronting each other in the market place, and the state recognising all their legitimate rights as legitimate. And the rest of us should then be allowed to choose which arrangements we prefer, with equally little state interference. If those rules had been followed in this case, of Amazon's discounted books, my guess is that Amazon would still be discounting books, but to be sure would involve being sure about an alternative reality scenario, and you never really can be, because what free people will choose is inherently hard to predict.

(42)

John Louis Swaine wrote in with an interesting piece about his own 'road to Damascus'. "It took approximately 8 years to move from being a Labourite teenager to a Libertarian at the age of 23. I used to blog quite a lot so I felt the urge to write something about it. Since the Samizdata weblog has been one of the most important contributing factors for this change, I thought I would submit it to you."

Most people have a "Summer of '69" they can relate to; a magic period of youthful exuberance, tempered by important life experiences and left to bake softly in the warmth of the July sun. Mine was in 2001, I was 16 and beginning to ask the bigger questions about society and life.

I had opinions, I suddenly cared about issues. Like virtually every young person I came to the conclusion that equality was of paramount importance and that the only means by which to achieve it was through the prescription of schemes and initiatives by Government. After all, is that not what my generation had been taught? The importance of civil duty, of taking part in the organs of governance and through them making life better for your fellow man?

I dutifully signed up to the Observer brigade. Things could change, things could be fixed and crucially, the fix was always within the grasp of Government.

I did have the benefit of a decent grounding in knowledge of markets. I rather suspect you cannot have spent a significant amount of time growing up in Hong Kong without absorbing it - capitalism and free markets are in the air there, mixed in amongst the toxic levels of pollutants and exhaust fumes. Your chances of developing lung cancer or respiratory disorders may be high but you will also assimilate at least some understanding of how a financial system works.

Tony Blair's governing ideology therefore seemed intoxicating - using the state to care for one's fellow man whilst reforming the public sector and embracing free markets. Everything fitted nicely into place.

The first cracks in my political viewpoint began to appear on the 11th of September, 2001...

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and subsequent UNSC Resolutions authorizing the use of force to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan, I read daily in my newspapers of the horrors of warfare in Afghanistan. The US, it seems, were doomed. If the might of the Soviet Empire could not conquer the nation, then surely the US would be bogged down into a quagmire of small arms fire and disappearing assailants.

Within a month of beginning their assault the US had demolished the Taliban's standing army, on November 12th the Taliban fled Kabul and a military victory was imminent. The emperor had no clothes.

I read the Observer and the Guardian less and less and instead migrated to the Times. However I retained my same staunch belief in the struggle for an egalitarian society through Government. I wrote a political blog and had quite a bit of traffic. I moved to London to read Law and joined the Labour party. I was ultimately quite satisfied with the way in which the United Kingdom was being run and governed.

During my study for my degree I took a particular interest in Constitutional Law and received a 1st for the module, my lecturer asked me to perform some extra research for one of his upcoming books on Civil Liberties and I happily accepted. The history of the British 'constitution' was enthralling and I began to get a real sense for what it meant to be British.

We were a people who lived under the Magna Carta, whose parliament established the ground rules for modern day governance, and who time and time again, took up arms in defence of liberty. We had little time for despots, deposing one and then giving up on the other's ridiculous dictatorship the moment he passed on. Through all of this, a current of individual liberty ran strong. The Common Law is a marvellous thing and leafing through its enormity was like gazing up at the shadowed spires of a Cathedral from the inside.

I watched the Labour party's reforms shudder to a halt. Where there were steps taken towards decentralization in Foundation Hospitals, the Government took several back in other areas of public life. Government began to balloon. I grimaced as grown men and women on the Labour back benches complained that businessmen from the private healthcare sector had been given posts within the NHS - heavens forbid those who have proven themselves in competitive healthcare markets should be given the reigns of a Hospital.

I had the good fortune of attending a Grammar school for two years after passing the 11+. As a young adult, the 'debate' surrounding Grammars disgusted me. My school (Colchester Grammar) had certainly not been a haven for rich boys whose family could afford "tutors". Amongst all my classmates I was unquestionably the most affluent, being the son of a successful barrister. My friends were almost universally drawn from the working class, with one or two hailing from the lower middle classes. I do not think I knew of one boy at that school who was 'privileged'.

What people objected to, it seems, was not that this 'free' schooling system existed, but rather that it meant someone, somewhere out there was getting a better education than someone else. This was not a cry for equality of opportunity, this was a demand that no child aspire to or achieve better than anyone else his age. The gifted should remain amongst the rest, to be held back to ensure that they did not get too far ahead or somehow to drag their classmates towards better academic achievement. Anyone who has attended a school in which they have exceeded the academic capability of their classmates knows that this is a patent fallacy. Roald Dahl's "Matilda" has special significance for those of us who have, we know what it feels like to be kept in a system for arbitrary reasons, which limits your liberty and traps you within the confines of what is deemed to be 'average'.

I drifted towards the centre of the political spectrum and no longer called myself "centre-left" or "Blairite". However it was not until about 3 weeks ago that I came to my final realization. The writers with whom I agree most tacitly: Hemlock, Glenn Reynolds, the contributors to Samizdata are libertarian to a man.

They are not simulacra of Ebineezer Scrooge, they all believe that society should be fair, they just disagree vehemently with the notion that such a task should be left to the state, or indeed that the state is in any way capable of achieving this goal. Charities and NGOs perform consistently better than public initiatives designed to carry out analogous tasks.

It was this realization that was the final catalyst: caring about your fellow man and opposing the works of the state in achieving that goal are NOT mutually exclusive political creeds.

I've lived in a society in which there is no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends, an extremely low income rate (16%) and a streamlined civil service under the full protection of British Jurisprudence. Guess what? It was a great society! Crime was low, the streets were well kept and the tasks, which Government is necessary to perform were carried out perfectly adequately. The Government did not need to pick up Inland Revenue like a dust-buster and hoover up half my money each year to achieve it! It had followed a Laissez-Faire industrial policy for generations and had been a free-market economy since its creation.

I speak of Hong Kong pre-1997 and I can not believe it took so long for me to see how competent such a system was.

Sure it had an ID card system, but it was across the border from a billion people doing their damnedest to escape a barbaric communist dictatorship and had an immigration crisis on its hands. The card is now tied into the Drivers License so it's not an arbitrary extra bit of identification you need to carry around and works as a passport for HK immigration. Most importantly since the state is not hell-bent on interfering with every single facet of your life, it generally does not seem so odious.

One of the arguments made for ID cards in the United Kingdom is that the state is not some malign force as in other countries so it can be trusted with an extra means of keeping tabs on its populace but this is akin to saying that the pit bull about to ravage your arm is not in fact a carrier of rabies like the one across the street, so it's all right to put down your handgun. If the state wants an ID card from me, it can bloody well start behaving a lot more like its former colonial charge.

Why, when all the evidence available points to the same facts - Free Markets perform better than regulated ones, US States with more lax gun control laws have lower rates of violent crime that ones which do not, Charities and NGOs are more efficient than public sector bodies etc - do we insist on following the ideas which have proven, in the past 100 years, to be complete and utter hogwash?

Banal though it may be, I remember playing SimCity 2000 as a teenager on my computer. Every time I tried to set up a high-tax, high-service economy within my city, my economy, followed by the city itself, stagnated. The answers have been staring me in the face for years.

Yesterday I cut up my Labour party membership card and cancelled my standing order to the party. When asked about my political affiliation a few days ago, I answered "libertarian" and somehow the world made a great deal more sense.

As I pondered this matter and resolved to write this piece, I concluded that I had taken far too long to realize what was in front of my nose, yet the sobering reality is that this left-to-liberty transition is typically played out over the course of a lifetime. How many 40 year old Labourites are there still in this world? I believe I've been remarkably fortunate, I have the means to concentrate my personal wealth under a low tax regime and now have the intention of doing so. I can still make the world a better place like my 16 year old self wanted and more importantly I can do it without stuffing the paycheck of 40 inefficient public sector bureaucrats. All that at age 23? I have got a bright future to look forward to and perhaps with the growth of libertarianism, my children will too.

(29)

Jack Straw, it is amazing to relate, has been touted as a potential Prime Minister. Who knows, if the implosion of the Brown government gets worse, he might still be in the running for the top job. So it might be useful to realise that among his gifts is one for sublime comedy:

The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor has commented that when the history of this era is written, the last 10 years will be seen as heralding a "quiet revolution" in the way in which the UK is governed. He is correct.

Quiet or not, there have been major changes. In case our Jack needs a bit of assistance, here are some of them:

• Emasculation of the House of Lords
• Erosion of the right to trial by jury
• Removal of the double-jeopardy protection in court trials
• Extension of blasphemy laws
• Law enabling the creation of a centralised state database and ID card system
• The passing of more than 3,000 criminal offences
• Anti-social behaviour orders - many of which can be imposed without full due process of law
• Civil Contingencies Act, giving sweeping powers in the case of "national emergencies"
• Erosion of right to hold public demonstrations
• Erosion of rights of private property owners to use their premises as they seek fit: bans on smoking in pubs and restaurants, for example
• European Arrest Warrant

Okay, I think you get the general idea. And on the other side of the balance sheet, what can Straw suggest? He talks about the Freedom of Information Act and EU "human rights" legislation. The former is an improvement but hardly compensates for the list above; the latter is a mish-mash: some of the "rights", as my sneer-quotes imply, are not rights in the classical liberal sense as acting as brakes on coercion, but rather entitlements, or claims, and which interfere with things like freedom of contract, etc.

The general thrust of policy over the past few years has been towards more regulation of personal behaviour in the fields of health, the environment, family upbringing, smoking and diet. About the only emphatic move in a libertarian direction is on the area of booze: 24-hour drinking; yet the government cannot get itself in a consistent frame of mind when it comes to drugs - and alcohol is a serious health hazard when consumed to excess - so we continue with a largely unwinnable war on drugs, which by the way operates to the detriment of our campaign t