We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.
The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.
– Gawain Towler
“Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of water and electricity, while ‘large parts of Britain were deindustrialised’. It might have been an appropriate line for Labour when fighting the 1997 general election. For Burnham to deliver it today is a little ridiculous, given that Labour has been in power for 15 of those past 40 years. Indeed, Burnham himself was in the cabinet for three of those years. He appears to be confessing to having been part of the neoliberalist regime which ruined Britain.
Burnham is a substitute prime minister in a party which two years ago won 34 per cent of the vote in a general election, yet you would think from the tone of his address today that he had just won a large personal mandate. He has none, and that is not a great basis on which to announce a grand plan to reverse 40 years of anything: neoliberalism, socialism of whatever else. Moreover, Burnham appeared to confirm that he will not be seeking a mandate. After paying a warm tribute to what he saw as the great achievements of Keir Starmer – the man he has just deposed – he said that the people of Makerfield had spoken on behalf of all forgotten communities. Really? I don’t recall the people of Scunthorpe, Teesside or Barrow in Furness asking Burnham to speak on their behalf. In reality, Burnham simply held onto an existing Labour seat, and our new PM is going to treat that as carte blanche to reverse 40 years of economic policy.”
– Ross Clark, Spectator.
“The year 2026 brings four semiquincentennials that matter greatly to me, that I think are related to each other: the American Declaration of Independence; the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and the patenting of James Watt’s double-acting steam engine. Each event marks a profound shift in how human beings understood and interacted with the physical world and with each other. Before this cluster of anniversaries, we’ve just passed another related semiquincentennial, of the birth of one of our most influential applied moral philosophers. I am speaking, of course, of Jane Austen.”
– Lynne Kiesling, at the Knowledge Problem substack. The article came out on New Year’s Eve, 2025. Definitely worth a read.
Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online.
These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s.
Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us.
– James Martin Charlton
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the families of the victims of horrific crime always express the same concern, word for word, every time. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the “specially-trained” officers who support them.
– Konstantin Kisin
She was funny in a register entirely her own. On day one in the Strasbourg parliament I stepped out of an office into one of those interminable corridors to see her at a distance, walking in lockstep with Claire Fox, the two of them deep in conversation. Two women of ferocious conviction from utterly different traditions, the convent Tory and the old revolutionary, neither of them over five foot four, moving down the corridor like a single determined engine. She looked up at my somewhat awed face as they passed and twinkled. ‘Two galleons passing through’, she said, and sailed on.
– Gawain Towler writing of Anne Widdecombe
Markets are discovery mechanisms. In war adaptation and discovery are a matter of survival.
Ukraine began the war with a traditional military procurement system. Large, standardised orders from suppliers chosen by the defence ministry with no room for adjustment to individual circumstances. Ukraine’s key innovation was to decentralise military acquisition, placing the funding and decision-making power in the hands of military commanders on the front lines.
Enabled by their earlier implementation of a public electronic procurement system Prozorro, groundbreaking in its own right by allowing greater price competition and transparency, Ukraine launched DOT-Chain Defence in July 2025. Perhaps best described as an ‘Amazon’ for weapons systems, Military units independently select, order, and reserve the necessary equipment, see delivery timelines, leave feedback, and receive quick responses. The system is designed to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and allow frontline brigades to order in exactly the resources they need at any given time with minimal delay. If a product is low-quality individual units will cease to order it as soon as battlefield conditions expose its flaws, providing rapid feedback to manufacturers to improve their products.
The e-points system is another recent deployment. A unit carries out a combat mission and uploads video proof of its achievements, targets destroyed etc., to the DELTA combat and control system. The unit is then awarded e-points at the end of the month, a virtual currency which it can use to purchase the weapons systems of its choice.
By introducing clear incentives at every step of the process, combat units are motivated to provide results, manufacturers to improve quality and the Ukrainian military machine becomes ever more effective.
– Samuel Williamson
Every party in trouble prays for the same miracle, which is amnesia. The Conservative Party’s entire strategy for the next four years rests on the hope that the British people will misremember the last fourteen. Kemi Badenoch has said as much, remarking that it is unhelpful to churn over every incident of those years. Unhelpful to whom, one might ask. Yesterday Reform UK answered her with a website, and I want to spend a few paragraphs telling you why donotforget.co.uk matters rather more than a campaign microsite usually does.
– Gawain Towler
“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.”
– A J P Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. From the first page.
(Hat-tip: Institute of Economic Affairs at its new site. It manages to tie its insights about licensing laws and trade to the glorious English football victory over Mexico last night in the latter country.)
Establishment clearly running an operation to get Farage.
If they do force him out – clearly the game plan- over technicalities about what he did / didn’t declare, I think they’ll start a firestorm.
The public will see this as the attempted stitch up that it is. Clacton folk (I know them a little) will reelect him in any by election.
Demands to destroy the rotten political establishment will assume a revolutionary vibe.
I almost want the Times columnists types to be so stupid. They are late stage Romanov stupid.
– Douglas Carswell
The history of post-war Britain is essentially the educated middle class giddily, gleefully taking a sledgehammer to every single load-bearing pillar in society in the belief that the roof will somehow stay up through the sheer force of our own cleverness.
We’re now finding out.
– the minimally named “Matthew“
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration?
Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive.
[…]
All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want.
As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive.
– Anonymous (unsurprisingly)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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