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]

Samizdata quote of the day – bring back the Law Lords

In any case, if those who stubbornly insist the Supreme Court is exactly like the old Appellate Committee are correct, then there can be no objection to moving it back to the House of Lords since it would make no difference whatsoever. It would be simple enough. The Supreme Court gift shop will be the first to go, with its Supreme Court-branded teddy bears and its unsold copies of the laudatory coffee table book about the building’s architecture. Baroness Hale’s leek-themed carpet, a 1970s style fever dream, will be next, revealing the sturdy floors underneath.

Then their lordships can return to the anonymous backrooms of the House of Lords, safe from the temptations of being supreme over Parliament. Middlesex Guildhall, that much-abused building, can be restored to its former glory, if it ever had any, and assist in dealing with London’s rising crime levels. Then the ghosts of the Blairite constitution may finally be exorcised.

Yuan Yi Zhu

Samizdata quote of the day – Where’s the anger?

There have been numerous foiled attacks on politicians, too. Just weeks after the Westminster Bridge horror, Khalid Ali, a Taliban bombmaker, was tackled by armed police near Downing Street. He was armed with knives. He also said he was there to send ‘a message’ to those in power. A few months later, ISIS supporter Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman was arrested for plotting to bomb his way into Downing Street and behead Theresa May.

The response to this sustained, years-long assault on our elected representatives? Not silence, exactly. There has been plenty of chatter and commentary. It’s just been about completely unrelated issues. There has been a desperate attempt to change the subject, and to downplay the threat posed by Islamist extremism.

Tom Slater

Samizdata quote of the day – Faustus in Westminster

That is the detail of what Faustus does after selling his soul. Part of the moral of the play, I suppose, is the disparity between what the Doctor imagines he will do with the time given to him and what he actually ends up doing with it. For, as readers of the play will know, Faustus ends up wasting his time in a pretty big way.

One thinks: you plotted to dislodge your boss and then spent multiple evenings debating Liz Truss – for this?

You would have thought that if you knew you were going to be claimed by the Devil in a few years’ time you would go high on the hog at least. Tick off all the items on your bucket list or the like. But Faustus wastes his time. Indeed he ends up doing bathetic things – like playing schoolboy pranks on the Pope.

This aspect of the play returned to me often during the Boris Johnson years. Here, after all, was a man whose lifetime ambition seemed to be to hold the highest office in the land. After years of japing and jestering, and a certain amount of leadership too, he got there. And then what did he do? A bit of Brexit, admittedly. Then a whole dollop more green. A lot of stupid posts about his dog, and an awful lot of fibs, and then – bang – it was all over. The Devil came for him, and although he was not allowed as much time as Faustus is, it was still possible to look at him and say: ‘What did you do with your time? Why did you waste it? OK – you tweaked some noses. So what? What was it all for?’

Tragically, the same thought now occurs with Rishi Sunak. For once again we have a Conservative prime minister who has clearly had his eyes set on this prize for a very long time. Goodness knows, this was a man who was willing to serve as a junior minister during Theresa May’s premiership.

And then, after a cunning campaign to unseat and replace his boss, he finally achieved his goal. And for what?

Douglas Murray

Samizdata quote of the day – UK government overreaching again

But the proposed UK law would go beyond just FaceTime and iMessage to encompass all Apple products.

Earlier in January, civil liberties groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Open Rights Group and Privacy International, put out a joint briefing opposing parts of the bill.

The groups said they were concerned the proposed changes would “force technology companies, including those based overseas, to inform the government of any plans to improve security or privacy measures on their platforms so that the government can consider serving a notice to prevent such changes”.

They added this would be “effectively transforming private companies into arms of the surveillance state and eroding the security of devices and the internet.”

Zoe Kleinman

The Potemkin politics of the UK

As the Samizdata quote of the day has been taken already by an excellent candidate, I thought I would add this quote for your delectation and discussion:

Public consultations have been sold as a way of increasing transparency and the quality of government. In reality they have often become Potemkin exercises where the Government is able to signal that it is doing something without actually doing it; or, worse, a policy colonisation process by a self-selecting public-sector clique of lobbyists, charities, and interest groups.

Fred De Fossard, head of the British Prosperity Unit at the Legatum Institute.

The way that these consultations are handled, often to give ministers the “right” answers and cover for what they wanted to do anyway, also speaks to how, as the writer notes, much of the supposed opportunities from being outside the EU are not being embraced.

With the Conservative Party so far behind in the polls, one might assume ministers would utilise the sovereignty of Parliament in what time they have left to do a few popular things, and legislate for the views of Tory supporters. There is still no sign of this happening; indeed quite the opposite, if the legislative agenda in the recent King’s Speech is any guide.

And there’s this zinger of a point:

The Government seems intent on eroding democracy further, by handing more powers to arms-length bodies, so the state will get even bigger, but less accountable. The Competition and Markets Authority is soon to be given new powers to regulate the digital economy; a brand-new regulator will oversee English football, despite the country boasting the most successful footballing economy in the world.

Needless to say, as or when we get a Labour government, I expect little change on this issue of “arms-length” bodies taking key decisions and arrogating more power for themselves. The fiasco of the Post Office and the wrongful convictions of hundreds of people might put a dent in this, but I am not optimistic.

These are deep-rooted problems, and for all that I am concerned about the direction of politics in the UK right now, I don’t see the Conservative Party as providing any sort of solution. My thoughts are increasingly mutinous.

The author concludes:

If British conservatism has a future, it must stop government-by-stakeholder, re-democratise the state, and end our recent experiment in the banal tyranny of process.

Understanding the Post Office scandal

If you want to understand how the legal system made it so easy for the Post Office to destroy the lives of the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – and how the legal system then made it so hard for them to obtain justice… read this by David Allen Green.

Samizdata quote of the day – we are more screwed than even I imagined

The course began with the issue of definitions. What is Terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.’

I posed to the room: ‘Surely we can acknowledge subjectivity while being able to come up with a collective understanding of what terrorism is?’ Some 40 civil servants looked at me blankly. No?

I wondered why we were there.

The danger of understanding terrorism with cultural relativism is that it breeds moral apathy; the kind that says ‘Who are we, mere democratic, liberal Westerners to impose our morality onto others? Who are we to say our culture is superior to others?’

These are luxury attitudes. It is easy to be sat in Kings College London and feel that all cultures are equal, when you haven’t been anally raped at a peace festival by someone shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and held hostage. In the introduction to the course, labeling an organisation as terrorist was described as a problem because it ‘implies a moral judgment’. Nothing was said about why a moral judgment might be appropriate.

Anna Stanley

What Nigel Biggar says about the British Empire

We are constantly being told by that coalition of communists and racists that talk about “de-colonisation” that the British Empire was a Bad Thing and that therefore we whiteys should a) be ashamed, b) tear down any monuments to that empire and c) give all our money and wealth to the descendents of the alleged victims of that empire. This despite the fact that there is almost no one alive who had anything to do with said empire. There is no force for good like inter-generational guilt.

For some time Oxford Academic Nigel Biggar has been discomfited by this claim and these demands. In 2017, he was denounced by “fellow” academics for running an “Empire and Ethics” project. Last year saw the publication of his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. This itself was something of a palaver with Biggar’s original publisher dropping the thing in what appeared to be a cancellation. Luckily there is still some competition in the publishing world and another publisher came to the rescue.

Biggar is at pains to point out that he is an ethicist not a historian. He deals in moral issues not historical ones; hence the title of the book. Well, that’s the theory but with over a hundred pages of footnotes it would appear he is quite good at the not-day job.

He examines the various claims that the “de-colonisers” make: Amritsar, slavery, Benin, Boer War, Irish famine. In all cases he finds that their claims are either entirely ungrounded or lack vital information that would cast events in a very different light.. Amritsar? Dyer was dealing with political violence that had led to murder. Some victims had been set alight. Anyway, he was condemned for his actions by the British authorities and, indeed, his own standing orders. Slavery? Everyone had it and Britain was the first to get rid of it. Benin? They had killed unarmed ambassadors. Irish famine? They tried to relieve it but they were quite unequal to the size of the task. In the case of Benin he comes very close to accusing the leading de-coloniser of knowingly lying. The only one of these where I don’t think he is so convincing is the Boer War. He claims that Britain was concerned about the future of the Cape and especially the Simonstown naval base and also black rights. I think it was the pursuit of gold even if it does mean agreeing with the communist Eric Hobsbawm.

He is far too polite about the “de-colonisers”. They are desperate to hammer the square peg of reality into their round-hole of a theory. To this end they claim knowledge they don’t have, gloss over inconvenient facts, erect theories that don’t bear scrutiny and when all else fails: lie. Biggar tackles all of these offences against objectivity with a calmness and a politeness that you can bet his detractors would never return.

The communists – because they are obsessed with such things and are past masters at projection – like to claim that there was an “ideology” of Empire. Biggar thinks this is nonsense. As he says:

There was no essential motive or set of motives that drove the British Empire. The reasons why the British built an empire were many and various. They differed between trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official and statesman. They sometimes differed between London, Cairo, Cape Town and Calcutta. And all of the motives I have unearthed in this chapter were, in themselves, innocent: the aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government. There is nothing morally wrong with any of these. Indeed, the last one is morally admirable.

One of the benefits of the British Empire is that it tended to put a stop to local wars. How many people lived because of that? But that leads us on to another aspect. Almost no one ever considers what went on before the Empire arrived. Was it better or worse than went before it? Given that places like Benin indulged in human sacrifice, I would say that in many cases the British Empire was an improvement. And if we are going to talk about what went before what about afterwards? He has little to say about what newly-independent countries have done with their independence. The United States, the “white” (for want of a better term) Commonwealth and Singapore have done reasonably well. Ireland is sub-par but OK. Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent have very little to show for themselves. This may explain why Britain needed very few people to maintain the Empire. At one point he points out that at the height of the Raj the ratio of Briton to native was 1 to 1000. That implies a lot of consent. Tyrannies need a lot more people.

The truth of the matter is that talk of reparations is rooted in the failure of de-colonisation. If Jamaica were a nicer place to live than the UK, if Jamaica had a small boats crisis rather than the UK then no one would be breathing a word about reparations or colonial guilt. All this talk is pure deflection from the failure of local despots to make the lives of their subjects better.

Biggar has nothing to say about what came after the empire and he also has little to say about how it came about in the first place – so I’ll fill in that gap. Britain acquired an empire because it could. Britain was able to acquire an Empire because it mastered the technologies needed to do it to a higher level and on a greater scale than anyone else. Britain mastered technology because it made it possible to prosper by creating wealth. That in itself was a moral achievement.

Of course, modern Britons don’t actually need to justify the Empire. As I pointed out at the beginning none of us had anything to do with it. You could argue (does anyone actually do this?) that we current-day Britons are the inheritors of the same culture and perhaps we should be ashamed about that. Except that I am not in the mood to condemn a culture that produced the rule of law, freedom of speech, property rights and the Industrial Revolution. Anyway, does anyone seriously think that modern British culture would be capable of giving birth to a second empire? Culture changes. The other argument is that many of us continue to be the beneficiaries of the Empire. At very least those who have started with nothing and yet are still on the hook for reparations are entitled to feel a bit miffed. But one only has to look around to see that most of Britain’s prosperity is much more recent in origin. Sure, that big house might have originally been built from a slaver’s profits but if a more recent person hadn’t kept the roof intact it would be a ruin by now.

A narrative about a rapacious British Empire is being used to first humiliate and shame modern Britons in preparation for their impoverishment and eventual extermination. OK, maybe I am getting ahead of myself here but I’ll bet you some of them of thinking that. There is certainly nothing in the “decolonisation” belief system to prevent it. Biggar’s achievement is to demonstrate that – if you do believe in intergenerational guilt  – there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Tories delenda est

The Tory failure is, as Helen Joyce mordantly details, spiritual too. The care of souls is what Trans extremists have squarely set themselves at, and this Tory government has, in law and administration alike, conceded to them. Penny Mordaunt, Maria Miller and Caroline Nokes head a very long list of Tory MPs who have not just done the bidding of Stonewall et al, they have cheered them on and denounced their critics.

The Critic Editorial

What did you think when you saw this headline?

“White middle-aged men are ‘bottom of everything’ says bank worker sacked over N word”

I thought it meant that the bank worker had either called someone the N-word or had referred to them by that term. I was wrong. The man in question is called Carl Borg-Neal, and you can hear him tell his own story on this video. Mr Borg-Neal was sacked from Lloyds bank, where he had worked for more than a quarter of a century, simply for saying the word out loud as part of a well-intentioned question during a training session on “Race Education for Line Managers” – a training session which had been billed to attendees as a space where they could speak freely.

I am going to quote the Free Speech Union’s own account of the case at length. Much as I admire the FSU’s work (I am a member), I would have preferred to quote just one or two paragraphs and then provide a link to the rest. Unfortunately the FSU’s article on Mr Borg-Neal’s case is to be found under the general URL for the whole organisation, https://freespeechunion.org/, which means that the link will soon point to whatever their next bulletin is about, rather than to Mr Neal-Borg’s case in particular. It would be better if the FSU had a unique URL for each article. I digress. Here’s the article:

The Free Speech Union has won its biggest ever legal victory at the Employment Tribunal, securing damages likely to exceed £800,000 for Carl Borg-Neal, a dyslexic Lloyds bank manager who was sacked following a workplace free speech row.

This is a fantastic result and it’s worth pointing out that Carl’s final compensation package – which includes damages for past loss of earnings, future loss of earnings, a pensions award, compensation for discrimination, aggravated damages and compensation for personal injury – is well in excess of the amount typically awarded to Claimants at the Employment Tribunal.

In July 2021, Mr Borg-Neal was one of around 100 senior Lloyds managers to participate in an online training session entitled ‘Race Education for Line Managers’. Provided by an external organisation, the training formed part of the bank’s ‘Race Action Plan’, launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death the previous year.

Carl had worked for Lloyds for 27 years without incident, was popular among colleagues and had risen to a managerial role at head office. Far from being indifferent to racial equality, he had recently joined a new scheme mentoring young colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds and was working with three mentees, one of African descent, one of Asian descent and one of European (non-UK) descent.

At the start of the session, the trainer read out a script that established the parameters for what was to follow. “When we talk about race, people often worry about saying the wrong thing,” she said. “Please understand that today is your opportunity to practice, learn and be clumsy… The goal is to start talking, so please speak freely, and forgive yourself and others when being clumsy today.”

Carl was relieved to hear that since his dyslexia can occasionally cause him to ‘be clumsy’ when speaking ‘freely’. During a subsequent discussion on ‘intent vs effect’, he decided to take the trainer’s statement at face-value. Thinking partly about rap music, he asked how as a line manager he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority background use a word that might be considered offensive if used by a white person. Met with a puzzled look from the trainer, he added, “The most common example being use of the word n***** in the black community.”

→ Continue reading: What did you think when you saw this headline?

Samizdata quote of the day – a perfect summary of politics today

It’s going to be an interesting election: the party that deserves to lose versus the party that doesn’t deserve to win.

– Commenter Andy

Samizdata quote of the day – why the Tories need to burn to ash

Almost half the Conservative Party’s backbench MPs in the British Parliament belong to a Caucus promoting extreme Net Zero ideas that is funded by a small group of green billionaire foundations. The Conservative Environment Network (CEN), which acts mostly as a lobby group, receives over 80% of its funding from the European Climate Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Oak Foundation, WWF-UK and Clean Air Fund. As regular readers will recall, these paymasters crop up regularly whenever anyone of influence, be they journalists, academics or politicians, requires help and guidance in promoting the insanity of removing hydrocarbon energy from industrial societies within less than 30 years.

[…]

It is noted by CEN that when Russia invaded Ukraine “we helped promote the narrative that reducing dependency on fossil fuels through renewable energy and insulation would help defeat Putin”. Quite how fossil fuel dependency is reduced by intermittent renewables that rely on back-up hydrocarbons is not immediately clear. It’s unlikely that Putin quaked in his boots at the thought of the widespread mobilisation of loft insulators in the U.K.

Chris Morrison

I made it clear to my very marginal Tory MP (150 vote majority last election) that her membership in CEN guarantees I will be voting Reform.