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.
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“In the pantheon of destructive, counterproductive laws of the last few centuries, Labour’s new Renters’ Rights Act, which starts today, must be up there with the worst. Perhaps alongside the Corn Laws of 1815, or the Trade Union Act of 1906 that allowed unchecked industrial unrest and economic decline, or the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 that constrained housing supply. It is that bad. The Renters’ Rights Act is sold as a moral crusade: a bold attempt to drive rogue landlords out of England’s private rental sector and protect tenants from abuse. As with the soon-to-be-implemented Employment Rights Act 2025, it is a cure that worsens the disease. Just as higher unemployment will come from the Employment Rights Act, so higher rent and fewer tenancies will come from this Renters’ Rights Act. Employment rights creating more unemployed people, renters’ rights creating more people that cannot rent. Classic performative socialism.”
One take-away from all this in my opinion is that this will seriously damage private landlords who own, say, one to five properties, and benefit larger, more institutional landlords, including corporations. Ownership of rental property will become concentrated into the hands of medium-sized and large companies, which I suspect is exactly what the existing government (and not just the existing one) wants. Such landlords will be more pliable when it comes to political pressure to adopt this or that new rule. Also, at the margins, it makes the rental sector less flexible, which also hampers the ability of people to move around in finding and obtaining new jobs. This adds to the baleful impact of the new employment legislation in the UK, which amongst its features is an attempt to re-unionise the workforce and shorten periods when an employee is on probation and can be let go. Even the BBC covers this aspect of such rules, referring to “unintended consequences”.
The point has to be made over and over that there is cause and effect. Make X more costly, or potentially risky (such as by making it harder to fire a person, evict a delinquent tenant) – there will be less of X. We impose speeding tickets on speeding motorists, so why should it be different if we somehow increase the cost of doing something, all else being equal? In fact, it would be honest if a politician said “yes, imposing these rules will reduce supply of X, so we will need to make up the difference in some other way”. But this hardly ever happens. There’s just this assumption that a new piece of law or tax will be absorbed. This is a species, in a way, of the magical thinking that we also get in areas such as around Net Zero.
I often do not agree with Peter Zeihan, to put it mildly, but he might be more or less right about this, given the Atlantic alliance effectively ended in January 2025, at least de facto if not de jure. It pains me to write that as someone who has been a pro-US Atlanticist my entire life.
There is a ritual as old as democracy itself, and it has nothing to do with voting. It takes place in the days before polling, in the offices of think tanks, the studios of broadcasters, and the columns of political magazines. It is the ancient art of expectation management — the careful calibration of what counts as success and failure, conducted not in the interests of accuracy but of narrative. This week, with the May 7th elections bearing down upon us, we have been treated to a masterclass of the genre.
Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov and a man whose estimable intelligence I have no interest in disputing, has published a guide to the upcoming elections in Prospect. It is admirably readable and contains much of interest. But embedded within it is a paragraph about Reform that repays close attention, because it illustrates with almost pedagogical clarity how the expectation game is played.
Kellner deploys the Rallings and Thrasher model to suggest that if Reform win 1,400 seats, they will be “sunk in gloom,” and that anything short of 2,000 should indicate that they are “slipping back.” He frames sub-2,000 as the threshold of adequacy. The implication is clear: a party that currently holds two councillors among the seats being contested should apparently consider 1,400 gains a cause for institutional mourning.
Only?
Let me be direct: I would be happy with 1,000 seats. I would be delighted with anything north of 1,200. And I say this not from false modesty but from an honest reading of the data, weeks of campaigning on the ground, the political landscape, my own politically pessimistic nature, and, perhaps most importantly, from a sceptical eye on the baseline figure Kellner has chosen to make his arithmetic work.
Nextdoor, for those that don’t know, is one of those local social media apps. It can be a great place to find out local news, although the number of posts about cats being run over can be depressing. The other day I saw a post that depressed me despite featuring no dead pets. A presumably well-meaning lady asked, “Would it be unreasonable to remove the shop brand labels on clothes that I want to give to local charity shops?” She had observed that some people buy clothes with prestigious labels from charity shops or second-hand clothes apps such as Vinted and then sell them at a profit. She wanted to prevent this happening.
Several people challenged her view. “Why would you take the labels out if you are donating to a charity?” said one response. “The charity could make more money with the labels in”. That seemed to be the majority opinion. But a distressingly large minority clearly felt that reducing the charity’s income from selling donated clothes was worthwhile to ensure that no “spivs” could make any money from selling them a second time.
Many years ago, I was chatting with the grandmother of a family friend, whose name was Hannelore. She grew up in Germany on a family farm in Schleswig-Holstein, not far from Hamburg, and candidly admitted that as landowning farmers, they all feared the communists and so were broadly supportive of the NSDAP during the 1930s. Indeed, when the war started, any misgivings they had evaporated when Poland swiftly fell in 1939, and then France collapsed in a month and a half campaign in 1940. The family even attended some pro-government rallies to celebrate these victories.
By 1943, Hannelore said it was clear it was not going to be a short war, as Allied bombers were now a constant presence in the skies above. It was also very hard to find farm labourers as the war effort was consuming more and more resources by then. Yet even so, the family remained broadly optimistic about the war ending with German victory.
But then in late July for an entire week, the RAF and USAAF filled the sky over Hamburg by day and by night. And although Hannelore did not know it at the time, it was called Operation Gomorrah. She told me that on one night in particular, her father called the whole family outside. It was bright as day, the entire skyline to the south a line of incandescent light. By morning, white dust entirely covered their home and farmland, with a constant rain of ash still falling from the sky. 40,000 people had burned to death in a firestorm in a single day in Hamburg. And only then, our friend’s grandmother said, did they finally realise everything was not going to be alright and the war had been a catastrophic mistake. Only then, and from then onwards, did everything they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio ring hollow.
I was in my late teens sitting in an old farmhouse in Scotland when Hannelore told me that story from her youth.
So, on this portentous Beltane as I watched a series of videos from Tuapse in Russia, I had something of a flashback to that story told me several decades ago.
In the early days of the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine in 2022, there was a series of rallies in Tuapse in support of Putin’s government. I wonder if perspectives have started shift now that the reality of this war is coming home to Russia in earnest.
“The people pursuing luxury beliefs are engaged in a kind of status competition. Who can épater la bourgeoisie with the boldest, most transgressive political statements? After Oct. 7, 2023, we saw this kind of status-jockeying on college campuses, where elite students vied to become the most fervent supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Keffiyeh scarves became de rigueur. Celebrating political murder is the next step on this progression. For most, it’s only talk. But there will always be a few who seek what they see as the ultimate status: actually carrying out a political attack.
“People who shrug off this violence chic as mere talk need to take a hard look at what’s going on. The foiled attack on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was the third attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in less than two years. The 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was tragically successful. As was the hit on two Israel embassy staffers on a street in Washington, D.C., last year. We’ve seen hundreds of attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues. An anti-Israel extremist firebombed the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The list goes on and on. And the pace of these attacks seems to be accelerating.”
It follows from this that digital ID could easily function as a permissions system. The computer might say No, leaving John unable to hire the car or buy the wine. That could be the result of an administrative error or technical glitch but, by the time the issue was resolved, John’s plans would have been cancelled. But it could also be due to the cancellation of his digital ID, a possibility the Government makes explicit in the consultation, explaining it would need the power to revoke someone’s digital ID.
Speaking at the Parliamentary committee, insider-outsider Whitley said that the system envisaged for the right-to-work checks was one in which permissions for other activities, such as buying alcohol, could be switched off and on at will.
The title of this Telegraph article by Daniel Hannan “Here’s why I’m quitting the Conservative Party” is true – he is quitting – but not for the reason you think. The Reform Party will not be getting its first representative in the House of Lords quite yet. Hannan writes,
Here is the nub of the problem. A majority of the electorate believes that Britain, which has the highest tax rate since the aftermath of the Second World War and whose national debt is about to overtake its annual GDP, is some kind of Hayekian, if not Dickensian, state. The single most unpopular Labour policy since polling day was to seek to remove the winter fuel allowance from better-off pensioners.
Our politician problem, in short, is a manifestation of our electorate problem. Plenty of MPs, including Labour MPs, can see what needs to be done. But they can’t see how to get re-elected if they do it.
For example, almost every politician will privately admit that the pensions triple lock is condemning Britain to penury, yet no party proposes abolition. Why not? Because, by 65 to 11 per cent, voters want to keep it (all figures are from YouGov polls within the last 18 months).
MPs likewise know that the NHS cannot remain a state monopoly. Wes Streeting, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch – all have eyes in their heads. But, having eyes, they are also aware that voters oppose any use of private provision, even within a system free to the user, by 71 to 16 per cent.
Every MP grasps that housebuilding has not kept up with population growth for 40 years. So where are all the new towns that keep being proposed? It turns out that voters (by 49 to 30 per cent) don’t want them.
We are in a vicious circle. As things deteriorate, voters become angry, and blame the political class. MPs lose whatever lingering legitimacy they had, and become even less able to propose unpopular policies.
and
Consider, for example, the idea that rent controls reduce the number of available properties and so drive up rents. It is not obvious, but a few minutes’ thought reveals that, if people cannot make a profit by letting out their homes, they will not do it.
Or consider the idea that you become more secure by buying what you need from around the world rather than by manufacturing it at home. Again, it seems counterintuitive, but we apply that principle to our own lives. Indeed, it is precisely the important things – food, clothing, housing – that we purchase from specialists rather than trying to make them ourselves.
Consider, above all, the idea that cutting the tax rate might encourage more economic activity and so generate more tax revenue. This must, if you think about it, be true. A tax rate of 100 per cent would mean zero revenue, since people would not work for nothing, so it is simply a question of finding where the optimum rate is.
At present, though, voters instead favour any tax that they think will fall on other people. For example, a wealth tax – a textbook example of a levy that drives entrepreneurs away and reduces revenue – is backed by an extraordinary 75 per cent of voters, with just 12 per cent opposed. In the current climate, almost no one in public life is prepared to tell 75 per cent that they are wrong.
Yet it is precisely the counter-intuitive truths that can be profitably taught. That was what Ralph Harris did in the 1950s and 1960s; and it is what I shall be doing from 1 June, when I take over as the director of the IEA.
“Britain is running a live experiment in how fast you can drain a tax base before you start draining a country. This recent article in The Times reports on a freedom of information request by Wealth Club to HMRC has revealed that the top 1% of taxpayers (circa 500,000 people) contributed nearly £94 billion in tax in 2023/24. That’s a third of all income tax collected. The top 100,000 paid almost a fifth of the national total on their own. At the same time, Britain is losing those very people. The latest Henley Private Wealth Migration Report forecasts £66 billion in wealth leaving the UK this year as record numbers of millionaires move abroad. That follows 10,800 departures in 2024, the highest ever recorded.”
I got this on my Linkedin page, from a chap called John Russo.
Here’s more:
“Critics call this alarmist. They point out that only 0.6% of the UK’s millionaires are leaving. But this misses the point. It’s not the number of people that matters. It’s the volume of capital, the density of investment, and the influence of networks that disappear with them. When a founder, a fund manager, or a family office relocates, their employees, service providers, and charities often follow. The irony is that the UK’s tax system remains among the most progressive in the developed world. Those with higher incomes already contribute the majority of national revenue. But the politics of envy has become the economics of loss.”
Hard to dispute any of this. Read the whole thing, as someone once put it.
Do you think they’ll find any? I’ve got a few ideas as to where the investigators might look. Real out-of-the-box, blue-sky thinking.
Remember this map, put out by Sarah Palin’s Political Action Committee in late 2010?
In case the image goes away, it is headed “20 House Democrats from districts we carried in 2008 voted for the health care bill. IT’S TIME TO TAKE A STAND” and shows a map of the states of USA with clip art images of crosshairs over those districts. Below that is a list of the representatives of those districts.
Here are three different Guardian articles published on one day, 9th January 2011, linking that map to the shooting spree by Jared Loughner in which he attempted to murder Representative Gabrielle Giffords and did murder six others.
The metaphor of targeting is very common in politics. A few days before the last-but-two attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, President Biden said it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye”, without anyone thinking Joe Biden put Thomas Crooks up to it.
But that map, Sarah Palin’s map, is different. No evidence was ever presented that Jared Loughner ever even saw the map (which had been put out by the failed vice-presidential candidate’s Political Action Committee several months previously and was about a specific political issue, Obama’s healthcare bill, in which he had no documented interest) – let alone that he was moved to murder by the clip art of a target over Gabrielle Gifford’s district.
Yet the New York Times, no less, told us that the link between The Map and political incitement was clear. In an editorial called America’s Lethal Politics the NYT said,
“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, greviously wounded Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarh Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that puts Ms Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
Actually, it put the places they represented under the cross hairs, not the representatives themselves, but that is beside the point. The point is behold the power of the map.
Obviously the use of the metaphor of a target cannot explain why people try to assassinate Donald Trump, or else Joe Biden would be in the crosshai- sorry, in the frame, now. Equally obviously, the endless stream of claims in left wing media that Donald Trump is a “pedophile, rapist and traitor” cannot explain why people try to assassinate Donald Trump, or else left wing media outlets would be bad like Sarah Palin.
Wake up, sheeple. It’s that accursed map. It wasn’t just Palin’s PAC that published it, it was re-published by a zillion left-wing newspapers and websites. Every left-winger in America must have seen it. A smart CalTech-bound kid like Cole Tomas Allen would certainly have been politically aware at the age of sixteen. He must have seen it. We already know of its power to reach across time and space to penetrate and warp vulnerable minds. Just watch The Ring and you’ll understand.
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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