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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Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.
Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.
More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.
– Fraser Myers
My first piggy bank was in the shape of a globe. After I’d found out what a globe was my first question was “Where is Britain?” and I got the rather disappointing reply familiar to all Britons. My second question – to which there was an similarly disappointing answer – was “Where is Vietnam?” I asked because I had heard the word over and over again on the radio.
In 1975, South Vietnam was defeated by the communist North. I remember the TV pictures. I was particularly saddened by the sight of a helicopter being thrown off the deck of an American aircraft carrier. I knew then that this was a catastrophe although it took me a lot longer to find out just how much of a catastrophe.
People often talk about how bloody the Vietnam War was. Perhaps 500,000 deaths. What they rarely talk about is how bloody the Vietnam Peace was. Two million dead by some estimates. Once the South Vietnamese Army had collapsed the South Vietnamese had nothing to protect them from communist tyranny, red in tooth and claw.
It didn’t have to be this way. The big secret about Vietnam – apart from the peace being bloodier than the war – was that South Vietnam would have been just fine had the US public not got bored of the thing and the US Congress not voted to end combat air patrols over the country.
I can’t imagine what brought that to mind.
As European countries, finally, crank up defence spending, International Traffic in Arms Regulations (or “ITAR”) are likely to come up in conversations.
Reflecting on topics such as this got me thinking that so much of the Western supply chain in military kit is controlled by the US. On the positive side, you get economies of scale and all that comes with these kind of forces. For years, Americans have been keen on selling all this funky kit to the likes of Germany, Britain, etc.
The problem is that to follow an independent foreign and military policy in this new era means that chain is breaking. There is talk that the US can operate a “kill switch” so that countries using certain US-made weapons cannot use them in ways that an administration does not like. It reminds me a bit of worries about Chinese electric vehicles being vulnerable to such a “switch”.
This seems in some ways to be a risk management issue. There is a broader Nassim Taleb-style point about making defence and security in the free world less fragile. Think how much of our defence and communications run off a handful of networks and suppliers. There are US satellites, cloud computing services from the likes of AWS, Microsoft, etc; military hardware suppliers in the US such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney. And many more. These systems generate great efficiencies and rich export earnings, particularly for the United States.
There’s a problem – a fragility. Europe has become dependent, complacent and comfortable.
As we found out because of the 2008 financial crisis and covid, overconfidence in certain institutions (US government, central banks, medical experts) can lead to dangerous outcomes. There is a sort of moral hazard problem. Just as “too-big-to-fail” bank bailouts create foolish attitudes about risk, a sense that the US military or whoever would ride to the rescue of a country meant too many nations got complacent. In fact, it is possible to see some of what is going on right now in behavioural terms. Incentives matter. Shield people against certain costs, and they become spendthrifts, borrow too much, or assume they can strike attitudes on things and there won’t be bad outcomes.
(See my related post on what countries such as in Europe, parts of Asia etc, do now.)
“Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice”, writes Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph.
The article starts by repeating a familiar refrain about the unprecedented loss of civil liberties during the pandemic.
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
All true, but the real meat is here:
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it”.
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: “Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said.
If was capable of having that thought, he was capable of acting on it, or rather of continuing to act on it. He was not, as I once thought, a man in a panic who, pathetically but understandably, followed the the united voice of “the experts” because he could not imagine doing anything else. As a successful politician he knew the political nature of the pressure he was under and chose to give into it. He switched which expert to follow – switched from the expert who was right to the “expert” who was wrong – on political grounds. Oh, no doubt his decision was influenced by which expert shouted the loudest (it was not Jenny Harries) and said the scariest things, but a refusal to be moved from a rationally-decided course by emotional displays is the very definition of a leader. I wonder, does he ever think now about how near he came to being the second Churchill he dreamed of being? All he had to do was stay firm.
Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
And it was popular. Very popular.
Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Persuading people that they have been badly treated is easy. Persuading them that they themselves have behaved badly and stupidly is not easy at all. How do we do it? A cynic would say there is no need to try. Just publicly blame everything on “the politicians” (in this case Boris Johnson, who certainly deserves plenty of blame but not all of it) in the same way that the Greens publicly blame all the environmental damage they believe comes from humanity’s reliance on oil on “the oil companies” rather than the people who use the oil, namely all of us. But I do not believe that any strategy of persuasion that relies on a conscious lie can succeed in the long run.
My prediction is 10-15 years from now, due to Trump’s foreign policy realignment or other more local factors, several additional nations will have nuclear weapons as part of either a substitute for the illusion of being under the US nuclear umbrella, or as part of a “tous azimuts” defence policy. Poland, Japan, South Korea, plus Taiwan & Ukraine if they survive long enough. I imagine if Taiwan is occupied by China, Australia will take the plunge as well.
The domestic discussion is most advanced in Poland & Ukraine for obvious reasons, others are only just mumbling about it currently. I can also imagine a Pan-European nuclear weapons programme as well (a great idea, but being Pan-European, it will take 30 years before they even agree where the HQ should be located).
This would make the world a somewhat safer place.
So why should a judge not be political, what is wrong with a judge deciding to be progressive? Well in the UK no one elects the judiciary; the independence of the judiciary was guaranteed by judges agreeing to honour the requirement to be strictly neutral and objective, as my late father, who was a Scottish Sheriff, did. He always said that the moment judges start to dabble in politics they lose all authority. They are the Crown and are bound by the same laws that bind the Crown.
Yet that is no longer the case, is it? We now have judges, prosecutors and Chief Constables who see it as their duty to ‘be progressive’. This is all done under the guise of ‘supporting human rights’ but in practice it creates a scenario where they start making up laws as they go along. The police do similar.
In the UK Parliament is sovereign. That is the fundamental guiding principle of our constitution. But Blair vandalised this by removing so much actual power from Parliament and allocating it to unelected, unaccountable quangos. He did this to drive the progressive agenda, even when Labour is out of power. And it has worked.
– C.J. Strachen
Today’s Telegraph boasts a ragebait article by William Sitwell called “The loss of Latin from schools is a triumph, not a tragedy”. He did not enjoy Latin at his prep school, so he is glad that the Labour government abruptly withdrew funding for a programme that had supported Latin teaching in state schools, despite the programme being focussed on schools in deprived areas.
The prep school Mr Sitwell attended was called Maidwell Hall. Labour’s imposition of VAT on private school fees has meant that this school will soon close its doors forever. Mr Sitwell seemed sad about that when he wrote this piece: “The death of my old prep school shows Labour is hell-bent on destroying my way of life”. I would have guessed that the teaching of Latin at prep schools was a small but distinct component of that way of life. I do not know what caused the abrupt change of tone. Pragmatism, perhaps. There is probably some Latin proverb about how the man who is heir-presumptive to a baronetcy is wise to make nice to a Labour government.
Mr Sitwell – if he has some other title, he does not use it when writing in the Telegraph – clearly enjoyed enraging most his readers by writing this:
And to this day, I have no regrets. Nothing I do, say, see, observe or experience ever bears any relation to, or could possibly be enhanced by, an appreciation of Latin. It’s never helped me order a beer in Spain, have a sea urchin removed from my foot in Greece nor brought me any closer to understanding the constitutions, cultures or history of the West.
But what those Latin classes did do was fill my childhood with countless hours of pointless education when I should instead have been forced to study the likes of economics, business, entrepreneurialism, spreadsheets and profit and loss. Now that, believe me, I really do regret. Or as Erasmus probably wouldn’t have put it: “Me paenitet.”
Despite never having learned Latin myself, my sympathies lie with the majority of the Telegraph commenters who argue in favour of teaching Latin and other “useless” subjects. I suspect that if Maidwell Hall and Eton had replaced Latin with Economics, Entrepreneurialism & Spreadsheets circa 1980, Mr Sitwell would have written, with equal passion but less eloquence, about how dismal VisiCalc was and how he wishes he could have learned Latin instead.
Is it better to teach children “useful” subjects, which they can see the point of learning but which do nothing to encourage flexible thinking, and which may turn out to be completely useless if the world changes, or to teach “useless” subjects, for which the advertised benefit of “learning to learn” is small recompense for the certain disbenefit of thousands of hours of pointless toil?
I dunno. You sort it out for your own kids, or let them choose for themselves. The point is that of course the Labour government closed the Latin Excellence Programme for political reasons. They are politicians. That’s what they do. That’s what you gave them democratic power to do.
Wittingly or otherwise, the MAGA online right started to absorb Russia’s narrative on Ukraine: that it isn’t a real country, that the Ukrainians aren’t a real people, that if they are a real people then they are uniquely corrupt. On and on it went: that Ukrainian soldiers are ‘literal’ Nazis, that Zelensky is constantly buying villas and yachts in the south of France, that the whole war is one big money-laundering operation, that Ukraine’s war to push the Russians back is unwinnable because of the great might of the Russian army – and that the whole thing is a giant waste of US taxpayers’ money.
– Douglas Murray (£)
Lord Gavin Barwell was the Chief of Staff for Theresa May – in a field with numerous candidates, probably the worst British Prime Minister in living memory. Reacting to a recent Daily Sceptic article that laid out the science surrounding carbon dioxide, he pounced on an X repost by “Toby and his mate [yours truly]” and stated: “I suspect the next generation may pursue people like him who sought to delay action for damages.” Barwell’s comment is as silly as it is sinister, but it indicates considerable elite derangement as members observe their Net Zero fantasy falling in flames. Net Zero was only ever an elite luxury belief backed by 30 years of lies, fake science and constant climate scare forecasts that never happened. Removing all hydrocarbons from industrial societies will lead to economic and societal collapse. Removing hydrocarbons from the developing world is just plain wicked.
– Chris Morrison
I have seen a number of US-based commentators rail against American involvement in many international events and wars, and to an extent they have a point. Not least, they’re right to ask hard questions about what America gets in return for all that apart from our love. Selling fancy military jets and tech is nice, but not much compensation, arguably, for much of the grief that comes with financing military efforts. So even if a different POTUS was office, we’d have reached this situation, if not quite the same way.
Remember that less than two months ago, the POTUS was a senile, crooked, and in my view deeply unpleasant old man who liked to shove America’s nose into UK domestic matters, such as Northern Ireland, to take just one example. So this is a bipartisan problem, not one specific to Trump and his circle.
In a way, Trump is doing Europe and certain other countries a favour, even if it does not come across that way. I expect S. Korea, Japan, even Taiwan, to spend even more on defence, such as anti-missile defence. Those nations must be deeply alarmed. I expect Israel to get involved in lending out its expertise to countries willing to work with Israel. (One side-effect of this period is that behind the scenes, military co-operation between Europe and Israel will increase. Let’s get IDF pilots of a certain age to train folk up. They’re the best in the world.)
Various thoughts this morning in London, as I get ready to fly on business to Zurich (the Swiss have some clever tech, by the way):
Net Zero is dead. Keir Starmer must in whatever way he can to sway his backbenchers and the chattering class, put NZ into the side of the road. That might mean sacking energy secretary Ed Milliband. Deindustrialisation must stop. Windmills, solar energy and happy thoughts cannot build a submarine, artillery shell factory or a bunch of anti-missile batteries. And screwing the British economy to make a tiny dent in C02 emissions so we feel all virtuous is a luxury belief. Luxuries are out.
Liz Kendall, the minister responsible for benefits in the UK, will have to squeeze benefits paid to millions of people who are currently allegedly too ill to work. We spend tens of billions on keeping working-age adults away from productive work. It’s unsustainabile, financially and morally. It also robs the UK of productive potential, and lets human capital disintegrate. If Starmer can blitz foreign aid, he can instruct his colleagues to do the same on welfare.
European nations will start to further restrict the ability of US-based companies, investors etc from buying controlling stakes in unlisted and listed European firms that produce tech and goods that have military uses, either explicitly, or potentially. Such firms will also be banned, or restricted, from listing on the New York Stock Exchange for the forseeable future.
Americans coming to Europe on various trips may notice that visa-free applications become more onerous. I don’t like it but I won’t be surprised if it happens, particularly if such a person has been to Russia in the past decade.
Intelligence sharing among the “Five Eyes” alliance that dates back to WW2 (the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) will squeeze out the US to some extent, if not completely. Subtly, however, there will be more of a move towards countries we might have to trust a bit more. With Tulsi Gabbard as a intelligence-related US government member, some of the 5E countries will be nervous.
I want to stress that I don’t necessarily endorse all the actions that will be taken, or at least I don’t have time here to go into the finer details. Trump is going to be in office for four years and we don’t know what happens after the mid-terms. He’s also getting older and more volatile. At some point his acolytes will fall out (Musk, probably.) But whatever happens, Europe must rearm significantly, must increase focus on security and intelligence gathering capabilities, and prevent further US leverage over our resources where possible.
If you don’t want WWIII, then you don’t want some thug dictatorship thinking it can invade countries whenever it feels like.
– Frank Fleming
To all the people holding a vitriolic hated, anger & haranguing Zelenskyy,
Whom remain completely silent over Putin, as if he doesn’t exist – despite the fact that he’s the tyrant that started this invasion & could stop it whenever he wanted to – you’re a pro-Kremlin shill.
– Andreas Koureas
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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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