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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Samizdata quote of the day – the Uniparty is not even hiding that it is the Uniparty anymore There are also no prizes for guessing why Sir Keir is behaving in such an anti-democratic fashion. “If there is a Conservative government, I can sleep at night,” he said. “If there was a Right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.” He couldn’t have summarised the phenomenon of the uniparty any better if he’d tried.
Labour and the Conservatives, in this conception, are competitors: Reform is an enemy: an existential threat to a consensus both parties have played their role in promoting.
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes (£)
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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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Yesterday the thought occurred to me of the possibility of a government of “National Unity” – Lab, Con, LibDem. All they need is an existential crisis which may be genuine due to absurd policies such as Net Zero or could be manufactured. Perhaps this is why there is so much ultra-hyped fear-mongering about Russia. If you ignore the nukes Russia is a failing regional power. Perhaps the suspension of some local elections for “admin purposes” is a dry run…
Here’s Neil Kinnock:
There were many real people of the right in the last Conservative Party government – but they found that they had no power.
NO POWER.
Being elected, whether to local or to national office, is no good – if you find you have NO POWER.
There must be institutional changes (a true Counter Revolution) to address this – officials, “experts”, and “independent bodies”, must have their power ended – they must be removed from public life.
But such a Counter Revolution would not just be against a trend that started with the arrival of Prime Minister Blair in 1997 – this trend towards more and more power in the hands of officials and “experts” stated long before that.
As far back as 1929 Chief Justice Hewitt denounced it in his book “The New Despotism” – and it can be traced back all the way to the mid 19th century with the creation of the Civil Service (and other things).
Even Margaret Thatcher, a very strong willed person with a clear agenda, often found herself helpless – every document the lady got to see being written by the enemies of her Conservative agenda, and every “choice” influenced by endlessly lies dressed up as “information” and “advice”.
Hence such things the failure to repeal the race laws (the string of Statutes passed from 1965 to 1976 – and on into our own times with such things as the Equality Act) which undermined both Freedom of Association and Freedom of Speech – in 1979 even the first of these Statutes (the 1965 Act) was only 14 years old, and the 1976 Act was only three years old – but it was declared (by the entire administrative machine) that it was “impossible” to do anything about them.
The government led by Margaret Thatcher came into office pledged to recognise the black (yes black) led government in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia – but the entire international (international – even back then) establishment said that was impossible – and that power “had to be given” (after a fig leaf “election”) to Robert Mugabe and his Marxist Zanu PF – vast numbers of people (most of them black) died because of that.
That it was in 1980 – a helpless Margaret Thatcher looking on in despair.
In 1986 we had the Single European Act.
As a young person at university I knew this was handing over power to the EEC (which later became the EU – European Union), but Margaret Thatcher did NOT know that – as the lady was a prisoner in a castle of lies, with every source of information the lady got to see – controlled by her enemies (who were also the enemies of this nation) – Margaret Thatcher was told it was a “free trade agreement”.
A “free trade agreement” that, in reality, gave what became the European Union a stranglehold over the laws of this island.
Note just how radical the lies of the establishment were – even back then. They lied to, and manipulated, a Prime Minister – and they did so without shame, indeed they were proud of their evil actions – and the establishment are vastly WORSE now.
The old idea that being Conservative, or being “on the right”, means “preserving the institutions” does not work when all the institutions (all of them) are rotten to the core – as they are NOW. Today, 2025 and going forward, ALL of the institutions of the United Kingdom are rotten to the core.
If the Reform Party came into office – it would, now, have to carry out a Counter Revolution – smashing the entire establishment.
Does Mr Farage understand this?
And does he understand that it might (might) not be a peaceful process?
I had some practical experience of Mr Farage before the local council elections of May 2025.
The Gentleman went around the country, including Kettering, promising lower Council Tax and claiming that waste and inefficiency was the problem – “send in the auditors” he said, repeatedly.
Lots of money was spent on auditors (both internal and external) every year – so “send in the auditors” was a spectacularly ignorant (I mean no offence by using the word “ignorant” – I mean it literally, as lack of knowledge, NOT as an insult) thing to say (and it was said repeatedly) – nor do such auditors (internal or external) really identify savings.
High local government spending is a result of Adult Social Care and Children’s Services – both of which are mandated by national government (by the national laws and bureaucracy – the “experts” and officials).
Voting for the Reform Party is NOT going to stop the Council Tax, in such local authorities (authorities that have responsibility for Adult Social Care and Children’s Services) going up by 4.9% every year – regardless of who you vote for. And it will not stop new taxes being introduced on top of that,
And when did national government start telling local councils they MUST spend money on XYZ regardless of what local taxpayers wanted?
1875.
Yes – 1875, the Disraeli Act which mandated about 40 things that local councils must do, whether local taxpayers wanted the council to do these things or not.
Yes (yes of course) things are vastly worse now – but do you see how far back the decline goes?
Effective reform (or an effective Reform Party government) would have to mean a Counter Revolution – a real Counter Revolution. A smashing of the present system of government, the smashing of the institutions – just about all of them.
Does Mr Farage understand that?
In case people do not know……
The institutions of this land (just about all of them), the officials and the “experts”, have led to a situation where we have a population of around 70 million people (vastly bloated by mass immigration and the natural increase, births, of these new population groups), and we import more food and more raw materials than ever before – the situation has never been extreme, yet on-top-of-this we import manufactured goods.
Yes we also export manufactured goods – but we import much more than we export, and we import raw materials and food (more than ever) on top of this.
We also have the highest energy costs in the world – which are killing off what remains of manufacturing industry, and we have ever more taxes and regulations (and pro trade union laws and practices) which will lead to MASS UNEMPLOYMENT – indeed it already exists, but it is hidden by putting vast numbers of unemployed people on other forms of benefit.
The idea that a nation of some 70 million people can be supported by the Credit Bubbles of “The City” is absurd – even if the “The City” could carry on as it is – which it can NOT. And neither can New York or the other “financial centers”.
The overall situation in the United Kingdom is truly terrible – as will become obvious over the next few years.
The chances of us getting to the next General Election, supposedly to be held in May 2029 (to coincide with the next major local government elections) are, tragically, low.
If you can leave – leave.
Those of us who have to remain are not going to do well.
Paul,
On the subject of energy costs you might find this map informative…
Paul: As an American, I had not known about that part of British—may I call it constitutional history. We have enough problems in the United States, but they mostly take the form of financial aid from the federal government to the states, and the threat of cutting it off if the states don’t comply; there’s not out and out compulsion. What you apparently have is an appalling legal arrangement, and one that shows why conservatives, such as Disraeli, are unreliable allies for libertarians and classical liberals: They tip too easily into collectivism and out and out authoritarianism.
Perhaps, but then consider it was the classical liberal Gladstone who was one of the key individuals responsible for civil service reform that turned into a permanent professional body and not Disraeli, who was generally against that.
While I’m far from favouring everything Disraeli did, I don’t think he did anything quite as inimical in the long-term to British liberty as Gladstone initiated with civil service reform. I’ll concede Gladstone was a million times more well intentioned than the opportunist Disraeli, but good intentions often lead to worse unintended consequences than opportunism.
I’ve probably mentioned this before. The two other partners in my father’s firm back in the ’90s were prominent figures in two parties apparently at daggers drawn. (I won’t name names, but although their activities were largely confined to Scotland, there’s a fair chance you might recognise one.) And we’re not talking Labour and the LibDems here; publicly, the hatred could hardly be more visceral. He always said that once they got talking, it was obvious they had more in common with each other than either did with him.
Of course, as Adam Smith told us, people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public. And their trade, as my dad often noted with annoyance, wasn’t law; it was politics.
Thank you Nick.
Hawaii is a special case (due to its isolation) – but the high energy costs of California are self inflicted, and any business (including Silicon Valley business) that remains in California, with its crippling taxes, endless regulations, and high energy costs, is violating its basic duty to shareholders – the influence of institutional share “management” entities (Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard – who have shares in each other) and the Credit Bubble banks, keeps many enterprises in California – against the interests of the people who are supposed to benefit from the Pension Funds (and so on) whose shares are entrusted the care of such “management” entities.
William H. Stoddard.
Many Victorian “Conservatives” and Victorian “Liberals” seem to have have fallen into the folly of “Social Reform” – although, at first, the economy grew faster than the state – so (in spite of these politicians) the state, as a proportion of the economy, actually SHRANK up to the 1870s – and only then started to grow as a proportion of the economy.
But you make a valid point – for example Richard Nixon did not just admire “Teddy” Roosevelt (and for why that is a bad thing – just see the platform of the Progressive Party in 1912 – with its claims that all natural resources, even land, belong to “the community” – not to individuals and families) he also admired Disraeli – and, from his statist perspective, he was correct to do so.
Whether it was Lord Stanley (later the Earl of Derby) and Disraeli on the “Conservative” side or Lord Russell (a friend of Stanley-Derby – the idea that Lord Russell supported laissez faire is false – unless one confuses laissez faire with “free trade” which the British establishment may have done) on the “Liberal” side – the attitude seems to have been “let us find new things for government to do”.
Even in the 1830s they were using IRELAND as a test bed for their ideas – national armed police force (that came in in the very early 1800s), state education system (1831), Poor Law tax (1838 – but the measures of the late 1840s made this tax vastly higher) and on and on.
And international historiography is so corrupted that it presents the horrors of the late 1840s in Ireland as the result of “laissez faire”.
Martin – yes the irony is extreme.
Gladstone supported the creation of the Civil Service because he thought it would lead to less expensive government, and more “efficient” government. And, as his friend and biographer John Morley pointed out, it was Gladstone’s obsession with “efficient government” that undermined his aim to end the Income Tax (which did NOT really come from the Napoleonic Wars – it had been abolished after those wars, and returned in the 1840s) – because Gladstone made it so easy for the new state to collect Income Tax.
Disraeli thought a Civil Service would get in the way of “Social Reform” – cling to ideas of limited government.
They were both wrong – indeed if they could have seen how things would turn out – their positions would have been reversed.
Perhaps the most consistent limited government British politician of the 19th century was John Bright.
He started as a dedicated Liberal – but ended up supporting the Conservatives, not that (by that time) he had much faith in either party – they had both (as far as he was concerned) abandoned any real commitment to liberty.
Was there a time when the British establishment was really interested in reducing the size and scope of government?
Perhaps the 1820s. The time of Prosperity Robinson and so on.
Although it should be remembered that government continued to shrink (as a proportion of the economy) till the 1870s – in spite of politicians, not because of them.
Sometimes things change for odd reasons.
For example, Castlereagh (who later went insane and killed himself) – reacted to the abolition of income tax by saying that it was only fair to reduce other taxes as well (so the poor would benefit).
To balance the budget with income tax gone and other taxes cut – there had to be real cuts in government spending.
The Conservative Party isnt conservative. Its mostly controlled by progressives.
Western competitive civil service systems are based on the Imperial Chinese civil service system and not surprisingly, end up with the same transfer for power to the expert/scholar class resulting in stagnation. and corruption.
Yes, Farage & Reform’s grandees absolutely understands that. And the fact they understands that is understood by the people who matter within the Blob. That is why they react so badly when it comes to Reform.
“Yes, Farage & Reform’s grandees absolutely understands that.”
That is reassuring.
“And the fact they understands that is understood by the people who matter within the Blob.”
That is less so. I didn’t think they were that smart.
Vinegar Joe – excellent point Sir. I will remember this point – and use it.
Stuart Noyes – Conservatives who actually were Conservative, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, found themselves to be powerless, to be without power. Even on quite minor matters – they would ask officials not to do certain things, and the officials just carried on doing these things – basically spitting in the face of these ministers.
Perry – I hope you are correct Sir.
I imagine the Blob people looking out over the completely disarmed Reform supporters and thinking . . . all is well. No threat there at all. Let them tweet and march.
At some point, change can only happen through force. When there is no force remaining, there will be no change.
Another historical irony was that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin admired the Chinese civil service due to its apparent meritocracy.
I think we can say with over 200 years more experience that meritocracy, especially within government agencies, is overrated.
Martin – I did not know that.
I had no idea that Jefferson and Franklin fell for this – thank you for pointing it out.
Senator Roscoe Conkling was correct – you can have Representative Government or you can have Bureaucracy – but, in the end, you can NOT have BOTH.
Either the elected politicians can hire and fire the staff – or they are not really in power (just in office).
“Personal are policy”.
Sorry – I meant to type “Personnel are policy”.
bobby b – you have a point Sir.
It is one thing to win an election – it is another thing to get an ideologically corrupted state to obey.
Paul, on the day they announced to y’all that they were going to delay some elections, they abrogated your democratic system.
The long knives should have come out on that day. But nothing happened, so they know they won. They can now move on to that pesky 2029 election.
Paul:
I agree that a Reform government needs to destroy the blob to get anything done, and it will not be easy. I hope they realise there is no point trying to change anything, whole swathes of bureaucracy must simply be dissolved. Things like the EHRC (not to be confused with the ECHR) just need to go. Otherwise, the blob will fight back. Look at how they got Dominic Raab sacked, a hard working minister who simply expected a good quality of work from his civil servants. How dare he!
You are of course right about local government, the various mandatory provisions they have to make for adult social care, special education et al are just financially ruinous. This is another area that a Reform government would have to tackle. I hope that their experience of running councils will help them in this.
But above all, they must destroy the blob before the blob destroys them.
JohnK,
Alas… so far… Reform have a poor track record on running local government.
@Martin
I think we can say with over 200 years more experience that meritocracy, especially within government agencies, is overrated.
I don’t think that is true at all. The problem is definitely not that government does things too well or that civil servants are too skilled. Fundamentally the problem is that they do the wrong things (which mostly means they do something when they should do nothing) and promotions within the western civil services are based on politics and seniority, not merit – in many respects merit is a demerit.
@bobby b
At some point, change can only happen through force. When there is no force remaining, there will be no change.
“At some point” is sufficiently flexible that it is hard to argue, but I do want to say that the history of revolution is not necessarily a good one. There are far more French revolutions in history than American ones. And one should certainly consider the American people before thinking that revolution will bring about positive change. I’d say a large majority of Americans think that the government does too little, not too much, spends too little, not spends too much, centralizes too little, not too much. There is a significant majority of people who think that the solution is “tax the rich and give us more free stuff”, which is not good whether achieved by elections or at the point of a gun. I have a very MAGA friend of mine who is a big player in the movement to get another constitutional convention. I cannot think of a worse idea than a new constitutional convention. That would be a blow from which the world would never recover.
Ultimately the problem with western civilizations is not the government, but the people who voted them in and support them. If there was a mandate for a smaller, less tyrannical government, we’d see some movement in that direction, even if the blob was drug kicking and screaming and treasuring in their hearts the day when they could turn things around when we were all distracted. Instead the ratchet goes in the opposite direction. That great hope we all had that Trump would help seems to diminish by the day. Just today we hear of his plan to spend gazillions on his “golden navy fleet”. Somehow in this, one of the most peaceful eras in American history, we are spending vastly more on defense than we ever did. It does not make any sense, but those who had hoped that DOGE would be a signal of smaller government to come must surely be very disappointed in where things are going. And I think the assassination of Charlie Kirk is one of the most successful moves the left could have made. His absence is echoing through the whole MAGA movement.
Now I guess we must all look into the black hole of AI and wonder what it will bring, and if it will bring our salvation. Me? I don’t know at all. But perhaps our hope that Elon would save us with DOGE might be redirected instead to the other things he is doing which may be our only way out. Perhaps with a President Vance, who I think will be a much better President than Trump.
As I have said many times, Elon is the most important human alive today.
Any government can pass laws that shape the civil service. Any government can start firing civil servants that obstruct policy. Why haven’t the Conservative in name only party done that?
bobby b – their excuse for delaying local council elections is that these councils are being replaced anyway, a local government reorganization.
However, the people did NOT ask for this local government reorganization – it is the idea of officials and “experts”.
It would be as if officials and academics in the United States said “Rhode Island is very small – let us make it part of Massachusetts” with no vote of the people on the matter.
Stuart Noyes.
In theory Parliament can repeal any Statute passed by a previous Parliament.
So I would argue that you are, Stuart Noyes, CORRECT in Constitutional Law.
But to say this makes many people go crazy – including “Conservative” academics.
Indeed, Stuart Noyes, that is the reason I am not working in a university.
“History has no reverse gear” – the exact words that a “Conservative” academic used against me. The argument being that once something is done – it can not be undone. The process of “Social Reform”, supposedly, can not be reversed.
It was not just the official left that destroyed me – it was “Conservatives” like this. Who defined me as a “Reactionary” – which is fair enough, as I am a Reactionary (and proud of it).
Kemi Badenoch has to defeat these Social Reformers – these “history has no reverse gear” types, or the Conservative Party will have no future.
If “history has no reverse gear” if “Progressive” moves, such as creating the bureaucracy and giving it more and more power, can not be reversed – then there really is a “Uniparty”.
Is it case of passing laws or of simply repealing them?
If a law(s) is repealed, for example remove this whole grotesque shitshow of didn’t earn it quotas, what can “the blob” do?
What legal basis would a whole tranche of destructive parasites – directly employed in all branches of government, in many private organisations, not to mention a whole cult infecting academe – have for existence?
How difficult would this be to do? And why didn’t the conservative in name party not do it years ago?
Never underestimate your enemy, but don’t overestimate them either. “The blob” has an awful lot of weak spots and it is not some borg-like collective.
Nick:
I don’t necessarily think Reform is doing a bad job in local government, they have barely started. But Paul is right to say that much local government spending is mandated by central government. In many ways local government is a sham. However, that does not mean there is not waste to be found, if you know where to look for it.
@Stuart Noyes
Any government can pass laws that shape the civil service. Any government can start firing civil servants that obstruct policy. Why haven’t the Conservative in name only party done that?
That is certainly true in theory, in practice it is much harder. The government does not, after all, write the actual laws — this is done by civil servants — and they don’t administer the laws, that also is done by civil servants. And the unionization of the civil service makes it practically impossible to fire anyone. And of course the government has subjected itself to all sorts of treaties and extra national laws that make it impossible for them to do much of what they want, insofar as they do want it. Finally, the civil service is not without teeth. Were a government really to try to reform the civil service, the civil service would fight back with the massive power that they have to destroy a government’s success, Liz Truss, who could have been an excellent prime minister, has a story to tell here.
Of course, in Britain anyway, the government has the power to change all of that, but it is not simple. The civil service have had two hundred years to build defensive mechanisms that make any temporary government helpless in face of it. As Sir Humphrey Appleby said “permanence is power, rotation is castration.”
It is why, I think, the civil service is one of the most dangerous institutions in our nations. They carry massive power over our lives and are effectively unaccountable to anyone except their own internal structure.
JohnK – yes – local democracy has been horribly undermined, over a very long period of time
Fraser Orr – sadly excellent points Sir, I have nothing to add.
Fraser Orr – “…the unionization of the civil service makes it practically impossible to fire anyone.”
This, Fraser, is the nub of it all. In a different life, I did things in different settings and the critical part of the process is to kill the first one who stands in the way. Not the first one to speak, offer opinions, or counter-argument, the first one who just decided to obstruct. Out, gone, finished forever. And don’t worry overly about process or even losing the Industrial Tribunal in 9 months time. (Indeed, it was ofetn cheaper to just not bother contesting those.) As soon as you realise that all of the rules and procs are there to obstruct you and have been put in place by the enemy, the easier it is to just see them as a cost of doing business.
We have in the UK recently witnessed at least two and possibly three coups d’etat. May, maybe, but certainly Bojo and Truss were brought down by the power of the blob. The blob needs to be brought to heel and that can only be done by mass eradication at this stage. Farage should start with the BBC and the madder of the quangoes, and then fire the top three layers of the Treasury. Let them squeal and weep. God will know his own. He will no chance otherwise.
Happy Christmas to youse all, Comrades.
The political divide in the uk has for a long time been horizontal. The political class vs us. The Conservative Party dont even understand what that word means. Most of it’s MPs should be Lib Dems.
Actually, it seems that the first government bureaucracy in Europe was introduced by Philippe II Auguste (reigned 1180 to 1223) in France.
It is possible that Philippe II was inspired by the Muslim public administration that he found while crusading.
This was based on the system introduced in Iran by Khosrow I (reigned 531 to 579 AD), and i believe that Iranian was still the official language of public administration in the Ottoman Empire.
Of course, it is also possible that Khosrow I was himself inspired by the Chinese model, somehow.
The interesting aspect of this, to me, is that the French, Iranian, and Chinese systems of public administration were all introduced by monarchs. This is why i do not take seriously neo-monarchist claims that a return to monarchy is needed to control, reduce, or destroy the administrative State.
Merry Christmas btw.
mongose – yes indeed. And a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.
Stuart Noyes – some of them should be Lib Dems, well no-one “should” be a Lib Dem (they should follow their moral reason and reject the doctrines of the Liberal Democratic Party) – but I know what you mean, some (some – not most) Conservative Party Members of Parliament would find a better fit for their ideas in the Liberal Democratic Party.
As for lack of understanding of basic terms – yes there is some lack of understanding, and it is very troubling. For example, good people (and they are good people) such as Ian Duncan Smith using the term “Social Justice” as if it was a positive term – because they did not know what it means (the evil the term stands for).
“And why should they know what these terms of political philosophy mean – they were busy earning a living and bringing up a family, unlike you Mr Marks!” – yes indeed I have wasted my life, but it is still disturbing that many people in politics, good people in politics, do not know what basic terms (such as “Social Justice” or indeed “Conservative”) mean – they are not lying, they really do not know.
Snorri Godhi – interesting points Sir, and thank you for making them.
Indeed the Persian bureaucracy (which I believe goes back rather before the reign of Khosrow – although he certainly reformed it) whether or not it was inspired by the Chinese bureaucracy, inspired the bureaucracy of the Emperor Diocletian.
It is not true that Diocletian “ended the crises of the third century” as the history books falsely claim – as the Empire had already been reunited by the Emperors Aurelian and Probus.
Indeed the Empire under the Emperor Probus (allegedly killed in a mutiny) seemed (seemed – in reality it had declined greatly from the peak of civilization under the Emperor Antoninus Pius) much the same as it had always been – the Emperor presenting himself a simply a military commander, writing respectful letters to the Senate, no great taxation in Italy, and-so-on.
The Emperor Carus was, in some ways, much the same – the Persian envoys finding himself sitting on the ground in his military camp, with ordinary bread and cheese.
The elaborate ceremonies, the prostration on the ground, the smell of incense, no one to look at the Emperor directly (and so on) came with Diocletian – and, like the state bureaucracy, seem to have been copied from Persia.
State arms factories, the break up the the traditional legions, people being forced to carry on the occupations of their parents, peasants tied to the soil as serfs – all came with Diocletian. As did insane levels of government spending which even the crushing taxation he introduced could not finance.
The vast government he introduced eventually collapsed under its own weight.
And you are quite correct – various Kings of France tried to bring it back, going right up to the “Sun King” himself – Louis XIV.
The idea that absolute monarchy leads to greater liberty for ordinary people is indeed absurd – as a glace at what absolute monarchs do, makes clear.
Indeed it was LIMITS to the power of the monarch, such as those agreed to by King Charles the Bald of France in 877 AD, that were the foundation of what liberty Europe had.
Most importantly his acceptance that a King of France could not legally take LAND from one family and give it to another family – which an Islamic ruler (like a Roman Emperor) could do.
The conflict between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans in south eastern Europe is also about this – over many centuries.
Is a ruler LIMITED (“Feudal”) or ABSOLUTE?
It is no surprise that modern academia (and the media) support the Ottomans – twisting the history in their favour.
It is no surprise – because modern academia (and the media – and so on) support an all-mighty state = and have a deep hatred for Christianity.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.
Diocletian also established a Secret Police force – rather than relying on ad-hoc spies and private informers.
This is said to have been inspired by Oriental examples.