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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Wales deserves a closer look. Turnout was 50.1 per cent. Yes won by 559,419 to 552,698, a margin of 6,721 votes, settled only when Carmarthen declared last. Barely a quarter of the Welsh electorate voted for the body that now sits in Cardiff Bay as the Senedd. In 2011 a further referendum gave it primary lawmaking powers on a turnout of 35.6 per cent.
Nobody now argues that a 0.6 per cent margin on half a turnout denied the Assembly its legitimacy. Devolution’s supporters treat that September night as the founding act of modern Welsh democracy, and they are entitled to. But the principle has to run both ways. If one in four Welsh electors can found a legislature, then 17.4 million votes on a 72.2 per cent turnout, the largest vote for anything in British history, cannot be treated as provisional.
Ethnicity is not an opinion, but a fact of history, intermarriage and statistics of known populations: Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, a few Scandinavian and, later, Normans. If you care to look up ethnogenesis, pedigree collapse and “identical ancestry” you can learn that, over several hundred years and assuming intermarriage, these groups have by now mixed almost entirely.
The population statistics of England are particularly favourable to this analysis because there wasn’t much immigration, from anywhere, from the 11th up to the mid-20th century. If your family were all here in 1900, it’s reasonably probable, with the exception of a relatively small influx of Huguenots and Irish, that they were all here in 1100 and that most of them were here much earlier than that.
English ethnicity, at the end of those several centuries, is more clearly defined than most. To deny an English ethnicity is to say ethnicity does not exist, which would pose quite the shock to parts of our current political establishment.
The sad reality here is that virgin steel production in the rich countries is a dying technology. We just don’t need it any more. Pretty much every steel we do want can be made from scrap in an electric arc furnace. And those few – very few – steels that cannot be won’t cover the costs of running our own blast furnace. It’s over, like hydraulic power companies and thorium lamp mantles. This is, of course, what happens with every company, every technology, eventually. It stops being worth doing so people stop doing it.
The only thing of value here is what lefties and socialists put on manly men doing manly things, buffly. And while that’s a perfectly acceptable, even sensible, kink there’s no reason why the rest of us have to pay for that. But there we are, nothing so conservative as a socialist or lefty. Nothing can ever be allowed to die off, all must be preserved.
And, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if they’d thought through what their plan was going to be before they spent the half billion? With that more – ooooh, much more – to come?
Months before Starmer’s departure, Dominic Cummings appeared on Michael Gove and Madeline Grant’s Quite Right podcast and issued Nigel Farage with an extraordinary warning. Cummings predicted that senior figures around Whitehall would conclude that they had made a historic mistake by allowing Brexit to happen and would not repeat it with Reform. In the imagined voice of this establishment, he said: “Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage and make sure that he doesn’t win it by fair means and foul.”
Cummings went further. He predicted leaks of medical records and tax records, phone bugging and the disclosure of private information.
Why do the unions fund Labour? Because it works for them. The Employment Rights Act is very close to a straight transfer of TUC conference policy into the statute book, and nobody involved is embarrassed about it, nor should they be, since that is what affiliation has meant since 1900.
Sharon Graham has been admirably plain about this. Standing for the general secretaryship she told Keir Starmer there would be no more blank cheques. She has put Unite’s funding under review when Labour councils have crossed her. She treats the money as leverage because it is leverage, openly, on the record, in the Sunday papers. Then she stands up and objects to donations from men who want nothing.
Because that’s the difference, and it’s the bit her argument cannot survive. Harborne and Delo aren’t buying policy. There’s nothing to buy. We were low tax, pro-enterprise, anti-quango and hostile to the regulatory state before either of them wrote us a cheque, and we’d be all of those things tomorrow if both of them stopped. You cannot purchase a conviction from someone who already has one. All you can do is pay for the envelopes.
What they’re buying, as far as I can see, is a fair fight. The most conventional British appetite there is, the one that makes a crowd turn on a man who kicks somebody off the ball, and the one thing the modern establishment has decided it cannot afford to concede.
Nobody woke up. That’s the insult, and it isn’t aimed at two crypto billionaires who can look after themselves. It’s aimed at you, and it always was.
Oddly enough, Labour governments understand incentives perfectly well when trying to make us stop smoking, or encouraging us to buy electric cars and install heat pumps. But suggest that incentives might also influence migration, however, and the concept suddenly becomes bafflingly controversial.
Covering your face is clearly an affront to trust, openness and civility. Progressives know this, of course – although they only say so when it suits them. And their double standards aren’t only on show when it comes to the burqa.
The recent anti-immigration protests in Dover and Portsmouth were condemned as ‘thuggish’ by Labour’s crime and policing minister, Sarah Jones, who admonished the protesters for being ‘dressed in all black and wearing face masks’. But when hundreds of Islamic sectarians – dressed in all black and wearing face masks – marched through Whitechapel in east London last year, there were no such complaints from the left. Nor has there been much criticism of the thousands of protesters who have covered their faces with keffiyehs while calling for the destruction of Israel on pro-Palestine marches over the past few years. It seems it’s only when white working-class men start masking up that we hear all the talk about law and order, and the importance of seeing each other’s faces.
What we witnessed in Portsmouth was a public explosion of the deepest fissure in British society right now. On one side stands a state that has abdicated its prime responsibility, which is to defend Britain’s territory and Britain’s people from external forces. And on the other stand everyday citizens enraged by this managed suicide of British statehood, by the sacrifice of our sovereignty at the altar of a phoney globalist virtue that says borders are bigotry and migration is splendid.
A Home Office whistleblower has said what many of us have suspected for some time: that the vast majority of “asylum seeker” claims are false. In fact, he says, only around one per cent are genuine. For the state to keep foisting strong, fit, aggy men onto communities that don’t want them, while barking “They’re asylum seekers, you racists”, is wicked and preposterous. If the state wants to put a stop to the kind of vigilantism we saw in Portsmouth, then it just needs to do one simple thing: its job.
Will Self manages the same trick, in his own register. He recently published a piece he had the nerve to call J’Accuse, in which he put the invented term “gender criticality” in scare quotes, for fear that the rest of his prose might touch against it, and treated a position that would have been unremarkable a decade ago as self-evidently disreputable now.
Self doesn’t do Jon’s soft, sorrowful faux-concern. He does something closer to sneering, the confident dismissal of a man who’s decided which side sounds cleverer and doesn’t need to check. But it’s the same cowardice wearing a better jacket. Neither of them will say whether a man belongs in a woman’s changing room. But both of them will happily write thousands of words about those of us who simply say no.
Reform’s lack of history is what its enemies most enjoy pointing at, and they’re half right. We have no Butskellite settlement to draw on, no Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets from 1978 with our name on the cover, no forty-year archive of Fabian tracts to be mined and misremembered. We have a party that is, in policy terms, seven years old and in serious policy terms about two.
The page is blank, which is a double edged sword. A blank page has one great advantage. It owes nothing. There is no wing of the party that owns an economic orthodoxy and will sulk if it is departed from, no shadow of a previous government to be apologised for. Reform can walk down the corridor of every other party’s lockers and take whatever fits. Right to Buy was Margaret Thatcher’s. The two-child cap was George Osborne’s. The suitability test is older than either. A Conservative research department can’t do this. Every idea on its shelf has an owner objecting to its being moved. We have no shelf, so we have the run of everyone else’s, and the only question any idea has to answer is whether it will work, and whether it cleaves to our spine.
The other edge of the blade is that it has all had to be done at once, and at pace, with no institutional memory to fall back on. There is no cupboard of half-finished papers to raid. Every document has to be started from nothing, argued through, costed, tested and released, while the same people fight a by-election in Clacton, run a few dozen councils and answer the phone to the Times.
I can answer this simply. William Shakespeare doesn’t send me a monthly letter threatening to send the boys round if I don’t give him money for something I don’t want, don’t need and don’t use.
However, less flippantly, the BBC’s bias is blindingly obvious to anyone who takes even a passing look. The most egregious recent example being the Trump edit. But even before that, we have a flat refusal to engage with anyone who dares to disagree with the climate hysteria. Their COVID coverage was not only dire; it was blatantly untrue and hysterical. At no point did they do any journalism and question the inflated death figures coming out of Downing Street via Half-Whitty.
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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