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 – Russia and Britain vastly overestimate each other’s influence

For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you.

– Ed West

Samizdata quote of the day – Riotous Assemblies (a history of recent English aggro)

The subject of public disorder seems strangely topical, as I’m writing as rioting in France quietens down. Events in Paris and elsewhere have, inevitably, prompted a number of “what if?” comparisons with the UK. Our tradition of protest is significantly different from that of continental Europe, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be complacent. On the other hand, nor is it necessarily a reason for panicky chief constables and sly mandarins to litigate for mega-forces, national police services and gendarmeries.

– Dominic Adler, discussing Blighty’s recent history of crowds kicking off. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.

Samizdata quote of the day – The Entertainment / Grift / Online Industrial Complex

Once you realise part of Patriot Platform’s operating model is that of a parapolitical soap opera, with feuds, beefs and big characters… it starts to make more sense. And, ofc, this type of politics turns on making a pound note, as Tommy Robinson’s many detractors have shown. And I’m hardly Nick Lowles, but evidence is evidence. There’s an entire ecosystem of influencers, “auditors” and YouTubers making a living peddling ragebait. The police? They’re extras in Danny Tommo’s ongoing structured reality TV show.

– Dominic Adler

Samizdata quote of the day – Chaos on the streets: civil wargaming

Ostensibly, modern states have an unassailable advantage against the mass of the population. Where once the mob could reasonably threaten to tear the king from his castle, today the state has overwhelming military superiority against the disarmed population. Speaking in terms of leverage, the state seemingly has the winning hand: it is the sole provider of security, public goods, infrastructure, and the enforcement of contracts — and every member of the public is dependent upon it for these services. A truly praetorian modern state, therefore, should possess a kind of escalation dominance which guarantees its victory in any standoff.

The state’s position, however, is weaker than it might first seem. The sheer size of modern states precludes the possibility of true praetorianism, which requires not only that the state, as an organisation, be technically independent from the population, but also that the people who make it up have a coherent and separate identity which preserves that independence at every level of its operation. An organisation consisting of millions of people cannot achieve this kind of unity, and indeed the vast majority of people who deliver the state’s capabilities at the ground level do not see themselves as parts of a defined organisation, but simply as people like any other who collect a paycheck that happens to come from the government. Such de-corporatised agents of the state cannot always be relied upon to favour the interests of the institution over those of dissenting factions within the population, with whom they may share certain identities or even personal connections.

– Pimlico Journal

Samizdata quote of the day – When something is done by the public, it can only be undone by the public

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.

– Gawain Towler

Samizdata quote of the day – The quickest way to fuel an English ethnonationalist movement is to deny that English ethnicity exists

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.

– Isabel Paterson

Samizdata quote of the day – Now they’ve bought it they’ve no clue about British Steel

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?

– Tim Worstall

Samizdata quote of the day – The British state has delegitimised itself, expect it to act accordingly

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.

– John Hardy (£)

Saamizdata quote of the day – They think you’re thick

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.

– Gawain Towler

Samizdata quote of the day – A state that cannot protect its borders cannot protect its welfare state either

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.

– Neil Davenport

Samizdata quote of the day – Why ban balaclavas, but not burqas?

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.

– Hugo Timms

Samizdata quote of the day – What we really saw at the Portsmouth migrant boat protest

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.

– Brendan O’Neill