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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The day before yesterday, while travelling on the London Underground, I came across an interesting little news item in one of those free newspapers, about how a visit by President Bush to Britain caused disruption at Heathrow a week or two ago. Heathrow being near to Bush’s destination, which was Windsor Castle, he or someone decided that he would arrive there, rather than at a military base. Only last night did I remember to chase it up on the internet. Here is the original version of the story I encountered.
British Airways has criticised Heathrow owner BAA for allowing George Bush to fly into the UK’s biggest airport, forcing the cancellation of at least 69 flights and disrupting the travel plans of 40,000 passengers.
Willie Walsh, BA chief executive, said he was angry that the presidential entourage, which included two Boeing 747 jets and four helicopters, caused chaos 10 days ago as runways were closed and planes grounded. “The decision to allow President Bush and his fleet of aircraft to fly into Heathrow rather than a military base was one all of Heathrow’s users could have done without,” he said. “I am also angry that this was allowed.”
Walsh said the disruption began two days before the president’s visit on June 15 and lasted for the two days that his party stayed in the UK. Heathrow was reduced to one working runway for 30 minutes on June 15 and 16, after its other runway was closed temporarily for the arrival and departure of Air Force One.
I know, I know. If it had been any other President, the Guardian would not have been half so exercised. And had it been President Chavez causing all this fuss, they would have found a way of saying how splendid that was. But this time I happen to agree. Read the rest of the article to learn the full scale of the disruption.
I remember being shocked, in Edinburgh I think it was, when by chance I happened to observe the then Prime Minister John Major being driven past, in the midst of a huge fleet of black cars and police motorbikes. Ordinary motorists were swept from the road to make room for all this shinily mechanised pomposity. It is one thing to object to “statism” in an abstract sort of way, as I had long been doing even then. It’s quite another to observe the actual state in action, in a great flurry of self-importance such as this was. Nothing I was doing was deranged, luckily for me. But I know just how little all these people in their black cars and their blaring motorbikes would have cared if my plans and activities had been thus interrupted. And now these people are crashing through major airports and screwing them around, as if air travel wasn’t chaotic enough already. In the old USSR they used to have dedicated central lanes for the fat cats to be driven along in their convoys of fatcatmobiles. Now the whole world seems to be heading in that direction.
I am not an admirer of British Airways. From what I hear, the habit of BA’s senior management of shouting at anyone who tries to tell them bad news (they call this procedure, bizarrely: “NLP”) was a major cause of the recent Terminal 5 luggage catastrophe. Lots saw this disaster coming. They tried to tell their bosses. Instead of listening and taking the necessary corrective steps, the bosses simply shouted. But I like what BA’s top boss said about this more recent episode very much.
There seems, finally, to be a concerted effort going on to rid Zimbabwe of its appalling President, Robert Mugabe. The disgust felt by the entire civilised world at from the farce of the recent Zimbabwean election, won in the first round by the opposition but now about to be scrubbed out by pure force, was too much even for President Mbeki of South Africa to resist. Today Nelson Mandela made a short speech giving voice, finally, to his disgust at Mugabe’s behaviour. And now that Mandela has spoken, Britain has felt able to chip in by forbidding a Zimbawe cricket visit to Britain next year, and by stripping Mugabe of a knighthood of a particularly grand and vacuous variety that was conferred upon him some years ago. As the Tesco adverts say, every little helps.
But Mugabe will never go merely because of trivial indignities such as those. He has no better nature to be appealed to, no shame. It is being said that if South Africa pulls the plug in some way on the Mugabe regime, that will finish it. I hope that some time during the next few days or weeks, we will all get the chance to see if that’s true. When the lights don’t work inside Mugabe’s palaces, when the electric fences guarding him stop hurting anyone, when his bodyguards don’t know where their next meal is to come from, then that will indeed be the end of him, and this can’t come too soon for the wretched people of the country he has ruined. It’s all very Shakespearian.
I don’t know if Mr Brown will deserve any particular credit for such an outcome, if and when it finally materialises. I recall Mr Brown lining himself up some weeks ago with all this anti-Mugabe activity, speaking out against this grotesque man at the UN or some such place. But I suspect that this was only done then so noisily and so newsworthily because this was about the only uncontroversially respectable policy that Mr Brown still had on his desk at that time, which was, you will recall, a time of impending elections. I remember at around that same time speculating that Mugabe would outlast Brown. I hope that this turns out to be wrong, or, if right, that this is because Mr Brown succumbs to mysterious medical problems brought on by Labour Party fundraising difficulties, some time during the next few days.
Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Leo McKinstry
first published by Partridge, 2000, fully revised and updated edition published by Harper Collins, 2005
Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don’t have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven’t learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn’t, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that’s what you think while you watch.
When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott.
Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what’s happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful – if often hideously slow-scoring – opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world’s most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators.
I don’t usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn’t widely selling it wouldn’t have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn’t hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott’s trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong. → Continue reading: Geoff Boycott and the vices and virtues of selfishness
Greedy, greedy, lying, incompetent, untrustworthy, crooked bastards.
– From the first comment in response to Guido Fawkes‘s latest revelations about how much MPs are now deciding to pay themselves
This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online – as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:
Newspapers employ “fact-checkers”, but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that “The moon is made of green cheese” it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.
This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.
Wired reports on a scheme to make new nations:
Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?
If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
Excellent. Most of the bad ideas about how to govern nations have been tried out for centuries. They work moderately well for luckier ones amongst the plunderers, more or less appallingly for the plunderees. The good ideas, like very low taxes, very light regulation – in short: liberty – have been attempted only very occasionally. Anything which tilts that balance in the good direction is to be welcomed. I strongly believe that all social, political, and legal ideas should indeed be allowed on these jumped-up oil rigs (rather than merely my own social, political, and legal ideas), as the Seasteading Institute clearly envisages, but only if all those involved in each attempt consent to being part of it.
That should shoot most of the collectivists at the starting line. Most collectivist political ideas are about what should be done by them, the evil collectivists and their evil friends, to others who can’t defend themselves against their ghastly ideas even by running away, let alone resisting plunder. If only for that reason, the evil collectivists are all going to hate this stuff. And if only for that reason, I already like it, even if it never gets much beyond internet speculation.
The more honestly deluded among the collectivists, who really think that people will consent and go on consenting to their rancid notions, like those 1620-vintage (have I got that date right?) settlers on the east coast of what is now the USA, will, if they are ever silly enough to try one of these schemes, get a crash course in what they really should be doing and how the world really works.
I found out about this plan via one of my internet favourites just now, BLDG BLOG. The BLDG BLOG man is torn between architectural excitement and political unease:
It’s not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it’s a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.
Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa). Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn’t just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.
He’s not advocating it, you understand. Perish the thought. Who knows what frightful political genies may be let out of the bottle of the twentieth century collectivism to which most architects are still wedded? But, he can’t stop himself thinking: cool. I hope he’s right. About the coolness, I mean.
I’ve been doing some more reading of the Wired piece. One of the moving spirits behind the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, who is David Friedman’s son. If David Friedman is anything to go by, Patri (whom I have not met but whose blog I dip into from time to time) is surely a great guy. However, this makes me fear that the people doing this particular scheme are experts not on money, power, etc., but on libertarianism. This is not a good sign. Schemes like this cannot merely be virtuous. They have to work, and I fear that this one won’t. I mean, if it only starts to look like working, think of the number and nature of the people who will want it squashed. I really do hope that I’m wrong about this particular scheme. If I’m only wrong once about schemes like this, it will be a different world and a massively better one.
Even though I do not know if it should be done, given that it would be done by the people who would do it rather than by people who would do it well, I’m glad someone has at least said this:
Invade the country, shoot the generals and feed the people.
Those are apparently the words of David Davis, opposition spokesman for something or other. His colleagues were “stunned”, says Iain Dale.
Incidentally, Biased BBC, who I do not always like (basically because I do not always dislike the BBC), made a good point recently about those Burmese generals. After quoting a Wikipedia entry to the effect that the Burmese generals are quite a bit more socialist than not, Niall Kilmartin says:
This socialist origin and orientation of military rule in Burma seems to have been airbrushed out of routine BBC coverage. The mention of ‘generals’ and ‘military’ with no hint of their ideology has an obvious tendency to suggest a right-wing regime rather than the left-wing regime it more appears to be.
Well, whatever. What is definitely true is that if, during a natural disaster, a government treats its own people as hostages rather than anyone they are supposed to help, then helping those people means shoving the government aside, at least for the duration of the disaster. Trouble is, smashing up a government does not, to put it mildly, necessarily mean helping its people. It’s one of those necessary-but-insufficient situations. I actually think that if these generals did fear an old-fashioned invasion, a bit more than they do now, they might tolerate an NGO invasion instead. Surely, a threatened invasion, a real one, might accomplish something here. Trouble is, if you threaten something, it is better to mean it.
Latest from the BBC on Burma here. Things are said, by some, to be “improving”. Hmm.
My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland:
The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams.
I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state, it is school examinations. Schools and parents and children need to be able to choose the best exams to take, and employers need to be able to choose which exam results they will take seriously. That way, exam results will change to suit the needs of the times, but will continue to be a meaningful test of educational excellence.
More than 30 schools have said the tests in English and maths, will be held over either two or three days.
The Association for Quality Education said the exams would be held in venues across Northern Ireland.
So far so good. But this is where the report becomes less pleasing:
However, Caitríona Ruane accused the schools of being elitist …
Ah yes, elitist. What kind of a vicious school wants to teach only those pupils whom it wants to teach, and to teach them really well? Monstrous.
… and said they could face legal action from parents.
Parents, that is, demanding better exams results. At present, the government pays for all such litigation. An independent exam system will have to pay the costs of resisting all such legal challenges for itself.
Now comes the really scary bit, the bit that got me putting this here, rather than only, say, here:
“They have a choice, people always have a choice,” the minister said.
“What I would say to them is think very carefully before you go down the route of bringing boards of governors into situations were they may find themselves spending their time in court.”
This is the language of the Mafia.
What is happening here is that the state has made something, in this case exam results, so complicated and legally challengeable that only the state can easily afford all the litigation involved in supplying such a service. Then, they impose “progressive” and “radical” change, i.e. they wreck the state system. At which point, some people and some institutions try to make an independent go of replacing the formerly adequate (albeit ruinously expensive for the mere taxpayer) state service with one that they have devised themselves. And, legally, they can go it alone. They can do this. But the laws they have then to obey are so complicated that it will cost them an arm and a leg.
Back door abolition of whatever it is the politicians want abolished, in other words. Nationalise part of something. Throw money and laws at all of it, thereby herding everyone into the arms of the state system, on purely cost grounds. Then shut down whatever bits of the state system they always had in mind to destroy, and defy the “private” sector to respond, in an impossible legal environment that only the state can afford to function in.
Only very wealthy institutions can afford in their turn to defy such arrangements. Politicians duly denounce them as: very wealthy. If the private sector decides to charge quite a lot for the now very expensive service that they provide, they are accused of charging a lot. And the politicians use those excuses to pass yet more laws, if they prove to be necessary, turning difficulty into impossibility. There’s a lot of it about.
The overall result in this case, Shane Greer fears, will be the destruction of the really quite good top end of the Northern Ireland education system.
I just came across this. What’s happened is that they’ve discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:
Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn’t there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.
Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn’t actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.
Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.
I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren’t crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?
It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that “Read more” button, you may rather quickly want to read less. → Continue reading: The age of political landslides
To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam – seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture – to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques – it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.
The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?
– Mary Jackson quotes from a Spectator article by London’s newly elected mayor Boris Johnson written just after the July 7th attacks on London (but Boris backtracked during the recent campaign)
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner and I love London town, but from where I sit by far the most newsworthy winner in the recent round of British local elections was the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. However, unless I am very much mistaken (which is entirely possible), the Boris Johnson blog, far from being at the centre of the Boris campaign, was put on ice for the duration, and looks like staying there.
Or am I missing something? Is there another Boris Johnson blog? Is there one for his currently very neglected constituency (the one linked to above), and another blog (not linked to because I can not find any such thing) about him trying to be and now being the Mayor of London?
If my failure to spot it means that there is indeed no Boris For (Boris Is) Mayor blog, then I think that’s rather a telling fact about the limits of internet political campaigning in Britain. The way Boris himself told it when interviewed on the telly at the very end of his campaign, he did his campaigning not via any internet efforts, but by trekking around London making personal appearances and being on local radio stations. You might have thought, what with so much of success in local politics being the art of attracting any attention at all, and what with Boris having done this so very, very well and having got his own vote out so very, very successfully, a blog might have been part of it.
Or is the thing that I am missing that other bloggers, like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, made crucial contributions to Boris becoming Mayor by campaigning on his behalf, under the opposing radar so to speak, making points in his favour and claims on his behalf that he himself did not have to worry about and which he was not personally obliged then to, as they say, clarify? Boris would no more have his own campaigning blog than he would set up and run his own radio station. In politics, it seems, either you do it, or you blog, but, you don’t do both. This makes sense, I suppose. Blogging works best when you blog your mind, and tell it how you see it. Blogging means having an authentic voice. Politics, on the other hand … Some bloggers – this one, for instance, in something he said at a gathering I was at – have complained that Boris’s authentic voice was also muted, for the duration. Something to do with him not drinking, perhaps? (Bring back the booze I say.)
On the other hand, why didn’t any of Boris’s mere supporters gang up and run a Boris-is-here-today-and-there-tomorrow Boris-thinks-this-Boris-says-that blog, at least while the campaign itself lasted? Not worth the bother, presumably.
In other local election news, my brother Toby Micklethwait (UKIP) came a decent (but to him I daresay deeply disappointing) second to the Conservatives in Englefield Green west, very near to where we were raised and where our Mum still lives. He too accomplished what he accomplished not with any fancy blogging or internetting, but with lots of posters stuck up in people’s gardens, with a ton of leaflets and other printed material, and with all the associated personal chit-chat. Maybe the truth is that the more local the politics (and Toby’s latest burst of politics was about as local as it is possible for British politics to get), the less relevant blogging is to the campaigning politician. The blogging USP, its ability to send your message whizzing around the entire planet in seconds, does everything but solve your actual problem, and tells everyone in the world all about you except the exact people you are trying to reach, so blogging is of little use to you. Maybe it is time for me to revive that notion I once had about becoming the Supreme Ruler of the World.
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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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