Samizdata

I just heard David Cameron on the news tonight saying that under Gordon Brown, Britain will just be getting “more of the same” of what it got from Blair.

In other words, Gordon Brown is a Blairite. Just like David Cameron then I suppose.

If you are going to vote, and you want a conservative alternative to Blair’s populist creeping regulatory authoritarianism, vote UKIP.

Otherwise just expect “more of the same” from both Brown and Cameron.

It is hardly a secret I really really do not like Dave Cameron, but I was surprised when a chum of mine called me up to say Cameron was calling for a smaller state. I found this hard to believe and soon found this article called Cameron: People must be nicer to each other.

The Conservative leader accused Labour of treating Britons like children, saying the Government’s knee-jerk reaction to any problem was to bring in laws which often discouraged people from taking responsibility. He argued that measures such as anti-social behaviour orders had been counter-productive because they allowed people to abdicate responsibility for their actions.

[…]

He called for a “revolution in responsibility”, saying that the next Conservative government was not going to treat its citizens like children, promising “to solve every problem, respond to every incident, accident or report with a new initiative, regulation or law”. He insisted that a framework of incentives would prove more effective than regulations and laws. Mr Cameron promised to strengthen the family with the reform of a tax system that he claimed penalised couples who stayed together.

The fact the regulatory state is incredibly corrosive to civil society (in every sense of the phrase) should be self-evident to anyone claiming to be a conservative, but as Dave Cameron is not a conservative, in spite of leading a party called the Conservatives, I would not automatically assume he actually believes that. So you would think I would be pleased to finally see him saying something along these lines. In truth I burst out laughing when I read that article, not because I do not agree but because I do not believe him.

He has previously spent so much time telling us he can be trusted not to ‘do a Thatcher’ and how he intends to regulate our lives just as much as Blair’s Labour party, only ‘better’, why should his sudden enthusiasm for less regulation be believable? Simply put, he is not actually promising any such thing, not really.

The default position of all politicians is to pass laws in order to be seen to ‘do something’ and there is not a chance in hell that Dave Cameron, who is really just a political hack who sees power as an end in and of itself, will seek to actually roll back the state in any meaningful way and thereby deprive himself of patronage and political tools.

So of course the mask quickly slips…

He said a Conservative government would grant councils greater control of spending, while people should be encouraged to become more involved in the ownership and operation of their schools, public spaces, and social and environmental services.

Ah, so actually he is all in favour of the state doing stuff, he just wants it to be the local state rather than the central state. Sorry Dave, the only way you will stop damaging civil society is not by allowing a town council to spend the damn money, it is by not allowing any part of the state to spend so much money. A hell of lot less. There is just as much stupidity, greed and obsession with state control in town halls as there is in Westminster.

There is an interesting discussion point in the Telegraph called Should we be looking for a new England?.

And my answer would be yes. Ideally I would have liked to preseve much of the old England but I fear that is no longer a realistic option. I used to support the idea of an unwritten constitution because of the importance of unenumerated rights, but the Major and Blair years have shown that Britain’s unwritten constitution was not worth the paper it was not written on. We have been disarmed, we have had our rights to free speech greatly curtailed, our rights to trial by a jury of our peers abridged, our underpinning civil society regulated out of existence in area after area, our right to property vastly infringed upon.

In short, there can be no pretence whatsoever that The System has worked to protect us from our political masters. The British system survived for a long time because enough people wanted it to survive. As most are now willing to allow themselves to be herded and bought off with their own money, the system is now little more than populist authoritarianism.

Yes, we very badly need a new England.

(Kindly spare us any jokes about New England.)

Today’s news has two splendid examples of how holding a ‘high office’ (in a company, institution or government) is in no way an indication of intelligence or good judgement (and therein lies the reason I am in favour of having as small a state as possible).

We have just seen the Royal Navy and UK government suffer a P.R. debacle at the hands of Iran, so if there was even the faintest glimmer of wit to be found within the Ministry of Defence, one would assume that they would be working to make sure this whole affair passes through the news cycle and flushes down the memory hole as quickly as possible. Right?

Hell no. Against the usual practice (and therefore involving a proactive decision by the Minister to ‘do something’ rather than just shrug his shoulders and say “sorry, my hands are tied, it’s the regulations, you see.”), for some inexplicable reason the MOD has said the fifteen former captives can sell their stories to the press, thereby guaranteeing this whole event will stay ‘live’ for as long as possible. Very clever. Clearly this government has passed mere ineptitude and moved into its terminal senile dementia stage.

The second one is not an indication of a spectacular (almost comical) lack of political acumen on display but rather an example of a truly moronic moral calculus. We see senior British clerics berating Britain for not thanking the Iranian state for returning the servicemen and woman they took from Iraqi waters at gunpoint. I am sure there is some commandment in the Bible about the victims of a crime thanking the unrepentant perpetrators of the crime but I cannot off-hand think where that is.

It is moments like this that I am almost moved to ‘thank God’ (yes, I am being ironic) for the fact I managed to shake off the mental shackles of youth and become entirely God and Church-free.

I think Colonel Tim Collins has it about right:

Col Tim Collins, who led the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said: “It’s a close call as to which organisation is in the deepest moral crisis – the Church or the Ministry of Defence.”

Indeed.