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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Friday’s Guardian carried a scary piece, headed:
Extremist groups active inside UK universities, report claims
So? What do you expect? I was getting ready to say. Of course students like to try on new ideas and they suck up stuff from all sorts of weirdos from the Hare Krishna, to the Federation of Conservative Students (RIP), to the Department of Gender Studies. Some of my best friends are “extremists”. A university that’s a tepid-bed of moderation is scarcely worthy of the name.
Then my eye hit the scary bit. The second paragraph reads:
Yesterday the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, ordered vice-chancellors to clamp down on student extremists in the wake of the July terror attacks in London.
I may have had very little administrative contact with my own universities, but I am fairly sure it wasn’t part of the vice-chancellors’ job description to tell students what they can say and what they can think. And I knew the current administration had taken the first steps to control by seizing admissions procedures, but I definitely missed the bit where universities ceased to be independent institutions, and Mrs Secretary of State Kelly could order vice-chancellors what to tell the student body what it may say and think.
The excitable self-promoting report by erstwhile history professor Anthony Glees (who seems interestingly close to the security establishment) was picked up in a number of places, but I haven’t heard suggestions elsewhere that Kelly is doing any such thing. Let us hope that this is just a mistaken presumption on the part of the journalists involved that all-powerful ministers can order anything… not a PR prelude to the Government “discovering” it does not have such a power and that it is vital it gets it quick “for national security”.
The Home Secretary today announced yet another package of “anti-terrorism” police-state measures.
Maybe it’s just me, but don’t they appear to come out more frequently and be bolder each time? The pace is stiffening, which is weird since the rhetoric is always of “striking a balance”. Surely, if a balance really was being sought, we would expect successive adjustments to be smaller and smaller?
The most interesting and alarming are the “powers to tackle extremist bookshops”. The proposed new offence is “the publishing or possessing for sale of publications that indirectly incite terrorist acts”. Better run down to Waterstones or Borders and pick up those copies of The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Fountainhead, Long Walk to Freedom, and Mein Kampf now, before they are shut down.
Make no mistake, the Blair régime now proposes to make many, many polemical and political books illegal. Or potentially illegal. For “indirect incitement” is a novel, but plainly very inchoate, inchoate offense, and the definition of “terrorism” we may expect to be used is that of the Terrorism Act 2000:
(1) In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where—
(a) the action falls within subsection (2),
(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and
(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.
(2) Action falls within this subsection if it—
(a) involves serious violence against a person,
(b) involves serious damage to property,
(c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action,
(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
(3) The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
(4) In this section—
(a) “action” includes action outside the United Kingdom,
(b) a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated,
(c) a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and
(d) “the government” means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.
(5) In this Act a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation.
Potentially, is the rub. I doubt any of the works I mentioned will be banned this decade. But almost every strongly expressed political, religious or ideological opinion will be illegal, if the authorities so choose.
Arbitrary power by democratic mandate. Lawlessness backed by law. Once more Lenin would be proud.
I’ve already pointed out what the Home Office’s ambitions could mean for this site. Locking people up and deporting them for openly expressed opinions is easy. But the freedom of the press in other parts of the world presents a problem: are they going to search every book package from Amazon.com for works from the proscribed list?
“Thanks to corporations, instead of democracy we get Baywatch”
– George Monbiot, in today’s Guardian
Sounds good to me. When do we start?
I am not the only one calling for a sense of proportion. The Security Minister for Northern Ireland, Sean Woodward, told Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this morning that despite these disorders most people in Northern Ireland were able to go about their normal lives without disturbance yesterday, and we should not get these things out of proportion.
While I am inclined to agree this is not Armageddon, I would suggest that the Government’s sense of proportion is a touch selective. Had riots with firearms, incendiaries, and home-made grenades broken out in Blackburn at some march by a Moslem sect, would we expect such a calming response? Not on your nelly.
We might have woken up to martial law imposed on Lancashire and Yorkshire. At the very least Charles Clarke would be appearing on all channels advocating internment, massively increased police powers and speeding-up the Home Office’s beloved ID card scheme. There would certainly be nothing else on the news.
Is it that 40 miles of water makes the difference? Is it colour or nominal religion? Or does the security establishment (despite being in a scrap with them on this occasion), still think of Unionist extremists as being somehow on ‘our’ side.
How dangerous is nuclear power? Think about Chernobyl, all those people who have died from radiation as a result of that huge disaster…. A total of 59 over 20 years, it turns out.
The world’s worst nuclear accident is significantly less dangerous to the general public of the continent of Europe than, say, Metropolitan Police drivers, never mind the continent’s public transport systems and its oil refineries. I am unaware of any casualties caused by wind farms, but it is hard to build tall things without someone managing to fall off, or some heavy bits dropping off occasionally.
Buses kill. Ban them now!
Compare this:
By 2050 earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Syme {no relation} in 1984
with this:
People’s names are already on a large number of databases.
Most of us have dozens of cards in our wallets with our identities on. We
already have a Big Brother society. ID cards mean identity fraud can be dealt with and stopped. ID cards are a means of controlling the Big Brother society rather than creating it. Big Brother society is already here.
Charles Clarke, quoted in the Eastern Daily Press today.
Controlling the Big Brother society might sound like preventing it, restraining it. But your expectations deceive you. Forget literary allusion. “Big Brother society” means whatever the establishment defines it to mean.
Now consider only the words, how they literally fit together. Big Brother society = our society. ID cards are a means of controlling society.
I promise only mild amusement, but sometimes mild amusement is what one needs. And there’s a subtle mordancy underneath.
The latest splendid animation from Will Flash for Cash Productions in aid of the UK campaign against ID cards is here, and will explain the title of the post.
For those who missed it, their earlier biting attack on Mr Secretary Clarke and the glorious scheme using a cute musical puppy is here.
Welcome to a strange world. Sound, and familiarity with British political figures, most definitely an advantage.
I promise only mild amusement, but sometimes mild amusement is what one needs. And there’s a subtle mordancy underneath.
The latest splendid animation from Will Flash for Cash Productions in aid of the UK campaign against ID cards is here, and will explain the title of the post.
For those who missed it, their earlier biting attack on Mr Secretary Clarke and the glorious scheme using a cute musical puppy is here.
Welcome to a strange world. Sound, and familiarity with British political figures, most definitely an advantage.
This fascinating factoid courtesy of The Times’s Gabriel Rozenberg:
Tolley’s Yellow Tax Handbook is the standard professional reference on UK direct taxation. Its format has changed little for many years.
1996-1997 edition: 4,555 pages.
2005-2006 edition: 9,050 pages.
As Rozenberg points out, for income tax law to get to the size that a summary filled 4,555 pages took nearly 200 years. Boy, has the present government been busy.
Close observers of the Treasury will know that this has happened at the same time as the Inland Revenue has been piloting a glorious project that could only happen in Whitehall, the Comprehensive Tax Law rewrite. This, the first part of which is about to be enacted, is allegedly designed–this is not a joke–to simplify UK tax law without changing it.
It does serve to emphasise something that is often neglected, even by our friends at the ASI, who calculate Tax Freedom Day on the basis of the tax take. Tax burden, the cost of tax to the payer, is always greater than the actual tax he has to pay. The difference, the compliance cost, is hard to measure. But it is utterly invisible to the Civil Service, to most politicians, and most employees. To them it is someone else’s problem, if they notice at all.
But when bureaucratic treacle is poured into society’s gearboxes, everyone suffers indirectly. Compliance costs are still costs. Leaving aside the moral case against tax, they produce all the baneful economic effects of higher taxation (a split economy, advantages for tax-planners and those who can afford them, disincentive to work or invest, regulatory distortions), without putting more money into the public purse.
It is not just complication. Many of the more recent reforms (and this started under the Tories) move administrative and collection responsibilities from the government to the taxpayer or his employer, so Tolley’s doubling may well be an underestimate of the increase in compliance costs. Taxation has risen fast in Britain. But tax burden has risen, and continues to rise much faster.
Today’s Guardian is as ever full of fascinations, but this, from a TV review by Mark Lawson struck me as gloriously, perplexingly weird:
The notable balance of the film is shown by the fact that both liberals and conservatives are offered a harrumph-moment: the former when we note that the Guildford Four were locked up for these bombings rather than the people who actually did it, the latter when we learn that those who actually did it were freed from jail as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
It beats me why conservatives should not care about false convictions, nor liberals about murderers being released as part of a dodgy political deal. But then, I do not see liberalism and conservatism as irreconcilable opposites, which is probably why I still have trouble predicting what the PC attitude among media folk will be, even after 20 years of working on the fringe of the media.
Elsewhere in the same issue, the reliably barking John Sutherland takes a story about a US alternative medicine quack, and manages to find it is proof, not of human wickedness and human credulousness, but of the evils of capitalism:
But the runaway success of Natural Cures also bears witness to genuinely troubling aspects of the American healthcare system. It has been estimated that some 50 million citizens have no health insurance. For these desperate people, who fall sick like everybody else, “natural cures” are all they can afford. “Socialised medicine”, as the Clintons learned the hardway, has no place in America. Capitalistic medicine does. What John le Carré calls “Big Pharma” has made America the most drugged nation in history.
Which “explanation”, unfortunately fails to account for some important facts: (1) the purportedly natural non-cures offered by quacks are not generally cheaper than the products of Big Pharma, even at US prices; (2) the most drugged nation in history, is on average (i.e., including all those without health insurance) rather healthier than Britain if you look at survival/recovery patterns for pretty much any disease; (3) The European quack industry is also fabulously successful, and expensive, despite the subsidised competition from socialised medicine.
What is particularly enjoyable about this lunacy is it appears in the same issue of the paper as a nice clear feature by the impeccably rational Dr Ben Goldacre explaining why alternative medicine offers comforts not available from a scientific physician.
Gustave Le Bon would have something to say about this. He’d point to the sugestibility of the emotionally aroused crowd:
Almost three-quarters of the public believe that it is right to give up civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks.
A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that 73% of respondents back the trade-off, with only 17% rejecting it outright. The results provide evidence of public support for Tony Blair’s anti-terrorist reforms which he unveiled before leaving on his summer holiday earlier this month.
Full article here.
I simply do not accept there is a trade-off to be had. Our liberty is our safety.
The world is replete with counterexamples to the trade-off twitch. (One cannot call it a theory.)
Take Saudi Arabia. Civil liberty does not exist there. It is an alien concept, and, in common with other alien concepts, banned. There is no protection of citizen from state, and no limit to the actions that can be taken.
Yet terrorism is in robust health. The Kingdom’s official figures for the last two years (which one would expect to paint the rosiest picture) are 129 dead and 720 injured among civilians and security forces. More than twice Britain’s casualties among a population that may be around a third of ours–reliable figures on anything Saudi being hard to come by. (They probably have significantly more police, too.)
The FT paper edition for 20th/21st August has feature on some of its writers sitting some of this years’ A-level exams. Though a stock sort of piece, this much the best of its type I’ve read and is full of insights, most provided by the examiners they involved in the exercise.
For example, here’s Matthew Lumby of the QCA:
A lot of people think that in an essay question you are just judged on content and style when in fact the markers will be looking for a number of specific things.
What else is there?
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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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