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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I cannot claim to have been brave very much in my life. And I do not know that I am being brave now. But I do know that I am now committed along with more than 10,000 others to refuse to register with the National Identity Register, whatever the Government may now choose to do to me.
The first NO2ID “Refuse” pledge through the MySociety PledgeBank site has been successful. 10,000, and counting, British people value freedom enough that they are prepared to become an un-person, rather than submit to lifelong supervision under the fallaciously named “ID card” system that the Government hopes to introduce. In four weeks we have raised promises of £100,000 for legal defence. And people are still joining in.
In a few days we will launch a bigger pledge, a million-pound-plus fighting fund, for everyone to subscribe to who supports the refuseniks, but cannot (because they have dependents or professional obligations) join in the identity strike. We need 50,000 people willing to pledge £20 if the bill passes. Look out for it.
And to the American readers of this blog I say: Help us now. If we go down, you are next…
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.
My life is my own.”
… hears that his friend, an economist, is in Addenbrooks [in the US version of this joke, in Mount Auburn] with a badly broken leg, and goes to visit.
Physicist: What happened?
Economist: I had just stepped off the balcony, and wham! — I fell and broke my leg.
Physicist: You stepped… off… the balcony? What on earth for?
Economist: How was I to know there would be gravity failure?
I was going to write a piece with that title (assuming the allusion would spare me from discipline for scattering the star-field with apostrophes) but it seems Richard Tomkins in the FT has done it first, and, almost certainly, better.
However, that’s a subscription-required piece, so I will rehash my main thoughts for those who do not subscribe, and do not still have a venial physical paper habit like mine.
I was dumbstruck by the general soft welcome among free-market types for Alastair Darling’s hints at individual travel charges by satellite. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but the only word that springs to mind is – “suckers”.
Just because a minister says something is “road pricing” does not mean it is a real live example of a market mechanism. In fact, when a minister in the current UK government says something, one would have thought that by now most people would be looking for the misrepresentation. If the minister seems to be saying something, then the truth is likely incompatible with the impression. → Continue reading: Do not ask the price, it is a tax
Let us not blame Gordon Brown for everything. He has learnt the lessons of his predecessors. The wrong lessons.
Compare:
Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember my faults this day:
[…]
And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt.
And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.
And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. (Genesis, Ch.41)
And,
I announced that I had no proposals to touch on the ‘anomalous but much-loved tax-free lump sum’
[…]
The side offensive began with the imposition in 1986 of a statutory limit on the size of pension-fund surpluses. This was much more difficult for the pension lobby to fight, and as a result I was able to get it on to the statute book. The dramatic improvement in the financial climate of the previous three or four years meant that many occupational funds had accumulated assets far in excess of those needed to honour their liabilities to their pensioners – in other words, and even on the highly conservative basis used by pension fund actuaries, the funds were heavily in surplus. This was not simply due to inadvertence. For these excess funds enabled companies to accumulate income, free of liability to Corporation Tax, in a gross fund
[…]
The 1986 reform put an end to this: no undue surpluses could be created, and existing surpluses would have to be run down over a period to a maximum of 5 per cent of total liabilities.
[…]
The course taken by most companies was the employer’s contribution holiday, whose economic effects were a rise in company profits (and cash flow) and thus in Corporation Tax receipts, coupled with a fall in recorded personal saving, since employers’ pension contributions are officially classified as personal savings. (Nigel Lawson, “The View from No.11”, Bantam 1992)
And saith the chief butler to Pharaoh, pay unto Joseph no mind. For the tax-gatherers counsel that ye take any fat kine that ye find among the people and slaughter them. The meat of the unjust surplus shall feed the priests of your temple. If there be famine the people will gnaw on old bones. And they will be weak and not rise up. But the tax-gatherers will be fat and glorify Pharaoh’s name.
Jack Whitham of the University of York offers the code for rather a snazzy self updating banner. (Be warned, you may have to edit out some carriage returns if you cut and paste. I did.) It looks like this:
It seems like we are getting there. The serious press is starting to understand the threat posed by the nationalisation of personal identity dressed up as a populist system of “ID Cards”
This devastating quote appeared in an article in the New Statesman, house magazine of the British political left:
“Public opinion likes the idea of ID cards because it seems like the ultimate solution to all known problems,” says Brian Gladman, retired director of strategic electronic communications at the Ministry of Defence. “But actually, the way this bill is designed enables a police state. You’re not going to be allowed to opt out of having an ID card, the linked databases make detailed tracking feasible, and a system with this combination of complexity and scale is way beyond the state of the art. It won’t be reliable or safe. Anybody with access to the database will be able to target anybody. It’s horrendous what you’ll be able to do.”
One hopes the message is now starting to get through to Labour MPs, and they may find important other things to do rather than vote for the second reading (the first non-formal stage) in parliament.
Let us return to the lost age of blogging for a moment.
I thought I would share with readers this gem of the interwebby thing: The ChildCare Action Project (CAP): Movie Ministry
I have been going there for years, and it is less well-known than it deserves. (For former connoisseurs, the tinsel aesthetic is unaltered but the disruptive popups are gone.) It is full of wonders for liberal secular types like me.
If you do not know where to start, just plunge into the movie reviews here and discover the ungodly propaganda of the Hollywood elite in your favourites. You see, they are not just coddled world-insulated champagne socialists but servants of the evil one.
As a British atheist the Christians I actually meet seem to me mostly harmless, perfectly normal people. But this stuff is by turns hilarious, mind-boggling, and spine-shivering. Which is all you can ask of entertainment. And it has a salutary moral effect, too. If not quite the one intended by its dedicated creators.
P.J. O’Rourke got something similar from visiting the Praise the Lord theme-park in the 80s:
“We came to scoff. We left converted – to Satanism.”
I am a news-junkie, so facing this morning without the Today programme on the BBC is a gruelling prospect. For BBC staff are on strike, so most live news programmes are not running today.
I was highly amused, however, that the first replacement programme on Radio 4 at six o’clock (when Today is due to start) was an In Business documentary on podcasting. Can this be entirely coincidental?
“There’s plenty of competition out there, boys. And it’s free.” Is the pretty clear message.
There is a name for a country where the police tell us what the law ought to be, and give us heavy hints which way to vote. It is called a police state.
In a constitutional monarchy such as ours, the police keep the Queen’s peace and uphold the laws as they are; they do not bluster and threaten the public for publicity, nor do they enter the political process and shill for attempts to change that constitution.
Your resignation would be appropriate. Before you go and do something even more repugnant.
Robert Kilroy-Silk is a laughing stock in sophisticated circles, even in those slightly askew sophisticated circles—sophisticated ellipses?—Samizdatistas belong to. But should he be?
A glance at the manifesto of Veritas, the man’s own personal political party, suggests not. Not only is it produced in a deep purple colour that readers of this blog will find comfortingly familiar, but some of the views expressed there wouldn’t be so far out of place here either.
Let’s speed past the tosh about immigration, this year’s must-have fearful tic for every pol-about-town, and see what’s hidden in the exotic interior… → Continue reading: Image is everything, unfortunately
Cricket will be suspended indefinitely at Albion College from now on, in order to preserve the playing fields, it has been announced.
Head Boy, Mr ARP Blair said: “The groundsman has explained to me that it is vital to maintain the cricket square and outfield that have nurtured Albion’s spirit of fair play for nearly 300 years that we stop cricket immediately. Of course we must do what the groundsman says. His staff have have had great difficulties arising from boys running up and down on the pitch and using bats and balls in a most irresponsible manner. By stopping play indefinitely, he has explained, the mystery of the soil and their special gardening techniques (which he will explain to boys sitting the Rural Sciences exam), will allow them to keep the playing surfaces safe from any boys who might tear up the grass.
“We have to trust the groundsman in this. He, after all, knows more about fields than any number of cricketers. I’ve heard that some people are saying he only wants this so that he can spend more time drinking in the pavilion, and that I’m only supporting him to curry favour with those boys who have never seen the point of games or latin and would like this to be an agricultural college. Anybody saying such things is a traitor to the school’s tradition, and if I find out who they are they will be very severely dealt with.”
[Apologies to overseas readers for over-British allusions. Glossary available on request]
The gods of Samizdata decree that linking to The Times of London is discouraged. But I am going to at least quote from it. Twice.
First, here is William Rees-Mogg on the EU Constitution, but stating a general rule:
So long as our Government takes us for fools, we have every reason to take them for liars.
Meanwhile, my former neighbour Mr George Thomas, on the letters page, demonstrates an application of the rule:
Tony Blair claims that “there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack”.
He is wrong. If the 20th century teaches us anything it is that the greatest threat to civil liberty comes from governments that have been allowed to exercise excessive power over their own people. The greatest civil liberty is to live securely protected from government intrusion. We have seen that, while terrorists can threaten the lives of hundreds and maybe thousands, governments can oppress and maltreat entire peoples and can do this for decades.
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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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