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Just as war, as is sometimes said, can be the health of the state, so can domestic civil disorder. One of the arguments we can expect to hear in the coming days, and are beginning to hear already, is how much of the recent mayhem has been driven by Britain’s evil “consumerist” culture, our “market-based materialism”, and suchlike. The implication being that we need to have more and more controls over our lives (that is not the same as saying people need to understand self-control and save rather than rely on credit. That is a separate argument). I am willing to stake a few pounds that there will be calls for some sort of National Service for youngsters, if not in the form of the military (who’d want these scum in charge of weapons?), but something else, perhaps. (Again, I have nothing against clubs and groups set up to help youngsters grow up a bit into adults, so long as this is voluntary.)
A random example of the kind of “if only we had powerful leaders” line comes from John McTernan, in the Daily Telegraph. He starts off with this:
“Churchill redeemed himself, and saved the world, during the Second World War. Margaret Thatcher defeated fascism in the Falklands war, and ultra-Leftism in the miners’ strike. We are a better and stronger country, at home and abroad, for her undeviating will and courage. It wasn’t just Britain – the post-war world was full of examples. Nixon and China. Reagan and the Russians. Gorbachev and perestroika. Mandela and de Klerk. These were big figures who made bold choices, shaped the future, called the shots.”
Well, maybe. I find the Nixon example dubious. Sure, he may not be the devil of lazy historical analysis and he unfroze relations with China, but he also, remember, imposed wage and price controls in a panic about inflation and was hardly a consistent advocate of small government, at all. I’ll come to Mrs Thatcher in a minute.
“Evelyn Waugh used to criticise the Conservative Party because it had never turned the clock back by a single minute. But at least it was properly conservative. Harold Macmillan would be shocked at the modern party’s Maoist commitment to revolutionary change, just as Tony Crosland would be aghast at Labour’s obeisance to capital.”
Harold Macmillan is a man who wanted Britain to join the EU; his essentially paternalist version of Toryism, and his deference to the legal privileges of the trade unions, helped breed the kind of complacent attitudes that saw the UK lose its industrial edge. In certain ways, “Supermac” and that whole generation of Tories up to Mrs Thatcher advocated a form of controlled retreat. As for the awful Tony Crosland, why praise a man who once infamously said he wanted to destroy those “fucking grammar schools?”. I hate it when a certain kind of commentator gets all misty-eyed for the political leaders of days of yore, such as the ghastly Nye Bevan, the Labour politician who saddled this country with the National Health Service. We can do without that kind of “leadership”, thank you very much.
“The connecting thread is that Left and Right have accepted not merely market mechanisms, but the market’s ultimate mastery. For more than 30 years, politicians have told industries, communities and voters that you can’t buck the system. In doing so, they have internalised their own advice, and ended up enslaved by these new gods themselves.”
One of the people who said you cannot defy market forces, or fail to heed what Kipling called the “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, was of course, Margaret Thatcher, whom the author of this article claims to admire. In fact, Mrs Thatcher’s greatness, in my opinion, in part stemmed from her willingness to tell people that water did not flow uphill, that if you want to distribute wealth, you have to create it, and that defying the laws of supply and demand typically made problems worse, as in the case of trying to fix the value of sterling. That was one of her best traits.
“George Osborne’s mantra is that if we don’t face up to austerity, then we’ll be like Greece, at the mercy of the markets. Would any Conservative politician, in any previous administration, have compared our great nation to a failing southern European economy (rather than a modern-day Athens or Sparta)?”
I have no idea. I think that pointing out that if the UK fails to get its house in order then we will have the kind of disaster as seen in another country, is a good thing for a politician to do. It is about describing hard reality, not coming out with some sort of guff about “we are a great nation and can do what we like” sort of line.
“Our former leaders would be shocked by the willingness of Cabinet ministers to talk down our country. Accepting your own powerlessness is a characteristic of weak leaders throughout history: always managing, never transforming.”
It is not about “talking down”, but facing reality. To change, you first need to accept where you are now. In the UK, many people, some of them holding quite diverse political views, have been slapped hard with that reality.
People going to fancy dress parties do it. The blogger Old Holborn does it. I am talking about face masks.
Face masks have been targeted as one of the things that the authorities may try to ban in the wake of the riots. Enforcing such a rule, even if it makes sense, strikes me as difficult. Perhaps the only way to interpret and enforce such a law would be to say that anyone wearing an item obscuring most of the face during a time of public disorder would be at risk of prosecution. (Wearing a ski mask should be illegal in the middle of a riot, but not on the slopes of Chamonix, for example). But again, how to decide when to impose the rule? Perhaps a public official, preferably a magistrate, has to read out what used to be called the riot act and after the reading of said act, anyone wearing a mask or suchlike is in trouble.
But it may not be so cut and dried as that, alas. There is the issue of public versus private space to consider. Owners of private property, such as shopping malls and the like, are entirely within their rights to insist that people entering the premises should show their faces, and comply with whatever codes of behaviour might be stipulated, however rational or otherwise, just as private members’ clubs and other places ought to be able to insist on dress codes, for example. Banks will typically insist that motorcyclists take off their helmets, if I recall correctly. (That makes perfect sense, for security reasons).
But as I know some regulars will ask, how does this ban on face masks apply to Muslim women who cover their faces behind a veil or other such form of costume? If such a person enters a shop, say, does this mean the police will now insist they show their faces? I’d like to see how that’s going to work. What about Islamist demonstrators against, say, military actions in the Mid-East? I cannot honestly see how the cops are going to successfully enforce a mask ban without a serious ruckus.
Like a lot of ideas that sound good to politicians in the heat of the moment, the notion of banning people from obscuring all or part of their faces is difficult as a general aim of the law, even if owners of private spaces are entitled, as they are, to make such demands. I can see all kinds of issues of interpretation coming up: what about a guy who wears a baseball cap with big sunglasses – is that illegal, or not? What counts as a “mask”? Surely, any law would need to consider the full context here, but it is not always obvious whether wearing a certain item signifies intent to avoid detection.
Instead of such silly measures, the government must focus its attention, as has been pointed out ad nauseam here, on the following areas:
–T ougher sentences for crimes of all kinds, including theft, which in far too many cases is treated as a minor matter. Such punishments must include restitution of the victim(s);
— Drastic cuts to welfare benefits combined with a big rise in tax thresholds at the bottom of the scale to make work pay. Even the dimmest thugs operate under some sort of cost/benefit analysis. Make work pay;
— Lowering the compulsory school-leaving age; change to labour market rules to encourage apprenticeships, vocational training;
— Allow people to use force in self defence, including firearms;
— Legalise (most) drugs. Yes, this is probably the most controversial idea, and maybe I would not enact this until the moral hazard-machine of the Welfare State has been seriously changed, but it is a key issue. If gangs don’t control the drugs trade, it undermines the gang culture more generally;
— Tax cuts more generally so that married spouses don’t feel under such pressure to both work to keep a decent income. This may also reinforce marriage and provide a better environment for children;
— Scrap the various quangos, race relations organisations and other tax-funded institutions that far from alleviating tensions, often inflame them by the manufacture of various grievances for classic bureaucratic empire-building reasons;
— Zero tolerance policing. Get some guys from New York over to London for some rapid tutorials.
I am sure there are more ideas on how to strengthen the family, encourage positive behaviours and deter bad ones, but it seems to me that trying to regulate dress codes in the streets is one of the most pointless unless the conditions can be very clearly defined in law and avoid arbitrariness. Not a good idea, Prime Minister. There are other, more urgent things to do, and time is short.
“The public’s mood has changed irrevocably; on crime and punishment, social attitudes will have hardened permanently as a result of the past week’s events. Strong speeches from the prime minister are a step in the right direction, as is the much more effective policing of the past 48 hours, but the public wants real, permanent change, not just temporary, emergency measures. A YouGov poll found that 85 per cent of the public believe that most of those taking part in the riots will go unpunished – they have lost faith in the system. This is understandable: it also reflects the perception of the thugs themselves. Criminal activity is far more rational than people believe, especially in wealthy societies such as ours: there is a lot of empirical and statistical work that shows that criminals implicitly weigh up the costs and benefits of crime. A high probability and cost of detection reduces crime, all other things equal; a low likelihood of detection, a low likely cost (such as a negligible prison sentence or a caution, as has too often been the case in the past) and a larger payoff (flat screen TVs or expensive trainers) raises it. Many of those storming shops made that very calculation this week, albeit implicitly and in some cases incorrectly.”
Allister Heath, editor of CityAM. Read it all.
The political party that most intelligently grasps this change of mood, and responds to it by a re-assertion of the right of individuals to defend themselves and their property, and which unravels the disaster wrought by welfarism, supine policing and a hopelessly over-regulated labour market, should win the next election. The question, as ever, is which party has the nous and courage to do this. So far, the signs have not been very encouraging.
Taking a break from life in riot-torn London, I came across this item at the FT about some of the implications of longer lifespans. It is a mixed situation. Excerpt:
“Maxmin admits there are no miraculous solutions to the problems of a fast-ageing society. We will all have to work longer, save more and pay more in tax to cover the costs of a world with a greyer population. Even so, he thinks models like Elder Power can have a much wider application. Perhaps moments like the collapse of Southern Cross, he tells me, could (in the right hands) become moments of opportunity. More generally, models like Beacon Hill Village, ITNAmerica and Elder Power show glimpses of a future in which more elderly people can stay in their homes for longer. All three use innovative technology, make use of assets in their local community and bring together the resources of local businesses, volunteers and the state to solve problems none could have solved individually, at reasonable cost.”
How we deal with ageing, and the issue of longer lifespans, is of course intertwined with the current fiscal breakdown of many developed economies. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. And in that Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda book I have been linking to lately, about the impact of mass aviation, there is a segment on how said aviation can be used to dramatically reshape healthcare, such as by flying people with problems to cheaper, but arguably better run, hospitals in Asia. It struck me while reading this book that while automobiles and consumer electronics have been propelled by their Henry Fords, Michael Dells and Steve Jobses, we haven’t really had, in healthcare, a similar set of individuals to drive innovation and push things sharply down the price curve. The dynamics of Silicon Valley, allied with cheap Chinese manufacturing and just-in-time stock inventory systems, hardly touches healthcare at all, although this is starting to change, perhaps. Of course, much of this is caused by how healthcare is seen, wrongly in my view, as somehow “different” from such vulgar things as selling flatscreen TVs or cars. Healthcare is political. That’s the problem.
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.
– Philip Johnston, journalist.
Read the whole article.
This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – where the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.
– Brendan O’Neill.
You don’t have to buy some of the slightly misty-eyed stuff about working class “communities” to see that he has a strong point. As I often like to point out, an open liberal society requires a modicum of basic respect for the lives and property of others, a certain amount of fertile soil for particular virtues to take root in and flourish.
My area of central London – Pimlico – has not, yet, been hit by the mayhem engulfing many boroughs of this great city. My friends who live in or near these areas are safe, as far as I can check. (I heard from Michael Jennings, who lives in Southeast London, and he’s okay). I have been interested in the sort of reactions from Americans and others from abroad. Clearly, fewer than 12 months ahead of the Olympic Games, this violent disorder comes at a terrible time for the organisers of that pointless junket:
“As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones. This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now. There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill. One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night.”
(Via Instapundit). Another point is that UK homeowners and business owners are not allowed to use deadly force in self defence, a point that has been made regularly, of course, by this blog.
In the meantime, these books are worth reading, in my view, if you want to understand what has gone wrong in the UK:
Life At the Bottom;
The Welfare State We’re In.
Mind The Gap.
Guns & Violence: The English Experience.
I’d add that a common complaint – sometimes made by libertarians and conservatives – is that our police are more interested in political correctness than enforcing the law severely. There may be some truth in that, but I am not sure that this is the issue here. And I am struck by the BBC’s coverage. The Labour MP, Diane Abbott, was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast television and instead of making any sort of excuses, such as the usual crap about Tory “cuts”, was pretty blunt about the need to deal with these thugs. Interesting.
I think the conclusion of this paragraph by Daniel Johnson is overly gloomy:
“The present hysteria obscures the fact that the most unaccountable power in the British media culture is not News Corp. but the BBC. Funded by a poll tax, driven by a leftist mindset, and ruthless in its use of monopoly power, the BBC has been using its saturation coverage of the phone-hacking story to destroy its main competitor. If the BBC succeeds in its aim of driving News Corp. out of the UK market, the British public will be the losers. There is a real danger that the case for the free market, Judeo-Christian values, and Western civilization will no longer be made in Britain.”
I am not so concerned as Johnson is. If Murdoch did pack it in, leaving a vacumn in the sort of space he has filled, someone else could and would fill it. I think that in the age of the internet and a profusion of blogs and other outlets, that the barriers to entry into the media business have been dramatically lowered.
Like Johnson, I have not joined in the general baying for Murdoch’s blood, sensing that some of those who wanted him done down were looking to strengthen the armlock of the BBC and throw out an upstart who upset their cozy world. (My goodness, he wasn’t even Bwitish!). Other news organisations besides those run by Murdoch have done bad things, and given the weaknesses of any organisations run by human beings, those failings will remain. The best insurance against such abuses is the widest possible array of choice in media so that consumer power dominates. Remember, Murdoch decided to shut down the News of the World when advertisers threatened to pull the plug on him. Subscribers can and did cancel on him. With the BBC licence fee, there is no such way that irate consumers of television can vote with their wallets.
Anyway, here’s another paragraph from Johnson that I liked:
“How precisely the closure of a newspaper serves the cause of liberty, such commentators cannot say, any more than they can justify their implied comparison with the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus of the man who not only gave the British press a new lease of life by defeating the print unions, but also lavished tabloid profits on the upscale Times and the highbrow Times Literary Supplement for over 30 years. The News of the World, though beneath the contempt of today’s pundits, was loved by George Orwell. He begins his great essay “The Decline of the English Murder” by evoking a scene of postprandial bliss: a working-class Englishman following his Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding by opening the News of the World to read about the latest, most lurid murders.”
On an optimistic note, I’d add that one of the trail-blazers in new media, Glenn Reynolds, marks 10 years of Instapundit today. Well done him. All hail to the King of Knoxville.
I got this via Pajamas TV. Well, it’s Friday:
“Warning: This segment contains graphic images of Matt Damon discussing tax policy.”
And the footage of Damon sharing his profound thoughts on the “upper class” etc is not for people of a nervous disposition.
Let’s not forget that magnificent movie and its treatment of Damon, Team America.
“Flowers begin arriving past night and bidding starts before dawn. To ensure their lilies and hyacinths are ready for the auction block, growers move them from cold storage onto carts in the early morning, or else rush them from Schiphol after overnight flights from Quito, Nairobi, and Tel Aviv. It’s impossible to see, much less make sense of, the Aalsmeer at eye level, as the floor of its central warehouse is a thicket of carts bearing blooms, all waiting their turn. This is the world’s largest commercial building at ten million square feet, more than twice the size of Chicago’s Willis Tower or Merchandise Mart….” (Page213).
“From a catwalk running above, you can study the crazy quilt of tulips, sunflowers, azaleas and hydrangeas bleeding into daubs of orange or pink on the horizon. The quilt constantly changes colors and patterns as burly Dutchmen at the wheel of one-man tugs trail daisy chains behind them.” (Page 213)
What is interesting about these passages, concerning the marvels of the vast flower-auction market in Holland, and the global reach of this business made possible now due to aviation and refrigeration, is that the author does not fall into the usual stale bromides about how all this aviation-led trade is killing the planet. I liked this passage, on page 232-3:
“Food miles cannot begin to compare in toxicity with flatulent cattle. Anyone who’s read the Omnivore’s Dilemma can recite chapter and verse on the perils of force-feeding corn to livestock in feedlots. Cows produce methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times more potent than carbon, as a by-product of digestion…..A breakdown of the Big Mac revealed that nearly a third of its [carbon] footprint stems from feed production, another third from storage, and much of the rest from slaughtering, frying, and baking. Food miles contribute 3 per cent.”
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda. 2011.
Nick Gillespie, who when he is not pointing out how American politics is changing rapidly with his fellow Reasonoid Matt Welch, has an interesting essay up about how much of what passes for the “artistic community” was left looking pretty lame in how writers, painters, sculptors, film-makers and even poets responded to 9/11. (Yes, it is almost a decade ago). He makes a number of good points. Tim Sandefur weighs in with some thoughts of his own and makes this pretty blunt point:
“That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.”
For me, the only really telling film made about 9/11 has been Flight 93. I watched it several years ago and remember it as a powerful, if flawed, production.
As Sandefur says, the inadequacy of art in relation to a terrible event such as 9/11 is a broader reflection of how art has arguably, degraded in recent decades. For what it is worth, I am one of those old grouches who finds a lot of what passes for Modern Art to be mind-erasing garbage. But then again, my “modern” tastes in things like science fiction, and all the whizz-bang art that can come with it, don’t necessarily make me old fashioned, either.
As an aside, I came across these photos of Civil War memorial art. Worth a look. It adds to Sandefur’s point on representational art, I think.
This paragraph from a good posting by Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review’s Corner blog, applies not just to the US, but also to the UK:
“The strangest thing about the current paradox of cash-flush companies and little or no economic growth is the administration’s puzzlement over the lethargy — as if no one outside Washington ever listened to what the administration has said or noticed what they have done the last three years.”
Exactly. I’d also add to VDH’s list of things that have stymied recovery: the still-lingering and damaging impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on things such as initial public offerings and the foolish FASB tampering with share option payments that have crimped venture capital startup businesses. (I can, by the way, recommend this book by Dale Halling about why US entrepreneurship is stalling – it controversially argues that a key problem has been the erosion of patent law in the US, an argument that is bound to get some libertarian opponents of IP excited).
VDH’s points apply in Britain, too, such as what he says about demonisation of some businesses, as well as things like bailouts, Green regulations and so on. Of course, a key problem here is the European Union and all the red tape that comes from that.
Regime uncertainty, if I can use that term, is a big problem. We have a tax authority (HMRC), given the power to decide, as it goes along, what constitutes tax “avoidance”, so that avoidance is now seen as wrong, as is tax evasion. This relates to a wider problem of uncertainty. Even the daftest tax laws are more tolerable if they are predictable. The problems get even worse, though, if officials have the ability to retrospectively decide that this or that business practice is wrong and should be shut down. Our tax code remains one of the longest and most complex in the world.
We need far fewer laws, and those that remain should be simple, easy to understand and enforce. Sometimes though, doing things the simple way seems to be so hard.
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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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