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“The irony of Xi’s Ahab Quest is that Taiwan has never been a part of China. ‘China’ today is a recapitulation of the old Qing Empire (which, to add irony to irony, was not Chinese but Manchurian). Tibet, East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria are in no historical sense remotely ‘Chinese’. Ditto for Taiwan, in which Qing officialdom evinced only desultory interest until 1854, when American Commodore Matthew C. Perry, fresh from his gunboat-treaty journey to Japan, showed interest of his own.”
– Jason Morgan, Spectator. Morgan says a Chinese attempted conquest of Taiwan, and war with neighbours, such as Japan, and the US, is inevitable.
I think the headline is self-explanatory. A new US report delivers what looks like a devastating verdict. (It was from a Republican committee; I am unclear what the Democrats might have said.) For me, the refusal of the Beijing regime to allow independent inspections and its bullying of anyone who raised questions, triggers my suspicions. Science writer Matt Ridley has come to the same conclusion, although he is far more qualified to write about it than someone like me. He co-authored a book on the topic.
It is not clear what, if anything, the West can now do other than the following:
Cease all funding of gain-of-function or similar experiments carried out in China. No Western individuals or organisations should be allowed to fund experiments of this nature in China. So it means people such as Dr Fauci would, under my rule, be treated as criminals for having any financial or other involvement with such research.
Where such experiments are conducted in places such as the US, they must be disclosed from the start, and subject to regular review and full reports given to the authorities, including media. There was a recent report that such work was being done in Boston, where the virus has a high fatality rate, although there has been pushback on this story here. Can someone explain to me what is the possible purpose of this? (If it is to defend against viruses, this should be made clear from the start.)
Restrict Chinese government/business (usually front organisations anyway) access to Western medical and scientific research as much as possible (I realise that in an online world, there are limits), particularly around technologies that can be weaponised.
Continue to demand answers about the sources of the pandemic, and make a willingness to be open about this a condition of more open relations going forward. Make it clear that unleashing a virus, even by accident, and doing nothing much to warn neighbours in good time or be open about investigating it, is a hostile act. I would like to hear the likes of Sunak, Biden, Macron, Scholz and the rest make these points, regularly. If not, they need to be asked why they aren’t raising it. And for good measure, the World Economic Forum head honcho Klaus Schwab needs to be regularly asked about this, and about whether any WEF members are funding such research. Let’s at least use the whole ESG agenda for some good and demand that no ESG-linked finance should touch gain-of-function research unless for a clearly-stated and checkable benefit, in full public view.
I don’t think sanctions are of much use here. Ironically, China’s zero-covid policy, which appears without end, is a form of self-harm that is more damaging than any amount of sanctions activity. President Xi has been re-elected by the Chinese Communist Party, and presumably hopes to be in post until he dies, or is too infirm to do the job. That is punishment enough for those who want to prop up this regime. It is, alas, miserable for the hundreds of millions of Chinese people who, through little fault of their own, live under this tyranny.
“I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually.”
– Bono, the rock musician from U2. It would be quite amusing to see him say all this on stage the next time he is in front of the crowds at Glastonbury. Watch their heads explode. (I should add that he is far from going full classical liberal, but that’s not a bad start.) He is quoted at the Marginal Revolution blog, that took the quote from a paywalled New York Times page.
It is easy to understand why those who are not fully down with the whole Green alarmist agenda are annoyed at the fracking ban under Rishi Sunak’s new administration. (In reality, local authorities could and would still try and stop it, even if it was legal at the national level.)
A problem with the ban, though, is that it says something about the approach of the Sunak administration: it is in thrall to the Precautionary Principle. Don’t do anything if there is the slightest risk of harm to the environment or if it upsets some local people. And that means that on issues such as house building, new nuclear power plants, roads, Heathrow third runway or a “Boris island” in East London, or anything else, the risk is that nothing much gets done.
Lest anyone think this is a purely Tory issue, it isn’t. A Labour government is unlikely to be like the Attlee/Wilson ones where there was at least a sort of working class affinity with industry. Trade unionists used to be proud of how they worked in mines, factories and shipyards. They got dirt under their fingernails, and they wore this as a badge of pride. Today’s post-modernist Left bemoans developments such as the demise of steel production, but fails to join the dots between this and the deliberate raising of energy prices through “Green transition” policies. Also, much of the modern Left does not reside in the industrial sector, but is more about the public sector. So the problem is one of a wider cultural/philosophical aversion to making things or doing things that are in any way “dirty”.
Meanwhile, countries such as India and China, or Indonesia, suffer no such inhibitions. And we will import energy and other products from nations that are likely to enforce less stringent controls on pollution. And yet the likes of Starmer, and various commentators, will bemoan the demise of UK manufacturing. But if we refuse to build reliable, cheap energy (wind and solar don’t count, being weather-reliant), then our demise as an industrial power will continue. (Fossil Future, by Alex Epstein, is a must-read and corrective to current alarmist nonsense, not least because it addresses the philosophy of the Greens, and provides an alternative. Too few debunkers of Greens do this.)
A few days ago I went to Battersea Power Station, now fully refurbished and turned into a shopping mall and apartment block, with various offices and things like art galleries. I can admire the architecture, the lovely industrial-style touches and the gantries and machinery. But what strikes me as symbolic of modern Britain is that we have turned a power station into a shop, and when the wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine, and we haven’t enough baseload power, the building will go dark. That’s where decades of evasion and Green ideology have taken us.
We are turning into a theme park.
Update: Germany is keen to be a theme park too. Major chemicals manufacturers, unable to withstand surging energy costs, are moving out, according to this Reuters report
“Restoring the fracking moratorium would be an error. To rely on imported gas when we have 50-100 years’ supply under our feet is not a stance rooted in science or economics, but political weakness in the face of militant protest groups and anti-development campaigns. This decision will not help the planet; the UK will become more dependent on gas imports, with higher emissions than local production. It will not help the growth plan; we will be borrowing to pay Qatari and US taxes rather than building an industry.
It will not help the low carbon transition; there will be fewer fossil fuel taxes to fund it and the cost of all energy sources will rise. It will not help our allies in the EU or Ukraine; surrendering further dominance of regional gas markets to Russian tyranny. It seems the Government and Opposition are determined to risk blackouts and freezeouts before taking hard decisions rooted in reality.”
– Andy Mayer, of the Institute of Economic Affairs (one of those evil organisations now safely removed from influencing our “sensibles” in government), talking about the decision of the new Rishi Sunak government to ban fracking. The quotation explains the imbecility of that decision. (I received the comments in an email; there is no weblink that I could see.)
Who needs vulgar industry anyway, when we can import all this stuff from grubby foreigners, daaaahhling.
Update: Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Daily Telegraphs compliments the frackers of the US for helping to save the West (he’s not exaggerating) but argues that UK fracking is far less sensible as an investment proposition, and he may be correct. However, he goes onto laud the benefits of the UK going all in on Green, renewable energy, and talks about hydrogen, etc. But throughout the entire article, written with AEP’s typical brio, is not one single reference to battery storage capacity. Weather-dependent energy requires storage to deal with the baseload power issue. There may well be solutions in the skunkworks, but an awful lot is riding on this. There might well be a sort of “Moore’s Law” effect on renewables and affordability, but batteries are the key. And making batteries needs lithium, cobalt, and other minerals that come from places that are often not exactly very agreeable to the West. And there are environmental side-effects, including damage to water supplies (often far more serious than anything that fracking might cause.)
“Since the country [UK] seems to be heading back very rapidly to the 1970s it is worth asking: just what is keeping people in Britain, especially young people?”
– Ross Clark. He’s clocked the fact that far from net immigration being an issue, the challenge over the next few years is persuading anyone with a pulse to stay in the UK, if the prospect is of high taxes, weak growth, and all the rest of it.
Russia has always been a colonial power in denial. While conquering and ruling multitudes, it insisted that—in contrast with violent Western conquests—the indigenous peoples themselves sought Russian protection and that Russian rule was benign. This gap between rhetoric and reality is evident in the country’s current designation as a “Russian Federation”.
– Michael Khodarkovsky.
Update: Liz Truss has just resigned as PM.
Lord (David) Frost is one of the sanest observers of the UK political scene. He’s in favour of the pro-growth, lower-tax agenda that Liz Truss has made much of. He writes more in sorrow than anger that the time has come for Ms Truss to stand aside.
His article includes the nugget of insight around how, in the very early 80s, Sir John Hoskyns, advisor to Margaret Thatcher in her Policy Unit, had set out in a memo a series of “stepping stones” for reform and change. To make changes on energy, tax, inflation, house planning, etc, requires a lot of patient preparatory work, to ensure that reforms don’t alienate the public on a large scale, or rattle the markets. This is akin to a pilot on a ship or plane having a passage plan before leaving port or taking off.
A serious government needs to have a worked-out idea of where it is going, and how it is going to do it, and have contingency plans. For example: when contemplating the need to take on Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, following the damaging strikes of the early 70s, Mrs T. put Nigel Lawson in charge of energy (before he became Chancellor in 1983) and he built up coal stocks so that the UK had a buffer of coal during the likely strike. This is like a general marshalling his forces intelligently before going into battle.
My impression is that Truss lacked people around her who knew how to guide her in such a way. And this speaks to what in my view is a deeper problem with much politics today in the West: the lack of strategic thinking and understanding of statecraft. Politicians sometimes study subjects such as “international affairs” or “politics” in liberal arts degrees and masters’ degrees in university. There is the Kennedy School of Government in the US , to give one case. But I wonder how much actual practical knowledge of how to get things done is learned. (If any readers have been to these places, let me know.) In fact, they may simply spend time wallowing in forms of ideology; they’d be better off reading Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, even if it appears to be a treatise on cynicism.
Perhaps the nature of those in public life has changed. Whatever else one might say of them, the old landed gentry and business class of people who tended to be Tories had an understanding of the processes of government and making change, although a lot of them were also capable of mass incompetence. On the Labour side, the experiences of unions and working in industry gave a certain realism and understanding of how tough life could be.
I worry that too few in public life have this sort of “ballast” in their lives. And we end up with people who don’t really know what they are doing.
Perhaps a more intractable problem is that so many people now assume that government, on the scale we now have it, is the “normal” state of affairs, and that anything taking us to a smaller State is terrifying. And it requires tremendous rhetorical skill, management capability and insight to show how a route to a saner state of affairs is possible, even exciting and enticing. This is doubly hard to do after a pandemic, and after when a large chunk of the professional middle classes had spent two years on furlough, watching TV and baking bread at home. And the sadder fact is that a lot of such people, although they will never admit it unless after several drinks, rather enjoyed the experience.
“….it is more useful to see Liz Truss’s rise and fall as symptomatic of an identity crisis among free-market policy-makers across the West, as they wake up to a world in which can exist neither as competent technocratic administrators nor as a radical liberalising movement. This new world is one in which both Thatcherism and the Blairite Third Way are dead. What those commentators suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome appear to have missed is that the country is reeling from what many hoped was a transitory crisis, but now seems to be a permanent paradigm shift: one in which high inflation is endemic and the welfare capitalist model that has been propped up by cheap credit for the past 20 years is vanquished.”
– Sherelle Jacobs. Daily Telegraph (£)
I wonder if people will talk of these times in the way they once discussed the tumultuous Corn Law/free trade debates that led, eventually, to the formation of the Liberal Party (Whigs and Robert Peel supporters joining) and the Tories, led by Lord Derby and later Disraeli, languishing in opposition for 20-plus years. Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a Manchester man who relishes the traditions of classical liberalism and economics in that city), argues that big realignments are going on. I think, contrary to his view, that economics is as important as “culture wars” stuff to what is causing politics to shift. The public has just had a big lesson in why economics matters. It matters a lot.
“The Tory vision of the country is, or should be, one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives. It involves building things and going places. It involves houses and factories, roads and cars, ports and airports, as well as parks, countryside and gardens.”
– David Frost, a former member of the Boris Johnson administration, who resigned in part over things like tax hikes. I get the impression that his views are falling on deaf ears among many Conservative MPs, for whom building things, travelling, entrepreneurship, or of how life should be about a sense of adventure, are all terrible things to be banned or viewed with suspicion. Maybe we will get a political realignment at some point, where the Tories revert to their 19th Century default of being the party that largely resisted, or was snooty about, industry and an upwardly mobile class, with a different party championing such things. It may not happen, but I get the sense that there is a lot of change in the political culture at the moment. If you are a young, ambitious person, what on earth does much of the UK political order have to offer if you detest politics and want to just get on with life? The answer, for many, will be to leave.
“The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15 per cent, to over $300 billion, in the first nine months of this year, from the same period in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This is Wall Street just doing its job: making money. Banks earned more than $1 billion in revenue from fossil lending during the first three quarters, in line with 2021. Why quit business with a booming sector over a distant climate goal?”
– Alistair Marsh, Bloomberg. ($) The US news service has been pushing the whole “Green transition” agenda in recent years in its coverage, at the behest of founder Michael Bloomberg, so there is something darkly amusing watching the organisation concede that decarbonisation has been a big loser for investors in recent months. If you are JP Morgan, BlackRock, Bank of America Merrill Lynch or a small investment house in Massachusetts, you have to explain to clients why you hugely lagged the stock market because of your “Green” decisions.
As the late Richard Feynman once said apropos the Space Shuttle, nature cannot be fooled. That applies to economics as well.
“You couldn’t force lockdowns without laptops, Zoom, Amazon deliveries, cloud computing, Slack, QR codes or Netflix. Without them, lockdowns would have lasted two, maybe three weeks tops before the utter destruction of the economy forced everyone back to the workplace. Instead, we took the Faucian bargain of technology-enabled yearlong lockdowns because it was doable. Silicon Valley’s tools became shackles.”
– Andy Kessler, WSJ ($). Tech is great, and these channels would be useful in any sense, but it is certainly true that for a segment of the population (such as those with media influence and in government), they made lockdowns far more “doable”. For a fan of tech such as me, that is an uncomfortable thought.
“Faucian bargain” – very droll.
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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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