So with regulation. Don’t change it, abolish the very idea of regulating vast swathes of the economy. Don’t reduce the state all over, kill parts of the state.
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First Minister Nicola Sturgeon ought to be riding high. The Mirror reports, “Nicola Sturgeon’s coronavirus handling has won over swathe of voters with support for Scottish independence hitting 57 PER CENT, poll finds”. There have been something like seventeen polls in a row showing majority support for independence. For myself, I would be enormously sad to see Scotland leave the UK, but that is not the point of this post. The point is to ask what the hell is really going on? Something must be. Go to the leading pro-Independence blog Wings Over Scotland and the message from the bloggers and the commenters is one of fury with Sturgeon and despair over the prospects of independence. Compared to 2014 it is a different world. I do understand the outline of the events that led to the convening of the Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints, and which have led the Herald to report,
What stumps me is how it comes about that the reporting by Scottish newspapers (most of whom are anti-independence) seems to support Nicola Sturgeon and speak as if independence is all but inevitable while the leading pro-independence blogs seem sure her resignation and disgrace are imminent and that she has put back the prospects of independence by years. What is not being said? Who is not saying it? The second most popular pro-Independence blog is probably the far left Bella Caledonia. Or maybe it isn’t any more – much can change in six years and much has. In 2014 Wings and Bella were in lockstep, fighting for the same goal. Now they oppose each other bitterly. All the more surprising, then, to read a guest post on Wings, to find myself moved by its patent honesty, then to get to the end of the post and find (a) that it was by someone who until a year or so ago was one of the leading lights of Bella, and (b) that someone is Robin McAlpine. He is the left wing authoritarian (I do not completely repeat myself; there are some points where the two circles on the Venn diagram do not overlap) who wrote an Orwellian piece for Bella called “Real Freedom Sounds Like Many Voices” in which he proposed to institute a system for newspapers like that which supports the BBC: there would be a compulsory newspaper subscription payable by all Scots (the supposed sweetener for this was that the newspapers so funded would be “free” – as in free of charge, not politically free), a handful of approved newspapers would be given government franchises, and, in his own words, “this would require that titles other than the franchised ones would be banned.” Mr McAlpine’s “Real Freedom” post dates from 2013. I wrote my Samizdata piece about it in 2017 when it looked as if Bella Caledonia might have collapsed. I wanted to preserve the memory of just how authoritarian Mr McAlpine’s views were. The piece dated 14 January 2021 by Mr McAlpine that so surprised and moved me is called “The Integrity of a Nation”. It begins,
Added later: For me, the key part of Robin McAlpine’s post was this:
Emphasis added. The manipulation of the law to target political opponents should concern anyone. The “specific individual” is of course Alex Salmond. He is not a nice man. His own defence lawyer does not think much of him. But there is a hell of a difference between having wandering hands and being a rapist. The prosecution had every chance to prove him a rapist and could not do it. A mostly female jury at the height of the #MeToo movement found him innocent of all thirteen charges. Before anyone chimes in, yes, one of them was “not proven” – that is still an acquittal. What a spectacular failure. Almost as if the case should never have been brought at all. Perhaps this failure resulted from the plague of memory loss that has afflicted many of Scotland’s top civil servants, Nicola Sturgeon herself, and her husband Peter Murrell, who happens to be Chief Executive of the SNP yet displays Biden-like levels of incuriosity regarding meetings of burning importance to that party that take place in his own house. For details see his Wikipedia page, though what it says now may not last the hour. January 18th, 2021 | 22 comments
 If you do not hold the ‘correct views’, the time is rapidly approaching that you need to find alternative venues for expressing those views. So set up your own blog (& do NOT host it with a company owned by Big Tech) and/or set up accounts on alternative platforms that do not depend on the very worst of Big Tech. It is only a matter of time before Twitter, Google & Amazon makes the decision for you, either kicking you off platforms they own directly or taking down other platforms they disapprove off by denying them hosting. Gab and Parler can be accessed via the web, and the Parler app can still be installed on Android devices. It’s a quick and easy process. And if you are still using an iPhone and want the app… consider making your current iPhone your final iPhone. Dissenting views are under attack and the people doing the attacks do not even need to hide the fact anymore.  January 10th, 2021 | 65 comments
Biden victory confirmed after deadly attack on Capitol Note the convenient unidirectionality of the word “deadly” in that BBC report. A writing challenge for you: how would these events be reported if those who stormed the Capitol had been doing it in support of Black Lives Matter? January 7th, 2021 | 166 comments
How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown? How can you justify failing to subject lockdown to a detailed cost benefits exercise? And yet you are going down the same un-costed route again. How can you justify outsourcing the entire educational, economic, mental and social wellbeing of the nation to ever more secretive and unaccountable NHS quangos with their own political and vested interests all supposedly under the control of Matt Hancock at the Department of Health? Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to. December 23rd, 2020 | 10 comments
– Priyamvada Gopal and Gavan Titley in a piece for the Guardian called “The free speech row at Cambridge will restrict, not expand, expression”. Did you guess what was coming? December 19th, 2020 | 24 comments
…from the Second Book of Kings, Chapter 20, Verses 12-19:
While I would not go so far as to claim this post was divinely inspired, 2 Kings 20: 12-19 actually was the lesson in a church service broadcast on Radio 3 on Wednesday morning. I caught a little of it while in the car heading down to Bisley to perform an activity that once would have been proudly described as contributing to national security. (Do not try this line now.) Anyway, for some reason over the next few days I found myself paying a little more attention to news stories like this one from today’s South China Morning Post, “US blacklists about 60 more Chinese firms including top chip maker SMIC and drone manufacturer DJI”, …or to this one from the BBC two days ago, “Huawei: Uighur surveillance fears lead PR exec to quit”, Or to any of a thousand others. But what is the lesson for today? What should we do about the threat from the People’s Republic of China? “War is the health of the state”, wrote Randolph Bourne, and cold war is its daily vitamin pill. It was not so long ago that people like me were enthusiasts for China’s turn to capitalism. I still am, mostly. Now that their rulers have cast off all but the fig leaf of communism, a significant fraction of the human race has been lifted out of poverty in my lifetime. The Chinese people are not free, but they are much more free than they were in the days when the Eight Revolutionary Operas were almost literally the only music allowed. I am happy for them. Yet when I see that famous video of Joe Biden, the man soon to take up residence in the White House, jovially saying, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man”, I cannot but remember the words of the prophet:
December 18th, 2020 | 16 comments
I do not know a single family who have adjusted or in anyways changed their Christmas plans in the last week or two due to changes in the state’s latest whims regarding Covid-19. Question: I am a lockdown sceptic but outside my bubble, are there people willingly rearraigning their lives when the state issues new edicts? December 17th, 2020 | 50 comments
Roger Waters, a co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd, is protesting Twitter for censoring the youth and student movement of the Socialist Equality Party. It’s funny to see the Left suddenly upset about censorship. I applaud Waters’ stance about the importance of free speech, but where was his activism when social media was (and is) censoring the other side? – Zilvinas Silenas pointing people at an article by Jon Miltimore December 6th, 2020 | 15 comments
What great minds have met and advanced human knowledge under the banner of the Royal Society. Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Newton, William Herschel, Charles Babbage, Darwin, Einstein, Hawking. Now reduced to petty power grabs by encouraging politicians to meddle in minutiae. “Platforms and regulators should limit streaming resolution and default to SD, the authors urged.” Pathetic. December 3rd, 2020 | 12 comments
As President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” The Daily Mail reports,
Samuel Paty was murdered by Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Muslim Russian refugee of Chechen ethnicity. Not home schooled then. Certainly not home schooled in France. But what about the perpetrators of other Islamic terrorist attacks in France? The relevant Wikipedia article does not make it easy to tell, since someone has decided to remove the names of the terrorists. But so far as I know none of the perpetrators of the biggest terrorist outrages in France were homeschooled. Like their counterparts in the UK they were typically products of their country’s state education system who first turned to petty crime and then were “redeemed” by Islam. November 19th, 2020 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
In response to the lockdown Sir Desmond Swayne said his initial reaction was “despair”, adding: “These are difficult decisions but that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s the wrong decision. More people will die in the long run.” An MP since 1997, and former PPS to David Cameron, Swayne says he’s definitely voting against the lockdown and points to the fact that when he asked Matt Hancock two weeks ago what evidence he had of excess deaths above the long term average in recent weeks, the Health Secretary said there wasn’t any. Swayne says: “Every year thousands of people are carried off as a result of the flu but we don’t run around like headless chickens.” Another MP who says he’s voting against the new lockdown is the MP for Bolton West Chris Green. Green resigned as a Ministerial Aide in early October over the Coronavirus restrictions, saying at the time that the “attempted cure is worse than the disease”. Since then he hasn’t changed his mind and says a lockdown now “only pushes the problem into the New Year when another similar lockdown will be imposed.” November 1st, 2020 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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