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]
|
When the state’s representatives does something truly egregious, like shoot someone dead for no good reason or seize someone’s property because they want it to be owned by someone who can pay more tax to them, it is pretty easy to get folks angry by recounting such tales and get them to nod solemnly and intone “The state is not your friend”.
Yet maybe the proverbial straw that will break the political camel’s back may be one of the seemingly endless encroachment of the state into the little stuff of everyday life:
I tell her about that infamous legal text, and the insane requirements it places on all of us who break our own windows, in our own homes, in the course of a loving affray, and how we are compelled, if we wish to replace that window, to become members of the Society of Window Replacers, called FENSA, provided we can stump up the fee and pass the exam; and if we cannot pass the FENSA exam, how we must go to the council and deposit a plan showing how we propose to replace our own windows, in OUR OWN HOMES, in line with Britain’s commitments under the Kyoto protocol on climate change, and having replaced the window how we must then go back to the council and get a COUNCIL APPOINTED WINDOW INSPECTOR to come out and verify that whatever we have done is in line with those international commitments. And is that not mad, ladies and gentlemen, I demand. Is that not the height of insanity?
And it is via this sort of thing that the state gets businesses to eagerly sign up to ever more regulation. I mean if you in the window replacement business, the last thing you want is ‘laymen’ getting the idea that they do not actually need you.
Yet there comes a time when even the post-Thatcher strategy of regulatory gradualism used by socialists of both left and right accumulates to the point it cannot escape the notice of any but the most obtuse Daily Mail reader or wilfully blind Guardianista. As it gradually dawns on people how few things they can do with their own land, labours and capital without navigating a labyrinth of regulations and permissions, maybe the already palpable uneasy I detect will turn into something which is actually politically useful for attacking the whole system.
And when might that point be reached? Good question.
Well, well, well. A famous showbusiness celebrity is making a big fuss about the crushing of dissent and the stifling of free speech.
But, this time, the claim has merit:
Blackadder star Rowan Atkinson has launched a comedians’ campaign against a government bill to outlaw inciting religious hatred.
The Mr Bean actor says parts of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill are “wholly inappropriate” and could stifle freedom of speech….
The main thrust of the bill creates a new Serious and Organised Crime Agency to tackle drug trafficking, people smuggling and criminal gangs.
Quite what religious ‘hatred’ has to do with drug trafficking and criminal gangs is quite beyond me but this appears to be another example of the government bundling up huge sheafs of seen-to-be-doing-something new laws and stuffing them altogether into one big, deliverable package. Perhaps they are trying to cut down on their printing costs.
Anyway, to the meat of the matter. I applaud Mr Atkinson for his taking a stand notwithstanding that it may be motivated by self-interest. That is still better than nothing. However, I expect that his pleadings will fall on wilfully deaf ears. HMG was rattling its sabre about new ‘hate speech’ laws even while the cement dust was still drfiting over New York. It was, near as dammit, their first response.
I have not yet read the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill but, in due course, I will. I do not expect that it will materially differ, either in theme or content, from similar recent legislative atrocities. That is to say, it will endow the state with sweeping new powers, give birth to lavishly funded and unaccountable agencies and usher in a whole raft of new laws that will be so widely and vaguely drafted as to make them dangerously open to interpretation and judicial activism.
Following the now familiar pattern of previous legislation, widespread enforcement will prove impossible. So enforcement will be selective, politically-motivated and high-profile with a handful of unlucky short-straw drawers nailed to the wall pour encourages les autres.
If that was the only outcome then it would be bad enough. That alone would be sufficiently capricious and despotic. But that is only the intended outcome. The unintended outcome could be a great deal worse.
A climate of cowed silence doth not a happy-clappy country make. The worst of it is not knowing where the boundaries are. What can we say? What can’t we say? The majority with something to lose will opt for saying nothing at all as the safest policy (and who can blame them?). Thus, there will be a Potemkin appearance of normality and what we have learned to refer to as ‘tolerance’.
But, underneath, the true picture will be much darker. The only way to successfully challenge bad ideas is to challenge them with good ideas but that is not possible to do if the bad ideas cannot be expressed in the first place. Similarly, resentments left unspoken do not simply whither on the vine and grievances (however irrational and baseless they may be) will not conveniently decay into half-lives like radioactive materials.
Instead these unstable elements will foment and fester and bubble away quietly in the dark until the solution has been transformed into a toxic and explosive substance. It will remain inert only so long as the lid can be kept firmly screwed down.
If David Blunkett falls from office because of his shenanigans between the sheets, I do hope that civil rights activists will not see this as a sign from God (be it Cthuhlu or whoever) that the truly perilous state in which British liberty stands is about to take a turn for the better.
Nothing Blunkett has ever done was done under his authority alone. The accelerating rate at which common law is set aside and ancient liberties debased have been the product of decades of antipathy to non-collectivist rights and individual liberty, a process which was well under way when David Blunkett’s Tory predecessor was in power: would-be future Prime Minister Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard.
The fall of a ringwraith might be cause for some brief rejoicing (I will certainly be raising a glass or two that day!) but please remember there are plenty more where he came from. Sauron lives at Number 10 Downing Street, not in the office of the Home Secretary.
This is fun, in a gruesome way. It is the David Blunkett policy maker, which comes up with things like this:
Detain yobs in the street indefinitely under the Terrorism Act, and then put them under a curfew order.
Or this:
Arrest refugees, and then issue them with compulsory ‘Entitlement Cards’. And charge them for it.
Or this:
Pre-emptively convict asylum seekers, and then try them in secret. And charge them for it.
Although, whenever the BBC is mentioned, I get the feeling that quite a few people around here might agree with Automatic Blunkett’s ideas. I got this, for example:
Deport the BBC to Guantanamo Bay, and then give them a ‘Citizenship Test’.
That is the problem with people like Blunkett. Almost everyone gets something that they want.
Qwghlm.co.uk, whoever he may be (this would be a good place to start finding out – his real name is, I think, Chris Applegate), adds his own cautionary note:
NOTE: The random generator can generate actual policies that Blunkett has launched. I take no responsibility for any distress caused by sudden realisation of the truth, nor any feelings of fear, doom etc. for one’s own civil liberties.
“I take no responsibility …” This man sounds like a lawyer. Maybe a lawyer and definitely a pessimist. Could he be a lefty version of this person.
See also gwghlm.co.uk’s latest blog posting about ID cards. Quote:
I’ve written before at much greater length on just why ID cards are such a bad idea (snappy three word version: costly, useless, invasive) and none of these questions has been satisfactorily answered in the meantime.
Indeed.
(It is off topic, but I could not for the life of me get copying and pasting from this guy’s blog to work. First I could not highlight just the bit I wanted. Then I could not copy even that huge gob that I almost completely did not want. (Although, I was able to copied the embedded short cut.) In the end, I copied that last quote by hand. What gives? Am I using the wrong Internet access whosadaisy programme? Is he one of these guys who made up his own blogging programme? Enlightenment please.)
Margaret Hodge makes speeches about the unsung virtues of the Nanny State.
She forgets to remind us of her record as leader of Islington council, when a shocking series of terrible abuses against children were covered up…. by the Nanny State.
Unfortunately for people like Hodge, some of us remember the reports of child brothels being run from local government premises, where children were hooked on drugs and rented out for sex by local government employees and bullying older children. I remember the exposures (after years of cover-ups), the harrassment of anyone daring to protest against the paedophile rings operating in Islington and Lambeth, to name only the worst cases in London.
Unfortunate too, the Guardian, not noted for its crusading against the welfare state, details the case neatly, including recent attmpts by Hodge to prevent the BBC from telling the story of one of the abused children who were unsung recipients of Islington’s special care. I was especially impressed with Hodge’s rubbishing of a victim of sexual abuse as “an extremely disturbed person”.
Never mind the unsung virtues of totalitarian welfare statism, how about the unsung victims? Margaret Hodge is a government minister with a nice salary, lifestyle to add to her already considerable wealth before becoming a national politician. Instead of devoting herself to helping the victims of her administration with her own time and money, Hodge wants to tax the rest of us to create more opportunities that would allow ‘public servants’ to destroy even more lives than at present.
What a fine signal she sends to the most vulnerable in our society. And what a fine signal from the present government. I feel sick.
Travelling to distant lands often has the effect of changing your perspectives about your own country to some degree or other. After returning to Britain from my trip to the USA earlier this week, I was struck by how leaden and grey London appears in November compared to the pastel, azure balminess of the California coast.
But, that said, I was born here in Blighty and I have had a lifetime of getting used to its forbidding and dismal winter skies. Besides, there are other and newer characteristics that make me wonder exactly what type of country I have returned to. They are altogether more pernicious and have nothing to do with the climate:
In the aftermath of my experience, I started some purely anecdotal research on the type of behaviour and attitude displayed by the police towards me. In speaking to friends, acquaintances, tradesmen, cab drivers and people in the pub I rapidly came to realise that a quite staggering number of ordinary, law-abiding people had endured similar experiences.
To discover precisely what ‘experiences’ the author was forced to endure, you will need to read the entire article. I recommend it in particular to our non-British readers so that they can get some idea of what is happening to this country.
The account of the ordeal left me with a ball of cold mercury in the pit of my stomach. For what happened to him could just as easily happen to me or any number of my friends, relations or colleagues.
And this is merely a taste of things to come. The hors d’oeuvres before the main course. We will not enjoy this meal.
The vast majority of the British public opposes the government’s nannying campaign, according to a poll released today by the campaign group Reform. It shows that 71% of the public think that “Too many infringements on personal liberty are being proposed on matters that should be for individuals to decide for themselves”, while only 27 per cent believe that “The Government should legislate on such things even if they mean restrictions on personal liberty.”
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that we have long regarded the Ban on Foxhunting with Dogs as having very little to do with foxhunting.
As David Carr has pointed out before, those who shout loudly that the move against hunting is ‘undemocratic’ are completely wrong: it is perfectly democratic. Welcome to the world in which there is no give and take of civil society… welcome to the world of total politics.
Mr Bradley says: ‘We ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom: it was class war.’
The MP for The Wrekin adds that it was the ‘toffs’ who declared war on Labour by resisting the ban, but agrees that both sides are battling for power, not animal welfare.
‘This was not about the politics of envy but the polities of power. Ultimately it’s about who governs Britain.’
[…]
‘Labour governments have come and gone and left little impression on the gentry. But a ban on hunting touches them. It threatens their inalienable right to do as they please on their own land. For the first time, a decision of a Parliament they don’t control has breached their wrought-iron gates.
No kidding. That is what we have been pointing out here on Samizdata.net for quite some time and why we have treated commenters who shrugged and said “why get worked up about foxhunting?” with such derision. It was never about hunting but rather things that are far, far more fundamental. It is about those who would make all things subject to democratically sanctified politics (‘Rule by Activist’) seeking to crush those who see private property and society, rather than state, as what matters.
Mr Bradley, 51, admits that he personally sees the campaign to save hunting as an assault on his right to govern as a Labour MP.
And Mr. Bradley is correct but for one thing: the battle in question is about the limits of political power and not just Labour’s political power. Until the supporter of the Countryside Alliance see that they are actually struggling against the idea of a total political state, they will not even be fighting the right war. It is not about who controls the political system but what the political system is permitted to do under anyone’s control. The United States has a system of separation of powers and constitutional governance which (at least in theory even though not in fact) places whole areas of civil society outside politics. Britain on the other hand has no such well defined system and the customary checks and balances have been all but swept away under the current regime. Britain’s ‘unwritten constitution’ has been shown to be a paper tiger.
But those who look to the Tories to save them from the class warriors of the left are missing another fundamental truth. During their time in power, the Tory Party set the very foundations upon which Blair and Blunkett are building the apparatus for totally replacing social processes with political processes, a world in which nothing cannot be compelled by law if that is what ‘The People’ want: populist authoritarianism has been here for a while but now it no longer even feels it has to hide its true face behind a mask.
Moreover it would take another blind man to look back on Michael Howard’s time as Home Secretary and see him as being less corrosive to civil liberties that the monstrous David Blunkett. Have you heard the outraged Tory opposition to the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act? Of course not, because the intellectual bankruptcy of the Tory party is now complete… for the most part they support it. If the so-called ‘Conservatives’ will not lift a finger to stop the destruction of the ancient underpinnings of British liberty, what exactly are they allegedly intending to ‘conserve’? The Tories are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem and the sooner the UKIP destroy them by making them permanently unelectable, the better, so that some sort of real opposition can fill the ideological vacuum.
Those who were marching against banning foxhunting completely miss the issues at stake here. The issue is not and never has been foxhunting but rather the acceptable limits of politics. And you cannot resolve that issue via the political system in Britain. It is only once the people who oppose the ban on foxhunting and the people who oppose the Civil Contingencies Act and the people who oppose the introduction of ID cards and data pooling all realise that these are NOT separate issues but the same issue will effective opposition be possible. And I fear that opposition will, at least until the ‘facts on the ground’ can be established, have to be via civil disobedience and other ways to make sections of this country ungovernable by whatever means prove effective. The solution does not lie in ‘democracy’ but rather by enough people across the country asserting their right to free association and non-politically mediated social interaction by refusing to obey the entirely democratic laws which come out of Westminster.
Peter Bradley is right and he has provided any who are paying attention with a moment of utter clarity: It is time to challenge his right to ‘rule’ by whatever means necessary.
The Civil Contingencies Act became law last Thursday in what can only be described as a blaze on non-publicity. This legislation, which represents perhaps the most serious threat to liberty in Britain since World War II, has put in place the legal tools for some future government to impose rule-by-edict.
It would be hard to overstate how grave this situation is.
In about three months’ time from now, the centuries-old country practice of foxhunting with hounds will be a criminal offence in England and Wales, following the decision by Labour MPs to vote for total abolition of the activity. It has already prompted thoughts on whether foxhunting groups will defy the law and make life in marginal rural constituencies difficult for Blair and his cohorts. Personally, I hope Labour lose a swathe of key seats on this issue, although in practice I do not imagine the issue will be a make-or-break one. But it will have an effect.
In issues like this, it is easy to get caught in the thickets of whether foxhunting is particularly cruel or not, a necessary activity, etc, etc. But it seems to me that the supporters of foxhunting allowed themselves to devote too much time stressing how many jobs would be lost from a ban, and not enough time on the fundamental issues of liberty and property rights. What appals me – as one who has never been to a hunt meeting in his life – is that the banners of foxhunting are determined to crush a particular form of enjoyment. Foxhunters have fun. Yes, their idea of fun may not be yours or mine – but our lives would be pretty bleak if our pleasures could be struck down at the whim of a temporary majority of our fellow electors. In banning a form of fun, this government has shown itself at its bullying worst and established a particularly nasty precedent, coupled with a rancid amount of bigotry against the ‘upper class’. The affair is a reminder of just how much class hatred still exists inside the so-called New Labour Party.
The property rights issue also has not been stressed nearly enough by the now-defeated hunting lobby. The government has essentially told owners of land that they are not allowed to hunt game on it in a certain way. It is, along with the outrageous ‘right to roam’ legislation giving ramblers freedom to go on owners’ land, an attack on the ownership rights of landowners.
The question now has to be – who is next? Game shooters, anglers, horse riders? What happens when today’s cheerless puritans run out of things to abolish? Will they spontaneously combust?
I am writing this up in deepest rural Suffolk, which is not a main hunting area like Leicestershire or Gloucestershire, but nevertheless the locals are steamed.
UPDATE: In case anyone brings up the argument about cruelty to animals, while I strongly sympathise, I should point out that the abolition of hunting with hounds will not mean the end of killing foxes, which are classed as vermin. They will be shot, gassed and trapped. Nice.
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious – and growing – civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
Business enterprises are often attacked for selling people ‘junk food’ and not telling them about the health benefits of vegetables.
Well recently ASDA (the British arm of Walmart) labelled its vegetables, explaining that people who eat certain types of vegetable have a lower chance of developing certain forms of cancer.
ASDA was promptly prosecuted and punished. It seems that ‘making health claims’ is not legal in Britain.
Oh well, back to selling junk. The state is not your friend.
|
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.
|
