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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The trouble with people who ‘come in from the cold’ is that they have unfortunate tendency to bring some of that coldness with them and, every so often, they just cannot help but drop a little of it into our lives.
Take, for example, Christopher Hitchens, a man who has been widely (and justifiably) praised for the excoration of his former leftist colleagues since the WTC attacks. But reports of defection from the dark side may well have been exaggerated if this infuriatingly superficial and condescending bit of Euro-fawning is anything to by:
The Turkish Cypriots did not mount mass demonstrations against partition because they had any romantic idea of the European dream.
They just didn’t want to be confined in a little sweat-shop state, forced to do business in the mainland Turkish lira, and kept away from a prosperity that they could see taking place on the other side of the wall.
See, the Turkish Cypriots want to embrace Europe so why are we Brits being so stubborn? Who is Mr.Hitchens trying to kid? The Northern (Turkish) sector of Cyprus has been the subject of official sanctions imposed by just about every European country since it was established in 1974. If the Cypriot Turks are, indeed,wallowing in a ‘little sweat-shop state’ then Europe is the cause of their misery not the cure.
For them, “protection” and “protectionism” became the
same thing – another name for stagnation and isolation.
‘Protectionism’ does indeed mean ‘stagnation’ but membership of the EU does not mean the abolition of protectionism. It simply means writing protectionism across a whole continent. It is exchanging the almost non-existant risk of ‘Fortress Britain’ for the racing, inescapable certainty of ‘Fortress Europe’. A bad idea does not get better by simply inflating it.
In order to join this club, you had to have a political
democracy and free movement of labour and capital
No, in order to join this club you have to submit to the will of the Commission and agree to trade according to their incomprehensible ziggurat of rules and regulations. → Continue reading: Smack my Hitch up
Or is the headline France satisfied with EU deal on farm subsidies somewhat worrying? If it was “France absolutely livid about EU deal on farm subsides”, then we might be getting somewhere. However, that doesn’t seem to be something we ever see. If France was absolutely livid, there wouldn’t be a deal.
(via Eldan).
European Union agriculture ministers have agreed radical reforms to the controversial system of paying subsidies to farmers. They promise to slash the monstrous bill of 43bn euro ($50) that EU countries’ taxpayers have to foot in order to subsidise ehem…French… ehem… farmers.
EU farm commissioner Franz Fischler, who first proposed the reforms, said the accord marked “the start of a new era” and would fundamentally change the 45-year old Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
Is this encouraging? We do not think so. And neither does the BBC. Shock, horror. Cast your eye over the deal and note it has as many (loop)holes as Swiss cheese (which, by the way, is produced without EU subsidies). I would like to draw your attention to the point 3.
- Abolish most of the subsidies that reward farmers according to how much food they grow.
- Farmers will receive a single payment, rather than grading the amount of money in line with the amount of food produced.
- Individual countries will be able to stick to the old system if there is a risk that the new system would lead to the land being abandoned.
- The prices at which the EU intervenes to support farmers are to be cut in key sectors, including milk powder and butter
- Countries like the UK, which want to press ahead with more radical reform, are allowed to do so.
- Direct payment for bigger farms will be cut to finance the new rural development policy, promoting the environment and animal welfare.
So the end of EUcrats meddling in agriculture in nowhere in sight. The ‘reform’ is merely a cosmetic rejuggling of CAP’s inefficiencies and vast bureaucracy induced by the wide-spread criticism of the policy for distorting global trade and hurting poor countries. The subsidies have been the key sticking point in agreeing the next round of global trade talks directly opposing the EU child-like and visionary drive for ‘global influence’ as a counterpart to the US.
Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.
It’s a typical EU compromise which gives and takes a little from everyone and creates terrible difficulties for those who have to implement it.
Guess who said that? Gerd Sonnleitner, head of Germany’s farmers union. He got that right but I doubt he will see the light on the other side of the EU fence.
Mr Prodi is not amused. The UK government’s decision on the euro had disappointed him. Oh dear. He probably can’t wait to get his hands on UK affairs himself.
The EU chief also reckons that it was a signal of deep political problems. He is right there. The EU has deep political problems. No wait, he meant the UK – it appears that he doubts the wisdom of the direction our reverent Tony Blair has taken over the euro.
Prodi acknowledged that Tony might have had a tough time winning a referendum but he said he did not know whether the prime minister’s decision was due to political wisdom or a lack of courage. Of course, Prodi does not worry about referendums, you just keep having them until they say ‘yes’.
And finally, Mr Prodi warns that Britain cannot remain half in and half out of Europe. Oh good. Let’s get out then…
Never mind San Francisco or Hampstead, Brussels is the true home of the radical student left. Still as committed as ever to the anti-ismism crusades of the 1980’s, they continue to dig away at the foundations of our ‘bourgeois values’.
Seems they have just struck another seam:
The Commission is in the final stages of drawing up a directive to ban sex discrimination, with implications for the media, advertising and insurance industries.
The draft directive, revealed in Tuesday’s Financial Times, would leave it to the courts to decide whether programmes or advertisements were sexist or “did not respect human dignity”. An explanatory note says: “The purpose of this provision is to avoid throughout all forms of mass media all stereotypical portrayals of women and men, as well as any projection of unacceptable images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements.”
The law could have profound implications for institutions such as Britain’s topless Page Three girls in The Sun newspaper and vast swathes of Italian television. Advertisers using sex to sell could also be affected.
If it wasn’t so offensive and inappropriate, I’d say that they’ve just discovered a motherlode.
The real devil in this detail lies with the apparently reasonable proposition to ‘leave it to the Courts’ thereby providing a fig-leaf of objective justice. Actually, though, this is a charter and blessing for looney-left activists to drag any number of advertising agencies and media companies through any number of Courts on pretty much any pretext they damn well please (as these things are usually drafted in the widest and vaguest possible terms).
However, in practice, this will only need to be done once or twice for the wicked capitalists to get the message and, in order to avoid the risk of a ruinous lawsuit, start censoring themselves. That is the ideal solution because why bother with all that messy and troublesome enforcement business when life is so much easier for the ruling elite if everyone just internalises their own repression.
The European Union: if it didn’t exist, we would not have to invent it.
One of the more feeble but less important things about the euro is the actual design of the banknotes. It was decided early on that the notes would show pictures of bridges, supposedly to symbolise “the close cooperation between Europe and the rest of the world”. However, due to the fact that there were not going to be enough notes to show a picture of a bridge from each Euro-zone country, the notes were instead designed with pictures of bridges that don’t actually exist, but which resemble (in terms of style) bridges that do exist somewhere in Europe. (To my eye, a remarkably large number of them resemble real bridges that are actually in France, but that might be just me). So, rather than drawing attention to the great cultural treasures that do in fact exist in the euro-zone, European money instead gives us a sort of homogenised blandless.
(Euro coins have one common side and one side that the country that would issues the particular coin into circulation can do what it likes with. Just as with the state quarters in the US, which the states got to design, the quality of the designs is variable).
In any event, it was nice to see on the front page of this morning’s Times (which Samizdata does not link to) that the people who design British coins do not go for such blandness. From 2004 to 2007 Britain (assuming it does not join the euro) is going to release a series of four new pound coins showing great British bridges.
Of course, issues of everyone getting their turn come into this, too. As England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all use the same coins, one of the four coins has to feature a bridge from each of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom. (Curiously, the situation with the pound is the precise reverse of that with the euro. All of the UK uses the same coins, but England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have different banknotes).
This is where we get to the interesting part, which is the choice of bridges on the coins. Choosing for Scotland and Wales was undoubtedly very easy. Benjamin Baker’s Forth Bridge and Thomas Telford’s Menai Strait Bridge are so famous that it can’t have taken more than a moment to choose them. As for Northern Ireland, we have the rather more obscure Egyptian Arch from the Belfast-Dublin railway. Sadly, there are no really famous bridges in Northern Ireland, so we have to make do with what we have. I would rather a more famous bridge from somewhere else in the UK on the coin, but I guess Northern Ireland has to get a coin.
As for England, we have the very new Gateshead Millennium Bridge. This choice doesn’t impress me greatly, as I think the new bridge is more a piece of urban decoration than a piece of important infrastructure. (It illustrates that with modern super-strong materials, engineers and architects designing urban footbridges suddenly have immense freedom to be playful with the design of such bridges, as almost anything they can imagine has suddenly become technically possible and affordable. This is an interesting story, I am all for urban decoration, and I think the bridge is a very good example, but am not sure that this bridge is the right choice for a series of coins that celebrates great bridge building.
So what would my choice for the “England” bridge be? → Continue reading: Euro notes, British coins, and a tour of Britain’s finest bridges
Here is a quote from an opinion piece by David Heathcoat-Amory MP, the Tory party representative on the convention, published in the Telegraph:
No one in the convention doubts the scale of the undertaking or the huge implications for the way Europe is governed – except, apparently, the British Government, which is completely isolated in maintaining that the new constitution is just a “tidying-up exercise”. In the convention, this caused bafflement and then some hilarity. Peter Hain, the government representative, belatedly declared a number of “red lines” on proposals that he wants removed, such as majority voting on foreign policy, social security harmonisation, and interference in criminal justice procedures. But if these issues are so important to the Government, how can it just be a “tidying-up exercise”?
The truth is that the European Constitution founds a new union, with a single unified structure and legal personality. The existing structure, which secures the rights of member states to make their own decisions and collective arrangements about foreign policy and criminal justice matters, will disappear. The EU will have “exclusive competence” over trade, competition rules, common commercial policy, fisheries conservation and the signing of all international agreements.
Please read the whole article, it’s terrifying in its clarity. To be honest, I don’t know which bit I find more scary. The one about the changes to the UK legal system:
The EU’s proposed criminal justice powers are particularly striking because they allow for harmonisation of national laws and procedures by majority voting. This obviously goes to the heart of domestic policy, particularly for a country such as Britain with a distinctive common law tradition, including jury trials, habeas corpus and rules of evidence that differ from those in most other EU countries.
Or the one about foreign policy:
Foreign policy, which is at present decided between national governments, will change completely. The new foreign minister will “conduct the Union’s foreign policy”. There is provision for majority voting on policies recommended by the foreign minister.
None of the above is new and has been bemoaned on Samizdata.net many times, but it gets more frightening as the process of EU imposition on the UK progresses…
The proposed EU regulation of blogs and other forms of Internet speech being suggested by the Council of Europe (a quasi-governmental think-tank whose views have inordinate sway with the EU’s policy making elite) is very revealing about what lies at the heart of The Great European Project.
Steven Den Beste has written a rather good article on why the press is treated differently than broadcast media which use the finite resource of the electromagnetic spectrum. One can argue that as the EM spectrum is finite, it is reasonable to share out its use and as clearly not everyone can set up a radio or TV station, some rules to prevent the use of the media from becoming over mighty are justified. This is not quite how I see that issue myself but the contention is far from absurd.
One can even make the far less supportable assertion that because in reality setting up a newspaper is far beyond the means of most people simply because it is so expensive, the state should regulate the press, at least to some extent. Not surprisingly I flatly reject this notion and think the only defence individuals need against the established press are laws against libel. However the thinking behind this sort of regulation is at least easy to understand and can, if you accept the state as an essentially benevolent neutral institution (which I certainly do not), be seen as a way to prevent abuses of power by an over-mighty media corporation given the vast asymmetry of access to public opinion between a newspaper and an individual.
But when the Council of Europe start urging the EU to regulate blogs like this one, it should be clear that none of the arguments which can be applied to broadcast media and or the press apply here. As I mentioned in my previous article on this issue, if you have a cheap computer and a crummy modem, it still only takes about five minutes and no money whatsoever beyond your dial-up or broadband connection charges to set up a blog. There is no asymmetry of access to the public involved here. Granted, setting up an effective blog is another issue entirely, but simply getting viewable grievances in front of blogosphere eyeballs is simplicity itself.
So if anyone can set up a blog, and there is no finite resource in need of being allocated ‘fairly’ and there are no de facto capital related barriers to ‘market’ entry, what are we to make of this Council of Europe proposal to regulate us? → Continue reading: What is really going on in Europe?
People in the US, who take notions of Freedom of Expression and Private Property for granted, will be astonished by the latest steaming pile of wisdom to emerge from the clenched cheeks of our European would-be masters. Declan McCullagh reports:
The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or “blogs”), must offer a “right of reply” to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.
With clinical precision, the council’s bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:
- “The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours.”
- Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. “It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it” from the spot of the original mention.
- “So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link.”
- Long replies are fine. “There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media.”
It’s pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it’s no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only “professional on-line media.” Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word “professional” and intentionally covered all “online media” of any type.
Read the whole article.
So what is the message to the EU I mentioned in the title? Simple:
We will not comply
We have a comments section on samizdata.net in which people can and do comment about what we write, but access to that comment section is at our capricious discretion. If we decide we want to IP ban someone or want to delete their remarks from our comments section because we think they are offensive, or even if they are not offensive but we just bloody well feel like doing it because we have a headache, then we bloody well will. This is our private property.
We are already hosted on a server in the USA and I am quite confident our hosters would tell the EU where they can stick any demands to yank us off the net because we decline to submit to political moderation of the form our free speech takes on our private property (i.e. the server space we rent from them). If we have to go entirely pseudonymous and log onto Samizdata.net in order to post via ‘dead drop’ servers rather than submit to EU regulation of how we manage the information on our blog, then that is exactly what those of us who post from within the rapidly emerging EU tyranny will do. We utterly reject political moderation of free speech in civil society. This is not about giving people a voice but rather about replacing social interaction (which is what true free speech is), with political interaction mediated and mandated by the state.
If these regulations become the law of the EU (as seems likely), we will not obey, we will not cooperate, we will not accept that anyone has a ‘right’ to reply on our blog. Do you think we have said nasty things about you and want to reply regardless of our unwillingness to let you use our comment section? Fine…go to blogger.com, sign up (for free), click on ‘create a new blog’ and voila… you have your own blog on which you can scream about how those mean old Samizdatistas ‘done you wrong’ to your heart’s content.
And if the EU says we have to let you comment… tough shit, it ain’t gonna happen. The people who write for Samizdata.net all now live next door to Samizdata Illuminatus, in Arkham, Massachusetts.
 
Having been involved in British libertarian circles since I was in my late teens about 18 years ago – god that makes me feel old – I have gotten used to the charge that the likes of us are crazed dogmatists. In Britain’s notoriously anti-intellectual culture, being interested in ideas, and worse, ideas which question the need for most of what governments do, is to be branded as a dangerous nutter. (Mind you, having read abusive comments directed at yours truly by various LewRockwell.com types, I feel almost quite moderate and middle-of-the-road these days.)
Step forward Aidan Rankin, who in The Spectator magazine, charges that eurosceptics within the Tory Party and among libertarian circles are the “new Trotskyists,” every bit as militant and dogmatic as the old left. In a way, that is a backhanded compliment of sorts because it shows that folk like Rankin are at least becoming aware of our existence, even though they prefer to construct straw men for the purpose of easy knock-down pieces rather than describe us more accurately. Anyway, let us fisk:
On Europeans and other issues the Tories are still impeded – not by indecision as in the recent past, but by an insidious ideological rigidity, a right-wing version of political correctness.
Huh? Really? Has the Tory Party, in recent years, called for, say, total withdrawal by this country from the EU? No. But to read Rankin you would assume that to be the case.
Public scepticism about the single currency is matched by the lack of public support for Eurosceptic campaigns. This is because even to sympathetic observers such campaigns appear so often to be bitter and bigoted.
He has half a point. I think the eurosceptic lobby would do better to focus on the essentially illiberal nature of the EU rather than on the fact that is being run by vile Frogs, etc. → Continue reading: Straw men
Here are extracts from a letter by Geoff Bean, an English dairy farmer, addressed to Steve Williamson, a “Special Enforcement Officer” of the agency in York. The York farmer bought builder’s rubble to make repairs round his farm, but received a letter stating that since his land did not have the benefit of a Waste Management Licence, this depositing of “waste” was in clear breach of the law and requesting that Mr Bean submit to a formal interview under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) to “establish” his involvement in this unlicensed waste management operation.
I am in receipt of your pompous and ill-informed letter. How dare you write to me in such terms, as if you were addressing a common criminal.
The “waste” for which he had paid good money was about to be put to valuable use replacing the floor of a barn and resurfacing his farm tracks.
Were I a one-legged homosexual Afghan refugee/terrorist living on the welfare state, you and your ilk would not dare write in such a manner for fear of having all the human rights lawyers in creation round your necks, but as you are speaking to an honest, hard-working and overstressed Englishman, you appear to think you can behave like all too many of the vast and ever-increasing army of totally useless, non-productive, arrogant and bloody-minded officialdom, who are now only too successfully doing more damage to this once great and free nation than was ever achieved by Adolf Hitler.
Mr Williamson repeated that Mr Bean must submit to interview “under caution”. Mr Bean agreed to spare some of his valuable time to assist Mr Williamson in his “futile attempt” to justify his “bureaucratic red tape”, but reminded him that, since slavery in this country had been abolished, he would expect reimbursement at “£150 an hour or part thereof, plus VAT”.
That’s the spirit!
But rejoice ye not, since whether Mr Bean will face criminal charges for his breach of EU law, the agency cannot yet comment…
From Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker’s Notebook
Update: If you think this is outrageous, you might want to share your thoughts with Mr Steve Williamson himself. And while you are at it, why not to cc his boss, the regional director Mr Andrew Wood. We have done a bit of research and think these email addresses will work, given the format of the Environmental Agency emails.
I don’t know whether we have just signed up to a new EU Constitution or not. Strange as it sounds, I truly have no idea. Judging from the opening paragraphs of this Telegraph report, it’s already a done deal:
To the strains of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, the Convention on the Future of Europe proclaimed agreement yesterday on a written constitution for a vast European Union of 450 million citizens bringing together East and West.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the chair of the 105-strong body, held up a text that he said could be offered proudly to prime ministers next week as a permanent settlement for a free and democratic family of nations.
So is that it then? Are we now all Euro-serfs? Has the knot been tied, the deal been struck and all the irons shoved deeply into the fire? If so, well that was pretty sneaky of them, wasn’t it.
On the other hand, further down in the same article, there is room for doubt:
EU governments will have their chance to chip away at the 224-page text in an intergovernmental conference running from October to next spring, although Mr Hain said the essential architecture is now written in stone.
That sounds like there’s still room for an argument, doesn’t it? Though perhaps not much argument. More like wiggle room.
Well, I must confess I’m stumped. Like every other Euro-project it’s all camouflaged in double-speak and drenched in high-concept gobbledegook. Maybe salvation lies in the hope that possibly the EUnuchs don’t understand it either.
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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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