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]
|
“Canada’s Newspaper of Record Asks: ‘What If They Ultimately Find Nothing?’”, asks Jonathan Kay at Quillette.
A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.
On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.
It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.
The only evidence that had been offered in support of the original claims consisted of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the former residential school grounds. As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves. These dislocations can be associated with graves, but also with pipes, rocks, tree roots, and a dozen other common subsurface artifacts. To truly identify actual graves, one must dig—something that the Kamloops First Nation leaders who originally advanced these false claims have conspicuously failed to do; despite having received more than $12-million from Canada’s (equally gullible) government for search activities.
The Globe and Mail article to which Mr Kay refers is this one: “There is no reconciliation without truth”, it says, before immediately rowing back with the line “Two things can be true, at the same time.” There is much else in the same vein, including this darvolicious line:
That there have been no human remains found at Kamloops does not mean children did not die there. It does not mean that crimes were not committed against children, crimes that were inexcusable. A contention otherwise is denialism, and it is morally repugnant.
As Jonathan Kay says,
In paragraph eight, the writers try a second motte-and-bailey gambit. We are informed that “regardless of what they find [in Kamloops], the fact remains that more than 3,500 children are named on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation‘s registry of students who died as a result of the residential school system, which operated in Canada for more than 160 years.” This is absolutely true. But it’s also completely irrelevant. No one disputes the information published by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which, unlike the Kamloops hysteria, was based on careful research. In that case, researchers had names, dates of birth, and other identifying details for the victims. None of that exists in the case of the Kamloops story.
The Globe’s implicit argument here is that it doesn’t really matter all that much if those 215 children actually existed or not, since we have the names of 3,500 other children that can be trotted out for the same purpose—so, at worse, we’re still batting 94% on dead-child statistics.
As my deliberately crude wording here is intended to suggest, the rhetorical trick the Globe is playing here isn’t just misleading, it’s also grotesquely reductionist. The documented deaths at residential schools were largely the result of tuberculosis. While the elevated tuberculosis death rates at residential schools represent a stain on Canada’s national conscience, the issue of substandard public-health amenities is completely distinct from lurid fairy tales in which mass murdering Catholic clerics intentionally dispatch 215 children into shallow graves. Every morally aware adult knows this, notwithstanding the Globe’s effort to blur the two categories.
It is probably best if you do not actually read this post.
“Nourishing Justice” is a report produced by a charity (not the sort of charity that runs on voluntary contributions from the public) called “Eating Better” (Registered Charity No. 1175669). The Executive Director of Eating Better is Sarah Wakefield, the Green candidate for the Makerfield by-election upon which so much hangs. Sarah Wakefield wrote the foreword for the “Nourishing Justice” report.
I found out about the report from a GB News article called “Green candidate in Makerfield by-election wants farming to be ‘decolonised’ with ‘inclusive spaces'”. The idea that British farming needed to be decolonised confused me. Who from, the Romans? I was not convinced that GB News was giving a fair account of Eating Better’s charitable work, so I decided to check for myself. GB News was giving a fair account. “Eating Better” did indeed host a decolonial decision-making workshop called “The Gathering Table” in August 2025, co-facilitated by Diana Garduño Jiménez of a charity called “Nourish Scotland”.
“Nourish Scotland” (Registered Charity No. SC048239) is funded by a similar mixture of state money and grants from philanthropic foundations as “Eating Better”, but with the addition of some money from the Scottish government. To be clear, the organisation “Nourish Scotland” did not produce the Nourishing Justice report. “Nourish Scotland” might also be easily confused with, but is separate from, another body and another report mentioned on page 8 of the Nourishing Justice report, which says,
“The contemporary UK food system generally lacks the ability to apply race, gender, and class analysis to how food systems should change. The Sankofa Report: British Colonialism and the UK Food System delves into the numerous layers of inequalities in the current UK food system, stemming from the legacies of colonialism and exploitation. It highlights issues such as underrepresentation in the sector, food insecurity, lack of access to green space for marginalised communities and to the dominance of western epistemologies (theory of knowledge) in food research. Most importantly, the report emphasises that in order to create meaningful and lasting shifts, we must confront and address the forces that have shaped our present food system.
The “Sankofa Report” to which Nourishing Justice links is the rather grand title given to a fourteen page report on “British Colonialism and the UK food system” written by an intern called Jada Phillips at “Food Matters” (Registered Charity No.1178078). The organisation “Food Matters”, you may be surprised to learn, is a registered “charity” funded by by a mixture of public sector grants, National Lottery money, and most of the same charitable trusts and foundations as fund “Eating Better” and “Nourish Scotland”. The name of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation turns up in all three.
I think. Maybe it was only two out of three, or maybe I was thinking of another charity called Eat Scotland or a trading card game called Charity: The Gathering. Gimme a break, I’ve got three tabs up from the Charity Commission, two Annual Reports, four responses from two different AIs (at least one of which is a lie), and a splitting headache.
It’s easy to get confused between the all these bodies with wholesome-sounding words to do with food and eating in their names, but it is very important that you distinguish between them because otherwise you might think that they are functionally identical bodies whose employees get to eat pretty well by being paid to quote each other by the taxpayer.
In the Telegraph, Charles Moore writes, “Will politicians ever realise that they can’t fix prices?”
The article begins with an anecdote to which I can relate:
When I was about 12, I thought like Rachel Reeves. “Prices are going up too much, so why,” I asked my parents, “don’t we just stop them going up?”
I cannot remember their answer, but I now know what my problem was. I did not understand what a price meant. I thought it was an order from on high (which, in dictatorships, it is). Only gradually did I come to understand it was something infinitely more subtle. It is the result – the signal – of an agreement made between someone who wants to sell something and someone who wants to buy it.
The equivalent “Why don’t we just” moment in my childhood occurred when my parents were moaning about lack of money. Less polite than the young Master Moore, I stamped my little foot and said, “If you haven’t got enough money, go to the bank and get some more.”
I blame fairy stories. I don’t recall ever believing in dragons, but I think I did believe that a Good King (or rather a Good Democratically Elected Prime Minister; I was that sort of kid) had but to say the word and there would be no more poor. I was pretty stupid for a clever seven year old. Our present Democratically Elected Prime Minister is sixty three.
After a brief explanation of what market signals are and how very bad things happen when people distort them, Mr Moore continues,
In my youth, most British politicians of both parties thought in my childish way. In 1972, Ted Heath’s Tories, shocked by the inflationary effect of the artificial boom their own policies had created, intervened to stop the merry-go-round. The Government’s Counter-Inflation (Temporary Provisions) Bill created a Price Commission and a Pay Board. All price rises were frozen for 90 days. Only one Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, voted against this profoundly unconservative measure.
Geoffrey Howe, later a great free-market Chancellor of the Exchequer, was Heath’s minister for consumer affairs. As such, he was the enforcer of every single price control. The utter absurdity of this was brought home to him when he was informed that the Vicar of Trumpington had doubled the charge for brass-rubbing in his church during the freeze. It was part of his job as the relevant Cabinet minister to prevent even that.
On 7th May 2026 the Guardian published the following article by its regular correspondent, George Monbiot, a supporter of the Green Party: “Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’”
He says,
Further work by the same scientists along with other people’s studies show that persuasive methods do exist. They don’t change everyone’s minds, but they can make enough difference to win elections and build a kinder, fairer, greener country. These techniques are known as “deep canvassing”.
Deep canvassing works only if you have a large army of volunteers, ideally from the community you’re trying to reach. Instead of delivering a message then scuttling away, as conventional canvassers do, their role is to connect and listen. Across conversations that might last for 10 or 20 minutes, they let people discuss their feelings. Then, without arguing or judging, they share their own experiences and ask questions (“have you ever been treated unfairly?”) that might reveal common ground.
Done honestly, non-judgmental listening is an excellent idea. “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”, as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus once said.
Far though Mr Monbiot’s political beliefs are from mine, I acknowledge that on several occasions he has demonstrated both honesty and a willingness to listen, by publicly stating that he had changed his views in directions that made him unpopular with his fellow Greens. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident, he surprised many by saying that he had changed his mind in favour of nuclear power, and, so long ago that I cannot find the reference, he realised that the policy of autarky that the Greens then recommended for the UK was equivalent to the sanctions on Iraq that they were denouncing, and said so in public. Unfortunately, as it did for a lot of people, the Covid-19 pandemic de-magnetised his moral compass and in 2021 he came out in favour of censorship, writing an article called “Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them”.
Censorship and seeking to listen “without arguing or judging” are matter and anti-matter; they cannot coexist. To censor is to judge certain opinions as so pernicious that they must be suppressed. In the world that Mr Monbiot has said he wants, if one of the people “exhausted with politics” to whom he is listening were to express the anti-vax views that a lot of such people hold, his next action would be to report them to the police. In our world – in our Britain – there are plenty of opinions about migrants and transgender people that are widespread among the alienated masses that when expressed have resulted in state punishment, ranging from sending the police round to issue a “friendly warning” (for most of my life I thought that sort of thing only happened in dictatorships), through people being forbidden to access social media without the permission of their police minder and having their devices seized, up to arrest and jail. Even if Mr Monbiot were to bind himself during his radical listening sessions by something like the seal of the confessional, the mind that holds it to be desirable to legally suppress certain bad opinions cannot hear expressions of those opinions without categorising them as crimes that it is not convenient to punish right now.
Three quarters of a century ago in 1956, Chairman Mao Zedong – whose name was then usually romanised as Mao Tse-Tung – launched the “Hundred Flowers campaign”. Under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”, the communist authorities proclaimed that from now on they would no longer punish critics. All would be free to speak, the better to promote new ideas to improve China.
Tentatively at first, some did offer their criticisms. When nothing bad happened, the trickle became a flood. Then, having established who their critics were, the communists arrested them and sent them to labour camps.
The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrian Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.
So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:
2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.
1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.
1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.
1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.
1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.
1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.
1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.
1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]
1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.
1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.
1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.
Anything I’ve missed?
Musa al-Gharbi is an American academic – a sociologist and a professor of journalism – who is an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He describes himself as a Democrat.
If you were asked to guess from the information in the sentence above what he would say in a talk giving an overview of sociological research about American voters in the era of Trump, you’d probably be wrong, just like I was.
I found his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” informative and entertaining, particularly the section that starts at 28:02 and continues until about 40:00 on what is commonly called “the public loss of trust in science”.
(As Professor al-Gharbi points out, there has scarcely been any public loss of trust in science.)
I thought that this apparently minor news story from the Telegraph, the comment made by someone called Bernie@Artemisfornow while linking to the story on Twitter, and the reply to that comment with an apt quote by Alexis de Tocqueville were all worth highlighting.
In case the screenshot goes away, the Telegraph story has the headline “Volunteer banned from cleaning graves over ‘health and safety’ fears” and the standfirst “Ben McGregor says South Tyneside authority has threatened him with legal action, despite praise from families“. It continues,
A volunteer has been banned from cleaning graves because the council says it is not safe.
Ben McGregor, 25, washes the headstones at Hebburn Cemetery, South Tyneside, with only soap, water and a bristle brush.
He lost both his father and his best friend to suicide and, after struggling with his own mental health, said that “if I am helping others, it helps me”.
However, the Labour-led council claims it would be “inappropriate” for Mr McGregor to continue his work because “safety checks have not taken place”.
He has been praised by families for his transformations of the headstones, but said the council had threatened him with legal action if he did not stop.
Mr McGregor said: “The one that stands out to me is a woman who was suffering from cancer. She was crying on the phone, saying that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. The council’s response has blown my mind. It’s doing my head in”.
To which Bernie@Artemisfornow replied,
This is England, where even the kindest, most human acts are subject to control by authoritarian pen pushers.
Using “health and safety” to stop a young 25 year old man from cleaning gravestones with soap and water.
This is how you crush a society. You do it by smothering small acts of decency, like driving people home from the pub and cleaning gravestones. You do it by putting rules in the way of people pulling together, until eventually they just stop trying.
and TurnedFourthing @turnedfourthing in turn replied,
de Tocqueville had this figured out 180 years ago:
After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Many years ago, I was chatting with the grandmother of a family friend, whose name was Hannelore. She grew up in Germany on a family farm in Schleswig-Holstein, not far from Hamburg, and candidly admitted that as landowning farmers, they all feared the communists and so were broadly supportive of the NSDAP during the 1930s. Indeed, when the war started, any misgivings they had evaporated when Poland swiftly fell in 1939, and then France collapsed in a month and a half campaign in 1940. The family even attended some pro-government rallies to celebrate these victories.
By 1943, Hannelore said it was clear it was not going to be a short war, as Allied bombers were now a constant presence in the skies above. It was also very hard to find farm labourers as the war effort was consuming more and more resources by then. Yet even so, the family remained broadly optimistic about the war ending with German victory.
But then in late July for an entire week, the RAF and USAAF filled the sky over Hamburg by day and by night. And although Hannelore did not know it at the time, it was called Operation Gomorrah. She told me that on one night in particular, her father called the whole family outside. It was bright as day, the entire skyline to the south a line of incandescent light. By morning, white dust entirely covered their home and farmland, with a constant rain of ash still falling from the sky. 40,000 people had burned to death in a firestorm in a single day in Hamburg. And only then, our friend’s grandmother said, did they finally realise everything was not going to be alright and the war had been a catastrophic mistake. Only then, and from then onwards, did everything they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio ring hollow.
I was in my late teens sitting in an old farmhouse in Scotland when Hannelore told me that story from her youth.
So, on this portentous Beltane as I watched a series of videos from Tuapse in Russia, I had something of a flashback to that story told me several decades ago.
In the early days of the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine in 2022, there was a series of rallies in Tuapse in support of Putin’s government. I wonder if perspectives have started shift now that the reality of this war is coming home to Russia in earnest.
Yes, really. It’s in the Guardian: Anti-Trump sentiment being examined as motive for White House press dinner shooting
Do you think they’ll find any? I’ve got a few ideas as to where the investigators might look. Real out-of-the-box, blue-sky thinking.
Remember this map, put out by Sarah Palin’s Political Action Committee in late 2010?
In case the image goes away, it is headed “20 House Democrats from districts we carried in 2008 voted for the health care bill. IT’S TIME TO TAKE A STAND” and shows a map of the states of USA with clip art images of crosshairs over those districts. Below that is a list of the representatives of those districts.
Here are three different Guardian articles published on one day, 9th January 2011, linking that map to the shooting spree by Jared Loughner in which he attempted to murder Representative Gabrielle Giffords and did murder six others.
Ewen MacAskill: Gabrielle Giffords shooting reignites row over rightwing rhetoric in US
Jessica Valenti: The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords highlights the ‘man-up’ culture in US politics
Chris McGreal: Arizona shooting: ‘Does she have any enemies?’ ‘Yeah. The whole Tea Party’
The metaphor of targeting is very common in politics. A few days before the last-but-two attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, President Biden said it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye”, without anyone thinking Joe Biden put Thomas Crooks up to it.
But that map, Sarah Palin’s map, is different. No evidence was ever presented that Jared Loughner ever even saw the map (which had been put out by the failed vice-presidential candidate’s Political Action Committee several months previously and was about a specific political issue, Obama’s healthcare bill, in which he had no documented interest) – let alone that he was moved to murder by the clip art of a target over Gabrielle Gifford’s district.
Yet the New York Times, no less, told us that the link between The Map and political incitement was clear. In an editorial called America’s Lethal Politics the NYT said,
“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, greviously wounded Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarh Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that puts Ms Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
Actually, it put the places they represented under the cross hairs, not the representatives themselves, but that is beside the point. The point is behold the power of the map.
Obviously the use of the metaphor of a target cannot explain why people try to assassinate Donald Trump, or else Joe Biden would be in the crosshai- sorry, in the frame, now. Equally obviously, the endless stream of claims in left wing media that Donald Trump is a “pedophile, rapist and traitor” cannot explain why people try to assassinate Donald Trump, or else left wing media outlets would be bad like Sarah Palin.
Wake up, sheeple. It’s that accursed map. It wasn’t just Palin’s PAC that published it, it was re-published by a zillion left-wing newspapers and websites. Every left-winger in America must have seen it. A smart CalTech-bound kid like Cole Tomas Allen would certainly have been politically aware at the age of sixteen. He must have seen it. We already know of its power to reach across time and space to penetrate and warp vulnerable minds. Just watch The Ring and you’ll understand.
Wat Tyler’s men in 1381 marched on London to demand the abolition of serfdom and the repeal of the poll tax. They did not want revolution; they wanted the king to be good. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was 30,000 northerners marching under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ to protest Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries – it was not a rebellion against the Crown but a petition to it, in arms, to reconsider. The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 involved Cornish and Devon men refusing the new Protestant liturgy, and dying in considerable numbers for the right to pray as their fathers had. The Covenanters of Scotland fought not for novelty but for a particular understanding of the proper ordering of church and state. The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 was a Protestant constitutional protest dressed as a dynastic claim. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, that driest and most English of upheavals, resulted not in a republic but in a constitutional settlement – William III was invited in from the Netherlands not to overthrow the monarchy but to regularise it, to make parliament sovereign without making it supreme over everything that mattered to ordinary people. Each of these movements sought not the destruction of the existing order but its correction, its return to a lost and better version of itself.
The Chartists sit squarely in this tradition. What they wanted was not new. The rights they demanded had a genealogy that stretched back through Thomas Paine to the Levellers to the barons at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was sealed. Each generation of the English popular movement has had to rediscover that the constitutional ground gained by one era tends, mysteriously, to be lost by the next, that the establishment has an almost geological patience in the slow work of reclaiming power from the people who briefly forced it to concede.
– Gawain Towler
[AIUI etc, etc.]
In the beginning there were wireless sets. But the government worried that these could be used by spies for a foreign power. So it demanded that wireless owners took out licences. The licences were free the government just wanted to know who had a wireless. Just in case.
Then someone came up with the idea of broadcasting. Music, lectures, news, that sort of thing. The government came up with a scheme. They would charge a fee for the licence. It would also demand that wireless manufacturers make a contribution. To sugar the pill it would make it illegal to sell a wireless set that wasn’t made by a member of the British Broadcasting Company.
The minister responsible for this? One Neville Chamberlain.
And so in late 1922 the BBC, in the shape of such regional broadcasters as 2LO, came into being. And it was very popular – save for the fact that building one’s own set was illegal. But the arrangement had an expiry date. And a committee was set up to decide what to do next.
A hundred years ago it reported and as you can probably guess, the manufacturers were ditched with the recommendation that a public body to be known as the British Broadcasting Commission be put in its place financed entirely through the licence fee.
Why? I seem to remember being told that the Company was in dire financial straits. But there’s not a hint of it in the report as published in The Times. Actually, there is very little justification at all. Although they do say this:
Notwithstanding the progress which we readily acknowledge, and to the credit of which the company is largely entitled, we are impelled to the conclusion that no company or body constituted on trade lines for the profit, direct or indirect, of those composing it can be regarded as adequate in view of the broader considerations now beginning to emerge.
So you are getting rid of something you “readily acknowledge” is a success for something that might work?
We do not recommend a prolongation of the licence of the British Broadcasting Company or the establishment of any similar body composed of persons who represent particular interests.
I’ve got some bad news about how that’s going to work out.
We think a public corporation the most appropriate organization. Such an authority would enjoy a freedom and flexibility which a Minister of State himself could scarcely exercise in arranging for performers and programmes, and in studying the variable demands of public taste and necessity.
The Times’s own report of the report has this to say:
The British Broadcasting Commission will be appointed by the Crown, and the Committee feel that the proposal is an interesting development in the application of the principle of public ownership.
So, the whole thing was a communist experiment. Great. And then there was this doozy:
It is felt that that principle can be easily applied in this instance, because broadcasting must of its very nature be a monopoly.
Clearly that argument falls because it is not true that broadcasting is a monopoly. But even if it were, as a libertarian, in principle I would prefer such things to exist in an unfettered free market.
 Before it became Lenin in the lounge Update 10/4/26. Incredulity has been expressed over the idea that d-i-y wireless sets were illegal. They were but only for about a year or so. And I don’t think there were any prosecutions. Oddly enough, when “interim” licences were first issued – for just such sets – the number of licences doubled more or less overnight.
The Wikipedia entry for apophasis, the rhetorical technique of raising an issue while claiming not to mention it, says,
As a rhetorical device, apophasis can serve several purposes. For example, It can be employed to raise an ad hominem or otherwise controversial attack while disclaiming responsibility for it, as in, “I refuse to discuss the rumor that my opponent is a drunk.” This can make it a favored tactic in politics.
Apophasis can be used passive-aggressively, as in, “I forgive you for your jealousy, so I won’t even mention what a betrayal it was.”
From an article by Oliver Wright in yesterday’s Times called “Louis Mosley: Our critics are putting ideology over patient safety”:
It was, by any standards, a very personal attack.
“No-one should be judged by who their parents or grandparents are,” Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader pronounced at a recent campaign event — before proceeding to do just that.
“But this is a man who is the grandson of Oswald Mosley and still insists on wearing a black shirt every single time he is on TV.” The subject of Polanski’s vitriol was Louis Mosley who, by dint of genealogy, is the grandson of the 1930s British fascist leader.
I do not wish to divert attention from the many legitimate concerns about the use of Palantir’s data-gathering software – originally developed for police and military use – during the Covid pandemic and in other civilian contexts, so I won’t even mention what a hypocritical rabble-rouser Zack Polanski is.
|
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.
|
