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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“But his [Peel’s] chosen remedy for widespread poverty was already apparent. It did not lie in changing the Poor Law, or reducing factory hours through a Ten Hour Bill, or in accepting the irrelevant political demands of the Chartists. Still less did it consist in commissioning that engine of public welfare and State guidance of the economy to which we became accustomed in the twentieth century. Peel and most of his contemporaries would have regarded our giant complex of State machinery as a destructive restraint on individual freedom.”
Robert Peel, page 243, by Douglas Hurd.
Indeed they would have so regarded the modern state of the late 20th and 21st centuries. And with good reason. Somehow, I doubt that even the founder of the Metropolitan Police would have liked the idea of the modern Surveillance State. I am not too sure that he’d have been all that keen on top tax rates of 50 per cent and more, compulsory schooling to the age of 18, or the hideously regulated labour market of today.
And this historical shift, I think, can explain to a certain extent why, to a British audience dulled by decades of socialism, the sight of Americans protesting against Big Government and the like is so odd. Last night, on the BBC, the broadcaster and one-time Sunday Times (of London) editor, Andrew Neil, was looking at the Tea Party movement. It was not all bad as a documentary – he had a great short interview with the son of Barry Goldwater – but in the main, the general idea that the viewer was meant to draw was that the Tea Party movement was comprised mainly of cranks, bigots and fools. The problem, I think, is that Britain has not really had a genuine, tax-cutting protest movement since the anti-Corn Law League of the 1830s and early 1840s, which is why I was so struck by that passage about the Peel administration. We have to go back to the early years of the Industrial Revolution to find anything remotely like such a protest for government retrenchment and tax cuts. No doubt Mr Neil would regard Cobden, Bright, or indeed Peel himself, as a bunch of nutters.
And that, of course, is why the accurate teaching of history, such as around such episodes as the Industrial Revolution, is so important.
[with apologies to the Four Yorkshiremen]
A fantasy writer produced this:
But there’s a dark side as well. We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn’t want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It’s the world that bequeathed us the adjective “Dickensian”, that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It’s the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).
Oh really? Try this from the Old Bailey’s website:
1760-1815
From approximately three-quarters of a million people in 1760, London continued a strong pattern of growth through the last four decades of the eighteenth century. In 1801, when the first reliable modern census was taken, greater London recorded 1,096,784 souls; rising to a little over 1.4 million inhabitants by 1815. No single decade in this period witnessed less than robust population growth.
In part this urban bloat resulted from a marked decline in infant mortality brought about by better hygiene and childrearing practices, and a changing disease pattern. By the 1840s children born in the capital were three times less likely to die in childhood than those born in the 1730s.
 Hanoi, Vietnam. October 2010
Apparently, it takes about a third of a century for the remains of a B-52 that fell into a lake after being shot down to turn into an interesting piece of municipal sculpture in a nice part of town.
Okay…
It may be surprising to present-day readers to think that it was once thought a “soft option” to transport a convicted criminal to a colony such as Australia’s Botany Bay. But as this letter shows, that is what some influential people thought at the time:
“the sentence of the Court is that you shall no longer be burdened with the support of your wife and family. You shall be immediately removed from a very bad climate and a country over burdened with people to one of the finest regions of the earth, where the demand for human labour is every hour increasing, and where it is highly probable you may ultimate regain your character and improve your future. The Court has been induced to pass the sentence upon you in consequence of the many aggravating circumstances of your case, and they hope your fate will be a warning to others.”
Sydney Smith, Whig clergyman and wit, as quoted in Robert Peel, by Douglas Hurd, page 78.
As an aside, Peel was involved in two issues – re-connecting bank notes to bullion, and the 1844 Bank Charter Act – that have enduring relevance to our own time. Hurd’s biography is very readable and has a nice tone to it; in my view, however, Norman Gash’s study remains the definitive one.
There have, as I might expect, been a flurry of reviews about a recent biography of Harold Macmillan, who – to those non-Brit readers who might not have heard of him – was prime minister in the late 1950s through to 1963, and who was involved in controversies that hung over his head until his very old age, such as the issue of his alleged involvement in sending Cossack forces back to the tender mercies of Stalin at the end of WW2. He was a complex and interesting character in many ways; my mother remembers his nickname of “Supermac” and the extraordinary period in the early 1960s when the Profumo Scandal broke, as well as Macmillan’s own resignation through ill health and the subsequent emergence of Alec Douglas Home as leader. Home, let it not be forgotten considering how he was mercilessly lampooned by parts of the leftist press, almost won the 1964 general election.
One review here by Simon Heffer more or less sums up my own views of the man. Heffer recognises that for all Macmillan’s undoubted merits – he was, for example, an extremely brave army officer wounded several times in the First World War – that he was a decidedly flawed politician in certain respects, particularly on the crucial issue of economic policy and industrial relations. The 1950s and 60s saw the rise of what was to be dubbed the “British disease” – a time of rising industrial strife, inflation, low productivity, endless “stop-go” cycles of Keynesian-inspired reflation followed by subsequent slamming on of the monetary brakes. And while it would be grossly unfair to pin too much blame on one prime minister for the sort of problems that eventually came to a head in the 1970s, he must take some share of the responsibility for the mess that was eventually addressed – after a fashion – by Mrs Thatcher’s administration in the 1980s. And yet the impression I get from Heffer’s review, and particularly, this one by Peregrine Worsthorne, is that the biography more or less absolves Macmillan of any blame whatever. Worsthorne’s review in the Spectator – behind a subscription firewall – carries this, for instance:
“He was right to have himself been the main political champion of his old friend Keynes and his economics.”
Oh dear. Fell asleep during the 1970s, did we?
He also says that Macmillan was right to have played down the danger of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I am not sure that is really true, but if it was true, is that to his credit? With the benefit of hindsight, the Soviet Union was a rotten house that looked imposing with all its mass Red Square parades and all the rest but eventually crumbled very fast, but at the time, it did not seem that way, and some very supposedly clever people, such as that Keynes fan (!) JK Galbraith, were arguing as late as the early 80s that there was no real difference economically between the West and the Soviet Empire. And the sheer size of the Soviet armed forces, and the way that the Hungarian and Czech revolts were harshly suppressed, hardly squares with the idea that that Empire could be treated with a sort of shrug of the shoulders. By the way, for a dose of good sense on the Cold War years, I recommend this by Norman Stone.
But perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of Worsthorne’s review is this part, in which he writes mournfully of what might had been had Sir Alec Douglas Home won in 1964:
“This would have spared us both the Thatcher interlude, which put power in to the greedy hands of what Macmillan called the ‘banksters’, and then the Blair/Brown years, which entrusted it to the equally grasping and disreputable New Labour cabal, which purported to be a meritocracy. But it is beginning to look as if a promising reaction has set in – not too late one hopes – and although David Cameron is not exactly a 14th earl, he is the next best thing, so Uncle Harold must be cheering in his grave.”
I am going to do Worsthorne the respect of assuming he is sane, and serious, when he wrote that somehow, Mrs Thatcher’s time in office was some sort of ghastly “interlude” when the rightful aristocratic rulers of us unwashed were horribly pushed aside by a bunch of grammar school educated City slickers and Jewish intellectuals. Macmillan once infamously said that he regretted there were more Estonians than Etonians in the Tory Cabinet of the time, a particularly nasty little line. Sure, the attack on the Blair and Brown bunch is perhaps more deserved, but let’s not forget that Blair was a Fettes public schoolboy, and a good many of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers came from smart backgrounds.
In fact, when all is said and done, what Worsthorne rates as Macmillan’s greatest achievement, is contained in the opening paragraph of his review. I leave readers with this to ponder:
“Since the main purpose on earth of the Conservative Party was, and still should be, to keep Britain’s ancient and well-proven social and political hierarchy in power – give or take a few necessary upward mobility adjustments – Harold Macmillan must rank very high in the scale of successful Conservative prime ministers; just below Benjamin Disraeli, whose skill in sugaring the pill of inequality and humanising the face of privilege is never likely to be bettered.”
In other words, whatever Macmillan may or may not have done to stem the UK’s post-war economic decline, at least he kept the toffs on top.
Words fail me.
On this day in 1805, a famous signal was sent in the context of the struggle against an earlier iteration of pervasive European Union.
I am reading a review of this book (thank you Instapundit), about Stalin and Hitler and their many and mutually supportive crimes, and I came upon a fact that was very surprising to me:
About as many people died in the German bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as in the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.
Here in Britain we remember, those of us who are the remembering sort, Winston Churchill’s metaphor-mangling talk of winds and whirlwinds, sewing and reaping. Relatively mild bombing of British cities by the Luftwaffe was followed later in the war by truly horrific bombing of German cities by the RAF.
But that original wind, in other parts of Europe, was windier than I had realised.
LATER: And here’s another little fact that pulled me up short:
In just a few days in 1941, the Nazis shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all their concentration camps.
Although, I am not clear whether that is inmates in camps at that time, or inmates in camps over the whole period. The former, I think. Either way, it is hideous. Not sure I want to read the entire book. I already get the general idea.
You never stop learning strange things, do you? For instance, this morning, I was (still am) listening to CD Review, and the presenter Andrew McGregor suddenly starts talking about how, in the year 1612, the heir to the throne, James I’s son Prince Henry, rather foolishly went for a swim in the Thames, caught typhoid, and died. Cue an “outpouring of grief”, which included songs about the death of the young Prince (aged 18), hence the CD angle.
And who became king of England instead? Why, only Charles I, who got himself executed in 1649, in the midst of a ferocious civil war between himself and his severely angered Parliament. That I had heard about. Prince Henry was apparently, and in fascinating contrast to his younger brother, a Protestant:
Henry was quite the Protestant – when his father proposed a French marriage, he answered that he was ‘resolved that two religions should not lie in his bed’.
You can’t help wondering: What If? What if Prince Henry had not gone for that swim, and had become the King instead of Charles I? How might English history have turned out then?
David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:
I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.
The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.
Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.
But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.
In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn’t got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day – puff-puff – the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.
We’ll see. Well, I probably won’t see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.
And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.
I like this article about the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. It is a reminder that at one time, the holder of that office did not regard himself as a rockstar. Maybe he was lucky in being born before the age of TV. If he had been around in more recent times, maybe our views would be different. I bet Churchill would have been massacred on TV.
My favourite story about Silent Cal, as he was known (not a man of long windy speeches), was when he was once coming out of a church, and was approached by the usual journalist types asking him about what the preacher said in his sermon. “Sin”, replied the POTUS. “Er, what did the preacher say about it?”, asked the hacks.
“He’s against it,” replied Mr Coolidge. (Try and top that, PJ O’Rourke).
Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, about which I wrote the other day, taught me a good appreciation of Coolidge. There is also a nice collection of some of his comments here.
You can always count on Sean Gabb to take a controversial line. And on the British Empire in India (he says it was in many ways a good thing), he is not frightened to do so, even if it means saying things that have driven a few Indian or expat Indian readers into a rage. (I urge readers to read the entire Gabb piece).
There have been empires of a fairly liberal nature, and at times, it is fair to say, that there was greater respect for life, liberty and property under certain relatively liberal empires than in sovereign, nation states. I have heard the Austro-Hungarian Empire defended on such grounds; the British Empire was in some ways a pretty loose-knit thing (it had to be – we did not have the manpower to run it in a more heavy-handed way); and certain other empires might have stacked up quite well when looking at what replaced them. But, and this is surely the key point: we are talking about empires. They developed out of conquest, of kicking out rulers or property owners of various kinds, and moving in. Sometimes the invaders were actually invited in to get rid of the existing scumbags, but usually not. (Malta, in the late 18th Century, asked Lord Nelson to kick out the French who had taken control of the island. The Brits stayed until the early 1970s).
So, it does rather make me scratch my head to read Sean’s defence of the BE when I consider that, for example, he and many others like him in the Libertarian Alliance have fiercely criticised the European Union as a sort of France-German imperial regime, imposing a certain kind of social democratic worldvew. Libertarianism is not a monolithic creed (thank god), but on the face of it, the presumption must be that a believer in liberty must look askance on empires and conquest, and be wary of attempts to rationalise it by reference to certain outcomes that are only known after the event.
Take another sort of “empire”: the Brussels elite of the European Union – who are not exactly respectful of democratically expressed “no” votes in referenda, may defend their ambitions as being high-minded, and indeed, there is a sort of “new imperialism”, known as Transnational Progressivism, or Tranzi for short. Or take the case of US foreign policy, also sometimes damned as imperialistic. It is also worth noting that Sean, and other critics of the American-led military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, have condemned what they see as the “neocon” doctrine of seeking to spread democracy and liberty into barbarous lands at the point of a bayonet (or Apache helicopter). But that is exactly how Sean frames the case in favour of the British Empire. Odd. The likes of Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and other priests of empire (not to mention Kipling) were the neocons of their time. (In fairness to Sean, he also criticises the conflicts in the ME as not being about the defence of British interests).
Some of this support of empire also explains, so I understand it, some of why Sean Gabb casts Churchill as a villain of 20th century history, as a destroyer of empire. Gabb claims that by refusing to capitulate to Hitler in 1940 and sue for peace and leave Western Europe under Nazi rule, Churchill ensured that the British Empire was finished, whereas had we been neutral in the 1940s, then – so the argument goes – the Nazi-dominated Europe of the time would have left the Empire alone, or at least for a fairly long period. Although obviously horrible for those Europeans under Nazi rule, avoidance of war with Germany would at least have spared the Empire all the losses it suffered.
I am not convinced of this line of reasoning. First of all, it is far from clear, given Hitler’s record as being a serial breaker of treaties, that any non-aggression pact signed between Britain, its Empire, and Germany, would have been worth the paper it was written on. If the Empire had stayed out of military conflict with Germany, that would have given Hitler the knowledge of having a free hand against Russia, making it far more likely that Germany’s invasion of Russia would have been more of a success. From Bordeaux to Vladivostok would have been one, huge national socialist empire, greedily looking south at the oilfields of the Middle East under British influence, potentially threatening the Suez Canal and link to India. It is hard to see how such an immense landpower would have been able to rub along with the British Empire without conflct in the medium term.
In any event, the Empire, while it may have come to an end sooner than it did due to the immense costs of WW2, was already in a state of flux: Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other dominions were moving towards greater self government; there was a vigorous, pro-independence movement in India during the 1920s and 1930s, and suppressing that movement with the use of armed force hardly sits easily with a libertarian credo.
One final point, to which I am indebted to Paul Marks for pointing out: there was a brief campaign, led I think by the likes of Joseph Chamberlain, to create an Imperial Parliament in which all members of the Empire would have had some sort of representation, perhaps like a sort of BE version of the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. The idea never really got off the ground as a serious political venture.
For all of the talk about a fourth branch of government, calling to account corruption on both sides of the aisle, and informing the people’s decisions with transcendent objectivity, the media has always been a bullhorn for specific biases. The virgin media of our youth did not exist, and it should not exist. As with every other facet of life in a free society, it is only competition that creates progress and openness. In media, this means diverse views and diverse sources, calling not only corrupt politicians into account, but each other as well.
– Jeremy D. Boreing
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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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