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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 latest Free Life Commentary is the occasional essay series written and e-published by the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb. In the latest, number 112, he descibes how he yesterday spent An Afternoon with Tony Martin:
Since time immemorial, on the third Thursday in September, Thame in Oxfordshire has hosted what is now the largest agricultural fair in the country. From all over England people come to buy and sell things and to see one another. There are tractor displays, and cows, and horses, and stalls selling clothing and food and drink, and vast car parks for the thousands of people who attend.
I was there yesterday at the invitation of the BBC. Bill Heine, a populist libertarian from America, has a show with Radio Oxford, and is in the habit of getting me on air every week or so for five minutes at a time. Yesterday, he wanted me not on the end of a telephone, but in person. Without offering the usual fee that I charge for leaving home, he wanted me to drive for a round trip of 300 miles to spend an hour live on air discussing rural crime and the right to self defence. For that distance and that time, regardless of fees, I would normally have refused. However, this was different. One of the other guests was to be Tony Martin.
He is the farmer who shot two thieves in August 1999, killing one and wounding the other. He was put on trial for murder and convicted. On appeal, his conviction was changed to manslaughter, and he was eventually released on Friday the 8th August this year, having spent more than three years in prison. He could have been released last year, but the authorities argued at the parole hearings that his lack of repentance made him a continuing danger to any thieves who might try to break into his home. He is presently facing a tort action for damages from the thief he neglected to kill – the man is claiming for loss of earnings and for reduced sexual function. His legal fees are being charged to the tax payers.
This is a case that has at times filled me and many other people with incandescent rage. It is the perfect summary of all that is wrong with modern England. Now, I was invited to meet the man at the centre of the case. Let alone driving – I might have walked the entire circuit of the M25 to be with him. So off I went.
And so should you, by reading the whole thing. Sean took photographs of the event, or persuaded others to take photos in those cases where he was a photographee. Sean, to those who have known him at all long, looks impressively slim, while Tony Martin looks pleasingly plump despite his ordeal by injustice, and subsequently by celebrity.
The piece may be about a rather doleful subject, namely injustice and official stupidity. Nevertheless I found that reading it made me feel quite cheerful – cheerful that such men as Tony Martin exist, cheerful that I have a friend like Sean Gabb who is prepared to go to all that trouble just to lend him moral support and then to write about it, and cheerful that I now have the chance to give the whole event another little boost, thanks to Samizdata.
Peter Hitchens, the arch-conservative (small-c) journalist and detester of Blairite Britain, might be thought on the surface to have a few things in common with the scribes at this blog. Well, this article in The Spectator in which he defends the British Broadcasting Corporation, should nail that idea in short order.
Hitchens – brother of maverick left-liberal fellow journalist Christopher – shares with many people a widespread loathing of the BBC, the trashiness of its downmarket programmes, the bias of its news service, and so forth. And yet he is fiercely opposed to abolishing the BBC’s licence fee, the tax which is imposed on all current purchasers of television sets to fund that organisation.
Indeed, Hitchens seems to bemoan the rise of commercial television, cable and satellite outlets, as having created pressures on the BBC to dumb down. He yearns for the days before the mid-1950s when the BBC had a total monopoly on broadcasting. He seems to be saying that the BBC is okay so long as it is run in the way he likes. It is totally outside his frame of mental reference to imagine how quality television, however defined, can thrive in a market where consumers pay out of their own free will.
To be fair, he says the BBC should openly allow its broadcasters to admit their political biases in full rather than cover them up under a pretence of impartiality, but also ensure that for each avowed leftwing journalist, there should be a counterpart of a conservative. This may sound quite an improvement, but it is entirely unrealistic to suppose that the programme makers who run the BBC in its present privileged state would concede such ground. The beast cannot be tamed. It must be consigned to the abbatoir.
There is a broader point. Even if the BBC was a genuine paragon of truth, objectivity and high culture, its licence fee would still be unjustified. It is a tax and increasingly hard to justify in a world of diverse broadcasting channels, not to mention the Internet.
In his great book, The Constitution of Liberty, the late FA Hayek wrote in his final chapter, “Why I am Not a conservative.” Hitchens’ article is a good reminder to me why I am of the same view as the great Austrian economist.
Chief Wiggles is is on the warpath. I wouldn’t approach him too closely today if I were a reporter.
He’s absolutely right. The correspondents in Iraq are lying to us by choosing to report only the negatively spectacular. It’s an inherently false view and doesn’t help anyone understand what is actually going on.
I personally saw the same thing happen here in Belfast. I can remember more than one lovely peaceful day on which I found out from the international news there had been rioting a mile away from where I live. From what I have heard, there were times when reporters outnumbered rioters. You can do wonders with the right camera angle.
You see, reporters are like flies. The entire forest can be full of sunlight through leaves and the smell of spring flowers… but they will manage to find and congregate on that pile the bear left behind in the back of its’ dark den.
Sweden’s broadcasting watchdog was censuring an Oprah Winfrey talk show for showing bias toward a U.S. military attack on Iraq. The censure means Swedish television network TV4, which broadcast the show in February, must publish the decision but there are no legal or financial penalties. Annelie Ulfhielm, an official of Sweden’s Broadcasting Commission, said:
Different views were expressed, but all longer remarks gave voice to the opinion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and should be the target of attack.
The Swedish government strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying it lacked a U.N. Security Council mandate. A TV4 spokesman said the Oprah Winfrey show usually drew an audience of about 100,000-140,000 Swedes, making it one of Sweden’s more popular day-time television programs.
Just as people were getting carried away with the NO result of the Swedish referendum on the euro, the above news items is a timely reminder of the fact that the Swedes are even further down the statist route than most of Europe. A frightening thought indeed. Obviously, the Swedish ‘authorities’ felt that they had to ‘protect’ the country from the US imperialism as perpetrated by the one and only Oprah. Something’s rotten in the state of…er… Sweden?
Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet.
The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah.
But how about this for a train of thought?
Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn’t really taken off. There’s too much free stuff, and anyway, people don’t want to pay. Maybe they’re scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they’ll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they’re waiting.
But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with?
What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that’s why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much.
Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? → Continue reading: Big brands getting even bigger by giving it away
This must have happened before, but it’s the first big example of it that I’ve heard about at all recently. Tomorrow’s British press is apparently full of reports of what Mr Blair “said” to a bunch of trade unionists. In other words, the press printed the stuff that they had been given by Downing Street beforehand. They printed a whole load of stuff that he was going to say. The trouble is, BBC2 TV’s Newsnight has just reported, several trade union leaders who were present at the meeting at which all this was going to be said are adamant that Blair didn’t actually say it.
There must have been occasions where the print media have written reports in the past tense about events that had yet to occur, only for them not to happen as scripted, but it is somewhat unusual for our Prime Minister to be directly involved in such a mess-up. Why didn’t Blair follow his own script? Did he chicken out? Did he set the papers up on purpose? Did he think the whole thing would remain permanently in two separate compartments, with the trade unionists getting one message, and the rest of us getting another, without anyone comparing notes?
Maybe this sort of nonsense happens every day, and the government has (had) a gentleman’s agreement with the BBC that what it says it is going to say is what it said, regardless of what it really said. And if the newspapers print a load of bollocks they are too embarrassed to admit it, and it all dies the death without any embarrassment to anyone. Except, that – maybe, could be, I don’t know, I’m guessing – the government forgot that the BBC now hates it. → Continue reading: And the news is that … the news we just said may not have actually happened
You know, I’m beginning to suspect that Rod Liddle is on the same journey I took, albeit in a higher plane, from New Labour placard-waver, to semi-rabid libertarian back-street raver. There have been several excellent articles in The Spectator, recently, topped off I think by his latest piece on the travails of the Reverend Tony.
I did have Rod pegged as being a straightforward leading member of the liberal elite, with his column in The Guardian, and his editorship of the Today program. But ever since the BBC let him go I’ve really begun to welcome his regular appearances on Channel4 News, his pieces on the stupidity of over-regulation, and his devastating broadsides against the Spin-Meisters of the champagne socialist lie machine.
So is the end in sight for Boris’s demise as editor of the Speccy? As a South Oxfordshire resident, an occasional bag-man for Boris, and a one-time writer for his magazine, my opinion is torn in two opposing directions. But if Boris is happy to give up the mantle, to concentrate better on his task of becoming a serious politician in the mould of Lord Salisbury, then is there a better potential editor around than Rod Liddle? I’m becoming ever more confident that Lord Black doesn’t think so.
And following Jonathan Pearce’s earlier article, on the matter, would a change be a good thing anyway, for one of my favourite magazines?
One thing though, Rod, if you’re reading. Gonna have to give up that Guardian column. Sorry.
I cannot recall hearing of such a petulant outburst from the normally stately and dignified BBC:
The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a “capital imperialist” who wants to destabilise the corporation because he “is against everything the BBC stands for”.
Sounds like my kind of guy.
Lorraine Heggessey said Mr Murdoch’s continued attacks on the BBC stemmed from a dislike of the public sector. But he did not understand that the British people “have a National Health Service, a public education system” and trust organisations that are there for the benefit of society and not driven by profit.
Methinks the executives of the BBC sense that they are in trouble. They realise that ‘Auntie’ no longer enjoys an exalted status as a national treasure and, hence, is vulnerable.
The time-honoured and global reputation for fairness, accuracy and objectivity is something they have dined out on, abused and terminally tarnished. And, even if this were not the case, in an era when the market provides so many choices, it is impossible to stem the growing discontent with the arcane and punitive television tax that funds the BBC.
But it’s all the fault of Rupert Murdoch and his band of evil capitalists. (Oh, and George Bush of course).
I read an article over on Fox News which does as a good a job explaining media bias as any I’ve seen.
Since postings here today seem a bit thin on the ground, let me recycle a link which I’ve already featured on my Culture Blog, but which I think is interesting enough to make a posting for the mass media. (I originally found it at b3ta.com.)
I’m talking about this, this being a site which includes something I’ve read about a lot but never actually seen demonstrated with the relevant contrasts. I’m talking about the ancient and now technologically rejuvenated art of picture retouching.
The most striking is the picture you get to straight from the link, but there are lots of others at the same site.
Okay I admit it, at this point I did pause a bit to think of a political moral to stick at the end, a thing not needed on a Culture Blog. But I think there is one, concerning the degree to which cameras do or do not tell lies. Put it this way, I think maybe I’ll give this site a mention at White Rose as well. An awful lot of credence is placed these days on photographic evidence. What this before/after site reminds us is that photos are only as reliable as a way to tell the truth as are the people in charge of them. (You have only to think of Stalin’s graphics department.) As it gets easier to manipulate images, so our readiness to trust them ought to diminish.
This site shows what is the result of retouching. But does anyone here know how long it takes to do this kind of thing, and how difficult it is? And can all of it simply be done with Photoshop?
On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme (on Monday’s show – if my memory serves) there was a story about the destruction of the forests of Eastern Europe.
The BBC journalist would refer to forests in country after country and talk about how the trees were “illegally cut down” and the timber “illegally imported into Western European countries”.
I noticed something about the BBC man’s remarks. In each Eastern European country he discussed he talked about the ‘national parks’ or the ‘national forests’ – never once did he talk about privately owned forests being destroyed.
Whether forests are owned by old aristocratic families or by private companies (as in the State of Maine) there is no question of them being destroyed for a quick buck – ownership (as opposed to licences, or ‘rights to’ or other nonsense), brings concern for the long term.
Of course the BBC man did not notice this – he just claimed that ‘things’ would be improved when the Eastern European nations joined the European Union and there were even more regulations than there are now.
Behind the headlines, underneath the debate, hidden by the cheery faces of the elite and occluded by the gleaming fabric of the towering glass monuments in Strasbourg, something darker stirs in Europe again according to this report from UPI
Those of us who ever bothered to read the small print knew from the get-go that far from being “a great coming together of the European peoples…yadda yadda yadda..” that the whole project was nothing more than an exercise in cynical bribery and vote massaging
Nothing new here, of course. Politicians are what they are and, as my Grandmother used to say, from a pig expect a grunt. No, what is new is the sheer scale of this. Most politicians aim to buy a constituency; really ambitious ones aim for a whole country. But these guys are shooting for a whole continent!!
I’m surprised that the Greeks have joined in. They, of all people, should know a thing or two about hubris and, perhaps if they had stopped to think for a moment they would have realised that if this thing breaks it will break very, very badly
They say that time is a slow but fair judge; fair, but not always merciful
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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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