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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
Nextdoor, for those that don’t know, is one of those local social media apps. It can be a great place to find out local news, although the number of posts about cats being run over can be depressing. The other day I saw a post that depressed me despite featuring no dead pets. A presumably well-meaning lady asked, “Would it be unreasonable to remove the shop brand labels on clothes that I want to give to local charity shops?” She had observed that some people buy clothes with prestigious labels from charity shops or second-hand clothes apps such as Vinted and then sell them at a profit. She wanted to prevent this happening.
Several people challenged her view. “Why would you take the labels out if you are donating to a charity?” said one response. “The charity could make more money with the labels in”. That seemed to be the majority opinion. But a distressingly large minority clearly felt that reducing the charity’s income from selling donated clothes was worthwhile to ensure that no “spivs” could make any money from selling them a second time.
The title of this Telegraph article by Daniel Hannan “Here’s why I’m quitting the Conservative Party” is true – he is quitting – but not for the reason you think. The Reform Party will not be getting its first representative in the House of Lords quite yet. Hannan writes,
Here is the nub of the problem. A majority of the electorate believes that Britain, which has the highest tax rate since the aftermath of the Second World War and whose national debt is about to overtake its annual GDP, is some kind of Hayekian, if not Dickensian, state. The single most unpopular Labour policy since polling day was to seek to remove the winter fuel allowance from better-off pensioners.
Our politician problem, in short, is a manifestation of our electorate problem. Plenty of MPs, including Labour MPs, can see what needs to be done. But they can’t see how to get re-elected if they do it.
For example, almost every politician will privately admit that the pensions triple lock is condemning Britain to penury, yet no party proposes abolition. Why not? Because, by 65 to 11 per cent, voters want to keep it (all figures are from YouGov polls within the last 18 months).
MPs likewise know that the NHS cannot remain a state monopoly. Wes Streeting, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch – all have eyes in their heads. But, having eyes, they are also aware that voters oppose any use of private provision, even within a system free to the user, by 71 to 16 per cent.
Every MP grasps that housebuilding has not kept up with population growth for 40 years. So where are all the new towns that keep being proposed? It turns out that voters (by 49 to 30 per cent) don’t want them.
We are in a vicious circle. As things deteriorate, voters become angry, and blame the political class. MPs lose whatever lingering legitimacy they had, and become even less able to propose unpopular policies.
and
Consider, for example, the idea that rent controls reduce the number of available properties and so drive up rents. It is not obvious, but a few minutes’ thought reveals that, if people cannot make a profit by letting out their homes, they will not do it.
Or consider the idea that you become more secure by buying what you need from around the world rather than by manufacturing it at home. Again, it seems counterintuitive, but we apply that principle to our own lives. Indeed, it is precisely the important things – food, clothing, housing – that we purchase from specialists rather than trying to make them ourselves.
Consider, above all, the idea that cutting the tax rate might encourage more economic activity and so generate more tax revenue. This must, if you think about it, be true. A tax rate of 100 per cent would mean zero revenue, since people would not work for nothing, so it is simply a question of finding where the optimum rate is.
At present, though, voters instead favour any tax that they think will fall on other people. For example, a wealth tax – a textbook example of a levy that drives entrepreneurs away and reduces revenue – is backed by an extraordinary 75 per cent of voters, with just 12 per cent opposed. In the current climate, almost no one in public life is prepared to tell 75 per cent that they are wrong.
Yet it is precisely the counter-intuitive truths that can be profitably taught. That was what Ralph Harris did in the 1950s and 1960s; and it is what I shall be doing from 1 June, when I take over as the director of the IEA.
“Britain is running a live experiment in how fast you can drain a tax base before you start draining a country. This recent article in The Times reports on a freedom of information request by Wealth Club to HMRC has revealed that the top 1% of taxpayers (circa 500,000 people) contributed nearly £94 billion in tax in 2023/24. That’s a third of all income tax collected. The top 100,000 paid almost a fifth of the national total on their own. At the same time, Britain is losing those very people. The latest Henley Private Wealth Migration Report forecasts £66 billion in wealth leaving the UK this year as record numbers of millionaires move abroad. That follows 10,800 departures in 2024, the highest ever recorded.”
I got this on my Linkedin page, from a chap called John Russo.
Here’s more:
“Critics call this alarmist. They point out that only 0.6% of the UK’s millionaires are leaving. But this misses the point. It’s not the number of people that matters. It’s the volume of capital, the density of investment, and the influence of networks that disappear with them. When a founder, a fund manager, or a family office relocates, their employees, service providers, and charities often follow. The irony is that the UK’s tax system remains among the most progressive in the developed world. Those with higher incomes already contribute the majority of national revenue. But the politics of envy has become the economics of loss.”
Hard to dispute any of this. Read the whole thing, as someone once put it.
“Why taxes are to blame for Britain’s fly-tipping problem” is the title of an article in today’s Telegraph by Patrick Galbraith, Environment Correspondent, and Emma Taggart, Economics Reporter, both of whom have earned their job titles. The standfirst is the title of this post. “Levy aimed at discouraging people from [X] is having the opposite effect” ought to win a National Recycling Award for ease of re-use. There’s a line that won’t be sent to landfill any time soon.
I quote:
The scale of the problem has become a national scandal, with observers focusing on how to stop fly-tippers, and questions being raised over the efficiency of regulators amid efforts to clean up the mess.
Yet there has been relatively little examination of the causes of the problem. One of the major drivers is that Britain has the highest rate of landfill tax in Europe.
Every time someone hires a skip or asks a builder to tear out a kitchen, the quote for the disposal of the rubbish comes with an added tax of £130.75 per tonne.
According to Mr Rayner, fly-tipping at the level we see it in rural England is “100pc an unintended consequence of the tax”.
The levy was first mooted by Ken Clarke, the former chancellor, in the autumn Budget of 1994 at just £7 per tonne.
At the time, Clarke said that the tax fulfilled “twin objectives of raising money and protecting the environment”. It was Britain’s first tax with an environmental purpose and was introduced with the promise that it would raise “several hundred million pounds a year”.
From 2007 to 2014, the tax rose by £8 a tonne each year in order to meet EU landfill diversion targets. Under Labour, the tax has risen significantly, climbing from £103.70 per tonne in 2024 to £130.75 in April 2026, a 26pc increase in just two years.
It is now far above equivalent taxes on the Continent. In France, the levy is €65 (£56) per tonne, while in Portugal it is €30. Even Denmark’s landfill tax is less expensive than ours.
At face value, the tax makes sense. It discourages people from mindlessly throwing things away and is meant to encourage recycling.
Unfortunately few people ever look past the mask of “face value”.
Sam Dumitriu, the head of policy at Britain Remade, a think-tank that campaigns for economic growth, notes that we currently have a system where taxes effectively incentivise people to fly-tip, but the authorities are scandalously useless at bringing those doing the tipping to justice.
“We have the worst of both worlds in that we have probably the biggest payoff in Europe for committing this crime, but we have pretty poor enforcement,” he says.
The results can be seen in the picture the Telegraph used to illustrate the article:
Up to 20,000 tonnes of waste was dumped beside the River Cherwell in 2025. Credit: Jacob King/PA Wire
Added later: it’s easy to get the scale of that photograph wrong and think the foliage at the sides is merely a pair of hedges between which someone has dumped a truckful of waste. Those are not bushes. They are full grown trees. A better impression of the amount of rubbish there is given by this drone footage published by the Guardian, which shows the rubbish heap and cars running up and down the A34 beside it, all in the same shot. Fly-tipping on this scale did not used to happen in the UK.
“Comedians tell ministers lack of funding is no laughing matter”, says the BBC headline writer. Do not judge him too harshly; hanging would suffice. The article continues,
Comedian Tom Walker, who portrays the fictional journalist Jonathan Pie, said the government needs to recognise comedy “as an important cultural thing from grassroots to sitcoms on the BBC”.
Walker suggested changing how stand-up comedians and others in the industry are viewed, explaining: “Essentially every stand-up comedian is a small business, they are an entrepreneur and that should be rewarded and acknowledged.”
“Should be rewarded”, that’ll get a laugh from the actual entrepreneurs. According to the Cambridge dictionary, an entrepreneur is “a person who attempts to make a profit by starting a company or by operating alone in the business world, esp. when it involves taking risks”. Get it? They take the risk, they get the profit if it works out, and they take the loss if it does not. By definition, no one who has a guaranteed income from the state is an entrepreneur.
Ro Dodgson said comedy is “often based on risk” and clubs and promoters who are struggling financially are less able to take a chance on new acts.
The comedian said if the government agreed funding to clubs “as almost a form of insurance” to keep trying new acts and supporting emerging talent “then we’d have an industry that can sustain itself”.
By definition, no industry that has a guaranteed subsidy from the state sustains itself.
“Governments controlling prices? It has long been unthinkable – but may now be inevitable” is the headline of an article by Andy Beckett in the Guardian.
He writes,
Politicians are not supposed to meddle with prices. Even though much of politics is about whether voters can afford things – especially in an era of recurring inflationary shocks – ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s planned economy four decades ago, the orthodoxy across much of the world has been that only markets should decide what things cost.
As the hugely influential Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, in a complex modern society, information is too dispersed among potential sellers and buyers of goods or services for government to make informed and correct decisions about the prices of those goods. Hence, his disciples say, the inefficiency of state-run economies, from post-colonial Africa to the eastern bloc.
Yet as the 21st century has gone on, and market economies have proved ever less able to provide essentials such as energy and housing at an affordable cost – while also generating their own huge inefficiencies, such as soaring salaries for failing executives, and privatised utilities that don’t provide a functional service – so interest in the state regulating and even setting prices has started to grow again. Sudden bursts of inflation from wars, the pandemic and agriculture’s disruption by the climate crisis have prompted governments to make economic interventions that would until recently have been considered hopelessly old-fashioned, unnatural and even immoral. Even the Tories, one of the most stubbornly pro-market parties in the world, introduced the energy price cap, having previously called this Labour policy “Marxist”.
Hey, at least he’s heard of Hayek, and he is not wrong to say that the Tories introducing the energy price cap was a betrayal of their previous beliefs. Same goes for Michael Gove’s abolition of “no fault” evictions. I had thought better of Gove. I note that neither of these anti-free market moves did much to help the Conservatives at the subsequent election. Yet Mr Beckett is also right to say when left wing governments introduce price controls and rent freezes they are almost always immensely popular. It is not really a paradox. Human beings are good at spotting opportunism and hypocrisy on the part of other humans, but they are proverbially bad at weighing short term pleasure against long term harm.
A BBC story with that title warmed my heart.
A group of villagers who fought to overturn a council’s crackdown on second home-ownership say they are “proud” of their “David and Goliath moment”.
About 18 months ago, the council of Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, made what it called a “proactive step” to limit the number of second homes in the area.
Gwynedd Council, which reasonably enough calls itself by its Welsh name Cyngor Gwynedd since it is in a Welsh-speaking area, is currently under the control of Plaid Cymru.
It hoped that by introducing legislation requiring homeowners in the county to seek planning permission before turning a residential property into a second home, it would help local people who were being priced out of the market.
But some residents of Abersoch, a village on the Llŷn Peninsula which sees about 30,000 visitors during peak summer months, said the knock-on effects from the legislation – known as Article 4 – had been tough.
They described tradespeople needing to look for work further afield and long-time visitors feeling unwelcome.
The People of Gwynedd Against Article 4 campaign group took legal action against the council, Cyngor Gwynedd, and in November 2025 Article 4 was quashed.
Good for the campaigners. The BBC article later quotes two solicitors who brought the case on behalf of “People of Gwynedd Against Article 4”:
Laura Alliss, 38, who lives in Abersoch, said she initially threw away a council notice about Article 4 before she said she realised it affected everyone in Gwynedd.
“I just threw it in the bin because it just said it only affected you if you were a second homeowner, which we weren’t,” she said.
Enlli Angharad Williams, 29, who grew up in Abersoch, realised Article 4 “really impacted” her ability to re-mortgage when coupled with an existing Section 106, external restriction.
The two solicitors helped get a judicial review commissioned after £105,000 was raised by a fundraising group.
Enlli said her friends and family were initially “quite angry” after she put her name down as a claimant against the policy, until they came to understand its impact.
Enlli described it as a stressful time, saying she was “ecstatic” at the decision to scrap the policy, adding: “I’m proud of the community, actually.
“I think it’s shown how much community there is left here.
“We can’t live without the tourism here.”
There cannot be that many Welsh solicitors called “Enlli Angharad Williams” (for those familiar with the IPA, her first name is said /ˈɛnɬi/) so I am pretty sure that the Enlli Angharad Williams who appears on the “Meet the team” page for a Welsh law firm (and volunteers for the Abersoch lifeboat) is the same person as the lady just quoted. The page says that “Enlli is a fluent Welsh speaker and is happy to discuss matters in the medium of Welsh”. I’m glad to see Welsh speakers push back against the ill-considered tendency of Plaid Cymru to curtail property rights whenever they can. What Plaid Cymru think they are doing is enabling young adults who grew up in Welsh-speaking households to afford to be able to buy houses in their local area, hence keeping it Welsh-speaking, rather than being priced out by the English-speaking people who buy second homes there. But nothing drives young families out of an area faster than a lack of jobs. There are parts of Liverpool – one of them ironically called “Kensington” like the swanky London borough – that were so depressed that in 2013 Liverpool city council was selling houses there for £1. Sure, that is at the extreme end of the spectrum, but there are plenty of places in the UK now, both rural and urban, where houses sell for prices that wouldn’t buy you a broom cupboard in London, and wouldn’t buy you much in Gwynedd either. Why? Because the jobs are elsewhere. And after a few years of that, the people are elsewhere too.
“If money is infinite, why is there poverty?”
Because money isn’t wealth. It’s a claim on wealth.
You can print claims. You can’t print the goods and services those claims are supposed to buy.
Give everyone $10 billion and nothing gets richer. Prices just explode until that “wealth” buys nothing.
Poverty isn’t a shortage of paper.
It’s a shortage of production.
Printing money doesn’t solve that. It hides it for a moment, then makes it worse.
– Rock Chartrand
Dean Conway has written a supportive article for Central Bylines about the Green Party’s eye-catching new housing policy:
Green Party policy ‘Abolish Landlords’: solving the housing crisis
The Green Party’s ‘Abolish Landlords’ policy could end the housing crisis with a number of measures that will benefit tenants
“The Private Rental Sector has failed”, reads the Green Party’s statement to ‘Abolish Landlords’ motion, adopted as party policy at October’s Green Party Conference. Key elements of its plan to tackle the UK’s endemic housing crisis include:
Abolishing Right-to-Buy legislation and introducing Rent Controls.
Levying more taxes on landlords, including Land Value taxes and national insurance on rental income.
Ending Buy-to-Let mortgages.
Subsidising councils to buy back properties that have not been insulated to EPC rating C or have been vacant for more than six months.
Speaking to Alex Mace by email, Worcester City’s Green Party councillor and co-sponsor of the motion, he told me that ‘Abolish Landlords’ “takes actual concrete steps to solve the housing crisis that are largely how our original stock of council homes were built through the 50s, 60s and 70s”, including establishing “a state-owned housing manufacturer … to deliver housing at scale”. While the motion does not actually outlaw landlordism, it “seeks to make it significantly less attractive to be a private landlord”.
I’m getting a “defund the police” vibe. Tell the base that the slogan means exactly what it says, while telling the rubes that it doesn’t, with scope to row back on either position when convenient.
By the way, here is the Greens’ policy on migration, as stated on their website:
The Green Party in government will:
Implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration
Treat all migrants as if they are citizens
Give all residents the right to vote
Help families to be together
Dismantle the Home Office
Abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition
Abolish the ten year route to settlement
Stop the profiteering from application fees
Stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status
Accept our responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move
That policy would increase the need for rented housing rather a lot.
“How to detoxify the immigration debate” is the title of an LSE (London School of Economics) blog post by Hana Kapetanovic.
The debate is being dominated by the loudest voices with the most strongly held views; the voices of the majority aren’t being heard. It would sound very different if they were. In British Future’s segmentation of public attitudes to immigration, the biggest group by far is the “Balancer Middle”, with around half (49 per cent) of the public falling into this group. This group is not fundamentally opposed to immigration, but wants it to be “controlled and fair”.
and
As much as public perceptions are shaped by the media, political and information landscape, we mustn’t forget that public perceptions in turn shape media and political debates. The media publishes articles they think people will read. Politicians move to where they think the votes are, and yet are still faced with low trust. We need to break this democratic doom loop.
Breaking the democratic doom loop and detoxifying the debate sounds nice, but her proposal to do this is to take a group of a few dozen voters – a group that is a representative sample of the electorate but is self-selected in that the group is made up of the sort of people who want to participate and have time to do it – show them lots of briefings by government approved experts, have them converse for a few days guided by a government facilitator, and declare that whatever curated consensus the group comes to after this exercise has greater democratic validity than either the discourse of MPs who have actually been elected or the myriad private debates of the un-detoxified mass of the electorate.
This process is called a “Citizens’ Assembly” or a “Citizens’ Jury”. If all these grand titles boil down to is a bigger than average focus group, fine. Endearingly worthy, in fact. But the minute this “Citizens’ Assembly” starts to displace the powers of the old sort of assembly voted in by all the citizens, or the “Citizens’ Jury” starts to think that it can make decisions that affect other people’s lives as if it were a jury jury, then…
No.
“UK minimum wage is raising youth unemployment, Bank of England’s Mann says” – Reuters, Feb 15th 2026
Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Feb 20th 2026:
This week, unemployment rates for 18- to 24-year-olds hit a high not seen outside the pandemic since 2015. School leavers are now competing for work stacking shelves or pulling pints with overqualified new graduates who can’t find graduate jobs, at a time when pubs, shops and cafes don’t seem to be hiring. Even those employers strong enough to have survived lockdown routinely complain that it’s getting too expensive to hire staff – especially young ones.
The Centre for Policy Studies thinktank calculates that it will cost 26% more to hire an 18- to 20-year-old by this spring than it did in 2024. That reflects government decisions taken for perfectly good reasons, including hiking employers’ national insurance to fund the NHS, plus two chunky rises to the minimum wage for the under-20s (now £10 an hour) in line with manifesto promises to level it up with the higher adult rate (now £12.21) over the course of a parliament. No matter how noble the motive, once it costs the same to hire four teenage Starmers as it once did to hire five, there are likely to be consequences. Yet until this week, when an internal Labour argument about whether they could be inadvertently pricing young people out of work spilled on to newspaper front pages, political debate over why so many young people don’t have jobs has mostly involved blaming them for being anxious snowflakes. Injury, meet insult.
I am truly, non-sarcastically impressed that Ms Hinsliff and a few other left-wing commenters are now willing to admit that “there are likely to be consequences” to increasing the minimum wage. Hearing that word, “consequences”, enter left-wing discussions of workers’ pay is like a glimpse of a little mammalian form scurrying through the dust kicked up by a brontosaurus.
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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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