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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We have, of course, been laughing at this for decades. ‘Yes Minister’ is regarded as perhaps the finest British sitcom ever made precisely because it is devastatingly accurate. Sir Humphrey is not a caricature; he is a documentary subject lightly fictionalised. ‘The Thick of It’ is funnier and darker, but its portrait of an institution that treats elected politicians as an irritating management layer to be managed, delayed, and where possible redirected is not satire but observation. The reason these programmes land is that everyone who has encountered Whitehall at close quarters recognises the creature.
Kruger’s diagnosis of the structural problem is precise. The Cabinet Office, created in 1916 to manage Cabinet business, has since Tony Blair expanded nearly five fold to employ over 11,000 staff, becoming the principal source of authority across Whitehall, to the point that 10 Downing Street appears on the official organogram as a subsidiary unit of the Cabinet Office, listed alongside the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and the Public Inquiry Response Unit. The Prime Minister’s office, in other words, is officially a sub-department of the bureaucracy it nominally directs. If you wanted to design a system that maximised the power of unelected officials relative to elected ministers, you could scarcely do better.
The solution proposed is radical but coherent: abolish the Cabinet Office entirely, replace it with an Office of the Prime Minister led by a powerful Chief of Staff appointed directly by the PM, and a new Department of the Civil Service charged with headcount reduction, AI adoption, and transforming Whitehall’s culture and productivity. Ministers would gain real powers to hire and fire civil servants, including their Permanent Secretaries. Quangos would be brought back into departments or scrapped. The model draws on serious international precedents: Australia’s combined Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which coordinates the whole of government with only 1,000 officials, and Japan’s 2001 reforms, which reduced the number of departments from 22 to 12 after career civil servants had begun running their departments as independent operations, effectively ignoring the Prime Minister’s agenda.
There will be much pearl-clutching.
– Gawain Towler
Before easing sanctions on Russian oil, how about easing sanctions on British oil?
– Daniel Hannan
The Crime and Policing Bill, currently completing its passage through Parliament, represents the most comprehensive assault on the traditional liberties of the freeborn Englishman since the Stuart kings. It is more dangerous than those royal provocations, because it comes dressed in the language of safety, of community, of respect, and because it is only part of a wider pattern that, when you step back and see it whole, should stop the blood.
Let me begin with a man most people have never heard of. Giles Udy is one of Britain’s finest historians of Soviet Communism. His book Labour and the Gulag is a work of meticulous, uncomfortable scholarship, tracing the seduction of the British left by the Bolshevik experiment. He has spent twenty years studying what it actually looks like when a state decides that its ideological certainty entitles it to total control over those who do not share its worldview.
Udy has recently made a statement that I suspect cost him some effort to compose. He is not a man given to hyperbole. But writing about Soviet repression, he finds it, as he puts it, “really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.” Hard, but he reaches it nonetheless. “What Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common,“ he concludes, “is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to total control over all those who do not share their worldview.“
He is careful to note we have no Gulag, no death penalty. So am I. But his observation about the tools of control is what should make us stop. Legislation, and courts co-opted to apply it. The policing of dissent, hate crime orders, arrests, the long-term seizure of electronic appliances to intimidate those against whom no charges are ever brought. Twelve thousand arrests annually for social media posts. The framing of dissent as fascism, a habit, Udy notes, with deep roots in the Labour movement’s Stalinist period, when ‘fascist‘ became the approved term for anyone who inconveniently noticed what was happening in Moscow. Orwell’s thought crime, he argues, has become a reality. It is 2026, and he cannot believe what he is seeing. Nor can I.
– Gawain Towler writes a terrifying essay
What is still so lacking in these arguments [about Brexit] is even a smattering of emotional intelligence. No one fully understood the implications of Brexit but when so much of the establishment, the great and the good, the entire culture industry, told everyone to vote Remain then it was obvious that many would stick two fingers up.
This was described as a monumental act of self-harm, but I always understood the Leave impulse as coming from an England that would not do as it was told.
That England never went away. That England is still continually being ticked off for expressing its identity incorrectly. Yet, as we have just seen in the local elections, both the Scots and the Welsh have voted for their own nationalist politicians. The Leave vote was an expression of cultural identity.
– Suzanne Moore (£)
“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.”
As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc.
The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO.
I’ve finally figured out why I find Wes Streeting so grating. It’s because he bigs up his working-class origins even as he shits all over working-class Britain. ‘I’m from Stepney’, he chirps, like a camp Dick van Dyke, before looking down his Cambridge-educated nose at his fellow oiks who voted for Brexit. He wears his humble roots like fancy dress to disguise his lofty indifference to the populist beliefs of those who don’t only come from working-class Britain but still live there. ‘I’m one of you’, he says, when every Brit with a brain knows he’s one of Them.
– Brendan O’Neill
A Regulating for Growth Bill – a slogan up there with copulating for virginity and drinking for sobriety…
– Nick Timothy MP
The paper’s authors are too diplomatic to say it directly, but the implication is clear: Rachel Reeves is pursuing a policy that risks making the crisis she fears more likely, not less. Markets have noticed. Long-dated gilt yields have been rising for most of 2025 even as the Bank of England has been cutting interest rates, a dissociation that signals precisely the kind of underlying distrust the paper warns about.
The question the paper ultimately poses is not an economic one. It is a political one. These reforms, the civil service reductions, the welfare tightening, the Bank of England adjustments, the net zero rephrasing, are all achievable. They were, in many cases, the settled common ground of British economic management not long ago. The question is whether any government has the nerve to implement them before a crisis compels it, or whether, as the authors quietly and rather despairingly note, “even among policy experts there is growing recognition that much of what needs to be done will not be attempted until a crisis compels it.“
That sentence should haunt anyone who reads it. Because what it describes is not a failure of economics. It is a failure of political will. And in a democracy that has spent six years lurching from one emergency to another, we should not be sanguine that the compulsion will arrive in time, or in a form we would choose.
Break the glass now, or wait for someone else to break it for you. That is the choice. And this paper, to its credit, has at least had the honesty to say so.
– Gawain Towler, discussing In case of emergency, break glass by The Centre for a Better Britain
There is, however, a still more fundamental cause, one I have not ceased to articulate: our managerial system of government is breaking down under the weight of a welfare state we cannot afford and which fails to meet expectations.
Promises made to successive generations cannot be met from our productive output. The gap has been filled by debt and by the systematic debasement of the currency since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. In the nineteenth century, a pound in 1900 bought roughly as much as a pound in 1800. Since 1971, the purchasing power of money has collapsed. That is not a coincidence. That is policy.
I put this thesis to Rishi Sunak in a private meeting. He readily agreed I was right. The room of some thirty MPs looked crestfallen, until someone said, “But we can’t do anything about it before the election” whereupon everyone relaxed and reverted to type. That moment encapsulates our problem precisely.
Liz Truss understood the fiscal reality and tried to act on it. She was also, simultaneously, spending enormous sums on an energy bailout. The bond markets noted the contradiction and drew their own conclusions. She was unlucky with undiagnosed structural problems in bond markets while caught between two incompatible imperatives. Her underlying diagnosis was not wrong.
It turns out reality is not optional. You can ignore it, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring it. Rachel Reeves and the whole nation are discovering this now, after the Chancellor brought welfare cuts to MPs who told their constituents for years that austerity is a choice and said, “No thank you!”
Starmer’s current crisis sits at this junction: a government elected on the promise that “change” would be painless, running head‑first into the arithmetic they declined to discuss.
– Steve Baker
The above Acts and the provisions within them are used to arrest and prosecute people for various speech- and communication-related offences. Because the above legislation is vague, subjective, and (with the exception of the Online Safety Act 2023) drafted in an era before the internet existed or was widely used, these Acts are prime examples of bad law, even outside of the political issues we might take with them. This gives the police and judiciary the power to decide which ‘offences’ are selectively enforced, and, in the case of the Public Order Act 1986, even gives this power to the government itself (as deployed by Keir Starmer after Southport).
Some will try to argue that, because the United Kingdom is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and incorporates this into domestic law via the Human Rights Act 1998, free speech is protected. Unfortunately, this is false. Article 10 of the ECHR states the following:
‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.’
However, this is a qualified right, and is subject to national restrictions and limitations, as laid out in domestic law:
‘The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.’
It is this qualification that gives the police and judiciary, using the above Acts of Parliament, the ability to restrict and criminalise certain forms of speech, communication, and expression. The free speech protections under Article 10 of the ECHR are nowhere near as stringent or comprehensive as something like the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which reads much more broadly and has been vigorously defended by the US Supreme Court:
‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’
– Pimlico Journal
But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defence spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defence spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.
In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.
– Jonny Ball writing What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong
The shape of England’s local government this morning is one that neither of the governing parties of the previous century would recognise.
Reform controls councils across a geography that would have seemed fantastical three years ago: the coalfields of Yorkshire and the North East; the post-industrial heartlands of the West Midlands; the prosperous Essex commuter belt; a London borough; the county halls of ancient Conservative shires. The party that did not exist at a local level in 2022 is now the second largest force in English local government.
Labour has lost control of towns it has governed since the age of Harold Wilson. The Conservatives have lost county councils they held through Thatcher and Major and every convulsion since. Both parties are being eliminated simultaneously, Labour in the post-industrial north and midlands, Conservatives in the shires, by the same insurgency operating through different electoral vintages in different places.
The political establishment consoled itself after 2025 with explanations about protest votes and mid-term difficulty and the challenges of governing. Those explanations have not survived 2026. The protest vote does not win fifty-eight of seventy-five seats in Sunderland. The mid-term difficult does not take Wakefield from a party that held it for half a century. Something more fundamental has changed, and the thirds system means that those councils still holding on by accumulated history will find out, in twelve months, what Wakefield found out on Thursday.
The tide is still rising. The next wave is already dated.
– Gawain Towler
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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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