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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The subject of public disorder seems strangely topical, as I’m writing as rioting in France quietens down. Events in Paris and elsewhere have, inevitably, prompted a number of “what if?” comparisons with the UK. Our tradition of protest is significantly different from that of continental Europe, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be complacent. On the other hand, nor is it necessarily a reason for panicky chief constables and sly mandarins to litigate for mega-forces, national police services and gendarmeries.
– Dominic Adler, discussing Blighty’s recent history of crowds kicking off. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.
One is we’ve just let state spending drift up too high. It’s 10 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than it was in the early Blair era. That in itself is enough to take 1% off growth, probably. Second, the markets are all gummed up. All our markets of all kinds are simply gummed up, over-regulated massively compared to where we were 20 or 30 years ago. The third bit of it, I think, is less economic and more cultural. I think it’s about the erosion of the sense of the British nation state’s political project – that we are all one country together, all pulling in the same sort of direction.
– David Frost
In the course of a fairly long working life I have seen the newspaper as an institution grow from small things to very great things. It has grown with the growth of popular government in the country. I don’t think that is a mere coincidence. The one can hardly exist without the other. A free Press is essential to the working of the modern democratic State. A democracy uninformed is a blind giant, who may destroy the very things which he ought most to value, and who may end by destroying himself. The first act of a tyranny is to suppress or shackle the Press. Let us never forget that the liberty of unlicensed printing is the foundation of all our liberties.
– C. P. Scott on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1926.
Scott was celebrating 55 years of editing the then Manchester Guardian. One can only wonder what he would think of Ofcom etc let alone the modern-day Guardian’s support for it.
Nixon incurred a generation’s outrage and mockery for insisting to interviewer David Frost that, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump, within the first month of his second term, asserted on social media that, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a formulation frequently attributed to Napoleon. When asked the previous month by The New York Times whether there were any constraints on his power, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” These statements are much closer to reality than they were during his first term, thanks to a 2024 Supreme Court decision, Trump v. United States, granting presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions for the exercise of “core constitutional powers,” plus lesser forms of immunity for “official acts.”
– Matt Welch gives the POTUS a kicking.
“The funniest thing I’ve ever heard is that the kids are rioting in Paris because of ‘educational inequality’. I was taught in classes of 30 in wooden huts so cold you could see your breath in winter, but it never occurred to me to burn down the town hall. This isn’t a ‘legitimate expression of rage’, it is a pathology, evidence that the whole of Europe – not just France – has a cancer, of which violence and decay are merely the symptoms. Our tumour is bad philosophy. It has been growing for years.”
– Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph (£)
Once you realise part of Patriot Platform’s operating model is that of a parapolitical soap opera, with feuds, beefs and big characters… it starts to make more sense. And, ofc, this type of politics turns on making a pound note, as Tommy Robinson’s many detractors have shown. And I’m hardly Nick Lowles, but evidence is evidence. There’s an entire ecosystem of influencers, “auditors” and YouTubers making a living peddling ragebait. The police? They’re extras in Danny Tommo’s ongoing structured reality TV show.
– Dominic Adler
The green transition was paid for in roubles, and the people who signed the cheques sat in the chancellery, not on the fringes. When Donald Trump warned the UN General Assembly in 2018 that Germany was making itself dependent on Russian energy, the German delegation was filmed smirking. Merz now tells a British Prime Minister that Russia’s friends sit on the AfD benches. Russia’s most useful friends in Germany wore SPD and CDU rosettes, and they were doing exactly what RT asked.
And look how it turned out. Labour went into the 2024 election promising to ban fracking for good. The Bowland shale stays where it is. Britain buys gas from Norway’s pipelines and from tankers out of Qatar and Texas, at whatever price the world sets that winter. Whether or not Moscow lifted a finger, it got exactly the British energy policy RT spent years asking for, and Burnham’s government is the one delivering it.
So here’s a question for the next time he walks into Number 10 asking what the Russians have been up to. Not the referendum. Ask about the shale.
– Gawain Towler
Tim Stanley is a historian by trade, and the author of Whatever Happened to Tradition? — a book subtitled History, Belonging and the Future of the West.
It was something of a surprise, then, to hear him tell attendees at a Conservative Party conference fringe event last week that “the country has changed”, and that “you are not going to reverse that”. Stanley went further still, declaring himself “pleased to see that the right accepts that change and has changed with it”; in his view, “it would be regressive and immoral to try to reverse what has happened.”
He was, of course, talking about the seismic demographic changes which have taken place in this country over the past few decades, against the express wishes of the British people. Indeed, the changes which have taken place over the past few decades represent the biggest demographic change in these islands since the migration of the Anglo-Saxons a millennium and a half ago.
– George Baker
Which in turn causes me to recall a remark made by Chesterton:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
– G.K. Chesterton
Ostensibly, modern states have an unassailable advantage against the mass of the population. Where once the mob could reasonably threaten to tear the king from his castle, today the state has overwhelming military superiority against the disarmed population. Speaking in terms of leverage, the state seemingly has the winning hand: it is the sole provider of security, public goods, infrastructure, and the enforcement of contracts — and every member of the public is dependent upon it for these services. A truly praetorian modern state, therefore, should possess a kind of escalation dominance which guarantees its victory in any standoff.
The state’s position, however, is weaker than it might first seem. The sheer size of modern states precludes the possibility of true praetorianism, which requires not only that the state, as an organisation, be technically independent from the population, but also that the people who make it up have a coherent and separate identity which preserves that independence at every level of its operation. An organisation consisting of millions of people cannot achieve this kind of unity, and indeed the vast majority of people who deliver the state’s capabilities at the ground level do not see themselves as parts of a defined organisation, but simply as people like any other who collect a paycheck that happens to come from the government. Such de-corporatised agents of the state cannot always be relied upon to favour the interests of the institution over those of dissenting factions within the population, with whom they may share certain identities or even personal connections.
– Pimlico Journal
The first was the Church of England, which tore its liturgical and theological inheritance in tatters and now presides over a moral irrelevance in the life of the nation. The grandest was the Bank of England. In May 1997 a Labour government handed control of interest rates to unelected officials, and Paul Tucker, later the Bank’s deputy governor, has noted the irony that it took a government of the left to do what the right had long talked about.⁵² The courts followed. In his 2019 Reith Lectures Jonathan Sumption, recently retired from the Supreme Court, described foreign policy, military operations and the prerogative powers of the Crown having “one by one yielded to the power of judges”.⁵³ His critics say he exaggerates, and Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project has spent a decade arguing about where the line should sit, but nobody disputes the direction of travel.
Then came the quangos. The number of central government public bodies rose from 474 in January 2015 to 603 in January 2025.⁵⁴ Last month a Cabinet Office minister told the Commons there were 306 arm’s-length bodies, a third of them due for reform, while a Conservative MP put the true figure at over 400, spending more than £390 billion a year, one pound in every three the government spends.⁵⁵ The definitions are as slippery as the numbers. What none of these bodies has to do is face an election. Cobbett would have recognised the arrangement at once, and so would Wade. In 2023–24 at least 343 quango staff were paid more than £200,000.⁵⁶ We’ve just stopped calling them sinecures.
Its enemies have a name for this world. The Blob.
– Gawain Towler demonstrating once again that Reform really do understand the shape and nature of the enemy. A long read that is well worth your time.
Why are such “small” sites not viable for the large developers? More pertinently perhaps, why are there not small developers who choose to build on sites of such scale? Because the bureaucracy – that interminable fight through the local council to gain planning, the demands for most of the profit to arrive as social housing and on and on – means that no small scale builder can survive. It’s necessary to be operating at a large scale to pay for all of that. You simply have to be a large organisation, building at scale, to be able to afford the army of your own bureaucrats necessary to fight the state.
So, abolish that bureaucracy and small scale builders will reappear and those 850,000 homes will be built.
850,000 houses missing in London alone. That’s what the current planning system denies us all. Probably a good idea to fire the bureaucrats and have the houses instead.
– Tim Worstall
Wales deserves a closer look. Turnout was 50.1 per cent. Yes won by 559,419 to 552,698, a margin of 6,721 votes, settled only when Carmarthen declared last. Barely a quarter of the Welsh electorate voted for the body that now sits in Cardiff Bay as the Senedd. In 2011 a further referendum gave it primary lawmaking powers on a turnout of 35.6 per cent.
Nobody now argues that a 0.6 per cent margin on half a turnout denied the Assembly its legitimacy. Devolution’s supporters treat that September night as the founding act of modern Welsh democracy, and they are entitled to. But the principle has to run both ways. If one in four Welsh electors can found a legislature, then 17.4 million votes on a 72.2 per cent turnout, the largest vote for anything in British history, cannot be treated as provisional.
– 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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