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.
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Some note-worthy observations and comparisons in no particular order:
– Sikh leaders have come out to condemn the behaviour of the offender and his family and to show their support for the victim. This contrasts noticeably with Muslim leaders after a Muslim atrocity, where the emphasis is on disowning the perpetrator and pretending he wasn’t really one of them
– The murder does not appear to religiously inspired. This was a murder by someone who happens to be Sikh. There is no suggestion that he thought his actions were justified by his religion.
– That Sikhs have cover for going about armed is largely irrelevant to most knife crime. Removing daggers from law-abiding Sikhs is not going to stop murderers from carrying knives.
– The lack of concern by the police for the victim is palpable. Derek Chauvin, however, had already called for the ambulance before he and his team had to restrain George Floyd. They continued to beg for the ambulance to arrive all the way through the incident.
– The resulting angry crowds are not burning down shops and looting. Sikh temples are not being attacked: their anger is directed – correctly – at the police.
– No-one in authority has taken the knee.
– The Pedant-General summarising the situation rather well.
To which I would add to anyone saying this horror should not be politicised: the incident is intrinsically political.
Why? Because the incident centres not just on the murder itself and murderer’s use of the word-of-power ‘racist‘, but also on the subsequent actions of the police, who responded to that word-of-power as the user intended them to.
So, this is all political because the police are the literal enforcers of the state’s will, responding as they have been trained to respond. This is a consequence of decades of establishment policy decisions by both Labour and ‘Conservative’ governments, a product of politically directed institutional police culture.
“When one your tribe is murdered, I call for calm and unity because that is according to your principles; when one of my tribe is murdered, I call for protests and riots because that is according to my principles.”
– Alice Smith on the stark difference between reactions to the deaths of Henry Novak and George Floyd. She’s paraphrasing Frank Herbert.
But tell me, there’s no “National White Police Association” in the UK, so why is there a “National Black Police Association” and a “National Association of Muslim Police” in the UK?
A poll showing Reform ahead of Labour among trade unionists is being treated as a bombshell. It should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Anyone, that is, except the union leadership.
[…]
Danny Kruger understood this before most. His public conversations with the leadership of the PCS and the National Education Union, in which he made perfectly plain to them that a Reform government would not be conducting its relationships with the civil service unions on the terms to which they had become accustomed. A Reform Government will not be bullied, and will apply the law. As we can now see he was directing his comments to people whose members, in significant numbers, might well vote for him. The officers sit there with their lanyards and their institutional memories and their absolute confidence that the working class would do as it was directed. The members, meanwhile, were doing something else entirely.
This is the structural problem that no amount of emergency press releases will solve. The union movement in Britain has, over the course of a generation, undergone a quiet transformation that its leadership has been careful not to notice. The headquarters of the major unions are populated, to a remarkable degree, by people who have spent their entire careers in the union movement. Many went straight from university to a union research department or political officer role and have not left. They are committed, intelligent, and hardworking. They are also, by inclination, temperament, and life experience, entirely disconnected from the people they purport to represent.
– Gawain Towler, who really has been blogging up a storm lately over on Fainting in Coils
Against this, the Restore case. Their central claim, repeated by Rupert Lowe and echoed across social media by his more vigorous supporters, is that all Labour figures are the same, Reform and the Tories are essentially equivalent: that it is all the uniparty, that there is nothing meaningfully to choose between them. I have to say, with respect, that this is patently and provably untrue. Reform’s record in local government, its positions on immigration, on Net Zero, on civil liberties, on the democratic accountability of public institutions, represents a genuine and substantive break from the political consensus of the last thirty years. One may argue about pace, emphasis, internal culture. One may not, in good conscience, argue that there is no difference between a party committed to rolling back mass illegal immigration and a party that presided over it.
– Gawain Towler
“If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down. That would rule out what might be seen as a natural trajectory from less successful to more successful, or from early struggle to affluent independence, perhaps involving personal resourcefulness or a climb up a professional ladder.”
And:
“Personal achievement and self-improvement are among the greatest satisfactions life has to offer. The possibility of moral agency and the scope for taking individual responsibility are probably the defining attributes of emotional maturity.”
– Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph.
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
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