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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But here is the point, and it is the point Kruger’s £200 million should open rather than close. It is not just the unions. The unions are the visible tithe. The larger sum flows outward, to the charities, the NGOs and the grant-fed campaign groups that the state funds to lobby the state, and on this the indispensable work has been done by Charlotte Gill (go subscribe), who has spent years doing alone, unpaid and frequently abused what an entire national press corps could not be bothered to do. Her Woke Waste files are a public service. By her count the government handed £1.73 billion in grants to the charities she has analysed over five years, and £222 million of it went to twenty organisations working on asylum and migration, with £153 million to Migrant Help alone. These are not food banks. Many of them campaign, litigate and brief against the elected government’s stated policy, and then invoice it. The Home Office funds the bodies that sue the Home Office. The taxpayer pays for both sets of lawyers and is then told the resulting paralysis proves the system needs more money.
Put Gill’s ledger beside Kruger’s and the shape of the throne becomes visible. A permanent, salaried, pensioned class of activists, some inside the departments with union lanyards, some outside with charity numbers, all funded by the people whose votes they exist to frustrate. £200 million is the entry in the accounts. The true cost is every policy smothered, every removal blocked, every reform “reviewed” into dust.
The Tories knew all of it. Fourteen years, and the grants rolled out and the facility time rolled on, because the truth is they preferred a subsidised opposition to a fight. Kruger sat among them and watched, steam gently raising from his ears, which is precisely why his defection mattered and why his papers read like a man emptying his notebooks at last.
– Gawain Towler
The issue here is that taxes upon employment income end up being paid by the workers, not the employer. It’s wholly standard analysis that this is so, that the incidence of things like national insurance, social security, is on wages, not upon corporate profits.
Thus that entire £3.5 billion is a rise in taxation upon the wages of the workers. That’s just the way it works out.
If our rulers knew this and decided to do it anyway then I’d at least admire their sneakiness. But what worries me rather more is that peeps like Our Ange will be believing that the £3 billion does in fact come from the employers. You know, that they’re simply ignorant.
– Tim Worstall
“In the current Russian leadership’s rather 19th — though increasingly 21st — century view of how the world works, lesser powers must defer to great ones or pay the price. The UK, a country in a category all of its own when it comes to Kremlin resentments, has just been warned that it’s inline for such a punishment and I’m not sure that’s being taken seriously enough.”
– Marc Champion, columnist at Bloomberg ($).
The final sentence is a classic of masterly understatement.
Reform’s lack of history is what its enemies most enjoy pointing at, and they’re half right. We have no Butskellite settlement to draw on, no Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets from 1978 with our name on the cover, no forty-year archive of Fabian tracts to be mined and misremembered. We have a party that is, in policy terms, seven years old and in serious policy terms about two.
The page is blank, which is a double edged sword. A blank page has one great advantage. It owes nothing. There is no wing of the party that owns an economic orthodoxy and will sulk if it is departed from, no shadow of a previous government to be apologised for. Reform can walk down the corridor of every other party’s lockers and take whatever fits. Right to Buy was Margaret Thatcher’s. The two-child cap was George Osborne’s. The suitability test is older than either. A Conservative research department can’t do this. Every idea on its shelf has an owner objecting to its being moved. We have no shelf, so we have the run of everyone else’s, and the only question any idea has to answer is whether it will work, and whether it cleaves to our spine.
The other edge of the blade is that it has all had to be done at once, and at pace, with no institutional memory to fall back on. There is no cupboard of half-finished papers to raid. Every document has to be started from nothing, argued through, costed, tested and released, while the same people fight a by-election in Clacton, run a few dozen councils and answer the phone to the Times.
– Gawain Towler
I can answer this simply. William Shakespeare doesn’t send me a monthly letter threatening to send the boys round if I don’t give him money for something I don’t want, don’t need and don’t use.
However, less flippantly, the BBC’s bias is blindingly obvious to anyone who takes even a passing look. The most egregious recent example being the Trump edit. But even before that, we have a flat refusal to engage with anyone who dares to disagree with the climate hysteria. Their COVID coverage was not only dire; it was blatantly untrue and hysterical. At no point did they do any journalism and question the inflated death figures coming out of Downing Street via Half-Whitty.
– Longrider
In 2011, with the glass barely swept up after the London riots, the think tank Demos measured Britain’s pride in itself and found it obstinately intact. A net 74% of us were proud to be British. Last week Demos ran the ruler over us again. The figure is 47%. Pride in Britain’s role in the world stands at 13%. The BBC, which fifteen years ago enjoyed a net pride score of 48%, now sits at minus 11, meaning more Britons are ashamed of the Corporation than proud of it. That last number is, I suppose, at least evidence that the public can still see straight.
– Gawain Towler
Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.
– Rosalind Arden
“The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become `common goods and utilities.'”
– Ryan Bourne
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been accused of damaging scientific integrity after retracting a paper which suggested that Covid vaccines may have been to blame for some excess deaths during the pandemic.
In 2024, a group in the Netherlands published a paper in BMJ Public Health, warning that some pandemic deaths may have been caused by the indirect effects of containment measures and vaccination programmes, and calling for further investigation.
The work was peer reviewed for nine months, and accepted as accurate by the BMJ, the UK’s leading medical journal. However, it was retracted this week after a slew of complaints and an investigation by the Princess Máxima Centre in Utrecht, where three of the four authors worked.
The investigation found no evidence of malicious intent, fabrication or falsification of data, but still labelled the work as misleading and selective because it “did not reflect scientific consensus”, and had disproportionately focused on the negative effects of vaccination.
– Sarah Knapton (£)
The central fact of migration is that it is heavily path dependent, an idea laid out many years ago in Paul Collier’s Exodus. The number of people willing to move, in a world where travel is relatively cheap and safe, where wages are far higher elsewhere and established communities have already settled, is vast. This has already been illustrated by the natural experiment of North Cyprus, an unrecognised state in which citizens have the right to move to a richer country (Britain), and in which citizens of a poorer country (Turkey) have the right to move to. As a result, more Turkish Cypriots now live in Britain than in Cyprus, where they are outnumbered by Anatolian Turks.
– Ed West
But eventually one notices that the Tories cannot achieve the easy things either. They cannot stop the boats because the Blob is too powerful. They cannot build houses because the planning system is too powerful. They cannot cut spending because the Treasury is too powerful. They cannot reform the NHS because the NHS is too powerful. And now they cannot liberalise Soho because the Soho Society is too powerful. There is one common denominator here, folks: it is called the Conservative Party.
– John Hardy (£)
Standing at the fence I found myself asking what a Cochrane would do now, and the answer is uncomfortable, because the need for one is so plain. Our age has its Basque Roads, victories thrown away by commanders unwilling to close. It has its prize-court corruption in the procurement billions that vanish without a ship, a road or a reactor to show for them. Above all it has its Stock Exchange trials. Ask the sub-postmasters. Ask the infected blood families. The machine that ruined Cochrane, the machine that would rather destroy the innocent than admit error, has never been better fed. His modern heir would fight it as the original did, by knowing it better than its own officers. Cochrane was an engineer’s son and an inventor to his fingertips, and his heir would read a procurement database the way Cochrane read Spanish gunnery, as a system with a blind spot waiting to be boarded. He would use parliamentary privilege to name names. He would be unclubbable, immune to honours, indifferent to the lobby. And he would accept the price, to be ruined at least once, publicly and with relish, by the people he had frightened, and to come back over the prison wall.
– Gawain Towler
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