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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In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”.
The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’.
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them.
I recognised the moment for what it was. A rite of passage, and an attempt to place a boundary around my speech. Informing her as I did so, I reached for my phone and began recording, as much for posterity as for evidence.
This is not good enough, says Ofcom. It wants, it seems, pre-emptive powers to block access to sites operating anywhere in the world, should they be deemed harmful to people in the UK.
This is authoritarian nonsense on any number of levels. For one thing, it moves noticeably towards a Great British Firewall, like that used in China. We should also worry that an unelected agency is spending its time digging around the internet looking for material it would like to stop us seeing. Admittedly, we are told that the issue here is material that’s harmful to children and sites such as suicide forums. But it is a racing certainty that any such powers, if given, will be invoked to go well beyond suicide forums.
Equally, it’s not clear whether Ofcom wants these powers to extend to blocking sites to users across the globe. A recent Ofcom update on a suicide site clearly suggests it sees a UK geoblock as insufficient. This really would bring us into cloud-cuckoo-land. No national regulator, whether it comes from the UK, China or Burkina Faso, has any business censoring the global internet.
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.
The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the families of the victims of horrific crime always express the same concern, word for word, every time. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the “specially-trained” officers who support them.
The business secretary, Peter Kyle, has told UK pension funds to “get off their high horses” and invest in Britain or be forced to do so by law.
Expressing frustration at the level of investment in British companies after years of government initiatives, Kyle said the UK’s biggest asset managers “should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success”.
“I don’t think mandation is ideal in any circumstances. But I’ll use it if I have to, because I’m in a rush,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of an event at Lloyds Banking Group’s headquarters in London, he said he was “fed up” with being asked by the City to tweak regulations to boost investment in the UK economy, only to see a lack of investment follow government reforms.
“Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not,” he said.
“They are representing British savers. And so they should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success. And not just sitting aside from the economy, in a walled-off garden. They are out there with the rest of us. They need to get off their high horses.”
Yes, the pension funds are representing British savers. Which means the only duty those pension fund managers should “feel” is the duty they have by law; their fiduciary duty to those savers to invest those savers’ money in the way that is best for those savers. Not best for Britain-as-a-whole, and certainly not some politician’s pet project that nobody in their right minds would risk tuppence on if they were not forced to do it. Best for those savers. Because it is their money. Sorry to labour that point, but it is a point Labour seem to have difficulty absorbing.
And you won’t make Britain a success by forcing people to “invest” (what a lie that word is) in the way the Government tells them to. Britain’s historical success was built on being one of the few countries where people could invest their money as seemed best to them.
Did you notice the mafia-like threat in Peter Kyle’s words “Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not”?
Kyle has form on that. This time last year, when he was Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, he said that to question the Online Safety Act is to side with child abusers. His specific target was Nigel Farage, but he applied the same sentiment to everyone. In his own words,
“I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?”
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration?
Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive.
[…]
All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want.
As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive.
The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.
The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.
Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door.
This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground. Too many, stretched by work and time pressures, would rather outsource that responsibility – first to big tech as both the playmate and the nanny, and ultimately to the state to act as Big Brother.
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But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
Further work by the same scientists along with other people’s studies show that persuasive methods do exist. They don’t change everyone’s minds, but they can make enough difference to win elections and build a kinder, fairer, greener country. These techniques are known as “deep canvassing”.
Deep canvassing works only if you have a large army of volunteers, ideally from the community you’re trying to reach. Instead of delivering a message then scuttling away, as conventional canvassers do, their role is to connect and listen. Across conversations that might last for 10 or 20 minutes, they let people discuss their feelings. Then, without arguing or judging, they share their own experiences and ask questions (“have you ever been treated unfairly?”) that might reveal common ground.
Done honestly, non-judgmental listening is an excellent idea. “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”, as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus once said.
Far though Mr Monbiot’s political beliefs are from mine, I acknowledge that on several occasions he has demonstrated both honesty and a willingness to listen, by publicly stating that he had changed his views in directions that made him unpopular with his fellow Greens. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident, he surprised many by saying that he had changed his mind in favour of nuclear power, and, so long ago that I cannot find the reference, he realised that the policy of autarky that the Greens then recommended for the UK was equivalent to the sanctions on Iraq that they were denouncing, and said so in public. Unfortunately, as it did for a lot of people, the Covid-19 pandemic de-magnetised his moral compass and in 2021 he came out in favour of censorship, writing an article called “Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them”.
Censorship and seeking to listen “without arguing or judging” are matter and anti-matter; they cannot coexist. To censor is to judge certain opinions as so pernicious that they must be suppressed. In the world that Mr Monbiot has said he wants, if one of the people “exhausted with politics” to whom he is listening were to express the anti-vax views that a lot of such people hold, his next action would be to report them to the police. In our world – in our Britain – there are plenty of opinions about migrants and transgender people that are widespread among the alienated masses that when expressed have resulted in state punishment, ranging from sending the police round to issue a “friendly warning” (for most of my life I thought that sort of thing only happened in dictatorships), through people being forbidden to access social media without the permission of their police minder and having their devices seized, up to arrest and jail. Even if Mr Monbiot were to bind himself during his radical listening sessions by something like the seal of the confessional, the mind that holds it to be desirable to legally suppress certain bad opinions cannot hear expressions of those opinions without categorising them as crimes that it is not convenient to punish right now.
Three quarters of a century ago in 1956, Chairman Mao Zedong – whose name was then usually romanised as Mao Tse-Tung – launched the “Hundred Flowers campaign”. Under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”, the communist authorities proclaimed that from now on they would no longer punish critics. All would be free to speak, the better to promote new ideas to improve China.
Tentatively at first, some did offer their criticisms. When nothing bad happened, the trickle became a flood. Then, having established who their critics were, the communists arrested them and sent them to labour camps.
The way in which they miss the point, is exactly why Labour does. It describes a desire for democratic control of institutions as a ‘dark path’ yet simultaneously support a party that is bringing in Digital ID, curtailing jury trials and the rest. We are on a dark path already.
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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