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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News reaches us from Dundee, of a lady, Carly Mackie, who thought that she could have her cake and eat it, by parking on another’s land and ignoring the notices demanding the payment due in exchange. Having ignored around 200 such notices, she was taken to the Sheriff court and the Pursuer (Plaintiff/Claimant) won a tidy £24,500 (c. USD 30,400).
Well Carly, it’s your party and you can cry if you want to, but the Sheriff would be unmoved.
Sheriff George Way ruled: ‘[Miss Mackie] has, in my judgment, entirely misdirected herself on both the law and the contractual chain in this case.’
He added that the company had a valid contract and residents in the area had a ‘legitimate interest arising from their title to the land to protect their property and amenity’. The sheriff continued: ‘Parking is not only an amenity but a valuable commodity in modern life.’
Well, he might have said: “The Defender was a trespasser, the Pursuer offered to let her park there if she agreed a fee, she did so, and so the fee is due.“.
However, a Conservative MSP has, we are told, chipped in:
Tory MSP Murdo Fraser has highlighted the distress caused by ‘bully-boy’ tactics, including the threat of court action, increased fines and damage to an individual’s credit rating.
The bully-boy? This was a woman parking on other’s land. Court action is there as the lawful way to prove a claim, and the credit rating? Who (sensibly) would lend money to Miss Mackie now? She clearly seems to think that debts are optional.
The Daily Mail has its own view.
The Dundee case is thought to be the first in Scotland involving a private parking firm and a member of the public – and lawyers say it could open the floodgates in a sector that is notoriously poorly regulated.
Yes, what regulations are there to stop people trespassing? What regulations are there to stop people from breaking contracts, such as an agreement by conduct to pay a fee for parking on land without prior permission? Do tell. Or perhaps let us stick with this private system of offer and acceptance.
It’s nice to know that out there, some judges sit, like spiders, waiting for a buzzing fly to land in their web. Can we have a bit more of this please, it might help to rebuild faith in the law?
As the Daily Telegraph said on Tuesday – the government has got things the wrong way round on European Union regulations.
The position should be that all E.U. regulations on our domestic (internal) life are void when we leave the E.U. – unless it can be shown that a specific regulation serves a useful purpose (I would be very hard to convince on that point).
Sadly the government is saying “we will incorporate all the regulations into British law – and then decide which regulations we want to repeal later”.
That is the wrong way round – the burden of proof should be the other way round.
– Paul Marks
Surely now, no-one can doubt that the EU is so much more than a set of laws regulating trade and commerce? Why did so many UK politicians try and pretend this was just a business or commercial arrangement? As this declaration reminds us in a timely way, at the heart of the EU is the strong desire to create a single country. It will have common borders, one currency, one foreign policy and one social policy. It will have its own energy policy, its own transport policy. Indeed, it has much of that already. It is only those who refuse to read EU documents who can think otherwise.
– John Redwood MP, referring to “The Rome Declaration” of EU states drawn up a week ago, which he says shows a clear intent to create a single European state, from which the UK has today, via the Article 50 process, begun to extricate itself.
Of course, England has been here before. The EU (that’s the Pope and the whole of Catholic Europe) excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and barred all trade with us; not even a WTO-terms deal, only a bit of state-sanctioned piracy and smuggling kept us going. In reaction we went further afield to find new trade partners and accidentally founded the British Empire, established dominance of the seas and oceans and led the world in trade and commerce. They did us a favour, really.
– Raedwald, taking a few liberties but making a great point 😀
It is possible to go through an entire education to PhD level in the very best schools and universities in the British system without any of your teachers or professors breathing the words “Friedrich Hayek”. This is a pity.
Hayek died 25 years ago today, yet his ideas are very relevant to the 21st century. He was the person who saw most clearly that knowledge is held in the cloud, not the head, that human intelligence is a collective phenomenon.
If Hayek is mentioned at all in academia, it is usually as an alias for Voldemort. To admire Hayek is to advocate selfishness and individualism. This could not be more wrong. What Hayek argued is that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the great feature of the market is that it enables us to work for each other, not just for ourselves; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress, but a hindrance.
– Matt Ridley
I like those elongated cakes with raisins in them referred to on the package as “finger madeleines with raisins”. A few days ago I purchased another stash of them, from the Afghan-run corner shop nearest to me.
They looked like this:
Sorry about the strange blue reflections of something blue in the transparent but shiny packaging, but it is important that you realise that this is a photo of these finger madeleines before I opened them.
Same sized package. Same price. But, six empty spaces where there used to be six finger madeleines. Twenty four finger madeleines instead of thirty finger madeleines.
We are seeing quite a lot of this in the UK just now. Soon the packages and/or the prices will change, but meanwhile, the quickest way to adapt in the short run is just to reduce the amount in the package.
Brexit is not proving to be an economic catastrophe, and I remain very optimistic about it in the longer run, that being why I voted for it. But it is proving something of a dislocation in the short run, if only because the sort of people whose job it was to foresee it mostly did not foresee it. I don’t blame them for this. I did not foresee Brexit either. I merely voted for it.
But Scottish nationalism is a blind and unreasoning beast, appeals to logic and sentiment will get us nowhere, and we should recognise this fact. If one seriously believes that the Scottish people are being oppressed and having their democratic rights trampled by the Evil English, or that they somehow lack their due influence in our nation’s government despite enjoying political devolution and autonomy far greater than that enjoyed by the UK’s most populous home nation, then a sensible discussion cannot be had.
– Samuel Hooper
If cutting that welfare state means that women are getting less out now then that obviously means that before the cuts to the welfare state then women were getting more out.
– Tim Worstall
I am becoming steadily more convinced that Mrs. May doesn’t believe anything, but by God she doesn’t believe it fiercely!
– Michael Jennings, of this and other parishes
Can the NHS be reformed? Or is major surgery required if it is to make a full recovery? We need to come up with much more radical reform than is currently being proposed. And if that doesn’t work, instead of accepting the somewhat back-to-front NHS version of TINA – in which we are told that there is no alternative to a welfare-state-era model of provision frankly unfit for the 21st century – we need to replace the NHS with something better.
According to Benedict Spence, writing in the Independent, ‘pretty much all of our European counterparts have a universal and in many cases much better healthcare system than the UK – and, horror of horrors, most European healthcare is what we would call “privatised”’. The UK is unusual among developing nations, he says, whose often social-insurance-based systems often perform better than ours (for example, in cancer survival rates). And yet, the defenders of the NHS remain ‘aggressively insular’.
– Dave Clements
Political correctness is not some sort of politeness, it is a cancer, a disease that eats away at society, allowing the poison to fester, for it stifles free speech and attempts to control our very thoughts, encouraging self-censorship. Freedom to speak means the freedom to offend and those so offended may respond in kind.
These days, if someone calls out “racist” or uses the terms such as “Islamophobe” or “homophobe” or some other variation, I switch off as they have labelled themselves as someone whose opinion I may safely ignore.
It’s nice to see that [Trevor] Phillips has finally seen the light, but the damage has been done and he was part of that.
– Longrider.
But I would respectfully take issue with the last line, which although undeniably correct, suggests a counterproductive sentiment. Nevertheless I strongly suspect from Longrider’s choice of title, Much Joy, that in truth he also sees this much as I do. And thus, although I am an atheist myself, this second quotation actually expresses my view rather well.
“I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”
Welcome to the fight, Trevor, let me show you to your place on the forward edge of the battle area.
After the Commons vote on Brexit last week, Davis is said to have approached Abbott for a kiss but apparently she told him to ‘fuck off’. Later, a Tory friend texted Davis to ask him about the incident. Davis texted back saying he hadn’t tried to kiss Abbott, and wouldn’t, because ‘I am not blind’. In short, he thinks Abbott is unattractive.
It is tempting at this point to say Davis’s text messages were crude. But that would be wrong, because the fact is they’re none of our business. He did not say these things for public consumption. It was an off-hand, matey remark of the kind all of us make via text or email or WhatsApp or whatever. That Davis’s texts were leaked doesn’t make it okay to haul him over the coals for them, to insist that he retract and repent, because this still amounts to shaming someone for a private conversation. The correct response to the texts would be to say: ‘This is not my concern. People can think and say whatever they like in private.’
Of course that hasn’t been the response, because such is the stifling intensity of the ‘You Can’t Say That!’ culture that now even private speech, glorified thoughts in essence, are considered fair game by the shut-it-down brigade.
– Brendan O’Neill
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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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