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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I have to confess, as an ignorant inhabitant of North America, that I don’t really understand the current press scandal in the U.K., and I was hoping that perhaps someone could enlighten me.
As I understand it, a number of members of the press committed crimes in the course of gathering material for stories — that is, they committed acts that were already illegal, and which already carried substantial penalties.
It would therefore seem that preventing such acts in the future would require nothing more than diligently enforcing existing law.
I’m therefore curious as to what purpose is articulated for ending freedom of expression in the U.K.
Is it claimed that the laws were not being enforced before on the powerful? Then surely the new restrictions on freedom will be selectively enforced as well, with only the weak being stifled. (That is, of course, universal — the powerful never need permission to do anything. Freedom is a protection for the weak, the strong need no protection.)
Is it claimed that performing criminal acts was somehow insufficiently illegal? Is it claimed that the existing laws against criminal conspiracies are not already broad, vague and all-encompassing?
All too frequently, when it is discovered that merely making acts illegal is insufficient to prevent them from happening, rather than trying to see to it that existing law is enforced, the craven panderers to the outraged (by which I mean our supposedly elected masters) simply propose to make a crime doubly illegal, triply illegal, or quadruply illegal, as though multiplying the number of ways in which some act is forbidden is a magically all-potent and riskless remedy.
Anyway, to return to my original question: as someone who (for once) lives in a sane country, that is to say a place where there is a near-absolute protection for freedom of speech and the press which is beyond being destroyed for the political expediency of the moment, and who is not immersed in the discussion of the bout of temporary insanity now gripping your island in the Atlantic, might I ask what the point claimed here is? What is the putative purpose of making things that were illegal before even more illegal? Is there one, or is this just an exercise in appeasing a bunch of outspoken members of the professionally offended classes?
In other news, it would appear that the “Conservative” party believes that the housing market in the U.K. is insufficiently distorted and in danger of reverting to market principles. To prevent that, the new budget contains provisions to assure that there will be malinvestment, bank bailouts, and direct state losses from mortgage defaults for years to come.
I confess to being impressed. It is normal for politicians to fail to learn from history, but here they’ve managed to forget even 2008. Well done, gentlemen, well done!
Chancellor extends home-buying schemes
There is a very interesting article over on dropsafe about several people meeting with #HackedOff this evening regarding the Leveson Royal Charter… ie state regulation of the news in Britain.
To say Alec was not impressed would be a masterly understatement:
There’s a reason that I don’t like politics and prefer coding. Coding is clean. Politics at this level is not compromise, and it’s not about other peoples’ compromises either; it’s more like trying to waft the farts of other peoples’ compromises in a general direction which you hope will be least offensive to people you care about but who will definitely be impacted.
This will not end well.
The thingie below was kindly sent to me by Guido Fawkes.
Sign the petition and tell them to Blog Off!
“Bent British newspaper hacks are indeed a curse. Nobody anywhere in the world thinks Britain’s tabloid press does a good job. But the slimiest, most gin-sodden Fleet Street hack who ever lived isn’t as dangerous to Britain as the bland, responsible, respectable people who decided to set up a government-backed press board. Britain can thrive in the 21st century, but it will surely fail if the British people allow their brain dead but well groomed establishment free rein.”
From The American Interest.
The eroding liberty of the UK is getting noticed.
Just to weigh in with my tuppence on the UK attempt to regulate the media, which is proving to be grimly fascinating in the manner of a slow-motion car accident, this item by the Guardian newspaper points out that the local UK media, such as regional newspapers and the like, could be crippled by the prospect of “exemplary” damages and a cumbersome complaints procedure.
It is, I suppose, a bit late in the day for a leftist newspaper such as the Guardian to notice that heavy regulatory moves weigh particularly on smaller firms. That sometimes is the point – so that big firms can flourish. Notice how bigger firms tend to be more pro-European Union than smaller ones, for example.
In the UK’s financial sector, the wealth advisory industry has been put under what is called the “Retail Distribution Review”, which is designed to stamp out use of commission on sales and force up standards for advisors. A result has been that hundreds of advisors have gone out of business, or been forced to sell their firms to rivals, and so forth. The cost of purchasing financial advice has risen, putting it out of reach of often the very people who need it the most. Result!
There comes a point where one grows weary of fighting against this period of sustained lunacy. When an entire political establishment, such as the current one in the UK, feels determined to lash out, the results are terrible. Eventually, one hopes, this nonsense might get overturned, as may happen as court cases concerning the press regulation show it to be the pile of dog-mess that it is. Nick Cohen explains what a legal minefield this will be.
There appears to be no clear idea of what sort of internet-based publications will be affected. I suspect that those organisations that are not already hosted outside the UK will move, as will some of the people involved. The UK government has, along with the the opposition side, just given another reason for anyone with a love of liberty to get out of here while they still can. People overseas have noticed what a joke the UK is becoming on this issue. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Mr Obama ideas.
If asked which groups posed the greatest threat to individual liberty in modern Britain, I would unhesitatingly cite two groups. These groups are, broadly, the medical profession and those who are generally called ‘celebrities’ – pop stars, film stars and so on.
– “Whig”, at the Adam Smith Institute blog.
Nick Cohen is that rare and admirable thing, a genuinely liberal left-winger. Here he is in full flow today in The Observer:
We are in the middle of a liberal berserker, one of those demented moments when “progressives” run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend. Inspired by Lord Justice Leveson, they are prepared in Parliament tomorrow to sacrifice freedom of speech, freedom of the press and fair trials. They are prepared to allow every oppressive dictatorship on the planet to say: “We’re only following the British example” when outsiders and their own wretched citizens protest.
A rant worth reading. Do.
Something that Mr Cohen doesn’t cover is that, we too, appear about to be regulated. Parliament is not just abridging the freedom of the press, but of the web too. As Guido Fawkes explains regulation looks likely to cover not just Fleet Street (if that were not bad enough), but:
“relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: (a) a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or (b) a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)
(My emphasis.) That means ALL the blogging commentariat there, almost all charities and campaigning organisations of every political stripe who publish news comment or press releases or highlight particular stories on their websites, and maybe your personal site, too.
Once you’ve read what Messrs Cohen and Staines have to say, you might feel like commenting on the news yourself. If you live in Britain an email to your MP, especially if he or she is a Labour or LibDem MP, might be worth the effort. You can write to them – including the ones who will only take a fax – easily from the site of the same name: writetothem.com Do so before they vote on the proposals.
The three main parties are all deciding how they will kill off the last vestiges of freedom of the press in Britain.
Ed Miliband was hoping to sit down with David Cameron and Nick Clegg later on Tuesday or Wednesday to agree a historic new deal which would see newspapers regulated like the BBC.
We will know soon enough exactly how they will do this, but do it they will. And you can be sure they will present it as protecting freedom of the press.
Yesterday, I took this photograph in Holborn, London, advertising the (Australian influenced?) cuisine of this pub:
Click to enlarge, and then note the horse burger. It’s starting to look as if the main long-term effect of the Great Horse Meat Scandal upon Britain is that the British diet will be expanded. The politicians huff and puff. We get to discover how good horse can taste (that being a piece that was linked to by Instapundit yesterday).
Healthy life expectancy is shorter in the UK than abroad
People in the UK enjoy fewer years of good health before they die than the citizens of most comparable European countries as well as Australia and Canada, a major report shows.
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said Britain’s performance was “shocking” compared with that of other countries, and called for action to turn it around by local health commissioners, who are about to take up their new responsibilities.
The UK ranked 12th out of 19 countries of similar affluence in 2010 in terms of healthy life expectancy at birth, according to a detailed analysis from the Global Burden of Disease data collected by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle.
Despite big increases in funding for the NHS in recent years and many reform initiatives, the UK was in exactly the same place as in the league table for 1990, according to the IHME report, published in the Lancet medical journal.
Emphasis added. The report’s authors, and the Guardian article from which I quote, are at pains to say that
the problem is only in part to do with hospital care – much of it is about the way we live. Our diet, our drinking and continuing smoking habits all play a part
In other words, Britain’s relatively poor average life expectancy partly is to do with NHS hospital care, but they would rather not say so. As for the remainder of the problem that is not caused directly by the failings of the NHS, I wonder if the report’s authors have considered the possibility that the “despite” might be a “because”? Why do the British do worse than other nationalities of similar wealth when it comes to living an unhealthy lifestyle? It is no answer to just say “culture”; why is our culture as it is? Have we always been thus? We have a long tradition of getting drunk, I grant you, but my impression is that the British were not considered any fatter or any more drug-addled than comparable nations a few decades ago… before 1947, let us say for the purposes of discussion.
It is often said that one of the great blessings of the NHS is that it has lessened the fear of illness. The fact that they do not have additional worries about costs or insurance does come to those already worried about illness as a huge relief, and NHS-sceptics like me have to engage with that, sometimes in our own lives. So let us do so. I submit the hypothesis that a certain amount of fear of getting ill is salutary – both in the general sense of producing a beneficial effect and in the more specific, and original, sense of promoting health.
Naturally, I speak here of averages over a large population. Many illnesses cannot be avoided by human action; that is what insurance is for. When considering any one individual, I doubt that when making the many small bad decisions that have the cumulative effect of making him or her unhealthy, “hey, I don’t have to worry about paying for healthcare” often comes consciously to mind. But, like the proverbial mills of God, the mills of incentives grind slow but they grind exceeding small. In some countries those many small decisions take place under the shadow of “I might end up with a bill for this”. In Britain they do not. My hypothesis might go some way to explaining Britain’s anomalously poor average health. Something must explain it.
By the way, I shall take it as read that every human being has a perfect right to eat, drink, smoke and inject as he or she pleases. I shall also take it as read that the authors of the report and 95% of its readers wish to deny others that right. If the hypothesis above is correct, Britain has set up a system that, besides the inherent wrong of being based on coercion, removes one of the incentives for people to take care of their own health. How to solve that? More coercion, of course.
“If you want to revisit the 1970s, you no longer need a history book or a time machine. All that’s required is a collection of today’s newspapers – Right- or Left-leaning, it matters little – together with a regular infusion of BBC agitprop. With a few notable exceptions, all seem to gravitate around a tediously predictable banker-bashing, anti-profit, bonus-hating, anti-big-business agenda which spins us 40 years back in time to one of the lowest points in British history. What goes around comes around, I suppose, so with inflation perking up again, it can surely only be a matter of time before the Government brings back a fully blown Prices Commission. I exaggerate, of course, but only to make the point.”
– Jeremy Warner
He is broadly right, of course. Some of the “banker bashing”, though, has even come from the free market side of the fence, such as from the likes of Professor Kevin Dowd – who is known around these parts – making the point that banks operating with the implicit guarantee from the state and cheap money have been able to let their normally healthy instincts run amok. Alas, most of the attacks have focused on their allegedly big bonuses, which while it does not miss the mark entirely, is not really central to why we got into our current mess.
And Warner is interesting on how an energy sector, which has its problems, will not be in good shape if we keep hitting bank finance. There is another issue, meanwhile. What we might be seeing is a mixture of “junk science” (the notions that are leading us to turn our backs on cheap or at least reliable energy) and “junk money” (Quantitative Easing, etc).
It is interesting that he argues that there is a 1970s feel about the UK at the moment. He is right, although the private sector does not have the union militancy of back then, and the Cold War is over, and globalisation, for all its ups and downs, has taken more hold to the immense benefit of countries such as India and China. I see little sign of a move back to the 1970s in Asia.
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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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