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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A large chunk of the Political Class is starting show all the signs of an entrenched deeply entitled group starting to smell the whiff of the great unwashed upwind of them.
My gawd, what might happen if people in the UK actually got a choice about the EU?
But of course anyone who thinks that Dave Cameron actually wants the UK out of the EU, in spite of mild bleeting about ‘renegotiation’, is quite frankly a wilfully blind fool. My only hope is that Dave is stupid enough to think that he can ride that particular wild horse and keep it under control and taking sugar from his hand without biting his fingers off.
Over at Neal Asher’s (more on him from me later, once I have finished his novel) blog, I see this entertaining Boris Johnson quote about fracking:
The extraction process alone would generate tens of thousands of jobs in parts of the country that desperately need them. And above all, the burning of gas to generate electricity is much, much cleaner – and produces less CO2 – than burning coal. What, as they say, is not to like?
In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news. Beware this new technology, they wail. Do not tamper with the corsets of Gaia! Don’t probe her loamy undergarments with so much as a finger — or else the goddess of the earth will erupt with seismic revenge. Dig out this shale gas, they warn, and our water will be poisoned and our children will be stunted and our cattle will be victims of terrible intestinal explosions.
Which is all very good except that, as Tim Worstall is forever pointing out, jobs are a cost. I can see why Boris, a politician, would see votes in talking up the thousands of jobs, but I hope he understands this. When he chooses between scheme A and scheme B, I would hope he does not pick the most expensive, more labour intensive one.
And it is unadulterated good news. The greens’ opposition to fracking may be working now, but the political will will be there the moment the first blackouts hit. So I do not imagine things will get much worse than that, and then there is enough energy for a few more technological revolutions.
One of Obama’s apparatchiks has said that Britain’s membership of the EU was in the American interest.
Two responses spring to mind.
The first was… So what? This remark was obviously aimed the the dismal British government but furthering ‘the American interest’ should be very low on the list of priorities of any government that is not located in Washington DC. So even if it was true (and frankly nothing could be further from the truth), this should be of trivial import to anyone in the Sceptred Isles.
The second was… ok, so how much are you willing to pay for that “US interest”? If the US interest is served by continued British membership of the sclerotic EU, then perhaps the hapless US taxpayer should get shafted for, oh, lets say 50% of the cost?
First you pay income tax. Then they pay some of it back as child benefit. Then you pay some of the child benefit back as the higher income child benefit charge.
It is difficult to accept the sincerity of the professed free market beliefs from the kind of Tory who rails against the permissiveness of our age; even on the purely economic side, the supposedly laissez-faire beliefs of some extreme Tory activists are barely skin-deep.
– Samuel Brittan, in 1969 reviewing ‘Freedom and Reality’ by Enoch Powell for ‘The Spectator’.* As true today as it was 40 years ago, sad to say. He goes on:
There is no evidence for putting Mr Powell in this latter category. But his economic liberalism is allied uneasily with an attachment to the nation state as the absolute political value. Most economic liberals, on the other hand, while conceding that Englishmen would naturally have a greater feeling for other Englishmen than Peruvians, regard the national interest as a function of the interests of the individuals who compose it, and are highly suspicious of supposedly superior collective entities. Indeed, once the supremacy of overriding national goals is admitted it is difficult to see what arguments there are against Mr Wilson, having been elected by a national majority, decreeing that an excessive consumption of candyfloss is against his conception of the British idea.
The latter was merely a philosophical fancy in 1969. Mr Wilson went out of his way to be photographed smoking. O tempora! O mores!
Let us revive the permissive society! [pic: Allan Warren]
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* [Reprinted in his 1973 book ‘Capitalism and the Permissive Society’ whose 40th anniversary calls for a series of quotations. Let us revive the permissive society!]
Two men dressed as Oompa-Loompas – characters from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – are being sought by police in Norwich after an attack in the heart of the city.
Look, I know that folk from East Anglia – where I come from – are used to being abused for being “in-bred” or having “webbed feet” and other silly nonsense, but to be accused of trying to commit crimes while dressed as Willy Wonka’s employees is a bit much. (Just in case anyone wonders, I am not making light of what might be a serious crime.)
Mind you, Norwich did used to have several chocolate factories. Oh well, it makes a change from reading about the US “fiscal cliff”. I promise to be a bit more productive on this site than I have been in recent months. 2012 was effing busy.
Steve Redgrave writes in the Telegraph (which may be inaccessible to overseas readers unless you delete the Telegraph cookie):
The 29 gold medals – not to mention the dozens of silvers and bronzes – won by Team GB not only defined the most spectacular year of sport I can remember, but completely overhauled how we are perceived as a nation.
Really? Who is this ‘we’ I wonder? I perceived Britain as a regulatory statist nation circling the drain with a smug grin on its collective and in-need-of-a-punch-in-its-Steven Fry face before the Olympics… and the preposterous and expensive spectacle has just reinforced that view.
Indeed the much trumpeted ‘success’ of the games just tries to stuff the economic damage they caused down the memory hole. But hey, in the final self congratulatory event, the establishment got to praise that ‘envy of the world’ that so few other nations seem to envy enough to emulate, the NHS, so no… the Olympics just reinforced my less than flattering view of Britain rather than ‘completely overhauling’ it.
While the default response to reading any government document is and must forever be “Bah humbug”, I must admit that, when reading the latest from the DCLG this Christmas Eve*, I am tempted to let slip a surreptitious “God bless us, every one” or similar piece of Tiny Timmery.
Cease funding ‘sock puppets’ and ‘fake charities’: Many pressure groups – which do not deliver services or help the vulnerable – are now funded by state bodies. In turn, these nominally ‘independent’ groups lobby and call for more state regulation and more state funding. A 2009 survey found that £37 million a year was spent on taxpayer-funded lobbying and political campaigning across the public sector. Many of these causes may be worthy, but why should they be funded by taxpayers?
Endearingly, Mr Pickles or whoever wrote this has not got the usage of the term “sock puppet” quite right. I would have called what is being described “astroturf” myself, but even so the appearance of the term “sock puppet” in a government document is a great big blog-print in itself. Specifically the print left by the currently inactive but still influential trope-namer “Fake Charities” blog started by Chris Mounsey of Devil’s Kitchen fame.
Scanning back to sensible suggestion no. 31, it too shows the influence of blogs:
Scrap trade union posts: Get rid of unnecessary non-jobs such as taxpayer-funded, full-time trade union ‘pilgrim’ posts.
“Pilgrims” was a term coined by Guido to describe a full time union organiser paid from the public purse, named after one Jane Pilgrim, who posed as, and was admiringly reported as, a nurse giving the then Health Minister a piece of her mind before the revelation that she hadn’t been near a patient in years.
“England has 39 police forces, headed by 39 chief constables or commissioners. In the past 18 months, seven have been sacked for misconduct, suspended, placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation or forced to resign. That is not far off a fifth of the total. In the same period, at least eight deputy or assistant chief constables have also been placed under ongoing investigation, suspended or forced out for reasons of alleged misconduct. No fewer than 11 English police forces – just under 30 per cent – have had one or more of their top leaders under a cloud.”
The Tories are re-learning the point that unionised organisations tend, over time, to pursue their self interest in ways that, unless subjected to the rule of law, will be destructive. This conduct is some way off from the ideal as set by Sir Robert Peel.
This blog has reported repeatedly on the Paul Chambers case. Quickly, Mr Chambers was convicted of a criminal offence for stating on Twitter that he would “blow (Robin Hood airport) sky high” if it did not reopen soon after bad weather, because he wished to catch a flight in order to see his girlfriend. This was an obvious joke, and was understood as such by absolutely everyone, but he was convicted anyway, lost two jobs as a consequence etc etc, before being finally cleared on appeal to the High Court.
News out today. Slightly before this incident, members of the same security staff at that same Robin Hood airport in South Yorkshire came close to actually blowing the airport sky high. They did this through utter incompetence, by insisting on opening and inspecting a shipment of anti-tank ammunition that had been flown into the airport, despite having no expertise or understanding of how to properly do so.
Guess what? The security staff in question were not convicted of anything. In fact, by law they cannot be prosecuted in such circumstances. Funny, that.
The police log, the leaking of which to the media fuelled the clamour for Mitchell to quit as chief whip, claimed that his swearing shocked “several members of the public”. Yet the CCTV footage appears to show there was no crowd watching at the gates of Downing Street: there was just one passerby at the time of the incident. While we still cannot be absolutely certain what transpired that night – there is no audio – the footage does not appear to suggest a serious altercation. The supposed independent eyewitness who came forward to corroborate the log’s version of events – a fatal development for Mitchell – is said to be a serving copper who was not at the scene.
Emphasis added. Because if this turns out to be true, it is a case of false testimony by a police officer.
There was a good comment to the above article from PolishMark:
A small incident, yes, but with serious ramifications. This is starting to look like a police conspiracy to remove an elected politician from Government. You don’t have to like the Government to be concerned by this.
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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