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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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From an auctioneers’ website:
lot details
lot no 305
description
A silver rectangular medallion, London 1977, applied with ‘WE FIX’D IT FOR JIM’ and ‘NATIONAL VALA 1977’, 4.2cm high, with a suspension loop, on a belcher link chain, the ring catch stamped ‘STER’
The National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association (National VALA) was founded by Mary Whitehouse, CBE (1910-2001) in 1965.
Provenance: From the estate of Sir Jimmy Savile. OBE, KCSG, LLD (1926-2011)
It would be ridiculous to attempt to extract some moral from the existence of a medallion apparently issued by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, 1970s campaigners against obscenity, particularly obscenity on the BBC, and the late Jimmy Savile, 1970s BBC DJ and TV host, now alleged (credibly alleged, despite the inevitable swarm of bandwagoneers) to have been a sexual predator with no regard for gender, age, vulnerability or consent. Any competent hack could whip up two think-pieces with mutually exclusive morals in one hour flat and bank his cheques from the Mail and the Guardian in the morning.
It was just an odd thing I found on the internet.
Just to add to the oddity, the auction was held in Saviles Hall. It is no longer possible to Google for the origin of that name.
The medallion went for £220, somewhat below the estimate. Wonder what it’s worth now?
Yes, I think I am avoiding talking about the Savile case. You can remedy that below. The case, as opposed to the medallion, throws up so many questions and points for discussion that I was hard put to keep the number of categories for this post under half a dozen. Please bear the laws of libel in mind if referring to living persons.
I have frequently noted here the obsessive fortification of the state during the last decade: how all public buildings in Britain have steadily become the opposite – closed-off, accessible only through guardrooms, by special permission.
A fascinating and frightening piece by Anna Minton in the FT Locked in the security cycle describes something I did not know. Though I had noticed a more general neurotic security obsession in new developments, I thought this was merely a matter of insurance and corporate cowardice. Some of it may be. But some of it is official coercion. Minton explains:
High security is now a prerequisite of planning permission for all new development, through a government-backed policy called Secured by Design. […]
Secured by Design is administered under the auspices of the Association of Chief Police Officers and backed by the security industry, with the initiative funded by the 480 security companies that sell products meeting Secured by Design standards. It is also supported by the insurance industry, with lower premiums for the increasing levels of security offered by Secured by Design standards.
Beware the security-industrial complex!
Note this is enforced by state power: since the all-nationalising Attlee government of 1945-51 planning permission controls all building in Britain. It is a panopticon of the built environment, covering all significant building or alteration of building: nothing is legally done privately; nothing is legally done without prior official approval. So “a prerequisite of planning permission”, means developers comply or they don’t build. But the standards to be applied by planning officers are controlled by a ACPO – a closed professional body for senior police and civilian policing officials – and far from correcting the producer interest, as choice might, deliberately incorporate it as a driving factor.
What will we get – what are we getting – all around us? An architecture calculated to reproduce the assumptions of those in security positions and industries of what’s a good place for people to live, trade or work, for children to play or be educated. Those are assumptions about order, ‘appropriate’ persons and behaviour, the need for oversight, the nature of – and constant presence of – threat. Hence the suspicious building syndrome: you will be increasingly screened to permit entry, and watched, controlled inside the perimeter. Hard, plan-defined boundaries, rather than freely negotiated common use of space.
But look! Lots of jobs for guards and electrical maintenance crews. Compliance by large builders will make their lives easier and competition more difficult. ACPO members will find valuable consulting work. Politicians can say we live in a society with “world class” security. The execution of policy will be deemed its success. Everybody (who matters) wins. Positive feedback.
But not the only feedback loop. The authorities are not interested in contrary evidence. Public bodies and quangos are skjlled at commissioning proleptic studies, and the institution of ‘public consultation’ is highly developed as an art of obtaining affirmation for policy, but even so, there are clear signs that that official security obsession creates psychological insecurity in the populace. Minton again:
Although crime has been falling steadily in Britain since 1995, fear of crime is soaring and 80 per cent of the population mistakenly believes crime is rising. Fear of crime does not correlate with actual crime but with trust between people, which is being eroded by high-security environments. […]
One of the key drivers for this project [Minton’s forthcoming NEF-published report] is the dearth of evidence that Secured by Design and high security prevent fear of crime and create strong, stable communities. Of the few existing studies, an investigation into CCTV by the Scottish Office found that while people often believed CCTV would make them feel safer the opposite was true, with both crime and fear of crime rising in the area investigated. The author concluded this was because the introduction of CCTV had undermined people’s personal and collective responsibility for safety. Research has also found an “unintended consequence” of extra security can be that “symbols of security can remind us of our insecurities”
[my emphasis]
I would add: they also remind us of something else. The pressure for all this comes from regulatory culture. As with the fortification of the state, it reveals and propagates the intense fearfulness in authority itself. Authority is frightened of the unsupervised individual, and thinks we should be too. To recycle a phrase, they hate our freedom. The possibility that life may be lived harmlessly in divers ways is just as much anathema to a secular bureaucrat as a religious totalitarian. If rules and fear are not everywhere, we might not accept that the people who make up rules always know best.
Presumably Matthew Woods learned a powerful lesson about the potential consequences of tasteless humour when a 50-strong mob turned up at his house and the police had to arrest him for his own safety. Jailing him on top of that is insane. Sick jokes can upset and offend. Hurriedly formed vigilante mobs can kill. If the state earnestly believes that the former pose a greater threat to social order than the latter, the state is nuts.
– Charlie Brooker, quoted here, on the latest person in Britain (last time I checked) to be sent to prison for a Facebook posting. Sometimes we end up on the same side of the barricade as the Guardian in-crowd.
It would be fair to say us folks at Samizdata can be depended on to oppose state subsidies for, well, almost everything. But when I read this:
Companies including Siemens, Alstom UK and Mitsubishi Power Systems wrote a candid letter to Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, warning that a lack of decision-making and threats to relax key green targets “have caused us to reassess the level of political risk in the UK”.
My immediate response was “awesome! Now spend some tax money for their air fares to encourage the fuckers to leave sooner rather than later!”. The departure of rent seeking tax farming parasites is rarely a bad thing for the people whose taxes are being farmed.
So happy trails, guys! 
This happy combination of headline and subheading on the Green Party home page will probably be gone by tomorrow, but if you click here and look under the heading “National news”, it says,
Global GM experiment must stop
More research into genetically-modified food and herbicides must be done, in the light of more evidence…
Remember sing-songs down the pub? OK, do you at least remember hearing that once upon a time there were such things as sing-songs down the pub? And Fred would stroll over to the old Joanna and have a tinkle on the ivories…
If this sounds as remote from modern life as the Wars of the Roses, that might be because for the last few years Fred would have been liable to arrest. The Licensing Act 2003 made live music at pubs illegal without a licence no matter how small the venue.
The good news is that it is no longer a crime to play a mouth organ in a pub without a licence.
The bad news is that for nine years it was a crime, and we submitted.
Rejoice! Ed Milliband will announce at the Labour party conference today that
Labour would impose a legal duty on any financial services firm that manages savings to maximise the saver’s returns.
At last Labour are to drop all that guff about “stakeholders” and “corporate responsibility”, although to make it compulsory to pursue profits at the cost of all else is rather repressive.
But what a turnaround, eh? Can it really be happening?
No. It’s all a mistake. They just haven’t noticed yet. Tim Worstall has cruel fun pointing out that Mr Miliband does not appear to have worked out that his proposal would make ethical investment illegal.
Worstall concludes
If those proposing the reform of the financial markets know so little about the financial markets that they can make this sort of mistake: well, what value their plans for reform of the financial markets?
I tend not to bother much these days with the dead-tree press but occasionally I’ll pick up a paper on my journeys on London’s Underground to one meeting or whatever. Yesterday, Anthony Hilton, writing in his regular column in the Evening Standard, absolutely crushed the argument, as floated by the mis-named Liberal Democrats and its leader, Nick Clegg, that what Britain needs is a “wealth tax”, given the existence of current state grabs of our wealth upon death:
“What no one seems to have grasped, however, is that if a further wealth tax were imposed to be paid by people when they were still living, it would reduce the yield on inheritance tax. A wealth tax on the living would not raise additional revenue so much as bring part of the payment forward which would ultimately have come out of the person’s estate anyway on their death. This is most obvious in considering some of the schemes mooted to pay a mansion tax. It is understood that the nearest most people come to wealth is to own a house that has gone up in value over the years. Many of the people living in expensive homes are old and not particularly well-off in terms of income. The house is probably the only thing of real value they have. It means they do not have the ready cash to pay the tax.”
Absolutely. Hilton continues:
“This cash-flow problem could be overcome, it is suggested by wealth-tax supporters, by telling them to borrow against the value of their property through an equity release scheme. They would of course have to pay interest on the money thus borrowed, or have it added to their debt. Alternatively, it may be permissible for them to defer payment and allow the outstanding tax to roll up into a lump sum. This would then be collected on death when the house could be sold. Obviously, both solutions are possible. But both would directly reduce the value of the deceased’s estate, and would therefore result in a pro rata reduction in the amount of estate duty.”
And he plunges a stake into the heart:
“So we have a proposal that would deliver no increase in the overall tax take but would create even more impoverished pensioners, who would be most likely to get their revenge at the ballot box. It might not go down that well with younger voters either once they saw a wealth tax — or the fear of a wealth tax — take away any chance that their parents might help them with a deposit for a house.”
Of course, it is entirely possible that Clegg and his allies are only giving the impression of wanting to enact such a tax in exchange for agreeing to more, supposed spending cuts, and in reality, they realise how pointless and self-destructive such taxes could be. But it is also a sign of how far away we are from any coherent notions of tax in the first place. Consider: the current government recently sought to attract foreign investors to the UK by offering accelerated visas for those investing serious amounts in the UK; it has, it says, sought to clarify rules about domicile and residence. Last year, finance minister George Osborne vowed to cut the top rate of income tax to a still-high 45 per cent. Imposing a wealth tax would blow such limited moves towards commonsense out of the water.
Much is being made of Mitt Romney’s leaked comments to the effect that 47 per cent of America will never vote for him, because this 47 per cent depend on government hand-outs and he, Romney, has said he will cut these hand-outs.
Judging by what happened in Britain in the Thatcher years, Romney is (assuming I have it right what he said) wrong, about none of these people voting for him I mean. Here in Britain then, as in the USA now, unemployment was unprecedentedly high, and many assumed that nobody unemployed and drawing the dole would ever vote Thatcher. Yet quite a few such people did, and not just once either. They did it again and again.
Anti-Thatcherites said that this was false consciousness. These poor deluded, put-upon Conservative voters simply did not understand their own interests.
But what if such down-on-their-luck Conservative voters actually wanted jobs, even though they did not now have them? Many definitely did. What if they depended on government hand-outs, but hated this and longed for this demeaning arrangement to end? And what if, rather than blaming Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, or even if they did blame Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, they instead focussed on the future and regarded Thatcher as a better bet than the Labour alternative for them to get new and different jobs?
Even if all that any voter ever cares about is his or her own economic interests, and damn the country, for an unemployed person in the 1980s in Britain to vote Thatcher was at least a reasonable thing to do. It was not a self-evident case of someone not knowing what was best for them. Voting for the likes of Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock (Britain’s Obamas of those times, neither of whom ever made it to Prime Minister, thank God) might merely have made unemployment even worse, and jobs even harder to come by.
My point is not that such disagreement with the more usual opinion (if you’re unemployed vote left wing) of those times was definitely correct. I merely argue that such disagreement was a reasonable judgement to make, given that it was indeed a judgement call.
The same will apply to many Americans who depend on government hand-outs now, who will likewise vote for Romney rather than Obama, because they reckon Romney is more likely to get them back on their economic feet than Obama, and because back on their economic feet is where they really, really want to be.
And this will remain true, even though Romney has just (or so I have been reading) insulted these people by accusing them of being incapable of rational thought of the sort that I have just described, and of being incapable of voting other than for Obama, like so many sheep. At least Romney is showing hatred of the arrangements that they also hate, and which Obama might well make worse, and showing determination to change those arrangements. That might count for far more, in the eyes of an unemployed person who badly wants not to be unemployed, than those insults. So, he thinks I’m a sheep. So what? I know I’m not.
Thatcher herself never made the mistake of accusing unemployed Brits of being incapable of discerning what a brilliant Prime Minister she was, for them as for all others. From where she stood, only Labour voters were in the grip of false consciousness.
How many unemployed people will vote Romney? Rather more if Romney gives them further reason to vote for him, by saying something like: if you hate being dependent on the government, vote for me, and you’ve got a better chance of getting back into paid work than if you vote for the other fellow. → Continue reading: Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)
Did you hear what John Major had to say yesterday? “The ‘green shoots‘ of economic recovery are on the way as ‘darkest moment’ passed” Oh my God, I guess we are closer to the brink than I thought.
– Perry de Havilland over a glass with some Samizdatistas.
James Delingpole surely spoke for many in fearing that one Owen Paterson does not make a summer of sane energy policy. Nevertheless, as Bishop Hill notes, Paterson has been talking sense, to Farmer’s Weekly:
From my own direct constituency experience I don’t personally think that inland wind farms are effective at reducing carbon. I don’t even think they are effective at producing energy.
A BH commenter desribed that as:
… the kick in the groin that the wind energy sector has so long deserved.
I hope it hurts.
More from Delingpole, about one of the many creatures that the Paterson tendency is up against, here.
LATER from Christopher Booker:
What they could not have expected was Mr Davey’s response. He trenchantly dismissed their calls, restating his view that we urgently need a massive new investment in gas generation. Only after 2030 would this require the “carbon capture and storage” that, as Mr Davey has already admitted, is still an “unproven technology” (and is likely to remain so). So the first message of last week was that the once hugely influential Climate Change Committee in effect has been kicked into touch. In the name of keeping Britain’s economy running, the Government seems now determined to break its own law.
What makes all this even more significant, however, is that it is taking place against the background of a truly astonishing worldwide energy revolution. As can be seen from the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, country after country is now rushing to exploit the shale gas that, in the past four years, has more than halved gas prices in the US. China, Germany, France, Russia, South Africa and others all have immense reserves that promise to provide the world with cheap energy for centuries to come. And, here in Britain, determined moves are at last being made to reverse the Government’s grudging negativity towards our own vast shale gas reserves, led by our new Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, who seems to be winning surprising support for his enthusiasm for shale gas from key officials in his own department and the Environment Agency, which has regulatory responsibility for this new industry.
After years when our energy policy was being dictated by green wishful thinking, by the likes of Lord Deben and by state-subsidised pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth (which first invented, then helped to draft, the Climate Change Act), reality is at long last breaking in. The green make-believe that has cast such a malign spell over our country for far too long is finally on the run. Truly, last week was history being made.
Those are the concluding paragraphs of a piece well worth reading in full. The times they are a-changing.
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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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