Samizdata

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard

– H. L. Mencken

I read this article by Matthew d’Ancona and had to laugh out loud.

David Cameron would be wrong to jettison his co-pilot. Nick Clegg’s only chance of recovery is to ignore the turbulence and carry on regardless […] Instead, Clegg has led his party in another direction: into office with an ideological rival, and the cockpit of compromise, U-turns, and grinding policy formation. To say it has not been easy is a laughable understatement, and the price – so far – has been immense. But it was the right call.

Hahahaha… political rivals, sure… but ‘ideological’ rivals? Oh give me a break. Tories, LibDems, Labour, oh and SNP… ie. all of Britain’s main parties are utterly committed to the regulatory welfare state and their ‘idealogical rivalry’ amounts to arguing over the length of their minister’s ties. The ‘co-pilot’ is staring straight ahead as the aircraft in on ‘finals’ for a CFIT.

I particularly loved this…

“The best help we can give the Lib Dems is not a shopping list of policies,” says one senior Cameroon, “but to help them through their adolescence as a party of government – to help them navigate this crisis.”

It is not that the LibDems are ‘adolescent’ but rather that the entire political establishment appear to be intellectually ‘senile’ as the disconnect between objective reality and acceptable political reality grows apace (and largely unremarked by that essential priesthood of media truthsayers).

It hardly matters which of these lumps are in office. All the policies being bandied about are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and not only does *no* major political party have the will to implement a radical reduction in state expenditure and a massive reduction in the red tape that limit the scope for new market entrants in industry after industry, they all lack the will to even seriously discuss such notions.

When someone suggests a budget that has the state appropriating 20% less of the national wealth overall next financial year and the same the year after that, and allowing banks to simply go bust if they screw the pooch on an epic scale, well then and only then are they are getting serious… but until that happens, let the various party loyalists blather on about Dave and Nick as if it actually matters.

The Ponzi scheme has reached the ‘end game’ phase and the antics of the clowns in Westminster and their supporters are as important as a tinker’s damn. Britain and much of the western world have got the leaders they voted for and the ones they deserve. Drink wine, watch films, play games, meet friends, but only pay attention to politics for the entertainment value. It is not like politics is actually going to have much impact on where the economy is heading.

I am sitting next to the beach at Lyme Regis, south Dorset. The sun is out, the Brits have a public holiday due to the Royal Wedding, and I have deliberately fled central London to be down here. A good choice, as it turns out. This has to be one of the nicest parts of the UK.

The Daily Telegraph has one of those gushing, pro-Royal editorials written, I sometimes think, with the deliberate desire to wind up the malcontents out there. It seems to have succeeded most admirably, judging by this fellow in the comment threads by the name of “tyburntree”:

“….a nation with much to celebrate…”
Er, like what exactly? Treason committed at the highest levels. Illegal wars. Thoughroughly undemocratic parliamentary system. Deliberate population replacement and destruction of indigenous identity and culture ( contary to international law). Islamic extremism. Children killing children. Strutting Peacocks and thieves in our House of Shame. A three party dictatorship. Useless police. Useless courts. Useless schools. The refusal of our political class and courts to deport foreign criminals. Holiday camp prisons. Mulitculturalism. And last but not least a series of broken coronation oaths that have left this country at the mercy of an EU dictatorship.
Independent English Republic now!”

This is what might count as a sort of grumpy, right-wing kind of anti-royalist. I suspect that Samizdata regulars might agree with some of the sentiments expressed here – although the stuff about “deliberate population replacement” sounds a bit hysterical to me – plus the line about “illegal” wars (what, so it is okay so long as we get UN approval for them?). And for a person who seems to be concerned about the loss of “indigenous” identity and culture, why does this man want a republic? Like it or not, a constitutional monarchy is part of that “indigenous culture” of the UK, and has been for a long time. To be a republican, as this guy must surely know, is to make a pretty big break with tradition.

I am an agnostic about republics and monarchies – I think the system we have now is no worse than any likely alternatives. Republics have not, by and large, been noticeably less prone to the follies of socialism and big government than constitutional monarchies. Arguably, the reverse.

Anyway, I’ll unashamedly be raising a glass to the happy couple today. We can resume normal service tomorrow, whatever that means.

David Deutsch, quantum theorist, libertarian and a man with a brain exceptionally huge even for a libertarian, has posted a video on youTube of himself discoursing against AV (thanks to Sarah Fitz-Claridge for passing news of it on to me).

It is a beautifully clear 15 minutes of listening. He argues that AV, by making proportions of MPs more closely reflect the proportions of electors supporting the parties, doesn’t succeed in its purported aim of making the electoral system fairer. Rather, by making coalitions almost inevitable, it gives king-making power to the third party. Not only does that have nothing to do with numerical ‘fairness’, it makes it virtually impossible for electors to influence the third party and hence for it to learn from experience – Popperphiles will love his introduction of the great Karl into the argument near the end. First-past-the-post is less bad in this respect. The implication is that any proportional-representation system will have the same weakness.

I always participate in elections. I almost invariably spoil the ballot paper with a libertarian slogan. I try unsuccessfully to make my kinfolk and friends understand that this symbolic act is no more ineffective than the votes that they cast and is just as morally responsible. One of the rare votes I did cast was for a UKIP local councillor. I could actually detect a difference between UKIP and the other parties, and I approved of it.

Now I think David Deutsch might have persuaded me to cast a vote again – against AV.

I used to hold fairly high hopes about Nick Cohen, who had the courage to tell his leftist friends a few home truths about the sheer madness of their consorting – in the case of the hard left – with radical Islamists. He does not adopt the default “Blame America First” line on issues such as, say, Iraq, or for that matter, events in the Balkans. In the very big scheme of things, he’s one of the good guys, in my opinion. The trouble is that he is still a big government leftie; for him, the reductions in spending by this government, which are not that much more than envisaged by former UK (Labour) Chancellor Alisdair Darling, are wicked. Oh well.

He attended the protests against the UK government’s supposed “cuts” on Saturday (the sneer quotes are there because it is not clear that government spending as a share of GDP will actually shrink). Before I return to his comments against the “cuts”, here is what he said about the kind of folk causing a tear-up in the West End:

The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics. As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.

Quite so. All we have to do now is get Mr Cohen to give up on the nonsense of this Keynesian idea that cutting public spending – and hence debt – somehow reduces “demand” in the economy. Given that a large chunk of tax revenues are gobbled up on debt interest payments alone, it seems fairly good public finance to make an adjustment. Cohen and others would do well to realise that Britain’s public finances were on their way to ruin long before anyone had heard of sub-prime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations, or for that matter, Ben Bernanke.

As an aside, I was in Piccadilly on my way to a meeting yesterday, and could see some fairly extensive damage to shops, banks, etc. Well done guys.