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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Mark Steyn has been in London, and although his visit has coincided with truly wonderful weather – I have spent a great afternoon with my wife and friends eating good food on the side of the Thames in Richmond – it has also been a time of protest:
“In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists. Judging from the many marchers partial to robotic, pseudo-ethnic West African drumming, the British left’s plan is presumably for the entire country to relaunch itself as the world’s least rhythmic percussion ensemble.”
This denial of reality is everywhere. Consider this YouTube spot featuring Mark Littlewood, head honcho of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a friend of mine) alongside some hard-leftist type who regards the mass protests yesterday as an example of the Labour movement “striking back”. As far as this guy is concerned, our national debt is relatively low (seriously), we can, somehow or other, grow our way out of any problems that might exist, etc. In fairness to the BBC interviewer, she did not let this guy make these points without challenge and I thought Mark acquitted himself well. A good, perhaps “soft” point to make here, as Mark did, is the “think of the children” angle. The protesters who want to protect final-salary public pensions, vast numbers of state jobs, etc, are choosing to do so regardless of the debt being loaded on the shoulders of future generations. And in their adolescent fantasies, they imagine that all the mess can be somehow put right by taxing the evil rich bankers. There is, in this worldview, a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, usually located in a tax haven. But what these folk don’t seen to understand, or perhaps, don’t want to understand, is that taxing banks even more means lower savings rates, higher borrowing charges, worse service, lower investments. If we drive sources of capital away, as happened in the 1970s, then does this young activist really believe that will benefit the more vulnerable people in this country in the medium-term? I suspect he either does not care or imagines that somehow, something will turn up.
This mindset does not come out of thin air. The activist was trotting out the standard, dreary line about how all the things he imagines are good (and I regard as thoroughly bad), such as comprehensive state schooling, socialised medicine and Big Government, arose even when Britain was broke after WW2. Arguably, these developments ensured we stayed thoroughly broke, right up until the 1970s when the UK was, humiliatingly, bailed out by the IMF. As Mrs Thatcher said, in the end, socialists always run out of other people’s money.
A difficulty for any government is that once the drug of state dependency has been created, it is a long, hard road back to sanity. I don’t like this government, which is hardly close to my own classical liberal worldview, but some measure of credit is due here. A larger chunk of voters than is perhaps realised have no conception of self reliance, independence, or a desire for said.
Many voters have been clients of the state all their lives; changing that will be enormously difficult. Whole cities, such as in the north of the UK and pockets elsewhere, derive the bulk of their incomes from taxpayers in the more prosperous parts of the UK. Londoners are a fairly stoical lot, but we are getting a bit tired of folk coming to the capital, trashing it, and demanding that this evil den of capitalism should go on providing them with the lifestyle to which they think they are entitled. Maybe London should declare itself an independent state and we’ll see how well the rest of the UK can cope without this high finance. The Atlas Shrugged narrative continues.
Independence for London. Hmm, there have been worse slogans.
Big demo against the cuts in London today! Takes me back, that does. Maggie, maggie, maggie, OUT OUT OUT!
Simon Jenkins says British demonstrations scarcely ever achieve their aims. I think they often do. Not always quickly, not always directly, and the aims achieved are not always good, but the clue to the effectiveness of demonstrations is in the name. The demonstration demonstrates that there are enough people who care enough about some issue to fill up in Trafalgar Square. They vote, thinks the politician. Not that he panics; he knows that there are other voters shouting or yawning at their televisions as they show pictures of the Trafalgar Square lot, but the highly visible existence of this big shouty bundle of single-issue votiness seeps into his mind and affects his decisions, irrespective of whether he likes them or loathes them.
On the other hand, sometimes the demonstration demonstrates that there are not enough people who care about your issue to fill up Trafalgar Square. (There will be today; I speak in general terms.) If the mainstream media like your cause they will do their very best to help by means of what I think of as the squat shot. That’s when the cameraman squats on the ground and points the camera upwards so that the shot shows only bodies and not the tell-tale large areas of empty pavement between and around the marching feet. (Added later: however eventually, the use of this low-angle crowd-shot becomes a signal to alert observers that attendance was low, and the subject of ridicule. The BBC have wised up and reined back on its use in the last few years.)
And sometimes – in fact ofttimes – the demonstration demonstrates that quite a lot of your supporters are not very nice. The blogger Zombietime went to many anti-war demonstrations in the US while G W Bush was president and quietly snapped away. One of the results was this record of the signs calling for Bush to be assassinated. Here in Britain the student demonstrators against tuition fees did not endear themselves to the public by the fact that one or two of their number were photographed hurling fire extinguishers from the top of buildings or hanging from the flag commemorating the war dead at the Cenotaph. I sympathise with the demonstration organisers in these cases: they did not condone these actions – but like the scorpion in the fable who could not help but sting even at the cost of his own life, demonstrations cannot help but demonstrate something. You asked the public to watch and judge your cause by the people you assembled, and they will.
As will your own people. The demonstrations I went to in the 70s and 80s have merged in memory. Was it at the CND one, or the anti-NF one, or one against changes to the immigration laws where I saw the collection bucket being passed round for the IRA? The bucket filled up slowly, I’ll say that much for my fellow demonstrators, but it was not empty. At all of them I picked up piles of mimeographed leaflets that I now wish I had kept. They were revealing. They were insane. I realised that Searchlight, for instance, who I had thought of as just an anti-fascist group were very left wing indeed. Most of all I remember the posters. Three quarters of the posters, and almost all of the printed ones, were produced by the Socialist Workers Party. Busy little bees, they were. They still are: it is an astonishing fact that this tiny and fissiparous Trotskyist sect has twice dominated massive popular protest movements in my lifetime; the Anti-Nazi League / Rock against Racism movement of the 80s and the Stop The War Coalition of 2001-2008. Sorry, 2001-present, only they stop wars much more quietly now that Mr Obama is president. They were also big in CND.
Most demonstrators back then avoided carrying SWP posters. But it was difficult to refuse if someone asked nicely, so ordinary non-SWP people did end up walking for miles with an embarrassing commie placard thinking, how the hell did I end up doing this and I’m not doing it again. I suspect this will happen today as it did in the 80s.
The problem with demonstrators being turned off by weird extremist literature and weird extremist fellow attendees is not confined to causes that I dislike – even if part of the reason I now dislike them is that I was turned off by the weird literature and people. I sympathised with, although I did not attend, the big demonstration in 2002 against the hunting ban. My husband picked up a BNP leaflet for me while he was there because he had heard earlier verbal versions of the reminiscences about extremists at demonstrations that form much of this post. It depressed me that the originators of the leaflet were probably right in seeing that demonstration as a good opportunity to shift their stuff. One good thing, the leaflet had a picture of a squirrel on it. The good here is not the squirrel per se, fond as I am of the tree-rats, but at least they felt the need to hide behind cuddly things.
Oh yeah, another thing to avoid is having the same demo at regular intervals. Lie all you like about numbers, the media will help you if you are left wing, but when like for like comparisons can be made, decline will out. A left wing writer said in 2003:
The SWP’s main priority is recruitment. Why else did it continually call demonstrations week after week during the Iraq conflict? This was a big tactical error for the anti-war movement. When the bombing started, many people felt dispirited and tired, but were organising and carrying out further actions and protests. More importantly, the SWP had not realised that many people on the enormous demonstration in February were there because they felt they had been denied a democratic voice. These demonstrations were bound to result in diminishing numbers – and many were bound to judge that as the collapse of the anti-war movement.
Innovative forms of demonstration like Earth Hour (today, apparently) replace the crowd in Trafalgar square with the crowd at home doing something that shows up somehow. This avoids the “embarrassing supporter” problem and the “clashes with the other big demo” problem. However having a metric for your demonstration that is easier to count than crowd size, and having it as a regular event, makes this type of demonstration particularly vulnerable to the cold wind of comparison to last year. The better they do one year, and the more their success is hyped up, the tougher the target for next year.
“Liberal democracy is not about “paying a fair share” based on the exigencies of the moment and the vagaries of public opinion. If it were, Parliament would be little more than a trading floor where the freedoms of minorities were bartered away for temporary fixes and periodic bond repayments. True liberal democracy was and still should be about protecting and preserving freedom, equality in liberty and equality before the law – even when it is not, financially or politically, in our best interests to do so.”
PJ Byrne, over at the Adam Smith Institute blog. Alas, “true liberal democracy” is hard to achieve, given the strong urge by politicians to persuade one group of electors to rob another group, or indeed, even to rob themselves.
I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron – I think he is both.
– A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around.
It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn’t follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts.
LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent.
Caroline Lucas MP, Britain’s only, (or “first” as the Guardian puts it) Green Party MP, writes “Scrapping the fuel duty rise will hurt Britain economically”. In the article she says,
Some of the loudest voices are calling on the chancellor to scrap the planned fuel duty increase, due in April. But that essentially means using tax-payers’ money to fix a problem that we cannot control – the long-term upward trend in oil prices.
A commenter called Fomalhaut88 pointed out one strange aspect of her article at 12.53AM. He or she wrote,
Only in the mind of Ms Lucas could not raising a tax further be defined as “using taxpayers money”.
Some words from Ms Lucas that occur a line or two down are even more bizarre:
“A report commissioned from the Policy Studies Institute for the Green Alliance calculates that using a fuel duty cut to bring pump prices back to December 2009 levels would cost the taxpayer almost £6bn in the first year alone.”
Spot the error in this sentence. I have put the relevant bit in bold to make it easier for you. I don’t really think you need that help in spotting such an absurdity, of course. But by Gaia, some people do.
Freedom/liberty is defined in different ways. Some people talk of “free will” of agency, of the ability (sometimes and to some extent) to choose. Of how human beings are just that (beings) not flesh robots whose actions are either determined by a process of causes and effects going back to the start of the universe or are a matter of random chance (neither determinism or random chance being agency – being human choice).
This is not the place to debate the existence of the “I” (the reasoning, self aware, self) and to argue that agency is not an “illusion” (although if it is a illusion who is having the illusion – humans being simply being flesh robots), but I will say that if humans are not “beings” (not agents) then freedom is of no moral importance. No more than it is of moral importance whether water is allowed to “run free” or constrained behind a dam. But then, of course, if there is no agency (no freedom of choice) then there is no morality anyway. A clockwork mouse does not have moral responsibility – and neither would something that looked like a human being but was, in fact, not a “being” (an agent – a choosing “I”) at all.
As for the position that it is “compatible” that a human might have no capacity what-so-ever to choose any of their actions (including lines of thought) and yet still be morally responsible for them – well it is not compatible, basic logic does not allow us to have our cake and eat it as well.
Others talk of freedom in terms of stuff – goods and services.
Such people may or may not accept that humans have the capacity (sometimes to some extent) to make real choices – but they hold that even if humans do have the ability to make choices this does not mean they should be allowed to.
People will make the wrong choices – they will do things make the world a worse place, even for themselves.
To some extent the political libertarian actually agrees with that – after all we do not believe that people should be allowed to make the choice to rob, rape or murder other people.
Or, rather, they should be allowed to make the choice – but not to act on it (aggression should be opposed), and they should be punished if they do act upon it.
Some people have suggested that we be called “propertarians” (rather than libertarians) because of our opposition to chosen actions that aggress against the bodies and goods of people – to which my response is “if you want to call me a propertarian do so – I do not take it as a insult”.
However, the political libertarian (such as myself) tends to deny that non-aggressive choices – choices that respect the bodies and goods of other people, tend to be “wrong” in general.
We hold that most people, most of the time are more likely to get things right than the “great and the good”.
Not just “were you ten times and wise you would not have the right to impose your plans upon myself and others”, but also “even if you were ten times as wise you would still muck it all up”. Indeed it would be claimed that the clever elite are not “wise” at all – for if they were “wise” (rather than just clever) they would understand that trying to “plan society” always ends badly.
In part at this point we move from philosophy to political economy – economics… → Continue reading: The rise and decline of freedom in Britain – the decline and rise of the State
I believe I am the senior Samizdatista, in years if not in eloquence or influence. And one of the privileges of advancing years is the right to inflict upon strangers the details of one’s various medical infirmities and experiences. I can’t, yet, quite manage the truly, Platonically essential, shameless way of doing this, which is: in a very loud voice on the top deck of a double-decker bus. But, a blog is a satisfactory next best, so here goes. Stop whatever else you may be doing or trying to do, stop talking amongst yourselves, and listen to me.
A few months ago, a crown that had been attached to one of my disintegrating British teeth started to loosen, and about one month ago, this crown fell off. My non-British dentist advised that what remained of the real tooth was now useless and that it all should go. This was not a wisdom tooth; those are long gone. It was the next one in, top left. But I wouldn’t miss it, said my dentist. If I did, an “implant” could be contrived.
So, a week ago now, the tooth was duly removed. The NHS had been asked to do something about all this, as soon as the crown had become loose. But not a peep was heard from the NHS in three months (apparently a whole clutch of letters due to go out had been delayed for some obscure reason – waiting lists?), so when the crown finally did fall off, I decided to go private. Had I been content to lie about how much it was hurting (in reality it only started hurting after the tooth had been removed), the emergency bit of the NHS might have obliged. But, forced to choose, I preferred buying to lying, and so, for £150, the date was fixed and the deed was done.
Local anaesthetics do away with almost all pain, but I can’t get used to the notion that all that grinding and sawing is not hurting, and I love it when it ends. But taking out a tooth involves flesh, not just teeth. I had supposed that once the tooth had gone, any discomfort involved would end, but gouging out a tooth does damage. It does less damage if all of the tooth comes out in one go, but mine did not. After most of the tooth had been removed, a long, thin root remained, and further damage was done to my gum while that was dug out. So, not surprisingly when I actually thought about it, it was only when the local anaesthetic started to wear off that the serious discomfort began. The pain has by no means been unbearable, but it started out quite bad, and has still not truly abated. For a couple of days all but the smallest mouthful, the shallowest spoonful, involved a painfully slow wrenching open of the jaw. I am still chewing only with the other side of my mouth, not least because the hole takes time to fill itself in. Further dentistry may be required to this end.
Okay, so much for the shouting on a bus bit. Now it gets a little more officially Samizdata-esque. → Continue reading: Defensive British dentistry
Which they probably won’t now take, but later they may get the point.
I recall how, some time in the early 1980s, I had a run-in with a British Post Office worker.
I had this package which I wanted the Post Office to, you know, post to someone. So I wrapped it up and took it to the Post Office.
But it turned out that it was just that little bit too big for the hole that this Post Office worker wanted to put it into.
“Look”, he said, as if instructing a small and inattentive boy. “It’s too big to go in,” said he. “Can’t you see that?” He had a point, sort of. It really wasn’t hard to see, now. Big package. Slightly smaller hole. As we would say now: simples. And yes indeed, I could see that now. But when I was wrapping up the package at the bookshop I was then working in, I had no idea about the hole I would later have to stuff the package into. I felt like hitting the Post Office worker with the package, or at the very least explaining all this, in an angry tone.
But, wisely, I did not do this. Instead, all forced charm and bogus ingratiation, I acknowledged the abjectness of my obviously foolish miscalculation, and apologised deeply. What had I been thinking? Then, I tried to persuade him to think of some other procedure to enable the Post Office to post my package, and eventually, after some further instruction of me concerning my sloppy and foolish ways, he did agree to accept the package, despite its obvious failure to fit into his hole. He took the package and disappeared in a self-important manner to some room in the back of the Post Office. I went back to my bookshop, muttering curses to myself and speculating about the hole I would really have liked to shove my package into.
Some little while later, I observed, on the television, some Post Office workers who were engaged in a fight of some kind against our then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher wanted to do something or other to the Post Office that the Post Office workers were angry about. It would cause chaos, they said, and make the Post Office worse, they said, and more expensive, as it quite possibly would, and quite possibly did. But because these Post Office workers were dealing, not with defenceless little me, but with Margaret Thatcher on the rampage, they were the ones now on the defensive. She wasn’t trying to persuade them of anything. She was simply telling them. They were trying to persuade her to do things differently.
To this end, the Post Office workers were appealing for public support.
They thought they would get it, effortlessly. From the way they were talking on the television, you would think that The Public were about to rise up in a great tidal wave and overwhelm the Prime Minister with their hatred of her (then as now quite widespread) and their love for the workers of the Post Office and their admiration for their extreme wisdom and obligingness.
But The Public all did as I did. We just sat there, saying: “You bastards may well be right that Maggie T’s plan will harm the Post Office, but her plan does at least have one huge plus. You hate it! It will make you suffer! You think we will help you stop it. Dream on, you tyrannical, supercilious bastards.” The great public silence that greeted the Post Office workers, instead of the great wave of support that they had been counting on, must have shocked them deeply. Important silences, huge non-events, are not usually front page news. But I noticed, and others surely did too. I wondered what Mr Your-Package-Is-Too-Big My-Hole-Is-Too-Small was thinking and feeling about it all. I hoped he was suffering.
Those Post Office workers had totally misunderstood that package-in-the-hole moment that I had had with one of them, and millions upon millions of other moments like it, stretching back through the decades. They, the Postal Workers, imagined that at the end of such moments, The Public walked away full of love and gratitude for the Postal Workers. But actually, we walked away full of pent-up rage. We had had to force ourselves to fake love and gratitude, and hated the Postal Workers all the more because of this. They had believed our performances. They really thought that we really were full of love and gratitude for them. Big mistake. Huge mistake.
Come the day when the tables were turned by a politician who was aggregating all our rage into a force majeure moment which left them trying to persuade her to do what they wanted, they were helpless.
All of which was brought on by this Instapundit posting about how angry the American Public now feels about American public sector workers of various kinds.
I now feel much better. Also, I wonder if blogs will make a difference to this kind of thing. Will blogs, and especially blog comments, tell America’s public sector trade unionists to back off gracefully, the way no blogger or blog-commenter could tell our unions circa 1984? They surely will. They surely are. But will they listen? Will they get it? It will be interesting to see.
Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel…
“Excuse me,” he says, “I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Er, no,” you reply, “I am happy dressed the way I am.”
“I see,” the man replies, “well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie.”
“But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!” you point out.
“No,” he says, “I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don’t do what I want voluntarily.”
This statement of the bleedin’ obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of ‘press release’ style journalism:
The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.
If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.
So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin… ‘voluntary’… ‘not nanny state’…
Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a ‘political correspondent’ at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the ‘Nanny State’ in action… and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense ‘voluntary’?
… Kenneth Clarke invariably supports anything with “european” in front of it. If they re-named ebola virus “european virus”, I expect he’d declare himself in favour of that, too.
– Owen Morgan commenting on James Kirkup’s Daily Telegraph blog
I am neither advertising nor criticising this site. The first I heard of it was a few minutes ago, in a comment by someone calling themselves “scrivens” to a Telegraph article called The Grievance Industry. I do not know any more about it than what it says. I just find its existence very, very interesting, as an example of a modern solution to a modern problem.
http://www.serial-litigants.com
Searching for an opposing party can be an expensive and time consuming process as there is no readily accessible database of employment tribunal decisions. Serial-litigants tend to benefit from anonymity.
This is where our service can be of benefit to parties. By searching, and collecting, this information we allow parties, and their lawyers, to check if an opposing party is a serial-litigant. Armed with information about other claims, the opportunities for achieving a successful outcome (or even a strike-out without a full cost hearing) can be greatly increased. In our experience some serial-litigants simply drop their case once confronted with a clear picture of their claims.
These guys charge £99 to do a search of employment tribunal decisions for you, temporarily discounted to £50.That is practically free in comparison to the cost of defending – let alone losing – a case at an employment tribunal. But practically free is not actually free. I wonder if it would be possible within the laws of libel to do something similar that was both open to public view and literally free to use, because done by volunteer labour, in the manner of fakecharities.org (this blog, passim)? I do not say that would be better than a for-profit service such as this; on the contrary my instincts are that a leavening of money in this type of proceeding keeps the cranks at bay. But what an interesting development such a website would be. Of course the people who could be bothered to spend their own time to track down serial litigants for public exposure would be those who had been stung by them, or thought they had.
I know this kind of thing has long been known about and talked about, but the single thing that I most like about David Cameron’s speech about multiculturalism, terrorism, and so on, which he gave in Munich on Saturday, is that I can read it, in its entirety. I don’t have to rely on a journalist, however conscientious he may or may not have tried to be, to pass on to me whatever small fragments of the speech he considers to be significant, along with hostile reactions to such fragments that he has got or read from various people with axes to grind, many of these reactions having probably been supplied by people who haven’t actually heard or read the original speech and are only going on what the journalist tells them it said. And then somebody else gets angry about one of these critical reactions, and it all spirals away from anything that actually got said in the original speech. And the bloke who gave the original speech says to himself: why do I bother? Time was when that kind of thing was all that most people had to go on. But those days are now long gone. Good riddance. Disintermediation, I think this is called.
As I say, hardly a blindingly original observation, but in the matter of this speech, I have never before felt this internet-induced improvement so strongly. The subject matter of Cameron’s speech is a minefield. Although I do not agree with everything that he said (see below), I am glad that he is at least talking about this stuff, at a time when many of our more thoughtful political leaders are scared to. The existence of the internet is the difference between a much-overdue, semi-intelligent public conversation about these vexed issues and mere mudslinging.
So, given that I am able to read it all, what did I make of it? Here are a few early thoughts.
One of Cameron’s most important points is that insofar as “multiculturalism” means double standards in how Muslims are treated by the British law, them being allowed to behave far worse than us indigenous ones, then multiculturalism is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea if it involves state support and encouragement for groups which encourage terrorism. Well said, and about time too.
He makes many other points, which I agree with rather less. He uses, for instance, the now established habit of curtailing the freedom of speech of racists and fascists to justify further curtailments of free speech, for Muslims. But if we all get to hear what they all have to say, fascists, Muslims, (fascist Muslims?), then we can take issue with such notions. And whenever something nasty happens that some nasty has said should happen, the police will at least know where to start looking. Free speech, quite aside from being a human right and everything, is actually quite a practical policy for maintaining civil peace. It helps a lot that most of us think that merely saying nasty things shouldn’t be a crime, and that in a world where people can say pretty much what they like, the police must confine themselves to chasing after those who actually do nasty things.
I also take issue with the way that Cameron muddles together two distinct, although related ideas. On the one hand there is the idea that Islam itself is a problem, rather than just “Islamic extremism”. And then there is the further idea that therefore Muslims ought to be deported, forbidden from speaking their minds, from building mosques, and generally from going around being Muslims. He opposes the second idea, but makes it seem like that necessarily means opposing the first idea also. I support the first idea, but not the second. I definitely think that Islam itself is a problem, but I believe that the answer (see my previous paragraph) is to argue with it, to tell it that it is a problem and why it is a problem, and to invite people who are wondering about it to leave or stay away from it, rather than stick with it or join it. If you must be a believer in something religious, let that religion be something like Christianity rather than Islam, because Christianity, although at least as odd from the merely is-it-true? point of view is, at the moment, so very much nicer than Islam.
Everything I observe in the reactions of the nastier kinds of Muslim tells me that they are acutely sensitive to such arguments, to the point where they would very much like such arguments to be banned, whether such arguments include deportation demands, mosque-banning and so forth, or not. To me, Cameron’s thinking says, first, that banning free expression for racists and fascists is absolutely fine, and that therefore banning free speech for “Islamic extremists” is fine also. But what next? Banning people from even saying (as I do not say) that Muslims should be deported and mosque-building banned? Or even from saying (as I do say) that Islam itself is a disgusting and evil body of thought and that the only absolutely morally correct thing to do if you are a Muslim is to damn well stop being a Muslim?
Which means that I was disappointed, but not surprised, that Cameron made no mention of the right of a person to stop being a Muslim, without being subjected to death threats and worse. Disappointed, but not surprised. For Cameron, being a “devout Muslim” (as opposed to an extreme Islamist) is more than sufficient, as far as he is concerned. As Prime Minister, he is not in the business of wanting anyone to convert this way or that, other than in the very feeble sense of wanting people to vote for him and for his political party. I see that. But he ought, I think to be ready to defend the rights of those who really do want to convert, from anything to anything else, and in particular out of Islam. Cameron called for “muscular liberalism”. So, when push next comes to shove in the form of a big ruckus (will this be that?) concerning someone who has stopped being a Muslim, will Cameron apply a dose of muscular liberalism to that argument, to allow such a person to believe whatever they want to believe, and to be as public as they like about it?
I confess that the phrase “muscular liberalism” did appeal to me when I first read it, and no doubt this phrase has tested positive with the focus groups. But what exactly will it mean in reality? Might it mutate into the government telling people like me that we can’t be rude about devout, law-abiding Muslims and the things that such people say they believe in? (“Muscular liberalism” in the USA would be a terrifying idea.) I am sure that many Muslims already fear – are being encouraged by each other to fear – that it may degenerate into a mere excuse for Muslim bashing, in the physical and wrong sense, by the government and its employees, and by many others. Perhaps (actually I’m inclined, as I read this through before posting it, to make that: probably), as we all challenge the phrase from our various different positions, muscular liberalism will degenerate into one of those mush phrases that mean whatever anyone listening wants it to mean, and then by and by, whatever the powers that be want it to mean. In other words it may degenerate into meaning nothing, just like the words “Big Society” have, in the minds of nearly everyone I meet or read.
But I want to end where I began, with the pleasure I feel that I and all others who choose to comment on this speech, here or anywhere else, are at least able, if we want to, to read the speech itself. Last night, for example, at the Christian Michel evening that I alluded to in an earlier posting, I got talking with an acquaintance about Cameron’s speech. After he had begun to opine about it, rather intelligently, I asked him: Have you actually read the speech? Yes, he said. Me too, I said. This exchange pleased me then and it pleases me still.
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