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]
|
British tax funded broadcaster the BBC (it does not like the term “state broadcaster” as it prides itself on its political independence from the government of the day – although it shows no independence from collectivist ideology in general) does not run advertisements apart for what it considers good causes. Such as, of course, itself – BBC shows and other products.
The first “Director General” of the BBC, when it stopped being a commercial company, was a man called John Reith – and annual lectures are given in his name, the “Reith Lectures“. The BBC proudly advertises these lectures as a high culture jewel, something that no nasty commercial or charitable broadcaster would ever produce. Each year some establishment person actually lowers him or herself to speak to the unclean masses.
However, this year the endless advertisements were useful. The lecturer (a former head
of the Royal Society – although Newton, Boyle, and the others must be spinning in their graves) is to be a man of science, but of the modern sort in that the advertisements quote him saying that science must avoid investigating certain things – there are “doors that should remain closed”. This is an attitude that would have pleased the more extreme people in the Inquisition, but is unlikely to inspire children to question established orthodoxies – but, of course, questioning is no longer the function of “science”. Also the main modern functions of science appear to be to combat “climate change” (by supporting ever greater power for governments, pretending that more regulations and taxes will “save the planet” rather than be a corrupt scheme for special interests to gain money and power – by the way this is true even if, as may well be the case, the theory that human C02 emissions are a danger is correct, as such schemes as “Cap and Trade” will do nothing to reduce such emissions and such political scams are not part of science anyway) and to make sure that the “benefits of globalization are equitably shared”.
How “science” can be twisted so that this last nakedly political aim can be claimed to be part of it, I will never find out – as, of course, I will avoid the Reith Lectures as if they were the plague (which they are – the plague of ignorance and collectivist fanaticism), but I am still grateful for the advertisements for, as always with BBC advertisements, they warn people that the show being advertised is excrement, something to be avoided unless one enjoys stepping in excrement. However, if should be remembered that for children, especially for intelligent children interested in the world, such things as the “Reith Lecturers” are presented as key to the golden door of knowledge.
This is the tragedy – it is the most intelligent and hard working children who are ruined, those who hunger for knowledge are poisoned with a political message disguised as science (or history, or high culture). Not everyone has access to books (especially in modern times – the days when ordinary homes were full of serious works are long gone, at least in Britain), and many people are not first inspired by books in any case – they are inspired by the spoken word. And both the education system and the media (especially the broadcasting media) target such young people for ruination – for taking what is good in them, and turning it bad. Teaching them a rigid orthodoxy (which they must not question) which is really a mask for a political ideology – world egalitarianism, the “equitable sharing” of “the benefits of globalization”, with its basic denial of private property rights.
Perhaps, as so many tell me, the internet will save such young people – but perhaps it will not. I remain doubtful.
Oh and I, of course, remain open to correction – for example it is possible that the lecturer (his name did not make an impression on me – such beings being rather close to being parts of a hive mind anyway) may explain various new designs for atomic fission power stations in his lectures and discuss various approaches to nuclear fusion in great and enlightening detail. If he does I will have been, partly, refuted.
Tim Worstall asks a good question about why the UK taxpayer is giving aid to countries. First off – as can be seen in the associated comment thread – it seems madness to give money to a rapidly growing economy such as India when that nation has a space programme and a nuclear weapons programme. True, that country still has immense numbers of very poor people, but surely the best way to address that problem is to continue with pro-market reforms, encourage as much free trade as possible, and so forth.
Another good reason for opposing government-to-government aid (and that is what a lot of such aid amounts to), is because it bolsters existing, sometimes very harmful regimes, is frequently stolen and stashed away, or is misused, or deranges local markets, and creates a bureacracy with a vested interest in continuing programmes far beyond their useful life, assuming they ever had a valid reason in the first place.
Unfortunately, “Overseas Aid” has taken on a near sacred status in UK political discourse on a par with “National Health Service”.
Here’s the problem: the global economy has gone tits up. We are doomed. And nowhere is more doomed than Europe whose Monopoly-money currency is going the way of the Zimbabwe dollar and the Reichsmark, and whose constituent economies are so overburdened by sclerotic regulation and so mired in corruption, waste and the kind of institutionalised socialism which might work just about when the going’s good but definitely not now sir now sirree.
And what, pray, is the European Union’s solution to this REAL problem which has already led to riots and death in one country and which could well lead to many more in the horror years to come? Why, to impose on its already hamstrung, over-regulated, over-taxed businesses yet further arbitrary CO2 emissions reductions targets, which will make not the blindest difference to the health of the planet, but which will most certainly slow down economic recovery and make life harder and more miserable for everybody.
In Britain, David Cameron is wedded to the same suicidal policy – on the one hand brandishing £6.5 billion cuts in government spending as though this were a sign of his maturity and his commitment to reducing Britain’s deficit, while on the other remaining committed to a “low carbon” economy set to destroy what’s left of our industry and cost the taxpayer at least £18 billion (yep – almost THREE times as much as the pathetic cuts announced so far by his pathetic chancellor) a year.
– James Delingpole explains why he keeps banging on and on about Global bloody Warming.
“The process is the punishment”, and Dale McAlpine has been processed.
Charges have been dropped against a Christian preacher who told a police officer homosexuality was “a sin”.
Of course they have. So long as someone pushes back, the police will retreat. They know that they would lose in court – they also know they do not have to win in court in order to intimidate. Being arrested is not nice, is it? The mere arrest is quite enough to spread the idea around that saying homosexuality is a sin is illegal.
Dale Mcalpine, 42, was accused of a public order offence after speaking to a community support officer (PCSO) in Workington, Cumbria, in April.
…
Mr Mcalpine was preaching to shoppers in the west Cumbrian town on 20 April when he said he was approached by the PCSO, who told him he was a liaison officer for the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
“He told me he was homosexual,” Mr Mcalpine said.
“I said ‘the Bible says homosexuality is a sin’. He said ‘I’m offended by that and I’m also the LGBT liaison officer within the police’.
“I said ‘it is still a sin’.”
He said three uniformed police officers then appeared and accused him of using homophobic language.
“I’m not homophobic, I don’t hate gays,” Mr Mcalpine said. “Then they said it is against the law to say homosexuality is a sin. I was arrested.”
Kudos to gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who “condemned the arrest and urged the home secretary to issue new guidelines to the police” – although it is a pity that Mr Tatchell does not follow through the logic of his argument to the case of property rights.
Once freedom goes it becomes a matter of elite fashion just who the police harass. In 2010 it was Baptist street preachers. Twenty years earlier it was homosexuals. Twenty years later it may be homosexuals again. Get yer multiculturalism right and it could be both.
This blogger makes the sort of point that ought to be on the lips of any member of the UK government right now. On the BBC Breakfast TV show this morning, one of the presenters tried to make out that the UK government’s planned £6 billion cut in the current financial year would be painful (cut to photos of concerned civil servants, etc). But in the context of the gigantic sums the UK government spends every year, £6 billion is chickenfeed. It is practically a rounding error. Even the tiniest adjustment in spending and revenues renders such a number utterly nugatory.
So what gets me is why this fact is not made clear by the government. And in addition, when asked: “So Minister, are you planning to make public sector staff redundant?” the answer must be, “Yes, there will be cutbacks. The state has taken on hundreds of thousands of folk, not in front-line services, but in the long tail of administration. Some of that has to go, hopefully by voluntary redundancies and the like but there will also have to be compulsory cuts. It will unpleasant, but the idea is to shrink the state, non-wealth creating bit of the economy and expand the wealth creating bit. There has to be a significant adjustment. Thank you very much and enjoy the Chelsea Flower Show”.
That’s what I’d say, anyway. Guess that’s why I am not an MP.
Brown is on the ball yet again
Gordon Brown’s continuing success as Chancellor is a journalistic frustration. His economic forecasts prove more accurate than those of his self-righteous and near permanently wrong critics. It is boring that brick by tedious brick he is laying the foundations of an economy and society that copies Scandinavia’s successes as much as those of the US. And it is infuriating that the predictions that his sums will end in a terrifying black hole never come true.
– Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian, December 2004
“Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left”
– Gordon Brown’s departing Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne, writing to his successor, May 2010.
Ian Cowie at the Telegraph has an instructive little piece about that now-abandoned scheme of the recently departed government, the Home Information Pack.
So, farewell then, Home Information Packs (HIPs). You were about as much use to homebuyers and sellers as a chocolate teapot. You were even worse value for people who spent time and money training to become HIP inspectors.
Home Information Packs, for the benefit of our overseas readers were… sorry, my brains are going to flee at speed through my nostrils if forced to spend more than a gonzosecond contemplating a thing engendered by John Prescott and Yvette Cooper. HIPs were a very boring thing to do with selling your house where you had to pay the government to send around a fluffy tailed squirrel to tick a box saying you had double glazing. The original idea was not obviously stupid. It was going to stop gazumping by – by – John Prescott! Yvette Cooper! Alert! Alert! Imminent overload! – anyway, there is some similar scheme in Denmark where they have nice painted furniture and socialism works. Alas, they did some research and found that gazumping is only a factor in 2% of UK house sales. Time for the chop, then? No, Minister. Not after they had thought of the name and everything. Won’t somebody think of the publicity? “Minister in a hip new idea!” “Hip, hip hooray for HIPs!”
So HIPs were reinvented as being all about the Home Condition Report, these being something like quickie house surveys except the seller rather than the buyer has to arrange them and pay for them.
Do you see the problem with that?
Full marks. Not very many marks, though, because so did practically everybody else. That, dear readers, is the particular aspect I wish to highlight as being typical of the modern state. The modern state is like the stupid driver at 5 minutes 30 seconds in the Demented Cartoon Movie.
Sure, everyone hates surveyors and has heard a horror story about them, but you did not have to be a genius to figure out that buyers were still likely to want a professional they could sue carrying out the survey rather than a government squirrel. All the home condition report would mean was that in practice the sellers and the buyers would both have to pay. Everybody, even the government, seemed to know it was not going to work but somehow it lumbered on.
Adverts appeared in the jobs freesheets for squirrel-training. It seemed a nice government-backed job for people who were somewhat educated but not very good at getting jobs. Thousands of well-spoken but slightly desperate people took out loans for this training.
Eventually the government got cold feet about the slowdown in the housing market and said that it would remove the requirement that Home Condition Reports were compulsory. So there was no point left in HIPs and they might as well be dispensed with altogether? No, no, HIPs were still totally vital because they were all about the … the … the Energy Performance Certificate. How could a prospective purchaser live without knowing whether his potential dream house was a nice A (short green stripe) or the blood red and scarily long stripe that denoted a wasteful G?
Fine, it turned out. Purchasers were already able to figure out that Ye Olde Cottage with the leaded windows was a G with a Stripe of Shame as long as your lower intestine and if they wanted Ye Olde Cottage they did not care, and if they did not want Ye Olde Cottage but Ye Modern Boxe they could already see the double glazing. After two re-brandings HIPs had became a national moan. Still the Stupid Driver faced with the demand from the on-board computer to steer moaned, “But I’m bad at that.”
With the election and change of government the HIP finally died, unmourned. Even the Association of Sadder and Poorer Little Squirrels accepted the game was up.
Except that in the graveyard something stirs… the Energy Performance Certificate is required by the European Union.
Those of us who lived through the previous end of Labour rule, in 1979, recall how that moment was remembered as the time when rubbish was lying in the road uncollected, thanks to strikes by the bin men. That little story summed it all up, and ushered in an age of union bashing. And Labour Party bashing, for several general elections.
Will this story be the abiding memory of the end of Labour rule now?
Civil servants came under increasing pressure from ministers in the dying months of the Labour government to carry out expensive orders that they disagreed with and responded by submitting an unprecedented number of formal protests in the run-up to the general election.
The five separate protests came in the form of written ministerial directions – requested by the most senior civil servant in a department when they disagree with a minister’s decision so strongly that they refuse to be accountable for it.
For me that perfectly captures the public squalour that is always unleashed by dead-on-their-feet Labour governments, as they madly pursued that last ounce of private affluence for their various client groups, and damn the consequences for the country.
Labourites are now pinning their hopes for an early return to office on the notion that the government that now has to clean up their mess will get most of the blame for that mess.
This is partly why Labour sorched all that earth. It wasn’t only tribal greed. It was deliberate political calculation. But if it becomes firmly established that the current mess is indeed a Labour mess, and that all the grief that followed immediately after their time in government was Labour grief, then Labour could be out of business for far longer than they now calculate.
Personally, I hope Labour are out of business for ever. And see also this posting I did for here a couple of years ago, which also had “scorched earth” in its title. This holds up quite well now, I think, especially the final sentence, as do many of the comments.
Michael Jennings then argued, from the behaviour of idiot Australian voters in similar circumstances, that as soon as the mess is cleared up, Labour spendthrifts will be back to create more mess, to scorch more earth. I really hope he’s wrong. But then, two years ago, I also hoped that the above kind of behaviour would itself cause a Labour electoral wipe-out, and that didn’t really happen, did it?
Maybe the Conservatives will now decide that the mess must never be cleared up, that the earth must remain permanently scorched, so that the country never feels able to afford a Labour government ever again. This certainly seems to be their current policy. Which might be great for the Conservatives. Shame about the country.
When a party loses power after an election it is traditional for departing ministers to leave personal notes to their successors, usually consisting of advice on how to do the job. In a rare and beautiful display of political honesty, the departing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, wrote the following to David Laws, the Liberal Democrat who is taking over:
“Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam.”
This almost reached the sublime level of the parting message of Reginald Maudling to the new Chancellor James Callaghan in 1964: “Good luck, old cock … Sorry to leave it in such a mess.”
Many of the relatively new Docklands Light Railway stations I’ve passed through, often being situated on old or new viaducts, or part of similarly elevated main line stations, have offered fine views of the eastern parts of London, which is where many of the big towers are. Yesterday afternoon I took my camera with me in search of more such stations with views. I was not disappointed, and the weather, not good of late, was also on my side.
Pretty much by chance, I found myself at this station:
From this quaintly named viewpoint, I saw what I at first thought was some kind of football stadium. But, it seemed not to be finished. What could it be?
Also, other building was going on not too far away, by London standards. I love a good crane cluster:
But what was it all? Then I saw a weird object looking like a giant deep sea fish. This could only mean one thing: an unpopular sport of the kind that Needs Government Help. This wasn’t football. Of course! This is where the Olympic Games are going to happen:
All those wires in the sky are because regular trains go past this station, although they don’t stop there.
Here’s another picture, relevant to those above, this time of the front page of the London Evening Standard from last Friday:
By us, Mayor Boris means me and my fellow Londoners. Here is the story.
I cursed the day that London got these damn games on the day it got them. It looks like all other London taxpayers will soon be doing the same. And I will be very surprised if all other UK taxpayers don’t end up agreeing, despite what that “Culture Minister” says.
The “GREED IS GOOD” thing concerns Michael Douglas, pictured in the picture, reprising Gordon Gekko. I dare say we will soon all learn that the entire recent economic meltdown was Gekko’s fault. Nothing to do with crazy government monetary policy. But banking, like the Olympic Games, is a nationalised industry, and each is as economically out of control as the other.
In May 1979 I was walking over Hungerford Bridge a day or two after the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power. I saw in the distance a small embarrassed-looking group gathering to take part in some sort of march or demonstration to protect union rights. I was not happy about Mrs Thatcher’s victory, earnest young leftie that I was, but I remember thinking, at least she’ll stomp on the unions.
I gather that there has been some sort of political development today.
Finish this sentence, if you can: At least he’ll….
Can it be? Do my eyes deceive me? An MP… a Tory MP… who seems to have a grasp of economics!
How long before this guy gets a visit from the party whip advising him that insightful talk about real world economics might be harmful to his career, capice?
|
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.
|
