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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Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.
Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish’s probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.
That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?
Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you’re a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren’t we? What’s this – you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid… oh, you are a Muslim. That’s OK, then.
I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple’s dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.
Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.
But can we dispense with the State altogether?
Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?
Where Tony Blair had no reverse gear, and Lady T was not for turning, Mr Cameron has a full gearbox and power steering that allow him to execute swerves and three point turns.
– Benedict Brogan
… yet again I find myself pondering adding a “No shit Sherlock” category… maybe more decorously listed as “I told you so” or some such.
George Osborne was recently in New York, soaking up plaudits for boldly leading Britain into fiscal austerity at a time when, apparently in contrast, America’s feckless political elite has allowed the national debt to balloon. The problem is that UK austerity, so far at least, is a myth.
November’s national accounts, released last week, were shocking. Government spending last month was sharply up on the same month in 2009 – yes, up! British state borrowing is still escalating, with the national debt rising very quickly.
– Liam Halligan.
However I do rather roll my eyes at the word ‘shocking’ as it has been screamingly obvious what was happening for quite some time. Sometimes I think Samizdata needs a category called ‘No shit, Sherlock’. How anyone could have thought Cameron’s dismal followers were ever serious about actually cutting back the state is hard to fathom.
I’m against the rise in student fees… ‘cos it ain’t fuckin’ high enough
– Thaddeus Tremayne
I can now safely say that Mr Tommy Sheridan, once the lion of the Scottish Socialist party, displayed more than comradely affection while visiting a Manchester sex club called Cupids. In 2006 it was not safe for the News of the World to say this: Mr Sheridan successfully sued the paper for libel. If his life were a play this would be Act III when the hero seems all-conquering. Enter Iago:
The jury’s verdict implies that it also believed that it was Sheridan whose voice was heard on a secretly recorded video confessing that he made these admissions. The video, taped by his former friend George McNeilage and bought by the NoW for £200,000, became a central part of the perjury trial. Sheridan insisted it was a forgery.
Sheridan has been told to expect a prison sentence.
When he gets out he can have a chat with Jeffrey Archer. They will have plenty in common.
I find the sheer, vulgar symmetry of both of their stories fascinating. You could plot their fortunes as a sine curve. It’s like the plot of a Jeffrey Archer novel, only less subtle.
Like many other people trying to plan arrangements over Christmas, I am keeping a close eye on the weather reports. I have the grim task of driving to East Anglia on Tuesday for a family funeral; on Thursday, I am due to be flying to southern Germany to stay with relations but have no idea whether that is likely to happen. But at least I am able to be in the comfort of my home. Thousands of people are not so lucky.
Watching the BBC’s rolling news channel today, I listened as a woman, who has been on board a BA flight to Pakistan, described how her aircraft has been standing on a runway, moving no-where for about 6 hours. Passengers were suffering panic attacks; the cabin was very hot and there was no water to drink; and of course there are few toilet facilities. One thing that the woman said struck me: the passengers were not allowed to try and get off the plane. If they did, she said, they’d be arrested. The staff were to all in intents and purposes holding passangers hostage, a nice inversion of a hijacking.
It seems to me that this situation is absurd. Given the privileged position of an airline operating under such laws governing international flight, there ought to be a clear “duty of care” on such airlines to provide all decent condtions, including things like food, water and so on, for passengers. If they cannot do this on the plane, then the passengers are entitled to ask to get off, go to a building and wait for developments.
What we are talking about are hostage conditions. I’d be interested to see if the passengers could join together and bring a lawsuit against the airline, and what the outcome would be.
The weather has been severe – and flight safety is a key concern, but the airlines are having a bad Christmas. And it does not look to be getting better any time soon. As far as I am concerned, I cannot wait to see the end of December soon enough.
Philip Johnston write that “Vested interests are protecting administrators and forcing cuts to vital services” in an article about PFI contracts (Public Finance Initiative).
But for the most part “privatisation” is a meaningless distraction. The only realistic way to reduce state expenditure is to actually shed state functions as the root cause is not which mechanism the state uses: direct employees funded with taxes or outside hired hands funded with taxes.
Either way, the people who carry out state functions are creatures of a system funded by taxes rather than subject to the rigours of actual market pressures… until everyone in the chain can go broke as a consequence of their actions, it is still a state structure regardless of who is making the wheels go around.
Indeed every time the state bales out a bank regardless of the moral hazard, they spread the decision skewing and insulated-from-consequence disease associated with being supported by taxes.
To reduce state expenditure, you need to get the state out of all but its “core business”. You need to remove whole function of what the state does, not just hire different people to do it. The real problem is a century of ‘mission creep’. Until you can countenance that you are not serious about reducing the bloated state.
But I don’t get the impression that Cameron and his Coalition are any more interested in personal liberty or rolling back the frontiers of state than their predecessors. The “Big Society”, indeed, is a watered-down version of the sort of bogus, grand, unifying scheme employed in the Fascist Italy of the Thirties.
–James Delingpole
To anyone with a vaguely libertarian perspective observing the relentless creep of regulatory politics into ever more aspects of civil life, it has long been self evident that as a practical matter the statist right are largely interchangeable with the statist left. After all David “I see no liberty” Blunkett was simply standing on the shoulders of Michael “there is something of the night about him” Howard, no?
Hence the recent remark by the dependably dismal John Major that he likes being in coalition come as no surprise to me whatsoever. Indeed the only thing that ever so slightly raised one eyebrow on my part was his willingness to left the mask slip.
And with this in mind, I left a comment on Norman Tebbit’s blog in response to this:
“I respect those who are working in UKIP, but I would hope that you would respect us Eurosceptics in the Tory Party too.”
“Well I would respect you a lot more if you were not aiding and abetting the people who have turned the Conservative party into a party of Big Euro Statism… but the fact is they could not have done it without folks such as yourself helping to keep a critical mass of genuine conservatives voting for the party despite profound unease with the likes of Cameron, Major et al.
If you are hanging in there because you seek to take over the Tory party (re-take really) and drive out the twerps who now freely admit they are ideologically fungible with the left (something I have been pointing out for a decade, so Major’s remarks are hardly a revelation to me)… ie you remain a Tory so you can do a UK version of the Tea Party… well great, that is certainly something I could get behind… but if you are just going to be enablers for people who frankly do not share your conservative views, then with all due respect Norman (and I do mean that) you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and that is a great pity.”
Here is Alex Singleton’s take on what could happen to Cameron’s chances of a second term, if he continues surrendering to the EU:
UKIP arguably cost the Conservatives 10 seats at the last election. If a handful of extra [Tory] activists defect to UKIP in each marginal constituency in time for the next election, and others prioritise their golf over Tory leaflet drops, this figure could easily increase, helping to drive David Cameron from Downing Street.
Given how statist Cameron is, that is a delightful thought.
The Guardian laments the stillbirth of the clause in the Equality Act 2010 that required public sector bodies to consider the impact of every policy on inequality. The Act itself was passed as one of the last flourishes of the previous government, but this clause was not due to come in until April 2011. Now Teresa May says it never will.
In practice the “public sector equality duty” would have meant that local authorities would have had to carry out an “Equality Impact Assessment” on, well, everything. Here is a link to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s own guidance on carrying out an Equality Impact Assessment.
The Guardian says that the clause was “a moderate and sensible effort to provide exactly the ‘framework for equality’ she [Teresa May] claims she wants” and May was mean to kill it. I quote from the editorial linked to above: “All the clause required was that every new policy had to be considered through the filter of its impact on poverty. ”
All? That “all” is no small thing. Funnily enough it was the left that alerted me to the sinister effects of having to consider things through a filter chosen by the elite. “Hegemonic discourse” is their preferred term for it.
Now the Guardian says the clause was nothing more than a light steer given to councils that they would be free to interpret how they wished, and talks as if the description “socialism in one clause” was just Teresa May’s snark and scaremongering. Back in January 2009, though, Polly Toynbee wrote an enthusiastic article about its potentially “mind-bogglingly immense” impact and quoted a Labour Cabinet minister who described the public sector equality duty “with relish” as… guess what?
“Socialism in one clause”.
Rather let the cat out of the bag, there.
Quite a lot of the time, I get irritated by the Channel 4 news programme, and its anchor, Jon Snow, who is often so blatant in his bias that it no longer angers, merely bemuses. But in fairness to that channel, it still seems willing to take risks with genuinely intelligent and argumentative programmes of the sort that the BBC will often rarely touch these days. Case in point was this programme. It does not pretend to be coolly objective: it is fiercely pro-free market; it hammers away at the fact that Britain is massively in public debt and that this issue primarily stems from decades of the Welfare State and a socialistic polity. Various people, such as Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, appear on it. (Very good he is too, as the old film reviewer Barry Norman used to say). I would imagine that anyone watching this who is a Keynesian or big government type would be spitting blood by the end of the show, particularly as a result of how, for example, it raves about Hong Kong under the benevolent guidance of John Cowperthwaite during the late days of Hong Kong’s colonial history. Another thing struck me: Alisdair Darling, the former finance minister in the recent Labour government, came across as incredibly weak in defending his views; he looked a broken man. The head of the TUC, Brendan Barber, looked like a complacent City banker during the fat years.
This show is not an isolated example of how the channel has thrown rocks at the received wisdom. This show was another case; and this more recent tilt at the gods of AGW alarmism was another.
Of course, these may only be isolated examples. But I am not so sure. There is, at the moment, a general questioning among some people about certain supposedly “settled views”, such as that we need governments to prevent AGW, or that printing money and expanding the state is a good thing, or that genetically modified crops are the mark of Satan, and so forth.
And I can remember the Channel 4 Diverse Reports series of the 1980s, including its show, The New Enlightenment (which I don’t know is still available). I remember watching it for the first time and imagining how the the heads of leftists and tweedy Tories would be exploding.
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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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