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]
|
I would hope, however naively perhaps, that a forthcoming UK government, after the current shambolic one, might take the axe to some of the quangos – quasi-autonomous governmental organisations – that cost so much and do relatively little that is of any use. So it is frankly laughable that the Conservative Party’s idea for controlling public spending (you mean hopefully cut it, Ed), is to set up something called the Office of Budget Responsibility. Oh please. What the heck is the Treasury department supposed to be for? The problem of controlling, and cutting, public spending is both simple and hard: simple to understand – there’s way too much spending, and we need to slash it – and hard, in that it will involve facing down various vested interests. Previous governments that have cut spending, or tried to do so, such as the Thatcher administration, did not have to set up some daft “office” to address the issue.
The trouble with this idea is that it shows how the current Tory party feels it must distance itself from the harsh decisions that will have to be made to shrink public spending from its current horrific levels. But this is an impossible task – far better to be blunt with the public.
In an earlier piece here today, Perry de Havilland referred to the great fuss that Britain’s broadcasters are now making about the rather small successes of the BNP in the Euro elections, and their relative silence concerning the much bigger success achieved by UKIP. True. UKIP is indeed being ignored, and the BNP is indeed being talked up. But I don’t think it’s right to dismiss the talking up of the BNP entirely as tactics. I think that genuine fear is being expressed by our former gatekeepers of correct thought. The rise of Adolph Hitler has been obsessively taught in British schools for the last generation or so, as the very definition of that which Must Not Happen, yet now, something not wholly unlike it appears to be happening, here in Britain! Calamity!
I say “former” gatekeepers of correct thought because that is surely the other thing now happening that scares these people. The internet, as we enthusiasts for it have been saying ever since it got started as a mass phenomenon a decade ago or more, entitles people to say whatever they like. They no longer need the permission of anybody more important to reach a quite large audience with an opinion that quite large numbers of people agree with but which the Gatekeepers disapprove of and want suppressed. Very suddenly, in a matter of a year or two, servile and carefully crafted letters to the newspapers, that conceded almost everything but cunningly managed to slip a tiny few incorrect thoughts past the Guardians, could be forgotten about. A blog can now be cranked up, and the blogger can tell it exactly how he reckons it is. Potential supporters can be directed with a link to the manifesto of whatever crank party the blogger happens to approve of or find interesting. If a Gatekeeper now wants to quote a “crank” out of context, Google ensures that the rest of us can read the opinions of said crank, in context, whether the Gatekeeper himself deigns to include an actual link or not.
My eldest brother is a UKIP activist, and I sense in him none of the frustration that he and his UKIP brethren used to feel, about being ignored by the masses, because then ignored by “the” (there then being only one great lump of them) media. When he now knocks on a door, the householder knows just what Elder Brother stands for. Conversation can immediately proceed to the matter of what a splendid front garden or front door the householder is presenting to the world, thus establishing that although firm in their opinions, UKIPers are still humans, able to see the world through eyes other than their own. Seemed like a nice enough bloke. Yeah, maybe I’ll vote for him, if I don’t fancy any of the others. That the big media are still trying to ignore Elder Brother now no longer worries him. The Gatekeepers now have to convince him, and all the other people who think as he does, that he and they are wrong. Good luck with that.
As a radical libertarian activist, I built the entire early first half of my career (if you can call it that) contriving to navigate, with cunningly photocopied pamphlets, around Gatekeeper assumptions that such opinions just could not be sincerely held, by anyone who mattered. I helped to contrive a local internet, you might say, for London libertarians, and I helped to feed libertarian memes into low-grade BBC local talk shows. Ever since the real internet came along, I have had a great deal to say for myself, but have nevertheless been feeling somewhat at a loose end.
All of which means, as the title of this posting proclaims, that the burden of proof has now been reversed. It used to be that someone who favoured radical tax cuts, or bringing immigration to a halt, or expunging the EU from British life, or that Jesus Christ is Our Saviour and gayness is evil, or that Islam is not welcome in these islands, or any other such challenge to Gatekeeper orthodoxy, had to prove to the Gatekeepers that his opinion was worth being heard and had some flicker of merit, perhaps because (see John Stuart Mill) it ensured that the Gatekeepers were at least prodded from time to time into keeping their orthodoxies in full working order. Now, the Gatekeepers, their gates electronically melted, have to explain why such notions do not have any merit, and why people should not vote for them. Since the Gatekeepers have spent all their lives loftily refusing to participate in any such arguments, instead only contriving verbal formulae to demonise all such notions as “extreme”, “selfish”, “old fashioned”, “racist”, “far right”, and so on, they are, not surprisingly, very frightened at suddenly having to overturn the habits of a lifetime. What, they wonder, if they make even greater fools of themselves than the internet, by telling voters directly about all these wickednesses, has made of them already? What if they join in these arguments, but then lose? Well, indeed.
Last night, for instance, I watched a lady cabinet minister carefully refusing to reply to what the man from the BNP was actually saying, and instead insisting that the BNP is “really”, “essentially”, racist. By all means throw that last point in incidentally, but ad hominem attack and nothing else no longer works as an argumentative technique, because the argument is now raging anyway and Milady Cabinet Minister can only decide whether or not she joins in. The BNP can decide what it will now say, and say it. It does not need permission from Her Ladyship, or from her friends in the BBC or in the big national newspapers, to say whatever it wants to say, to anyone who wants to listen. The man from the BNP oozed confidence. The Lady Cabinet Minister looked uncomfortable.
As it happens, I share quite a few Gatekeeper objections to some of these “extreme” ideas, even as I am enthusiastic about others of them. I quite like immigration, especially from Eastern Europe. Jesus Christ is not my saviour, and gayness is fine by me. I fear that if Britain leaves EUrope, economic freedom (let alone any other kind) may not erupt, but rather something far nastier and stupider and more xenophobic and more economically wrong-headed. And so on. But, I do favour radical libertarianism. And I do not like Islam at all, and believe that the only defence of its unchallenged presence in our midst that makes any sense is based on believing that what it actually says will be almost unanimously ignored by its supposed supporters in favour of far kinder and far gentler mis-readings of it.
But then, I am not saying which opinions I think should be allowed and which not allowed. I say: allow them all. In fact, the nastier and more belligerent they are, the better it is for us all to be able to acquaint ourselves with them. Where I agree I will say so, and where I disagree I will say so. I just did.
And when it comes to voting, vote for one of the little parties, that actually believes in stuff. Don’t waste your vote on the Conservatives, LibDems or Labour. What will voting for them accomplish? How will voting for those people tell anyone what you actually think and actually want?
“The irony is that no other leader could have led Britain so skilfully through financial crisis. Without him, the banks might have collapsed, and the G20 would never have happened. His work on development ensured that thousands of children did not starve and did not die because the rich world deemed them worthless.”
– Mary Riddell, in the Daily Telegraph.
So tell me, Ms Riddell, can you perhaps explain why the financial crisis, that has sent many British banks into the arms of the UK taxpayer, has not had a comparable impact on say, Canada, which shares a rather large landed border with the country at the centre of the credit crunch, namely, the US?
And why do you think that the government that presided over this disaster, that allowed public finances to run into the red, and massively so, before the credit crunch, can claim merit for what has happened since?
Does she not think that the way the Bank of England sets interest rates, or how banks have relied on the “too big to fail” assurance of public support, might not have had a teensy-weensy bit to do with foolish lending, for example?
Just asking, Mary.
The media and chattering classes are agog that the BNP, a fascistic and racist party, have gained some electoral success.
So what?
The Labour and Tory parties have been broadly fascistic (a corporatist ‘soft fascism’ whose symbol is a CCTV rather than the goose-step-and-armband kind) for the best part of a decade. Thus the way I see it, the BNP is just a more overt and perhaps more honest expression of the sort of mainstream democratically sanctioned tyranny that has been steadily and remorselessly stripping away civil liberties for quite some time now.
I cannot help thinking the real motivation for the aghast shrieks about the BNP is that it means the mainstream media do not have to dwell unduly on the far more ideologically antithetical-to-the-establishment and strategically significant growth of UKIP.
The truth is the world view and policies of the (truly vile) BNP is not that different on 95% of issues than the (vile) Tory, (vile) Labour Party and (fairly vile) LibDems, all of whom, once you strip out the overt racism of the BNP, broadly agree about the role of the state. That is to say all their statist-regulatory world views are more or less fascistic when it comes to matters of economy and civil liberties.
The gasps and finger pointing at the thuggish scrotes of the BNP give many an excuse to avoid focusing on the electoral success of UKIP, because unlike the profoundly statist BNP, UKIP is a party filled with people who actually do want a less intrusive and smaller state. UKIP may not aspire to some libertarian minarchist paradise, but they actually want less net regulation and dare to talk about civil liberties as something that matters (as opposed to the LibDems, who strongly believe civil liberties matter and yet want to regulate the crap out of everything, as if somehow that has no bearing on liberty).
In short, the fact UKIP thinks that the liberties of individuals is something to shout about and they want to shrink the state at all, rather than just keep expanding the state, but just a wee bit slower than the other guys… well… in the context of where we find ourselves today, this verges on revolutionary.
No wonder the mainstream would rather emote and declaim about the ultimately irrelevant BNP.
In a comment thread on this posting, the question came up, from the commenter “Laird”, as to why Samizdata has not written about the local UK/European Union elections. Part of the answer, for my part, is that a little bit of me dies whenever words such as “EU elections” come up, but also there has been a lot of commentary and head-scratching analysis, in the press and other blogs, on this issue for the past week or so. What could I say that has not been already said?
Anyway, for our non-UK readers who have not been following it, the ruling UK Labour Party did very badly in both the local UK elections and the European one. In the latter case, Labour came in third place (15 per cent of votes cast), behind the Tories and United Kingdom Independence Party respectively. UKIP is a party that wants the UK to leave the EU. I voted for it – partly because I did not want the Tories to get a larger share of the vote and hence get complacent, partly because I broadly agree with UKIP on things like cutting state spending and the EU. UKIP is not a hardline libertarian party but it is the best of a bad lot, generally. And I happen to know one of its MEP candidates, Tim Worstall – who is a member of the London bloggerati – and I always say it is a good idea to vote for someone you know, trust and like (I also know Syed Kamall, a Tory MEP, but just could not bring myself to vote Tory. Sorry Syed).
As for the aftermath, well, UK PM Gordon Brown has managed, by a mixture of party membership cowardice, shellshock, bullying and flimflam to persuade his colleagues in Parliament to give him another chance in the job. Labour has suffered the lowest share of the vote since the First World War, albeit on a very low turnout of voters. The national socialist British National Party, a party which, let it not be forgotten, holds to fairly hard-left views on economics, has picked up two seats in the European Parliament, and did so by playing fairly hard on the grievances of traditional Labour voters in run-down parts of the UK. There has often been a streak of “sod the foreigner” in the makeup of the UK left, although it has been tempered by a sort of transnational progressivism, at least from the Fabian middle classes who have provided Labour with some of its intellectuals (if that is not too grand a word to describe such people).
So there you have it – Britain is on course, if poll data are accurate, to have a Conservative government by the middle of next year, when a general election must be held. Europe has moved, politically, to the right, with concerns about immigration and economics driving some of that. But the UK Conservatives, while they have benefited from a mortally weakened government, have not convinced me that they have a serious intent to shrink the state. It may be that when or if David Cameron gets the keys to 10 Downing Street and has a chance to read the financial books, that the full horror of what he sees will necessitate spending cuts. We shall see.
And in the meantime, the US has, at least for a moment, moved to the left under Mr Obama, although for how much longer, it is premature to say (bring on the mid-term elections!). Ideologically, the Atlantic may be widening. We live, as they say, in interesting times.
Doubtless politics has always had its dark side. But the depths to which it has sunk over the last 12 years under New Labour has been unprecedented in this country. Of all the legacies left by this Government the poisoning of political discourse is surely the worst. Gordon Brown, foul-tempered and intolerant, has been at the very centre of this mess.
Gordon Brown never was fit for Number 10 and, given the wreckage of the economy, the public finances and the financial regulatory system, was never fit for Number 11 either.
– Ruth Lea adds to the admosphere now being created by the WAGS. Have those Blair Babes finally justified their existence?
I guess it is a sign of the times that when the UK ruling Labour Party is in such a mess, the appointment of a character such as Sir Alan Sugar, the businessman and brash TV show main man, gets a collective raspberry, rather than the coos of applause and “well dones” that would have been the case say, five years ago. It is a largely pointless appointment.
Sir Alan, who is also the front-man for the BBC TV talent show, The Apprentice – modelled on the US one fronted by Donald Trump, is a Labour supporter, believing that there is a large, possibly even larger, role for the state in business. For all his image of the self-made man, he is in many ways quite a corporatist in this sense. And in his demeanor, he represents what a lot of leftists think business is: cut-throat and aggressive. Socialists often buy the idea that commerce is not a positive-sum game, so when they go into business, they behave like the worst caricature of the cliched 19th Century mill-owner. The whole vibe of “The Apprentice” is dog-eat-dog, pandering to the worst impressions that many people have about business.
And make no mistake, Sir Alan, even if he is a nice guy in his private life, comes across as a bully. And this is not a snobbish point, by the way, about his London accent or razor-dodging demeanor. I watched a BBC TV programme the other day when he was asked about his trip to see Gordon Brown, and the media outlets were rife with speculation on what he was doing. Sir Alan could hardly be surprised to be asked about it. Instead, he brushed aside this situation by almost telling the news presenter to shut up. “I’m not gonna talk abaaat it.” For one minute I thought the BBC was going to cut the interview short. It should have done so.
In the fag-end of Labour’s days in power, the elevation of this man to the peerage and a pointless job in “enterprise” will be seen as a rather bizarre footnote.
To quote David Davis MP, three months ago, “How will we know we are living in a police state?”
Is it when the police conduct a systematic campaign of false arrests in order to gather information on people who might commit a crime? Is it when they do that, and public reaction is no more than a shrug? A couple of days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported discoveries made by my local Liberal Democrat PPC, excellently living up to the first bit of her party’s vaguely oxymoronic name:
Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.
The alleged practice is also described as part of a “long-term crime prevention strategy” to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future. […]
A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.
The officer said: “Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence.*
“It is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.
“We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future.”
Acting “on intelligence”, that is, hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, and prejudice, when they know they have no evidence let alone reasonable suspicion of any actual crime — for intelligence is not evidence, it is a substitute for evidence in its absence — the Metropolitan Police are making unlawful arrests, in order to take samples (fingerprints and DNA), that it is deemed by the human rights court to be improper for them to hold in any case. And that fact has not caused public outrage. It has yet to reach any broadcast news service, as far as I am aware.
A quiescent, compliant public and a quiescent, compliant media, are the handmaidens of a police state.
“Food, we are told, is the new sex. It is certainly true that food has taken over from sex as the principal concern of what I call the “interfering classes” – the nannyish, middle-class busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of the nation’s culinary morals, and who are currently obsessed with making the working class eat up its vegetables. We no longer have the prudish Mary Whitehouse complaining about sex and “bad language” on television; instead, we have armies of middle class amateur nutrionists and dieticians complaining about all the seductive advertisements for junk food, which are supposedly corrupting the nation’s youth. By which they mean working-class youth; everyone knows that it’s the Kevins and Traceys who are stuffing their faces with fatty and sugary snack foods, not the Jamies and Saskias.”
Watching the English, pages 306-307, by Kate Fox. A sharp passage from a perceptive book on the inhabitants of this odd, damp island in north-east Europe.
The meltdown of Gordon Brown’s Labour government continues. I was struck by this passage of resigning Cabinet minister James Purnell’s letter to the Prime Minister. It is very revealing in what it says not about the differences between these men, but their similarities:
“We both love the Labour Party. Party. I have worked for it for 20 years and you for far longer. ‘‘We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing. I owe it to our party to say what I believe no matter how hard that may be. I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more not less likely.
That would be disastrous for our country. This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy. It calls for a Government that measures itself by how it treats the poorest in society.
Quite how one can “love” a party responsible for so much mayhem is an interesting question. There is something distinctly creepy about a man who says that he owes “everything” to a political party founded upon socialist principles. Everything? Does this man have no conception of a life beyond party politics? Does he not understand the concept of civil society, of a world outside government?
And although one can possibly agree on the need for better public services and open democracy, there is something revealing in his call for “stronger regulation” and an “active state”. We have, as this blog likes to point out with reference to the financial crisis, for example, had a bucket-load of regulation and state activism, and these have arguably helped create many of our problems, not solved them. I am also not aware that Mr Purnell, or his peers, would be any better than Brown in their stance on issues such as civil liberties and the database state, for instance. They might simply try to make it a bit more palatable.
So although one might be glad that this man has helped plunge a dagger into Mr Brown, it is not entirely clear to me that this fellow would represent a significant improvement. He wants the NuLab regulatory, interfering state to continue. I see no awareness of the disaster caused by runaway public spending. In other words, he’s not much of an improvement. A spell in the private sector, away from the party machine he claims to “love”, would be the best thing that could happen to Mr Purnell, if he wants to develop a wiser worldview.
Meanwhile, the BBC is asking the question about Gordon Brown: “Why has the man once regarded as one of Britain’s finest Chancellors [finance minister] in such trouble?”
Hilarious. This is a man who, as Chancellor, took hold of a relatively strong set of public finances, and over a course of 10 years, ran the UK into the red even before the credit crunch hit. Far from having been a “brilliant” finance minister, he has – apart from his keeping Britain out of the euro, arguably – been a disaster.
Update: the political situation in the UK is now having direct effects on financial markets.
Update: more resignations. It could all be over for Brown by the end of the weekend. Goodness knows what other countries must make of this.
Two fun comments on this brief report of the resignation of Hazel Blears.
From “Simon George”:
There is a term in electrical engineering. It refers to a kind of power failure that instead of occurring instantly, can take a long time to occur. It plays havoc with equipment and is usually much more damaging that a normal blackout
It’s called a ‘brownout’.
And this little snippet from a spoof speech by HB, penned for her by “The Penguin” (10:56 am, worth reading in full):
“My politics has always been rooted in the belief that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary expense claims, …”
I’m also dipping in and out of Prime Minister’s Questions, on the telly. It all illustrates what I more and more feel about how The Universe works, which is: that there are two kinds of questions. There are those that the questionee can ignore. And there are those that he finds he really must answer, because if he doesn’t answer them convincingly, something he is desperate to prevent will happen. Outside of Parliament, all kinds of questions are being asked of Gordon Brown, and not answered, and this now looks like costing him his job. But PMQs is a monument to the first kind of question. Brown is, it would appear, browning out, although I have learned the hard way not to state when the process will be completed. But you wouldn’t know it from watching PMQs.
I have said it before. I am trying to remember if I lacked the nerve to use the full obscenity last time, or whether an editor removed it.
Once again, though, I cheer the demise of a loathsome Home Secretary, but acknowledge that it will make little difference.
There was a time that I thought that Michael Howard was an unusually and unpleasantly illiberal Home Secretary. In truth, that was a fair estimate of the man, but I did not know what was to come.
|
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.
|
