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]
|
Coffee House links to the latest example of a government minister/official leaving potentially sensitive information on the train. As usual, one expects such stories to undermine yet further the credibility of government-created ID systems and databases. But I think it was our own Brian Micklethwait who wrote, a few months back (cannot find the link, sorry) that there is a chance that such “cockups” are deliberate.
What if such papers are being left lying around to create a false trail? Fanciful? Maybe. But it may just be that such officials are not quite as moronic as these stories suggest, or at least that another intepretation is worth thinking about.
Oh scratch that: they are all morons!
The account of Gordon Brown’s vile political career will not remotely surprise Samizdata regulars but this summary of the man who is now, hopefully, in the final phases of his career before reaching oblivion is a great read. Tom Bower’s article reads like a judge’s sentencing comments about a particularly nasty gangster.
I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job.
– Simon Heffer
I remember the newspaper parliamentary sketchwriter, Edward Pearce (no relation) once remarking, apropos the late Tory grandee William Whitelaw, that no-one would be Home Secretary if they could get a job refereeing sumo wrestling.
Guido’s commenters are becoming like a collective character in their own right – scurrilous, sweary, obscene, libelous, sexist, gay-innuendonic, very eighteenth century. I particularly like comment 14 on this, a classic in the modified cliché genre:
Something in the air?…yes, and it stinks: there was shit hitting the fan last week but we could soon see a pile of shit with a fan beneath struggling to cope.
I have been making a bit of a prat of myself here lately, predicting that Brown will go any day now, any week now, within a month, etc. The trouble with predicting a Tipping Point is that you never know exactly when it will happen. You only know that it will. It’s like knowing that there will be a stock market crash, but not knowing exactly when to switch all your bets. Yes, indeed, there will be a crash, but when? Only if you know that do you make your killing.
I think this story, about an old-school Labour ex-MP from T’North saying I quit is rather significant. There is no talk from this woman of the scurrilous Tory media or of what a tragedy Brown is enduring – this is as close to F*** Off You Mad Bastard as it gets. This is important because it goes to the matter of Labour’s core vote. Things for Labour could just go on getting worse and worse. There is no price, to put it in stock market terms, beneath which Labour now cannot fall.
I am now waiting for the next clutch of opinion polls. They could be the Tipping Point, because these may include evidence that even hitherto incorrigibly Labour voters, utterly devoted to the nincompoop idea of the government controlling everything and subsidising everything and hence ruining everything, are now going to sit on their hands for as long as Brown continues. There is a feedback loop at work here. Some core Labour voters are already disgusted about the smearing, and more will be as they learn more. But others will be (are?) disgusted that the smearing may be causing the core Labour vote to collapse, and will decide that they also need to join the chorus to get rid of Brown, even though they personally do not dislike him that much and quite like it now that it is Tories who are being smeared. This is the essence of these landslide things. At a certain point they feed on themselves. But … when???
I quite take the point made by Thaddeus yesterday, that a government falling for merely being horrid to other politicians is not nearly as good as a government falling for being an insanely bad government, of us. I would not be making half so much fuss about this Smeargate thing here if the charge against the Brown regime was not being lead by a hardcore libertarian. I’m now digging out my small collection of Guido photos, to exhibit here.
Guido even linked today to that wonderful Libertarian Alliance piece he did in 1991 about acid house parties. (See also this piece about The Benefits of Speculation, which now makes very interesting reading.) The LA is getting richer now, what with all us Gold Subscribers stumping up a hundred quid a year, year after year, but it will be many decades before it will be able to buy publicity like that.
One of my hobbies in recent years has been photoing tourists in London as they indulge in photography. And, given the harassment I am starting to get from uniformed persons as I wander about London snapping whatever I feel like snapping, I have for quite a while now been wondering how long it would be before I ran into a news story about the police harassing foreign tourists for taking photos and hence undermining London’s reputation as a nice place to visit.
The wait is over:
In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: “I’ve never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries.”
He described his horror as he and his 15-year-old son were forced to delete all transport-related pictures on their cameras, including images of Vauxhall underground station.
“Google Street View is allowed to show any details of our cities on the world wide web,” he said. “But a father and his son are not allowed to take pictures of famous London landmarks.”
He said he would not return to London again after the incident, …
You know how really shitty governments don’t care what their own citizens say about them, but can sometimes be slightly shamed by what the foreigners say? Well, I tried googling “Klaus Matka”, and got to a number of foreign versions of the same story, so this harassment is already being somewhat noticed elsewhere. The forbidding of photos of London’s famed double decker buses (“bus rossi a due piani”) is being particularly talked about. I hope this story goes right round the world, carrying with it the message of just what ghastly people now rule us.
I wonder what London Mayor Boris Johnson thinks about this.
Gordon Brown and his pack of malignant ZaNulabour jackals do not deserve all this negative sentiment and opprobrium. No, really they don’t. They deserve far worse.
I regard ZaNulabour as just about the worst thing to happen to this country since the Black Death and I share Brian’s manifest and meritorious glee at the now-very-likely prospect of Mr. Brown (together with his toadies and his cronies and his aunts) being given their marching orders and sent packing off to political obscurity. If we lived in a more civilised world then this story would end with each and every one of them staring up at the glinting, merciless blade of Madame Guillotine. But we don’t, so I will have to content myself with some sincere and noisy expressions of satisfaction at their demise together with a toast to Guido Fawkes, who did so much to bring it about.
But, what then? What follows next after Mr. Brown and his minions have been given the big, national elbow? Well, in due course (and perhaps even short course) Mr. Brown will be replaced by Mr. Not-Brown. And what lessons will Mr. Not-Brown have learned from the rise and ignoble fall of Mr. Brown? He will have learned that you can relentlessly plunder the wealth-producing sector of the economy in order to provide booty for your clients and be regarded as a visionary leader. He will have learned that you can establish a pettyfogging, pecksniffing, bullying surveillance state and be called a great statesman. He will have learned that you can hack at a once-prosperous economy with punitive taxes and onerous regulations until said economy collapses in an anaemic heap and be praised as an economic genius. And, crucially, he will have learned that you can get away with doing all of that, as long as you observe parliamentary protocols and refrain from seeking to smear your political classmates. That is unacceptable.
So Mr. Not-Brown has had his very simple manifesto handed to him on a plate, courtesy of his predecessor. All Mr. Not-Brown has to do is to pledge to ‘clean up’ politics and put a stop to all this lack of propriety and he is home and hosed. He doesn’t even have to keep his pledge because everyone will be so relieved that Mr. Not-Brown is not Mr. Brown that they will believe him. They will want to believe him and so he will get a free pass to do pretty much whatever takes his fancy. All Mr. Not-Brown has to do (for a couple of years at least) is to make sure that his toadies and his cronies and his aunts keep their cards closer to their chests while they get on with what everybody agrees to be the praiseworthy and important business of stamping on our faces.
In the fullness of time, Mr. Not-Brown will also be humbled by some scandal or other (brought to light, I am sure, by Guido) but by then he will have had his fun and he will shuffle away only to hand the baton of national-ruin over to Mr.Not-Not-Brown.
I am already celebrating the unfolding ZaNulabour train wreck and I cannot begin to tell anyone just how pleased I will be to finally see the back of them. But my joy is tempered with the melancholy realisation that a change of government on the basis of sleaze means no real change at all.
You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido’s, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:
Downing Street in ‘meltdown’
PRWeek – David Singleton 15-Apr-09
Downing Street was this week in ‘meltdown’ as Gordon Brown’s inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.
Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.
Brown’s close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp – or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.
One Downing Street insider said there had been ‘endless conference calls and crisis meetings’ since the story of McBride’s plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.
The source added: ‘This is a full on disaster for Gordon – Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown’s inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.
‘The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed – until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.
‘It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour – by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.’
Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: ‘Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.
‘The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.’
Which they will, because it did.
In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown’s ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it’s too late.
These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.
It occurs to me, reading this item about the decision by the authorities not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative MP, over his farcical arrest, that they decided that picking on this guy now that the UK government is in such a terrible mess might not be a runner. The police/Crown Prosecution Service might have been more confident of doing the government’s bidding when the government appeared all powerful. Now, I get the impression that in Whitehall, and across much of the government machine, arses are being covered, positions prepared. The police have probably woken up to the idea that soon, perhaps sooner than some imagine, their masters will be different, if only by political colouring.
This is how regimes die. Their toadies and functionaries start to turn on them.
Meanwhile, I wonder if we can persuade our American blogger friends to notice that the government of a G7 nation and NATO ally is, er, about to implode. I mean, I think that might even be of interest to The Community Organiser. Or maybe not.
Classic:
“I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.”
This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can’t now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido’s commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn’t. Not yet, anyway.
The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.
Brown’s problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.
The BBC’s caption under the video of Brown’s latest bout of self-strangulation says this:
Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics
LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.
You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don’t care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what’s happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.
See also: this.
The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the “Westminster Village” (see also: “Westminster Bubble”) somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, “Westminster Village”, right there in the title.
So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?
Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn’t be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention – if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against – to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must “move on”. We mustn’t be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.
And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various “reforms” of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do is drop dead, not just because of Smeargate, but because of, well, everything.
With far greater force, as was appropriate to a far greater evil, I felt this about the old USSR. The USSR, I believed, was smashable, and I believed this before it was actually smashed. I further believed, during the 1980s, that smashing the USSR was one of the very few big yet almost unambiguously good things that the world then was capable of administering to itself. Magic buttons in politics are rare, but here was one. The USSR, then and ever since it had begun, blighted everything. Nothing else could be effectively dealt with until it was dealt with. All the other problems (notably Islamic terrorism) were being inflamed by that one big problem, namely the apparently relentless arm-wrestling that then dominated world politics, between the USSR and the civilised world. And, to repeat, that one big problem, the continuing existence of the USSR, had one huge advantage over most other problems then or since. It was fairly easily solvable. The USSR was worth breaking because, in the word of Gordon Gecko, it was breakable. A few more well-aimed shoves and over it would crash. Accordingly, I and all other anti-Soviet elements at that time brandished whatever weapons we could find at that evil empire, threw whatever mud at it that came to hand. In my case that meant writing and publishing little pamphlets about such things as how the USSR was both worthy of being broken and breakable. (I probably contributed even more by have an unusual surname and a father, “Sir Robert” if you please, who was once upon a time in MI6. What else was I doing? Nothing as it happened. But they didn’t know that.)
In my recollection, nobody accused all us anti-Soviets at that time of being obsessed with the “Moscow Bubble”, but we were certainly accused of being obsessed with the USSR, and told that there was a world out there, full of “real problems”, and that we should stop being so monomaniacal about just the one mere government, disagreeable though it was. I agreed entirely about all those other problems, but believed that a huge step in the right direction, a huge step towards making all those other problems that little bit easier to get to grips with, would be to sweep the USSR from the board. Just smash it to rubble. I rejoiced then when that was done. I rejoice still that it was done. The post-Soviet news agenda hasn’t been a hundred per cent good, but it would take a month of blog postings to even begin to count all the ways in which the USSR’s collapse has made the world a better place.
On a far smaller scale and in a history-repeating-itself-as-farce kind of way, I now feel the same thing about the Gordon Brown government. Yes, there are a thousand problems out there that the British government and the wider British political debate ought to be addressing. Of course there are. And I will continue to try to find time and brain-space to blog about them too, just as I often wrote about other things besides the desirability of smashing the USSR during the 1980s. I would be very sorry if all other Samizdatistas were as monomaniacally fascinated by Smeargate as I now find that I am, and note with satisfaction that they are not. Nevertheless, here is a battle that both should be won and can be won. Quite soon now, it will be won. And the sooner it is won, and the more completely and dramatically and unforgettably it is won, the better. Once it is, we can all get back to arguing about all the other important stuff, without the chaos that is this present government screwing everything up, by the simple, sordid fact of its continuing existence.
So now, about that Derek Draper fellow …
A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog’s coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon’s time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.
Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration – I am a defender of free migration BTW – this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.
Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don’t say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green’s behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential “whistle-blowers” on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.
I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.
Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.
Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?
“There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest.”
– Blognor Regis
And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton.
|
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.
|
