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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Tim Worstall, whom I read daily, has a good post dealing with the idea that it is somehow wicked for banks to charge a higher interest rate for a mortgage than the official base rate as set by the Bank of England (or any other central bank, come to that). It is, as he says, a matter of pricing for risk. Lending money to a person with a relatively small deposit – or collateral – relative to the total value of a loan is risky. I am going to have to renegotiate my mortgage in the next few weeks, and because the pricing of risk has risen dramatically, I can expect to pay more even though my loan-to-value ratio is quite low and I have a decent amount of equity, while both my wife and I earn a reasonable amount of money. It is not a great situation to be in, but it could be worse. For many years I chose to rent and stash up enough money to put down a good deposit, as did my wife. That, by the way, is one reason why there is a basic injustice when relatively prudent folk get taxed to bail out the imprudent, such as a person on a 100 per cent mortgage.
To be honest, had the price of risk not been artificially reduced by recklessly loose monetary policy over the past few years, we would not be in this pickle in the first place, but that’s another story.
Whenever you hear a politician, particularly a Tory politician, use the term “fiscally responsible“, this is a codeword for… will make no difference.
The true meaning is “we will not actually reduce the size of the state, we will just move the pain around a bit”.
You might think this is good news. From The Times:
Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ – People living in council houses will no longer be entitled to a subsidised tenancy for life under Whitehall proposals to address waiting lists. New tenants would have fixed-term contracts under the plans, with regular reviews every few years, The Times has learnt. […]
At the moment anyone allocated a council home can usually stay for life, irrespective of circumstances. People in council homes paying subsidised rents can end up relatively wealthy, and in some cases they can bequeath the tenancy to their children. Frank Dobson became a Cabinet Minister while living in a council flat in his London constituency.
But no, even this is not a move to logic and fairness, removing privilege from state clients and getting the state out of people’s lives. The bit I cut out reads:
If a tenant’s financial position improved he or she would be encouraged to take an equity share or to move to the private sector. If they refused they could face higher rents. The right to a council home is also likely to be tied to a requirement to have or be actively looking for a job.
The measures are being considered by Margaret Beckett, the new Housing Minister, in the most radical shake-up of the social housing system for decades to ensure that those who deserve council homes get them.
So this is not, repeat not, a plan to reduce dependency, to diminish the proportion of the population in receipt of the taxpayer’s subsidy, nor even to relieve poverty.
It looks like the proposals will be both more intrusive, bureaucratic and moralitarian than the present ones. Instead of in old socialist style checking people are poor enough to qualify for subsidised housing and leaving them to it, on the (generally correct) assumption that the dependent poor are unlikely in general to get much better off, and not worrying if some do, we are to look forward to a new grand scheme of supervision, whereby people are compelled continually to immiserate themselves for the inspectors in order to keep their roof. So there is to be a new premium to be created for inadequacy and profligacy.
But the dependent class may not be too miserable or helpless. The very people who in a reasonable humane system we might be willing to help (those too feeble or disturbed to be able to earn a living) will not be the ones that are targetted for assistance, but those who have or are actively looking for a job, who show every sign of being able to look after themselves, in other words.
How to explain this? It is neither likely to be economically efficient, nor is kindly (foolishly or otherwise).
We need to note that as a project it embodies Gordon Brown’s puritan obsession with “hard working families”. I do not particularly care if people are feckless or pleasure seeking as long as it is not at my expense. I rationally wish I could be a bit more feckless and pleasure seeking myself, but I can neither afford it, nor do I have a sybarite’s soul. But the Brownite regards suffering and struggle, social compliance, and resentment of the easy life, as the core moral values.
And this is of a piece with the politics of New New Labour. For the struggling compliant, resentful of others pleasure, are reliable voters for the gifts of authority. The feeble and disturbed who can make no shift for themselves are not voters at all. This is a plan to build, and politically police, a new client class.
[To pre-empt the objection that at least it gets rid of privileged access to council accomodation to party apparatchiks and local government employees, I would point out that that form of corruption is already obsolete. Such people now get subsidised equity as often as subsidised rent, and get to live with others like themselves, not among the lumpenproletariat on council estates, because they have a claim as key workers. Key workers (who are largely middle-class and paid above average, even including town planners and Connexions advisers) constitute another client class of the state that has been silently established this last decade. Welcome to nomenklatura UK.]
Times have changed, voters want the pendulum to swing back from spending towards tax cuts. Rumours are circulating in the Westminster Village that Gordon and Alastair are preparing to announce tax cuts. Which will, even if they are only rhetorical tax cuts, in a stroke make Dave and George look ridiculous as both Labour and the LibDems promise tax cuts and the Tories are left high and dry stranded on the high tax centre ground …
– Guido
Short cryptic link-posts, of the sort which will make absolutely no sense as soon as the link stops working, seem to be accumulating here just now, so here’s another. Check this out. It’s Friday Ephemerus (?) number one at David Thompson‘s today.
Seriously, forgetting about the short cryptic thing, but assuming you now know what I am talking about, I think this might make a good visual metaphor for the television people as they chatter about the Glenrothes bye-election, just won by Labour. Suddenly, David Cameron must now be becoming afraid, very afraid. Is the utter cluelessness of the Conservatives about all the financial turmoil grabbing defeat for them from the jaws of victory? Are they starting to McCain themselves? Are they, the party that is confused and hesitant about doing the wrong thing, going to be beaten yet again by the party that is unconfused and brazen about it?
Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):
The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.
[Reported by The Register]
Twice is coincidence…
In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.
Three times is enemy action…
Hazel Blears MP:
There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. […]
Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.
I take it that “adds value” means ‘supports us’; “legitimate protest” means ‘sneering at our enemies’; and a “more responsible manner” means ‘without questioning our control of the discourse’.
So I pop in to Guido’s, and at the top right, item (as of now) one in the Seen Elsewhere section, is a link to this short posting at the UK Libertarian Party blog:
The Taxpayers Alliance have reported that the Lib Dem Northampton Borough Council have awarded themselves a 7.7 per cent wage increase despite a black hole in their budget.
A Lib Dem Councillor on being told that the story was on the Taxpayers Alliance Website, said its ok we have had an expert in who said unless it was reported in Guido Fawkes we should not worry about stories on Blogs.
Alas, the writer of that posting, Guthrum, is unable to reveal his source.
Meanwhile, the comment war sputters along at the original TPA posting, tax cutters trading abuse with selfless public servants who argue that if councillors are paid only peanuts the results will be ever more simian. But I reckon the problem goes deeper than that. What with all the statutory obligations now piled upon local councillors, these people no longer actually make local decisions; they merely oversee the local versions of decisions made by others, in London and in Brussels. They are the local arm of a nationalised or EUropeanised industry. Few who are even sane would want a job like that. Hence the following, from a TPA commenter:
As one who lives in the very town itself, I have to say that one of the most upsetting of this mob is one Roger Conroy, a skeletal gnome with appalling teeth who sends out these sort of low-rent Pravda newsletters featuring endless blurry photos of himself hanging around public places looking like a mendicant, pointing at things which particularly offend him – holes in the road, paving slabs, squirrels, that kind of thing. The last one included him pointing at a tree stump, and proudly declaring that he’d forced the council to remove said tree as “a security risk”.
And nobody sane would want to spend all his spare time quarrelling with someone like that. Whenever anyone tells me that the Lib Dems are becoming semi-sane, I picture someone like Conroy and say to myself: no they aren’t. To Samizdata’s American readers, i.e. to most of them by the sound of the comments these days, let me add that not everyone in the UK behaves like Conroy, or thinks like him. Besides which, you too also have the occasional Community Organiser wandering around trying to get noticed, do you not? But I’m guessing yours have better teeth.
Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph, urges Britons compelled to pay the outrageous tax, sorry, licence fee to the BBC should refuse to do so following the recent episode over two radio presenters who chose to mock an elderly actor about one of the presenters having had sex with the actor’s grand-daughter. I urge readers to read the Moore article. It is devastating and gets to the heart of why the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross saga is not just a minor issue, but a brutal example of what is happening in the culture of the UK.
It is a lamentable fact about Britain that one of the things we are best known for these days is braying vulgarity, rudeness and cruelty, although certain issues, such as football hooliganism, seem to have become a bit less of a problem in recent years. For example, I tend to find US television far funnier, far sharper and yet also less cruel. Of course this is a generalisation – I am sure Samizdata readers living abroad can give me examples of cruelty-as-entertainment – but in the UK, it is becoming more and more the norm, not the exception. And the BBC, paid for by a tax, is at the heart of it. What is even more pathetic about the brutality of this culture is that its targets are not powerful dictators or scoundrels, since that might be dangerous. It is the sheer cowardice of these folk that appals.
As Sean Gabb has written, the BBC is part of the “enemy class”. As libertarians, we need to realise that privatising the odd bit of the state is not enough. The BBC, as part of the media class that is so interwoven with the political, corporatist class, must be destroyed, totally.
I must say that one of the few gratifying aspects of the current financial turmoil has been the way in which one of the UK’s biggest banks, Barclays, has decided to spurn any offers of help from the UK government – ie, the UK taxpayer – and raise funds from mostly private investors. In its recent raising of about $12 billion of funds to improve its capital position, Barclays made it clear that it wanted to stick with funding via the commercial market because, if it had drawn on the UK state moneys that have been provided for the likes of Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, it would lose its freedom to set pay, among other things.
Now, free market purists may object that the Middle Eastern funds that have pumped cash into Barclays are not entirely private sector organisation and of course they have a point. But the fact is that as a taxpayer, I haven’t been asked to write a checque to Barclays, in contrast to other UK banks. Barclays has also kept its affairs away from the hands of such characters as Alistair Darling, the UK finance minister. Those banks which have taken state aid face the risk that the confidentiality of their clients, especially in the wealth management area, could be compromised. Of course, even before 9/11, banks have been required to compromise on secrecy due to things like money laundering laws and the like. But there is no doubt that once a bank becomes an arm of the state, such erosions of client confidentiality that have already occurred will increase.
And the reaction of certain parts of the media has been interesting. On Friday evening, the BBC economics correspondent, Robert Peston, told us in that extraordinary voice of his how Barclays shareholders would be penalised by having to pay a higher amount to obtain funding than if they had, like good little corporatists, gone along to the UK Treasury. Peston, as a corporatist himself and creature of New Labour, cannot fathom why a bank wants to stay out of the public sector. Barclays’ executive bonuses may be “obscene” as far as Peston is concerned, but at least Barclays avoided some of the worst excesses of the credit boom. It is, as a result, relatively strong as a bank. Barclays must be thankful that it lost a merger battle to buy ABN Amro last year. If its refusal to eat from the state table annoys BBC journalists – who of course are paid out of a tax – then the bank must have done something very right. One cannot exactly say that of a lot of banks these days.
Dizzy, of Dizzy Thinks fame, recently made an interesting prediction, concerning the attitude of Brits towards the USA:
If Barack Obama becomes President-Elect next week, don’t expect any of the snide anti-american Brits, Aussie and others to change their tune. They’ve had a hate figure in Bush for the past eight years, and I don’t doubt that Barack Obama will become an equal hate figure within a short amount time.
I do doubt this. I think that much anti-Americanism is really anti- a particular part of America, and this hatred is felt with equal strength by other parts of America. President Bush, after all, is not only hated in Britain. Many Americans hate him too. And Obama is from a very different part of America to the part that gave us President Bush. Obama is from one of the parts that hates President Bush.
I recall the Clinton years. Had the (very large) part of Britain that now hates Bush wanted to hate Clinton, it would have had at least as much to work with as it has had with Bush. But it didn’t want to hate Clinton, and it didn’t. Likewise, it won’t want to hate Obama, and it won’t.
Well, we shall probably soon see.
Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC’s television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London.
For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don’t remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don’t worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it’s warming; when it gets cold, it’s warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it’s warming twice as fast.
Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition.
What does predict the weather we’re having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit]
Here’s a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008’s weather than anything cooked up by the “capitalism causes tsunamis” crowd. Farmer’s Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists.
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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.
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