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]
|
Anatole Kaletsky is usually good value for his economic analysis. In a pretty scathing column today about the collapse of Brown’s political reputation since becoming Prime Minister last year, Kaletsky tries to contrast Brown the bumbling PM with Brown the masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer. He writes:
Indeed, he was probably the most successful chancellor in modern history, notwithstanding his muddled tax reforms, his badly timed gold sales and the fatal damage he allowed the regulators and courts to inflict on Britain’s pension funds. Mr Brown made the right decisions on monetary policy and the Bank of England. He kept Britain out of the euro. He reduced capital gains and corporation tax more radically than any Tory chancellor and he resisted populist demands to squeeze the rich.
Oh please. Sorry to rain on the parade here, but remember that in the early part of the current decade, Brown subtly shifted the way in which the BoE measures inflation. Without going into a lot of technical detail, he allowed the central bank to pursue a less stringent inflation target, and allowed it to loosen the strings of monetary policy. We are now – arguably – suffering some of the effects. Also – and it is frankly incredible that Kaletsky does not mention this – Brown has presided over a massive increase in the size of public spending and borrowing. During the supposedly fat years, the state of the public finances has actually got worse when it should have done the opposite. Hardly the mark of a good, prudent finance minister. The public sector payroll – no doubt expected to vote Labour – has swollen by up to 1 million since 1997, according to some estimates. That is a collossal increase and a large dead weight on the economy. Again, this burden is weighing more heavily on the economy now that the international environment has become more difficult.
By doing the British economy no serious harm during his long tenure at the Treasury, Mr Brown earned a distinction unique among postwar chancellors, with the possible exception of Kenneth Clarke.
Well, compared to some of the massive errors made by previous Labour and Tory chancellors, it is true that Brown’s record has been quite reasonable, but Kaletsky ignores the substantial shift in the size and cost of government since becoming Chancellor; that amounts to “serious harm” and detracts badly from his record.
Do not misunderstand me. It is not necessary to believe that every move made by Brown has been bad and it is also important to realise that in the globalised financial markets of today, there is only so much – thank goodness – that a finance minister can do. But as we have seen from the continued flight of entrepreneurs and businesses from Britain, from the tax increases, from the poor productivity gains in the UK, and so forth, Brown has been a mediocre custodian of the economy at best. And even his prize achievement, the independent Bank of England, looks less impressive now after the BoE was unable to act swiftly, as it could in the past, over the Northern Rock fiasco.
Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.
I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren’t crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?
It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that “Read more” button, you may rather quickly want to read less. → Continue reading: The age of political landslides
Like the diarist and blogger Diamond Geezer (now that’s what I call a brilliant name), I have come to value much of the scenery in the southeastern pocket of ours in England. If you are planning a daytrip and cannot face a long drive but want something that just about gets you away from the capital without being all precious about it, there is a lot to be said for Whitstable Bay in Kent’s north coast. It is not grubby like Margate or impossibly twee; it is in fact a bit like Southwold in my old stamping ground of Suffolk. The place has several good pubs and restaurants so it pays to book in advance to guarantee a table in the height of the summer. Yours truly and Mrs P. drove down on Sunday and got there early enough to ramble along the coast before filling our faces with lots of seafood. I visited the area several years ago and forgot how pleasant it is. The existing owners of the seafront properties have not – yet – sold up and given the presumably high price of property there, will not do so and make way for tall hotels. I am all for freedom to develop but I hope that the place does not get spoiled. I guess that in such a place, even without planning laws, owners almost operate a sort of tacit law that states: “Don’t mess this place up and ruin the long-run value of your own property”. I think this sort of unspoken desire by property owners who are proud of an area not to foul it up is actually a good example of how order and harmonious building design of sorts, comes about without the need for planning laws at all.
I’ll be back, as a certain Governor of California might put it. For two hours’ drive from central London, it takes a lot of beating.
Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian’s Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt:
DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful…
3.3 Identity management within Government
Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity data should be ignored in favour of a new set.
Like a lot of people, we couldn’t understand why the NI number and its related data wouldn’t do.
However, safe and reliable maintenance and use of a shared asset across multiple parties is a challenge for any organisation, not least Government with its many departments, each with its own priorities, objectives and challenges.
Then somebody showed us the figures that with a total population of 60M people in this country, maybe a sixth of them under 16, there are over 75M currently-issued NI numbers, and we finally started to understand that the entire current system is a complete balls-up.
People say to me, “Don’t worry, it won’t work.” I would like to remind them that grand government schemes that are not working tend to be adopted anyway, and all the suffering they cause is declared a good thing, necessary for the progress of the nation. Lysenko’s ‘winterizeation’ of wheat, did not work. Protectionism does not work. Most of the world’s ‘development’ projects do not work. It did not stop governments implementing them at the expense of humanity. It does not stop massive numbers of politically influential people still believing in the grand reconstruction of deep natural systems and human institutions by government power, and devoting their working lives to promoting it. The National Identity Scheme still has every prospect of being Britain’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.
(Hat-tip: Wendy M. Grossman)
We have witnessed two weeks of unravelling. A fortnight where the socialist foundations of New Labour were exposed by the electorate after Brown’s redistributionist endeavours foundered upon the rocks of his middling class taxcut dogwhistle. And their unionist pretensions were undercut by Wendy Alexander’s referendum put option. Salmond will never buy.
The disaffection with New Labour is a confluence of favourable attitudes and pernicious circumstances. The expansion of clientelism widens the contacts between the state and the working poor. Not those on incapacity benefit, not those on income support, but people who apply for tax credits or pensioners on the borderline of poverty. These people never put money by for adverse circumstances or sickness or retirement, since they had to fund state monopolies through taxation or national insurance. Their plight is imposed by the state and they are forced to recoup the taxes paid through the bureaucratic process of tax credits and means testing.
We forget our history at our peril. Nobody likes a state employee snooping in our lives and people will vote to put them back in Brown’s cuticle. There is only so far the state can intrude, even in a social democracy. Britain has never been a liberal democracy as liberalism died with Campbell-Bannerman, our first “Prime Minister”. Yet, the dismantling of war socialism was a popular move that assured Tory ascendancy throughout the nineteen-fifties, even with Eden’s reversal at Suez. Blair took note that consumerism trumped jingoism.
We have heard that the British people show greater trust in the state than their foreign counterparts. Why? Because the British political system, in the past, has been responsive to state intrusion and has reversed its effects. ID cards were abolished over here. That is why Britain survived as an admixture of monopolistic services and the judicious application of state power. New Labour revealed that the settlement had been overturned by all mainstream parties, with the help of Thatcher’s radical centralisation. All law-abiding citizens found themselves facing unprecedented scrutiny from the government and they responded with true British grit: they walked elsewhere in unprecedented numbers and said “Fuck you!”.
This makes the Tory achievement even more astonishing than it already appears, since so many of their natural constituency have emigrated.
So, Cameron, the people want government off their backs. Adverse economic circumstances and higher taxes, the inevitable outcome of socialism have increased their taxes and reduced incomes. New Labour wanted a voting bank and they found that state dependency equals Northern Crock (especially in Crewe) . Scything waste will reduce expenditure. It is not difficult. Reduce pork, reduce taxes.
Leaving aside the practical objections (such as decline in the quality of the UK legal system) is capital punishment justified for murder?
Note, this is not a question on whether capital punishment is effective, but is it just?
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner and I love London town, but from where I sit by far the most newsworthy winner in the recent round of British local elections was the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. However, unless I am very much mistaken (which is entirely possible), the Boris Johnson blog, far from being at the centre of the Boris campaign, was put on ice for the duration, and looks like staying there.
Or am I missing something? Is there another Boris Johnson blog? Is there one for his currently very neglected constituency (the one linked to above), and another blog (not linked to because I can not find any such thing) about him trying to be and now being the Mayor of London?
If my failure to spot it means that there is indeed no Boris For (Boris Is) Mayor blog, then I think that’s rather a telling fact about the limits of internet political campaigning in Britain. The way Boris himself told it when interviewed on the telly at the very end of his campaign, he did his campaigning not via any internet efforts, but by trekking around London making personal appearances and being on local radio stations. You might have thought, what with so much of success in local politics being the art of attracting any attention at all, and what with Boris having done this so very, very well and having got his own vote out so very, very successfully, a blog might have been part of it.
Or is the thing that I am missing that other bloggers, like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, made crucial contributions to Boris becoming Mayor by campaigning on his behalf, under the opposing radar so to speak, making points in his favour and claims on his behalf that he himself did not have to worry about and which he was not personally obliged then to, as they say, clarify? Boris would no more have his own campaigning blog than he would set up and run his own radio station. In politics, it seems, either you do it, or you blog, but, you don’t do both. This makes sense, I suppose. Blogging works best when you blog your mind, and tell it how you see it. Blogging means having an authentic voice. Politics, on the other hand … Some bloggers – this one, for instance, in something he said at a gathering I was at – have complained that Boris’s authentic voice was also muted, for the duration. Something to do with him not drinking, perhaps? (Bring back the booze I say.)
On the other hand, why didn’t any of Boris’s mere supporters gang up and run a Boris-is-here-today-and-there-tomorrow Boris-thinks-this-Boris-says-that blog, at least while the campaign itself lasted? Not worth the bother, presumably.
In other local election news, my brother Toby Micklethwait (UKIP) came a decent (but to him I daresay deeply disappointing) second to the Conservatives in Englefield Green west, very near to where we were raised and where our Mum still lives. He too accomplished what he accomplished not with any fancy blogging or internetting, but with lots of posters stuck up in people’s gardens, with a ton of leaflets and other printed material, and with all the associated personal chit-chat. Maybe the truth is that the more local the politics (and Toby’s latest burst of politics was about as local as it is possible for British politics to get), the less relevant blogging is to the campaigning politician. The blogging USP, its ability to send your message whizzing around the entire planet in seconds, does everything but solve your actual problem, and tells everyone in the world all about you except the exact people you are trying to reach, so blogging is of little use to you. Maybe it is time for me to revive that notion I once had about becoming the Supreme Ruler of the World.
Via Tim Worstall’s blog, I came across this imagined encounter between Polly Toynbee, and her political Mr D’Arcy, Brown, by this guy:
As for poor Pol, where to start? Imagine the despair, so raw you can almost taste it. Imagine the sense of crushing disappointment. For years now, she has waited for her prince to come – her dashing Norse warrior, who will sweep away all the effete detritus of the Blair years and unload a torrent of resources into child poverty and public services. Night after night she has left the red light on for him; lying in the bed in her Agent Provocateur lingerie, maybe some crotchless pants and a peephole bra, striking an uncomfortable pose lest he come charging through the door at any moment to sweep her up in his powerful arms.
Oh my god.
Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.
… Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”
There’s a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for “not doing enough” on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.
Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain – and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address – liberty is no longer intelligible.
Does the word “liberty” appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? … → Continue reading: More culture of control
From The Times:
Jansen Versfeld, the solicitor who conducted the fruitless search for a barrister, said: “Because of the very low rate of pay for these hearings, £175.25 per day, and the amount of work and complexity involved, with no payment for preparation, none could undertake to do it.”
Mr Versfeld, who is with Morgan Rose solicitors, said that there were 6,586 pages of documents and a total of 4,548 transactions that would require arranging into a manageable form by experienced senior counsel for an estimated six-week hearing.
[…]
“So although this defendant was convicted of offences only involving a few hundred pounds’ worth of cannabis, he found himself at risk of losing £4.5 million worth of assets – with the burden on him to prove that they were not ill-gotten gains. On top of that, he was prohibited from using those assets for his own defence.”
I predict that the law will be changed. It is plainly intolerable to the state that people’s property should not be seized merely because the unfair procedure is inadequately funded.
“The Tories are free-marketeers – they have a mechanism to get rid of their leader on a wet weekend. Labour are central planners, so adopt protectionist policies.”
– Fraser Nelson, over the Spectator’s Coffee House blog. His quote makes a fair bit of sense, even if you, like yours truly, wonder about the free market credentials of David Cameron’s Conservative Party.
“We’ve had it with baby boomer politics. We’ve had it with coteries and courts, dens and sofas. But if we are fed up with that private politics, we are also tired of the public face of politics. We are told that modern politics is about TV studios: that poisonous truth may be about to become untrue. Westminster and Whitehall might yet make a come-back, as bastions of decently-argued policy and its delivery. This is a switch away from post-60s trends. But it needn’t be a backward step to snobbery and stuffiness.”
– Richard North
I hope he is right, although I doubt that Westminster and Whitehall have ever achieved a high point of “decently argued policy and its delivery”. Rose-tinted spectacles, and all that.
|
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.
|
