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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Random searches of Britons going about their business are now established features of life in this country. The old refrain – “It could not happen here”, no longer applies. On Saturday, while driving along the side of the Thames towards Westminster, passing by the Tate Gallery, I was flagged down by a policeman.
Officer: “Could you show me your driving licence? This is a section 41 search” (at least I think that is what he said).
Me: “Section 41 or whatever of what?”
Officer: “The Terrorism Act”
Me: “Why have you pulled me and my wife over?”
Officer: “We are doing searches of vehicles in the area.”
Me: “Well obviously you are. Is this a random thing?”
Officer: “Yes. Please hand over your driving licence and we want to search the car.”
They searched the car, called up the driving licence authority, and were able to their enormous satisfaction confirm that I was whom I said I was. I was then asked to sign a document stating that the search had been carried out as it should have been. The officer gave me his name, rank and police station number and address. When I signed the form, he asked me how I wanted to classify myself as there were about 15 options, including “White British”. He was polite. My treatment was fine. The officer and his colleagues told me they were on duty, searching vehicles, for the rest of the day and into the evening.
Now I will spare you a rant about the impertinence of this. You can, gentle reader, assume as a matter of course that I regard such random searches of members of the public as impertinent. What makes me wonder, though, is what on earth the supporters of such searches expect? Do they honestly, really believe that would-be terrorists will be deterred, frightened off or caught? Unless the police put up roadblocks across London, at god-knows what disruption and cost, I do not see how doing this on one of many major roads will cause a blind bit of difference.
This is what has been called “security theatre”: lots of action signifying little. Even the copper who carried out the search had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.
Update: One commenter has complained that I am getting all upset for no good reason and has used the argument that this sort of behaviour is okay as it can act as a “fishing” expedition to unearth potentially other crimes. It is hard to summon breath to deal with such a brazen argument in favour of abolishing the idea that one is presumed innocent until otherwise.
Update 2: a reader asked for further details on the search. From the time I was pulled over to being let on my way, the process lasted 15 minutes. The police officer’s colleague called up the driving licence authority to give them my licence registration number and the authority took about 10 minutes to get back. An officer opened the car boot, rummaged around some bags and luggage – I was travelling up to Cambridge with my wife – and had a look inside the car. They also inspected my clothes and checked my footwear. They did not ask me to open the glove compartment of the car. They also did not look under the car with a mirror or anything similar, or look under the bonnet.
Matthew Parris makes an eloquent argument that Gordon Brown is an empty shell. Strip away the bullying, the glowering, “oh god just how wonderfully serious I am” pose, the desk-thumping assertiveness, you have very little. Parris argues that there is no organising philosophical principle that animates this man. As Margaret Thatcher might have put it, he has no anchor.
Parris’ argument is quite persuasive. Outside the MSM, bloggers, such as ahem, yours truly, have been unimpressed for years by this man’s supposed towering intellect and grasp of facts. But, unlike Parris, I do think there is a sort of core philosophy that Brown has. The problem, however, is that this “core” philolosophy is just too awful to dwell upon for very long. He is a worshipper of the state and its power to bring about his vision of an egalitarian, puritanical, work-for-work’s sake country. It is not a totally bleak vision: no doubt Brown believes people will be happy in such a country – I just cannot believe he is so malevolent up as to actually want people to be miserable – but the blessings of such a state of affairs are not immediately apparent.
That said, it is easy to wonder why people might wander whether much goes on of very great interest inside Brown’s head. Take the recent deceit of the UK electorate over the EU Constitution, sorry Treaty. As a result of signing this Treaty, a wide number of powers will be transferred to the EU and away from parliament. Now the likes of Brown crave power and although they may hope to join the EU gravy train eventually, that hope may not come to pass. So why are British politicians, even Scottish ones with a historical grudge against England, so keen to sign away such large chunks of influence and power? What, in short, is the point?
Let’s get this straight. The house price bubble has been caused by money printing. In today’s world, that means as a result of the Bank of England keeping interest rates artificially low. That’s why the money supply is growing at more than 10% a year and this money has to go somewhere. Lots of it has gone into the housing market. And the “solution” from all of the above is more of the same!
Those who are going to pay for this mess are the prudent, those who haven’t lived beyond their means. Their savings will be inflated away to bail out the welfare bums, many of whom are economic illiterates infesting the business world.
– David Farrer names and shames a bunch of granny muggers
A British court has ruled that there is a ‘right to life’ even under combat conditions and therefore the families of soldiers killed in action can sue the government for not providing suitable equipment.
In a blow to Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, a senior judge said troops in combat zones have a “right to life” at all times, even while under fire on the battlefield. The ground-breaking decision could lead to a flood of cases against the Ministry of Defence from relatives who believe the deaths of their loved ones were caused by poor quality kit.
As I have written before, it is deplorable that British soldiers are sent into action so poorly equipped when the state manages to find money for idiotic sports and ‘cultural’ expenditures. Yet I think this ruling is very dangerous unless it is very tightly defined to only cover equipment issues, and even then, I can hear the sound of cans opening and worms escaping. Inevitably this ‘right to life at all times’ means relatives will sue on the basis of operational military decisions if a decision causes the death of British soldiers.
Were I the government I would do whatever it takes to overturn such a notion and made sure this judgement does not lead to ever wider ‘interpretation’, as such things are wont to do. I am all for properly equipping Britain’s soldiers but this is a potentially disastrous way to ensure that. Wars are, by their very nature, messy and imprecise things and the idea of having civil courts sticking their beaks in is a giant step towards making the military unable to function at all. Even from the perspective of rights and liberty, in a volunteer military clearly prior consent is present to be put in harm’s way within the military context. This ruling has ‘horrendous unintended consequences’ written all over it.
David Selbourne is one of those intellectual figures who swims in similar currents to that of John Gray: mixing a sort of gloomy, conservative (small c) dislike of much modern culture and public life; a sort of grumpy dislike of the inevitably messy impact of individual liberty combined with a sort of authortarian desire for those in power to somehow rein in all this terrible individualist excess and take us back to say, 1950. Tim Worstall, well known around here, subjects his latest article to a fairly gentle fisking.
Here is the original piece by Selbourne. It follows a similar, arguably even more incoherent rant in the Spectator last week (sorry, I could not get the link to work, so you will have to trust me). Here he goes:
To expect the fulfilment by the citizen of his or her duties is no impertinence. It is essential to liberal democracy. Indeed, government ministers today speak hesitantly of a need for “constitutional renewal” or for a more “contractual” relationship between citizen and state. Under it, the performance of civic duties would be made a condition for the gaining of rights, many of the latter now routinely and shamelessly exploited by rich and poor alike.
As Tim puts it:
To return to a feudal system in which I owe duties to My Noble Lords in return for whatever rights they might see fit to grant me? Fuck that quite frankly.
Quite. Feudalism is actually a polite word for what this character wants to impose. A society in which freedoms are handed over like sweets in return for the prior performance of duties might be known as something rather ruder, like fascism.
Or maybe the problem could be more easily solved if Selbourne was honest about what he understands the definition of “rights” to be. In the classical liberal sense, a right is nothing more than a prohibition on the initiation of force against a person and his or her property; under socialism, the term “right” has been debauched into a claim on things such as the “right” to “free” schooling, which means that someone else be coerced into paying for the latter. The former negative definition of a right implies no such zero-sum game.
Selbourne must surely have heard of Isiah Berlin’s famous attempt to unscramble this confusion.
This appeared in the Daily Telegraph today, in an article describing the tensions inside the UK Labour government, assailed from its own ranks over issues like taxes on alcohol, imprisonment without trial and other matters:
Behind the scenes, things are even worse. With no clear direction from above, Cabinet ministers are at each other’s throats. I am reliably informed that, after one recent Cabinet meeting, Jack Straw threatened to punch Ed Balls during a row about who was responsible for youth crime. The Justice Secretary came back to his department fuming that he had never been spoken to so rudely by a colleague in public and that he was not going to put up with it.
Fistfights in the cabinet? Well, if you elect thugs, thuggery will break out eventually.
There has been a lot of comment this week about a House of Lords report on the benefits, or otherwise, of mass immigration to the UK as far as the economics is concerned. It did not address the cultural aspects, such as the influx of large numbers of people from fundamentalist Islamic states or people with other, very different traditions to those of the existing population. It talked about the impact on the economy. The general conclusion is that in the long run, there is a very small, positive impact on growth but no real impact overall on GDP per head. And for some parts of the existing workforce, the impact is bad: lower wages, or no work at all.
The Sunday Telegraph, in its leader column, broadly endorses this analysis. What bothers me, however, is this: if immigrants are ‘taking’ a certain number of jobs (our old friend, the Lump of Labour Fallacy, is at it again), why not recommend say, a drastic pro-emigration policy for say, 25 per cent of the population, or even half? I mean, if there are “too many” people in the UK, why not go for a massive reduction? Indeed, if you take the argument to extremes, you could argue that we would be fabulously rich if the population were reduced to say, 100,000 or one million.
But that would remove all the benefits of a large population, which the immigrant-bashers overlook: the skills, or ‘human capital’ that a large population makes available. The silliness of the complaints about all those foreigners ‘taking’ ‘our’ jobs is not just the Lump of Labour Fallacy, however, which by extension is part of the closed-system thinking one associates with socialism and many other collectivistic doctrines.. It is also the unspoken assumption, rarely explicitly spelled out, that there is some sort of optimum, or “just about right” level of population for a given geographic area. But how do the noble Lords or even a mere economist figure out how many people in a country is right or wrong? And as a commenter said, I believe on this site, some months ago, you do not hear about Tescos or Vodafone moaning about “too many customers” putting pressures on their services.
Of course, some commenters will insist that the cultural implications of mass immigration from the Islamic world, say, outweighs what economic benefits there might be, but that is a separate issue.
I realise it is only April, so there is ample time for someone else to win the much vaunted Samizdata prize of ‘oddest remark of the year’, but this has to be a real contender:
However, Prof Rowthorn said the most likely victims were British-born school-leavers who had never had a job, having failed to find the kind of casual work they might have walked into a few years ago. The claim will fuel a political row over the prospects for a generation referred to as “Neets” (not in education, employment or training).
The professor said: “We are looking at the most vulnerable, least skilled and in some ways least motivated members of the local workforce. The problem that eastern European migrants pose is that they are good workers.”
So the fact good workers are arriving in the UK is a ‘problem’ and that employers have them to hire rather than having to try and coax an honest day’s work out of the least unmotivated native born lumpen is… a bad thing for people in Britain overall? Hmmm.
Also as the total number of job has been rising steadily for quite some time, it is hard to hide the fact the children of the British ‘welfare’ state are simply acting as the state has conditioned them to act. Of course the irony is that the people in some part replacing them are high initiative individuals arriving from former communist countries in search of better opportunities. And such people filling jobs grows the economy, so again the advantages overall take wilful blindness not to see.
Locals who cannot compete with Eastern European need to ask themselves why that is. My guess is that they are not really trying to compete very hard because after all, they can always just sign on for the dole. I find it hard to be sympathetic when a person’s poverty is simply a function of a lack of motivation.
Of course one is not suppose to say things like that. My bad.
Glenn Reynolds posted a quote from the BBC and later discovered they edit the past.
As you know, I am not a skeptic of the science on this issue, something you never really see outside of journals… but I am utterly disgusted by the politics of it and the loathsome people purveying it for totalitarian purposes. This is not to say I will claim the writer was one of them, but that person may well have been pounced upon and forced to recant.
Perhaps I should note my own standards on this issue. I often ‘publish’ a late draft because my preview mode is not the best and do spelling, punctuation, link checks, syntax and such live. Sometimes in that interval I will make significant changes if I feel I did not make my point clearly. But once I am done, usually within 5-10 minutes of first publication, the article is forever frozen and any corrections (other than spelling or commas) is placed underneath the article in italics.
Making changes in the first few minutes after publication in this fast paced world is necessary. Going back hours or days later and making wholesale rewrites to the public record is not.
One might also note an exception: if one finds they have issued a libellous statement or accidentally published proprietary information or totally false information that is of course grounds for pulling the whole article… or striking out the offending phrase and placing a note like this one underneath. This is what the BBC should have done if they believed they had published incorrect data.
Note that I have been ‘playing’ with this article to explore with you the range of changes and time periods I feel comfortable with. There are some difficult issues here and I am not sure where the precise line is… although I am sure the BBC was well over it in this case.
This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn’t put it up a week ago, when I should have.
So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we’d talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And “Devil’s Kitchen”, one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:
We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen’s Tavern, Westminster.
Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …
So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen’s Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil’s Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. “They all are”, he said.
I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.
Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.
But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.
I also learned something else. Mr Devil’s Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That’s another thing that maybe should not count, but does.
My comment below on youth crime prompted a lot of good comments. My thanks for Civitas, the think tank, for commenting about this admirable venture to encourage youngsters to learn discipline, pride and have a lot of fun at the same time.
It is not all bad news out there, thank goodness.
I do not always follow politics. When things are going well for politicians I do not like I prefer not to think about it. But now, I am thinking quite a lot about Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.
Two labels have been attached to Gordon Brown, in succession. First, there was the big clunking fist metaphor. But now, this picture of a grim but determined, horrid by decisive individual, has been replaced by a quite different clutch of descriptions, most of which involve the word “dither”. This transformation was famously described by Lib Dem wrinkly Vince Cable as from Stalin to Mr Bean. So, which is true?
The answer is: both. If all that Gordon Brown was was Mr Bean, we could all relax, except those of us in the immediate vicinity of the man, such as his wife, secretaries, immediate subordinates, children, and anybody unfortunate enough personally to encounter him in the course of his staggerings around. But Gordon Brown is Mr Bean with the powers of a Prime Minister – Mr Bean a hundred feet high, able to ruin thousands with one ill-judged swipe of his arm, one petulant kick. This is not somebody who dithers only about whether to have one lump or two or perhaps three, although the telly-comedy sketchers are surely at work on that very notion as I write. This is a man who can, as and when he feels inclined, shut down this entire industry, or that one, or that one, depending on what he finally decides, or on what he merely hears himself saying or finds himself doing. He could rescue that whole area of the nation’s life from ruin, if he could only make up his mind about it, and he may do that or he may not, which actually, if you think about it, means that he will not. It is the combination of his vast powers to wreck (mostly to wreck) with his inability to decide on a “vision” – that is to say, on a recognisable and single path of wreckage which most of us could feel safe about not being in the way of – that makes this man so particularly scary, even by the standards of your average Prime Minister.
Blair at least seemed at least to have arrived in office with some idea of the limits of government power, and to have various notions about relying on it a bit less (along with others that involved relying on it far more). During the Blair years, Mr Blair would announce policies, some of which were sensible, and Mr Brown – the brooding, glowering dragon-in-a-cave Wagnerian bass Mr Brown – would either pay for them and mess them up or else just mess them up by not paying for them, depending on his mood. As methods of government go this one could have been a lot worse, although, as we are now discovering to our cost, it could have been a lot better. But now, our ruler is a fussy and insomniac incompetent, Mime with the powers of Wotan, but without Wotan’s hard-won wisdom. As somebody said over the weekend, what you want is somebody intelligent but lazy. What we have is an industrious fool.
The final touches to the story of the Brown moment are been inked in by the political commentators, and I do not believe that Mr Brown is going to be able, ever, to shake loose from these judgments. He is out of touch. He is terminally (Janet Daley makes much of the Terminal 5 fiasco) incompetent, and his followers are in disarray.
What follows? Will Mr Brown’s party sack him? Soon, I mean. It seems unlikely, but maybe. Will Mr Cameron be any better when he eventually takes over, as he surely now must? Ditto.
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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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