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I drive around London at weekends occasionally – I have a car but do not bother to use it to get work (I can reach my office in Westminster on foot, thanks to living nearby Pimlico). But when I do get behind the wheel, the congestion is terrible, not just at the usual peak times. Getting out of London often takes longer than on the open road. For example, whenever I go to visit my parents in Suffolk, at least half of the journey time is taken up by driving from Pimlico through the eastern reaches of London before actually hitting Essex on the A12. Pretty much the same dire situation applies if you head north, south or west.
Has the congestion charge, introduced by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, made much difference? I doubt it; it always looked like a revenue-raiser to me, whatever the spin. While in theory I have no ideological problems with the charge – if the roads are genuinely privately owned, that is – in the current context the charge seems like a bit of a con to me. Or at least it is unless we can get rid of the curse of the Bus Lane. But then the charge does not apply at weekends, so my view might be affected if I had to drive during weekdays. On those rare times when I have done so, I thought the traffic was pretty heavy.
This guy agrees with me. But what to do about it? Well, cutting down the number of buses – heavily subsidised – might be a start since they hog up so much space; some road widening might be workable in places but given London’s densely-packed streets and historic buildings, maybe not easily doable.
Maybe I should face the facts: if I want to drive without raised blood pressure, live in Nevada.
I say “recorded conversations” because I never know quite what the definition of a ‘podcast’ truly is. Is it a podcast if you just record it and sling it up at your own blog? So anyway, yes, I have recently done a couple of these.
First, I recorded Antoine Clarke and me having a discussion about the thinkings and writings of Sean Gabb, and person often mentioned here. We are, and accordingly were, somewhat critical. Blog posting by me here.
Second, Patrick Crozier recorded him talking with me about modern architecture, “Modern Movement” architecture, skyscrapers, horrible housing estates etc. Blog posting by Patrick here.
Both last about 40 to 45 minutes. If you have that kind of time to spare, enjoy.
And, Patrick Crozier and I have fixed to do another one of these things next week on the subject of Northern Ireland. Peace (so far, touch wood etc.) may not generate news, but we think it deserves to be at least talked about. I will certainly be re-reading the comments on this posting here before doing that.
Sooner or later, every Marxist expresses his sense of public duty by first telling you and me what to say and then what to think.
– Henry Porter
He is speaking specifically of Ken Livingstone, but it is beginning to be clear that little of the former student left of the ’70s now in power has parted with the spirit of Howard Kirk. Mao may be the model more than Marx. The Long March Through the Institutions being near its end, we face an obsession with controlling the detail of other’s lives and eliminating the possibility of resistance. You will not escape by avoiding thought or being silent about dissident; it is necessary to act in the approved manner to show your enthusiasm for progress and democracy.
The BBC is reporting one of the most grotesque things I have seen for a while…
Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity so government must act to stop Britain “sleepwalking” into a crisis, a report has concluded.
So, you are not responsible for what you stick in your own damned mouth. Think about that and the implications that pulse out of those words like a neutron bomb’s radiation.
I have long said that in the western world the fascist approach to control (you may ‘own’ the means of production but you must used them in accordance with national political directives, i.e you are completely regulated and thus have liability without control) has completely triumphed over the socialist approach to control (the state, euphemised as ‘The People’, directly owns everything and you are simply a politically directed deployable unit of labour). And of course ‘labour’ means you and what you do with your body. This particular means of production is already only ‘owned’ by you provided you use it in a politically approved manner. And that will soon include what you may eat or may not eat.
This BBC article makes me wonder if the time to start throwing rocks could be closer than we like to think.
Just in case you missed it – and I nearly did – I feel I should draw your attention to a document issued by HM Treasury at the same time as the Pre-Budget Report that has been exciting all the British media so. It is the “Service Transformation Agreement” [pdf] setting out in fifty-eight pages a general vision and departmental service plans. The latter, forming the bulk of the document, explain how each government department will use “identity management” to collate and share information about citizens and businesses.
They will be led by the new Ministry of Justice introducing “measures to overcome current barriers to information sharing in the public sector”. Those “barriers” are not mentioned in the document, but they are four, neatly pinned down by the MoJ when it was the plain old Department of Constitutional Affairs: 1) human rights law, especially the constructive privacy protections under Article 8 of the Convention, 2) the Data Protection Acts, 3) common law confidentiality, and 4) the fundamental rule of administrative law, ultra vires.
First: raising a particular tax rate or lowering a particular tax rate, even quite substantially, makes extremely little difference to the amount of actual money that the government ends up collecting. This is because Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Raising a particular tax rate increases what the government gets from that particular tax, but spreads a ripple of disappointed indolence and enforced inactivity throughout the economy, which lowers the yields from all the other taxes. Lower a particular tax rate, and the yield from that tax falls, but a ripple of enthusiasm and activity spreads through the economy, and the yield from all the other taxes rises.
British politics arrived at this state in the late 1970s and has been in this state ever since.
Labourites are now saying that the sums associated with Conservative promise to cut inheritance tax do not add up. Yes they do. How will this cut be paid for? By the increased yield from all the other taxes. (By the way, I know that this “cut” would not be “real” in the sense that it has already been preceded by a massive increase due to house price rises. In other words, it would be real, just as the previous but slightly less obvious increase was real.)
Insofar as Chancellor Gordon Brown has already pushed Britain beyond the top of the Laffer Curve, a cut in a particular tax rate may even increase government revenue.
Other Labourites (i.e. The Government) are also now revealing that they semi-understand all this. The Conservative cut in inheritance tax would be evil, would not work, etc., but they will now do their own (this reminds me of the Soviet response to Star Wars. It is mad. It will not work. We will do it too.)
Second: When pollsters ask voters whether they would like better public services in exchange for a tax increase, they quite often say:yes. The voters imagine only a small tax increase to themselves, and a definite increase in the services that they themselves will get. Okay? Okay. (A lot depends on the exact wording of the question.)
But, when a politician running for office says that he will put up taxes and supply better public services, only the first process is certain and the voters know it. The question in the previous paragraph about increased taxes and better services is not the question that the voters will actually be asked. The question they will actually be asked is: do you want a definite tax increase, and the almost certainly empty promise of better services which are unlikely to benefit you in particular anyway even if by some magical process such improvements do occur? Okay? Not okay.
By the same token, tax cuts are very popular with those who are paying the tax in question. These persons will definitely benefit, if only a little, and provided only that the tax cut occurs as promised. Will the particular public services that these persons get deteriorate? Probably, but only because these services will probably deteriorate anyway.
With infuriating credulousness, the BBC has taken as its top story (on radio as well as the web) the launch of a report from the ‘All-Party Committee on Identity Fraud’:
The All Party Group on Identity Fraud said a tsar was needed to co-ordinate the work being done by the government, police and private sector. The MPs also called for the government to make the public and businesses more aware of identity fraud and how they can avoid becoming victims. […] In their report the MPs also recommended police are given the resources to employ dedicated identity fraud officers. They said tougher sanctions should be placed on organisations that put people’s personal information in danger.
(Such as the Identity and Passport Service, local planning authorities, the Department of Health, ContactPoint, DVLA…and all the other branches of the caring data-sharing state? Just asking.)
So far so hopeless. The usual call for for more officials and more powers rather than any attempt to analyse the problem. The committee itself is not quite that stupid, even if it has not taken a particularly fresh look. It rightly blames the indifference of institutions and the foolishness of the public for much of it.
What is really damaging to the BBC’s credibility and to the honesty of public debate is what is next.
The crime costs the economy about £1.7bn a year, according to government estimates, with 171,488 cases coming to light in the UK during 2006. Recent surveys suggest as many as one in four people may have been affected by identity theft.
“Surveys” by whom? I wonder if the reporter knows. I can guess: Experian. But I can not readily find where this headline comes from. It appears in a more nuanced version on the National Identity Fraud Prevention Week site as…
“A quarter of the UK population has been affected by identity fraud or knows somebody who has.”
My emphasis. Not remotely the same thing. I know several Catholics quite well. My catechumenacy is a distant unlikelihood.
YouGov did a proper poll a year ago on behalf of NPower and found one in ten claimed to have been a victim in some way – without themselves providing a rigorous definition or checklist. The difference ought to indicate to anyone with the remotest curiosity that something is screwy about all these figures. You have to be suspicious of anything described as a “survey” – do BBC reporters not learn that in training?
And worse, they persist in quoting the entirely spurious “government figure” for identity fraud of £1.7bn a year. Anyone working in this field ought not just to ask, “What is the source for this figure?” and then check it. They should know that the Home Office report has been utterly discredited…
See here, or, in more detail, here.
… but it keeps coming back time and time again, as if you can make a fact by repeating a lie often enough.
There is no agreed definition of ‘identity fraud’. There are few useful figures, and in the circumstances there can hardly be. Meanwhile several interested parties – Experian, the only organisation linked to from the story on the BBC site, being one, and the Home Office being another – are engaged in a sustained campaign of hype for their own benefit. That is a scandal in which you would expect the news media to take an interest.
It is (at least) disappointing that the BBC apparently uses no critical judgement or background knowledge – or even Google – in reporting these things, but sees fit to reprint the gush of press-releases, as if it were a cheap fashion magazine handling a cosmetic company’s announcement of the latest face-cream. For all its admitted corporate culture problem in editorial matters, this is one of the world’s most widely trusted news sources (which, unless you take Fox or Xinhua to be gospel, you may say only shows how appallingly untrustworthy the others are). But it is starting to give the impression of not caring about the integrity of basic, readily-checkable, facts.
The postal strike in Britain would seem like the perfect opportunity to not privatise the Royal Mail but to acknowledge that in an era of competing global courier companies and e-mail, there is no long any need for the state to have a ‘national’ postal service at all.
As Dave Cameron never misses the opportunity to miss an opportunity, I do not suppose we will be hearing this from the Conservative Party any time soon then, eh?
I like to figure out the appropriate term for collections of things (a disorganisation of libertarians?), and upon reading the bizarre responses to Dave Cameron’s speech at the Tory Party conference, a ‘credulousness of Conservatives’ came to mind.
The Times writes of the speech, remarkably describing the entire exercise in dissembling as ‘refreshingly spin-free’:
By the time David Cameron got up to give his conference speech yesterday, it had become an awful lot easier to present him as a man of integrity in a world of spin. That was not the main theme of his speech, but it was a clear subtext. The Old Politics is failing, he said. And he explained why: top-down statism has not wrought the improvements that everyone seeks. This was an argument for limited government, not merely another shopping list.
Clearly there must be someone else in the party who just happens to share a name with party leader Dave Cameron, as obviously no one who writes for an august publication like The Times could have mistaken Dave “greener-than-thou we will match Labour’s spending on public services” Cameron for an honest advocate of limited government in any way, shape or form (or in fact a honest advocate of anything other than the notion “Dave Cameron should be Prime Minister”).
Now, if it was in fact the same Dave Cameron who runs the party who said things to indicate he is a supporter of limited government, do you think that maybe, just maybe, he is saying those things not because he believes it but because he is at a conference attended by activists for whom the term “limited government” is not a dirty word? And if so, could he just possibly be saying those things so these activists do not defect to UKIP in disgust or, more likely, spend next election day gardening or playing Halo 3 or just about anything else to deaden the pain rather than vote for someone who has lied and lied and lied to them and who is not in fact a conservative at all? Could he just possibly be saying what they want to hear in the hope they will pretend they never heard him advocate more ‘green’ taxes, sumptuary laws in the form of de facto rationing of air travel for the plebs, more public spending and more regulation, allowing those things to vanish down the ‘memory hole’ because they want to believe their woeful party still stands for limited government regardless of all the evidence to the contrary?
Just askin’.
For every rational cause you can guarantee there will be someone who tries to pursue it in a crazy and counter-productive manner. A Cambridge school caretaker has just been gaoled for sending letter bombs in protest against the surveillance state. Quite how he thought it might help is obscure; there is no Bakhuninite theory of precipitating revolution on offer, nor the intimidation/revenge motive of animal-rights terrorists. Perhaps he is a product of what the LM people identify as “therapeutic culture” and believes (compare Mr Blair) that strength of feeling is truth, and demonstrating the strength of one’s feelings by hurting others – a Big Howl – is persuasive.
All of which is by way of introduction to the strangest point in the whole affair: the post trial commentary from the officer in charge of the investigation. This is becoming a standard feature of any notorious case, one which I dislike intensely. I think the job of the police is to investigate crime disinterestedly, and they should not have a say in or comment on the process of the courts, any more than they should prejudice the position of suspects beforehand.
Detective Superintendent George Turner, from Thames Valley Police, said of the criminal,
“He utilised his interests in anarchy, terrorism and explosive devices in support of his political views.”
Uh?
Let us be clear. This is not a slip of the tongue. It is a pre-prepared statement, given out in a press release to be reproduced verbatim.
How could an interest in anarchy (which does not seem to have been made out in any account I have read, and I would be grateful to be pointed to the evidence) have utility in bombing people? It might, just, provide motivation, although there are lots of pacifist anarchists and few violent nihilists, but practical assistance?
And “in support of his political views”? No, quite back-to-front. His crimes were in (mistaken) pursuit of his political views. There is a worrying muddling of means and ends there. What Cooper did was wrong; it does not support his views in the slightest. The criminality is founded in his intent to damage property and injure people. But we are left with the impression that the views are the mens rea.
Except I do not think he should be making it at all, I would have no quarrel with D-Supt Turner’s prepared statement had it said:
“He utilised his interests in terrorism and explosive devices in support of a politically motivated criminal plan.”
What he actually said is a disturbing glimpse of an official mind-set in which non-conformity and violence, dissent and criminality, are confounded.
Dave Cameron is actually a very funny guy. His faux sincerity and Forceful Leader hand gestures (no doubt practised in front of a mirror for best effect), combined with crassly obvious weathervane-like changes of political position, are the perfect stuff of parody. I expect most politicians to be insincere as it is more or less a job requirement, but I find the combination of mannered earnestness and whore-like opinion poll based ideology-of-the-week strangely compelling viewing.
In truth the principle-free pursuit of power he represents is so toxic that I want to have an endless series of Two Minute Hates at the mere mention of his name… but then when I see that phoney baloney shtick of his in full televisual motion and pimple enhancing digital hi-rez colour, I find myself grinning from ear to ear at the sheer absurdity of the man (and indeed the party that voted for this bozo to be its boss). He changes direction faster than a startled fish and the fact anyone believes anything that comes out of his mouth is a source of morbid fascination to me.
The government has – with virtually nil consultation or fanfare – announced changes to what has been known in English law (I do not know how this works in Scotland) as Enduring Power of Attorney (EPA) – an important process for people who want to put the control of their financial affairs in the hands of close family members or friends whom they trust, to deal with the sad circumstances of senility and extreme old age.
Naturally, the British government, in its determination to prevent us poor little dears messing up, has decided to regulate the practice, which will make such a process far more expensive. Added to the recent fiasco of what are called Home Information Packs (HIPS), this lot seem keen to inflate the costs of housing transactions or handling the affairs of a close relative. This makes the current supposed enthusiasm of Middle England for the present government even more of a mystery, although I guess what it really shows is how little confidence people have that the Tories would reverse one iota of this sort of thing. Depressing.
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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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