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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There is an interesting discussion point in the Telegraph called Should we be looking for a new England?.
And my answer would be yes. Ideally I would have liked to preseve much of the old England but I fear that is no longer a realistic option. I used to support the idea of an unwritten constitution because of the importance of unenumerated rights, but the Major and Blair years have shown that Britain’s unwritten constitution was not worth the paper it was not written on. We have been disarmed, we have had our rights to free speech greatly curtailed, our rights to trial by a jury of our peers abridged, our underpinning civil society regulated out of existence in area after area, our right to property vastly infringed upon.
In short, there can be no pretence whatsoever that The System has worked to protect us from our political masters. The British system survived for a long time because enough people wanted it to survive. As most are now willing to allow themselves to be herded and bought off with their own money, the system is now little more than populist authoritarianism.
Yes, we very badly need a new England.
(Kindly spare us any jokes about New England.)
As every right-thinking person instinctively knows, one is not allowed to refer to the British National Party without such reference being accompanied by frenzied denunciations. As if the mere act of acknowledging the existence of that organisation is sufficient to brand the speaker with a mark of depravity that has to be warded off in advance.
I have decided to scratch my name off the cast list of that particular pantomime. The show has been running for far too long, everyone knows the script by heart and it all sounds to terribly, suffocatingly tedious and, if this article in the Times is any indication at all, then I am not the only person to have lost patience with the same old, same old.
What I find so interesting about the article is not so much in what is being said but in the manner in which it is being said. Gone is the fear and loathing, gone is the high moral indictment, gone are the blistering accusations. Instead, the rising popularity of the BNP (and its leader, Nick Griffin) is examined with a tone which is temperate, measured and, in some places, bordering on the sympathetic. That remarkable change of tone is, of itself, significant:
About 70 people are packed into a back room of the Golden Lion pub, with not a skinhead or pair of Doc Martens in sight and more tweeds than T-shirts. They are male and female, young and old, working class and middle class, ex-Labour and ex-Tory, several of them Daily Telegraph readers. They are mostly solid Yorkshire folk who have watched immigrants transform areas in which they grew up and believe – rightly or wrongly – that their way of life is under threat. They are bewildered more than hate-filled. They are fearful more than fear-inspiring, and feel gagged by political correctness. They do not come from sink estates. They are stakeholders, people with something to lose.
Throwing their lot in with the BNP may not be the wisest course of action but it would be a gross mistake to dismiss these people as knuckle-dragging bigots. They are unlikely to think of themselves in those terms. Indeed, they are people whose national character (or a part of it, at least) was forged in the fight against national socialism and while I might question the course of their political migration, I cannot find it in myself to blame them for their clear disenchantment with the status quo. → Continue reading: Weimar Britain
While watching a rather silly movie about volcanoes, starring Pierce Brosnan, I idly surfed the Web to see how many examples there have been of tectonic movements in the United Kingdom.
It turns out there have been quite a few, albeit not on the catastrophic scale recorded in the US west coast, or Japan, Greece, Turkey and Iran. But even in little ol Blighty, the earth has moved. The British Geological Survey website is worth a look. I was taken aback to see that there was even a minor tremor in Norfolk. Yes, Norfolk, home of turkeys, mustard and birthplace of Lord Nelson.
As advertised (where else?) in the Guardian:
Equality and Diversity Manager
Organisation: MERSEYSIDE FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE
Location: Merseyside
Salary: £31,653 -£33,315
Your challenge will be to ensure that a culture of fairness, equality and opportunity for all permeates through every Level of the organisation. You will achieve this by developing and implementing strategies, providing expert advice to managers. An innovative thinker, you will have experience of managing equality and diversity at a senior level within a complex organisation.
Get your applications in now!
Unlike some free marketeers, I do not have a visceral loathing of trade unions, although I can understand why some people do dislike them. With very large businesses, such as say, ICI or GM, it probably saves a lot of time and bother to negotiate pay and conditions through a union and its representatives.
So long as they do not try to form monopolies and freeze non-union members out of a company via a ‘closed shop’ or expect to be free of the ordinary tort liabilities of the Common Law, I think unions are often beneficial. They can provide services to their members like insurance or other benefits, help members with specific disputes, and occasionally their strikes for better pay and conditions do in fact help workers in vulnerable situations, such as where there are few other sources of work and an employer has a de-facto monopoly negotiation power – although such cases are pretty rare and do not last long in a properly free and efficient market place.
There is debate on whether employers really do have a structural upper hand in negotiating pay with employees and whether unions do anything useful to ‘correct’ that supposed imbalance. The economist W. Hutt was a notable skeptic on how much of an advantage employers actually have, if at all. Anyway, even if there is not a significant structural imbalance between the negotiating freedom of labour and employers, unions can smooth the pay negotiation path at times.
So there you have it. A member of the Samizdata writing crew, that band of capitalist oppressors, says that unions can be a force for good.
And then, as Stephen Pollard notes, the NUJ reminds us of why so many folk dislike unions and their antics. Sigh.
Considering how good squatters have it in England and Wales, I find it hard to take the faux-incredulousness in the British press about people who organize themselves on MySpace before going into unoccupied homes and destroying them for the fun of it. The law of the land has such little regard for property rights that it should come as a shock to no one that these teenagers do not, either.
Sometimes I read articles which seem to prove the existence of parallel universes. What I am curious about however is how does my web browser manage to access them from within this universe? I really must drop David Deutsch an e-mail and ask him to theorise.
For example, see this article sent from some alternate Earth, called ‘Britain counts cost of diplomatic furore over Berezovsky‘ (I apologise if the transdimensional shift causes your browser to crash):
The furore also probably extinguishes any hope that Russia will agree to let suspects be extradited to Britain over the London poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko
So by this I can only assume that some people think that if only Britain was ‘nicer’ to the Russian regime, there was at some point a ‘hope’ that the Russian leadership might allow the UK to extradite the people who could confirm the already obvious fact that the Russian state ordered Russian agents to assassinate Alexander Litvinenko in London.
Yes, I am sure the Russian authorities are really keen to do that. Not in this universe, of course, but I am sure that must be true in some other universe otherwise how else would it end up in a newspaper article?
I am fairly sure it is too late for an April Fool and I cannot detect humour at work in the writing so no doubt journalists Patrick Wintour and Laura Smith, the ones in this universe that is, are rather bemused by this transdimensional strangeness from their alter-egos from the universe in which politeness and pliability by Her Majesty’s Government can be expected to get Russian leaders to implicate themselves in murders on British soil.
Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was granted asylum in the UK due to his treatment by the Russian state, had said he wants to engineer the overthrow of Vladimir Putin:
“We need to use force to change this regime. It isn’t possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure.”
To which a Kremlin spokesman said:
“In accordance with our legislation [his remarks are] being treated as a crime. It will cause some questions from the British authorities to Mr Berezovsky. We want to believe that official London will never grant asylum to someone who wants to use force to change the regime in Russia.”
Yet the Kremlin seems to think it can murder its political opponents in London and at home and that is just fine and dandy. Who says Russian politicians do not have a sense of humour, eh?
What is sauce for the goose…
The government’s campaign to ban the rural practice of hunting foxes with hounds – motivated by a mix of sentimentality about animals, some genuine concern about cruelty and a lot of spite – has proven to be a waste of time, at least as far as I can judge from some news reports as well as direct personal experience. On the latter point, a foxhunt came across some open land that is owned by my father – what was left after he sold the bulk of the farm in Suffolk. The hunt did not ask my dad about coming across the land, and in fact caused a fair amount of damage to several hedges. My old man was, understandably, not very amused.
It is sometimes assumed that farmers and other folk who work the land must be in favour of hunting vermin and therefore support foxhunting. I ‘support’ it in the sense that I tolerate it. I tend to regard foxhunting as a mildly silly activity but there are lots of silly activities which make up the eccentric land of ours. Just because one might not enjoy a certain pursuit in no way justifies banning it. On practical grounds, if one wants to control wild animals like foxes, a rifle is arguably better use than a bunch of dogs. Riding to hounds across open fields and over high hedges might at one stage have been good training for a budding cavalry soldier. And Let’s face it, foxhunters chase foxes because they enjoy it; they enjoy steaming across the countryside, with all the adrenalin rushes and cameraderie that this brings. And a man and woman look pretty damn good in those riding clothes.
Even so, many farmers, such as tenant farmers, resent the hunt. When tenant farmers were more common than they are now, a landlord could ride across the tenant’s farm at will, and force said tenant to maintain the land in such a way as to keep up the supply of foxes, pheasants, partridges and other targets. Roger Scruton, in his ‘elegy’ to old England, defends the pattern of landholding in such terms (he denies the idea that one owns property in any absolute sense, but more as a sort of lease from the State). With the rise of owner-occupier farmers, however, it is not quite so simple for hunters to gallop across the land in pursuit of game come what may. The clash between foxhunters and farmers is rather ironic, given that some commenters tend to lump all country dwellers in the same mental category.
Respect for property rights is in decline in this nation, and from all quarters. The assault on property rights, such as telling owners of pubs that their clients cannot smoke even if no-one is forcing anyone to frequent a place, is only one such example. The ability of people to change their property is constrained as never before by planning laws. Landowners are also affected. All the more reason, then, why devotees of the hunt should respect the rights of people who are, in usual circumstances, tolerant of the men who chase the fox to the cries of Tally Ho!
It is all so clear to me now and I must say that I feel like such a fool for having been so taken in by the pantomime of ‘co-operation’ that was put on by our 15 naval personnel for the benefit of their Iranian captors and the wider world. Yes, I use the word ‘pantomime’ because what we all perceived to be a humiliating milquetoast submission was, in fact, a mere ploy to disguise a fiendishly brilliant plan to kill all the Iranian Guards by means of death from dehydration as a result of relentless and uncontrollable vomiting:
That was the last time Arthur saw Faye for six days as they were both put in solitary. Guards tried to make Faye crack by cruelly telling her she was the last of the 15 being held captive.
But, speaking of the moment they were reunited, he told how he wept and begged the 26-year-old for a hug. Arthur said: “I missed Topsy most of all. I really love her, as amumand a big sister. Not seeing her and not knowing if she was safe was one of the hardest parts of the whole thing.
“Then on the sixth day, when I was just about giving up hope, I was pulled from my bed in the early hours of the morning.
“They led me down a corridor and into a room, where I saw Topsy in a corner.
“I can’t describe how that felt…just every emotion rolled into one. I ran up to her, threw my arms round her and cried like a baby.
“When I’d calmed down, she asked, ‘Do you need another hug, a mother hug?’ and I said, ‘damn right’. She was just as pleased to see me because they’d told her I’d been sent home.
“Topsy said she’d always be there for me, to protect me and look after me.
Here endeth the lesson, Ahmedinejad. Those Iranian johnnies will never again make the mistake of underestimating the heroic professionalism and grim resolve of the Royal Navy.
Today’s news has two splendid examples of how holding a ‘high office’ (in a company, institution or government) is in no way an indication of intelligence or good judgement (and therein lies the reason I am in favour of having as small a state as possible).
We have just seen the Royal Navy and UK government suffer a P.R. debacle at the hands of Iran, so if there was even the faintest glimmer of wit to be found within the Ministry of Defence, one would assume that they would be working to make sure this whole affair passes through the news cycle and flushes down the memory hole as quickly as possible. Right?
Hell no. Against the usual practice (and therefore involving a proactive decision by the Minister to ‘do something’ rather than just shrug his shoulders and say “sorry, my hands are tied, it’s the regulations, you see.”), for some inexplicable reason the MOD has said the fifteen former captives can sell their stories to the press, thereby guaranteeing this whole event will stay ‘live’ for as long as possible. Very clever. Clearly this government has passed mere ineptitude and moved into its terminal senile dementia stage.
The second one is not an indication of a spectacular (almost comical) lack of political acumen on display but rather an example of a truly moronic moral calculus. We see senior British clerics berating Britain for not thanking the Iranian state for returning the servicemen and woman they took from Iraqi waters at gunpoint. I am sure there is some commandment in the Bible about the victims of a crime thanking the unrepentant perpetrators of the crime but I cannot off-hand think where that is.
It is moments like this that I am almost moved to ‘thank God’ (yes, I am being ironic) for the fact I managed to shake off the mental shackles of youth and become entirely God and Church-free.
I think Colonel Tim Collins has it about right:
Col Tim Collins, who led the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said: “It’s a close call as to which organisation is in the deepest moral crisis – the Church or the Ministry of Defence.”
Indeed.
If this story about Britain’s so-called ‘public service’ state owned broadcasting channel is true, the end of the BBC cannot come to soon.
Amid the deaths and the grim daily struggle bravely borne by Britain’s forces in southern Iraq, one tale of heroism stands out. Private Johnson Beharry’s courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol then, in a second act, saving his vehicle’s crew despite his own terrible injuries earned him a Victoria Cross.
For the BBC, however, his story is “too positive” about the conflict. The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain’s youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.
To be honest I find it hard to believe the people who run the BBC could be so overt in imposing their tax funded biases on the channel. If this is true, even I am shocked by the crassness of it.
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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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