Samizdata

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

– Margaret Thatcher

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.)

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.

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.

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!