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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The Iranians have just committed yet another violation of the Geneva Conventions: publicly displaying the British sailors they captured last week.
This makes the third violation of the Geneva Conventions by Iran: threatening to try soldiers in uniform for espionage, interrogation of captured soldiers, and now public display of captured soldiers.
As noted earlier, the Geneva Conventions appear to be a one-way street, applicable only to the US and its allies. If anyone can find any expressions of outrage directed at Iran for violating the Geneva Conventions from the “usual suspects” who have been so concerned with US compliance with same, do please post them in the comments.
[Note: first sentence updated after the illegal broadcast of the soldiers was made.]
I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers’ reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.
Clive has a picture taken from I’m All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove – the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick – as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United’s Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.
In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing – “Set the People Free” – while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).
And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show’s brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I’m All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas (“what a fwightful shower!”), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.
The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the ‘enlightened classes’ at the time, which was that Britain was not ‘modern’ or ‘efficient’ enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain’s industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain’s economic stagnation. The ‘fix’ was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions’ privileges, starting with the closed shop.
I have heard it said that Sellers’ portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers’ genius to send up the intrusive state of today.
It will not have escaped the notice of our regular readers that I have shown a somewhat less than charitable attitude towards the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. I think the time has come to provide some reasons for my hostility.
I realise that some people (maybe Cameron supporters among them) would dismiss my onslaught as the product of a crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant personality. Well, as a matter of fact, I am crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant but I have what I consider to be very good reasons for singling out David Cameron as the particular object of my animosity.
I also want to make it clear that I am not hostile to Cameron because he is not a libertarian. I do not expect Conservatives to be libertarians hence they are called ‘Conservatives’. Nor am I bitter about the fact that he is not a Conservative either. I expect very little from the current crop of moral and intellectual midgets that have aggregated in the Conservative Party and I am seldom disappointed.
Nor am I especially, or even moderately, outraged by his brazen careerism, his opportunism and his readiness not just to be cynical but to openly be seen to be cynical (e.g. peddling his eco-friendly bicycle to work, a few yards in front of the gas-guzzling limo bearing his briefcase). To this extent Mr. Cameron is probably no better or no worse than any of the other political jobbists who have infested our public realm like a colony of plague bacteria in the lymph node of a 14th Century peasant and from where they can, and do, distribute their pathogens around the national bloodstream. → Continue reading: What’s that coming over the hill?
I am glad that things look to have become a bit more peaceful in Northern Ireland.
Would I be correct in guessing that this settlement may be one of the good things to have emerged from 9/11? This would be a pleasing thought, given the grief that Britain and the USA seem to have made for themselves in Iraq, provided its truth will survive serious scrutiny.
What I have in mind is that following 9/11 the USA took its first truly serious look at IRA terrorism, voters as well as just terrorism experts, and all that sentimental and unthinking Oirish blarney support for the IRA, which had over the decades turned into real money and real weapons on a huge scale, no longer seemed like a harmless slice of electoral politics and suddenly looked like a seriously bad idea. (I recall thinking as soon as the Twin Towers came down that the IRA would not like this.)
For, no matter what concessions have been gouged out of the North Ireland Unionists, and even though nobody directly involved in this settlement would dream of saying it out loud for fear of upsetting the new applecart that has now been bodged together, this surely means that the IRA has lost. For the time being anyway. They wanted Northern Ireland to be detached from the UK and to become attached to the Republic of Ireland, but this has not happened.
Or is this just a ceasefire? And will the IRA, Hezbollah style, merely use the settlement and the governmental privileges it gives them to prepare their next offensive? Presumably this remains the Unionist fear. Only time and lots of it will tell, but to an ignorant outsider such as south of England me, this seems real. If so, then the inevitable self-congratulatory noises emerging from the government, and the general media acclamation for the deal, would appear to be justified.
A gentleman by the name of Fabian Tassano is justifiably angry about the raising of the compulsory school-leaving age to 18 years. Quite so. Arguably – and I do argue – the school-leaving age should be cut. Many teenagers, including the brightest, are bored stiff at school and their boredom leads to many of the disciplinary problems we see around us. Better, perhaps, to let teenagers work, discover the value of money, and then pick up their education when some of that youthful energy has already been channelled into a payslip. This has been the argument from a number of liberal educationalists, such as Prof. James Tooley, for years. Such a view horrifies the power-freaks in the political establishment who would probably like us all to stay in education until the age of 30, but the trend towards an ever-higher school/college-leaving age cannot go on.
Reading some history, it does seem as though we live in an age when in some ways, youngsters seem to stay young for much longer than used to be the case. By the time my old man was 18, he had already become an officer cadet in the RAF and by the age of 21, was navigating fast jet aircraft. One of my great uncles joined the naval academy at Dartmouth by the age of 15. The average age of many pilots in WW2 was 21. Now, if you believe the educationalists of today, a person aged 18 is not fit to put in charge of an electric toothbrush, and yet at the same time, things like the age of sexual consent have been reduced. So in some ways people are thought to be more mature, in other ways, less so.
I am a bit miffed that Tassano moans that Samizdata has had nothing to say on this issue. Had he been reading this blog in January, he would have seen that we were on the case, thanks to Alice Bachini. Pay attention, Fabian.
The invaluable Belmont Club points out the double standards of the "anti-war" side.
Captain Ed notes that Iran has blatantly announced it is going to violate the Geneva Conventions, but no one in the press or the human rights community seems to notice Iran announced tonight that the 15 British sailors captured off the coast of Iraq would get indicted as spies. … Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”
Of course, an essential element of the “espionage” under the Geneva Conventions is being out of uniform, and the British sailors seized by the Iranians were in uniform, so the sailors are of course not guilty of espionage. Belmont Club observes:
As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes – all while wearing mufti or even women’s clothing – these are all considered “freedom fighters” of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention.
A note to those who howl so loudly about Guantanamo, and are silent about Iran and its allies: When your principles are so flexible, and always to the detriment of one side, do not be surprised when people wonder if you are truly “anti-war” or just “on the other side”.
Make Ken Livingston carbon neutral… stop him breathing
– Overheard at a Samizdata party the other day
AA Gill, the Scottish columnist and restaurant reviewer, has always come across in my eyes as a man who wears chips on his shoulders like military epaulettes, which for an upper middle class lad seems a bit odd. He does not like the English much, does he? Even so, read the article, as it contains some painful truths as well as some unfair bile. He makes the point that the English/British are not always great adopters of life in New York. I have been to the city many times and saw this clubby sort of behaviour a few times. We Brits do not seem to realise how rude we can strike Americans. When I read of Americans being cut short at dinner parties or insulted by Brit tourists, I cringe, even though I tell myself that I am not responsible for the behaviour of my fellow countrymen and women. I feel much the same way when I overhear some idiot in Paris or Milan refusing to speak the local language and assuming that everyone speaks English rather than French or Italian.
I would be interested to know what Jim Bennett, the Anglosphere man, makes of this sort of behavioural friction. It may be just a matter of Gill being an arsehole. But he may also have a point.
Today is ‘Budget Day’, when the UK government lays before Parliament the amount of money it needs to raise to pay for its spending. Since the days of William Pitt, Robert Peel and William Gladstone in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the length of the tax code has grown at a terrifying pace. I came across this from a firm of accountants commenting on today’s performance by Gordon Brown:
Since 1997, the UK tax code runs to more than 8,300 pages, twice as long as it was 10 years ago, and the second-highest in the world’s top 20 countries apart from India , according to the World Bank and PriceWaterhouseCoopers
(Wall Street Journal, print edition)
No wonder accountants love Gordon. There is a sort of unhealthy symbiotic relationship between the whole financial services sector and Brown’s tax morass: the finance minister increases the complexity of the tax code; the accountants make money explaining this to their clients and helping some people to avoid it where possible. This in turn creates a whole industry of people with a vested interest in complexity. A flat-tax, for example, would put a lot of these financial whizzkids out of business and force them to do something more useful instead.
At a recent discussion with City types about this, this point was made very clear to me. Assuming we have taxes at all, they should be summarised on two sides of A4 paper, tops. The cost savings to business and individuals would be enormous.
Today, Brown grabbed superficial headlines by cutting the standard tax rate to 20p from 22p and cut the rate of corporation tax to 28p from 30p. It sounds like a good step and there will be some net winners from this. Good. However, as is always the case with this sly and driven character, the details are less flattering. The removal of the 10p rate for low earners, adjustments to National Insurance and corporate capital allowances means the overall balance is neutral rather than towards a smaller state. The state will take about 45-46% of UK GDP, compared with 37% in 1997 when Ken Clarke was in Brown’s job (it is worth remembering that Clarke is regarded as a leftwing Tory, but in certain respects his record is pretty good, or at least not as bad as it might be).
Watching the House of Commons debate on Brown’s speech, several things struck me. Tory leader David Cameron was plainly rattled by Brown playing the tax-cut card – however bogus a ploy Brown’s is. It might – just might – be enough of a shock to the Tories to realise that competing over which party can push up taxes the most and not get caught might not be a smart strategy with the voters. Brown is trying to pose as a tax-cutter. How odd it is that the Labour Party is now trying to make the running in this direction. Even though it is all hooey, it is interesting to see how Brown’s gambit may pay off.
The whole point of this budget, as far as I can see, is in Brown trying to squash Cameron: stealing some of his ‘Green clothes’ while also trying to persuade middle-income voters that Labour is actually more of a tax-cutting party than the Tories.
Even if this is utter rubbish – it is – the very fact that Brown wants to create such an impression is interesting. I am increasingly coming round to the view that libertarians and free-marketeer Tories should let Cameron realise that they prefer to keep in Labour than let the Tories win on a Big Government agenda.
“I love you, and I am a socialist”
This is what I, via the wonders of television, watched being said to David Cameron.
A young doctor made this comment to Mr Cameron when this leader of a British political party turned up at a demonstration of doctors and, whilst denouncing the Labour party government for not providing jobs for all qualified young doctors, promised “every single one of you” a job (or words to that effect).
To some people the above proves that Mr Cameron is a good leader of the Conservative party, to other people, such as myself, the above shows that David Cameron is not the leader of a ‘Conservative’ party at all.
We see the same facts but interpret them differently.
No no, not money. I need ideas.
I recently agreed to do another chat spot on 18 Doughty Street TV, and like a fool I picked Tuesday March 20th, i.e. this evening, all unaware that tomorrow is Budget Day, and we would all have to talk about the damn Budget. I hate, hate, hate Budget Days and Budgets, and conversations about Budget Day and conversations about Budgets, from the depths of my soul. I find the details of tax law deeply depressing and complicated, not least deeply depressing because so damn complicated. Plus everyone on regular TV drones on about it all for hour after hour, while saying (because knowing) extremely little, like cricket commentators when it is raining only not funny or interesting.
Anyway, I got an email this morning from His IainDaleness which included the following instruction:
We will talk about tomorrow’s budget in the first half hour. Please come armed with three things you’d like the Chancellor to do and three things you think he actually will do.
Any suggestions? I particularly need help with the “he actually will do” bit. Generally, presumably, he will (a) kiss babies and (b) steal their lollypops. (A lollypop for whoever can pin down the movie reference there.) But more precisely, what specific horrors are in the pipeline? I assume a lot of anti-4×4 crap. But what else?
And, of course, suggestions about what he should do will also be trawled through with a view to me using the best of them tonight, probably without credit to the originator.
I think that the entire government down be shut down for ever and taxes lowered to zero. But I think they want something more precise than that. So far, I can only think of saying, again, that The Top Rate of Income Tax Should Be Cut to Zero, which I think is a brilliant idea, if only because it makes the current lot of leftier-than-thou Conservatives squirm.
I am now off to read what UKIP has to say, budget-wise. (So far I have not got beyond the heading. Which should surely say “fiddles” rather than “tinkers”. The Emperor Nero was a violinist, was he not?)
…so did the Catholic Church speak up for him?
The BBC reports:
[T]he Catholic head of England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, said the government was rushing through the [Equality Act (Sexual Orientation)] regulations – after MPs were asked to approve them without debate.
He accused the government of “an abuse of parliamentary democracy”, adding: “Profound public concern about aspects of these regulations has not been heard.”
Where has His Eminence been for the last decade? The Blair administration has been applying the “programme motion” (pdf explanation) to curtail parliamentary debate and adopting wholesale the device of “framework legislation” to legislate by the nominally endorsed decree dressed up as statutory instrument.
Wave after wave of revolutionary legislation, stamping out liberty in every quarter and establishing imperial inspectorates in place, has gone through on the back of tendentious PLP briefings calling votes from MPs who have not participated in a debate and have no real idea what they are voting on. How come it is only abuse of parliament when it infringes the Catholic Church’s right to tell people what to think about gay sex, by telling them to think something different about 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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