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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And while we are on the subject of the Antichrist, is there not something very sign-of-the-apocalypse about this?
CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
‘Leaked’, my balls! This is being floated in order to measure public reaction. A muted response and all the right boxes will be ticked. A mass cry of protest and the plans will be shuffled off to another in-tray to await re-floating later in the year or early next year (preferably under cover of some news-consuming natural disaster or terrorist attack). These people believe that time is on their side and maybe it is.
Our masters are not only deeply and irredeemably malignant but they are also intoxicated with the heady fumes of power and verging on the insane. The question is, what do we do about it?
As regulars of this site will know, even the most ardent sports fans on this blog – Brian Micklethwait, Michael Jennings and yours truly – despise the Olympic Games. Or, more exactly, we despise how the Games in the UK are funded out of taxes, and despise the crooks, cretins and gullible fools who imagine that the benighted taxpayers of Britain are making some sort of “investment” by paying for the Games. The other evening, flicking through the channels, I saw Sebastian Coe, now a peer and a former Tory MP, go on about what a smashing “investment” the Games respresented, as if he was talking about a punt on the Nasdaq or a purchase of BMW bonds. That an alleged Tory should use the word “investment” to talk about something that could not stand up on commercial grounds and requires the looting powers of the state to function is depressing evidence of the calibre of Tories today. For all their faults, former Chancellors Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe or even Norman Lamont never insulted our intelligence by abusing the English language in this way.
It is possible that the Conservatives have made the crude calculation that the blasted Games, which surge in cost all the time, are going to happen anyway, will be an expensive mess, and the best thing to do is to make supportive noises, not appear to be grouchy, and pin any blame for cockups on the Labour government. From a narrow tactical angle, this is possibly sensible. There are some battles not worth fighting; while the cost of the Games could run above 10 billion pounds, the overalll size of UK public spending is several multiples of that and the Tories or any decent opposition must focus its attention on that. Although a huge figure, the cost of the Games represents a rounding error compared to the total public spending burden. Even so, it would be good to see the Tories flaying the government over the fiasco that this event threatens to become. Over at the Social Affairs Unit blog, the writer Jeremy Black makes some good points on what this government’s opponents should be doing.
Oh well, at least writing about this takes my mind off Ipswich Town FC’s miserable footballing year and England’s loss of the Ashes. Sigh.
As if the threat of being bullied and labelled a fattie is not enough, there is now the risk that the state and its agents will take a child into care if that child is deemed “obese”. Over the last few days, the press has carried reports of how a young boy, weighing in at a powerful 14-stone (196 lbs/ 89 kg), narrowly avoided such a fate.
My first instinctive belief is that the state has no business telling us about what should be the shape of our butts. In the case of children, responsibility lies with the parents, and there has to be real and sustained proof of neglect and abuse to trigger any form of intervention. In nearly all cases, my view is that the “cure” of taking an “obese” child into care will far worse than the supposed problem. Yes, extreme obesity, as measured in terms of excess fat vis a vis overall body shape, is not something to laugh at or dismiss. Although I have been lucky and born with a slim physique, I still try to build on that good fortune by keeping fit. There’s no doubt that many people in Britain are unhealthily overweight. Lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyles and the demise of hard, physical labour all have an effect. But while I would encourage folk to look after themselves, ultimately, what people choose to do with their lives is their business, not mine. In the case of this youngster, realising that he is overweight should be incentive enough to do something about it. His parents may not be the brightest lights in the harbour, but from what I have read, they plainly adore their son, although they probably could exert rather a stricter control over his diet.
As we have also found in so many cases, paternalistic state actions often start to “protect the kids” and end up spreading towards adults as well. I hope this young man learns to take pride in his own health and can look back in future to this time in his life as one where he learned to control his appetite and also realise how dangerous the state has become. There are plenty worse things than having a large tummy, that is for sure.
225 years ago today Parliament voted a resolution to end the war and grant the colonies independence. A month later Lord North faced a vote of no confidence and stepped down.
It seems to me any old place can declare independence, it is when your would-be rulers accept it that matters.
In the course of my day job, I have to give my boss a round-up of the Sunday business pages to keep track of all the latest news and features. Not surprisingly, the Sundays are full of stuff right now about Britain’s ‘super-rich’, such as those folk brokering lots of mergers and takeovers at the moment (see my post below defending private equity). Well, the socialist looters among us will be thrilled to know that the enemies of personal enrichment are alive and kicking. Here is a job ad in the Sunday Times:
“HM Revenue & Customs. Make a real difference, take our information to a new level” (I liked that bit)
“Attractive six-figure package – central London”
I am sure it is very attractive.
“You probably know HM Revenue & Customs as the people who collect tax but there’s far more to it than that”
I bet there is. Go on, we are dying to know.
“We play a vital role in law enforcement and protecting society”
Yep. When Gordon Brown fucked the UK pensions system, it was all about protecting society.
“90,000 work within HMRC, and we have over 40 million customers (taxpayers, claimants and others)
“Customers” – that is beautiful. And we ‘customers’ of VAT, income tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty, national insurance (tax), etc, are being cared for by 90,000 caring, sharing, hugging, cuddly people. Terrific.
“In every sense we have a huge responsibility for society and the economy, so customer focus sits at the heart of everything we do”
I do not know who writes these adverts, but the Comedy Central Channel is always in need of new blood. Hire this person immediately.
When I read the following column by Will Hutton, lambasting private equity firms for daring to take over big UK companies like supermarket J. Sainsbury or whoever, I laughed out loud. Here is his lead paragraph in Friday’s Guardian:
It is time to come to the defence of the public limited company, one of the great Enlightenment gifts to western civilisation. Increasingly capital, in the quest for higher returns to make vast personal fortunes, is going private to escape the demands of public accountability on stock markets. If uninterrupted, the long-term adverse consequences of this privatisation of capital for our economy, society and democracy will be profound.
Rubbish. Firms that are floated on the London Stock Exchange, Nasdaq or the Martian 250 are privately owned, Will. They are not owned by the state. True, limited liability laws, as the libertarian writer and friend of mine, Sean Gabb, likes to point out, present serious issues in terms of the gap between ownership, responsibility and control (I wrote about this topic a while ago). But to argue that private equity shops like Apax, Carlyle or Texas Pacific – those evil Amerikans – are taking what should be ‘public’ into grubby ‘private’ hands is economic illiterate nonsense. Firms exist to make a profit, Will. As Milton Friedman trenchantly put it without hint of apology to the gods of ‘social responsibility’, a company’s job is to make a profit for their owners, not to further whatever corporatist/fascist/socialist/ist agenda that happens to attract the gaze of Guardian editorialists.
Why the current wave of hysteria about private equity? It is being fuelled by two things: fear and envy. Fear of the power of these sometimes shadowy firms to buy up famous companies with great wodges of debt finance, or leverage, as the finance geeks put it. Envy, because of the large bonuses that the private equity honchos pay themselves and the often high profits they make in turning firms around. And of course no story about private equity can be written without referring to the Masters of the Universe lampooned by Oliver Stone in Wall Street or portrayed in books with such objective titles like Barbarians at the Gate.
In the main, what these firms do is target cash-rich firms that are run by often lazy executives who have presided over crappy business decisions. Take the meltdown of Marconi a few years ago, one of Britain’s most famous companies. That was a listed company. The destruction of value and jobs in that company remains, in my mind, one of the most disgraceful episodes in British corporate history and who knows, it might have been saved from making big errors had a private equity fund been in charge, rather than deluded executives. Private equity firms helped stymie Deutsche Börse’s foolish bid for the London Stock Exchange 2 years ago, and have turned around businesses. They typically buy and hold a firm for 5 years or more, take a hands-on approach to running firms before spinning them off to another buyer or floating them in an IPO. So Will Hutton should spare us sentimental guff about how limited liability firms floated on the stock exchange represent the perfect model of doing business or something that Adam Smith or Voltaire would exalt. They are merely one of the many ways in which economic activity manifests itself. As interest rates rise and the economic cycle turns, some of the excesses of leveraged buyouts will fade and private equity transactions will decline. No doubt Will Hutton will forget everything he has written and go back to bashing listed firms for their “short-termist” fixation with pleasing shareholders, or whatever.
As mentioned several times in these pages, by the way, one additional reason why listed firms go private is because their bosses prefer not to have to put up with onerous reporting requirements under US and other laws, like the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley rules. If Hutton or other big government advocates are worried about the migration of companies off the listed stock market, they might like to remember that point.
Right, my rant of the day is over. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Update: have slightly amended the text about Marconi, just to reinforce the point. One commenter, Bryan Appleyard, has argued that firms become “cultural” forces, as if released from the laws of supply and demand. I have heard some odd attacks on private ownership and M&A before, but that is a new one. Companies that have been taken over by private equity include the Automobile Association, Kwik Fit, Debenhams, various property firms, HEA, the US health chain, and many more. I don’t really see how the cultural issue makes a bit of difference to the folk who work in them or buy their products.
I’d also add that I think some of these private equity deals are in danger of coming unstuck, and no doubt much gloating and gnashing of teeth will occur when or if this happens. It is partly a function of low interest rates and the impact this has on asset prices. Monetary growth is strong at the moment and this is one of the ways in which money supply growth comes out. Another lesson from Friedman to remember.
The powers-that-be are moving to remove that annoyance to business-as-usual called the United Kingdom Independence Party by killing them with a legal move.
The UK Independence Party faces a crippling demand from election watchdogs to forfeit more than £360,000 of donations. The Electoral Commission is due to announce today that it is launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations made to the anti-Brussels party by one of its main backers […] The threat has stunned Ukip’s leadership, which admitted yesterday that forfeiting the money would effectively leave the party penniless […] He and Nigel Farage, the party leader, are furious at what they say is over-reaction to a “simple clerical error”. Mr Farage, who said Ukip’s annual income was about £250,000, said: “I would have expected a rap on the knuckles.”
What seems strange to me is that UKIP actually appear to be surprised something like this could happen. They are trying to break The System and neither of the two main parties who benefit from it really has any interest in seeing the vast body of consensus they both share threatened by outsiders. The LibDems are a predictable ‘given’ that do not really threaten the status quo… UKIP on the other hand is a wild card. If the UKIP thought the risk they posed as a spoiler was going to be fought out amongst ‘gentlemen’ via the ballot box, then they are more naive than I thought.
Also a pet peeve of mine… “launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations…” Recover? The money will be gobbled up by the Treasury. Seize, confiscate, appropriate, take, perhaps, but in order to ‘recover’ the money they would have to give it back to the donor. I have always though the legal use of the word ‘recover’ was the state speaking at its most euphemistically disingenuous.
Only Blair could repackage scuttle as a political victory. The situation in the south of Iraq has worsened over the last few years as British troops have withdrawn from the main towns, leaving the local areas in the control of the Mahdi Army and the Shi’a militias, often under the influence of Iran. The Times reports that the main tasks assigned to the British Army: pacification and reconstruction, have not been achieved.
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washing-ton, said the British move would simply hand more power to the Islamist groups backed by neighbouring Iran. “The British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British ‘lost’ the south more than a year ago,” he said.
Although there is no Sunni-Shia carnage to compare with Baghdad, the Shia-dominated south has been torn by a cutthroat internal competition for power that has turned bloody. Since August, both Diwaniyah and Amara have been convulsed by clashes between the mainly Shia Iraqi Army, and Sadr’s militia.
Unwilling to increase defence expenditure and recruitment, the government tried to hide behind a victory message whilst hoping to prevent the possible creation of a Shi’astan with a reduced force. Soldiers have done a sterling job under impossible political conditions, whilst stabbed in the back by the hypocrites in the Liberal Democrats. If the government cannot fulfil the security commitments that Blair undertook on our behalf, it should say so honourably and withdraw leaving the United States to hold the ring. If a hot war results from the Shi’a-Sunni tensions ensuing, Blair’s legacy will stand out: defeat abroad, failure at home.
Bryan Appleyard has a terrific piece in defence of 4×4 vehicles, often dubbed as “Chelsea Tractors” on account of their often being driven by well-heeled west Londoners in the narrow streets of said neighbourhood rather than being driven in muddy village lanes. He says what I suspect has been the obvious point, which is that class hatred and the current puritanical culture explains what fires the dislike of these vehicles. The amount of petrol consumed per mile has, I expect, not got a lot to do with it.
These cars have become emblems of all our environmental crimes. They represent 7.5% of the UK car market and 100% of British car loathing. The very idea that in town, or even in the country, anybody should use a car in which all four wheels are driven is regarded as a crime comparable to logging the rainforests or clubbing seals. Across Europe, owners of 4x4s
(or, as they are also called, Sports Utility Vehicles, or SUVs) have become eco-pariahs, malevolent planet-warmers. If you happen to be sitting in a Range Rover Sport, a BMW X5 or, worst of all, a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S in London, it is best not to catch the eyes of any pedestrian.
I can sympathise, however, with some, not all, of the annoyance that these vehicles provoke. Their drivers are often terrible, imagining that their being surrounded by massive lumps of metal means they are somehow absolved from the rules of the road. They gobble up a lot of parking space, which is at a premium in highly-taxed London. They have a higher centre of gravity than most cars and yet some drivers do not adjust their driving to take account of this. And I occasionally do wonder quite why a person needs such a large vehicle to take little Johnny to school or do the shopping.
But whether I think people should or should not “need” to have such a vehicle is beside the point. I have an opinion, but the Greenies want to use the coercive power of the state to limit our motoriing ambitions, and I very much doubt that concern for the welfare of the planet has much to do with it.
Talking of politics of envy and massive City salaries, this article is worth a look.
I am sometimes asked why I seldom write about matters in my local part of the world. Partly this is because local events are too depressing, but it is also that there is a ‘culture clash’ between myself and the local environment, something that becomes even more apparent if you compare the political fate of ‘conservatives’ in Kettering Northamptonshire and Kettering Ohio.
Recently a political leaflet from the ‘Conservative’ party landed on my doormat. The leaflet boasted of the ten thousand Pounds that ‘Conservative’ Country Councillors were each spending on local projects.
For a few seconds I was impressed. True some of the councillors are wealthy people, but none is the league of Bill Gates – ten thousand Pounds is a lot of money for them.
But then I understood that it was not their money. It was local taxpayers money that the County Council, which is ‘Conservative’ party controlled, had given to the councillors to be spent on various projects.
Now in some parts of the world this would be called a ‘slush fund’ or ‘pork’ to buy votes. But in the United Kingdom it is called ‘pavement politics’ and is considered entirely ethical rather than corrupt ‘political machine politics’.
How different things are across the Atlantic when you consider how the Republicans lost Congress partly for following a similar line of policy with many of the ‘pork barrel’ projects getting so much negative publicity with suggestions of impropriety. The Republicans in Ohio (Kettering Northamptonshire is the ‘sister city’ of Kettering Ohio and there are links between the Ohio Republicans and the Northamptonshire ‘Conservatives’) turned the State into the third highest taxed in the nation – and thus lost control.
The problem is that the situation is different. The Northamptonshire ‘Conservatives’ really are not being corrupt by the prevailing local standards in Britain. It is just that their minds are so different to mine that no real mental link exists – it is of limited use to write about people one does not understand.
He might well say, man, this is some repugnant shit:
Thousands of council staff are being trained to police the smoking ban in bars, restaurants and shops in England.
Ministers have given councils £29.5m to pay for staff, who will be able to give on-the-spot £50 fines to individuals and take court action against premises.
They will have the power to enter premises undercover, allowing them to sit among drinkers, and will even be able to photograph and film people.
If only Mr. Jackson were here to pop a few caps in a few asses.
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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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