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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It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.
– Patricia Hewitt denounces Iranian treatment of a member of the fifteen captured British navy personnel. Is there a more perfect illustration of the misplaced priorities of Blair’s Britain?
(Via Tim Blair, who notes “as always with such a blindingly stupid quote, be alert to the possibility it’s too stupid to be true.” Perhaps regular Hewitt-watchers would not see the need for such caution.)
I have always regarded it as reliably axiomatic that government departments are named after whatever it is they are trying to put a stop to. One need look no further than the Department of Education for practical proof of this principle in action.
For the same reason I have always regarded it as a blessing that the legal system has been administered by something called ‘The Home Office’. For all of its indisputable shortcomings, I took great comfort from the fact that we do not, nor have we ever had, a ‘Ministry of Justice’.
Until now:
New department: the Ministry of Justice
A Ministry of Justice will be created to provide a stronger focus on the criminal justice system, and on reducing re-offending.
This new ministry will take over the staff and responsibilities of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), including the prison and probation services, and have lead responsibility for criminal law and sentencing…
The Prime Minister said the new Ministry of Justice ‘will take the leading role in delivering a fairer, more effective, speedy and efficient justice system.’
I rather think that a more realistic appraisal will be opaque, incompetent and, above all, self-serving.
They may as well just go ahead and set up the Ministries of Truth, Prosperity and Freedom and I daresay that, in the fullness of time, they will.
I suggest that you read this before you sit down to eat breakfast and not afterwards, lest you spend the rest of your morning mopping semi-digested coco-pops off the kitchen floor. Here are a few tasters:
I’m in tune with the ‘I can’ generation
Wow! Is that anything like the Pepsi Generation? Like, totally kewwwwllll. Not to mention hot, hip, happening, in the groove and sexeeeeeee.
That is why social and economic change today require government leadership and profes sional innovation, as well as mass mobilisation.
Certainly, sir. Corporal Tremayne reporting for duty, sir (salutes).
In public services, an “I can” service will continually ask: how can we devolve power, funding and control to the lowest appropriate level, while maintaining high national minimum standards? Can teachers and children inject more creativity into what is learnt, where and how?
Well, ‘I can’ tell him what the ‘lowest appropriate level’ is for funding and power.
This is not a zero-sum game between government power and citizen power; it is a genuine partnership that breaks down the divide between producer and consumer.
Eh?
It doesn’t get any better than that. This man has penned a whole mainstream editorial vision every single syllable of which is complete bollocks. I have to ask myself whether he actually believes this horse-manure or is he just saying these things because he thinks that this is what the public wants to hear? What world does he see through his eyes? Does he actually see hordes of shiny, happy, clappy ‘I can’ people exalting at his feet and begging him to lead them to the Promised Environment? Is he so twisted by lies that he can open wine bottles with his fingers or he is so spaced-out on his own propoganda that he has drifted hopelessly away from anything that could reasonably be described as the real world?
Perhaps one of you ‘I can’ types out there can tell me.
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.
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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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