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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Subjugation of a cultural minority by a much bigger population is politically pretty stable. It can last hundreds of years. Subjugation and exploitation of the many by the few for any length of time needs structural legitimation or overwhelming power.
FW de Klerk inherited the Afrikaner hegemony but he recognised it had run out of road. Will Gordon Brown think again when Scotch Tony hands over the mob? Or is he another Botha?
I like Scotland and many Scottish things. One of the highlights of January is that it is easier to get haggis in London shops. I would shed a tear waving off that good liberal Sir Malcolm Rifkind at King’s Cross, if we had to exile all Scottish politicians for English national security. The Scots Nationalists are an ornament of the UK parliament: they have distinctive views clearly and openly expressed, rather than mouthing mush for the benefit of focus groups. But I am damned if the bullying puritan clique in Downing Street shall continue to buy votes north of the border with money plundered from the English.
An additional English Parliament (the BBC to the contrary) is not what we need. Overweening government is not ameliorated by more government. There is already too much government – both in Scotland and in England.
I have my principles, but I am a pragmatic voter. Never mind UKIP, if Alex Salmond wants to stand a candidate in Holborn & St Pancras, this libertarian Tory would be sore tempted. I do not know her politics, but I am sure our local Glaswegian Sharlene Spiteri would romp home on an SNP ticket.
You see Mr Brown, we English actually love Scots. Some of them we worship. It is you we do not like.
The sheer front of the man. Dave Cameron has been openly lying for political advantage again and again and in response to suddenly realising that the recent defections to UKIP are indicative of a very serious problem, what does he do? He is doing it again, with the Daily Telegraph not so much as blinking at the latest volte-face from repudiating Thatcherism to (ostensibly) wrapping himself in it. So I suppose from now on everything he has said since he was elected leader of the Tory Party (more regulation, less school selection, more Euro-Federalism) gets ‘packaged’ in a covering that suggests the exact opposite. “I am Thatcher’s heir!” he proclaims. Well as we are playing make-believe…”I am Howard Hughes heir”. It would appear that stating something boldly simply makes it so, regardless of all the contradictory evidence.
I have also been pondering the article of Matthew d’Ancona, or more correctly the attitude underpinning it, called ‘Tories who would rather lose than change’, which I linked to in my previous bit of bloggage as two bits of it stuck in my mind.
But to say that Mr Cameron is an old-fashioned statist is simply incorrect. His ethos has much more in common with the “compassionate conservatism” espoused by George W Bush when he was Governor of Texas than with the Butskellism of the old Tory wets.
…and…
I would simply ask this brilliant economist: who is more likely to lead a Eurosceptic government, to reduce the tax burden when the public finances allow, and to tame the centralised state? David Cameron or Gordon Brown?
Nice leading question. So when trying to get elected leader, Dave Cameron promises to pull the Tory Party out of the €uro-federalist EPP (part of whose platform is ‘ever greater union’), then decided not to after all… and then upon being elected goes back on his pledge to allow individual Tory MPs to campaign to leave the EU, and that somehow that makes him a… Eurosceptic. How does that work exactly? And his promises to impose more ‘green’ regulations and absolute refusal to say which government programmes or departments would be scrapped under his administration, that makes him in favour of reduced taxes? Really?
But when I saw d’Ancona holding up G.W. Bush (timber industry protectionism, ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ federal statism, Patriot Act, etc. etc.) as an example of someone who is not an old-time statist of really significant magnitude, well, that actually left me lost for words for initially (not a common occurrence for a opinionated git such as myself). So Dave Cameron is not an ol’ time statist… he wants the state to meddle in family life, but he is not a statist. He refuses to cut taxes but he is not a statist. His close adviser wants to redistribute wealth but Dave is not a statist. Oh, what’s that? He is actually Thatcher’s heir? Oh, that’s all right then! Phew, you had me worried for a moment there.
In short, Matthew d’Ancona’s article is actually either incoherent or (more likely) not actually based on any genuine exposition of what Tory ideology consists of at all but just a tactical piece designed to protect ‘his party’. I strongly suspect d’Ancona thinks getting onto power is an end in and of itself, rather than achieving some specific objective with political power. That really is the only way I can explain his strange lack of understanding why life long Tories have turned against his party. He seems to have the meta-context of ‘politics as its own justification’ if you like. No doubt if confronted with that notion, he would reply “you actually have to get elected before you can implement your policies”, as if you do not actually need to get the intellectual ground work into place for what you intend to do, you just get elected and viola…you implement whatever policies take your fancy… which would work if we were electing dictators, which we are not.
A very good indication that the Tories have belatedly woken up to the fact they are indeed circling the drain is that today’s Daily Torygraph is absolutely chock-a-block with anti-UKIP articles. It is almost as if they are trying to force UKIP out of existence by sheer force of column inches. The reason I have only externally linked to articles in the Daily Telegraph is that all the information you need to see the absurdity and contradictions in the articles today in the Telegraph praising Cameron and saying he is the heir of Thatcher can be demolished by reading other older articles… in the Daily Telegraph.
Are you a member of the Tory Party? Remember when Dave Cameron said he would pull the Tory Party out of the €uro-Federalist EPP once he was elected leader? Remember when he promised Tory MPs would be free to campaign for withdrawal from the EU provided they were not on the front bench?
Have you had enough of the endless porkie pies from Dave Cameron yet? Do you care if you are lied to just to get your vote? If you do care and you still like the idea of being a member of a political party, then I suggest go and join the only thing even approximating a conservative party in Britain… and to do that, you have to leave the Tory party because if you are not a part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
The only thing worse than another term of Labour implementing its destructive policies would be a term of the same destructive policies being implemented by Dave Cameron’s Tory Party and institutionalising radical regulatory centrist authoritarianism as the only permitted political option in Britain regardless of the party in 10 Downing Street.
Although the editorial writers are pulling out all the stops to minimise the threat of the UKIP, clearly the blood is in the water and ideology-free die-hard ‘sensibles’ like Matthew d’Ancona and other have abandoned their policy of trying to laugh off UKIP. There could be no clearer sign that the Cameron Tories are circling the drain.
Update: I left the following comment earlier today on the Telegraph’s website for the Matthew d’Ancona article linked above. As they seem to have decided not to approve the comment for publication…
So let me see… Dave Cameron (who you may have noticed leads a party that claims to be conservative) promises more ‘green’ regulations, goes back on his pledge to leave the Euro-Federalist EPP, goes back on his pledge to allow non-front bench Tory MP’s to campaign for EU withdrawal if they support that, has called for ‘redistribution of wealth’ a la Polly Toynbee, but no, he has not signed up for the European Social Model and is a pukka conservative. Is that really your position?
Sorry Matthew, but how credulous do you think people are? Not only is Dave Cameron a liar (please show me where the things I have mentioned are incorrect), he is clearly not in fact a conservative by any meaningful definition of the word.
I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
This afternoon I went to meet a business contact and walked past Chesterfield Street, in the area of London to the north of Piccadilly. The houses in the quiet street date back to the 18th Century and many of them, with their elegant Georgian front doors and understated proportions, have circular blue signs on the front, describing certain famous people who used to live there. One house states that Beau Brummell, “leader of fashion”, lived in one of the houses. Many foreign visitors who walk past the building and who wonder who this character was may have little idea of the man who rose rapidly to become at one stage the “most famous man in England”, setting new standards of dress and elegance for men. He lived the sort of life that puts modern gaudy celebrities in the shade. His life was a wild mixture of dazzling social success, fame and renown. But his later life was tragic, although the pain was partly self-inflicted: he eloped to France to escape from mounting debts and eventually died from disease.
A biography by Ian Kelly, now available in paperback, is an excellent story of how Brummell, descended from an upwardly-mobile civil servant and businessman, managed in a relatively short space of time to set the tone for Regency England. What I found so striking about the book was that although it showed that early 19th Century England was a very class-ridden place full of snobberies and harsh social conventions, it was also fluid and open to upward mobility to a degree that almost makes one wonder whether the age of George IV is in some ways more open than our own. Brummell’s grandfather was a servant; his father worked in the civil service and yet, by a mix of business acumen and a bit of sharp dealing in government contracts, amassed enough wealth to put his children through Eton and set his offspring up in the height of luxury. In some ways Brummell was the first person to be famous for being famous, for creating his own identity so well that he inspired people like Disraeli or, for that matter, Oscar Wilde (there is some debate on whether Brummell was bi-sexual). The Cary Grants, Errol Flynns or David Nivens are part of this suave tradition and so for that matter are such fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond in his dark blue suits and evening dinner jackets.
Kelly is wonderful in how he describes how Brummell set about the task of creating a new style of dress that continues to affect tailoring to this day. Inspired in part by the sort of uniforms worn by Napoleon’s and Wellington’s armies, particularly the dashing cavalry regiments, and by the new-found enthusiasm for all things Greek and Roman, Brummell set about driving forward the elegant styles associated with the Regency period. The classic English male attire which he created has its echoes down the ages. Even those City financiers who now ply their trade in the Square Mile of London or the capital’s Canary Wharf financial district continue to wear suits and neckties that owe something to Brummell’s influence.
Of course, many people, including finance professionals, lawyers and the like, have adopted a more casual dress sense since the days when no man in London would be allowed to live if he was seen wearing brown shoes in the city during the week or to be seen without a hat and cane. Dress-down Fridays are now the norm, although I have noticed how people often look exactly the same on a Friday, as if Thomas Pink shirts, Dockers’ trousers and loafers are as much a uniform as the old products of Saville Row.
Anyway, in these times when scruffiness is in vogue, perhaps we need a new Brummell to ensure that the movers and shakers of global capitalism dress to do justice to the noble calling of making enormous amounts of money. London is a great town, whatever its faults, so perhaps we should do it the honour of dressing accordingly.
On the subject of the Regency period and the characters of that time, Paul Johnson’s book is definitely worth checking out.
Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they’ve no idea what money’s for –
Ten to one they’ll start another war
I’ve heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor’!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
– A.P. Herbert (no relation)
Thanks to Brian Walden for reminding me of this, in a brilliant but very depressing radio essay: Lessons from Herbert.
The man tipped as the Labour Party’s next-leader-but-one has made what could be a career-threatening mistake. He has sided with rational evidence against a popular delusion. David Miliband has said in an interview with The Sunday Times that ‘organic’ food is “a lifestyle choice”, and that there is no evidence it is any better for you than the other stuff.
As agriculture minister he may have been trying to be generous to the farmers he works with who are not on that particular bandwagon: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” But it can not be too long before he has to apologise to the green lobby.
There’s a large chunk of the British middle-class that ‘just knows’ organic is good for you, nutritionally and morally, even if they rarely buy it. And as for the Hampstead elite among whom he grew up… Is he suggesting Poppy is stupid paying £6 a jar for strained bio-dynamic baby vegetables to feed little Rufus?
There is an interesting story about Simone Clarke, a ballerina with the English National Ballet who has incurred the ire of many by being an outspoken member of the neo-fascist British National Party (and who happens to also have a Chinese boyfriend). Calls have been coming in thick and fast for her to be sacked by all the usual suspects.
Lee Jasper, equalities director for the mayor of London and chairman of the National Assembly Against Racism, said: “The ENB must seriously consider whether having such a vociferous member of an avowedly racist party in such a prominent role is compatible with the ethics of its organisation. I seriously doubt that it is and that should lead to her position being immediately reviewed. I think she should be sacked.” He called on funders and David Lammy, the arts minster, to intervene.
As the ENB gets tax money, it is inevitable that this becomes a political issue, which is yet another reason no artistic organisation should ever be given public money for any reason whatsoever. However I really have no fundamental problem with the owners of a company or institution sacking people or refusing to hire them in the first place for no other reason than they do not like them (which is not to say I necessarily think firing someone because you dislike them is always a good idea). Just as Lee Jasper wants Simone Clarke to be fired, I would probably be disinclined to hire Lee Jasper to work for me because I just do not like people who support using the law to abridge the right of people to freely associate and dis-associate. Oh I share his aversion to racists (though Simone Clarke can hardly be a conventional white supremacist given that she has a Chinese-Cuban boyfriend), I just despise people who want to use the the state to back their social prejudices with the violence of law.
I am perfectly happy to state my prejudices and to act on them to whatever extent suits me on my own property and perhaps to try and get them acted upon within any company I have any degree of control over, but I do not expect my views to be imposed as the law of the land. So although the issue of the detestable tax funding makes this a more murky issue, if I was one of the Nobs at the ENB, I would hire and fire on whatever criteria I thought was appropriate to the job. If the bosses think being a member of the BNP is bad for their ‘business’, they should feel free to sack Simone Clarke. If they feel her nasty fascist politics make not a jot of difference to her ability to do the job and other considerations do not matter, they should tell the people calling for her to be fired to get stuffed… but it should be their call (and of course that will only be really true if they stop taking tax money to support themselves).
A mailing from the Royal United Services Institute invites me to a conference in April:
The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the country. It comprises the assets, services and systems that support the economic, political and social life of the UK. Any disruption, damage or destruction to all or part of the CNI could result in grave consequences for the functioning of government, the economy and society. Clearly the CNI is vital to the country’s well-being but the planning and implementation of its security is a Byzantine process; the CNI is a complex and uneven environment with ownership and responsibility spread across the public and private sector.
The threats it confronts are myriad including terrorist attack, industrial accidents and natural disasters. As demonstrated during the July 7 bombings, the Buncefield Disaster, and the foot and mouth outbreak, the CNI is a labyrinthine web of interdependent vulnerabilities that requires a coordinated and coherent response across its entirety to ensure its effective security and resilience in the face of such threats.
Dangerous rubbish. This is an epitome of the statist miscomprehension of complex systems, of economies and ecologies. ‘It is messy; we must coordinate it,’ they say. There are vital things that can be identified in advance as such, and other things not necessary to the ‘backbone of the country’, they think.
But the connections in a natural web are flexible, or they don’t get established in the first place. “Interdependent vulnerabilities” are what make systems adapt, the source of resilience. In unmanaged, open, systems everything is important and everything is unimportant: all things contribute their part to everything else (and you can’t directly measure their contribution), but competition ensures they are all redundant and replaceable.
The response to 7 July was a demonstration of improvisation by thousands of separate actors – millions if you count all those who took simple decisions to get out and walk, rather than passively waiting to be evacuated by the authorities, which would have been the orderly, planned, way to do it. London was functioning again in a day, despite, not because of, the “strategic interventions” that restricted the recovery of traffic flow, and filled the streets with police.
Livestock farming in Britain almost didn’t survive the Deprtment for Rural Affairs’ “coordinated” response to the last “foot and mouth” outbreak. Fortunately at the time DEFRA lacked the powers to coordinate more farmers out of business. The department didn’t see it like that: Its plans were frustrated, and that’s why things were as bad as they were. The ‘defect’ has been eliminated by the Animal Health Act 2002 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Nobody in government had to tell Tesco’s dealers to buy up more petroleum in Rotterdam when the Buncefield depot caught fire. The state way is a ‘strategic reserve’ of petrol under armed guard somewhere, distributed eventually by rationing according to who is important enough to get it, after declaration of a suitable emergency. As it was, loss of 20% of the country’s stocks overnight caused scarcely a single car journey to be cancelled – apart from those of the people no longer commuting to the flattened industrial estate.
Those ex-commuters would not be comforted by the thought that distributing tiles or soft drinks is not “critical” and not to be guarded by the state. What they do matters to them and their customers. When I want petrol, petrol matters; when I want tiles, they matter. We are all equally made poorer by the unavailablilty of either, because we can’t predict what we will want. Nor can the state.
How dare the planners decide for me what it is I want, as they do implicitly when they define some workers, some structures, as “key”? Well there’s a confirmation bias at work. What the state can best monitor is important (invisible, uncontrollable processes couldn’t be); so those who work for it are. Chaos is bad. State plans are designed to control chaos; therefore they do, and any unfortunate or unforseen consequences are just the remnants of chaos uncontrolled. Bad things are not in the plan, so not of the plan. They are part of the failure to squeeze out doubt, never caused or exacerbated by wrong or unnecessary decisions by the authorities.
The misunderstanding at the heart of planning is a fundamentalist belief that order and simplicity are public goods. They aren’t. It may be good to have them in your own life – if you want them. It is probably necessary to have them in managing a task, running a business, playing a game; to make any well-defined single goal attainable. Clarity in shared procedural rules is highly desirable. But if we want to live in a world where the goals and threat aren’t well defined, where we have a choice, and where how we live is not vulnerable to simple shocks from unexpected angles, then universal order and simplicity are bad. Conflict and competition, difference and redundancy are good. The more disorder, uneveness, and complexity our society has, the richer our lives, and the better equipped we are collectively to meet disaster by routing around damage.
The Labour Party has a big vested interest in maintaining the United Kingdom as Scotland is more or less a bastion of collectivist voters these days. As a result, they get rather twitchy when the topic of Scottish independence from Britain comes up (though I have always seen it more as English independence from Scotland).
Of course this is also yet another area of common interest with the Tories, who have always been wedded to the idea of the Union in spite of the fact they seem to be widely detested north of the border, regardless of their steady progression under Cameron into becoming just another European style regulatory statist ‘Christian Democrat’ party.
Yet it seems that the aspirations of Scottish nationalists are indeed coming closer to being fruition as they are getting de facto allies due to the rise of long dormant English nationalism. Breaking up the UK into its constituent parts sounds to me like a win-win for all concerned: British people who have a deep desire for totally pervasive regulatory statism will have an English-speaking place to move to where they can vote SNP and get the government they deserve, I mean, want… Scotland’s best and brightest entrepreneurial folks will decamp to England and probably start pushing for more a less regulatory environment… everyone is happy.
The end of the UK is not as unthinkable as it was just a few years ago. In fact I am not sure it will even that big a deal if and when it ever happens.
Given that the papers are full of the most appalling socialist commentators sharpening their knives to butcher Britain’s remaining economic freedoms, when ‘right-wing’ (in their terms, God help us) Tony Blair leaves office, it is nice to be able to point out a ray of sunshine.
I like Nick Cohen. He is often wrong, but he does have the sense to follow his own mind rather than retailing the received wisdom . And he is intellectually honest and self-aware, which is more than can be said for most commentators on the left. This is an impressive example:
Too many on the liberal-left, including me, don’t feel in our bones that it is as wrong for the state to take billions of pounds from taxpayers and waste them on, say, the fatally overambitious National Health Service IT project as it is for the owners of Farepak to take the Christmas savings of thousands of poor families and throw them away.
Leave aside for the moment that no one was compelled to take the appalling bargain offered by Farepak in the first place, and that no one, including the same poor families, has an option about the taxes going to the mad NPfIT or the destruction of their privacy that it entails. Leave aside that, even if one counts as robbery in the same way as the other, the NPfIT is more than 120 times as bad. (Though one couldn’t pass that topic without noting Gordon Brown took out of the nation’s pension funds in one early budget, what it would have taken 300 Robert Maxwells to steal.)
Cohen has recognised (1) that there is something not quite right about the disproportionate outrage lavished by the left on the Farepak disaster, when government spending takes money from people who need it and gives them nothing; and (2) that some other people do not share the reflex. He offers the insight as a matter of electoral strategy for Labour, so insight (1) may be a bit weak. But it looks to me like progress. Cohen can not quite see what is wrong with his viewpoint clearly enough to shift his ingrained value-judgements, but he can see that it might be wrong.
There has a been a Treasury report indicating taxes will increase for the next 50 years. If that does indeed come to pass it would be, to state the bleedin’ obvious, a Bad Thing. However that is really not what I want to comment on, but rather…
Last night the Conservatives said the 3.2 per cent increase was equivalent to just over £40 billion in today’s prices or 11.5p on the basic rate of income tax. […] The Conservatives said the Treasury figures exposed the true cost of Mr Brown’s policies, in particular the failure to ensure that taxpayers were getting value for money for the extra spent on schools and hospitals.
Now talk about having your cake and eating it too, or more correctly having our cake and eating it too. Such remarks by any Tory commentator are obviously predicated upon an assumption of wishful thinking and a mayfly-like memory amongst their intended audience. Does anyone remember ‘Dave’ Cameron’s plans to confiscate and redistribute wealth? Or add more expensive ‘green’ regulations to govern people’s lives in order to pander to the voodoo science of the enviro-mentalist lobby? The notion that the Tories are a lower tax/less regulatory alternative to Labour is preposterous if the words of the party’s leader mean anything whatsoever.
So how can a ‘Conservative’ spokesman keep a straight face and claim that rising taxation is a facet of Labour governments when ‘Dave’ have been going to such lengths to make it clear his Tory party represents continuity with Labour’s ideology of authoritarian centrist regulation? If all the UK does is continue to alternate between largely identical Tory and Labour governments, Britain really can look forward to fifty years of increased taxation and the economic and social decay that will bring.
Fortunately I do not see either party lasting anywhere near that long as dominant political forces.
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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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