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 seems that the Tory Party wants less market forces and more local political planning of the economy in order to stop local shops from closing.
But if enough local people wanted local shops to survive at the expense of supermarkets and out-of-town shopping centres, they would indeed already be voting for them… with their wallets and credit cards. Yet that notion seems not to compute with ‘Conservative’ Nick Hurd, the MP for Ruislip-Northwood. Presumably what he wants to ‘conserve’ is the power of local political activists by giving them even more power to decide who can and cannot make money in local communities. More ‘direct democracy’, eh Nick?
I must say the Spanish solution to people who cannot restrain themselves from meddling in the lives of others who want to just go about their business starts to look more appealing by the day.
My friend Amy Alkon (ask Perry about her delightful “Godless Harlot” business cards) is a nationally syndicated advice columnist in the US. She gets requests for assistance “a little too frequently,” as she puts it, from a certain girl in the UK. After being copied in on a round-robin email appeal from this British girl to several advice columnists, Amy pointed out to the help-seeker that she is more likely to spend her time responding to those who are not mass mailing loads of other people with the same question. How did the girl respond?
Excuse me, but you are supposed to give me advice, not insult me. Now give me advice, before i report you to the council.
Somehow I do not think that Amy need worry about having to fight an extradition order.
… on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty’s Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph’s legal editor explains:
[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” – anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.
Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.
I seem to recall someone, maybe even Iain Dale himself, saying to me some weeks back that what 18 Doughty Street TV needs is for someone important to say something newsworthily scandalous on it. The world, and in particular the Mainstream Media, would then start to pay attention to it.
So, could this be the breakthrough?
Iain Dale is surely hoping so:
In an interview on 18 Doughty Street’s One to One programme last night, Lance Price, former Downing Street spin doctor, has sensationally claimed that Tony Blair himself was the source of quotes describing Gordon Brown as having “psychological flaws”.
Price continues to say he was told by a figure very close to the Chancellor that Alastair Campbell “took the rap” to allow the Prime Minister to escape blame.
Judging by the email that I (and presumably the rest of the world) just got, in the small hours of this Wednesday morning, I get the feeling that Iain Dale reckons that this just might be the media ruckus he has been waiting for.
Now do not misunderstand me. I care very little for the fortunes of the Blair government, nor for the fortunes of whichever political gang – Brownies? Cameronics? – gets to replace these people for the next few years. 18 Doughty Street TV would like it be Mr Cameron and his friends, but I really do not care. I consider them all to be as psychologically flawed as each other. Whoever wins the next spasm of electioneering, we already pretty much know what will win, and it is unlikely to be nice.
What I am interested in, and do feel entitled to be optimistic about, is seeing the British broadcasting media go the way of the British print media and of the internet itself. I want British broadcasting – in particular British broadcasting about politics, and about what politics is and what politics should be – to lose its air of cosily unanimous religiosity, in which the only competition is in who can present the same centre-to-left news agenda and the same stale centre-to-left editorialising about it with the greatest earnestness and piety, and to become instead a bedlam of biases, biased in all imaginable directions, with no meta-contextual assumption left unchallenged. 18 Doughty Street TV has been a small step in that direction, not so much because of what has actually been said on it, but because of the example it has set to others concerning the viability of non-majoritarian broadcasting, and about the possibility that truly different things could start getting broadcast.
Although I do not know or care who Lance Price is, lots of others do, and I am accordingly still intrigued by the possibilities opened up by what he has said. Because of it, a whole lot more people are liable to hear, not just about 18 Doughty Street, but about “internet broadcasting” in general.
British print media people have always been quite diverse in their tone, so although the internet has been a technical and professional challenge to these people, it has not been that much of an ideological jolt for them. British broadcasters, on the other hand, have tended to understand the new ‘social’ media rather better, in the purely technical sense. The BBC web operation has had a huge impact. But ideologically, British mainstream broadcasting people are far more uniform in their ideological outlook, and potentially therefore face far more of an ideological upheaval at the hands of the new media.
So, I hope that neither Iain Dale nor I are making a fuss about nothing. I hope that this proves to be a fuss about something.
In conection with the above, this BBC report (credit where it is due) about Skype offering internet TV services, also makes interesting reading.
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).
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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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