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According to the Sunday Telegraph, a new way of calculating how council tax (local government taxes) are set will take account of aspects of a locality such as crime in setting the tax band. The nicer and less crime-ridden the area, the higher the tax you pay. Areas such as Chelsea and Westminster (I live in the latter area) will see their tax bills soar, while presumably if you live in a place such as Hackney, one of the most deprived and crime-ridden areas, your bill goes down. Marvellous. This is hardly an incentive for people to help curb crime and contribute to making their neighbourhoods more pleasant places in which to live.
One of the tropes of the MSM in recent years has been how the present New Labour government has turned away, in part, from the politics of punitive taxation as practised by Labour governments in the past. This is more about image than reality, however. Inheritance tax is biting into a broad swathe of the affluent middle class, the sort of folk that switched to Labour in 1997 or simply refused to vote for the Tories. Now Labour, in order to finance the swelling ranks of public workers, is proposing to hammer those same classes again. Even the Tories, who have been supine on the tax issue under the leadership of David Cameron, have started to kick up a stink on this issue.
The increasingly intrusive powers of officials in judging the values of our homes, coupled with this latest threatened increase, promises to be a gift to the Tories, if only they have the cojones to play the issue properly. The threatened increases are likely to hit precisely those marginal constituencies that the Tories must take from Labour to stand a chance of winning the next election. This does not look very intelligent from Labour’s point of view.
Yesterday I went down to the library in my hometown of Kettering, Northamptonshire.
There was a big display with a lot of ‘politically correct’ language – all about ‘sustainable development’ and other such. But when I worked out what it was all about it turned out to be the council’s plan for the Kettering area.
Exactly how many new houses, business enterprises and jobs there were to be was laid out (a bit like Gosplan from the old Soviet Union). The fact that it is impossible for some ‘plan’ to calculate the ‘correct’ level of all these things (something that Ludwig Von Mises pointed out in 1920) was ignored.
Nor was the possibility that government (in this case local government) should not provide all the roads, drainage, and other such that such developments demand. Of course the only way to judge if someone really thinks that a development is viable is to see whether they are willing to pay for everything (roads, drainage… and the maintenance of such things) themselves – if they are not it is a con.
In short the old unholy alliance between private developers and government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies…even the Soviets did not have that. All in contradiction to the promises that the town and county councillors got elected on (i.e. that they would oppose such ‘development’.
The level of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ that the council has is shown by the picture of the building they choose to illustrate their plans for the centre of Kettering (presently, years after the present administration came to power, the ‘one way’ and road blockage system is still driving customers to other towns and divides the town into two parts, north and south, that are virtually cut off from each other) – the picture was of a building, and not even a very good building, that is miles outside of the centre of Kettering in south Kettering (a few hundred yards from my home).
Almost needless to say the whole display included a lot of words about the ‘environment’ (the environment that the developments would be built on I suppose).
It is a rerun of the trash collection scam. Lots of different coloured waste bins and a collection (of one or more of the coloured bins) only once every two weeks, rather than every week for one bin – all in the name of the “environment” (although all the carefully separated, on the pain of punishment, trash is then mixed together again because the council has no way of disposing of it separately). The whole scam costs a fortune and is a health hazard due to trash rotting for two weeks in bins – or being spread about when they get knocked over.
If attacked on any of the above local councillors will just blame national or European Union regulations and they may well be right, but I suspect that it is not a matter of where the government plan comes from, it is a matter of it being a government plan that is the problem.
Meanwhile the councilors concern themselves with another project. After wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money on (daft) changes to the Town Hall, they now plan to waste millions on building a new Town Hall, or whatever politically correct name they come up with for it, someone miles out of town…I suppose they want to hide somewhere isolated so that angry people can not find them or the local government officers.
I have not mentioned what political party controls Kettering town council and Northamptonshire county council – but it does not really matter. The ‘Chief Executive’ (what we used to call the Town Clerk) and his deputy chief executives and other senior local government officers control everything – and they do so on the basis of various local and national regulations and policies.
Local councilors cannot even oppose these people as any written or verbal counter attack could be seen as ‘bringing the council into disrepute’ by the Local Government Standards Board – this body has hit councilors in other places for daring to speak against the administrators.
This is what it is like living in a ‘planned society’ like Britain, people who have something to lose do not tend to speak out.
Overconfident?
Governments are happily increasing their power everywhere by stoking fear of terrorists. Why risk undermining that by spilling over into loony implausibility?
Terrorism is the “biggest threat to all European nations,” Home Secretary John Reid has said as he discusses ways to boost security with five EU ministers.
– BBC
Utter tripe. Terrorism does kill, indubitably. That embarrasses governments that pretend to be perfect protectors.
Ignoring government self-image, it might be a serious enough threat to some people in some European states, to be worth some European governments spending a lot of treasure tackling it; and it might even be serious enough to merit changing the law to cope with it. I doubt both those prescriptions, and the latter more than the former, as regular readers will know. But they could conceivably be true.
However, let us review the facts against Mr Reid’s stronger assertion:
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any European nation. No European nation state, and no identifiable national group in Europe is in danger of loss to terrorism endangering its identity or existence.
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any Europen state. There are a handful of states in the world whose existence is from time to time endangered by terrorism. None of them is currently in Europe. The only very obvious example is Iraq. Colombia, Nepal, and others have come close recently, but no EU country has been in that position since the Greek civil war.
- To individual people and certain groups more than others, terrorism may present a threat, it is true. But that is not true of all European nations. The majority of EU countries have had no terrorist incidents whatsoever in at least a decade.
- Even in the few countries with significant terrorism in recent years (which really means France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK, if you extend ‘recent years’ to cover the last 20 or 30, which is a pretty generous estimate of the contemporary for a political phenomenon), actual casualties have been small. Hospital infection, food poisoning, non-political crime, bad driving… each presents a bigger risk to any of us. Terrorism is plainly not the biggest threat faced by people anywhere in Europe.
Witless hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of dictatorships propagandising their presumed-credulous servitors, in order to buff up their self-image. (Read any government-endorsed press story from an African or Mddle Eastern bullydom.) Dictatorships cannot bear to be embarrassed, and are embarrassed by terrorists, because they can never concede anything is outside their control. But in liberal states that sort of pretension to deity is supposed to be mocked from office. Which is Britain? Or is the question, which is Europe?
I normally have to get into my office in London’s docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:
Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.
Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief “debate” in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.
Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC’s attention.
Item: recycling of baby’s diapers.
Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.
Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.
Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the “news” items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call “consumer journalism” stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia’s obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond’s persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State’s business.
Bring on Guy Fawke’s Night, is all I can say.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– C.S. Lewis
A lot of people have been talking to me about the pubs of Yeovil this week. Not because of my unwise enthusiasm when young for rough cider. But because of this, first covered at the beginning of the year:
Revellers in the Somerset town of Yeovil, often seen as Britain’s answer to the Wild West on a Friday and Saturday night, were this weekend getting to grips with a unique scheme which is more science fiction than Wild West. Customers entering the town’s six main late-night drinking and dancing joints were being asked to register their personal details, have their photograph taken and submit to a biometric finger scan.
That’s from a report in The Guardian in May, which went on to explain:
The clubs and Avon and Somerset police, who are supporting the scheme, argue that it is not compulsory. Nobody can be forced to give a finger scan, which works by analysing a fingertip’s ridges and furrows. However, the clubs admit they will not allow people in if they refuse to take part in the scheme.
But things have moved on. “Don’t like it? You can drink elsewhere. Let the market sort it out… let these awful surveillance clubs go out of business and free-wheeling ones thrive,” was my immediate reaction. It appears that was naive. While it may be “voluntary” for drinkers, it appears that it is not voluntary for pubs and clubs. Not any longer. The Register explains,
“The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield,” said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.
Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode. […]
The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.
Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.
Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.
The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What’s deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of “liberalisation”. The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing – yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales – from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit.
Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials – who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them.
Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I’ve noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge.
They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying. “A Republic?” said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, “What is that?”
GIve me the foul air of corruption, if that is the only way I may be permitted to breath at all.
The occasions where I am prepared to wade in on the side of a bunch of a civil servants are as rare as hen’s teeth but this one is truly no contest:
THE Ministry of Defence has banned Britain’s biggest commercial news broadcaster from frontline access to the nation’s forces, The Times has learnt.
In an unprecedented move that risks accusations of censorship, the Government has withdrawn co-operation from ITV News in warzones after accusing it of inaccurate and intrusive reports about the fate of wounded soldiers…
“As bad a hatchet-job as I’ve seen in years. Cheap shots all over the place, no context, no reasonable explanation…”
In other words, the standard operating procedure of the MSM. The stink is now so bad that it is finally getting in to some very lofty nostrils.
… is they are all racists, apparently. The paradox inherent in such a declaration might not be lost on Trevor Phillips, were he not now one of the official arbiters of what is and is not forbidden thought and speech in Britain.
How extraordinarily coincidental that this line should emerge from a New Labour appointee just before the Home Secretary is due to announce that settlement of Bulgarians and Romanians here will still be controlled after they become EU citizens.
I believe it was the late Ray Charles who bewailed his melancholy lot in the song lyric, “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”. Looking back over the last hundred years or so, one could readily draw the same dismal conclusion about ideas.
At one level, this is to be welcomed. The 20th Century was not short of idea, most of them ranging from bad to downright horrific and which have now been defeated, discredited, marginalised or have just plain run out of steam. Gulags ‘R’ not us, thank you very much. Fine, except that it leaves us standing on the other side of the equation with no ideas at all, merely an awful lot of inertia and a dour determination to just carry on from one day to the next. Yes, it’s all very ‘end of history’.
In fairness that sort of works but only until the point where that persistent bloody nuisance history starts all over again. In other words, until about now:
John Reid has issued a dire warning that the Government risks losing the “battle of ideas” with al-Qa’eda.
The Home Secretary spoke out at an emergency meeting of ministers and security officials amid an ever-growing threat from home-grown Islamist terror groups.
He called for an urgent but controversial escalation in the propaganda war and said al-Qa’eda’s so-called “single extremist narrative” was proving ever more attractive to young British Muslims.
I suppose it is entirely consistent that a former communist like Mr. Reid has the capacity to understand the power of ideas, though perhaps his use of the term ‘Al Qaeda’ is entirely diplomatic when what he really means is Islam itself. For Islam is not only an idea, it is a big idea and very powerful one to boot. It is not going to be defeated by Western soldiers traipsing around in the dust of Basra or Helmand provience, regardless of how well trained, armed and motivated they may be. Nor will be it defeated by outright persecution in the West (should that be the next course of action). The Romans tried that in response to Christianity and look where it got them.
No, something else is needed though, precisely what, I cannot yet say. I can say that the official UK government effort, which, thus far, consists of this rather feeble outreach effort is bound to go nowhere. ‘Moderation’ is not an idea, merely a temperament. Appeals not to rock the boat are futile when set against a determined plan to sink the boat. Besides, the very fact that it is driven and financed by HMG means that it will almost certainly have the very opposite of its intended effect.
If this was a ‘battle of guns’, then we have all the best and biggest guns and there would not be even a trace of reasonable doubt about the eventual outcome. Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, but so bloody what?
Mr. Reid is nearly right. This is a not a ‘battle of idea’ it is a ‘war of ideas’ and we are in the midst of that theatre of war completely unarmed.
Henry Porter, the British journalist, gave a lecture recently, which is reproduced in the Independent newspaper here, which lays out in trenchant terms the sheer magnitude of the Blair government’s assault on civil liberties. None of the broad points will exactly come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog but I link to it because it is a pretty good primer on the issue for those who have not thought much about this issue.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn’t really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else’s rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves “if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear from these new laws”. Not true. There is something to fear – because someone else’s liberty is also your liberty. When it’s removed from them, it’s taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn’t count.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we’re heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
I like the way that Porter directly confronts the nonsense ‘argument’ that “only the guilty have anything to fear” line that one hears being trotted out in favour of things like abolition of Habeas Corpus or eroding the presumption of innocence in the Common Law. This is a fine article that deserves to be widely read. At the end, Porter recommends, among other things, a wholesale effort to teach children about how the laws protecting liberty were acquired, and why they were acquired, in the first place. For it is in its attempts to obliterate history, or make us feel deeply ashamed of it, that the real menace of New Labour’s modernisation obsession first revealed itself. It may strike some critics of libertarianism as paradoxical, given that libertarians are usually seen as fans of modern life, that any defence of freedom must be steeped in an understanding and appreciation of history, including the Classics. Perhaps our modern legislators would be far less of a menace if they had bothered to study the speeches of Pericles or Cicero.
Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:
In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces “conflict and insecurity” unless it acts now. “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.
I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about ‘catastrophic tipping points’. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition… whatever you would like to call it… might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.
What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.
If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food – except sun-baked and geyser-boiled – until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.
Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I’m going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.
For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.
For the Head Boy; “Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990).”
Mary Ann Sieghart has written an interesting article about the rush to subject more or less everyone who comes in contact with children to checks by the state. She rightly points out what a paranoid example this sets by presupposing that people are pederasts. I heartily agree with her article and see this as one of the more extreme examples of the state replacing social interactions with politically mediated ones.
One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly – and wholly innocently – adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them. Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people’s children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.
And then, in the next snippet by her, she writes lamenting the fact more people do not join political parties. Tellingly she mentions the two main (and largely indistinguishable) political parties.
Labour has a leadership contest coming up, in which members have a vote. Wouldn’t it be fun to cast one? And my local constituency is being split into two, so there will be selection processes for both new seats. I would love to have a say in the candidate selection, especially for the Tories. Having lectured them for years about the importance of choosing more women, it would be great to be able to make a difference.
What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it? What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it?
I find that interesting as on one hand she clearly laments the destruction of civil society by the regulatory state and on the other, she urges people to join the institutions who are responsible for doing precisely that. In effect she might just as well be saying: “it is terrible that gangs which threaten people with violence are invading our neighbourhoods and fostering a climate of fear… I wonder why more people are not empowering themselves over other people by joining a gang?”
It does warm the cockles of one’s heart to read a lede like this:
Political parties are so small they are “nearing critical condition” in many constituencies, a survey suggests.
Of course there is an agenda accompanying this report from an organisation calling itself Unlock Democracy. UD is a joint project of Charter 88 and the New Politics Network, and their aims are far from pure:
Revitalise local political parties through targeted state funding – Political parties are fundamental to our political system and should be funded in ways that encourage political participation and activism at a local level.
The group cannot seem to keep broken links (which are supposed to lead to their own project sites) off of their main website, but they do manage to get governmental ‘support’ for their People and Politics Day. (I have contacted the New Politics Network to ask what form that ‘support’ takes, and await a response.) The day boasts speeches from Tory chairman Francis Maude, Theresa May, various Lib Dem and Labour politicians, and even the leader of UKIP. Exhibitors include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, British Union of Anti-Vivisectionists, and the League Against Cruel Sports.
So the good news is that political parties face death. The bad news is, there are people who are trying to keep them alive, and getting governmental support to do so. The surprising news is…nowhere to be found.
UPDATE: New Politics Network’s press officer, James Graham, responded to my query about whether or not taxpayer money is funding this event:
The Electoral Commission, DCA and PEU are indeed financially supporting the event. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me but they have contributed around £17k in total, two-thirds of which comes from the Commission. I hasten to add that we are not making any money out of this project and it is currently just about breaking even.
Well, that makes it okay, I guess! (Not.)
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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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