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.
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The creation of a super-democratic body created by central government called the Standards Board for England, which can exclude members of a local council who were elected on a specific issue platform because ‘their minds are already made up’ has been described in the Telegraph as ‘hampering democracy’. This is rather like saying having your head cut off ‘hampers thinking’… true but more than a tad misleading. British understatement is alive and well it seems.
The Standards Board’s function is to prevent single issue politics by simply disallowing a ‘difficult’ elected councillor from doing what they were elected to do so ‘hampering’ democracy is not an unintended consequence, it is what the Standards Board for England does.
Face it, the whole point of the Standards Board of England is to prevent councillors who are elected on the basis of views unpopular with the establishment from being allowed to disrupt business as usual by asking difficult questions and proving resistant to being pressured by established political groupings.
So let us call the Standard Board for England and their network of ‘ethical standards officers’ what they actually are: Commissars.
At least 14 people were arrested on Friday night in south London as part of an anti-terror operation by police. Developing…
The ‘Conservative’ party in Britain continues to provide evidence for my theory that a vote for Dave Cameron is a vote for 99% continuity with the policies of New Labour. All they do is argue over which party is better at managing the introduction of new regulations and deciding which form confiscatory taxes should take. One party says “What about the environment?” and the other party replies “What about the poor?” Which party takes which position at any given time is an entirely cyclical rather than intellectual matter.
So if you like what Britain is today, why not stick with New Labour? But if you hate the extraordinary erosion of civil liberties, the arrogant yet ignorant statism, the pandering populism… why vote for a different party which is in overwhelming ideological agreement with New Labour and even apes them stylistically?
At least voting LibDem would be a vote for people who have some truly different policies regarding non-economic civil liberties… and a vote for the UKIP really is a vote for throwing a large spanner into the machinery of state (although I am not an uncritical fan of UKIP, they are the only party I would even consider voting for with any pleasure).
If the Tory party wins the next election, I think that is it for the UK for many years to come. If Dave Cameron gets into Downing Street that will have proven that the radical centre which constitutes ‘Blairism’, a populist authoritarianism which is starting to adopt totalitarian positions, is the only viable politics in Britain. That would validate Dave Cameron’s decision to jettison every last vestige of Thatcher’s pro-capitalist legacy and unless the Tory Party as it currently exist is destroyed by yet another election loss, we will see the move towards what might as well be a one party state become an entrenched reality.
Cameron delendus est.
The Labour Party under Tony Blair becomes ever more totalitarian, registering children so that the state can decide how to regulate theit lives and threatening to ‘intervene’ in people’s lives to prevent a child from becoming anti-social before it is born. It will do this by offering state ‘help’ to ‘underprivileged’ *(as preposterous an expression as has even been contrived) families, with the threat of force if the state’s ‘help’ is not accepted.
Logically the next step will be a state enforced eugenics programme to prevent the birth of ‘anti-social children’. You think I am joking? I assure you I am not. Members of the media class have occasionally called for eugenics that without causing one tenth of the outrage amongst the chattering classes that would be caused by, say, questioning the morality of the welfare state. As long as Tony Blair and his ideological clones in the Tory Party refuse to accept that the decay of British society is a direct consequence of replacing natural social mechanisms with state regulations (i.e. the regulated welfare state) radically interventionist measures are inevitable. They are left with increasingly extreme and totalitarian ‘solutions’ to the problems they have created because the true causes, and therefore the actual solutions, are off limits not just from political action but even from discussion.
An analogue would be the officers in command of a ship attempting to come up with a method of effective navigation but refusing to allow even the possibility that the world may be a sphere rather than flat.
And as neither Labour nor the ‘Conservatives’ will countenance even the discussion of anything that might involve a significant rollback of the regulatory welfare state, people who think things like force backed eugenics could not happen in Britain are quite simply deluding themselves. Logically I cannot see how that will not happen in the quite forseeable future given what is being said on high.
I judge that the greenslime must be growing in confidence, since they are no longer going to the bother of trying to disguise their true colours:
Thirty-eight campaigners have been arrested during a “mass day of action” against carbon emissions at Britain’s largest coal-fired power station.
Hundreds of demonstrators were hoping to disrupt operations at Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire.
Offences included criminal damage, aggravated trespass and possession of offensive weapons.
One is obliged these days to read BBC reports in the same manner as Cold War warriors read Pravda. Hence we know that the term “campaigners” means a marxoid rent-a-mob of the Great Unwashed and the term “lively protests” (which appears elsewhere on the page) means rioting.
The “campaigners” have pitched tents (quite literally) in a muddy field next to the power station which, despite the sanctimonious rejection of all things modern, does have a website here. If you can be bothered to wade waist-deep through all the turgid, infantile agitprop, there are one or two chortles to be had, such as from this semi-literate gem:
Commercial policy- basically no activity that is primarily about profit, though there is NGOs there who is happy to get new members/subscriptions.
Anyway, it is all for the good I say. Let’s face it we all know who they are, we all know what they are and we all know what they really, really want. If battle is to be joined then it is best joined sooner rather than later.
Fanatical ideologies contain within them the seeds of their own destruction for the members of the vanguard must continually prove their own purity of thought and fidelity to the cause. In doing so, they end up turning on each other:
London’s mayor has accused the head of the UK’s race watchdog of “pandering to the right” so much that “soon he’ll be joining the BNP”.
Ken Livingstone said Trevor Phillips had “an absolutely disgraceful record” at the Commission for Racial Equality.
He accused Mr Philips of trying to “move the race agenda away from a celebration of multiculturalism”.
The CRE said Mr Phillips’ views on multiculturalism had been “well-documented” and “well-supported”.
Revolutions eat their own children and ruling classes feast on themselves.
Keith Richards to Manager: “Hey, man, I want a bathtub full of tequila, a bevy of teenage groupie nymphos, a month’s supply of uncut Turkish smack and….no, better leave it at that“.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards may have flouted Scotland’s smoking ban when he played to thousands of fans at Glasgow’s Hampden Park.
The city council confirmed it was investigating reports that he smoked on stage throughout the gig on Friday.
Neil Rafferty, from the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest), said: “This is yet another way in which the smoking ban makes Scotland look ridiculous”.
A spokesman for the Scottish Parliament strongly refuted claims that Scotland was looking ridiculous but did announce that, henceforth, Scottish smoked salmon would have to be sold as Scottish ‘treated’ salmon in order to avoid sending out the wrong message.
Mr Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, has been writing articles for the last year or so showing that there is no freedom of speech for local councillors in Britain.
Under the regulations introduced by the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott a local councillor can be tossed out of the council and disqualified from being a councillor for years (in defiance of the voters) for such crimes as being “rude and demeaning to a senior officer”, “bringing the council into disrepute” (by attacking it – not by being involved in corrupt activities), trying to “reopen closed issues” (closed by the powers-that-be of course) and being “generally malicious”.
This is all on top of the Prescott principle that a councillor should not be allowed to speak about an issue he has an ‘interest’ in. This is not a matter of saying “I have a financial interest in such and such a judgement being made by the council…” A person may not be allowed to speak even if he clearly states what his financial interest is – or even if he has no financial interest at all. This is because an interest has been defined as including previous campaigns against a project or policy of the council.
Oddly enough only councilors who are against local government judgements that are in line with national government policy tend to get hit by these regulations. If one has campaigned against a government project one can be barred from speaking against it as a councillor, but if one has supported the project (or even been involved in drawing it up – for example in one of the government’s ‘Regional’ structures) one is rather less likely to be barred from speaking. The cases are decided by the ‘Standards Board for England’ – no judgement by a jury of one’s peers of course. Any councillor who tries to expose how local government officers and national government directives make ‘local democracy’ a farce can simply be removed from the council and barred for standing for election for X number of years.
The Prescott regulations are clearly not something that John Prescott happened to think of – they are an experiment that will later be more widely applied (already our old friends in the European Union are thinking about how to exclude from elections people who do not accept their ‘values and principles’).
When I have touched on all this in the past, some people have said “take the rascals to court!” → Continue reading: No freedom of speech for local councillors in Britain
I knew Sir Alfred Sherman only slightly (we met a few times), and in my youth I was too silly to value him as I should have done. I remember Sir Alfred once warned me (and others) of the plot by the establishment (by the way, as Sir Alfred was fond of pointing out, ‘the establishment’ is not the aristocracy or gentry, although some members of the establishment, such as Sir Max Hastings, may pretend to be gentry) to destroy the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS), I dismissed what he said as paranoia. I had yet to learn that the establishment were prepared to tell any lie and use any tactic, both in their unholy war against liberty generally and in their specific struggle to destroy the independence of the United Kingdom and make this country a province of the European Union.
Sir Alfred was of course correct in thinking that the destruction of FCS was an experiment by the left to see if they could destroy the democratically elected Mrs Thatcher later on (if an elected body could be destroyed, why not an elected Prime Minister). Without the FCS Mrs Thatcher could be presented as ‘extremist’ (as we were much more libertarian than the lady was, Mrs Thatcher could not be successfully presented as ‘extremist’ whilst FCS still existed, that tag would be monopolised by us silly students).
Also the lady would lose her most visible young supporters and could be later presented as isolated within the Conservative party (although a majority of both party members and members of Parliament supported Mrs Thatcher that little problem could be got round by manipulating the party rules). The antics of students (real or invented) would never cost the Conservative party votes, but without the students Mrs Thatcher herself could be presented as the wild and wacky person.
It would still take years to destroy Mrs Thatcher (as part of a general campaign to eliminate resistance to statism in Britain) – but the ground work would have been laid.
So the party Chairman (the normally tough and intelligent Norman Tebbit) was manipulated (via a campaign of great skill and dishonesty) into abolishing the FCS and the ‘libertarian’ Chairman of FCS itself was bought off with various promises (he is now a Conservative party MP and about as libertarian as the rest of Mr Cameron’s other little statist friends). Sir Alfred predicted all of this well in advance and told us – and (moron that I was) I did not believe him.
However, I was sad to learn of the death of Sir Alfred and read his obituary in the Daily Telegraph newspaper (supposedly the main Conservative newspaper in the United Kingdom) with interest.
I will not go into the various distortions and half truths with which the writer of the obituary seeks to smear Sir Alfred (the establishment has no honour and will even spit upon the dead), but I will comment upon one part of the obituary where the writer tries to praise Sir Alfred. → Continue reading: Sir Alfred Sherman – an ignorant obituary from the Daily Telegraph
Artur Boruc, a Polish goalkeeper playing for with Celtic, has received a police caution for “a breach of the peace” after he made the sign of the cross during a game. I can only marvel at how Muslims can march through London carrying signs threatening death against people who do not share their beliefs can get a police escort, whereas a devout Christian making the sign of the cross in public can get a police caution. The Polish player was not making rude gestures at a hostile crowd [see update & link below – perhaps he was] or trying to threaten anyone, he was just making a personal gesture indicating a set of beliefs.
I may be a godless rationalist myself but I sincerely hope Artur Boruc not just ignores the police caution but robustly reject it and continues to demonstrate his beliefs as he sees fit. If some Rangers fans cannot stand that and become violent, then perhaps that is where the police’s attention should be more properly focused. Moreover I hope his club supports him regarding this matter and if it does not then I hope he takes his talents elsewhere.
However I am rather bemused that the dismal Ruth Kelly is ‘surprised’ at this development seeing as how she is a leading member of the political class which put the legal infrastructure in place so that exactly this can happen.
Britain has nothing even vaguely resembling the First Amendment or the US Bill of Rights generally, instead relying on common law that springs from a highly imperfect cultural tradition of liberty. As this culture has been in effect ‘nationalised’ and largely replaced by fifty years of highly malleable legislation, there are now few legal tools left to secure individual rights against the state in the UK. Consequently we are left with just hoping for the state to act in a restrained manner as there so now so many laws that can be used to suppress freedom of expression (including not just social but also political speech) that the state can prohibit almost any action it wishes if it really wants to. Moreover public bodies have now been given so much discretion to exercise power ‘in the public interest’ that almost any petty-fogging official can seriously mess with your life if he or she is so inclined. And we can thank the likes of Ruth Kelly in both of the main political parties for this.
 Update: Although I stand by my general contention regarding the state of the law and freedom of expression in the UK, there may be a bit more to this specific story than the Telegraph article suggested.
Four firefighters are due before a disciplinary hearing over their refusal to hand out leaflets at a gay pride march in Glasgow
When did the ‘enthusiastic participation’ become compulsory?
ONE in five Britons — nearly 10m adults — is considering leaving the country amid growing disillusionment over the failure of political parties to deliver tax cuts, according to a new poll.
Good evening, this is a public service announcement from Samizdata.
If you are one of the 10 million or so adults who are considering emigrating from Britain, then you may like to know that there is a simpler, quicker and more cost-effective way to avoid cripplingly high levels of taxation: STOP VOTING FOR THEM!!
Thank you for listening and enjoy the rest of your evening.
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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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