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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As we enter Day whatever-it-is (sorry, lost count) of the war between Israel and Hizb’Allah, the ongoing suffering of the British chattering classes shows no sign whatsoever of easing up. In fact, and according to reliable eyewitness reports, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have led to the intellectual and moral displacement of tens of thousands of innocent journalists, politicians and media types, all of them old women, and who now have nowhere to go.
But I suppose that that is only to be expected given the Uberissue media status of the current war in the Levant. So dominant is coverage of unfolding events and so extenstive is the (usually wrong) analysis that even news of impending all-out, balls-out civil war in Iraq has been relegated to the ‘and-now-for-the-rest-of-the-news’ section.
However, I have noticed what appears to be a slight change of emphasis. Amid the dwindling number of pro-forma demands for ‘proportionality’ (as if flogging that dead horse for long enough will cause it to reincarnate), the blanket indignation at what Israel is doing is morphing into a sense of grievous effrontery over what Tony Blair is not doing, i.e. he is not caling for am immediate ceasefire. Some talking-head or other on Newsnight this evening even when as far as to suggest that Tony Blair’s lamentable failure in this regard was the cause of the continued strife.
But what if Mr. Blair was to oblige his critics and duly demand a ceasefire? Would the warring parties, upon hearing the plaintiff Voice of Blair wafting in on the Mediterranean breezes, forthwith end their hostilities? Would the Katushya rockets fall silent? Would the Israeli armoured divisions gratefully slam their gears into reverse and head, teary-eyed, back to Israel? Will the lion lie down with the lamb, the Hobbit embrace the Orc and so on and so forth? Well, no, and not even the most woodenheaded of the Ceasefiristas imagine that any of that would happen.
And if Mr. Blair were, indeed, to succumb to these demands (which seem to mostly emanate from his own party backbenches) what then? Nobody seems to know. But then, nothing need follow because calls for ceasefire are not really about saving lives in Lebanon, Israel or anywhere else. Nor are they about solving the problems or establishing peace. They are really about adopting the right posture that, in turn, absolves the posturer from having to make any difficult or embarrassing decisions. In short, it is a respectable cop-out.
The incessant, prating ceasefire demands have little to do with either the Middle East conflict or, indeed, any other conflict and are much more to do with internal politics. The pressure on Mr. Blair is not really to put a stop to the fighting because everyone really knows that he cannot do any such thing. Rather it is pressure on Blair to toe his party line, mollify his backbenchers and let everyone off the moral hook.
So does this mean I get a sick kick out of watchiing the continued bloodshed? The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. I, too, would like to see an end to the war as soon as possible but, as balanced against that, I would like to see an end to Hizb’Allah even sooner. Call me callous if you will but I would rather risk being seen as callous than offer myself up as a fashionably useless poseur.
A woman who had (what I certainly think was) a humorous sign on her gate saying “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” was forced to take it down by British police because it is “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. Yet seeing as Muslim extremists can walk down the street holding signs threatening to decapitate people, all with a police escort, it is clearly time to stop co-operating with the police and being so damn polite to them. Instead urge them not to allow themselves to be used to repress people’s right to express themselves and force them to fill out as much paperwork as possible. Got a lawyer? Call him. Just do not meekly co-operate.
We need to establish that there is no right not to be offended that trumps the reasonable right to self-expression. In fact I would argue that police escorted Muslims have already established that. If Muslims extremists can threaten people with death unless they express themselves in accordance with the restrictions Muslim activists want imposed on them, then we clearly do indeed have the right to make jokes about feeding Jehovah’s Witnesses to our dogs.
So stop making the job of the police easy when they try to impose such restrictions. If they want to stop you expressing themselves, do not threaten them but do not feel any great need to be unduly polite, make them arrest you and take the matter to court, every single time. I often go out wearing a tee-shirt saying “My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt”. Offensive? I do not think so but if anyone disagrees, I will not take it off and will force any policeman who takes issue with it to arrest me if he wants to stop me walking around wearing it.
Pinewood Studios, the place where the latest 007 movie is being made, has been damaged so badly by fire that it may have to be demolished. Very sad. The place has been used to make James Bond and other films for many years. I wonder whether the ghost of Fleming was appalled at the choice of actor and sent down a thunderbolt?
For a whimsical look at Bond’s place in post-British film and publishing and this country’s history, this whimsical book by Simon Winder is great and rather informative about the Cold War era phase of British history, despite the odd error of detail.
Angloslavia was originally a term coined by Ken MacLeod in his science fictions series about The Fall Revolution. If you have not picked these four books up, you should do so, now! The term is utilised here as a playful reference to the current flow of immigration from East Central Europe into the United Kingdom. This flow has serious consequences due to the interplay between immigration and public services. East European workers naturally respond to the market incentives provided by New Labour’s decision to open up Britain’s employment market. This improving migration is combined with an inflexible public sector which is not geared towards dealing with such a large increase in local populations. This inflexibility is due to the incompetence of New Labour’s administration, since they appear to have undermined, indeed destroyed, the Northcote-Trevelyan ethos of the mid-Victorian civil service, that ensured Britain’s civil service was more competent than most for a while.
A massive rise in immigration next year could trigger a devastating crisis in Britain’s schools, housing and welfare services, according to a secret Government report leaked to The Mail on Sunday.
The document reveals that every Government department has been ordered to draw up multi-million-pound emergency plans after being told public services face catastrophe as a result of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans pouring into Britain.
The government faces disaster if the courts, applying European law, conclude that all East European immigrants are eligible for the same benefits as United Kingdom subjects. A large influx will either force up taxes to pay for the extra services and benefits required, rewrite the rules to ensure that public services remain remain viable through radical reform, or do nothing.
One of her [Home Office Minister Joan Ryan] biggest fears is that the courts may force the Government to scrap its restrictions on East European immigrants applying for council houses or benefits. At present, they receive some benefits only if they register for work – which one in three don’t do – and earn full benefit rights after they have worked for a year.
Ms Ryan says: “The legal basis for this is precarious and there is a strong risk of a successful challenge. This is a concern.”
Benefits will provide an additional incentive for immigration from Eastern Europe. The pressures that this will place on the welfare state may provide a force for accelerated reform, since the free market will provide services cheaply and more efficiently, if given free rein.
So far, the addition of cheap flights to Eastern Europe, the added mix of Slavic tongues to polyglot London and the chance to taste more beers from exotic climes, has proved an exciting experience. Let us give the same chance to Sofia and Bucharest.
The welfare state is the engine of so many of the problems that the people who run this country complain about you would think its inherent problems would at least be a topic of discussion by the political class. But no. Yet a culture of entitlement without responsibility is not just a consequence of the welfare state, it is pretty much the objective of the welfare state. As a result it seems odd that the political class who presided over the growth of the all encompassing nanny state should decry the fact that people do not take responsibility for their health or behaviour when the very system they created is designed to prevent people paying directly for the health consequences of their life styles.
Yet because the welfare state is sacrosanct, it is not permitted to even suggest that it is the system itself that has produced the overweight chav generation that seems to irk the Islington set and their Tory imitators so much.
Blair said the government was banning the sale of junk food and fizzy drinks from vending machines in schools. He said if voluntary moves to limit advertising of junk food to children had not worked by 2007, new laws would be introduced. The government was also encouraging supermarket chains to adopt a single-system of labelling to identify healthy options.
“It will be much better if the industry comes together voluntarily around this scheme but once again, we are prepared to act if the voluntary system does not work”
And so if the threat of force does not work, yet more regulations will follow. Sure, that is it, we need more regulations. Yet all this dances around the issue that people buy what they want not because the labelling says this or that, but because they like it and there is no clear economic motivation to worry all too much about long term medical consequences when the NHS takes care of all that stuff. It is almost as if the Tories, LibDems and Labour are shouting at each other across the floor of Parliament, all pretending not to notice the large and very hungry elephant standing in their midst who is crapping all over the statist paradise that we would all live in if only we had a few more regulations.
The jury, at least, did not convict. A pity we shall never know (their deliberations being secret) whether this was that they found the evidence lacking, or the whole prosecution ludicrous. But it is perhaps some comfort, that if you are entrapped by a newspaper into discussing the purchase of an entirely fictional substance, and prosecuted with the Attorney General’s permision on inchoate Terrorism Act charges drafted to be hard to rebut, you can still escape gaol.
Whether this will be of much comfort for the three men just acquitted in the red mercury trial I doubt. They have been in custody as “terrorist suspects” since 2004, and had to find the funds to defend a trial that cost the prosecution £1,000,000 in taxpayers money. I only hope they have a million or so left to sue the News of the World and its “fake sheikh” agent provocateur, Mazer Mahmood.
Even if they were successful in that, of course the police, prosecutors, and their secret witness, B, are likely to go unpunished. It will be said they acted in good faith. It will be ignored that the waste of public resource and the injury to the defendents’ lives, was dealing with a ‘threat’ that could only ever have been fictional. It will be said that this is valuable and valid because it “sends a message” to all the real terrorists (200… 2,000… whatever the estimate is this week) that they were not investigating while they were wasting their time – and three families’ lives.
I have noted before that British justice (in a number of areas, not just terrorism) has started to take on the characteristics of a witch-hunt, with accusation the philosophers’ stone that transmutes ordinary objects and actions into evidence of guilt. But at least the persecutors of the witch-crazes purported to believe in witchcraft.
The Tate Modern gallery, built in an old power station, hosts art which is frequently of no aesthetic value whatever, in my opinion, other than to demonstrate the vacuity of much that passes for Modern or post-Modern, art. Apparently, this giant sculpture is to be built:
London’s Tate Modern, the world’s most popular modern art museum, unveiled plans on Tuesday to build a giant glass pyramid-style extension which its creator described as a “pile” of boxes.
Unlike the uniform glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris, the planned extension to the converted power station on the southern bank of the Thames is asymmetric.
The new building, which aims to ease visitor congestion, should be ready in time for the Olympic Games in London in 2012 and will cost around 165 million pounds to complete at current prices.
Makes the heart swell with patriotic pride, does it not? I love the line about the Olympics. Expect more stunts like this, paid for by the taxpayer, as the Games approach. Do not say you were not warned.
While on the subject of the dreadfulness of post-modernism, I can recommend this book.
In whatever shape England emerges from the war […] The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture
– George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn
But we live further from Orwell than Orwell from Bismarck. The current rulers of England are keen on uniforms, inspectors, permits and controls. (In 48 hours: “Ports and airports to get to discipline young offenders: Home secretary considers community work uniform.” The replacement for the Child Support Agency [not authoritarian enough], “will wield extra powers to punish parents who fail to pay, including evening curfews to prevent fathers going out after work, and having their passports confiscated to stop them taking foreign holidays, and even the threat of prosecution and prison”.) Law is treated with contempt if it gets in the way of the state’s priorities. (Last week the Home Office revealed its ideas for Serious Crime Prevention Orders, to be used to control the activities – such as telephone, travel, banking or internet use – of “known criminals” without the evidence necessary for an actual criminal prosecution.) The prohibition of suet puddings has yet to be ‘put out to public consultation’ (which is how we would know the matter had been determined). But it can only be a matter of time.
I saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil again last night. I had not for a long while. Seen just now, its aptness to New Britain is shocking. More surprising, I think than the utter submergence of Orwell’s gentle, un-Prussian England. We knew, in petto, we had lost that.
How long before we see official signs pronouncing “Suspicion breeds confidence” and “Help the Ministry of Information help you”? Eh?
I would like to begin this, my maiden article, by extending my sincere thanks to the Samizdata Editorial Team for affording me the considerable privilege of posting rights. In return, I will put my best endeavours to the task of justifying their faith in me.
On to matters at hand. It appears that a George Romero fantasy is playing itself out for real in the corridors of national power but, instead of laying siege to a shopping mall, the flesh-craving zombies are turning on themselves:
A 19-year-old female candidate for the police service recently learnt a hard lesson in diversity awareness. She had passed her written tests, and in her interview was asked what she would do if she needed advice. She replied: “I would go to my sergeant and ask him for help.” She failed the interview for referring to the sergeant as “him”, thus revealing her lack of gender awareness.
I hope that she was one of the brightest and the best.
Perhaps it is for lack of easily-available prey (the hunting grounds having been exhausted) that the predatory ruling class has turned on itself. Much like a deranged, ravenous beast that chews off its own hind leg, the demented state is ripping into the very mechanisms by which it effects control. In time, capability will be whittled away, morale will lie bleeding and purpose will be lost.
In case you think I am complaining, let me say here and now that I wish this process Godspeed. Having all but abandoned any hope that some externality will bring much-needed relief to this monstrously overgoverned patch of clay, the sight of the beast now doing us the favour of devouring itself brings a holiday to my heart. May the sinuous, thorny tendrils of enforced, prescriptive ‘diversity’ grow luxuriant in every corner of Whitehall. May its choking, poisonous emissions billow wildly and uncontrollably over the kleptopots of political control.
For ever and ever. Amen.
Tom Coates, who used to work for the BBC and is now at Yahoo, really lays into Ashley Highfield, the supposed visionary leader of the Beeb’s new media efforts. Euan Semple, the BBC’s former head of knowledge management, agrees with Tom’s assessment. An excerpt:
If Ashley Highfield really is leading one of the most powerful and forward-thinking organisations in new media in the UK, then where are all these infrastructural products and strategy initiatives today? And if these products are caught up in process, then where are the products and platfoms from the years previous that should be finally maturing? It’s difficult to see anything of significance emerging from the part of the organisation directly under Highfield’s control. It’s all words!
…[T]he truth is that for the most part – with a bunch of limited exceptions – these changes just don’t seem to be really happening. The industry should be more furious about the lack of progress at the organisation than the speed of it, because in the meantime their actual competitors – the people that the BBC seems to think it’s a peer with but which it couldn’t catch-up with without moving all of its budget into New Media stuff and going properly international – get larger and faster and more vigorous and more exciting.
Let us not forget that Highfield gets his funding whether he delivers or not, as the BBC is financed under threat of violence to anyone who wishes to own a TV in the UK. That is the plain, ugly truth of the matter, no matter how much Tom may like to think that the BBC is a ‘valuable organisation’. I guess I would want to believe that, too, if my salary had come from working people who faced prison sentences if they did not pay up.
Indeed, as Tom notes, Highfield’s miserable failures have resulted in him being rewarded with a much larger role within the BBC. He will be managing up to 4,000 people, according to the Guardian. Please, tell me again why we need this ‘valuable organisation’.
David Miliband, Britain’s Environment Secretary, gave a glimpse of what a future of total state regulation might look like by laying out the idea of individual ‘carbon rationing’ . It would allow the state to keep track of all your ‘carbon related’ economic activity and thereby regulate, well, damn near everything by deciding how many ‘points’ your activities will deduct from your ration. By introducing rationing in effect green extremists are floating the idea of putting the entire nation on what amounts to a de facto war footing in which the state controls ‘fair’ use of scare resources, taxing people with more money for their ‘unfair’ carbon use.
Make no mistake, this is not about environmentalist voodoo science, it is about controlling people and this is the tool they are going to use.
We (classical) liberals have spent a lot of our lives worrying about how to keep the state small and stabilise free institutions against collectivist urges. It seems we missed the point. The gradual socialist slide we were resisting popped. Meanwhile the revolution happened and we missed it. In fact most people seem to have missed it, including the old leftists that we feared and who are now equally perplexed. We were all looking the wrong way: Blair’s Britain is no more like Scandinavia than it is like Soviet Russia.
Matthew Parris might be right to detect something of the Third World in the way that government pronouncements no longer have a relation to reality, but I submit the polity itself is something new. It is nothing so human as kleptocracy. At some point Britain became a totalitarian bureaucratic state in spirit, while retaining plentiful food and clean water, and the forms of the rule of law – where that doesn’t get in the way of official power. Week on week measures are brought forward that present ministers would have organised protests against (and in some cases actually did) had they happened in 20th century South Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America… Had anyone been doing them but the benign guardians of civic republicanism (themselves), in fact.
Last week: Local authories get powers to seize empty housing.
Next week: Some more exciting ways for the Home Office to build a safe just and tolerant society.
1. Seize the profits of companies that employ people who are not permitted to work by the state, or subcontract to companies that do. And remove their directors and ban them from acting as directors.
2. The Serious Organised Crime Agency to have powers to seek ‘control orders’ on those it suspects of involvement in serious crime but does not have evidence sufficient to prosecute. These control orders would be like those on suspected terrorists and control potentially any aspect of a person’s life and their contact with others.
We will have to wait for the announcement to discover whether, “for operational reasons” they will, like the terrorist versions, have to be imposed in secret at secret hearings with the suspect unable to hear or challenge the evidence against them. What’s the betting?
[Note: The current default definition of ‘serious crime’, by the way, is that in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, s81. It is extraterritorial. Activity is serious crime if it would be a crime anywhere in the UK, involves the use of violence, or “substantial financial gain” or is conduct by a “large number” of persons in pursuit of a common purpose… The former NCIS (now part of SOCA) defined “organised” crime as that committed by three persons or more, so a “large number” may not be all that large. Mind how you go.]
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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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