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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.]
So we now know that the police officers who shot dead Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, claiming they thought he was a suicide bomber, will face no charges. Instead, Scotland Yard may face charges under, wait for it, health and safety regulations.
Yet all this utterly misses the point. I am willing to believe that the event itself was all just a horrible cock-up but what I am not willing to accept is that after shooting dead the wrong man, the authorities can issue a stream of bare faced lies with complete impunity. Very soon after the event it must have been clear to the police they had made a horrible blunder and this fact soon came out. However we were then told that the unfortunate Brazilian had significantly contributed to his own fate… he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket1, he had run when challenged by the armed police and been chased in the tube station2 and finally had vaulted over the gate and run on to the train pursued by the cops3… all of which we now know was completely false.
The reasons for such lies are clear. I was horrified when I first heard they had got the wrong man but given what we were told about how it had all gone down, I was not unsympathetic to the police. After all, in the aftermath of the suicide attacks on London a few weeks earlier and failed attacks a few days before, anyone who runs from armed police when challenged only to dive onto a crowded train can only expect one thing. But then the truth came out as there were simply too many witnesses and too many inconsistencies. Yet even that did not stop the London Transport CCTV footage that we are told makes us ‘secure beneath the watchful eyes’ from being mysteriously blank.
So where did those lies come from? Who told the police spokesman to offer up those fabricated events and why are they not on trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice?
And yet it seems the entire stream of disinformation that the authorities tried to use to mitigate this ghastly error has just vanished down the memory hole. Why are Britain’s self-important press silent on this? THAT is what I want to know.
1 = He was in fact wearing a short jeans jacket
2 = He rode to the station on a bus without being challenged
3 = He calmly used his season ticket to pass though the automated gate
Politician A says: Give me money. If I get power, I’ll let you have some of my power.
Politician B says: Give me power. If I get power, I’ll take other people’s money and give some of it to you.
Which is the more corrupt?
As readers of Samizdata may know from my previous articles, I do not think highly of British bookshops and recent visits have reminded me why. John Adamson (of Peterhouse Cambridge) has had a new book published called The Noble Revolt – it is an important work arguing the case that the resistance to Charles the first was mostly organized by great lords. Adamson’s work has been widely discussed, not just in academic journals but in popular magazines. So I visited a few books shops to have a look for it.
Borders – not there.
Waterstones – not there.
W.H. Smith (which owns Waterstones I believe) – not there.
History books sell well in Britain and this was an important new book – and it was not in the shops. “You could order it” – if I am going to order the book why should I not just buy it over the internet, where it would be cheaper anyway? So what new books did the bookshops have?
Almost needless to say there were three new death-to-America books.
One by Chomsky, one by Pilger and one by Mark Thomas.
I could not miss them – they were shoved in the most prominent places in the stores (sometimes side by side in a sort of unholy Trinity). The Thomas book ended up with him denouncing Radstone technology (a company I used to guard) for selling electronics to the evil Americans which they use in their unmanned Predator aircraft.
Mr Thomas boasted that the evil Americans had failed to kill a prominent terrorist (something he described as an attempted “extra judicial killing” – something which non-scumbags call “killing the enemy in time of war”), but had killed women and children (the fact that other terrorists had been killed in the attack was something he did not mention – no doubt because the death of comrades upset him too much). I could not bring myself to look at the new Chomsky and Pilger books – but if they are any different from the death-to-America stuff they have written a hundred times before I am six feet tall and have a full head of hair.
So there we have it. An important history book that would likely sell well is nowhere to be found (so people who pop in to book shops will not see and and therefore will not buy it) and another three books coming out with the same death-to-America stuff that their authors have written a hundred times before are displayed as if they were wonderful new works. I am told that the British bookshop enterprises are getting into financial trouble and they may eventually go bust.
Well, the sooner the better
There is now a very high chance that Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French consortium operating the Channel Tunnel rail-link between London and the continent, could be liquidated by this September, having failed to reach a key agreement earlier this week with creditors. The saga of how the operator would persuade a group of banks to let it restructure a huge pile of debt has been chugging along for months. Now there is a real risk that this marvel of civil engineering could be known as one of the biggest transport commercial flops in history. The free-marketeer in me says well, the venture was never based on fully commercial grounds in the first place. The folks concerned probably no doubt rightly thought that if the project was a flop, then the fortunate taxpayers of Europe would pick up the tab, just as they did with that other venture of high-tech wonder and dubious economics, Concorde. The romantic in me would be very sad to see this wonder of rail come to an end. I have used the Eurotunnel service several times, both for work and for short breaks to France in recent years. Every time I have marvelled at the smoothness of the service, only occasionally marred by delays in the English side of the operation, or by the odd rude French ticket inspector.
It certainly beats messing around in airport lounges, that is for sure.
It seems there is a shortage of certain drugs in Britain’s National Health Service.
Joe Fortescue from Alfreton, Derbyshire wants the government to provide more diamorphine, which has been in short supply since 2004. He said his 49-year-old ex-wife from Nottingham was screaming in pain in the days before her death because it was not available.
Horrendous. We are not talking about sophisticated and costly cutting edge drugs here, just a strong painkiller. As someone personally currently gobbling none-too-effective codeine painkillers every four hours after a close encounter with the NHS yesterday, dare I say I ‘feel the pain’ of those relying on the NHS in their time of need.
Perhaps the ex-husband of the hapless woman who died in agony for want of the correct drugs should have just scored some himself, available to anyone driving slowly with their windows open in the crappier parts of most large British towns and cities. Diamorphine is essentially just heroin after all and needless to say the ‘free market’ in heroin has no difficulty supplying public demand. Only the state could be inept enough to be unable to find heroin for a dying woman.
Truly the state is not your friend.
More here on the arrest of Labour head fund-raiser Lord Levy over allegations about tapping up folk for party donations in return for peerages. (See Alex’s post immediately below this one). First question: is this really the silver bullet that might finish off Blair? He has shown incredible resilience in the face of a huge dollop of scandals since 1997: Bernie Ecclestone affair, Mandelson’s various transgressions, a delinquent and violent deputy Prime Minister; Cherie Blair’s interesting spending habits, David Blunkett’s abuse of office and manifest failings, the sheer uselessness of his successor, Charles Clarke; the suicide of government scientist David Kelley and the whole spin-doctoring of arguments about WMDs in Iraq. In less than 10 years, the Labour government has established a record for venality, corruption and rank incompetence that it took the Tories 18 years to acquire. Quite some achievement, of sorts. Of course, although its economic record is not quite as splendid as some would claim, the relatively-good performance of the economy under Gordon Brown has kept the government of the day in reasonably good shape.
But for how much longer can even this part of the Blair record be relied upon? Yesterday, the Bank of England warned in one of its regular publications that there remain significant risks in the UK financial system, particularly concerning the amount of debt and consumer borrowing there is. Our public finances are slipping deeper into the red despite what has been a relatively decent run of economic growth, so goodness knows how bad those finances could get if there were to be a serious slowdown, or some shock to the financial system.
As a side note, it would be churlish not to praise indefatigible digger-up of news about the Levy saga, blogger Guido Fawkes. If I were the publisher of Private Eye magazine, I would be worried about the competition. Guido has been all over this story for weeks.
“We continue to “mind the gap”. The subject has not lost its power to provoke and wound and illuminate. We still talk quite a bit about it in various ways: journalistic-facetious, or pretend-anthropological, or even old-fashioned snobbish. But that does not mean that we are at all comfortable with the subject. On the contrary, we are often decidedly uneasy when it is brought up, and we do not care for it when the question of class is described as “Britain’s dirty little secret”. We tend to be especially resentful when the Americans or the French describe Britain as uniquely class-divided.” (page 105)
“We are often told that deference has disappeared from modern Britain. Yet the adulation of the rich and famous is surely as fulsome as ever. In hotels, restaurants and aircraft – the sites of modern luxury – the new upper crust is fawned on as egregiously as old money in its Edwardian heyday. All that has changed is that the composition of the upper class has changed, as it has done roughly once a century since the Norman Conquest…..what has almost disappeared is deference towards the lower classes. Throughout the two world wars and the decades following both of them, the lower classes were widely revered for their courage in battle and their stoicism in peace. Values such as solidarity, thrift, cleanliness and self-discipline were regularly identified as characteristic of them. That is no longer the case.” (page 107)
Mind the Gap, by Ferdinand Mount 2003. Definitely food for thought, and despite the title, is not a plea for some sort of mushy egalitarianism. I thought about this book while reading the comment threads here bemoaning the rise of the middle class football fan as some supposed frightful imposition on a working man’s game. We still bother about class, it seems.
In case anyone missed it, here is a fine article summing up what I think is the truth behind the case of the three NatWest bankers who are to be extradited to the United States on charges related to the collapse of Enron. The author, business writer Jeff Randall, fingers what he sees as the reason why the banks have been so coy about defending their employees from the U.S. legal authorities.
Unlike Stephen Pollard, who huffs and puffs about how this controversy is largely a matter of anti-Americanism, I do not like the smell of this case at all. I think Pollard’s argument – which has its merits – misses the point of how one-sided the operation of U.S. extradition powers are. These men are not regarded by the British authorities of being guilty of any offence. The U.S. authorities appear not – to the best of my knowledge – to have given even the semblance of a prima facie case justifying the extradition of this trio. And yet as the article points out, while the U.S. can use these powers – supposedly justified by the War on Terror – Britain has no corresponding right to extradite alleged U.S. wrongdoers (powers associated with terrorism have a habit of branching out).
As with the British blogger Clive Davis, I am a pro-American who also thinks the U.S. authorities sometimes do a lousy job at treating what they should regard as their close allies. Okay, I can hear the comments coming that even if they did a great job, it would make no difference. I am not so sure. While I agree with Stephen Pollard that U.S. authorities are arguably right to get nasty on financial wrongdoings and are often tougher than we Brits, this use of extradition powers looks a step too far. It does not strike me as smart diplomacy or right law, and I hope, perhaps naively, that the British government shows rather more backbone on this case than hitherto.
Here is more on the story, and more here.
UPDATE: And of course let’s not forget the continuing outrage of the EU arrest warrant. I should have mentioned this fact earlier, in case our American readers think I am picking on them.
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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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