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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Here is a telling quote from a recent Observer article about violence between (South) Asian and Somali schoolchildren in Birmingham:
‘This issue arises because it is a high density area,’ said Farrukh Haroon, a project worker at the YIP. ‘Communities are scrapping for scarce resources …’
Here is another:
‘It is complicated – there is not one pattern, not one trend and not one answer,’ said Simon Blake from the National Children’s Bureau. ‘But we have to bust these myths about who gets the best housing and how resources are allocated.’
Sorry, Mr Blake, but myths with a core of truth are hard to kill. Communities will always “scrap” for government resources because they are correct in their belief that if group A gets more of the pie then group B gets less. Scrapping, with or without bricks and broken bottles, is an excellent way to get more pie. Nor is it wise to hope for a day when resources are no longer scarce; in most of the country the economy is more sovietised than many countries that not so long ago were actually part of the Soviet bloc. If you will forgive an earthy metaphor, an economy based on drinking one’s own urine can only go on so long.
Laban Tall, commenting on the same article, congratulates the Observer for having finally discovered that not all racism is white on black. I am a good deal more optimistic than he that multi-racial – and even, to some extent, multi-cultural societies can be made to work. Just not where there is socialism.
God help us if the world ever becomes one multi-cultural society under socialism, as it looks as if it might. I forsee a future of low-level suppurating conflicts that never heal because the reason for their existence never goes away.
We have had a foretaste. A recent report that examined the causes of the riots in Burnley five years ago says that the government handing out “regeneration” money in the 1990s created rivalry and anger that helped create the conditions for the riots.
“Positive regeneration had an unintended side effect,” the report says. “Ironically, it contributed to social fragmentation by increasing neighbourhood rivalries …
You know what they say: first you screw up. Then you screw up again in the same way again to prove that it really was a screw-up first time round. You guessed it: Burnley’s problems in 2006 are to be dealt with by handing out regeneration money. But fear not!
Regeneration programmes now cover wider areas and are based on themes, rather than simple ward boundaries.
Themes. Assuredly these themes will make all well and no one will whisper that some communities are more thematically challenged than others and hence are getting more than their share.
However, never let it be said that government always screws up in the same way. Sometimes government screws up in new ways.
Elevate East Lancashire, one of the government’s nine housing market renewal pathfinders, is working – sometimes in the face of opposition from furious homeowners – to demolish inner Burnley’s too many terraces and provide sites for commercial builders to create new homes.
It does not say whether those “furious homeowners” are black, white or brown. It does not matter. Whatever colour their skins they will be embittered by having their homes taken from them for the greater good – the greater good of other people – and in a place blighted by regeneration it takes but the weight of the feather to tip the balance from general bitterness into racial bitterness.
The utterly flaccid David Cameron has balked at even the token gesture of pulling his ‘conservative’ party out of the Euro-integrationist EPP in the European parliament. As withdrawal from the EPP would be little more than a minor token that did nothing beyond offer the tiniest of fig leaves to the now completely naked Euro-skeptic remnants within the Tory party, is anyone under any illusions now of his inclination to ‘stand up for British interests’ in dealing with the EU?
As having the Tories ditch the EPP (whose platform includes ‘ever closer union’) was one of the planks of his pitch to win the Tory Party leadership against David Davies, will conservatives who are not pure Blairite (or perhaps even Heathite) now admit they have been screwed (and not in a fun way) and finally decamp from Cameron’s appalling social democratic party?
There is yet more evidence of the delusional mind set of those who say David Cameron’s utterances are just a deception to get into office so not to worry, he is really in favour of limited government and real-world economics. The truth is Cameron is New Labour through and through and those who want an unbroken series of regulatory statist policies from Blair’s government to continue should have no hesitation voting for the Tories.
But in our legitimate desire to drive out government waste and improve public sector efficiency, we have sometimes risked giving the impression that we see those who work in the public sector as burdens on the state rather than dedicated professionals who work hard to improve the quality of people’s lives.
So Cameron is now working hard to secure the public sector vote and he most surely deserves it as they need fear no loss of influence under him compared to Tony Blair.
Dedicated professionals, eh? You mean the people responsible for 95% of days lost to strikes in the UK1? The almost un-sackable people who get better pensions that people who work in the productive sector? The people who for some reason seem to get ‘sick’ far more often than people in the private sector?
A vote for the Tory party is a vote for Blairism, pure and simple. The Tories really really needs to be destroyed so that we can get a worthwhile opposition party.
1 = Not that I am really complaining… I would like 90% of Britain’s public sector to go on strike permanently, even if we still have to pay for them, so that people can discover that life will go on without them.
Let it never be said Samizdata does not listen to its public. I am sure the sainted editors would prefer me to add at this point that we reserve the right, however, to listen carelessly and ignore your views if it suits us. Be that as it may, I was at the Adam Smith Institute’s Tax Freedom Day celebrations this evening, and one of our readers, having said some very complimentary things, made a rather brilliant suggestion that I am now going to steal.
Inflation, we are told, is at a long-term low, because of that nice Mr Brown’s prudence. My friend points out however, that part of Mr Brown’s prudence has been prudently to exclude from many of his more interesting taxation devices, the items forming the Retail Price Index. He proposes a new index, of all those items whose prices the Chancellor controls because their consumer price is largely duty, or because they are practical necessities for most people whose price is directly set by the government. The latter are excluded from RPI by definition and the (plausible) suggestion is that such prices have risen very fast indeed.
The Gordon Adjusted Price (“GAP”) index would explain where your money goes, and why so many people find their pockets emptier despite notionally higher incomes and low inflation. It might make visible some of those hidden taxes. I have a hunch that the cost of living is actually falling in Britain, but the cost of government more than takes up the slack. Is it true? The GAP might provide a measure.
In the latest police anti-terrorist ‘swoop’ in which a man was shot (though not killed this time), there now seems to be some question of whether or not initial reports of a chemical weapons ‘factory’ and ‘hazardous materials’ being found have any truth to them at all. Moreover the highly dubious sounding report yesterday indicating the man who was shot was actually shot not by police but by his own brother is being denied by the lawyers of the injured man.
However at this stage all the information coming out is from the two least reliable sources imaginable, namely the lawyers for the people arrested (i.e. people who are paid to lie on behalf of their clients) and the police (i.e. an institution with a track record of lying about the facts when they shoot someone). As a result it is probably best to wait a while before drawing too many conclusions about what really happened and whether or not the guys arrested are guilty of anything more than being Muslims.
Whilst I would be delighted if the anti-terrorist squad had broken up an Al-Qaeda cell in the UK, the bitter experience of the Jean de Menezes killing and subsequent criminal conspiracy to cover up the facts, not to mention the scandalous Harry Stanley killing, means that the police and entire structure within which they operate cannot be trusted to tell the truth, it is only clear physical evidence that can show us what to believe.
A huge contingent of police and MI5 officers descended on a London house overnight and arrested its occupants who are suspected of developing a chemical bomb to use in a terrorist attack. One suspect was shot in the shoulder during the raid.
Meanwhile in Toronto, Canada, twelve men have been arrested in a raid where the suspects were thought to be assembling an ammonium nitrate bomb, having allegedly assembled three tonnes of the stuff.
Driving through Adelaide this morning, I idly turned my radio on, not something I normally do. But I happened to hear the South Australian police minister explaining to a couple of bemused hosts that the government here had made the possession of crossbows illegal. The radio hosts were bemused, not so much because of yet another assault on the tattered remains of Australian liberty, but because crossbows hardly seem like a problem hereabouts. It is not like you see gangs of youths roaming the streets with crossbows, after all.
The minister explained that there was a case in New South Wales a few years back and the government was keen to clear up ‘loose ends’. Apparently you can still possess one if you can prove you have a ‘lawful use’ for it; the Australian notion of liberty is that you are free as long as you enjoy the good grace of the powers that be.
Youths are hardly likely to be carrying crossbows, but they may well be carrying knives. I read this morning’s Daily Telegraph and came across an op-ed calling for a crackdown on knives, which are becoming a serious problem. Going by some of the comments to that op-ed, it’s a fairly popular idea with the ‘Torygraph’s’ readers as well. To be fair, Shaun Bailey does point the finger at the weakness of the criminal justice system, which is causing young people to take to knife ownership with such enthusiasm.
However, he also blames ‘culture’, which sounds to me like the old leftist excuse whenever someone did the wrong thing; that ‘society is to blame’.
We need to look at the material that youngsters have rammed down their throats every day. Magazines such as Zoo, Nuts and MaxPower. Programmes and films such as World Wrestling Entertainment, Get Rich or Die Trying, and MTV, City Gangster flicks and the whole music culture in general. If we want our youngsters to stop being violent, we need to stop showing them violent material, especially so early in their development. As a colleague said to me, the music industry is “peddling death to our children”.
I am certainly no expert on ‘popular culture’, but I would question the idea that ‘culture’ forces anything on young people. Cultural industries like magazines and music and television programs really are businesses just like any others; they have to respond to what the market is asking for. The point is that cultural industries are a lagging indicator, not a leading one.
What would change the culture is a change in society so that perpetrators of criminal behaviours face the full consequence of their actions; I suspect that would have a far greater impact on ‘youth culture’ then any ‘initiative’ to meddle with our culture; or to take away from lawful citizens their legitimate right to defend themselves. Which is where sloppy thinking like Shaun Bailey’s op-ed will take us to.
The Deputy Prime Minister is in trouble again. Apparently he has had a rest from the toils of office to play croquet at his grace-and-favour mansion. This has lead the something-must-be-done crowd to accuse him of slacking and call for his resignation. Apparently ministers – even ones without portfolio – are supposed to spend their every waking hour governing us.
Since Samizdata’s point of view (generally speaking) is that we would really rather be governed less, then I submit this is the sort of ministerial behaviour we want to see more of. With luck, it might spread to the Senior Civil Service, and stop the more serious business of the bureacratic dictatorship. Then Prescott would merit a dukedom. Meanwhile he certainly gets marks for making Britain a worse place more slowly than he might, and at the same time showing up the miserable priggishness of his political colleagues.
Or would you choose a world where a pleasant afternoon is better spent in a committee meeting figuring out how best to control other people’s lives, rather than enjoying a gentle game in the open air?
The litany of failures for the immigration system in the United Kingdom continues to defy imagination. This New Labour government allows rapists, paedophiles and violent criminals from all corners of the globe to stay in Britain, live off the welfare state, escape from prison and commit crimes at the expense of the law abiding public. Now they are giving them passports.
THE Home Office was under more fire yesterday after it was revealed jailed foreigners are being given British passports after release.
Officials confirmed convicted criminals from overseas were granted British citizenship if they stay out of trouble for a period after prison.
The length of the “clear” period depends on their sentence.
Yet the Government has promised to deport overseas convicts in an immigration crackdown.
It is clear that Britain cannot be trusted to run its citizenship programmes in an efficient or secure manner. Therefore, the United States should remove Britain from its Visa Waiver program without further ado. That would concentrate minds at the Home Office.
George Galloway thinks assassinating Tony Blair would be justified because of the war in Iraq… but if that is true, others might start thinking if Mr. George Galloway MP wants people to play that game, this notion should be more widely applied to all whose political views inevitably have violent consequences.
And so if politics did start to become more overtly and directly violent, with PM’s being bumped off because of their foreign policy decisions, this new paradym could well lead others who equally as intemperate as the Honourable Member for Bethnal Green and Bow to decide it was now acceptable (or ‘justified’ if you like) to start bumping off people who have demonstrated by their support for communist mass murderers like Fidel Castro as well as inciting violence against British troops by Ba’athist fascists and sundry Islamo-fascists in the past.
Just for reference, a definition of treason is:
The act of betraying; betrayal of a trust undertaken by or reposed in anyone; a breach of faith, treachery. High Treason or Treason Proper is the violation of a subject of his allegiance to his sovereign or to the state, levying war on the King’s dominions, adhering to the Queen’s enemies in her dominions, or aiding them in or out of the realm.
The NHS is now being instructed to turn its back on ‘alternative’ treatments such as homeopathy. This is a very good beginning… now all we need is for it to turn its back on non-alternative treatments too and Britain can start to allow a First World healthcare system to develop.
I oppose the ID card & panoptic centralised database plans of the UK government on the grounds it is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberties and truly deadly expansion of state power… but even on the utilitarian basis of the state’s own objectives, the entire scheme is a disaster in the making. This comes not from some civil rights activist but from an IBM researcher whose specialty is secure ID cards.
The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts – such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient – which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government’s plans do not include such an implementation.
Read the whole article.
(hat tip to commenter Shaun Bourke)
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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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