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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There is an article in the Guardian blog ‘Comment is Free’ by Peter Singer calling for Oxford University to stop trying to use the courts to prevent disruptive protests in the City of Oxford by ‘animal rights’ activists.
Although I agree that it is dangerous when the law is used to stifle freedom of expression (in other words, using the threat of violence in the form of arrest by the Boys in Blue to prevent protests), clearly most of those protesters would love to see laws prohibiting animal testing (i.e. they would be happy to see the threat of violence in the form of arrest by the Boys in Blue used to prevent animal testing) as Singer says in his article “In a democracy, those who advocate change can only achieve their goals by winning over the majority”… so clearly he is talking not just about making the protester’s views heard and therefore socially exerting moral suasion on people to stop doing what they are doing to animals, he is talking about ‘democracy’, i.e. politics, and therefore he is talking about violence backed laws.
I am sure that Peter Singer would reply to such an observation that if a law was passed prohibiting animal testing, that would just be ‘democracy in action’, assuming that to be self-evidently a good thing. And yet…even the courts are subordinate to the laws passed by Parliament so if a judge was to limit the scope of those demonstrations, surely if the protesters objective is to gain support for using getting coercive laws they approve of passed, they are just receiving what they are trying to do to others (i.e. subject them to coercive laws).
I do not know if the demonstrations in Oxford have passed the boundaries of reasonable protest and moved into the realm of violent intimidation (given the ‘animal rights’ movements long and current association with terrorism, it is not hard to imagine they may have done) but as a general rule it is indeed a very dangerous thing when the law stops people expressing themselves. However although I agree with Singer courts generally should not be used to suppress demonstrations, I will loose little sleep over one group of people using the regulatory state to impose their will on another group of people whose objective is to use the regulatory state to impose their will.
How can I disagree with A C Grayling on British values when he sums up Blair’s agenda so succinctly:
Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm. Or the government should be prepared to allow us to stay home behind drawn curtains, and to pay our mortgages and deliver our groceries under armed guard, to protect us form venturing into the streets where (so government fear-mongering might have us believe) thousands of bomb-carrying lunatic fanatics lurk.
To sum up, Blair would prefer us to be sheep, compliant, uncomplaining and stoical. These are the values that he would instill in new immigrants for his legacy: the great and glorious socialist millennium. That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:
To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort (the sanitised version) and the demand for, and founding of, Parliament.
This will gloss the fact that all our “revolutions” (after the Civil War at least), which by being so called give us a faint aura of past flair, were very pragmatical affairs, and like the empire almost accidental ones, driven from below by thoroughly banausic impulses and only retrospectively embellished, Boys’ Own style, by a sense of the heroic.
Their pragmatism is no doubt a virtue, and it would do no harm to anyone to learn as much; but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke – an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras, stoutly resisting the temptation to have opinions, and certainly not to voice them if by chance one should form between its safely capped horns.
Indeed, we would no longer be part of the Anglosphere.
In the Daily Telegraph there was a story about the decay of Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire. Paths worn out, litter, and general decay. Even the purple heather is being overwhelmed by bracken (perhaps a lesson to all those who think that ‘Mother Nature’ will always make things nice if she is left in charge). As usual ‘underfunding’ from the government (national and from the local government of the city of Bradford) got most of the blame.
But there were some other things mentioned. The pressure of the number of visitors was pointed to (no price of entry, no real owner… ‘tragedy of the Commons’ anyone?).
The removal of power from the local town to the city of Bradford back in the early 1970’s (by Edward Heath and Peter Walker the Conservative party ‘modernizers’ of their day – people much like David Cameron and Francis Maude in our own time). Was attacked by some people. Some people wanted to copy the ‘Malvern Hills Conservators’, a voluntary group in Worcestershire (or whatever it is called these days) which has been protecting the Malvern Hills since the 19th century – rather than trust either the city of Bradford or the local town council. And some local people pointed to something of interest.
Anne Hawkesworth (now that sounds like a Yorkshire name), from the local town council is quoted as saying “If you stand in the centre of Ilkely and look up, on one side you see the purple of the Beamsley and Devonshire estates, but on the Ilkley side you just see bracken”.
J.S. Mill (not a man I admire, as some readers here may know) said that private ownership of great estates could only be justified by the owner acting as a guardian for the people. I believe that such private ownership needs no ‘justification’, any more than Mr Mill should have had to ‘justify’ owning his house or his boots.
However, there is no denying that private ownership has proven to be a better guardian of the environment than the state.
As I write this, it is raining in a slight but persistent drizzle outside my Pimlico flat, central London. It has been a mixed bag on the weather front recently: some spells of great warm weather but a fair amount of rain. The cricket match at Lords was briefly interrupted by it. One can bet that the Wimbledon tennis tournament later in the summer will undergo the familiar ritual of thrilling matches being interrupted by rain (although I hear there are plans afoot to put a giant cover over the Centre Court stadium in due course).
Despite all this, we are told that Britain faces an unprecedented drought. All manner of water restrictions are threatened, although thankfully, given the less-than-wonderful personal habits of Londoners (any Tube user will know what I mean) it is still allowed for us to take a morning shower. In short, shortages. This appears insane in a country famed or infamous for its damp summers. It is an island in which few places are more than 100 miles from the sea. In a wider context, most of the Earth’s surface is covered in the stuff. What’s the problem?
The ‘shortages’ we have now have a number of causes, from what I can glean. There has been a substantial population rise in the southeast of England. Greater affluence means more dishwashers, bigger washing machines. Increasingly, many people will often have more than one bathroom in a house. Other, wetter, parts of the UK like the famously wet area to the west of the Pennines have not seen the same sort of population growth. There is plenty of water in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. → Continue reading: Water and some basic economics
According to something I just watched on UK TV, in a survey the public ranked estate agents lower in terms of trustworthiness than any other professional group in Britain… except for politicians. The programme also discussed how increasing numbers of buyers and sellers were doing business via the internet in order to cut out estate agents altogether.
As part of the show’s segment dealing with this, some woman from Which? (a statist ‘consumer group’ which acts as a pro-regulation lobby) came on supporting the idea that the state should regulate estate agents, requiring them to be licenced… in other words she wants to trust the most un-trusted group in Britain to regulate the second most un-trusted group in Britain.
David Cameron thinks it is the role of politicians to opine on what sort of clothing parents purchase for their children. I wonder if Tory voters who dislike the fact Tony Blair feels there are no aspects of private life which should not be subjected to state regulation, nevertheless like the idea of the leader of their benighted party ‘taking on’ businesses which sell clothes he disapproves of.
When Cameron says “I’ve never believed that we can leave everything to market forces,” I would turn the question around and ask if there is in fact anything he would truly leave to ‘market forces’, or as I prefer to call it, ‘personal choice’. I have no view regarding the rights and wrongs of what sort of clothing people buy for themselves or their children and I have no idea what the discontinued line of BHS clothing were actually like… but the real ‘creepy’ thing here is that a politician feels such matters are any of his damn business.
It looks like Mrs. T is reading some very sound literature these days. Any chance the Blairite currently leading the Tory party might be interested in something that challenges the orthodoxy like that book? I have my doubts.
Revealed by the blogosphere for all to see!
Once again the ‘we know whats best’ brigade is out in force, targeting pharmacutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. They are upset about some obscure point of medical research. However the tactics that they are employing are rather sinister, even for the creepy ‘animal rights’ fraternity.
Animal rights activists threatened small shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, with public exposure yesterday unless they sold their shares within two weeks.
Shareholders, many of whom are pensioners, were sent anonymous letters saying that their names would be put on a website unless the shares were sold.
GlaxoSmithKline has set up an information page for shareholders, which is welcome. However the company is deserving of censure, or, indeed, of a right-royal kick in the bollocks over this matter. Shareholders have a right to privacy and how the animal rights fanatics managed to obtain shareholder details is a question that the company should make great efforts to find out the answer to.
Given the highly emotive and irrational nature of the animal-rights lobby, this is not a matter that GlaxoSmithKline should be taking lightly.
Several times I have called for the Tory Party, at least in its current form, to be put to the torch so that a viable and genuine opposition party can form in Britain (even if it is called ‘The Tory party’) as an alternative to Blairism in its various forms.
But as I am hardly bashful about my hostility to modern conservatism, dislike for democratic political parties in general, contempt for that invertebrate David Cameron (or Tory Blair as I like to call him) and the whole class of people who appointed him, I do not expect my views to carry much weight with folks who take a less bile spitting view of the political system than me.
However it would seem that Peter Hitchens, who has been by any reasonable definition the very epitome of a core Daily Mail Tory and ‘sensible’ mainstream establishment figure, pretty much takes the same view that the current Tory Party needs to be destroyed. I have been mildly incredulous to read some of his more recent article in which he has started saying things which are more or less identical to a wild-eyed anti-establishment chap like me on this issue, and moreover for pretty much the same basic reasons.
I cannot help but wonder if all those large bodkins I have been sticking in this David Cameron doll I have dangling in front of me via a little noose have not started to pay off.
Today is local council election day in England and Wales. As a voter in the area of Westminster, I decided to stick to my local Conservative councillors since whatever I think of the national party (not all that much), the local lot seem to have done a reasonably decent job, and I know them reasonably well as sane individuals, so I duly put my cross against their names. At a national level, meanwhile, it is hard to figure out quite what the Tories are doing. They are confronted by a ruling Labour establishment in meltdown mode, corrupt, incompetent, arrogant and, on the field of civil liberties, positively dangerous. Yet so far leader David Cameron prefers to romp around in the Artic Circle to prove his supposed Green manliness to Guardian Man. All very unimpressive.
Oh well. At least Boris Johnson is honest about the future of the Tory Party: a sports club. Maybe Dave and Boris should pack up their bags and run a light entertainment show. They might even make a decent go of it.
Police state’s cannot work unless people cooperate with them, and the supermarket Tesco is doing eaxctly that: helping make Britain’s emerging police state a reality.
A man took some photographs to be developed taken whilst deer hunting (showing him posing with a deer he had bagged), to his local supermarket, Tesco. However when the staff saw the developed pictures, they called the police because they felt the images ‘inappropriate’, although he had broken no animal cruelty or firearms laws. So how do the police get involved when something is deemed ‘inappropriate’ rather than ‘criminal’? Nevertheless, the police duly did get involved and moreover according to the article they questioned the man for “several hours”. Unless there is a great deal more to this story that came out in the article, I cannot see what this guy did to justify being questioned at all, let alone for “several hours”.
Now this raises more questions: firstly, what could they possibly question him about for ‘several hours’? If they were trying to ascertain if he had a licence for the weapon in the picture, surely all they needed was his name, a police computer terminal and about five minutes of some police office worker’s time. So what exactly where they asking this man to justify?
Also, Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, does not think that his company was the one who was acting in an ‘inappropriate’ manner, strangely stating:
Tesco does not discriminate against any lawful section of the community.
Sir Terry has not thought that statement through clearly as it is manifestly not the case (and if he dislikes that assertion, his lawyer is free to contact me). To ‘not discriminate’ would mean Tesco treats lawful gun owners the same way way it treats lawful dog owners and lawful car owners (all of which must be licenced).
So, following that statement of non-discrimination, I wonder if every time (or even occasionally) the staff at Tesco photolabs see a person driving an automobile in a picture they develop, something that can only be done lawfully in Britain if you have insurance and a valid driver’s licence, do they call the cops so they can grill the guy in the picture and make him produce proof his vehicle was licenced? If they do indeed do that, well, then I suppose Sir Terry is correct and Tesco do not ” discriminate against any lawful section of the community” as they really do apply the same standards to everyone. If that is not the case, then Sir Terry is not being truthful as clearly they do indeed discriminate against a lawful section of the community, namely those who own licensed firearms.
Needless to say I will never shop in a Tesco again.
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