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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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)
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!
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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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