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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It is part of being a good citizen to prove who you are day in, day out.
– Andy Burnham MP
One of my least favourite UK firms is Capita (unaffectionately known as Crapita in some parts), a firm that provides the systems that help run things like the BBC television licence (boo!) and the London Congestion charge (qualified hiss), and which may, perhaps, be involved in operating a proposed national ID card (that would qualify for hurricane force boos all round). Well, in the light of such observations, this is rather interesting, is it not?
The chairman of Capita Group, a services company with government contracts, resigned on Thursday following publicity over a 1-million-pound loan he made to the Labour Party
It is important to remember that businesses like Capita are hardly paragons of capitalist virtue, in my opinion. Capita makes money from things like the licence fee, which essentially extorts money from people who own a TV set, even if they do not watch BBC programmes. If I were an ethical investment fund manager, I would refuse to own its stock on principle.
By the way, the idea of naming and shaming businesses, politicians and individuals involved with intrusive businesses like Capita was mentioned on Samizdata last summer. It will be interesting to see what else happens in the loans-for-peerages affair.
No wonder Blair looked miserable on Budget day yesterday.
The media has minutely examined the financial affairs of the Labour Party, offsetting the silence of potential Tory hypocrisy. Yet, this is less than not very important. The man who will not contest the next election has low approval ratings and the party that his successor will battle has lost their lead in the polls. Such are the dangers of binding yourself too closely to your enemy.
The real dangers lie in the rapid erosion of our civil liberties. A message that is always worth repeating and Henry Porter in the Observer does it better than I ever could:
You may have noticed the vaguely menacing tone of recent government advertising campaigns. Here is a current example: ‘If you know a business that isn’t registered for tax, call the Revenue or HM Customs – no names needed.’ Another says: ‘Technology has made it easier to identify benefit cheats.’
Whether the campaign is about rape, TV licences or filling in your tax form, there is always a we-know-where-you-live edge to the message, a sense that this government is dividing the nation into suspects and informers.
The article is a succinct reminder of all the arguments that need to be brought to bear to offset ID cards and the database, open to all and sundry. We must remember that only totalitarian states abolish privacy: whether they are of the soft or hard variant. In Britain, this will partially be achieved by linking ID cards to the ‘chip and pin’ systems that provide universal verification for card transactions.
You will need the card when you receive prescription drugs, when you withdraw a relatively small amount of money from a bank, check into hospital, get your car unclamped, apply for a fishing licence, buy a round of drinks (if you need to prove you’re over 18), set up an internet account, fix a residents’ parking permit or take out insurance.
Every time that card is swiped, the central database logs the transaction so that an accurate plot of your life is drawn. The state will know everything that it needs to know; so will big corporations, the police, the Inland Revenue, HM Customs, MI5 and any damned official or commercial busybody that wants access to your life. The government and Home Office have presented this as an incidental benefit, but it is at the heart of their purpose.
Last week, Andrew Burnham, a junior minister at the Home Office, confirmed the anonymous email by admitting that the ID card scheme would now include chip-and-pin technology because it would be a cheaper way of checking each person’s identity. The sophisticated technology on which this bill was sold will cost too much to operate, with millions of checks being made every week.
The British state has one objective: Without the ID Card, you will have no life.
This does not look good for ol’ big ears, does it?
A “cash-for-favours” row threatening Prime Minister Tony Blair has sent his approval rating to its lowest level since he come to power in 1997, according to a poll published on Sunday. The controversy erupted this month when it was disclosed that several wealthy businessmen were nominated for seats in the House of Lords after lending large sums of money to the Labour Party
It is becoming harder and harder to figure out the difference between Blair and the sort of operators who held sway in the Prime Ministerial offices of Italy, Japan and parts of Latin America for much of the last 100 years.
I repeat what I said a couple of days back: I predict Blair will be out of Downing Street in 12 months from now. This stuff is starting to pile on him with increasing weight.
Tony Blair’s weak and rather feeble effort to give a tincture of independence to state schools – arguably none, in reality – was only pushed through in the House of Commons last night because of support from the Conservatives, as this BBC report and others have stated. Dozens of Labour MPs, outraged at the very idea of schools loosening any controls from the State, rebelled. The Labour Party, having kept its mouth tightly shut in some ways while Blair sought to pass himself off as a pale Tory, is getting increasingly stroppy. The Iraq war clearly has had something to do with it, but there seems to be a sort of natural life cycle with Prime Ministers. As the years go by, and enemies are made, MPs passed over for promotion, the groupings of malcontents increases. It seems rather odd that Blair should suffer such a blow from his backbenchers on what is in fact hardly a radical education bill.
The irony of course is that Blair continues to be fixated by the career and achievements of Margaret Thatcher, a true radical in some ways with some significant achievements to her credit. Blair talks a good game on radicalism, as they say in sport, but delivery is often way short. His achievement, if we can call it that, has been a sustained and deep assault on the network of checks and balances that constrain State power, in particular, his determined assault on the English Common Law.
My bet is that Gordon Brown will be Prime Minister in 12 months from now. Any takers?
Tessa Jowell is the first British minister in recorded history to retire from her family on order to spend more time with her government.
– Andy Hamilton
It never takes too long for campaigners to set up a website providing all the information that you require to raise awareness and combat this perfidious Bill.
If this Bill passes, all that stands between us and an elected dictatorship is the restraint of our politicians. God help us!
… and why not? After all, as we now live in a de facto one ideology state (and that ideology is populist utilitarianism), what difference do the antics of what goes on in Parliament really make? The sooner we have the government doing away with this fiction of political process and just start ruling mostly by administrative edict, the better really. Far too many people are just hiding behind comfortable fictions.
I find the notion that it is news that Tory leader David Cameron is a Blairite so unremarkable that I am puzzled the Telegraph even runs with the story.
The closest thing to an actual conservative party is the UKIP because it sure as hell is not the Conservative Party.
I have not seen anything written here on what is being called the Abolition of Parliament Bill – the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill that was going through Parliament last week (whilst ‘Dave’ Cameron was off on paternity leave).
I have heard it finally finishes off the delegated legislation process (the process by which ministers and civil servants pass regulations with power given them under enabling Acts of Parliament) – a process that A.V. Dicey observed before the First World War and Chief Justice Hewitt was the last major establishment figure to oppose (“The New Despotism” 1929). It has taken a very long time to finish the process, but it seems Mr Blair will complete it.
Of course in a modern big government Welfare State having every regulation examined by Parliament is not possible (one extra reason to oppose a modern big government Welfare State).
Still a Statute that allows ministers to alter any regulation (apart from in the field of tax) without coming back to Parliament, and set up to two years in prison as a punishment for failing to obey their arbitrary regulations – well it does seem to a bit much even for Britain.
Have I just dreamed it all then?
Also nothing on our dear friends the Local Government Standards Board – people have noticed them now they have suspended Red Ken from his position as Mayor of London for a month (for nasty things he said to a Jewish journalist).
However, the Board has been doing this sort of thing (and far worse) for years. For example, if a councillor writes to try and expose the “wind farm” con (it is a con because it does not greatly reduce CO2 production – as the wind turbines do not produce much power and have to be “backed up” by coal and gas fired stations which run all the time as a safeguard) they might not (if the Board feels like it) be allowed to speak (or vote) against “wind farms” in council debates.
Ditto saying that Council ‘Chief Executives’ are paid too much or are useless (‘Chief Executives’ are the highly paid useless trash who have replaced what used to be called Town Clerks) – if a councillor says that he is in big trouble.
There is no automatic right for an elected councillor to oppose government policy (or ‘best practice’) in modern Britain and has not been since Mr Blair set up the Board. If the Board will let you speak and vote fine – but they may choose not to.
I am not a fanatical supporter of democracy, but I thought that many people were supposed to be. I have heard very little about what is going on in Britain – most people seem either to not know or not care
The Guardian’s Jenni Russell points out that the attitude of British officialdom is changing subtly.
I find this change truly frightening because I spent the first few years of my life in apartheid South Africa. My parents were political activists, and we lived in an atmosphere of fear. My mother’s relations distanced themselves from her, fearing that they too would be targeted if they associated with us. My earliest memories are of police raiding the house at night, emptying out dolls’ cots and sweeping books off shelves. People would simply disappear. A black friend left our house to travel to his family in Zululand, and vanished.
After a month of inquiries, someone found a witness who had seen him being picked up by the police. He was being held without charge under the 90-days legislation – the same policy that the government is trying to introduce here. The relief when we came to England was incalculable. This country, these policemen and this government were benign, reasonable and trustworthy. As my father never ceased to point out, a Britain that had fought fascism had a deep-rooted commitment to protecting the individual from the state.
That is no longer true. ID cards are one danger, but there are other measures which are already a reality. […]
I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom.
However, I think she is wrong about the cause:
This change in the relationship between people and officials can only be explained as a result of the new illiberal atmosphere in which we are living.
That’s back to front. An illiberal attitude is insufficient for oppression or we would be living under the dictatorship of the Free Church of Scotland. It is actually about power. Unchecked power will be abused. Not may, will.
You cannot change the culture of the law – Blair minor – without affecting the culture of the land. British police were once famous for courtesy. But then as little as twenty years ago they had few powers not available to the ordinary citizen. They relied on voluntary cooperation for much of their authority, and the reasonable exercise of that authority yielded general cooperation.
Before the merger of the agencies, the Inland Revenue was proverbially gentlemanly and reasonable compared to HM Customs and Excise, though the taxation functions were very similar. The difference in culture wasn’t accidental. Customs had vastly greater powers and found it easier to rely on fear to do the job.
ASBO-land is a different place from England. And this is why: as they gain more capacity to order us about, those in office will order us about more. What else?
The PM implies he wishes us to ‘respect’ one another and social norms. He claims he has given powers to officials to make it so. But respec’ on the streets will mean something else. It will mean respec’ (in the sense of fawning obedience) towards the same officials who have the powers to make it so. And as we have ever fewer rights – perhaps not even existence – without their say-so, truculence, swagger and oppression by officials will become the norm.
This pretty much explains the political situation in a nutshell. Serial commenter Pommygranate is writing about Britain but the same could probably be said about almost any western country to varying degrees: the state simply bribes people to vote for a bigger state by making them dependents.
His solution is an interesting notion.
But turkeys will still not vote for Xmas. Some on the right of the blogosphere are calling for voting restrictions for those who depend on the state for a living. Draconian indeed, but it may be the only way round this particular Catch 22.
Things would have to get very bad for that to be politically possible but is is a good idea. I quite like the idea “you can either work for the state and live of other people’s money or you can vote, but not both”. Not a chance that would happen any time soon but it is a damn fine idea nevertheless. In truth I suspect many people would be happy to make that choice as voting is hardly some blessed sacrament. If so many people do not really care about liberty, are they really so attached to voting? I wonder.
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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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