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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Blair’s speech echoed Hayek’s warnings that managerialism bypasses the checks and balances designed to prevent the erosion of liberty and miscarriages of justice. Like any good communitarian, the Prime Minister defined liberty as the balance between freedom and security, a political equation that is often on the lips of our tyrannous leaders. The fragile institutions of criminal justice and the common law were dismissed with disdain:
The theory is basically treating Britain as if it were in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The practice however takes place in a post-war, modern, culturally and socially diverse, globalised society and economy at the beginning of the 21st century. The old civic and family bonds have been loosened. The scale, organisation, nature of modern crime makes the traditional processes simply too cumbersome, too remote from reality to be effective…
Yes, in theory, that is what is supposed to happen through the traditional court processes. In practice it doesn’t. We are fighting 21st crime with 19th century methods.
Blair criticises the traditional court system for protecting the accused and takes great pride in “reversing the burden of proof”. To deal with the communally defined ‘anti-social behaviour’, the tool of social engineering is summary justice with a right of appeal, presumably to the same inefficient, cumbersome courts that, according to our Prime Minister, do not work in the first place.
Blair and New Labour take pride in smashing the checks and balances which protect civil liberties in this country. If you have misunderstood the man and still believe that he is located in the liberal tradition as some of the comrades do, think again. His first instinct is order, social and authoritarian, covenanted by the community and upheld through the state, in a mantra of rights and responsibilities, derived from Hobbes and cemented by Blair’s favourite socialist, R H Tawney.
Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community. It is about the consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant that we have with one another.
More grandly, it is the answer to the most fundamental question of all in politics which is: how do we live together? From the theorists of the Roman state to its fullest expression in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the central question of political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state?
Legal stricture will never be enough. Respect cannot, in the end, be conjured through legislation. Government can provide resources and powers. It can do its best to ensure that wrong-doing is detected, that its powers against offenders are suitable, that its systems are expeditious and its enforcement strong. And the British system, like others, in the modern world, has not been good enough against these standards.
Despite the loathsome outcome of this campaign and the manifold injustices that will result, one can pity Blair as an agent who follows the path laid out before him. The transition from a high-trust society to a low-trust society is a consequence of the welfare state and the expansion of moral dependency on the part of many individuals. The state lacks the tools to remedy and offset the pernicious consequences of its systems. It returns to the mindset that has served it so well: controls, shortcuts and arbitrary regulations designed to solve the defined problems. If existing systems like the courts are outside the executive control, they are bypassed for more malleable solutions.
Blair treads the path that has been written for him.
Britain’s Tony Blair has taken a further step in his self-declared role of father, and quite possibly mother, of the nation. He wants to introduce new laws to regulate anti-social, yobbish behaviour and introduce training (this is not a joke) for particularly wayward parents.
Given the recent Orwellian remarks of Lord Gould, this all makes perfect sense. Blair and his ilk have no conception of civil society as a network of individuals, mediated via institutions, evolving slowly across time. He has no idea of how in such a society, values of self-restraint, civility towards others, concern for the weak, can be internalised rather than be handed down by dictat.
This is not to say that yobbery, uncouthness, family breakdown and other pathologies are not serious problems. Of course they are. Ask anyone who has walked through a major UK city centre on a Friday evening. There is now a large and impressive body of work pointing to both the problems and some possible solutions in this regard. (Go and read Theodore Dalrymple or James Bartholomew, for instance). What these books and other studies have in common is an understanding that the top-down model of social reform, with its legions of officials, laws, agencies and so forth, has manifestly failed. There is little prospect of further efforts in this mould working either. Yet for Blair and so many others – including Tory leader David Cameron no doubt – problems of yobbery or mass drunkeness call for an “top-down” set of “solutions”. All the while the behaviours that are crimes, such as murder, burglary and violence, are frequently met with police indifference or punished only haphazardly by the courts. The law turns topsy-turvy.
It may amaze some readers to think that Blair was once thought of as a highly intelligent politician back in the mid-1990s, and there is no doubt that to this day, he remains – on tactics at least – one of the most astute political figures of modern times. In terms of his grasp of human nature, however, he presents a pitiable sight as he grasps for that “eye-catching” gesture.
This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an ‘icon of Britain’ via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.
The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain…
The Telegraph reports that the government has spent £1 million on a website inviting public nominations for English national icons. At time of writing, this vital cultural event, masterminded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is down, though you would think you could get quite a decent service-level contract for one… million… pounds. If by the time you read this it is up again, then look here for it.
Now you may say this is utterly fatuous. Why should we have a dcms at all? (Yes, that’s right: lower case initials in the logo. It is modern, you know.)
I beg to differ. This is an opportunity for the English people to express themselves and send a signal to the world about how seriously we take our national identity and native religions, and how much we value this Government’s intention to foster them. The last Census recorded nearly 400,000 Jedi in the UK. It is time for them to speak again.
The loathsome Philip Gould, a man who is like something out of Orwell’s 1984, has written a letter to the Guardian pointing out what Tory Blair David Cameron has made obvious over the last few days: New Labour’s ideology of regulatory statism and the incremental replacement of several rights based civil society with democratic omni-political interactions has completely won the argument amongst the professional political classes. David Cameron’s announcements of ‘belief’ in the purest form of socialism in Britain (the National Health Service) and his effortless assumption that it is the role of politicians and the state to tell companies what choices of food they may offer to customers to select from are not ‘clever politics’ but rather the total whimpering surrender to the ideology of Blairism. As Philip Gould points out, his side has won and won utterly. The entire meta-context within which political debate goes on has been conceded by the Tories, dooming them to always fight on ground of their ‘enemies’ choosing.
I have never been more certain that my conviction is correct that liberty, individuality and several rights can only be fought for outside the democratic political process. Although being in office matters to people like Philip Gould, to the rest of us the truth is we might as well be living in a one party state.
New Labour has indeed won in Westminster, regardless of who wins the next election, but of course as Gould cannot imagine anything beyond politics, there is still a civil society out there that needs to be defended against people like him and you cannot do that by voting for different sections of the political monoculture. I hope his article will be read by many of the remaining Conservative activists who are still quixotically clinging to the absurdity that a Cameron victory would change anything. To fight Tony Blairism first we have to destroy Tory Blairism. If you care anything for liberty and opposing the growth of a panoptic pooled database regulatory state, the worst thing you can do is vote for a Blairite like David Cameron and his intellectually defeated political party.
There are some things that most people know (or think they know) about the British book trade. For example that books are very expensive compared to some other places, and that buying a paperback can be unwise – due to the system of “perfect binding” where the pages are just stuck on to the spine, so they fall out if one actually reads the book a few times.
However, I do not wish to examine such points here. I wish to point out the simple leftism of the book trade. This may seem a predictable whine from a libertarian like me, but it is more than a whine.
Recently I read a review of Robert Conquest’s Dragons of Expectation in The Economist.
The review claimed that Conquest did not understand that his side now dominated the world. If by “his side” the review meant anti-Marxism, this domination does not seem to be in evidence in universities (or, in terms of attitudes, in most of the electronic media and much of the print media in the Western world – let alone in such places as Latin American governments), but let us leave that aside.
I went to bookshop after bookshop in search of Robert Conquest’s work. Borders, Waterstones, W.H. Smith – you name the shop, no book.
“But you could order the book or get via the internet” – but why should I have to?
Why should a work by the leading historian of Soviet Russia (the author of “The Terror” and other works) not be found on the shelves, so that I can have a look at it and decide whether I want to buy it? In fact none of Robert Conquest’s works were on the shelves of the bookshops of whatever town I happened to be in (London, Bolton, Manchester, York, Kettering – it did not matter what town). And remember Robert Conquest is not a radical libertarian – he is just a historian who did more than any other to expose the crimes of the Marxists.
Take the example of Borders in York – wall to wall Noam Chomsky. Literally wall to wall – a whole shelf full of his political writings (not his writings on the basis of language) and books on the next shelf to. And (of course) the endless works of M. Moore, and all the rest of the ‘death to Bush’ crowd.
Now I am no fan of President Bush, he has gone along with greater increases in domestic government spending than any President since Richard Nixon (and Mr Nixon had the excuse of a Democratic party controlled Congress). But the legion of Bush haters one finds in the book shops do not attack ‘No Child Left Behind’ or the Medicare extension or all the rest of the wild spending.
When they attack his foreign policy they do not understand that it is (for better or worse) a continuation of the policy of such men as President Wilson – i.e. an effort to impose democracy overseas. They present the whole policy as an effort to line the pockets of business contractors – or to impose Christianity in place of Islam. And when the authors discuss domestic policy they present a mythical anti-Welfare State pro-free enterprise President Bush.
Just as works on British politics present a free enterprise Mr Blair – rather than the real one of higher taxes, higher government spending and more regulations.
“Such ideas may be absurd, but they are the books that sell and book stores are in business to make a profit”.
How do they know that these will be the only books that will sell when they hardly ever advertise anti-statist books? Certainly there will sometimes be a promotion for an anti-statist book (such as the recent Mao: The Unknown Story – although this work seems to blame Mao as a man, rather than socialism as a doctrine for what happened in China), but this is very rare.
If one sees the notice “We Recommend” or “We Highly Recommend” on or near a book, it is a fairly safe bet that the book is bad – full of factual errors and written by someone who would like to nationalize the bookshop and send its shareholders to the death camps [editors note: there are solutions to this].
I am not even sure that such books do sell well. After all, if this so, who does one see (every sale time) great piles of leftist books on sale at half price (or less). I say again, how do the book shop people know that British people do not want to buy anti-leftist books in economics, history, philosophy and politics when such books are hardly ever promoted and are mostly simply not on the shelves?
A person who comes into a bookshop (rather than buys over the internet) is there to see what sort of books are about in areas of knowledge that he is interested in. To physically touch and look at these books – to see what he might like to buy (rather than just trust reviews). And yet a person who entered a British bookshop would encounter (for example) in economics just establishment Keynesianism (with all the standard absurdities, such as the doctrine that an increase in government spending financed by credit expansion boasts long term income) and Marxist (or Marxiod) attacks on Keynesianism. Chicago school works are very rare and Austrian school works virtually non-existent.
The “passing trade” – the people (like me) who often go into book shops to look at books, just can not find works we want to buy. Someone who is not committed politically will find very little in British book shops to challenge the left and open new possibilities to him. And someone who already knows what he wants may as well go straight to the internet (after all the books are not going to be in the bookshop).
“Anti-statist books do not sell” – really? Or is it that British bookshops are dominated by people educated in the universities and these universities are strongholds of the left?
There will be token non-leftist books in the bookshops – but the weight of the left is overwhelming, and I very much doubt that he it has much to do with what sells.
I have been a bit more tolerant than my Samizdatista comrades about the populist postures adopted by nice Mr Cameron. And being a Conservative Party member, it is me that has to be tolerant, after all. A certain sainted editor has been consistent in urging people not to vote for a long, long time, so a Tory leader really need not care what Perry thinks…
But this has brought me up short. OK, it is speculative bluster about what might be considered by a working party. But how are the ‘liberal values’, that Cameron has made so much of, served by forced labour?
The Tories continue to reinforce my view that they are just Labour-lite by saying they ‘believe’ in the socialist National Health Service. So presumably David Cameron will soon want to extend this wonderful thing that he ‘believes in’ to other areas of the economy. If command economics are the best way to provide something as important as healthcare, why is that not also the best way to build cars, run banks, make computers etc.? Surely if the Tory party believes socialism works, why are they not planning to introduce it more widely? Is this what comes next?
They talk in terms of how they can be trusted to ‘run’ the economy, as if the economy was something that requires politicians to function. And what is the ‘legacy of Thatcher’ if not the move away from a more command oriented economy? Well Cameron says he is breaking with that too.
So, if the Tories are a party which can appoint Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard as leader, probably the only man in British politics today even more authoritarian than David Blunklett, then clearly voting Tory to protect civil liberties from the predations of Blairism is utterly pointless (sort of like suicide for fear of death)…
…and now we see they are also a party which followed with a new leader who is promising to adopt Blairite economic policies, it does not really matter a whole lot which of those two parties actually end up in 10 Downing Street, does it?
Why vote for Tory Blairism when you can vote for the real thing, Tony Blairism?
Now that David Cameron has revealed to all but the most blinkered that he is just another social democrat who shares 99% of Tony Blair’s beliefs, I look forward to seeing how this will be spun by his apologists. No doubt they will still say Cameron’s utterances are just a cunning plan to get the Tories into office by stealing Labour’s best ideas but really he will rescue us from encroaching regulatory statism and socialist monstrosities like the dismal National Health Service. Oh sure, and how will that work, exactly?
If your answer to my remarks is still “but we need to get them into office to replace the dreadful Blair”, tell me why that would make any difference even if it was true? What is the point in replacing Blair with someone who is so similar ideologically? Is trivial window dressing like removing Tory MEP’s from the preposterous EPP-ED grouping really enough to buy your vote when he is falling over himself to pledge his loyalty to regulatory interventionist government and expanding the role of the state?
If you want to oppose Blair via The System, for goodness sake stop thinking about the Tory party. If you cannot kick your addiction to democratic empowerment fantasies, at least vote UKIP or even LibDem (who at least are less authoritarian on alleged security issues), but please do not reward the Tory party for becoming NuLabour with a Henley accent if you ever want to see the end of Blair-ism and its poison legacy.
Some time ago I referred to statistics on reported crimes in the UK, which prompted a rather heated discussion (that’s putting it mildly, ed) about the value of such numbers, given the obvious difficulties in knowing whether reporting of crimes gives an accurate picture of just how bad the situation really is. The British Crime Survey (BCS) which takes the public’s impressions of the impact of crime through interviews with thousands of people, can sometimes give a quite different picture.
This story shows that reports of armed violence are on the rise, and also contains data showing that experiences of crime have also gone up. A rather sobering set of numbers with which to start the New Year.
Commenting on the previous posting, RAB says:
Being very non technical, I don’t know how to start a thread, but there is a good leader in the Telegraph today on the 800 million quids worth of government non jobs Bliar and co have created. If someone would like to start one, I’m sure Verity, for one, would have a field day!
It is not technology you lack, RAB; it is the right to do postings on Samizdata. But your point is a good one, I think, even though personally I loathe the word “Bliar”, because name-calling is the language of loser propagandists, I think.
But getting back to that 800 million quid’s worth of government jobbery (as this kind of thing used actually to be called), I think RAB is right to ask us to post about this, and presumably he is referring to this:
There you will see page after page of vacancies on the state payroll: outreach workers, diversity co-ordinators, policy advisers, liaison officers. Some of them come with six-figure salaries. Indeed, the average annual pay for the posts advertised in Guardian Society this year is £10,000 higher than the mean private sector wage.
I seem to recall Richard Littlejohn writing about this years ago, in a book. But that was then (i.e. 1995). This is now.
All governments start out reasonably honest (I speak comparatively), but get more corrupt as they persist, and as the army of camp followers finds its way around and finds out where all the treasure is to be found and how to dig it out and take possession of it. Well, I reckon a big clear out of this lot may now be due any general election now. If not at the next, then pretty soon. → Continue reading: Snouts in the trough
David Cameron, newly elected leader of the Tories, has got off to a wonderful start, as I am sure readers will agree. He has signed up Sir Bob “give us yer fokkin’ money” Geldof to advise on world poverty; Zak Goldsmith, the environmentalist, has been also approached to advise on how to save the planet, and in a recent masterstroke, Oliver Letwin, a Tory MP, opined that the Tories should be concerned with redistributing wealth. Splendid. I am sure the sort of voters who deserted the Conservatives in 1997 and failed to return will be thrilled at this embrace of what looks like a sort of social democratic touchy-feely product by the Wonder Boy of Notting Hill. Or again, they may not.
All that remains is for Cameron to steal Labour’s old Clause Four promising nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then on to victory!
Meanwhile, Tim Worstall is similarly underwhelmed by Cameron.
Apologies for my sarcasm. Been a long day in the office.
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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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