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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Mr Clarke pointed to recent articles in the Guardian, Observer and the Independent newspapers which made “incorrect, tendentious and over-simplified” statements about Labour’s record on civil liberties.
– BBC Online
The pieces I’ve seen there were actually considerably more accurate than his rebuttals, and relied not at all on the circularity and misleading literalism that is the foundation of any Home Office statement. But maybe he’s worried about anyone else getting into the business of tendentiousness and over-simplification in relation to civil liberties. That’s his (and Mr Blair’s) job.
In my bitter and twisted way I often resent people being given good jobs when they have no clear talent for these jobs. Before going back to Bolton (I still have not set out) for my pointless course (pointless because I have not been “allocated 120 documented teaching hours” and therefore can not pass) I went over to a local supermarket to get a something to eat.
I started to read the Daily Telegraph, the leading Conservative newspaper in Britain and came upon an article by Mr Boris Johnson (Conservative party MP and journalist). The article was about the recent announcement of the closure of a car factory in Coventry in the English West Midlands. Fear not, argued Mr Johnson, for although this particular factory is closing, industry in general in the United Kingdom is doing well and unemployment is only 4% of the workforce.
The problem is that unemployment was 5% of the workforce in January (and I bet it has gone up since then). and industrial output has been falling for over a year. I actually agree with the thrust of Mr Johnson’s article (that we should not copy French regulations – although quite a lot of regulations have already come in over the years), but the careless attitude to facts irritates me.
Christopher Booker (of the Sunday Telegraph – the sister paper to the Daily Telegraph) regularly attacks journalists (including Mr Johnson) for getting the facts wrong (on the EU and other matters). But these journalists (and people in other walks of life) just carry on writing and speaking as if facts do not matter. How is it that people can get high paying and important jobs and just not bother about what they are doing? For example, Mr Johnson will have at least one paid ‘researcher’ – so it is not as if it would be a great effort for him to get the facts right (he just does not care – just as many other important people just do not care).
I know I have said it before, but it offends me that (for example) David Cameron (who has a degree in Politics Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University) talks as if he did not understand what the words “social justice” meant (i.e. the belief that income and wealth should be “distributed” by government in accordance with a pattern held to be just). Does he really believe in ‘social justice’? In which case he should not be a member of the Conservative party – let alone the leader of it. Does he not know what the words mean? But he is not Ian Duncan Smith (an ex leader of the Conservative party and ex-army man who also uses these words, but can not be blamed for not knowing what they mean) he has (as I said above) a degree in PPE from Oxford – how did he get the degree if he knows nothing about basic political philosophy? Or is he trying to trick people by using words he thinks they will like whilst not caring about the formal meaning of these words? In which case he is dishonest.
“Mr Cameron is not dishonest, he is a nice man and Mr Johnson is a lovely man”.
No Mr Cameron is not a ‘nice man’ – nice people do not call “most” (the exact word was “mostly”) of the members of another party “closet racists” without a very good reason. He was not referring to the genuinely racist neo-fascist British National Party (BNP), who pose no threat at all to the Tories, but rather the anti-European Union United Kingdom Independence Party, who do indeed take votes from the Tories. He also refused to apologize – and then got the party Chairman (arch plotter Francis Maude) to come out with even more smears.
And of course this is the same Mr Cameron of the PR work for Mr Green of Carlton television. When Mr Green was busy using shareholders money to try and prop “On Digital” Mr Cameron not only denied it was happening he said “if you print that I will have you sacked” to several financial journalists.
Mr Johnson is not a “lovely man” either – he cheats on his wife and then makes a little joke of it (in the hopes that he can get out of trouble). He also made great play of how anti-EU he was (when he stood for Parliament) – and then voted for the arch EU fanatic ‘Ken’ Clarke to be leader of the Conservative party (Mr Johnson then, I believe, supported Mr Cameron in the last leadership election).
These men have no honour and no ability, other than the ability to somehow get to the top.
“It is just because you are bitter and twisted Paul” – well that is true, but I still do not see why Britain has to have so many people in high positions who do not care about truth. It is as if the entire ruling elite (almost regardless of party) want to be the “heir to Blair” as Mr Cameron is supposed to have claimed to be.
Government spending, taxes and regulations are all on the rise in this country and have been for quite some time. This has happened many times before in history, but there is a odd thing about this time.
Most people seem to think that we have a ‘free market’ government, and that Mr Blair is very ‘pro-business’. I can understand people thinking the government is very close to some businessmen (the people who are connected politically), but there is a view that this is a general ‘free enterprise’ regime.
In the past Marxists held that various Labour governments were “really pro-capitalist” because these administrations were not as collectivist as Maxists would like. However, it is more than a few Marxists today. It does seem to be a common view that a state of affairs where way over 40% of the economy is spent by the state and what is left is controlled by a vast web of regulations is a ‘New Labour’ system where the government has turned its back on ‘social justice’ and is not doing enough to ‘help the poor’.
In the United States the wild spending Bush administration (responsible for the Medicare extension, “no child left behind” and the biggest increase in ‘entitlement’ spending since the days of L.B.J. and Richard Nixon) is held, by some people, to be ‘free market’. But then (like Nixon) Mr Bush is a Republican (who are supposed to be free market – even if they often not so) and has actually cut taxes (by some definitions).
In this country there should be no such confusion – the government is from the Labour party, and taxes (as well as spending and regulations) have been increased and are increasing – yet the view persists that this is somehow a pro free enterprise administration.
Many in the Conservative party seem deeply confused. For example Michael Gove MP writes in Forward! (the journal of Conservative Way Forward – I wonder if the people who control this journal know that ‘Forward’ [in various languages] was the name for first Marxist and then Fascist newspapers in 20th century Europe) that President Bush is not “concerned” enough about the “very poorest” and should have more of a “one nation social obligation” (supposedly John McCain would be more collectivist than George Bush and would, therefore, make a better President)
If this waffle means that President Bush should have spent even more money on the various health, education and welfare programs then Mr Gove knows nothing about what has been happening in the United States (but then Mr Gove has little interest in the United States, other than his desire that it should make war in various places). However, it is clear that Mr Gove (and his master Mr Cameron – the leader of the Conservative party) also think that there is not enough statism here.
The words ‘social justice’ are often used by some people in the Conservative party, as if there was no knowledge that basic point of being a Conservative is to oppose ‘social justice’ (statism – specifically the “redistribution of income and wealth”) and to support justice (private property – to each their own). The virtue of benevolence (what used to be called the virtue of charity) is indeed a good thing – but it is a different thing from the virtue of justice. It does no good (indeed it does vast harm) to confuse the concepts.
So we have a government that is greatly increasing the size and scope of the state and an opposition that seems to think that the government has not gone far enough. I suppose it might be claimed that Mr Gove and Mr Cameron are so deeply moved by the thought that there are poor people that they are willing to try anything, even “social justice”, in the misguided hope that it will reduce (rather than increase) poverty.
However, I am poor and I have not noted Mr Gove or Mr Cameron rushing to me and offering me a job or other aid. I know of no evidence that they have some deep feeling for the poor. At the base of their words does seem to be a belief that they well get more votes by talking and writing in this way – i.e. they think that even after the orgy of spending, taxes and regulations of the last few years, the people of this land are still in love with the “public services” and with “social justice”.
Perhaps they are right. As I have noted, many people do seem to think of Labour statism as ‘New Labour’ free enterprise. It is very odd.
This morning Andy Burnham MP was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that the government intends to make the British ID card an unrepealable fait accompli before the next general election:
I’m keen to see plenty of ID cards in circulation come the next election” […] The whole landscape will have changed by the time if – and it’s a big if – the Tories ever get anywhere near power.
This evening the NO2ID campaign launched its response:
I see that the Labour Party has decided to bash the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, using the image of a chameleon riding a bicycle. Ouch. I am not sure what is more damning: the chameleon image or the bike. Of course, this blog has already vented a fair deal about the supposed limitations of Cameron, so I will not tarry long on this point, other than to say that some of the fizz seems to have gone out of the Cameron charge of late, although it may be that he is simply waiting and watching while Blair, enmeshed in scandal and policy paralysis, meets his political Waterloo. I am still unconvinced whether Cameron will play a convincing Wellington, however.
Not content with bullying its own population, the British Government is now spending taxpayers’ money to export the culture of fear. This from the website of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to Romania:
With approximately 100 illegal immigrants deported from Britain to Romania every month and 250 Romanian asylum seekers registered last year in the UK, the Home Office and the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) decided to launch this publicity campaign in March 2005.
The existence of the IOM ‘Managing migration for the welfare of all’ is unwelcome news to me.
[…] But how does a state achieve the balance between the need for control of its borders and the need to facilitate movement across its borders for legitimate purposes such as trade, tourism, family reunion and education?
…asks the IOM, seeking to explain its purpose, but begging the question. The assumption is that states will naturally ban travel and trade (which is what ‘control their borders’ means) and then decide what are ‘legitimate purposes’ for permitted movements. But this is a convenient doctrine invented by states in the 20th century, a generalization of the conditions of the Tsarist police-state and the petty, nationalist bureaucracies that emerged in the 19th.
Where – let alone why – I choose to live or travel is no business of states, unless I am doing injury to their citizens. By going from place to place I do accept that places are different legally as well as culturally and physically. If there were no differences there would be no point in travel. But the natural condition of borders is openness. They are just lines on a map.
When the British left is worried about getting its vote out, a standard tool in the box is the scare story about “the extreme right” (meaning not us but the racist parties), being about to break through. This is not generally convincing nationwide, but that does not stop it being tried. Before the general election the New Statesman published an absurd story/slur that 1 in 5 Britons could vote far right – which spintastic headline involved counting UKIP, Veritas, and the English Nationalist Party as the much the same thing as the BNP and the National Front.
Now they are at it again for the local elections. Margaret Hodge, an impeccably New Labour minister, is quoted more or less everywhere today. (Though, now the story is more or less everywhere, she seems to have resiled from it somewhat. Strange that, a highly experienced, high profile minister mis-speaking in a set-piece interview for a national.)
As the BBC has it:
White working class voters are being “tempted” by the British National Party as they feel Labour is not listening to their concerns, a minister has said. Employment minister Margaret Hodge said the BNP could win seats in her Barking constituency in May’s council polls. She told the Sunday Telegraph many constituents were angry at the lack of housing and asylum seekers being housed in the area by inner London councils. The BNP said Labour were ignoring fears over “mass immigration” to the UK
You might think she is trying to have it both ways – and succeeding – by pretending to worry about xenophobia, while simultaneously acknowledging it, and suggesting it may be catered to. As anyone who had read the Labour general election manifesto might suppose it would be, what with half a page on e-borders, asylum and ID cards as immigration control.
But there is another possibility. The working-class voters of Barking and Dagenham might genuinely prefer the BNP. Not for its racist tendencies, but because they would rather vote for a less authoritarian variety of socialism than that offered by Mrs Hodge and her colleagues.
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in the Parliament Square area, and saw yet another weird demonstration by Fathers for Justice, this version of them now known as Real Fathers for Justice. It would appear that they were a day early with their over-the-top visual metaphor, but maybe that was how they wrong-footed the authorities.
Click to get a bigger picture.
I genuinely do not know whether these people are publicity geniuses or publicity maniacs, forcing their case upon everyone’s attention, or just annoying everyone and proving how much better it would be if they were never allowed near their children again.
Much depends on what you think of their website, which they did at least advertise quite effectively with this demo, although most of the news pictures seem not to have included the banner that I chanced upon. No doubt their hit rate has been going off the top of the page.
So far it looks to be long on flashy graphics and feuding, and short on arguing their case. But, on balance, I suspect that they are doing quite well. This is how you do things these days.
It does make you wonder, though, how clever the system is for stopping people planting bombs in such places. That part of London has gone insane with physical barriers, armed policemen by the hundred, and numerous law changes from inside the buildings being protected. Yet still, a few nutters with a banner and a lurid piece of religious sculpture seem to be able to clamber about at will, and remain there for a couple of hours while all the world takes photos.
I reckon Real Fathers for Justice are an al-Qaeda front. (Come to think of it, those Islamists are also pretty obsessional about keeping hold of their children in the event of divorce, aren’t they? It fits.)
Chronicling the poison spreading through the British system is a bizarre alienating experience. One feels like one of HP Lovecraft’s narrators. The horror is unnamable; we lack the words to describe what is happpening; but horror it is. The independent souls of individuals and institutions are being inexorably, ineluctably, supplanted by something dark and destructive, mirroring and subordinate to the great evil beneath Whitehall.
Look here, if you dare. You may wish to comment on that site.
Jim Murphy MP offers up a chorus in The Times’ Public Agenda section:
Have we done enough to ensure that the children of today are not left behind tomorrow? The answer is surely no.
One way of doing this is by empowering service users through offering a choice of service and providers.
Measuring people’s experience of their local environment, school or the criminal justice system -and acting on it – is also key to securing improvement. In measuring satisfaction, however, we must ensure that we don’t hear again only from the already socially mobilised.
So we have more to do.
But we can achieve this only through greater co-operation. That’s why I welcome the Future Services Network, a partnership between the National Consumer Council, Acevo and the CBI. An important development, it will help to ensure that citizens are at the heart of all policy. That’s all of the people all of the time.
No word of the incantation has discernable meaning. But the effect on this reader was to make him feel suddenly icy, hollowed-out; and the floor beneath him appeared to heave and writhe with snakes.
More official exhortation from the British state. This a poster on the underground.
Quite an interesting case, I think, because it isn’t the standard minatory approach: Do X as the Y agency demands, or get a big fine. This has the superficially laudable object of preventing children from bullying one another.
You may think (I do) that it ought to be unnecessary to urge people to protect children against bullies, and that this is not a suitable topic for state propaganda – that most adults could be counted on to intervene as a matter of ordinary humanity. But that reckons without the passivity and inanition fostered by 60 years of welfarism, and 30 years or so of ‘child protection’ doctrine under which speaking roughly to a little boy (let alone touching him), makes one the wickedest of criminals. You might have to work on people these days to get them to do something.
But plainly that isn’t the object of the exercise here. This ad doesn’t encourage people to stop bullying. For all the empty vapourings about ‘active citizenship’ (See here for an example of the Government propaganda on that topic that is churned out by notionally independent organisations), nothing may undermine the dependency culture. What this campaign is for is to get people to report incidents they think might be bullying to the authorities. There is a website and a subsidised telephone line for you to do so.
It is obviously impossible that this could help the unfortunate smaller boy. One has to conclude that isn’t really the point. The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is for to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision.
I don’t think that this is a deliberate, explicit project. I think it is a natural outcome of the cultural assumptions of those who commission such ads. We are not just supposed to love the surveillance camera, but to identify with it. The ideal citizen is a passive tool that reports back as requested; that fits in with the total bureaucracy’s demand for record.
For those of us – left and right – who still hold to the western liberal tradition of individual moral responsibility, this is a sickening, vertiginous conception of social life. The life of ants, not human beings. For those who are broadly conservative communitarians – right and left – who would like embedded institutions, direct relationships and personal responsibilities to dominate, likewise. The possibility that we may – all taken together – be in the minority should be a source of terror.
Secure beneath the watching eyes? Not in the slightest, me.
British policemen on appointment swear an oath:
I [SAY YOUR NAME] do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the Queen in the Office of Constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people; and that I will, to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property; and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to the law.
This morning sees the opening for business of the new Serious Organised Crime Agency – though it officially began existence on April 1st, it is no joke – whose spokesman was interviewed on the Today programme this morning.
He proudly stated that because its personnel will not take the Police Oath they would therefore be able to adopt ‘new and exciting’ methods. So what is to be sacrificed?
The same interview made clear that ‘once you are on their books you will be watched for life’.
Agents of SOCA will be empowered to operate without marking or uniform anywhere in the world. They are to be regarded as an intelligence service, permitted and encouraged to do anything within the law to (in the Home Office’s favourite phrase) ‘bear down on’ their targets. But the intelligence services don’t have powers of arrest or to compel cooperation. They cannot direct other law enforcement agencies or commandeer their facilities. The SOCA-man can.
Agents may operate in secret. And they may exercise any of the the powers of police, customs officers, revenue inspectors (though not bound by their rigorous code of impartiality and confidentiality either), or immigration officials. SOCA officials have the capacity to demand information from a vast variety of sources without judicial warrant, under statutes ranging from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to the Identity Cards Act 2006, and pass it on to whomsoever it chooses. It is a crime to fail to report to it a transaction you ought to have known was suspicious, even if you are a lawyer and asked to advise a client on a transaction. It can deputise – ‘designate’ – people freely to exercise its powers, and form ad hoc investigation teams it is an offence to obstruct. ‘Anything within the law’ is getting to be a very broad category indeed.
This story from the BBC is beyond parody:
Television viewers will have a say in the price of the licence fee, with the government conducting research before it sets the cost for the next decade.
Each licence will go up to £131.50 on Saturday, and the BBC has requested future rises of 2.3% above inflation.
The public’s views would have “a material impact” on the final sums, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said.
How jolly nice of our political equivalent of a head girl at school to let us unwashed plebs have some input into how much we get to pay for a service that, er, ahem, we have to pay for regardless of whether we watch it or not.
Seriously, though, this is the sort of thing one might expect of life in the former Soviet Union, where workers at the local tractor plant were urged to suggest ways to make the machines work even better down at the local collective farm.
Well, Ms Jowell might as well know what my preferred size of a licence fee is: zero.
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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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