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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Crime in Britain is a serious problem even though people will contest the figures and trends. The present government, no doubt aware that the issue remains a hot-button matter for voters, is determined to be seen to be doing something about it, however ineffectual.
In the process, rather than push for tougher sentencing and allowing people to defend themselves, the administration’s approach is to overturn centuries of checks and balances in the criminal law.
This is the latest:
Lord Falconer, the Constitutional Affairs Secretary, and Mike O’Brien, the solicitor general, are drawing up proposals to bypass the court process in as many as half the cases heard by magistrates every year.
Defendants who plead guilty to offences such as shoplifting, theft and criminal damage would have their punishment decided by the prosecutor, in consultation with the police, instead of going to court. Ministers believe that about half of the two million cases heard annually by magistrates could be handled in that way.
The plan would represent a revolution in the criminal justice system which has always been based on the principle that sentencing should be weighed in court, with the defence entering a plea in mitigation in response to the prosecution’s case.
The article goes on to say that the government aims to save money from this bracing and exciting new approach to law enforcement. Up to £350 million a year is spent on Legal Aid to court defendants appearing before magistrates. 350 million pounds is a large dollop of money although chickenfeed compared with what the government may end up spending – and we paying for – on ID cards. ID cards are likely, I confidently predict, to be largely useless in reducing crime, and I very much doubt that cutting public spending is a great priority of this government.
Andrew Zalotocky makes a useful point that we need to stop pretending that we have free speech in Britain, we do not. Time for a new description.
Regular Samizdata readers will probably be aware of the cases of Lynette Burrows and Iqbal Sacranie, who have both recently fallen foul of ‘hate speech’ legislation. The latter case prompted Guy Herbert to comment that “whatever it is, it is not freedom of expression”. I propose that we should call it ‘permitted speech’, in contrast to ‘free speech’.
For speech to be truly free it must include the right to say things that others would find grossly offensive. If a government uses the threat of prosecution to suppress speech that it considers offensive it is asserting that the people may only express the views that their rulers deem appropriate. No matter how lightly the government uses this power it is still establishing the principle that citizens do not have a right to speak freely, only a license to engage in the officially permitted forms of speech. America has ‘free speech’ and Britain has ‘permitted speech’.
Of course, the majority of people are not in the habit of expressing controversial views in the mass media and are therefore unlikely to feel immediately threatened by such restrictions. Even cases like that of the student who was arrested for calling a horse “gay” are likely to be seen as a joke rather than a demonstration of how criminalising the expression of certain opinions affects everybody. However, that just makes it even more important to explain why the right to freedom of speech must be defended, and to make clear that permitted speech is not the same thing at all.
We have recently had a run of posts about the new Conservative Party leader David Cameron. I think it is an understatement of the year to say that we contributors are underwhelmed by the gentleman thus far. The articles triggered off a good deal of commentary, not least from some belligerent self-styled New Labour supporters who openly admitted that Cameron is the most likely heir of the Blairite political tradtion, unlike Chancellor Gordon Brown.
In as much as I understand it aright, Blairism involves a number of elements: competent economic management at the macro level (no repeat of the disasters of yore under Wilson, Callaghan, etc); enthusiasm for blurring the boundaries of business and government; desire to micro-manage personal behaviours (training bad parents to be good parents); an obsession with modernity for its own sake; distrust, and in some cases, open dislike of British history and its tradtions; enthusiasm for transnational progressivism and its institutions such as the European Union and United Nations.
Now like all such things my view simplifies things a bit. But that is pretty much what we have got. We have a fairly reasonable economy – albeit one that has performed sluggishly of late – a fast-rising number of public sector workers; a raft of regulations governing the most minute aspects of personal behaviours, and so forth.
→ Continue reading: Stuck in the middle with you
The blessed UK government wants to pass a bill to reduce the amount of bureaucracy. This falls into the category of “government pledges to make water flow uphill” bracket, methinks. There have been dozens of widely touted events by governments (of both parties) to cut red tape and yet the amount of regulations that businesses and individuals have to cope with just grows like ivy up the side of a tree. The solution is not to pass another bill but to reverse the laws we have on the books already. Simple.
The actor Clint Eastwood once said that the problem with so many people in politics is that they tended to be folk like schoolteachers rather than people who have had to run a business and meet a payroll. I know what he means.
Nice and fair piece on the late Arthur Seldon, for years the editorial powerhouse at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The writer, Simon Heffer, is not always to my taste, given some of his Blimpishness, but he hits the mark here. One thing that stands out for me about Arthur is that he was not remotely interested in pandering to the short-term vagaries of opinion or attracting the plaudits of the rich and famous. He was also a representative of a style of liberalism going back to Gladstone, one which Britain is sorely in need of.
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?
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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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