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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Something extremely interesting has just been reported on Newsnight.
David Cameron has apparently been saying for some time now (but I missed it until now) that he is against “opposition for opposition’s sake” and that the Conservatives may well be voting for the Government’s latest education reforms. David Cameron is and has for some time been the Conservative spokesman on education, and he seems to be handling the Conservative response to these proposals.
Yesterday I did a posting concerning Cameron, and the consensus among the Samizdata commentariat was that nobody knew what Cameron stood for, or what any of his ideas might be. But I think what we have here is an idea of great importance. Maybe not an especially original one, and long overdue, but extremely potent mevertheless.
The Conservative Opposition has spent the last decade opposing everything that the Government has done, a process which I particularly associate with William Hague, but which his successors have not fundamentally altered. And since the Government has been relentlessly “triangulating” – i.e. stealing whichever Conservative policies they think are popular or which they think will eventually prove popular because they think that they will in the meantime work – this has meant the Conservatives suffering from a permanent, yet self-imposed, philosophical incoherence.
One moment the Conservatives would be saying that something or other that the Government was talking about should be more market-oriented. A moment later, some other Government initiative that was more market-oriented would be complained about. Complained about, as Cameron has apparently said, for the sake of complaining. One moment the Government was being not tough enough on terrorists, the next moment too tough, for doing pretty much what the Conservatives had just said they should do in another context. This is not opposition, so much as opposition-ism. It says: whatever they do is wrong! Never mind why. Never mind what we would do, or what we really think of it. Denounce it! We just scrape up whatever mud we can find on the floor and chuck it at them. No wonder the Conservatives have won parliamentary battle after parliamentary battle, but have been slaughtered again and again in the electoral war.
What would the Conservatives do, if they were the Government? For the last ten years, they have offered no sort of answer. And for this reason, there has been, in the competitive sense, no opposition, because no alternative Government that it made sense to even consider voting for. All anyone knew about the Conservatives was that they did not like the Government. Big surprise. But that is not a policy; it is a mere emotion. It has condemned the Conservatives to relentless irrelevance and unending public ridicule.
Now, if this “Cameron doctrine” is what it appears to be, and more to the point, if it goes into action right across the board, with David Cameron imposing it across the board in his capacity as Conservative Leader, New Labour will finally face what you might call a New Nightmare.
Take these education reforms. Blair says they are intended to make schools more independent and self-governed, and less controlled by local authorities. This is very Conservative friendly stuff, and not at all Labour friendly. There is a good chance that the massed ranks of Labour MPs will not vote for these reforms in nearly sufficient numbers, but that a more unified Conservative Party will see the reforms through nevertheless. This will split the Labour Party from top to bottom. We are doing Conservative policy! And with Conservative help! And in spite of our core beliefs!
Repeat that procedure every time Blair presents one of his reforms, but oppose ferociously when they resort to old fashioned, Old Labour, collectivism, and suddenly it is a new Parliamentary ball game.
It gets worse for Labour. In the electorate as a whole, the question will start to be asked: if we already have a Government that does Conservative things, despite its own supporters, and if that is what that nice Mr Blair thinks should be done, then does it not make sense to vote for the real thing, and vote in a real Conservative Government?
This is a tactical switch that the Conservatives should, from the purely political and competitive point of view, have done years ago. Finally, they have done it.
Or then again, maybe they have not. Cameron might not win the Conservative Leadership. Davies might go back to crass oppositionism. Cameron may win, but it may turn out that “opposition for opposition’s sake” was just a nice sounding phrase to win him the job, and he will then forget about it and carry on with the mud slinging.
But, this might just be a political turning point.
An Algerian man was arrested and put on trial in Belfast. We hope the evidence they have is of more substance than the mere presence of 25 disks of downloaded information on explosives. If that were ever to become a definition of crime in and of itself, I fear every technically inclined 14 year old in the Anglosphere would soon be imprisoned.
The defendant was living not far from a neighborhood controlled by Protestant Paramilitaries, most likely due to the presence of cheap housing.
How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent?
Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story.
But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude � honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which � is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron’s type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one’s best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate.
The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job. → Continue reading: Posh politicians and not-so-posh politicians who actually do things
Now I am a great believer that any company should be at liberty to hire or not hire anyone they damn well please for any reason whatsoever (contingent on the terms of a freely agreed employment contract, of course), regardless of whether or not the reasons are sensible or utterly capricious.
So when a tax funded body like the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service says…
Members of the British National Party should not apply for jobs in the fire service as there is no place for racists or bigots, a chief fire officer said in a report released today. Martin Chapman, Dorset Fire and Rescue chief fire officer, said: “Membership of the BNP is not itself unlawful, but its core values are considered to be incompatible with those of the fire authority and the role of the fire and rescue service.”
… I do not automatically think this is a bad thing. I also do not much care for bigots and racists and personally I would not hire a member of the BNP either. But then I would also not hire a communist, a socialist, an islamist or all manner of other folks, simply on the basis that I find their beliefs monstrous and therefore have no wish to enrich them.
But I would like to get some clarification on a few points from the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, seeing as they are a public sector body… would they take a similar position for regarding someone who was a communist or who advocates other forms of violence enforced collectivism, or is only trying to impose national socialism beyond the pale? What about someone who supports radical Islamist organisations that what to impose Sharia? How about members of Sinn Fein, the political wing of an outfit that has murdered thousands of people? Also, are members of the neo-fascist BNP now going to be permitted to stop paying for the Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, or is their money still welcome?
Just asking.
I am not exactly a fan of David Cameron, the 39-year-old (same as yours truly) who won a crushing majority of votes for the Tory leadership from fellow MPs. Yes, he is obviously bright, telegenic, youngish, and might have appeal outside the Tory ranks, but er, could we actually find out what he actually believes in, please?
What on earth does this mean, for example:
Slipping into the language of the street, Eton and Oxford-educated Conservative leadership hopeful David Cameron urged radio listeners on Friday to “keep it real”.
Huh? The rest of the Reuters article offers zero illumination. Now, I realise that expecting politicians to set out their stall in full has its risks. As a regular commenter, Verity, put it the other day, if a politician has a goodish idea, the chances are that Blair will steal it, or at least pretend to copy the policy (what happens in reality is a bit different). Politics is rather like business in that regard.
Meanwhile, Clive Davis wonders whatever happened to meritocracy in politics?
Just to remind everyone that today is a rather special Trafalgar Day.
Nicely done, Horatio.
It never takes more than a week or two to have my dislike for the political class resoundingly reinforced yet again.
In particular, those who wish to see a Tory government rescue our civil liberties from the predations of New Labour would do well to read this and this and then ask themselves why they think voting for these people is going to make the slightest bit of difference when push comes to shove.
Not content to rest on their laurels after defending the British people from the menace of pedestrians, our political masters have ensured that this “Freedom of Information” nonsense will not be allowed to stand in the way of confronting that most implacable threat to our way of life… this will put the cat amongst the pigeons! (sorry)
The UK government is making it possible — ahhhhh! – to let new fathers take three months’ paid leave off work. How nice. How generous. How could the heartless, flinty Gradgrinds like we libertarian free-marketeers oppose such a fine and dandy state of affairs?
You know the answer. The answer of course is that the cost of paying fathers paternity leave will be born by the employers, and hit small businesses disproportionately hard, as well as those employees who either through personal choice or circumstance do not, or choose not, to have children. And of course the whole issue ignores those subversive capitalist types who happen to be self-employed. What are they supposed to do, exactly?
My father (ex-RAF and farmer for 40+ years) would be chortling out loud at being told, just as the wheat harvest was about to start, that my birth would let him take three months off, far away from the combine harvester, plough and cattle shed. Perhaps we should start compiling a list of which Labour Party MPs have ever run a business from scratch and had to meet a payroll? I bet the list is short.
If our political masters were really wise on this issue, they would cut the overall burden of tax, so that parents could have a higher post-tax income with which to make decisions about family life that suit their own circumstances. Why is such a simple approach so difficult? (And by the way, I expectantly await what the Tory leadership candidates say about this).
Sorry about the title, a tad misleading…
There was an interesting article on the Adam Smith Institute blog yesterday highlighting the results of a YouGov poll which was examining people’s attitudes to wealth, wealth creators and business generally. Whilst I tend not to put too much stock in polls, this does makes quite encouraging reading.
Kenneth Clarke, the former British finance minister of the 1990s and most pro-EU Tory candidate in that party’s race for the leadership, has dropped out of the race. That leaves David Davis marginally ahead of the centrish David Cameron and Liam Fox. My money, for what it is worth, is on Davis to win, but I cannot find much enthusiasm for any of the candidates, to be honest. Tory leadership contests seem to occur with all the frequency of signal failures on the Tube during the rush-hour. There is a sort of wearying regularity about them.
I share the sentiments of this article about the lack of policy content from the candidates thus far. The only positive thing about the Tories, it seems, is their ability to keep the numerous global floods, earthquakes and bird-borne plagues off the front pages of parts of the media. In a way, the feat is quite incredible.
The scale of identity theft in Britain as revealed in this story ought to be shocking, but it does not entirely surprise me. My other half used to work in the credit card industry and she has plenty of stories to tell about how careless people are in throwing out old credit card bills and other documents. The slack attitude many people adopt boggles the mind.
Of course, when our lovely government gives a grateful nation the new ID card, all be well and we will not have to worry about such stuff anymore. Er, oh, wait a minute…
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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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