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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One of the things we quite often tell each other here at Samizdata is that if a new government department is created, then whatever it is of, so to speak, is now in much deeper trouble than before. Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Social Security. Department of Trade and Industry. Those all mean that defence, social security, trade, industry, are all going to be in permanently short supply and in a bad way from now on.
So it was with considerable sadness that, in Victoria Street this afternoon, I encountered this:
Constitution look out. And be anxious also about justice, rights and democracy. Click on the above little snippet of the photo I took to get the bigger context. I do not know why exactly, but I particularly dislike the lower case letters for the acronym. How long has this particular acronym been in existence? Since June 12th 2003, apparently. I had never noticed it before. This dca resides in an office block of impeccable tedium called Selborne House, 54 Victoria Street, the boring side and towards the boring end, which is why I had not noticed it before.
As soon as I started snapping, and in fact after I had only taken the one rather blurry photo that I have here displayed, a security guard emerged to remonstrate with me. Do you have permission to take photographs? No, of course not, I said. You need permission, he said, to take photographs of this building. Is it illegal, I asked, to take photos of this building from the street? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Why? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Okay, got you the third time, but it seems very strange. You need permission to take photographs of this building. Yeah got you mate. I’m just telling you that you need permission to take photographs of this building. He was an African with a very African voice and an impressive physique, and frankly you do not want to get into complicated arguments with people who work for the government. One of my rules. So I did not press my case.
But I press it now. Is it actually illegal to take photographs of government buildings from the street? Probably, these days, it is, sort of, depending on which lawyer you talk to. But how, in the age of zoom lenses, do they propose to stop people doing this? And what will they do about photos like mine? Perhaps, if some aspect of the government sees this, we will have to take these pictures down. It is the vagueness and the intimidation of all this, as much as the rule itself, that I object to. There was a sense of lawlessnesss about the whole situation. I did not collide with the will of Parliament, just with some government diktat that went round Whitehall in about 1999.
Surely, before telling someone out in the street that they may not take photos, the security men should have known their legal rights and been able to assert them explicitly, instead of just repeating that you have to “get permission”. If it was fear of terrorism, why could he not have said?
Something about all this makes me think that my suspicions about how little protection the people in this building will actually provide for such things as justice, rights and democracy are all too justified.
I mean, what kind of a building has a sign at the front saying what it is, which it obviously wants you to read and be impressed by, but then says you can’t take photos of it? And in the case of this building, it seems particularly odd.
No, another one quite separate to the festivities in Iraq…
Chief Inspector of HM Prisons Anne Owers has declared that the national symbol of England, the Cross of St. George, is racist and must not be worn by prison guards in case it upsets Muslim prisoners.
And it seems Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, agrees, saying that the Red Cross of St. George was “an insensitive reminder of the Crusades”, adding: “…that it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with.”
Who is “we”? Perhaps Chris Doyle and his Council for Dhimmitude should spend more time getting Arabs to understand the British rather than the other way around.
I wonder how this organisation would react to calls for Muslims to abandon the crescent moon, the green flag and all other overly Muslim symbols as being offensive to some English people who may associate them with slavery? I mean, if it is ok for Muslims to be offended by English people in England wearing English symbols that remind some people of a series of wars that ended in 1300, how can anyone mind if I object to Muslims in England wearing Muslim symbols that I choose to associate with Muslim atrocities against English people which ended practically yesterday… i.e. when Lord Exmouth destroyed Algiers in 1816?
Completely daft of course but if we accept the logic of the likes of Anne Owers and Chris Doyle, it seems inevitable. Are they sure they want to go down that path?
I cannot tell you how happy this makes me:
Ms Spelman, who is shadow local government minister, said the public were increasingly taking their cue from Mr Paxman when dealing with politicians. She said the reception she received from the public while out canvassing in her West Midlands constituency was the most unfriendly she had ever experienced. The public had clearly lost trust in politicians and thought they were only “in it for themselves”, she added.
No, really? I wonder what gave them that impression…
Perhaps you think I am talking about Venezuela under the thuggish Chavez?
Nope. I am talking about Britain.
Mark Steyn observes that an ethnic group in the UK is making its presence felt in the most detailed of ways:
Alas, the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and “pig-related items” will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee’s box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
As Steyn goes on to write, what will certain Muslim groups demand next: that Her Majesty the Queen be forced to abdicate on the grounds that it is intolerable that a Head of State be both a woman and be bare-headed? Is there no concession, however silly, that the cringeing political classes are not willing to make?
I think it is fair to say that yes, we should not go out of our way to put about images that are designed – key qualification – to be offensive to Muslims, or indeed Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or for that matter atheists, agnostics or whatever. But it surely is a hallmark of a robustly tolerant and orderly society that people should not fly into a rage over something like a picture of Piglet on the side of a council worker’s coffee mug. If the Islamists cannot handle that, then what does it say about their own faith and moral fibre? I am an atheist and yet I don’t demand that people remove expressions such as “For God’s Sake” or “Heaven Help Us” from their vocabulary.
This story by the BBC lays out how public sector jobs have outpaced those in the domestic private sector for some time, a statement that is hardly likely to surprise regular visitors to Samizdata.
The public sector is creating new jobs at a faster rate than private business, according to the latest official data.
At the same time, UK productivity is now at its lowest level for 15 years, further figures from the Office for National Statistics showed.
Analysts have long argued that the government sector trails behind the wider economy in terms of productivity.
Overall productivity grew by 0.5% in the year to July, the lowest since 1990 and down from 2.5% a year earlier.
The ranks of the public sector expand and of course, the government is quite happy about this state of affairs, since people who work on the taxpayer’s pound are unlikely to be keen on a drastic rollback of said state. Every additional worker adds to this ratchet effect.
As the public sector balloons, the cost frequently falls on those least able to bear it, such as this retired lady who went to gaol rather than pay a council tax bill that has risen far faster than inflation.
People like this lady probably voted for that nice, vaguely Tory-looking Mr Blair back in 1997 and who knows, gave him a second and third chance in the subsequent elections. But the question for the Tories, now gathering for their annual conference in Blackpool this week, is how to credibly halt and roll back the public sector juggernaut and thus make room for sweeping tax cuts. If they cannot do so, then frankly there is no point to them.
UPDATE: Noted libertarian author Sean Gabb gave an excellent talk in Westminster tonight. One of his central themes is that we will not be able to push back the onslaught on our traditional institutions until we understand the nature of what the “enemy” is. A key point is class. Class analysis is not and should not be a tool only of collectivists. The NuLab “project” can be thought in class terms, and the relentless expansion of public sector employment can be seen as a way of entrenching that class and its hold on society.
In the last couple days I have written, and then deleted unpublished, several articles about the IRA’s much ballyhooed decommissioning (or ‘decommissioning’, depending on what you believe to be the truth) of its weapons. In short, I am not sure what I think.
To try and make head or tail of what is going on, I have been hanging out at Slugger O’Toole.
And I still cannot figure out if it is cause to celebrate or just another ploy.
I went out this afternoon to partake of coffee with a friend, and on my way to the coffee house, I stumbled upon a news story, and took some photos of it.
Who is that?, I asked. A Father 4 Justice. Oh, one of them.
Cheap, modern, democratised communications pervade this story, and may also influence the reporting of it. Note that the guy has a portable telephone, which would probably not have been the case a decade ago, and which must surely have influenced how the authorities set about dealing with him. I mean, if you were a copper, it might make a difference if the guy you were trying to arrest was supplying a running commentary of your every move to his pals. Who were recording everything he said, as they surely were.
Other photographers were already out in force by the time I got there.
The professionals were there in strength.
But, so were the amateurs, …
… me included, with my 10x zoom lens and automatic anti-shake focussing, in a camera that cost less than three hundred quid.
One of the features of modern government, or maybe that should be recent government, is that modern/recent government often likes simply to blot stories off the airwaves. I am not saying that they wanted to squash this one. But I am saying that if they had entertained any such censorious thoughts, although they might have got away with this ten years ago, now, they would have far less chance.
They would merely have handed the blogosphere a nice little scoop.
Tony Blair gave his annual Labour Party conference speech to the party faithful (and not-so-faithful) in Brighton this afternoon. He touched on a variety of issues but this series of quotes stands out and reminds us, as if we needed reminding, that this is one of the most illiberal governments since the Second World War:
We are trying to fight 21st century crime – ASB (anti-social behaviour) drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime – with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.
It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn’t mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first.
The emphasis is unmistakeable, however much Blair tries to soften the authortarian message with assurances about defending the rights of accused persons. Under this government, the traditional checks and balances of the Common Law, already eroded by the previous Tory government, have decayed at an accelerating pace. The right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, double-jepoardy, admissability of previous conviction details… the list of protections that have been wiped out or been eroded gets longer and longer.
Blair, being the crafty sonafabitch he is, understands how easy it is to portray we defenders of civil liberties as “soft on crime”, and so the point to stress must be to challenge the false choice he offers: be liberal or be safe.
Far from making us safer, playing fast and loose with the Common Law protections of the individual are having the opposite effect in the medium and long run. Weakening the right to self defence emboldens burglars. And dismantling traditional legal safeguards will undermine respect for the rule of law among the otherwise law-abiding, to no good effect. And yet when people are convicted of serious crimes like rape and burglary, the offenders often regain their liberty after a relatively brief period in jail, making no restitution to their victims.
Blair, and for that matter the Tories, have still not grasped the fact that it can and should be possible to crack down hard on crime while protecting our ancient liberties. Or is that too subtle for for our political classes to grasp? Is there some great nugget of wisdom in the Blair speech that I missed?
Those so inclined to read Blair’s speech in full can go here.
Just as the NHS is the darling of the British people, it will come as no surprise that its failures are increasingly covered by the tabloids, who have found that the crisis in health provision is a concern to those who have to rely on the state through no fault of their own. High taxes and expensive private health care denies choice to the majority of the population.
One of the latest (and incredible) stories to emerge is a lack of mops in Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow:
PATIENTS spent two days in “grotty” wards – after a hospital ran out of mops.
Cleaners at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow were left stunned after bosses told them of the shortage. And it took two working days for the hospital to replace all the mops.
A source at the closure-threatened hospital said: “We knew things were bad here but this takes the biscuit. Cleaners went to work on Wednesday and were told there were no mops and nothing could be done about it
Only scenes such as these could be caused by a state monopoly of health:
After replacement mops arrived on Thursday, a source revealed that hospital staff celebrated.
The insider revealed: “People were dancing around the boxes, singing and chanting, ‘We have mops.’ ” The source added: “No wonder our hospitals are riddled with MRSA superbugs and such like if they can’t get something as simple as this right.”
Only the NHS could ration health and mops!
One cannot say, in general, that there should be more
or less legislation: that is for governments to
decide. If the present volume of legislation is
causing problems at the various stages of the
legislative process – and all our evidence confirms
that this is so – the first requirement is not a
reduction in that volume, but improvements in the
process at those stages where it is under strain. The
kitchen should be big enough and properly equipped to
satisfy the legislative appetite.
– Making the Law, Hansard Society, 1993.
So much for separation of powers in the view of serious British parliamentarians.
We know that it took Ian Blair a day to find out that an innocent man was killed by his officers. We know that he foresees little difficulty in retraining ex-soldiers on short-term contracts to act as armed police officers, accelerating the trend towards paramilitary forces in British cities.
Sir Ian’s suggestion that soldiers could be used as firearm officers is specially controversial after the shooting in London in July of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber the day after the failed July 21 attacks.
A Scotland Yard spokesman later said that retiring servicemen were just one group with pre-existing skills that could be hired on short-term contracts to allow police officers to focus on core policing activities. “It is absolutely not about hiring in soldiers for use on London’s streets,” the spokesman said.
We also know that, infected by memes of ‘command and control’, he wishes to shortcircuit archaic constitutional liberties that protect the individual, reduce the accountability of the police and give them additional quasi-judicial powers:
Radical proposals for a new breed of supercop with on-the-spot powers to confiscate driving licences and issue Anti-Social Behaviour Orders have been put forward by Britain’s top policeman.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, whose proposals were backed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), admitted allowing officers to impose instant punishments could blur the line between police and magistrates…..
Director of civil rights group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, accused the Commissioner of behaving like Judge Dredd, the post-apocalyptic policeman-come-executioner in British comic 2000AD, whose catchphrase is “I am the law”.
Ian Blair stated that he thought of resigning (as if it were a particularly hard day at the office?) :
However, he told Mr Sakur he did not come “very close at all” to quitting. “Because the big job is to defend this country against terrorism and that’s what I’m here to do.” He added it would not have been right for the force, “the country or the city of London” for him to resign.
Yes it would.
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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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