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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There is yet more evidence of the delusional mind set of those who say David Cameron’s utterances are just a deception to get into office so not to worry, he is really in favour of limited government and real-world economics. The truth is Cameron is New Labour through and through and those who want an unbroken series of regulatory statist policies from Blair’s government to continue should have no hesitation voting for the Tories.
But in our legitimate desire to drive out government waste and improve public sector efficiency, we have sometimes risked giving the impression that we see those who work in the public sector as burdens on the state rather than dedicated professionals who work hard to improve the quality of people’s lives.
So Cameron is now working hard to secure the public sector vote and he most surely deserves it as they need fear no loss of influence under him compared to Tony Blair.
Dedicated professionals, eh? You mean the people responsible for 95% of days lost to strikes in the UK1? The almost un-sackable people who get better pensions that people who work in the productive sector? The people who for some reason seem to get ‘sick’ far more often than people in the private sector?
A vote for the Tory party is a vote for Blairism, pure and simple. The Tories really really needs to be destroyed so that we can get a worthwhile opposition party.
1 = Not that I am really complaining… I would like 90% of Britain’s public sector to go on strike permanently, even if we still have to pay for them, so that people can discover that life will go on without them.
Let it never be said Samizdata does not listen to its public. I am sure the sainted editors would prefer me to add at this point that we reserve the right, however, to listen carelessly and ignore your views if it suits us. Be that as it may, I was at the Adam Smith Institute’s Tax Freedom Day celebrations this evening, and one of our readers, having said some very complimentary things, made a rather brilliant suggestion that I am now going to steal.
Inflation, we are told, is at a long-term low, because of that nice Mr Brown’s prudence. My friend points out however, that part of Mr Brown’s prudence has been prudently to exclude from many of his more interesting taxation devices, the items forming the Retail Price Index. He proposes a new index, of all those items whose prices the Chancellor controls because their consumer price is largely duty, or because they are practical necessities for most people whose price is directly set by the government. The latter are excluded from RPI by definition and the (plausible) suggestion is that such prices have risen very fast indeed.
The Gordon Adjusted Price (“GAP”) index would explain where your money goes, and why so many people find their pockets emptier despite notionally higher incomes and low inflation. It might make visible some of those hidden taxes. I have a hunch that the cost of living is actually falling in Britain, but the cost of government more than takes up the slack. Is it true? The GAP might provide a measure.
In the latest police anti-terrorist ‘swoop’ in which a man was shot (though not killed this time), there now seems to be some question of whether or not initial reports of a chemical weapons ‘factory’ and ‘hazardous materials’ being found have any truth to them at all. Moreover the highly dubious sounding report yesterday indicating the man who was shot was actually shot not by police but by his own brother is being denied by the lawyers of the injured man.
However at this stage all the information coming out is from the two least reliable sources imaginable, namely the lawyers for the people arrested (i.e. people who are paid to lie on behalf of their clients) and the police (i.e. an institution with a track record of lying about the facts when they shoot someone). As a result it is probably best to wait a while before drawing too many conclusions about what really happened and whether or not the guys arrested are guilty of anything more than being Muslims.
Whilst I would be delighted if the anti-terrorist squad had broken up an Al-Qaeda cell in the UK, the bitter experience of the Jean de Menezes killing and subsequent criminal conspiracy to cover up the facts, not to mention the scandalous Harry Stanley killing, means that the police and entire structure within which they operate cannot be trusted to tell the truth, it is only clear physical evidence that can show us what to believe.
A huge contingent of police and MI5 officers descended on a London house overnight and arrested its occupants who are suspected of developing a chemical bomb to use in a terrorist attack. One suspect was shot in the shoulder during the raid.
Meanwhile in Toronto, Canada, twelve men have been arrested in a raid where the suspects were thought to be assembling an ammonium nitrate bomb, having allegedly assembled three tonnes of the stuff.
Driving through Adelaide this morning, I idly turned my radio on, not something I normally do. But I happened to hear the South Australian police minister explaining to a couple of bemused hosts that the government here had made the possession of crossbows illegal. The radio hosts were bemused, not so much because of yet another assault on the tattered remains of Australian liberty, but because crossbows hardly seem like a problem hereabouts. It is not like you see gangs of youths roaming the streets with crossbows, after all.
The minister explained that there was a case in New South Wales a few years back and the government was keen to clear up ‘loose ends’. Apparently you can still possess one if you can prove you have a ‘lawful use’ for it; the Australian notion of liberty is that you are free as long as you enjoy the good grace of the powers that be.
Youths are hardly likely to be carrying crossbows, but they may well be carrying knives. I read this morning’s Daily Telegraph and came across an op-ed calling for a crackdown on knives, which are becoming a serious problem. Going by some of the comments to that op-ed, it’s a fairly popular idea with the ‘Torygraph’s’ readers as well. To be fair, Shaun Bailey does point the finger at the weakness of the criminal justice system, which is causing young people to take to knife ownership with such enthusiasm.
However, he also blames ‘culture’, which sounds to me like the old leftist excuse whenever someone did the wrong thing; that ‘society is to blame’.
We need to look at the material that youngsters have rammed down their throats every day. Magazines such as Zoo, Nuts and MaxPower. Programmes and films such as World Wrestling Entertainment, Get Rich or Die Trying, and MTV, City Gangster flicks and the whole music culture in general. If we want our youngsters to stop being violent, we need to stop showing them violent material, especially so early in their development. As a colleague said to me, the music industry is “peddling death to our children”.
I am certainly no expert on ‘popular culture’, but I would question the idea that ‘culture’ forces anything on young people. Cultural industries like magazines and music and television programs really are businesses just like any others; they have to respond to what the market is asking for. The point is that cultural industries are a lagging indicator, not a leading one.
What would change the culture is a change in society so that perpetrators of criminal behaviours face the full consequence of their actions; I suspect that would have a far greater impact on ‘youth culture’ then any ‘initiative’ to meddle with our culture; or to take away from lawful citizens their legitimate right to defend themselves. Which is where sloppy thinking like Shaun Bailey’s op-ed will take us to.
The Deputy Prime Minister is in trouble again. Apparently he has had a rest from the toils of office to play croquet at his grace-and-favour mansion. This has lead the something-must-be-done crowd to accuse him of slacking and call for his resignation. Apparently ministers – even ones without portfolio – are supposed to spend their every waking hour governing us.
Since Samizdata’s point of view (generally speaking) is that we would really rather be governed less, then I submit this is the sort of ministerial behaviour we want to see more of. With luck, it might spread to the Senior Civil Service, and stop the more serious business of the bureacratic dictatorship. Then Prescott would merit a dukedom. Meanwhile he certainly gets marks for making Britain a worse place more slowly than he might, and at the same time showing up the miserable priggishness of his political colleagues.
Or would you choose a world where a pleasant afternoon is better spent in a committee meeting figuring out how best to control other people’s lives, rather than enjoying a gentle game in the open air?
The litany of failures for the immigration system in the United Kingdom continues to defy imagination. This New Labour government allows rapists, paedophiles and violent criminals from all corners of the globe to stay in Britain, live off the welfare state, escape from prison and commit crimes at the expense of the law abiding public. Now they are giving them passports.
THE Home Office was under more fire yesterday after it was revealed jailed foreigners are being given British passports after release.
Officials confirmed convicted criminals from overseas were granted British citizenship if they stay out of trouble for a period after prison.
The length of the “clear” period depends on their sentence.
Yet the Government has promised to deport overseas convicts in an immigration crackdown.
It is clear that Britain cannot be trusted to run its citizenship programmes in an efficient or secure manner. Therefore, the United States should remove Britain from its Visa Waiver program without further ado. That would concentrate minds at the Home Office.
George Galloway thinks assassinating Tony Blair would be justified because of the war in Iraq… but if that is true, others might start thinking if Mr. George Galloway MP wants people to play that game, this notion should be more widely applied to all whose political views inevitably have violent consequences.
And so if politics did start to become more overtly and directly violent, with PM’s being bumped off because of their foreign policy decisions, this new paradym could well lead others who equally as intemperate as the Honourable Member for Bethnal Green and Bow to decide it was now acceptable (or ‘justified’ if you like) to start bumping off people who have demonstrated by their support for communist mass murderers like Fidel Castro as well as inciting violence against British troops by Ba’athist fascists and sundry Islamo-fascists in the past.
Just for reference, a definition of treason is:
The act of betraying; betrayal of a trust undertaken by or reposed in anyone; a breach of faith, treachery. High Treason or Treason Proper is the violation of a subject of his allegiance to his sovereign or to the state, levying war on the King’s dominions, adhering to the Queen’s enemies in her dominions, or aiding them in or out of the realm.
The NHS is now being instructed to turn its back on ‘alternative’ treatments such as homeopathy. This is a very good beginning… now all we need is for it to turn its back on non-alternative treatments too and Britain can start to allow a First World healthcare system to develop.
I oppose the ID card & panoptic centralised database plans of the UK government on the grounds it is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberties and truly deadly expansion of state power… but even on the utilitarian basis of the state’s own objectives, the entire scheme is a disaster in the making. This comes not from some civil rights activist but from an IBM researcher whose specialty is secure ID cards.
The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts – such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient – which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government’s plans do not include such an implementation.
Read the whole article.
(hat tip to commenter Shaun Bourke)
There is an article in the Guardian blog ‘Comment is Free’ by Peter Singer calling for Oxford University to stop trying to use the courts to prevent disruptive protests in the City of Oxford by ‘animal rights’ activists.
Although I agree that it is dangerous when the law is used to stifle freedom of expression (in other words, using the threat of violence in the form of arrest by the Boys in Blue to prevent protests), clearly most of those protesters would love to see laws prohibiting animal testing (i.e. they would be happy to see the threat of violence in the form of arrest by the Boys in Blue used to prevent animal testing) as Singer says in his article “In a democracy, those who advocate change can only achieve their goals by winning over the majority”… so clearly he is talking not just about making the protester’s views heard and therefore socially exerting moral suasion on people to stop doing what they are doing to animals, he is talking about ‘democracy’, i.e. politics, and therefore he is talking about violence backed laws.
I am sure that Peter Singer would reply to such an observation that if a law was passed prohibiting animal testing, that would just be ‘democracy in action’, assuming that to be self-evidently a good thing. And yet…even the courts are subordinate to the laws passed by Parliament so if a judge was to limit the scope of those demonstrations, surely if the protesters objective is to gain support for using getting coercive laws they approve of passed, they are just receiving what they are trying to do to others (i.e. subject them to coercive laws).
I do not know if the demonstrations in Oxford have passed the boundaries of reasonable protest and moved into the realm of violent intimidation (given the ‘animal rights’ movements long and current association with terrorism, it is not hard to imagine they may have done) but as a general rule it is indeed a very dangerous thing when the law stops people expressing themselves. However although I agree with Singer courts generally should not be used to suppress demonstrations, I will loose little sleep over one group of people using the regulatory state to impose their will on another group of people whose objective is to use the regulatory state to impose their will.
How can I disagree with A C Grayling on British values when he sums up Blair’s agenda so succinctly:
Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm. Or the government should be prepared to allow us to stay home behind drawn curtains, and to pay our mortgages and deliver our groceries under armed guard, to protect us form venturing into the streets where (so government fear-mongering might have us believe) thousands of bomb-carrying lunatic fanatics lurk.
To sum up, Blair would prefer us to be sheep, compliant, uncomplaining and stoical. These are the values that he would instill in new immigrants for his legacy: the great and glorious socialist millennium. That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:
To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort (the sanitised version) and the demand for, and founding of, Parliament.
This will gloss the fact that all our “revolutions” (after the Civil War at least), which by being so called give us a faint aura of past flair, were very pragmatical affairs, and like the empire almost accidental ones, driven from below by thoroughly banausic impulses and only retrospectively embellished, Boys’ Own style, by a sense of the heroic.
Their pragmatism is no doubt a virtue, and it would do no harm to anyone to learn as much; but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke – an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras, stoutly resisting the temptation to have opinions, and certainly not to voice them if by chance one should form between its safely capped horns.
Indeed, we would no longer be part of the Anglosphere.
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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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