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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Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:
But respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn’t any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don’t worry, you’re not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic.
As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit.
Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on.
The recent television programme which has made the most difference to Britain has, I would say, been Jamie Oliver‘s show about school food. I did not see the show myself, but my sister, who used to be a General Practitioner, did see it, and was hugely impressed by it. She has not been the only one, to put it mildly. Never in the field of human cookery will so much be eaten, so differently, by so many, at the behest of just one celebrity chef.
My sister was especially impressed by the bit of his show where Jamie persuaded just one family to change the diet, for just one week, of their extremely troublesome and badly behaved children. The behaviour of the children was utterly transformed! They became nice, companionable people. Even more striking was that, as a treat for having eaten their meat and two veg (or whatever it was) and for behaving so well, the children were given another junk food meal, and they immediately reverted to being their old monstrous selves.
I have two comments to make about this story, beyond observing that it has had an electrifying effect upon Britain’s educrats, and school food providers.
First, it is quite wrong to blame the free market for this sorry episode. In a real free market, schools would fall over themselves to offer good meals rather than bad ones. Insofar as there is something resembling a private sector in British education, it does supply quite nutritious food. (I went to a succession of private sector schools, and the food was pretty good, in the adult sense of being nutritionally good.) When British state schools were instructed, by Margaret Thatcher, to farm out school catering to the lowest bidders, that was an exercise in state diktat, not of the freedom of a free market. In real free markets you are not compelled to buy the cheapest version of what you want. No, you buy what you truly want, and if you choose to buy something good but more expensive, fine. That is your choice.
But when the same old single customer (the government) decides that its purchases shall be obtained from slightly different suppliers, that does not make a free market. One single word, ‘privatisation’, was invented to blur this distinction, the idea being that moves in a free market direction had to be made one small step at a time, and once you have lots of separate school food suppliers, that might make it easier to move towards having lots of genuinely independent schools. And that may even be true. But the distinction thus blurred should nevertheless be insisted upon.
Second, since this is not actually a free market versus state diktat issue, but merely a good food versus bad food issue, then, if like me you agree with my sister that the kind of food Jamie Oliver has been recommending would be an improvement over junk food, then you will welcome the influence he is now having. I agree that a free market in education, as in everything, would be better. But given that education is largely nationalised, it is good, other things being equal, that the inmates of this system should be well fed rather than badly fed.
At last, that bastion of idiotarianism the BBC is going to go off the air for a while, God willing! That these grasping tax funded parasites are going to strike during major televised sporting events is splendid news so maybe now more folks might be a bit less willing to shell out £125 (about $240) per year in order to support an institution filled with moral relativists, collectivists, reflexive anti-Americans and pro-Islamofascists.
Whilst Britain remains fixated on the aftermath of Tony Blair’s unprecedented third term victory against their intellectually bankrupt and dependably inept opponents, it would behove people in Britain to pay a bit more attention to the electoral earthquake which shook Ulster which has resulted in David Trimble’s relatively moderate Ulster Unionist Party has almost completely collapsing in favour of Ian Paisley Democratic Unionist Party.
Now that the only two significant political players locally are the two extremist parties from either side of the sectarian divide, things look like they are about to get dramatically more… interesting. The message from the Northern Ireland’s protestant majority seems pretty damn clear to me but is anyone actually listening? I have a feeling I am going to be spending a lot more time keeping tabs on what get said on Slugger O’Toole, that most indispensable source of insights for all things Northern Irish, to see how things develop.
This is interesting. It is Maurice Saatchi, in the Telegraph, ruminating upon the Conservative electoral defeat:
It will come as a surprise to my Conservative colleagues, as they absorb the lessons of last week’s defeat, to learn that the Tory Party lost the 2005 election in 1790. That was the year Edmund Burke first advised Conservatives to concentrate on: What is not What should be.
With that single fatal distinction, pragmatism became the hallmark of Conservatism. Absence of idealism became its invisible badge of honour. And aimlessness became the pinnacle of its morality. There would never be a romantic bone in a Conservative body – or so Burke hoped.
Two hundred years later, Conservatism has fallen into an electoral slump, because it remains captive to his bleak instruction. At the 2005 election, the authentic voice of 18th-century Tory pragmatism spoke through the medium of the Conservative spokesman who said: “If you want philosophy, read Descartes.” He meant that the function of the Conservative Party is to make the trains run on time. That may be so, or at least partly right. But the lesson of the campaign we have just fought is that the mere promise of efficiency is not enough to persuade people that you would be an efficient Government. Mere anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince the voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.
Read the whole thing. And while you are about it, read this Paul Marks paper to see what a misreading of Burke much of the above is. The usual Conservative practice where Edmund Burke is concerned is to misread him to be an unthinking, anti-principled pragmatist, and agree with that misreading. Saatchi misreads in the usual manner, but at least disagrees with the misreading. With the flair of the advertising man that he is, he signals his argument for principle by being a Conservative and opposing Burke. Good grief!! Would Burke himself have been pleased or infuriated? A bit of both, probably.
But never mind about such scholarly digressions. The point about this piece is not just what is being said but who is saying it. → Continue reading: Dumping pragmatism on pragmatic grounds
Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.
I have now had some time to reflect on the outcome of last week’s General Election.
In many respects it was something of a non-event. Nobody seriously expected any result other than another Labour victory and the only matter which gave rise to any material speculation was the size of the Labour majority.
As it transpired, that majority was considerably reduced, providing some electoral benefit to both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but nonetheless leaving the re-elected government with a perfectly playable hand.
On the face of it, last week’s elections appears to have changed nothing. Tony Blair is still the PM and his brand of ‘modernised’ social democracy appears to be what the public have again decided they want. Yet, a closer analysis of the voting figures reveals what I believe to be a significant development, albeit one that may take a while yet to manifest itself.
I will expand on this but, before I do, I want to make a few observations about the other two main parties. → Continue reading: Naked
The Daily Mail’s print headline screamed “You gave him a bloody nose!” and the Sun snickered that Tony Blair had been given a “Kick in the Ballots”.
Excuse me? Blair wins a historic third term with a good sixty plus seat majority and this is being portrayed as something less than a major political triumph for the Labour party? If ever there was an instance of how the mainstream media has a remarkable talent for making an ass of itself, this is it. This was not a ‘vindication’ of the Tories (as suggested by the print edition of the Telegraph), it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant. One way to see this is that Labour has pulled off a historic victory (which is an indisputable fact). Another way to look at this is that the Tories have suffered a historic defeat. That even after all these years they still cannot be accepted as a viable alternative shows that they are far worse historically speaking than any other British Tory party for a very long time indeed.
So I got the result I wanted. Sure I loath Labour’s ghastly regulatory statism and contempt for civil liberties but Michael Howard is now no longer leader of his party and the cabal around him which turned the Tories into Labour-Lite has been shown to be losers of quite some magnitude. Now maybe, just maybe, something better can come along as the scale of their failure starts to sink in.
In the comment section of my previous post on this blog, many people seemed to think I was urging ‘libertarians’ not to vote for the Conservative party because it was not the small government libertarian leaning party of my dreams. Well sure, but that is not who I had in mind. I was really not thinking about ‘libertarians’ at all when I urged people not to vote Tory, I was thinking about Tories. The reason I am delighted that millions of conservatives did not vote for Michael Howard was that the Tory party is not a conservative party and enough people realised that for the right result to happen. For as long as the Conservative party is peddling nothing more than the same old “give us your money for skoolzandhospitals” crap as Labour and the LibDems, they really should be shunned by millions of people who describe themselves as, well, conservative.
And that is exactly what happened.
9.30am BST Yes, Labour’s 60-65 majority was achieved with only 36% of the vote – an all-time low for a winning party in Britain. That reflects an election in which the traditional party labels didn’t quite capture the real divisions in the electorate. Nonetheless, I’d say it’s worse news for the Tories – not just because it’s an unprecedented third consecutive loss for the party but because such recovery as there was was so pathetic. In the days before the election, a lot of Tories told me that the real measure of their success was whether and by how much they’d break the 200-seat barrier. And even that was a conscious effort to lower expectations. The Conservatives are presently on 195 seats. That would have been regarded as a disaster for Thatcher, Major or even William Hague, and swift resignation would have followed. The Tory leadership’s ability to spin this as a great “improvement” is confirmation of just how shrivelled the modern British Conservative Party really is.
– Mark Steyn
Some brief news about the UK General Election.
With some 40 or so constituencies still to declare, ZaNu-Labour have (as expected) won a third term in office, though with a much reduced majority. Tony Blair looks rather chastened. The Conservatives have done rather better than I (or anybody else) had expected. Michael Howard looks rather pleased. The truly hideous Leninist-Democrats have gained a few seats but, fortunately, nowhere near as many as they were expecting. They are still in third place by some distance.
Oh and George Galloway is back in Parliament.
I will offer up some more thoughts later and as soon as I have some time to spare.
First impressions that this is going to be a much worse night for Labour than some polls have suggested. Exit polls are pointing to a big cut in the size of Labour’s majority. Early days yet.
Hopefully the Tory party will get hammered at the polls today and take a giant leap towards the crisis they so richly deserve. As I have urged before, if you ever want to get a party which does not share the vast majority of its views with Labour, then for goodness sake do not reward their aiding and abetting of pervasive government by voting for the buggers. Do not hold your nose and vote for Michael Howard’s carnival of clowns because they are the less evil because they are nothing of the sort: they are the same evil with the added toxic characteristic of providing an illusion of choice.
If you are going to vote rather than do something useful with your day, and yet you want an end to the European Union’s takeover of British politics, a smaller state, lower taxes (rather than just ‘less tax increases’) and an end to the panopticon ID/database state (or even just any one of those), you will get none of them by voting Tory. If you cannot bring yourself to kick the voting habit altogether, then why not vote UKIP? At least that way you get to indulge your fetish for voting whilst at the same time annoying the chattering classes and not rewarding a collaborationist ‘opposition’.
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