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]
|
The cover of print version of The Economist is titled ‘Taking Britain’s Liberties’ and the issue discusses many of the very serious abridgements of our civil rights that have recently taken place.
But rather than link to any specific article, what interests me is that the truly grave situation is finally ‘front page news’ in a fairly mainstream publication. It is nothing less than amazing that it has taken this long for the seriousness of the situation to reach the collective editorial consciousness of any significant element of the media outside the blogosphere and other elements of the activist fringe.
Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil company, is reporting very healthy profits which the Daily Express sensationally reported as £300 per second and there has been a chorus decrying this as ‘obscene’ (sundry Labour MPs) and according to Martin O’Neill (chairman of the trade and industry select committee) ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’.
So let me make sure I understand this… of the approximately 80p per litre (about $5.70 per US gallon) charged for gasoline at the pump in Britain, only about 16p is what the oil company charges: the rest is all tax.
And the politicians, who are responsible for four fifths of what is paid by British motorists to fill up their fuel tanks, are stamping their feet and threatening additional ‘windfall’ taxes on the companies responsible for the remaining one fifth of what is paid.
These politicians and their baying supporters are so wrapped up in a culture of value destroying appropriation and predation that they cannot see the true obscenity. To see that they need do nothing more than look in a mirror.
The company should have a large sign on the forecourt of every single petrol station they own in Britain with the following message:
Dear Motorists,
Do you think you are paying too much for your petrol? Well about 80% of what you are paying is tax, so if you want to pay less, do not come to us, go to your MP and ask him why you have to pay so much… and remember his answer next time you get the urge to vote.
Have a nice day.
Royal Dutch Shell
The problem is not Big Oil, the problem is Big Government.
“You can kill burglars” was the message that came blaring forth from the tabloid press with that flourish of heady triumphalism that usually accompanies a victory-for-the-common-man story (and which, on closer scrutiny, nearly always means that the government has just fucked over the common man good and proper).
To the cursory eye, the impression given is that the government has backed down and responded to public pressure for a change in the law to give citizens more rights to fight back against intruders and attackers. In reality, the government has done no such thing. Instead, those various branches of the state responsible for law enforcement have collaborated on a public statement:
Anyone can use reasonable force to protect themselves or others, or to carry out an arrest or to prevent crime. You are not expected to make fine judgements over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of you acting lawfully and in self-defence. This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon.
As a general rule, the more extreme the circumstances and the fear felt, the more force you can lawfully use in self-defence.
None of which sounds unreasonable per se, but all of which is merely a re-statement of the law as it currently stands. This is not a change of heart or a climbdown or a fresh start or anything else of that nature. This is just yesterday’s bill of fare, re-heated and served up with a garnish of finely-chopped press release.
In essence this is political chaff; a big bunch of glittery tinsel ejected into the air in order to deflect the heat-seeking missile of public disquiet. It appears to have done the trick.
As I have said before, the law does need changing in order to more accurately reflect the pre-1967 Common Law positions but, more than that, there needs to be a reversal of the last half-century’s worth of anti-self-help culture.
On the downside, we are still a long way from any of that change but, and on the upside, at least the ball is now in play.
As we mark the sombre 60th anniversary of the opening of Hitler’s murder factories in Belsen and elsewhere, those prize asses at the Labour Party come up with an anti-Conservative poster portraying leader Michael Howard and shadow finance pokesman Oliver Letwin as flying pigs. Both men are Jews.
Now, I will be charitable to the Labour Party and assume that the creators of this piece of rubbish were so dumb as to fail to think through the significance of this poster and are not anti-semitic, which is an extremely serious charge to make. As I am a hardline defender of free speech, I would of course say Labour is entitled to engage in any manner of roughhouse advertising. I certainly do not think the party should be dragged before the courts. In fact I think Labour has scored a bit of own goal. Some Jewish voters may shun Labour at the national polls, widely expected later this year.
This poster may suggest something quite encouraging to the Conservatives. Maybe this government, which is not exactly shooting the lights out in the opinion polls, is rattled at the Tories’ willingness to talk regularly about cutting the State down to size and cutting taxes. The Tory plans are hopelessly cautious, in my view, but credit to them anyway for pointing out that the government’s spending binge has failed to deliver discernible results and that a major reorientation of policy is required.
Mind you, I still haven’t forgiven Mr Howard for his support for compulsory ID cards.
At a Samizdata social gathering a few months back, one of the attendees (I think it was Patrick Crozier) posed the question of how much influence the blogosphere was having on the ‘real’ world.
The answer I gave at the time was plain and direct: none. A rather negative prognosis for sure but sincere and truthful as far as I was concerned.
However, my candour was not well-received. My dear chum Brian Micklethwait, in particular, took issue with me claiming that the blogosphere could well have be having an impact in ways that were not yet manifest. I countered this with the contention that in the absence of evidence of influence, one must assume that there is no influence at all.
Anyway, if memory serves, the rest of the bickering trailed off into a lake of libation and no firm conclusions were ever reached (are they ever?).
Since then, I have been forced to qualify my above-stated position because, in common with most other bloglodytes, I am all too familiar with the ‘Rathergate’ scandal over in the USA; a incident of such profile that it has made it impossible to deny that blogging is now having some degree of impact on the wider American polity.
But, as far as the UK is concerned, I have maintained my stance. Sadly and frustratingly, neither the blogosphere nor anything else seems to have been able to lay a glove on the great, heaving, suffocating beast of the hegemonic British intellectual climate.
That was my view. Until today. I required some proof to the contrary and now there is infallible proof:
Online journals and camera phones are a “paedophiles’ dream” which have increased the risk to children, the Scottish Parliament has been warned….
Rachel O’Connell said adults could use weblogs to learn about children….
She said: “This is just a paedophile’s dream because you have children uploading pictures, giving out details of their everyday life because it’s an online journal.”
I refuse to even attempt a rebuttal of this ludicrous and obviously desperate smear, preferring instead to let it stand naked in all its ignominy. Besides, it will not be the last. Blogging has clearly begun to make an impression on the minds of the political classes and they fear it.
The blogosphere has now landed in Britain.
There is a fine article by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph called The EU’s four-stage strategy to reduce Britons to servitude. It is an entirely accurate and reasonable article about the process of stripping British (and other European national) institutions of power and replacing them with Euro-level institutions.
He finished up with the notion that Michael Howard and the Tories will finally turn things around:
Mr Howard understands this very well. Not only is he a lawyer himself but, as home secretary, he clashed almost weekly with our judges – not least on immigration cases. He must have known that the EU would react as it did to his proposals: indeed, I suspect he was banking on it. He has said before that he wants to take powers back from Brussels but, until now, the issue on which he was planning to go into battle – the recovery of our fishing grounds – seemed rather marginal to most inland voters. Now he has found a casus belli where the country will be behind him.
It has been a besetting British vice that we ignore what is happening on the Continent until almost too late. But, when we finally rouse ourselves, our resolve can be an awesome thing. I sense that this may be such a moment.
But there is just one problem with that. The slide into the Euro-maw did not start under Tony Blair’s government. In fact it would be no exaggeration to say that the UKIP would not exist today if significant numbers of Euro-sceptic voters were not sick of being lied to again and again and again by Tory politicians. As I said to a table full of captive Tory grandees when I spoke at an event commemorating the end of Exchange Controls, a great many Tory voters simply no longer believe that the Conservative Party actually wish to conserve the things they care about and I very much doubt that any amount of rhetoric by any Tory will win back the trust of days gone by. Many of those former Tories who joined UKIP did so not just to oppose the destruction of Britain as a separate political entity but also because they truly hate their former party and see UKIP as a way to destroy it by making it permanently unelectable.
So what Mr. Hannan says is all good stuff, but what makes him think people should trust the party of Michael Heseltine, Ken Clark and Chris Patten to actually turn things around?
One of my favourite jokes – and if you are any kind of friend of mine you have probably heard it several times already – concerns a man who goes, on his own, to the seaside. He swims around, having a good time. Then, two strong hands descend upon his shoulders and force him beneath the waves, and keep him under until he thinks that he is about to die, without even knowing why. Finally, the two strange hands allow him to the surface again, and it turns out that they are the hands of a total stranger, who excuses his strange and aggressive conduct by saying: “I’m sorry, I thought you were a friend of mine.”
Well, now, as David Carr is fond of noting whenever he sees it happening, reality seems to have gone one stage further than mere humour:
A teenager was hacked to death by three friends who attacked him with large scythes, a court heard.
What are friends for?
The Countryside Alliance continues its quixotic fight to use the approved levers of power to overturn the ban on hunting with hounds. Somehow the realisation that there is nothing at all ‘undemocratic’ about the fact they are being oppressed by the state has still not percolated through those worthy but rather thick country skulls.
Mr Jackson said the Countryside Alliance believed that the House of Commons acted unlawfully in forcing through the Parliament Act in 1949, without the consent of the House of Lords. Mr Jackson stressed that he was not challenging the supremacy of Parliament.
But why not? If Mr. Jackson believes that what is being done to him by Parliament is unjust, then why not challenge the supremacy of Parliament? There is nothing sacred about a bunch of lawmakers and a law is only as good as its enforcement. If the Countryside Alliance actually have the courage of their convictions, they must start challenging the right of the state to do whatever it wishes just because its ruling party has a majority in Parliament. Maybe if they realised that they are a minority and will always be a minority they would be less inclined to trust the old way of doing things. There is a long history of civil disobedience to duly constituted authority in the defence of what is right. That matters far more that what is or is not legal.
Hubris and self-absorption are almost pre-requisites for a career as a professional politician, but I suppose it is always possible to have ‘too much of a good thing’ in any line of work.
When Robert Kilroy-Silk joined the UKIP in a blaze of messianic self-publicity, I suppose those good folks at head office should have realised that his arrival was going to be a very mixed blessing. And of course no sooner did he arrive than he launched a bid to take over the leadership of the party from Roger Knapman.
I suppose the Knapman/Kilroy-Silk relationship never had particularly good auguries as Kilroy-Silk’s core political beliefs have always struck me as rather hazy for the most part and when actually glimpsed, of rather variable geometry. Knapman on the other hand is that rarest of rare things in British politics, an ideological man of conviction who often says what he really thinks whilst actually making sense. Upon hearing that Kilroy-Silk was flouncing off in a huff because the UKIP proved somehow inexplicably immune to his charms, Knapman is quoted as saying “break open the champagne”, and “It was nice knowing him, now ‘goodbye’. I would love to hear what he said in private.
But Kilroy-Silk has said he will start up a new political party called Veritas, so the best prankster in British politics since the late lamented Lord Sutch will still be around to entertain us. No doubt if the Kilroy-Silk Party does emerge, it will quickly be known by many as the ‘In Vino’ Party.
The Labour government is planning to introduce ceremonies for ‘citizenship’ and ‘coming of age’ to add the imprimatur of The State to being ‘British’. Yet surely one of the things that has always made the British so different from many of the people’s of Continental Europe who live with the legacy of Napoleon is that we have not really needed the state to tell us via ceremonies and ID cards that we are British… or that we are in reality ‘subjects’, a far more honest term that ‘citizen’. Even the United States has its strange hand-on-heart ceremonies in some schools in which they pledge of allegiance not just to the principles of constitutional governance but also to a bit of coloured cloth. Yet in Britain such notions of social identity have generally been, well, social and not some propagandising artifice of the state.
This is yet another part of moving Britain into the more Napoleonic traditional in which the state is the core around which everything rotates in a politicised fashion and the highest virtue is political engagement (not a view I share, to put it mildly, given my view of politics). Such things are alien in this country and yet another sign that our political masters are obsessed with the fetishizing democracy as a way to make as many aspects of life as possible political in nature and requiring the intermediation of the state for ever more things. Such ‘ceremonies’ may be banal but what they represent is far from trivial.
The Conservatives are promising tax cuts. Good for them.
Tax cuts are always more popular than political chatterers think they ought to be, and tax increases are always more unpopular than political chatterers think they ought to be. The chatterers talk a lot and persuade themselves that their opinion about these things is shared, but come election time, provided there are any politicians who have remained unbullied by them, the chatterers are always baffled and disappointed.
Promised tax cuts are appealing to voters, because they have a quite good chance of materialising, and once they do, the voters get to keep the money and spend it how they want.
But when it comes to tax increases, and the accompanying promises of better public services, the picture is very different. From time to time, surveys of the sort that political chatterers take very seriously ask voters a question along the following lines: Would you be willing to accept increased taxes in exchange for better public services? And often the answer comes back: Yes, we would.
However, reality does not ask voters this question. What the promise of increased taxes in exchange for promised better public services actually means is the certainty of increased taxes, but the mere possibility that public services will actually get any better in exchange. The voters’ money might be spent better, but it is at least as likely to be spent on idiotic make-work schemes and political pay-offs. Faced with that question, voters tend to vote: No.
So I say that this is a smart Conservative move. They do not look like they can win any time soon, but this may soften the next blow quite a bit. On the other hand, if the government steals this policy the way it has stolen so many other Conservative policies, that will plunge the Conservatives into further confusion. But I would be quite pleased.
If such tax cuts occur, public services will be no better and no worse than they would have been otherwise. This is because tax cuts are actually a cut in the rate of taxation, rather than in the total amount of tax collected. If tax rates are reduced, the economy cheers up a bit, and the total tax take, from all taxes combined, is as big as ever. On the other hand, if tax rates are increased, as the Liberal Democrats are threatening, the economy stalls, and although the yield from the increased taxes increases, the yield from all the other unchanged taxes declines, and the total tax take remains stagnant. Which is yet another reason why the tax-increases-in-xchange-for-better-public-services idea is so foolish, and why voters are so right to shun it.
I have always endured a distinctly uncomfortable ambivolence on the subject of the physical chastisement of children. My rational inclinations are to disapprove of it as a whole. The law protects adults from being physically assaulted by other adults and I find the arguments that seek to exempt youngsters from this law to be flawed and unpersuasive.
That said, I know that there are many good and loving parents who sometimes smack their children out of frustration or a temporary flare of temper. It may not be beneficial thing but, rarely does this cause any real harm. Consequently, I view the engagement of the machinery of law enforcement with family life with the utmost trepidation:
Parents in England and Wales who smack children so hard it leaves a mark will face up to five years in jail under new laws in force from Saturday.
Mild smacking is allowed under a “reasonable chastisement” defence against common assault.
The purported distinction is not one in which I have any degree of confidence. Law enforcement in this country is often patchy, capricious and incompetent. I expect that truly serious abusers will slip the net while normally conscientious parents who lash out once in a moment of uncustomary anger will find themselves facing a custodial sentence and ruination.
Even if that were not the case (and it is very much the case) the new laws will result in an entrenchment of a culture of fear and suspicion. Children contrive to harm themselves all the time by flying off of their bikes, falling out of trees and sticking themselves with sharp implements. I have already heard far too many plausible accounts of parents who are scared of taking their wounded charges to a hospital in case they are accused of abusing them
In another age and in different political and legal circumstances, I would not be too concerned about these new laws. I may even (cautiously) approve. But it is not possible to see these developments as anything other than another step in the process of the gradual nationalisation of the family.
Nor will anyone’s life be improved by this legislation. It is enacted, in part, because it serves the interests of the professional welfare classes whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on this kind of state activism and partly because of the unfortunately fashionable view that people cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs in a satisfactory manner without the external discipline of regulatory control.
None of this means that I necessarily approve of parents who smack their children. Generally, I do not. But just leaving matters be is probably the least worst solution. Over the coming years, that object lesson will be driven home.
|
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.
|
