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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It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that we have long regarded the Ban on Foxhunting with Dogs as having very little to do with foxhunting.
As David Carr has pointed out before, those who shout loudly that the move against hunting is ‘undemocratic’ are completely wrong: it is perfectly democratic. Welcome to the world in which there is no give and take of civil society… welcome to the world of total politics.
Mr Bradley says: ‘We ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom: it was class war.’
The MP for The Wrekin adds that it was the ‘toffs’ who declared war on Labour by resisting the ban, but agrees that both sides are battling for power, not animal welfare.
‘This was not about the politics of envy but the polities of power. Ultimately it’s about who governs Britain.’
[…]
‘Labour governments have come and gone and left little impression on the gentry. But a ban on hunting touches them. It threatens their inalienable right to do as they please on their own land. For the first time, a decision of a Parliament they don’t control has breached their wrought-iron gates.
No kidding. That is what we have been pointing out here on Samizdata.net for quite some time and why we have treated commenters who shrugged and said “why get worked up about foxhunting?” with such derision. It was never about hunting but rather things that are far, far more fundamental. It is about those who would make all things subject to democratically sanctified politics (‘Rule by Activist’) seeking to crush those who see private property and society, rather than state, as what matters.
Mr Bradley, 51, admits that he personally sees the campaign to save hunting as an assault on his right to govern as a Labour MP.
And Mr. Bradley is correct but for one thing: the battle in question is about the limits of political power and not just Labour’s political power. Until the supporter of the Countryside Alliance see that they are actually struggling against the idea of a total political state, they will not even be fighting the right war. It is not about who controls the political system but what the political system is permitted to do under anyone’s control. The United States has a system of separation of powers and constitutional governance which (at least in theory even though not in fact) places whole areas of civil society outside politics. Britain on the other hand has no such well defined system and the customary checks and balances have been all but swept away under the current regime. Britain’s ‘unwritten constitution’ has been shown to be a paper tiger.
But those who look to the Tories to save them from the class warriors of the left are missing another fundamental truth. During their time in power, the Tory Party set the very foundations upon which Blair and Blunkett are building the apparatus for totally replacing social processes with political processes, a world in which nothing cannot be compelled by law if that is what ‘The People’ want: populist authoritarianism has been here for a while but now it no longer even feels it has to hide its true face behind a mask.
Moreover it would take another blind man to look back on Michael Howard’s time as Home Secretary and see him as being less corrosive to civil liberties that the monstrous David Blunkett. Have you heard the outraged Tory opposition to the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act? Of course not, because the intellectual bankruptcy of the Tory party is now complete… for the most part they support it. If the so-called ‘Conservatives’ will not lift a finger to stop the destruction of the ancient underpinnings of British liberty, what exactly are they allegedly intending to ‘conserve’? The Tories are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem and the sooner the UKIP destroy them by making them permanently unelectable, the better, so that some sort of real opposition can fill the ideological vacuum.
Those who were marching against banning foxhunting completely miss the issues at stake here. The issue is not and never has been foxhunting but rather the acceptable limits of politics. And you cannot resolve that issue via the political system in Britain. It is only once the people who oppose the ban on foxhunting and the people who oppose the Civil Contingencies Act and the people who oppose the introduction of ID cards and data pooling all realise that these are NOT separate issues but the same issue will effective opposition be possible. And I fear that opposition will, at least until the ‘facts on the ground’ can be established, have to be via civil disobedience and other ways to make sections of this country ungovernable by whatever means prove effective. The solution does not lie in ‘democracy’ but rather by enough people across the country asserting their right to free association and non-politically mediated social interaction by refusing to obey the entirely democratic laws which come out of Westminster.
Peter Bradley is right and he has provided any who are paying attention with a moment of utter clarity: It is time to challenge his right to ‘rule’ by whatever means necessary.
I snapped this outside the Victoria Street (London SW1) branch of Sainsbury’s on Monday evening. It’s too dark to see much of the bloke actually selling those Evening Standards, but his message is clear.
Sainsbury’s has been taking a bit of a beating at the hands of Tesco just lately. But this is bad news for Tesco.
While checking out the special offers that British supermarkets have on at the moment, I found myself at Somerfield‘s website a few minutes ago. Despite all of the nonsense that has come from the British government over the years, and especially in recent months, I was still shocked when I read a link asking Somerfield customers to register their views on the government’s plans to ban buy one get one free offers. Surely even this nanny government would not come up with so ridiculous and controlling a measure, I thought.
Well, I thought wrong – they are indeed that mindbogglingly dumb and power-mad, and plan to do exactly that. So, businesses can forget being free to offer their customers bargains on foods the government deems ‘unhealthy’. (The state apparently has no idea that it is possible to consume those evil ‘unhealthy’ foods in moderation and still be a healthy individual. Not that it matters, since the state has already decided that the average citizen is too stupid to choose what to put into his or her own mouth, and that our entire society should be dumbed down in order to compensate it, no matter the effects on commerce and personal liberty.)
I am in general an optimist, but when it comes to the government’s fetish for domination of individuals, I am nothing but a pessimist. In the mind of our legislators, the opinion of the average voter (voter, not person) seems all too similar to this parody by frequent Samizdata commenter Chris Goodman:
Food ought to be banned, or at least rationed by trained medical staff in public service centres, since people are not rational enough to use it properly. At the very least food should be labelled “Food can be bad for you”. Those who make billions of pounds growing and distributing food should not be allowed to give people what they want. It turns my stomach to think of all those multinationals making money out of producing delicious food. There ought to be a march against it. Think of the children! In a modern society politicians have a democratic mandate that decide what we should have for tea each day. I vote for the party that raises taxes in order to pay for more regulators.
As Dr Sean Gabb, a guy who says much I disagree with but who hits the nail on the head on this issue, puts it:
Whenever the government does something for us, it takes away from our own ability to do that for ourselves. This diminishes us as human beings. Better, I suggest, a people who often eat and drink too much, and who on average die a few years before they might, than a people deprived of autonomy and shepherded into a few extra years of intellectual and moral passivity.
At the rate Britain is going, you might think we have a large crop of intellectually and morally passive octogenarians to look forward to in a few decades’ time. Sadly, I have no confidence whatsoever that these restrictions on personal and commercial freedom will produce the results desired by the government – except, of course, for more power in the hands of the state. Woe betide the fools who vote for these people, and those of us who will not but who will suffer at their hands regardless.
The smoking debate is, to me, too depressing for me to want to go on about it. This Telegraph leader does go on about it approximately as I would if I could force myself, so read that instead.
The Scots, in the Gadarene sense, are leading the way towards a total smoking ban.
Says the Telegraph:
Over-mighty politicians, in Scotland as in the rest of the country, need reminding that they are elected to do the will of the people, and not to cure our bad habits.
The problem with that being: what if that “will of the people” is, precisely, to cure a bad habit? Once again, we observe democracy being equated with niceness and sensibleness, something we regularly complain about here.
With luck, the same story as has occurred with devolution will play out with smoking. The Scots go crazy, it all blows up in their faces, and the English get the chance to learn from Scottish error. I hope so.
David Farrer reports on Scottish devolution disappointments, from which the North of England learned, and on how the Scottish smoking ban is working out.
Changing the subject, but to emphasise what a continuingly good read David’s Freedom and Whisky blog is, here are two political maps of North America, both very diverting in their very diverse ways.
The election victory of George Bush is a hugely significant event in its own right but at least part of the reason why it gets so much coverage here is due to the near-absence of anything good happening in the UK. It has been this way for years.
Hence, I am doubly-delighted to note that a small proportion of the British electorate has done something right for a change:
People in the North East have voted “no” in a referendum on whether to set up a new regional assembly.
The total number of people voting against the plans was 696,519 (78%), while 197,310 (22%) voted in favour.
That is not just a ‘no’, it is a big, fat, resounding ‘no’.
The ‘new regional assembly’ that HMG was attempting to foist on the public was supposed to be the first of many similar boondoggles designed (allegedly) to facilitate ‘local decision making’.
Dressed up in the fuzzy, fashionable, eminantly spinnable language of ‘decentralisation’, these assemblies actually represent nothing more than yet another grossly expensive tier of government, complete with an army of paper-shufflers, ticket-punchers, regulators, office-holders, rubber stampers and form-fillers. Not to mention the heavy battalions of outreach co-ordinators, inclusivity counsellors, gender advisers, diversity directors, real nappy officers and sundry other busybodies and parasites.
In short, the whole thing is simply an ‘Enemy Class’ job-creation scheme and I like to think that (at long last) some sections of the British electorate were able to see the truth of this. Perhaps, just maybe, some of the long-suffering British cash cows have decided that they have donated more than enough blood to these Vampires-Who-Walk-By-Day.
HMG has promised that, in the event the referendum was lost, they would drop the whole idea. I am not at all confident they will abide by that pledge. The career ambitions of their supporters will not be so easily thwarted.
But, for now at least, I am prepared to bask in the moment and declare myself temporarily content.
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious – and growing – civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
If you want to read about the truly extraordinary and deeply depressing paroxysm of anti-Americanism that has swept like a firestorm through the British media over the last few days and weeks (having merely smouldered for years), you can read about it here.
Of a particularly fatuous TV guide blurb (“Jonathan Dimbleby takes a critical look at the Anglo-US war on terror…”), Mark Holland has this to say:
A critical look! Just for a change. I don’t know about you, but for me all those “Hey it’s all going swell; Bush, Blair and Howard are doing fine; the oil for food scandal has lined the pockets of Saddam, the UN and Total Fina Elf; etc” documentaries have become a tiresome bore.
For me the most depressing British anti-American exhibit of the last few days was a rant by Peter Oborne in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Having ignored the Mail, Sunday or of any other sort, for years, I had no idea it was capable of sinking to these depthsm and I only spotted it because I shared some coffee with Michael Jennings in my local Café Nero yesterday.
This picture, of the front cover of the Review section, sums it up well:
Click to get it bigger and more legible. If you really want that.
This is absolutely not mere anti-Bushism, for Oborne is vitriolically nasty about both Democrats and Republicans. Maybe this piece is available to read on the internet, but I cannot myself find it. I am actually rather pleased about that. → Continue reading: British Anti-Americanism gone mad
Business enterprises are often attacked for selling people ‘junk food’ and not telling them about the health benefits of vegetables.
Well recently ASDA (the British arm of Walmart) labelled its vegetables, explaining that people who eat certain types of vegetable have a lower chance of developing certain forms of cancer.
ASDA was promptly prosecuted and punished. It seems that ‘making health claims’ is not legal in Britain.
Oh well, back to selling junk. The state is not your friend.
At long last the shooting death by police of a man ‘armed’ with a table leg has been ruled an ‘unlawful killing’. It has been a damning indictment for so many years a couple servants of the state can gun an innocent man down in cold blood with impunity whilst at the same time other British subjects are denied the right to legitimate self-defence in any meaningful sence.
We have written before about the killing of Harry Stanley in September 1999 and I can only hope now that not only will the perpetrators of this act face prosecution for murder, the careers of everyone who worked to prevent charges being brought in the first place will will come to an absupt end, as an absolute minimum, and if there is any evidence that there were attempts to pervert the course of justice, then additional charges will be forthcoming higher up the chain of command.
It is a national disgrace that it has taken this long for the family of Harry Stanley to see anything even approaching the first glimmer of justice.
In conversation with a business associate, Alan Moore of SMLXL, yesterday, we got on to the topic of how the UK really is lagging behind when it comes to anticipating and preparing for the seismic shifts that are happening in business. I’m not sure if it was Alan or me who came up with this line, but it is as if they are standing at the foot of the volcano, having a picnic and drinking champagne. Maybe if they pretend everything is going to be okay, they won’t have to change. (See, on this note, SMLXL posts passim, including yesterday’s Another business model under threat.) Yes, we have covered this ground with Alan before.
Similarly, the UK market is way behind when it comes to blogging. I met in Paris last week with Guillaume du Gardier of PR Planet, and he was surprised to hear that France is much more developed on the blogging front than Britain. Does that make sense? On the surface, no, it doesn’t. The UK, sharing a common language with the US, should be much more up to speed on these things.
I am sure it can be annoying for a Brit to hear it from an American, but I suspect that one of the reasons for the slow uptake of blogging in the UK is that in general it is quite unlike Brits to get overly excited about anything. It is almost something of a sin to be wide-eyed and evangelical about anything, no matter how worthy that thing may be. Brits excel at cynicism and being understated and controlled; they are not entranced by the sort of hype that excites people in the US. (I again emphasise the generality, as I know and work with many Brits for whom the appearance of cynicism is not a concern.) In Britain, it is far more the done thing to be looking the other way when the bandwagon rolls up, and then scoff and roll your eyes when you finally see it, as it goes past…and then run run run to jump right on it, usually about 18 months behind the rest of the developed world.
Indeed, I remember as far back as a year ago, observing many conversations in British blog comments and on UK-based blogs, wherein bloggers themselves were turning their noses up at the buzz being whipped up in the US about blogging. Sure, it is good enough for them and they spend hours a day in the blogosphere, but God forbid they appear genuinely enthralled by this ‘phenomenon’! No, it is far easier to seem cool towards blogging. A shrug of the shoulders and a yawn would suffice…and then back to updating the blogroll and commenting on their daily tour of their niche of the blogosphere.
And so it goes. In the end, all you can do is shake your head and smile at such people – they can appear as unfussed as they like, and the bandwagon will roll on with or without their enthusiasm. But it is a shame for Britain that it once again is playing catch-up with the rest of the world when it comes to blogging and to the shifts in business that will be necessary for success in the coming decades. At times like these, that usually charming cynicism costs – big-time.
This post has been cross-posted to the Big Blog Company blog.
The British government is preparing to launch a further assault on the English Common Law by eroding the presumption of innocence in jury trials involving certain categories of offence. In short, the government wants it to be possible for a defendant’s previous convictions to be made known to a jury unless there are compelling reasons in the eyes of a judge against it.
It does not take a lot of imagination to see why prosecutors and even the odd well meaning but deluded politician think this is a grand idea. It must be disheartening for a prosecutor to see a serial rapist, mugger or thief get off on a technicality and for the defendant’s nefarious past to be undisclosed to a jury. But – and it is a very big but – keeping previous convictions a secret except in certain conditions is designed to ensure that juries examine a criminal case on the facts as they are presented, and not by trying to guess the motives of the accused or rushing to a conclusion on the basis of a hunch.
Also, by withholding information about previous convictions, police and others are forced to present their evidence as strongly and as competently as possible. The Law of Unintended Consequences applies here. My fear is that prosecutors and others could become lazier and more slapdash in how they present evidence if they think that they can always shove X’s seedy past in front of a jury as part of the case.
I must say it is hard to summon up feelings of surprise or even anger any more at what our political classes are doing to the traditional checks and balances of our criminal code. To be fair, much of this process began long before Tony Blair, although this most authortarian of governments has set about destroying our liberties with a zeal not seen in decades. I hold little hope that the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats will offer much resistance, given their terror at being thought to be ‘soft on crime’.
And so we go on, changing processes of law in ways which will undoubtedly lead to more unsafe convictions. The present government, like all too many before it, is extraordinarily hostile to process and the understanding of the long-run bad consequences of interfering with constraints of law and custom.
The likelihood, of course, that all this messing around with the Common Law will reduce crime significantly is, I confidently predict, zero.
So hapless Prince Harry takes a swing at some paparazzo who bashes him in the face with a camera, and the British press have apoplexy tut-tutting over his behaviour.
To use internet parlance, WTF? If some pushy bastard negligently clips you in the mouth with a camera whilst in search of a few quid, the correct response is to return the favour with interest. That is not ill-advised or thuggish or incorrect, it is an entirely appropriate means of male-to-male comminication at such a time. I am glad to see that there is a member of the royal family who actually has personality traits that approach those of the Crown’s normal everyday subjects.
It seem quite appropriate that not only should he not apologise for his reaction to the incident, he should be advising Christopher Uncle that if there is a next time, there should be some expectations of a royal boot in the bollocks as well.
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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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