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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This sounds promising:
The Tories’ flagship education policy to give parents more freedom to choose their children’s schools is to be dramatically expanded, the party has announced.
The “pupils passport” will be rolled out across England and Wales rather than just inner city areas as originally planned.
And so on. Basically it is education vouchers, but not called that.
There is even a good soundbite on offer:
“Under the Conservatives you’ll be able to go to the right school even if your family lives in the wrong street.”
Nice one. I was going to put this posting on my Education Blog, for obvious reasons. But thinking about it, I think the real significance of this announcement may be more what it says about the general attitude of the Conservatives.
Much as I dislike Tories because of the way they talk, dress, are, etc., this sounds very promising. Their problem for the last decade or so has been that they have simply stood up in the House of Commons and read out all the complaints everyone has had about what the government has done, is doing, or is about to do, regardless of whether the criticisms add up to a coherent alternative attitude to government. This tax increase is bad, but so is that spending cut. This attack on freedom is bad, yet this other attack on freedom is insufficiently ferocious. And their handling of the Iraq war has been a mess, I think. We aren’t sure about the war as a whole, but this … (fill in the detail of the week that they happen to be moaning about) … is terrible.
But this education announcement actually suggests a bunch of people who think that they might one day be the government. Three of four more announcements of this substantial sort, and the public might start to think of the Conservatives with a modicum of respect.
This is not what everyone would ideally like for education. That would be for everyone’s child to become a genius, with no effort, as a result of an infinitely powerful and infinitely nice Prime Minister with an infinitely nice smile waving an infinitely magic wand over each child’s head, causing all children everywhere to get ahead of all the other children everywhere else. But people are starting to get that a wish list is not necessarily a workable policy.
The Conservatives are never going to be liked. But people are starting to despise this government, for announcing rather too many wish lists – each one headed “dramatic new policy”, “radical shake-up”, etc. So even if people still quite like Tony Blair, they are starting to lose respect for him. If they ever start respecting the Conservatives more, then that will be a new phase of British politics, and a potentially Conservative phase.
Simple really. Give them a vested interest to do so, a financial interest in fact. Create vast numbers of public sector jobs funded from the disloyal private sector and then what do you have? You have 7.4 million people (plus their families) who owe their ‘jobs’ to an expanding state and whilst the Tories are hardly the party of small government, it will hardly have escaped the notice of state employed workers that the number of public sector jobs from Maggie Thatcher onwards had been falling for 15 years… and under Labour they are growing at an astonishing rate.
However the real ‘loyalty lock-in’ comes not from merely giving people a job but rather from providing them with not just a lavish pension but an unfunded one at that! This means that only tax money can redeem these pension plans in the future because, unlike a private sector pension which is backed by investments (investments the state regularly raids for their own uses), there is nothing other than a government promise to pay with other people’s money underpinning what Mr. Buggins from Whitehall intends to retire on. As this is of course economic madness, only someone with a direct vested interest would vote to perpetuate such a giant ponzi scheme.
Alas, people directly effected by something like that are far more likely to be dependable focused voters, whereas a private sector employee may well not see the direct causal link between their declining purchasing power and their public sector neighbour’s pension plan.
Labour’s strategy is multi-election political genius. And of course by the time the economy implodes, people will have either largely forgotten what caused the problem or when faced with cutting pensions in fiat money to telegenic old grannies, will find someone else to blame (Capitalists, Jews, White People, Black People, Arabs, Americans, etc. etc.).
But then as the high priest of amorality once said, in the long run we are all dead anyway.
One of the many perils associated with declining birthrates is that it makes it much easier for the social-working classes to nationalise children:
Every local authority in England will be required to appoint a director of children’s services in a bid to improve child welfare under legislation due to be unveiled by the government.
An “information hub” will be set up in 150 local authorities to record details of all the children in the area. Each child will have an electronic file – including their name, address, date of birth, school and GP – that states whether they are known to social services, education welfare, police, or youth offending teams.
Other measures expected in the bill include the creation of a children’s commissioner for England, who would protect the rights of children and young people, and statutory children’s safeguarding boards, responsible for coordinating local child protection work among social services, the NHS, the police and other agencies.
Only they don’t call it ‘nationalisation’ any more. Now they call it ‘protection’ but it amounts to same thing.
Sometimes, just occasionally mind, I actually quite miss the old-style firebrand lefties and their revolutionary rhetoric. At least they were honest and open about their ambitions and, in many ways, that made it a lot easier to tackle them head-on.
One of the very few benefits of Tony Blair being Prime Minister is that he and his supporters are hollowing out the Labour Party :
Labour was in disarray about how to deal with its “serial rebels” after splits emerged among ministers last night over high risk plans to bar dissident MPs from standing at the next election.
Miss Armstrong – furious at mass rebellions over top-up fees, foundation hospitals and curbs on asylum seekers – wanted rebels to know they could be deselected by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee unless they pledged loyalty to Tony Blair.
To watch a time-honoured institution like the British Labour Party rip itself asunder is tragic. Just tragic.
It will come as no surprise to anyone with a 100+ IQ and a modicum of knowledge about how the world works that Robert Mugabe and his murderous kleptocrats have appropriated more that £100 million (US $190 million) in aid sent to Zimbabwe by Britain and the EU.
As that was only to be expected, I cannot say it adds significantly to my loathing of the Mugabe regime. What does fill me with utter contempt is that the people responsible for this utterly predictable outcome still allowed the money to be sent in the first place.
As I have previously argued many times before about foreign aid, to send money for ostensibly humanitarian aims to a nation governed by a tyranny is to become the logistic support arm of that tyranny: insulating the regime from the economic (and hence political) consequences of its actions and thereby indirectly, but in a very real sense, making the regime more likely to survive than would otherwise be the case. That is true even if the humanitarian aid does indeed reach the people and projects it is targeted at.
This however is even worse than that. To send aid to Zimbabwe is to underwrite the tyrannical Mugabe regime directly as according to the latest report, 89% ends up in the pockets of Zimbabwe’s rulers rather than being spent on the humanitarian objectives for which it is intended. Thus not only can the people who sent the money not bask in their delusions that they have at least done good for those who benefit from the worthy projects, they might as well be buying weapons for Mugabe’s police and paramilitaries, not to mention making the bankers and shopkeepers in Zürich rather happy. They are directly supporting the tyrants with large cash injections.
As I disinclined to believe that the people in charge of the governments and agencies in question do not know full well where the money is going to end up, that makes them knowingly supporters of the regime. Which means they are supporting this:
Hilary Andersson, of the BBC’s Panorama programme, reveals how thousands of youths are being taught to rape, maim, torture and kill in Zimbabwe’s terror training camps – and now Robert Mugabe intends to make the camps compulsory for all the country’s young men and women
[…]
A former official with the Ministry of Youth, Gender and Employment Creation that oversees the camps, explained the government’s thinking. “You are moulding somebody to listen to you, so if it means rapes have to take place in order for that person to take instructions from you, then it’s OK,” he said. He was so horrified that he left his job with the ministry in disgust. Rape is just one of the ways camp commanders are able to turn their charges into unquestioning automata. The training methods vary from camp to camp, but the pattern is consistent.
If all that was happening was that the Guardian reading classes were getting a warm fuzzy glow because they were supporting British tax money going to ‘help stamp out poverty in the third world’, then that would be bad enough, given the reality of what this distorting flow of cash really does. But as Zimbabwe slowly morphs into an inept ‘North Korea Lite’, the platitudes and wilful ignorance of some are now directly funding truly monstrous horrors and misery because they are too damn lazy to think the whole issue through.
Of course if our political masters did not know this was going to happen when they decided to send huge chunks cash to a place like Zimbabwe, then they are naive to the point of idiocy and have no business being in charge of vast amounts of other people’s money to begin with.
So which is it?
There are several things which annoy the hell out of me regarding the ongoing ruckus over whether or not the British intelligence services have been spying on Kofi Annan and the UN generally, as alleged by Claire Short.
Firstly, the UN is nothing less than a logistics agency for tyrants around the world, insulating them from the economic consequences of their policies and ostensibly giving them equal standing with liberal human rights respecting regimes. Thus the notion that this institution’s leader, Kofi Annan, is some sainted figure beyond reproach (and beyond espionage) is both bizarre and repugnant. If we are to get any value from our pilfered tax money at all, I would hope some of it is spent spying on the corrupt functionaries at the United Nations.
Secondly, whilst I will defer to our in-house lawyer David Carr as to whether Claire Short’s actions constitute treason, at the very least I can only marvel how she was not immediately charged under the Official Secrets Act and thrown in jail… but silly me, I forgot there is one rule for the political, establishment and another everyone else.
That’s it, I’ve had enough. I just could not believe my ears, last night, listening to some po-voiced BBC reporter agreeing with some equally pompous do-gooding UK doctor that British people simply cannot be trusted to look after their own health. They also agreed that Wanless Chinder’s HM Treasury proposal, to introduce yet more tax-funded social engineering into British health care, was a desperately needed breath of fresh air.
Jesus H. Christ. Just when will you people get it? When will you get it into your thick skulls that it is your damned social engineering policies, over the last sixty years, which have created all of your alleged problems in the first place? When you take away people’s responsibilities for their own health care, by providing them with an MRSA-infested paid-for-by-everybody-else National Health Service, the obvious response is for many of them to start abusing their own bodies, or at the very least to start taking less care of themselves. Why? Because someone else will be forced to pick up the pieces afterwards, that’s why. So what the hell, let’s eat another cream cake, let’s drink another bottle of whisky. Because the NHS will pay for any liposuction I may need, afterwards, and the NHS will always supply me with a new liver, should I need one. And if they refuse to, then I’ll sue them for a loss of human dignity. → Continue reading: Death to the chocolate smugglers
It seems Gordon Brown’s favourite useful idiot, Derek Wanless, has been at it again. The much-criticised former banker, who disastrously turned the giant NatWest bank into a tiddler taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland, has taken a second lump of taxpayer cash from HM Treasury, to produce a second report telling them, once again, what they wanted to hear in the first place.
This follows his previous report, also commissioned by HM Treasury, which told them National Insurance payroll taxes should be raised to increase government spending on the NHS. Which duly happened, straight after the last General Election.
Dilbert Derek’s latest report tells us essentially that the government should do more to look after the health of its citizens. In much the same way, of course, that pig farmers should look after the health of their pigs. Welcome to the farm, citizens.
What this will undoubtedly turn into is a righteous claim, as predicted by our very own Mr David Carr, that HM Treasury should, unwillingly, and after due consideration, raise our taxes again. For our own good. Bless them.
Who cares what the actual tax will be? A fat tax, a hat tax, a stick it up your jumper tax, don’t worry, they’ll think of something. So my hot gambling tip of the day, if you’ve got any money left after this year’s January self-assessment tax deadline, is to put your loot down on ‘More Taxes Soon’, in the five o’clock at HM Treasury. This may be your last chance to ever have any spare money, so enjoy it while it lasts. Get a McDonalds with your winnings. Don’t worry. They won’t mind. They just want your money.
The following point may seem obvious, and my apologies to you in advance if it is, but it did wake me this morning, at around 5am. Which is unusual for me, because at that time in the morning, before my first cup of tea, I normally have the mental capacity and memory attention span of a small flea. A particularly unintelligent flea. A flea, perhaps, in desperate need of a government initiative.
It’s because of all these strikes we’ve been having recently, within the foaming shores of these sceptred isles. We had a paralysing Firemen’s strike, in which 17,000 soldiers, with 50-year-old equipment, unflappably replaced 55,000 strikers. We’ve just had a catastrophic government Civil Service strike, in which I was unable to claim state benefits for almost two whole days. And we’re currently enduring a calamitous state-owned University strike, where a bearded lecturer called Kevin, at the Friedrich Engels College in Newhaven, is refusing to deliver his annual keynote lecture on the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It’s been hell, it really has.
In some ways you could imagine that British industrial relations are heading down the same pan they headed down in the late 1970s. But wait! None of these strikes are actually industrial. In fact I cannot remember, for the life of me, the last serious strike which occurred, at all, in the industrious wealth producing private sector. There may have been the odd Spanish practices walkout in previously nationalised industries, such as British Telecom or British Airways, but a question formed in my mind, this morning, when by all that is great and good in the world it should have been dreaming about Penelope Cruz instead.
Have British strikes, to all serious intents and purposes, become an exclusively public sector phenomenon?
Are British strikes the last refuge of incompetent non-tax-paying public sector ‘key workers’, who wish to hold Britain’s wealth-creating taxpayers to ransom via the coercive hand of their idiot socialist friends in government? And is the public sector exclusivity of these strikes yet another testament to the enduring genius of our very own Joan of Arc, political saviour, and English heroine, Margaret Hilda, the Baroness Thatcher?
Your country is plagued by strikes and you want rid of them. Solution? Get rid of the public sector. Job done. Problem solved. Another instrumental Thatcherite lesson for politicians everywhere.
Baroness Thatcher. We truly are not worthy.
What does this sound like to you?
[From UK Times]
DOZENS of speed cameras are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points.
The devices are to be placed where police can no longer justify having a speed camera because there is no recent history of crashes.
Police hope that the speed indicator devices (SIDs) will defuse some of the anger generated by the huge increase in camera fines. Last year an estimated two million drivers caught on camera were fined £60 and given three penalty points.
The new devices use radar to detect the speed of an oncoming vehicle, and flash it up on a screen. If the driver is within the limit, the screen changes to a smiling face.
At just 1mph over the limit, the face will frown.
Because it sounds to me like the Home Office are starting to back down.
At this rate it will take about another year for the ‘frowny faces’ to be replaced by an All-Weather Traffic Co-Ordination Officer whose job it will be to stand on the verge of a dual carriageway and shout “fascist, fascist” as the cars whizz by.
The Catholic Communications Service for England & Wales have delivered a nifty rejection of a host of the intellectual bits of the Catholic church’s philosophical underpinnings which actually make sense, via a press release called Catholic Bishops: Why we must render unto Caesar. This pertains to a booklet called ‘Taxation for the Common Good’.
Yet again the church in England shows it has no problem superceding individual moral choice (there is no other kind really because a decision cannot be moral if it is not the product of individual free will) by using the collective force of the state.
Moreover taking the property of others is just fine by them. The problem is that when they say the word ‘moral’, they do not actually know what that means. Hint: it is not the same as ‘manners’ or ‘social conventions’ and is certainly not the same issue as ‘desirable outcomes’. If some members of a church (i.e. Catholic bishops in England and Wales) find the rarified air of pure moral theory too taxing compared to issuing pronouncements on plain ol’ politics, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
The Tenth Commandment:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s
Presumably this has now been updated:
The Tenth Commandment, revised:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s… unless the manner in which thou shall covet these things is intermediated by the state
If the Catholic church wants to spurn its role as a persuader of individual moral decisions and instead be just another collectivist political advocacy group, albeit one with rather interesting buildings and distinctively dressed employees, that is fine by me… but it should not then be surprised if people treat it as just another shrill NGO or perhaps think of it as being rather like that paragon of virtues, the United Nations.
For a far more interesting discussion regarding Christianity and Liberty than you will ever find on the arid pages of the Catholic Communication Service, take a peek at the interesting Volconvo site.
The front page of the Telegraph today has news of Michael Howard facing a shadow cabinet revolt last night over his plan to impose a public spending freeze, with senior members of his front-bench team protesting bitterly about proposed cuts in services.
So far, so good. Cuts in budget, good news for the likes of Samizdatistas. Thumbs up for Howard? Bad front-bench team who reveal themselves for the incorrigible statists they are? Not quite.
The Conservative leader has been told by several senior colleagues that they are particularly angry at proposed defence cuts of £1.5 billion that, they fear, could badly damage the party’s standing in the Tory heartlands.
The Tory party is trying desperately make themselves credible by pre-emptying Labour’s smearing them with spending less on ‘schoolzandhospitals’. As one frontbencher puts it:
If the Tory Party is going to get its message across, we have to be in the marketplace. If people think we are going to slash spending, then we are not in that marketplace.
The Tories are so obsessed about getting elected that they are losing their grip on substance. Mind you, they lost that with Thatcher’s departure… She may have actually increased the size of the state in some measures, which is evidence of how hard it is to cut the hydra down to size, but she was certainly aware of the true role of the state. Michael Howard is not.
Some people say it is still worth voting – maybe but not when a a sad greedy bunch of oily politicians out of power are competing with a faltering greedy bunch of oily politicians in power.
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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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